The Stories of Richard Bausch (60 page)

I know you think I use far too much energy thinking about and pining away for the past, and I therefore know that I’m taking a risk by talking about this ancient history, and by trying to make you see it. But this all has to do with you and me, my dear, and our late inability to find ourselves in the same room together without bitterness and pain.

That summer, 1933, was unusually warm in Virginia, and the heat, along with my impatience to arrive, made the train almost unbearable. I think it was just past noon when it pulled into the station at Charlottesville, with me hanging out one of the windows, looking for Louise or Charles. It was Charles who had come to meet me. He stood in a crisp-looking seersucker suit, with a straw boater cocked at just the angle you’d expect a young, newly married man to wear a straw boater, even in the middle of economic disaster. I waved at him and he waved back, and I might’ve jumped out the window if the train had slowed even a little more than it had before it stopped in the shade of the platform. I made my way out, carrying the cloth bag my grandfather had given me for the trip—Mother had said through her rheum that I looked like a carpetbagger—and when I stepped down to shake hands with Charles I noticed that what I thought was a new suit was tattered at the ends of the sleeves.

“Well,” he said. “Young John.”

I smiled at him. I was perceptive enough to see that his cheerfulness was not entirely effortless. He was a man out of work, after all, and so in spite of himself there was worry in his face, the slightest shadow in an otherwise glad and proud countenance. We walked through the station to the street, and on up the steep hill to the house, which was a small clapboard structure, a cottage, really, with a porch at the end of a short sidewalk lined with flowers—they were marigolds, I think—and here was Louise, coming out of the house, her arms already stretched wide to embrace me. “Lord,” she said. “I swear you’ve grown since the wedding, John.” Charles took my bag and went inside.

“Let me look at you, young man,” Louise said.

I stood for inspection. And as she looked me over I saw that her hair was pulled back, that a few strands of it had come loose, that it was brilliantly
auburn in the sun. I suppose I was a little in love with her. She was grown, and married now. She was a part of what seemed a great mystery to me, even as I was about to enter it, and of course you remember how that feels, Marie, when one is on the verge of things—nearly adult, nearly old enough to fall in love. I looked at Louise’s happy, flushed face, and felt a deep ache as she ushered me into her house. I wanted so to be older.

Inside, Charles had poured lemonade for us and was sitting in the easy chair by the fireplace, already sipping his. Louise wanted to show me the house and the backyard—which she had tilled and turned into a small vegetable garden—but she must’ve sensed how thirsty I was, and so she asked me to sit down and have a cool drink before she showed me the upstairs. Now, of course, looking back on it, I remember that those rooms she was so anxious to show me were meager indeed. They were not much bigger than closets, really, and the paint was faded and dull; the furniture she’d arranged so artfully was coming apart; the pictures she’d put on the walls were prints she’d cut out—magazine covers, mostly—and the curtains over the windows were the same ones that had hung in her childhood bedroom for twenty years. (“Recognize these?” she said with a deprecating smile.) Of course, the quality of her pride had nothing to do with the fineness—or lack of it—in these things, but in the fact that they belonged to her, and that she was a married lady in her own house.

On this day in July, in 1933, she and Charles were waiting for the delivery of a fan they had scrounged enough money to buy from Sears, through the catalogue. There were things they would rather have been doing, especially in this heat, and especially with me there. Monticello wasn’t far away, the university was within walking distance, and without too much expense one could ride a taxi to one of the lakes nearby. They had hoped that the fan would arrive before I did, but since it hadn’t, and since neither Louise nor Charles was willing to leave the other alone while traipsing off with me that day, there wasn’t anything to do but wait around for it. Louise had opened the windows and shut the shades, and we sat in her small living room and drank the lemonade, fanning ourselves with folded parts of Charles’s morning newspaper. From time to time an anemic breath of air would move the shades slightly, but then everything grew still again. Louise sat on the arm of Charles’s chair, and I sat on the sofa. We talked about pleurisy and, I think, about the fact that Thomas Jefferson had invented the dumbwaiter, how the
plumbing at Monticello was at least a century ahead of its time. Charles remarked that it was the spirit of invention that would make a man’s career in these days. “That’s what I’m aiming for, to be inventive in a job. No matter what it winds up being.”

When the lemonade ran out, Louise got up and went into the kitchen to make some more. Charles and I talked about taking a weekend to go fishing. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, looking satisfied. In the kitchen, Louise was chipping ice for our glasses, and she began singing something low, for her own pleasure, a barely audible lilting, and Charles and I sat listening. It occurred to me that I was very happy. I had the sense that soon I would be embarked on my own life, as Charles was, and that an attractive woman like Louise would be there with me. Charles yawned and said, “God, listen to that. Doesn’t Louise have the loveliest voice?”

And that’s all
I have from that day. I don’t even know if the fan arrived later, and I have no clear memory of how we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening. I remember Louise singing a song, her husband leaning back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head, expressing his pleasure in his young wife’s voice. I remember that I felt quite extraordinarily content just then. And that’s all I remember.

But there are, of course, the things we both know: we know they moved to Colorado to be near Charles’s parents; we know they never had any children; we know that Charles fell down a shaft at a construction site in the fall of 1957 and was hurt so badly that he never walked again. And I know that when she came to stay with us last summer she told me she’d learned to hate him, and not for what she’d had to help him do all those years. No, it started earlier and was deeper than that. She hadn’t minded the care of him—the washing and feeding and all the numberless small tasks she had to perform each and every day, all day—she hadn’t minded this. In fact, she thought there was something in her makeup that liked being needed so completely. The trouble was simply that whatever she had once loved in him she had stopped loving, and for many, many years before he died, she’d felt only suffocation when he was near enough to touch her, only irritation and anxiety when he spoke. She said all this, and then looked at me, her cousin, who had
been fortunate enough to have children, and to be in love over time, and said, “John, how have you and Marie managed it?”

And what I wanted to tell you has to do with this fact—that while you and I had had one of our whispering arguments only moments before, I felt quite certain of the simple truth of the matter, which is that whatever our complications, we
have
managed to be in love over time.

“Louise,” I said.

“People start out with such high hopes,” she said, as if I wasn’t there. She looked at me. “Don’t they?”

“Yes,” I said.

She seemed to consider this a moment. Then she said, “I wonder how it happens.”

I said, “You ought to get some rest.” Or something equally pointless and admonitory.

As she moved away from me, I had an image of Charles standing on the station platform in Charlottesville that summer, the straw boater set at its cocky angle. It was an image I would see most of the rest of that night, and on many another night since.

I can almost
hear your voice as you point out that once again I’ve managed to dwell too long on the memory of something that’s past and gone. The difference is that I’m not grieving over the past now. I’m merely reporting a memory, so that you might understand what I’m about to say to you.

The fact is, we aren’t the people we were even then, just a year ago. I know that. As I know things have been slowly eroding between us for a very long time; we are a little tired of each other, and there are annoyances and old scars that won’t be obliterated with a letter—even a long one written in the middle of the night in desperate sincerity, under the influence, admittedly, of a considerable portion of bourbon whiskey, but nevertheless with the best intention and hope: that you may know how, over the course of this night, I came to the end of needing an explanation for our difficulty. We have reached this—place. Everything we say seems rather aggravatingly mindless and automatic, like something one stranger might say to another in any of the thousand circumstances where strangers are thrown together for a time, and the silence begins to grow heavy on their minds, and someone has to say
something. Darling, we go so long these days without having anything at all to do with each other, and the children are arriving tomorrow, and once more we’ll be in the position of making all the gestures that give them back their parents as they think their parents are, and what I wanted to say to you, what came to me as I thought about Louise and Charles on that day so long ago, when they were young and so obviously glad of each other, and I looked at them and knew it and was happy—what came to me was that even the harsh things that happened to them, even the years of anger and silence, even the disappointment and the bitterness and the wanting not to be in the same room anymore, even all that must have been worth it for such loveliness. At least I am here, at seventy years old, hoping so. Tonight, I went back to our room again and stood gazing at you asleep, dreaming whatever you were dreaming, and I had a moment of thinking how we were always friends, too. Because what I wanted finally to say was that I remember well our own sweet times, our own old loveliness, and I would like to think that even if at the very beginning of our lives together I had somehow been shown that we would end up here, with this longing to be away from each other, this feeling of being trapped together, of being tied to each other in a way that makes us wish for other times, some other place—I would have known enough to accept it all freely for the chance at that love. And if I could, I would do it all again, Marie. All of it, even the sorrow. My sweet, my dear adversary. For everything that I remember.

“William Coombs,
With two o’s,” Melanie Ballinger told her father over long distance. “Pronounced just like the thing you comb your hair with. Say it.”

Ballinger repeated the name.

“Say the whole name.”

“I’ve got it, sweetheart. Why am I saying it?”

“Dad, I’m bringing him home with me. We’re getting
married.”

For a moment, he couldn’t speak.

“Dad? Did you hear me?”

“I’m here,” he said.

“Well?”

Again, he couldn’t say anything.

“Dad?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s—that’s some news.”

“That’s all you can say?”

“Well, I mean—Melanie—this is sort of quick, isn’t it?” he said.

“Not that quick. How long did you and Mom wait?”

“I don’t remember. Are you measuring yourself by that?”

“You waited six months, and you do too remember. And this is five months. And we’re not measuring anything. William and I have known each other longer than five months, but we’ve been together—you know, as a couple—five months. And I’m almost twenty-three, which is two years older than Mom was. And don’t tell me it was different when you guys did it.”

“No,” he heard himself say. “It’s pretty much the same, I imagine.”

“Well?” she said.

“Well,” Ballinger said. “I’m—I’m very happy for you.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“I’m happy. I can’t wait to meet him.”

“Really? Promise? You’re not just saying that?”

“It’s good news, darling. I mean I’m surprised, of course. It’ll take a little getting used to. The—the suddenness of it and everything. I mean, your mother and I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone. But no, I’m—I’m glad. I can’t wait to meet the young man.”

“Well, and now there’s something
else
you have to know.”

“I’m ready,” John Ballinger said. He was standing in the kitchen of the house she hadn’t seen yet, and outside the window his wife, Mary, was weeding in the garden, wearing a red scarf and a white muslin blouse and jeans, looking young—looking, even, happy, though for a long while there had been between them, in fact, very little happiness.

“Well, this one’s kind of hard,” his daughter said over the thousand miles of wire. “Maybe we should talk about it later.”

“No, I’m sure I can take whatever it is,” he said.

The truth was that he had news of his own to tell. Almost a week ago, he and Mary had agreed on a separation. Some time for them both to sort things out. They had decided not to say anything about it to Melanie until she arrived. But now Melanie had said that she was bringing someone with her.