Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

On the way to the car with Jeremy, each of them wearing a sweater in the chill of the morning, he saw the pink, shining offal, like a tiny brain, that he had spat out before entering the house the night before. He kicked it aside, saying, “Yuck,” to Jeremy, who hadn’t noticed because, Bing suspected, he could see only the bleak patterns of the morning ahead at school. Whatever they were, they were unspeakable, and Jeremy didn’t try to describe them.

As Bing buckled him in, Jeremy echoed, “Yuck.”

“Yuck what, old sock?”

“New sock,” Jeremy replied, dutifully socking his Pop-Pop’s arm.

“Yowch!” Bing howled, but Jeremy didn’t smile. He would return tomorrow, he thought, and he would see — while he drove, or while he added fares to his Metro card at a subway station, or while he looked at proofs — the ivory cheeks, chewed lips, and anxious eyes of his child’s child. There he sat, pinioned by buckles and straps. Bing thought of last night’s roasted chicken, now a half-stripped carcass. He thought as he started the engine that its flavor filled his mouth, as if a sour bubble of grease had come up his throat to burst behind his teeth.

“You are my hero,” he sang to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” “my lovely hero—” He said, “Did you know you were my hero?”

“No.”

“Do you know what a hero is?”

“No,” Jeremy said. Then he said, “Yes.”

“What, honey?”

“They have blue pants and boots and a red shirt,” the boy recited.

Bing prayed: Oh, don’t.

But Jeremy continued. “And they have a cape,” he said.

All that Bing could say, then, was, “I love you, honey. Pop-Pop loves you to bits.”

Jeremy whispered, “Yuck,” and then they were silent for the rest of the ride through the tidy village, and then while Bing found someplace to park, and then while he lifted his grandson out and onto the pavement, and then while they joined their hands and walked to school.

Muriel greeted her students outside the basement entrance of the Baptist church. She wore an unbuttoned navy blue raincoat over her shoulders. He saw white tights and a short, dark skirt, and he thought — as he had so often during the evening and the long night — of the smoothness of her thighs. She smiled at them, and Bing felt himself smile back goofily, as happily as adolescent boys can smile at adolescent girls who have been kind to them. She wore a raspberry-colored silk scarf, he noticed, that was held in place with a cameo pin. He thought of it as little and brave, but he felt only pleasure — his, but also hers — in the observation.

She said, “Good morning, Jeremy. Good morning, Pop-Pop.”

Jeremy looked at Bing before saying, “Morning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bing replied.

“Yes,” she said. She said, “I have something, Jeremy. I think you might need a new cape. This one is very powerful.” She drew a bundle from under her coat and shook it loose. A cape unfolded, a different shade of blue from her coat or skirt, but clearly part of an outfit she had planned while she planned this moment. She held it out, and Jeremy, after looking it over — Bing saw its J in white and lavender paisley — silently turned his back toward his teacher so that she could fasten its paisley ties about his neck.

When she turned him back around and kissed his nose, he looked at Bing.

“Looks good, old sock,” Bing said.

“New sock,” Jeremy told him and punched him with power on his offered upper arm. Bing winced and yelped, and Jeremy grinned very broadly.

“Thank you, Mrs. Preston,” Bing insisted.

“Thank you,” Jeremy said, moving away from them and toward a cluster of children who had been watching.

Bing said, “That was a great — I don’t know. Courtesy. Favor. Small salvation, for goodness’ sakes. Nora asked him if she should make another one, and he said no. He cried. He was angry, I think. Because the magic of the original was gone. But there you were with this—”

“A different magic is all,” she said.

He knew that he had to return to his car and drive to Nora’s and then leave. But he also had to stand among the copper and the orange leaves with his grandson’s teacher. “It was generous,” he said, “and a beautiful gesture in friendship. And it was gorgeous in and of itself.”

He felt himself reddening as she flushed up from the knot of her scarf along her cheeks and then her forehead. Her eyes were full. A father and his child were half a block away, followed by a mother who wheeled a stroller, and he sensed that they were aimed toward Muriel. Bing felt a desperation about being forced away from this final intimacy with her.

“Gorgeous,” he repeated.

“It’s when someone decides that the difference in the magic is acceptable,” she said. “And by the way: an action isn’t always a gesture.” She looked at the approaching father and she said, “A person needs to know the difference.”

And he didn’t. Maybe she knew that hesitation in him. Maybe it was why she was, apparently, alone — because others also didn’t know the difference in her. He saw his grandson’s long blue cape as the boy, under its protection, dared the dangers of his peers.

She turned from him. She turned back. “You might take some time and decide,” she suggested.

He said, “Yes.”

She smiled a sunny, theatrical smile. She said, “Teachers. They’re always giving homework assignments.”

“Nora’s coming to get him after school,” Bing said. “I have to get back.”

“Back,” she said.

“To New York. I have a job.”

Yes,” she said. “We never talked about our jobs very much. We were in a hurry.”

“Yes.”

“Too much of a hurry, do you think?”

“Not too much of a hurry,” he said. “No. I wish — I wish we could start in a hurry all over again.”

“We could continue in a hurry,” she said.

“Maybe I could phone you during the week,” he said, with a thick-tongued dullness he hated.

“Dear man,” she said, “I think you could do anything to me.” The spasm of anger he felt for the theater in her voice was frightening. He stepped back. He looked away and he waved at Jeremy, who moved his cocked arm back and forth — all he dared, in front of his friends, to display of farewell. “But you’re already gone,” she said. Her face grew serious and it seemed smaller. He thought he saw what she might look like, grown older.

Even he, Bing thought, could hear the sorrow in his voice. “Not that far,” he said, because he wanted her to smile. “Not as far as you’d think.”

Waving goodbye to her across perhaps ten inches as Jeremy had waved to him over a dozen yards, he turned away from the school. He prayed. He addressed no heavenly father stitched from children’s dreams. And he didn’t believe that his prayer could be heard. Still, he prayed, because now, he thought, just possibly, he understood some of what his wife might have meant in the rigors of her dying.

Anna, he said to her as he walked through the leaves to his car, could you do me a favor, dear girl, and give me a bit of a push?

THE COUSINS MADE a rough crossing, they’d have said, if they had thought to complain. They mentioned but didn’t lament the time in the air, the late arrival at de Gaulle, the bus ride to catch the train at the Gare Montparnasse, or the long wait for the Très Grand Vitesse to Bordeaux. They did joke about the man in the car rental agency at the Bordeaux terminal who spoke no English and who resented that they spoke some French. He cost them a half an hour of futile searching for the car he pretended to direct them toward, nearly shouting his exasperation: “ Les voitures, il restent la, à droit — la, monsieur! La!”