The Stories of Richard Bausch (36 page)

He knows it’s not cruelty that brought her here to tell him a thing like this, it’s cowardice. “I wish there was some other way,” she tells him, then turns and walks along the corridor to the stairs and down. He imagines the look she’ll give Dana when she gets to her seat; she’ll be someone relieved of a situation, glad something’s over with.

Back in the balcony, in the dark, he watches the figures leap and stutter and whirl on the stage. And when the performance ends he watches the Hall empty out. The musicians pack their music and instruments; the stage crew dismantles the set. When he finally rises, it’s past midnight. Everyone’s gone. He makes his way home, and, arriving, doesn’t remember driving there. The baby-sitter, a high school girl from up the street, is asleep on the sofa in the living room. He’s much later than he said he would be. She hasn’t heard him come in, and so he has to try to wake her without frightening her. He has this thought clear in his mind as he watches his hand roughly grasp her shoulder, and hears himself say, loud, “Get up!”

The girl opens her eyes and looks blankly at him, and then she screams. He would never have believed this of himself. She is sitting up now, still not quite awake, her hands flying up to her face. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, but it’s obvious that he did mean to scare her, and while she struggles to get her shoes on, her hands shaking, he counts out the money to pay her. He gives her an extra five dollars, and she thanks him for it in a tone that lets him know it mitigates nothing. When he moves to the door with her, she tells him she’ll walk home; it’s only up the block. Her every movement expresses her fear of him now. She lets herself out, and Casey stands in his doorway under the porch light and calls after her that he is so very sorry, he hopes she’ll forgive him. She goes quickly along the street and is out of sight. Casey stands there and looks at the place where she disappeared. Perhaps a minute goes by. Then he closes the door and walks back through the house, to the boys’ room.

Rodney is in Michael’s bed with Michael, the two of them sprawled there, arms and legs tangled, blankets knotted and wrapped, the sheet pulled from a corner of the mattress. It’s as if this had all been dropped from a great, windy height. Casey kisses his sons, and then gets into Rodney’s bed. “Odney,” he whispers. He looks over at the shadowy figures in the other bed. The light is still on in the hall, and in the living room. He thinks of turning the lights off, then dreams he does. He walks through the rooms, locking windows and closing doors. In the dream he’s blind, can’t open his eyes wide enough, can’t get any light. He hears sounds. There’s an intruder in the house. There are many intruders. He’s in the darkest corner, and he can hear them moving toward him. He turns, still trying to get his eyes wide enough to see, only now something has changed: he knows he’s dreaming. It comes to him with a rush of power that he’s dreaming, and can do anything now, anything he wants to do. He luxuriates in this as he tries to hold on to it, feels how precarious it must be. He takes one step, and then another. He’s in control now. He’s as quiet as the sound after death. He knows he can begin, and so he begins. He glides through the house. He tracks the intruders down. He is relentless. He destroys them, one by one. He wins. He establishes order.

Theodore Weathers would
probably have let things lapse after his son—the only one with whom he had any relations at all—passed away, but his daughter-in-law had adopted him. “You’re all the family I’ve got left,” she told him, and the irony was that he had never really liked her very much in the first place. He’d always thought she was a little empty-headed and gossipy—one of those people who had to manage everything, were always too ready to give advice, or suggest a course of action, or give an outright order. She was fifty-two years old and looked ten years older than that, but she called him Dad, and she had the energy of six people. She came by to see him every day—she seemed to think this was something they’d arranged—and she would go through his house as if it were hers, setting everything in order, she said, so they could relax and talk. Mostly this meant that she would be telling him what she thought he could do to improve his life, as if at eighty-three there were anything much he could do one way or the other.

She thought he spent too much time watching television, that he should be
more active; she didn’t like his drinking, or the fact that he wasn’t eating the healthiest foods; it wasn’t right for a person to take such poor care of himself, to be so negligent of his own well-being, and there were matters other than diet or drink that concerned her: the city was dangerous, she said, and he didn’t have good locks on his doors or windows; he’d developed bad habits all around; he left the house lights burning through the night; he’d let the dishes go. He never dusted or tidied up enough to suit her. He was unshaven. He needed a haircut. It was like having another wife, he told her, and she took this as praise. She never seemed to hear things as they were meant, and it was clear that in her mind she was being quite wonderful—cheerful and sweet and witty in the face of his irascibility and pigheadedness. She said he was entitled to some measure of ill temper, having lived so long; and she took everything he said and did with a kind of proprietary irony, as if another person were there to note how unmanageable and troublesome he could be. At times it seemed that any moment she might turn and speak to some unseen auditor: “You see, don’t you? You see what I have to go through with this guy?”

He had never considered himself to be the type of man who liked to hurt other people’s feelings, but he was getting truly tired of all this, and he was thinking of telling her so in terms that would make her understand he meant business.

Lately, it had been the fact that he was living alone. There was a retirement community right down the street: a room of his own; games, movies, company, trips to other cities, book clubs, hobbies, someone to get the meals. She went on and on about it, and Theodore would close his eyes and clap his hands over his ears and recite Keats, loudly, so he couldn’t hear her. “‘My heart aches, and a drousy numbness pains my sense,’” he would shout, “‘As though of hemlock I had drunk.’ As though of hemlock, Judy. Hemlock, get it? Hemlock.”

“All right,” she would say, “All right, all right,” and she would move about the house picking things up and putting them down, her mouth set in a frowning narrow line.

But of course there was always the next round, and when her temper had cooled she seemed to enjoy getting back into it—she hadn’t spent a lifetime telling other people what to do without having developed a certain species of hope or confidence in her ability to bend someone else’s will to
her own. He had watched her lead her husband around like a puppy most of his poor, cut-short life, and he told her so.

“John was happy with me, which is more than I can say for his mother when she was with you,” she said. “He had a good, rich, full life.”

“Sixty-six years is not a rich full life in my book.”

“No, it wouldn’t be, in your book.”

“Maybe Margaret wasn’t happy with me because I wouldn’t let her lead me around like a damn puppy dog all the time.”

“No, and she wouldn’t let you lead her around, either.”

“It was twenty years ago—who can remember who led who?”

“Speaking of remembering things, you have two sons still living in Vermont, and time isn’t standing still. Don’t you think it would be a good thing for you to reopen lines of communication? Maybe get on a plane and go see them. I thought you might make things up at John’s funeral, and I was very sad to see that you didn’t. John would’ve liked it if you had. Why don’t you go visit them in their homes—see what their lives are like. They have children you’ve never seen, wives you haven’t met.”

“I knew the first wives.”

“Is that why they fell from grace? Because they had divorces?”

“They fell from grace, as you put it, because they were messy and selfish about their lives and because they never had a thought for me or their mother.”

“Do you know what John thought about the whole thing?”

“I don’t care what John thought about the whole thing.”

“He thought we stayed in your good graces because we kept everything about ourselves a secret—you never knew what trouble we had.”

She was a
registered nurse specializing in pediatrics, and she was mostly on morning shifts, so he would say he liked that time the best: he would leave the phone off the hook and lie in bed reading the newspapers until his eyes hurt. Then he would get up and fix himself an egg, a piece of toast. By this time the sun would be high. He would pour himself a tumblerful of whiskey and take it out on the front porch to sit in his wicker chair in the warmth and sip the whiskey until it was gone. The sun warmed his skin; the whiskey warmed his bones. Before him was the street, what traffic there was; it all
looked as though it moved behind smoked glass. If he was really relaxed, he might doze off. It would be shady now, past noon. He would drift, and dream, and in the dreams he was always doing something quite ordinary, like working in the yard, or sitting in the shade of a porch, dreaming. When he woke up he would have a little more of the whiskey, to get ready, he told himself, for her arrival.

Today he went out back to talk over the fence, as he sometimes did, to his one acquaintance in the neighborhood, who was twenty years his junior, and a very bad hypochondriac. It made him feel good talking to this poor man, so beaten down by his own dire expectations. And it was good to know that Judy wouldn’t find him on the porch, half asleep, out of dignity for the day, an old, dozing man. He looked at the mess in the kitchen on his way through, and felt a little rush of glee as if this were part of a game he was winning. His neighbor sat in a lawn chair with a newspaper in his lap;
he
was dozing, and this was how he spent
his
afternoons. Theodore called to him from the fence, and he stirred, walked over. The two of them stood there in the sun talking about the hot weather. When Judy arrived, she sang hello to Theodore from behind the back-door screen and said she would make some iced tea.

Then she said, “I’ll get your straw hat, Dad. The sun’s so bright!”

“The way she worries about me,” Theodore said to his neighbor. “Jesus.”

The neighbor said, “I got severe abdominal cramps, lately.”

“Pay no attention to it,” Theodore said.

“It’s quite bad sometimes—it radiates into my shoulder. I’m afraid it’s my pancreas.”

“What the hell is that?”

“The pancreas is something you have to have or you die.”

“Well, then I guess we got ours.”

“You mean to tell me you don’t know what the pancreas is?”

“Sure, I know what it is,” Theodore said, “I just don’t think about it a lot. I bet I haven’t spent five minutes thinking about my pancreas in my whole life.”

“I believe mine hurts,” said his neighbor.

“Maybe it hurts because you’re thinking about it. Stand around and
think about your lungs for a while, maybe it’ll go away and your lungs will start to hurt.”

“You noticed something funny about my breathing.”

“I thought we were talking about your pancreas.”

Judy came out of the house, carrying a tray with iced tea on it, and wearing Theodore’s wide-brimmed straw hat at a crooked angle. “If you’re going to stand out in the sun you ought to have a hat on,” she said to him. She put the tray down on the umbrella table and came over and put the hat on his head. Then she opened the gate and invited the neighbor to come have a glass of iced tea. The neighbor, whose name was Benjamin Hawkins, was obviously a little confused at first, since in the five or six years that they had been meeting to talk over this fence neither of the two men had ever suggested that things turn into a full-fledged visit—not at this time of day, just before supper. It just wasn’t in their pattern, though sometimes in the evenings they watched baseball together, and once in a while they might stroll down to the corner, to the tavern there, for a beer. Talking over the fence was reserved for those times when one or the other or both of them didn’t feel much like doing anything else.

And so the invitation was not a very good idea, and Theodore let Judy know it with a look—though she ignored it and went right on talking to Ben Hawkins about what a nice thing it was to have a cool drink in the shade on a hot summer day. It was as if she were hurrying through everything she said, her voice rising, as she took Ben’s arm and started him in the direction of the umbrella table. In only a moment, Theodore understood what was happening, for he had turned and he could see that someone, a woman, not young, was standing in the back door.

“Well,” Ben was saying, “you make it sound so good, Mrs. Weathers.”

“What the hell,” Theodore said to his daughter-in-law.

She squeezed his elbow, and asked for kindness. “This is a nice lady I work with sometimes at the hospital. She’s a volunteer—and she’s a doll.”

“I don’t remember asking you to introduce me to people.”