The Stories of Richard Bausch (80 page)

You should’ve let me stay Marilyn. I’m better as Marilyn.

Okay, Marilyn. I love you, Marilyn. If I call the number again, can I ask for Marilyn and will they put me through to you?

They might.

It’s a strange world, there, Marilyn.

Only if you let yourself think about it too much. To me, it makes a perfect kind of sense. Now I really do have to go.

Hey.

Yeah?

You were sweet, Marilyn.

You, too.

I know it wasn’t as good for you as it was for me.

You take care of yourself, John. And try to be happy.

Thanks, kid. That’s excellent advice. I know this isn’t an advice line, but thanks anyway, it’s kind of you to offer it.

Bye, John.

Now
there’s
the note you want—that’s sexy as hell the way you said that. If you could manage that tone the next time I call, it would be perfect. Do you think you could manage that tone the next time I call if I ask for Marilyn and they put me through to you?

…

Hello?

I.

Anthony Trueblood dropped
out of graduate school at the University of Chicago in early April, upon the news that his father had left home for good. The old man had run off with a client, a woman half his age. Trueblood’s mother was in a bad way, her voice over the telephone sounding slurred with alcohol and whatever pills she’d ingested. Since there was no other family to speak of, the necessity of returning to Virginia glared at him. Anyway, he had fallen behind in his studies, and had been drifting for some weeks. He would be thirty in three months. As far as school was concerned, he felt played out; he was needed at home.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he found there.

He had to hospitalize his mother on the day of his return. She went willingly, with a scary nonunderstanding. He strove for gentleness, patience, forbearance, and felt inwardly livid with her. How could she direct her rage at herself so? Twice, alone in the rest room just outside the psych ward, he
stood at the sink and wept quietly, laving the cold water over his face, worrying that someone might walk in on him.

The house, which he had grown up in, could well have served to illustrate the ravages of depressive illness—a deplorable, shapeless mess. Evidently, she had let things go well before this latest crisis came to a head, and it alarmed the young man that he had heard nothing of it over the telephone (indeed, over the past months, he had thought his parents seemed better with each other, at least more considerate). His mother’s good dishes and tableware were stacked, stinking, caked with garbage, on tables and bookshelves and along the kitchen wall opposite the back door, and there were dirty paper plates and cups strewn among months-old newspapers and heaps of rags that turned out to be most of his parents’ wardrobe, on the floors. Every room had its mountain of neglect and refuse. He scarcely knew where to begin. It was all part of the chaos both of them had made.

Thirty-two years of a bad marriage.

He went about everything in a discouraged daze, gathering the old newspapers and lugging them by the armful out to the curb; collecting the strewn clothes, stuffing them into large lawn bags, loading the back of the car with them, and taking them to the cleaners. In three days he had not really put a dent in it. And apart from this dispiriting physical labor, he spent many hours trying to make some order of his mother’s untended life in the world: the bills, including the mortgage; her job with the county clerk’s office; the tangle of her other responsibilities. He took phone messages from her friends and contacted her boss—who expressed sympathy and indicated that she should concentrate on getting better—and he composed letters to creditors, several of whom had begun calling and threatening legal action. It was as though his mother had suddenly died, though the doctors assured him that she was not in any danger, her condition was temporary. In the evenings he shaved and showered, like a man getting ready for a date, and went to visit her.

Through all this, he received no word from his father, whose unbroken silence fretted the raw places in his soul.

The hospital interior looked depressingly like every depiction that he had ever seen of such places: dull, institutional colors, blank walls. She sat in a cushioned chair in the dayroom, with her hands folded in her lap, and asked him for a drink.

“I won’t do that, Mom. Please stop asking.”

“Have you been in touch with your father?” she said. Then she answered her own question: “You’ve been in touch with your father.”

“No.”

“You’re lying. I can always tell when you lie.”

This was not true, and had never been true, though it was a familiar expression of hers. “I’m not lying,” he told her.

“Liar.”

Trueblood tried to stick to the practical matters he had been handling for her. He sat with her, held her hands while she cried, and when she was cross, he simply bore it, for her sake, until she dismissed him.

At the house, alone, he watched TV into the early morning hours. The idea of reading anything, even a newspaper, made him feel oddly susceptible. The world went on with its disastrous business outside the windows and it was all too much to contend with. Several nights, very late, he made himself a drink, but didn’t finish it.

II.

A porcelain Madonna and three glass figurines were arranged on the hall table just inside the front door. The figurines were clear as the clearest ice: an angel with high arching wings folded into the long torso; a reclining mermaid, and the head of a cat. The table itself was clean, tended to, as were the Madonna and figurines. For some reason this was the only place his mother had maintained. Each morning, first thing, he went over the Madonna and the figurines with a soft cloth, and dusted the table, as if to preserve that small remnant of what had been her once-passionate care for her things. But now and then in the middle of the night, he stood in the living room with the angel, the mermaid, and the cat, and practiced juggling—a hobby he had brought with him out of childhood. He was good enough to be fairly certain of the safety of these objects he tossed and caught, though there was something faintly defiant about it, too. Almost a kind of spite. He would stand there silently, aware of his own hectic, gyrating shadow on the wall, the clear objects sailing in the air in the continuous whoosh, the little rush of his breathing—an acrobatic show for no one.

He had turned the couch in the living room into a bed. Most nights, sleepless, he lay there wondering about this turn his life had taken. When his thoughts became too morbid, he hauled himself up and went out to walk the neighborhood, where nothing was as it had been when he was a child. The woods had been torn down, and houses were bunched one upon another all the way up the long hill to Route 29. He walked past homes with warm lights in the windows, and occasionally, even in the middle of the night, he heard children’s voices. Later, lying on the couch again, he would play those sounds back in his mind, imagining that he had a family, children—that his life had changed, he had someone to strive for, come home to.

In Chicago, his classmates had considered him rather ascetic and strange. They probably made up stories about him and watched for signs of abnormalities. He had never been gregarious, but the circle of people with whom he spent any time had narrowed and narrowed. A woman had told him that he had a troubling way of looking off when spoken to, as if he wasn’t paying attention, and no doubt this was often mistaken for an arrogance he did not possess. The truth was that the direct gaze of another person made him feel uncomfortable, though he had striven always to be considerate, mild, even humorous. Still, he lacked the ability to feel at ease and he knew others reacted mostly to that.

Everything he had read about shyness blamed the shy person, as if it was always a problem of a troubled and selfish ego. He did not believe that. He did not like the state of things, but blamed no one for it. It was simply his nature, from his earliest memories, and he wished fervently that it were not so.

In his mother’s disordered house, gazing at his own face in the mirror as he shaved, he reflected with characteristic objectivity about himself that this was where he had ended up: he had taken nine years to finish his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina, and he had advanced part of one year in the study of ancient history at Chicago—all at the expense of his now absconded father—and he had never been close to marriage.

His father, who was fifty-five and looked twenty years younger, was presently in Maui on a kind of ersatz honeymoon, though he and the young companion wouldn’t actually have gone through any ceremony. Over the years, the old man had dallied with waitresses and ladies on the road, ladies met in travels for the firm—whose business ranged all over the upper South, mostly with chain grocery stores and hardware outlets and the builders of
shopping malls. For as long as the son could remember, other women were a source of trouble in the fractious lives of his parents. And his father had never even been very careful about it, didn’t seem able to keep his own secrets.

At the end of the second week home, looking through the mail and the unpaid bills in her desk, Trueblood found a piece of paper with the name of a cleaning agency written on it, Cinderfella, Inc. He telephoned them and asked for someone to help with things—a man answered, a rough, rude, harried voice on the other end. “Yeah, give me the address, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have to let you know what we’ll charge.”

“It’s a whole house,” Trueblood said. “A lot of work.”

“Yeah, all right—someone’ll call.”

When the phone rang fifteen minutes later, he thought it was the agency calling back. “Who’s this?” came the voice.

“Yes?” Trueblood said. But then he knew it was his father.

“That you, Anthony? What’re you doing there, son?”

The heat at the back of his head, the breathless anger rising in him, made it difficult to speak. “What am I—have you got any idea—” He couldn’t get the rest of it out.

“Listen, son. She let everything go to hell—I couldn’t stay in that fire-trap …”

Trueblood shouted: “My mother is in the psycho ward at Fauquier Hospital!” And slammed down the receiver so hard that it bounced off the cradle. His father’s voice was still audible in it when he picked it up and slammed it down again.

An hour later, a blue minivan pulled up, and a young woman got out-squarish, with washed blue eyes and a tired look, one lacy strand of dishwater blond hair drooping across her forehead. She squinted at him in the brightness. “Hi,” she said, coming up the sidewalk. She had a leather bag draped over one shoulder, and she leaned away from the apparent weight of it, the opposite hand out for balance. “My name’s Lynn Bassett.”

Trueblood introduced himself. She gripped his hand, stepped up onto the stoop, opened the door, and walked past him, dropping the bag with a thump on the hall floor. “Jeez Louise,” she said, pushing the hair back from her forehead. “What happened here?” She walked into the center of the living room. “What a mess.”

“I’ve been working on it for almost two weeks. This is nothing compared to what it was.”

“Jeez Louise.”

“How much will this cost?” he asked. “I never got this settled with the man on the phone. He was supposed to call me back.”

“He’s my brother: Cinderfella, get it? I’m helping him out. He sent me over here.” She picked up a whiskey glass that Trueblood himself had left on the end table, and sniffed at it, wrinkling her nose. “It’s ten dollars an hour, or fifty-five dollars a week, depending.” She put the glass down and regarded him.

As always, he was aware of his own unattractiveness: the heavy cheeks, the too-short nose; the flatness of his brow. He felt an almost irrepressible urge to hide himself. His parents had been attractive when young; he had seen the pictures. Their features had combined in him to make a vaguely swollen, infantine appearance; he was someone who had never lost his baby fat. He took a breath and tried to speak. “If—if I decide the more advantageous …” It was the voice, he knew, of someone rather stiff and overformal, the voice of his habitual reserve, and he checked himself, cleared his throat, then managed to say, “I think it has to be—this is several days’ work. Can you work here for a few days—is there a daily rate?”

“Ten dollars an hour. Three hours maximum. I’ve got other houses to clean.”

“When can you start?”

She shrugged. “Now?”

III.

He found it strangely pleasurable to be in the house while she worked. He was working, too, of course, going through his father’s clothes, putting suits and ties and shirts in boxes, intending to donate them to Goodwill, and hoping his father would come back looking for them. He spent one afternoon picking among some of the things his mother had saved from his boyhood: cards he had written to her and drawings he had made; letters to grandparents, and cousins in Alabama, people he hadn’t heard from in years, now. There was old schoolwork, too. He found a clay ashtray he’d made his mother in sixth grade, which she had never used. He found a carved clay head—the blocky face of primitive
art, though it had been meant to be a portrait of his father. It looked like a totem—something that might have been found in a cave, among bones.