The Stories of Richard Bausch (32 page)

“Charles,” Aunt Lois said, indicating the man on the sofa, “this is Mr. Rainy.”

Mr. Rainy was smiling in an almost imbecilic way, not really looking at anyone.

“This is Charles,” Aunt Lois said to him.

They shook hands. “Nice to meet you,” Mr. Rainy said. He had a soft, high-pitched voice.

“And this is Mr. Downs.”

Charles looked at him, took the handshake he offered. Bill Downs was tall and a little stooped, and he seemed very uneasy. He looked around the room, and his hands went into his pockets and then flew up to his hair, which was wild-looking and very sparse.

“Marie will be out any time, I’m sure,” Aunt Lois said in a voice that, to Charles at least, sounded anything but sure. “In the meantime, can I get anybody a drink?”

No one wanted anything right away. Mr. Rainy had brought two bottles of champagne, which Aunt Lois took from him and put on ice in the kitchen. The two men sat on the sofa across from Charles, and the football game provided them with something to look at. Charles caught himself watching Bill Downs, and thinking about how his mother had once felt something for him. It was hard to picture them together, as it was hard not to stare at the man, at his skinny hands, never still in the long-legged lap, and the nervous way he looked around the room. He did not look past forty years old, except for the thinning hair.

“You boys get your football watching before dinner,” Aunt Lois said, coming back into the room. “I won’t have it after we begin to eat.”

“I’m not much of a football fan,” Bill Downs said.

Charles almost blurted out that his father had loved football. He kept silent. In the next moment, Marie made her entrance. It struck Charles exactly that way: that it was an entrance, thoroughly dramatic and calculated to have an effect. It was vivacious in a nervous, almost automatic way. She crossed the room to kiss him on the forehead and then she turned to face the two men on the sofa. “Bill, you haven’t changed a bit.”

Downs was clambering over himself to get to his feet. “You either, Marie.”

“Merry Christmas,” Mr. Rainy said, also trying to rise. “Oh, don’t get up,” Marie was saying.

Charles sat in his chair and watched them make their way through the
introductions and the polite talk before dinner. He watched his mother, mostly. He knew exactly what she was feeling, understood the embarrassment and the nervousness out of which every gesture and word came, and yet something in him hated her for it, felt betrayed by it. When she went with the two men into the kitchen to open one of the bottles of champagne, he got out of the chair and faced Aunt Lois, whose expression seemed to be saying “Well?” as if this were only what one should have expected. He shook his head, and she said, “Come on.”

They went into the kitchen. Marie was leaning against the counter with a glass of champagne in her hand. Charles decided that he couldn’t look at her. She and Bill Downs were talking about the delicious smell of the turkey.

“I didn’t have Thanksgiving dinner this year,” Mr. Rainy was saying. “You know, I lost my wife. I just didn’t feel like anything, you know.”

“This is a hard time of year,” Aunt Lois said.

“I simply don’t know how to act anymore,” Mr. Rainy said.

Charles backed quietly away from them. He took himself to the living room and the television, where everyone seemed to know everyone else. They were all celebrating Christmas on television, and then the football game was on again. Charles got into his coat and stepped out onto the porch, intending at first just to take a few deep breaths, to shake if he could this feeling of betrayal and anger that had risen in him. It was already dark. The rain had turned to mist again. When the wind blew, cold drops splattered on the eaves of the porch. The cars and trucks racing by on the overpass at the end of the block seemed to traverse a part of the sky. Charles moved to the steps of the porch, and behind him the door opened. He turned to see his mother, who came out after glancing into the house, apparently wanting to be sure they would be alone. She wasn’t wearing her coat, and he started to say something about the chill she would get when the expression on her face stopped him.

“What do you expect from me, Charles?”

He couldn’t speak for a moment.

She advanced across the porch, already shivering. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, God.” She paced back and forth in front of him, her arms wrapped around herself. Somewhere off in the misty dark, a group of people were singing
carols. The voices came in on a gust of wind, and when the wind died they were gone. “God,” she said again. Then she muttered, “Christmas.”

“I wish it was two years ago,” Charles said suddenly.

She had stopped pacing. “It won’t ever be two years ago, and you’d better get used to that right now.”

Charles was silent.

“You’re turning what you remember into a paradise,” she said, “and I’ve helped you get a good start on it.”

“I’m not,” Charles said, “I’m not doing that at all. I remember the way it was last summer when I wasn’t—when I couldn’t do anything and he couldn’t make me do anything, and you and he were so different with each other—” He halted. He wasn’t looking at her.

“Go on,” she said.

He said, “Nothing.”

“What went on between your father and me is nobody’s business.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“It had nothing to do with you, Charles.”

“All right,” he said.

She was shivering so hard now that her voice quavered when she spoke. “I wish I could
make
it all right, but I can’t.”

Charles reached for her, put his arms around her, and she cried into the hollow of his shoulder. They stood that way for a while, and the wind blew and again there was the sound of the carolers.

“Mom,” Charles said, “he was going to leave us, wasn’t he.”

She removed herself, produced a handkerchief from somewhere in her skirt, and touched it to her nose, still trembling, staring down. Then she breathed out as if something had given way inside her, and Charles could see that she was gathering herself, trying not to show whatever it was that had just gone through her. When she raised her eyes she gave him the softest, the kindest look. “Not you,” she said. Then: “Don’t think such things.” She turned from him, stepped up into the doorway, and the light there made a willowy shadow of her. “Don’t stay out here too long, son. Don’t be rude.”

When she had closed the door, he walked down the street to the overpass and stood below it, his hands deep in his coat pockets. It wasn’t extremely cold out yet, but he was cold. He was cold, and he shook, and above him the traffic whooshed by. He turned and faced the house, beginning
to cry now, and a sound came out of him that he put his hands to his mouth to stop. When a car came along the road he ducked back into the deeper shadow of the overpass, but he had been seen. The car pulled toward him, and a policeman shined a light on him.

“What’re you doing there, fella?”

“Nothing,” Charles said. “My father died.”

The policeman kept the light on him for a few seconds, then turned it off. He said, “Go on home, son,” and drove away.

Charles watched until the taillights disappeared in the mist. It was quiet; even the traffic on the overpass had ceased for a moment. The police car came back, slowing as it passed him, then going on, and once more it was quiet. He turned and looked at the house with its Christmas tree shimmering in the window, and in that instant it seemed to contain only the light and tangle of adulthood; it was their world, so far from him. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, beginning to cry again. No, it wasn’t so far. It wasn’t so far at all. Up the street, Aunt Lois opened her door and called his name. But she couldn’t see him, and he didn’t answer her.

My sister only
tolerates me here, I’m afraid. She doesn’t want to talk about anything much; everything I do is a strain on her. This morning, I wanted to ask if she remembers a photograph of our father. “We used to stare at it and try to imagine him,” I say. “I used to carry it around with me—the one Uncle Raymond took with that old box camera of his.”

“I don’t remember staring at any photograph,” she says.

I follow her around the house, talking. I remember that I used to gaze at that one picture, though there were others—there must’ve been others—trying to imagine myself into the scene, trying to imagine how it must have been on that day when the picture was taken.

“You have Mother’s things in the attic, don’t you?” I say.

“I don’t have the photograph.”

“I’m sure Mother would’ve kept it,” I say.

“We’ll talk tonight,” my sister says. “If you want to talk. But not about any photographs or anything like that. You’ve got to get up and start again.”

“Do you remember the picture exactly?” I say.

“I remember that you’ve been here a week and haven’t had one job interview.”

“It’s hard for a man my age—a convicted felon.”

“Stop it,” she says. “Quit bringing it up all the time.”

“Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” I say.

And she says, “We can talk about things tonight.”

But at night her husband is diere, and while I listen to him talk about the disintegration of the schools (he teaches high school science, and I did too, until I was fired) or listen to him talk about the Yankees, she drafts letters to her two sons, both away at college—the same college, the same dormitory, though one son is two years older than the other and will graduate sooner. If we talk at all, really, it’s always about these two—one is letting his grades go to hell playing intramural basketball, the other is in love with a girl who has anorexia and has been in and out of the hospital.

“She’s been down to eighty pounds,” my sister says. “She doesn’t look much heavier than that now. She could be somebody out of those pictures of the death camps. And he says it’s because she’s depressed. She doesn’t like herself. For God’s sake.”

“I think that’s what the doctors are saying about it, though,” I say.

“It’s ridiculous,” my sister says. “We’re spending all this money on their education and you’d think somebody would teach them to be a little more careful about who they get involved with.”

They’re her sons. Her husband is childless, much older than she is; the boys were already out of high school when she met him. He was at George Washington on a summer grant, and she worked as a secretary in the Education Department. They were both recently divorced, and, as my sister put it once, they fell into each other’s arms and saved each other. His name is Roger. He’s a very kind, quiet, slow-moving man, whose face seems perpetually pinched in thought, as if he’s on the verge of recalling something very important. It’s always as if he’s about to burst into passionate speech. Yet when he actually does speak his voice is high-pitched and timid, and I find myself feeling a little sorry for him.

In the mornings, as he rushes from the house to catch his bus to the high school, my sister hurries along beside him. They talk. She gesticulates and explains; he nods and appears to try to calm her. From time to time one
of them glances back at the house, at the window of this room. My sister will explain these little episodes by talking of Roger’s forgetfulness. “He forgot his wallet again,” she says, “Who does that remind you of?”

“Me?” I say.

“No, you never forgot anything in your life.”

“Well, who,” I say. “You?”

“Eddie,” she says. “Don’t you remember how bad Eddie always was?”

Eddie was her first husband, and I don’t know why she brings him up to me in this way because I never really knew the man. I left home shortly after she met him. Uncle Raymond had died, and Mother was little more than an invalid. There was ill feeling over my decision to leave, though I did have a job to go to. It wasn’t as though I was hiring onto a ship or something, to wander the high seas. It was a very good job which I grew to like very much. But I remember my sister thought I was merely running away and for a long time after I went to teach in New York, I didn’t hear from her. In fact, she wrote that first time only to inform me of Mother’s death. I had expected the news for some time, because Mother’s letters had stopped scolding me about my failure to write my sister, and began to repeat, over and over, her regret about having spoken meanly to my father on the last day he was alive. It was apparently something she’d been carrying around all those years. They had been having some trouble over money, and she called him a weakling. It was the last thing she ever said to him. My wife, who lives in Florida now with someone named Kenny, left me a note which read, simply,
You deserve this.
She knew Kenny from her work; they were telephone friends. Kenny was the Florida representative for Satellite Analysis Systems Corporation, and they used to talk on the phone. When our trouble began, she started confiding in Kenny. Now they live together in a condominium on the Gulf. Kenny used to take drugs, she says, but that’s all over now. Lately, I hear from her mostly through her lawyer, whose name is Judith. We’re on a first-name basis because Judith used to be our lawyer. Everything has been fairly cordial, but they did take the house and most of the things in it; they put it all on auction, and since I no longer had my job, and there wasn’t much anyone would say to me where we lived, I came here, and was taken in.