The Stories of Richard Bausch (9 page)

A comforting word—cordials. She’d drink cordials in the nights, bouncing around alone in the house. She felt no bitterness, considered herself a fighter. They were in serious debt, living on cash only, bills piling up. This month’s cash was gone. The house was empty of cordiality. She had no appetite to speak of and nothing to drink. A terrible morning.

But she got herself up and out to work. And Allan had the asthma attack.

Pure terror. No one had ever expressed how
physical
thirst could get, how deep it went down into the soul.

Some days, Allan Meltzer’s parents had prevailed on her to give the boy a ride home. They lived a hundred yards from her, on the other side of Jefferson Street. Allan was a quiet, shy boy. She had heard his loud father outside, calling him “stupid.” She would think about his big moist dark eyes in class. She’d tried being especially kind—this child with asthma, allergies, a fear of others. The other children were murderously perceptive, and pecked at him.

All this lent urgency—and guilt—to the fact that he was gone to the hospital with asthma. Urgency because she feared for him; guilt because she planned to use his absence. No sense lying to herself.

She had such an awful dread.

When the school day ended, she started for the hospital, planning to check on Allan. The Meltzers would be there. They saw her as a kindly childless woman, Mrs. Porter, who had nurtured a whole generation of schoolchildren. Well, it was true. And they trusted her. She had a key to their house, for those times she took the boy home.

No, she wouldn’t deceive herself. A drink was necessary before she faced the Meltzers. Before she let another hour go by.

She drove to their house and let herself in. Mr. Meltzer kept only whiskey. She ransacked their kitchen looking for it, resolved to fix everything when she got to a level, when she could think straight again, out of this shaking. Quite simple. She was contending with something that had come up on her and surprised her.

She drank most of the bottle, slowly and painfully at first, but then with more ease, gulping it, getting calm. She wasn’t a bad woman. She loved those kids, loved everyone. She’d always carried herself with dignity and never complained—a smile and a kind word for everybody, Mrs. Porter. Once, she and Jack had made love on the roof of a Holiday Inn while fireworks went off in another part of a city they were passing through. On their fifteenth anniversary they’d pretended to be strangers in a hotel bar and raced to their room on the sixth floor, laughing, filled with an illicit-feeling hunger for each other.

Now she did what she could with the kitchen, reeling. Her own crashing-down fall startled her, as if it were someone else. “Jack?” she said. Oh, yes—Jack. Her once friend and lover, a world away. But all would be well. She could believe it now. She went out into the yard, looked at the trees, the late afternoon
sun pouring through with breezes, life’s light and breath. The great wide world. She felt good. She felt quite reasonable. Nothing out of order. Life would provide.

She started across the span of grass leading to the trees, confused about where home was. She sat down in the grass, then lay back. When they returned, the Meltzers would see. She would have to explain to them, show them the necessity. “Honesty is what we owe each other.” She’d always told the children that, hadn’t she? She had lived by it. Hadn’t she? “Be true, my darlings,” she had said. “Always, always tell the truth. Even to yourself.” That was what she’d said. She was Mrs. Porter. That was what she was known for.

For William Kotzwinkle and Charles Baxter
and with thanks to Bill Kimble

Imagine a shady
mountain road in early summer. 1954. Dappled sunlight on tall pines, the lovely view of a valley with a bright river rambling through it. And here comes a lone car, its tires squealing a little with each winding of the road. A lime-green ‘51 Ford, with a finish that exactly reproduces the trees in its polished depths. In the front seat of this automobile are the eccentric parents of Patrick and Elvin Johnston, brothers. I’m Patrick, twelve and a half years old. Elvin is a year and a half younger. We’re monitoring how close we keep coming to the big drop-off into the tops of trees. We’re subject to the whims of the people in the front seat, whose names are Myra and Lionel.

To their faces, we call them Mom and Dad.

Myra is thirty-six, stunningly beautiful, with black hair, dark brown eyes, flawless skin, and—as we have heard it expressed so often by our ratty, no-account friends at school—a body like Marilyn Monroe. Lionel is younger, only thirty-four—tall, lean, rugged-looking, with eyes that are the exact light blue of a summer sky, and blond hair just thin enough at the
crown of his head to make him look five years older. He’s sharp, confident, quick, and funny. He makes Myra laugh, and her laugh has notes in it that can alter the way blood flows through your veins.

Elvin and I have come to believe they’re both a bit off, and there’s plenty of evidence to support our thesis.

But we love them, and they, in their way, love us. It is very important that one does not lose sight of this fact.

So.

We’re on this mountain road, wending upward in the squeal of tires and the wail of radio jazz, while back home in Charlottesville lawyers are putting together the necessary papers to have us evicted from our rented house. The rental is our seventh in the last eight years. Our destination today is a hunting cabin owned by a childhood friend of Myra’s. We haven’t packed a scrap of food or very much in the way of clothing or other supplies.

We woke up with Myra standing in the doorway of our room. “You’re not ready yet,” she said, “are you?”

It was still dark out. “What?” I said. “What?”

“Who is it?” Elvin said.

“We’re leaving for our vacation this morning.”

“Vacation?” I said. She might as well have said we were heading out for a life of missionary work in Pakistan.

Myra and Lionel have never been the type of people to take vacations, per se. They’ve always had a way of behaving as though they were already in the middle of some kind of—well, furlough, let’s call it.

One Sunday morning as we were coming out of church, we saw Father Bauer backing out of the rectory door with a big box. Myra hurried over there, we thought to help him, but she stood silent behind him as he slowly backed through the door, groaning with the weight he was carrying in the heat of the summer day. She seemed merely curious, watching him. As he got free of the doorway, she leaned into him and said, “Hey!” loud, as if he were a long way off. Father Bauer dropped the box on his foot. Then he hopped in a small circle, holding the foot, yowling, “Merciful heaven,” at the top of his lungs.

He said this three times, as Myra, smiling, strolled away from him.

“I saw him hit a boy in the back of the neck yesterday,” she told us. “He’s not a very nice man, even if he is a priest.”

Of course, we never went back to St. Ambrose Church. And she never went back to her job there, as a secretary in the day school.

Myra likes going to new and different jobs, and we’ve already been to many different churches. We’ve attended services in every denomination of the Judeo-Christian South, and two or three of the Middle Eastern and oriental variety as well—these in Washington, D.C., only seventy miles north and east of us on Route 29. Myra doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular, either. She wants to experience the ways people find to celebrate having been part of creation, as she once put it. She isn’t really batty in that particular way. Not religious, I mean. She doesn’t think about it. The term
creation
is a convenient rather than a necessary expression. Her religious feeling is all aesthetics.

Lionel is less impulsive. His lunacy is more studied. He loves orchestrating the impressions of others. Once, with Myra’s help, he got a real estate agent to show us a house that was for sale in our neighborhood. The name he gave the agent was Mr. and Mrs. Phlugh. (“That’s P-h-l-u-g-h,” Lionel spelled it out for the trusting agent, “pronounced the same as the virus.”) As the poor man walked them through the house, Myra began coughing and hacking like a victim of tuberculosis in the last throes of the illness. “Is she all right?” the real estate agent asked.

“She’s done this since I’ve known her,” Lionel said, then coughed himself.

By the time the agent ushered them out of the house, he too was coughing, perhaps in sympathy, though it might also have been the result of anxiety and embarrassment. “Thank you so much,” Lionel said to him, coughing. “But I think we’ll keep looking. I want my house to be a place I can retreat to, you know—like a—like a sanitarium.” He turned to Myra. “Don’t you think, dear?”

“Yes.” Myra coughed. “Like that. Something quiet as a clinic.”

“Right. A clinic.” Lionel coughed so deeply it caused the agent to step back from him. “This is a great house,” Lionel went on, coughing, “but not for the Phlugh family.”

Lionel is a
qualified accountant, but he’s currently between jobs, waiting to take up a position with the State Planning Commission. It seems to Elvin and me that they are both perpetually waiting for a new job to start. Lionel’s
real passion is playing mandolin in the hillbilly band he started up the year my mother was pregnant with Elvin. One of the other men in the band, the banjo player, a man named Floyd, recently got married and moved to Tennessee to take a job in his father-in-law’s distillery. No one has replaced him, though Lionel has auditioned several players, so the band hasn’t performed in months, and that source of income is dry. The woman Floyd married is a few years older than Floyd, and once Lionel brought her into the house and introduced her to Elvin and me as our real mother. Elvin divined what he was up to almost immediately.

“I knew that,” he said, nodding at the woman.

I was momentarily flustered. Lionel saw it in my face and reached over to take me by the wrist. “Well, we got Patrick anyway.”

Elvin has always been skeptical about everything. When Myra developed appendicitis that year, Elvin thought she was joking and ignored the moaning and crying from her bedroom.

At the hospital, while she was in surgery, Lionel paced up and down the corridors, muttering to himself. No one could approach him or speak to him. And poor Elvin was as miserable as I’ve ever seen a kid be. Finally Lionel came in to where the two of us were sitting in the waiting room and scrunched down in front of Elvin. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “They call this guy Buttonhole Smith. He’ll get that old appendix out and he won’t leave but the tiniest little scar, and Mommy’ll be just like new.”

“Yes, sir,” Elvin said, and started to cry.

“Hey,” said Lionel. “It wasn’t your fault. You hear me, kiddo? Nobody’s at fault here. Every now and then life gets serious on us.”

“It’s above Glass
Meadow,” Myra says now, looking at some instructions she’s brought out of her purse. “Past a place called Brighton Farm. Apparently there’s a sign just past the nine-mile post.”

“Whoa,” Lionel says as we surge down a narrow hairpin curve and then shift upward again, heading skyward once more.

Lionel was a gunner on a B-25 during the war. There’s a small star-shaped scar on the fleshy inside part of his left forearm and an oblong indentation on the outside of it, near the elbow, caused by the path of the same tiny piece of shrapnel. Lionel deflects questions about it, usually with other questions: Why do you want to know about the scar? What interests you
about it? Do you like scars? Is it the war you want to know about? Which war? Does war interest you? He is capable of making you decide you don’t want to ask another question about anything, ever again.

“Glass Meadow. One mile,” says Myra, sitting forward, reading the sign as it glides by us.

“I never saw the mile post. Or the farm.”

“It said Glass Meadow. That’s what we want.”

“Maybe there’s more than one Glass Meadow.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lionel.”

We drive on. We’re quiet now.

On the left, as we come around another curve, is a novelty shop. There are bright tapestries hanging from a rack along the front. On the lawn are a lot of statues, looking like a gathering of little gray people and animals. Lionel pulls in.

“Oh, no,” Elvin murmurs.

“Stay together,” says Lionel. “No wandering off.”

“Where would we wander?” Elvin asks, sitting back in the seat. He’s apparently going to stay right where he is.

“You don’t want to come in, sweetie?” Myra says. But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s out of the car and moving swiftly across the lot in the direction of the statues. “Oh, look,” I hear her say.

Lionel has followed her, keeping a small distance. He’s between the little stoop at the front of the place and where Myra has crouched in front of a stone angel.

“I want one,” she says. “Lionel?”

“Where the hell would we put it, sugar?”

“The bedroom. All around the house.”

“What house?” he asks.

She ignores this.

“An angel,” Lionel says. “Any idea what we’ll buy it with?”