Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

IT BEGAN FOR ME in a woman’s bed, and my father was there though she wasn’t. I was nine years old, and starting to age. “Separate vacations,” then, meant only adventure to me. My bespectacled mother would travel west to attend a conference about birds; she would stare through heavy binoculars at what was distant and nameable. My father and I would drive through Massachusetts and New Hampshire into Maine, where he and Bill Brown, a friend from the army, would climb Mount Katahdin and I would stay behind at the Brown family’s farm.

And it was adventure — in the days away from New York, and in the drive alone with my father in the light-green ’49 Chevrolet, and in my mother’s absence. For she seemed to be usually angry at someone, and my father struck me as usually pleased with the world, and surely with me. And though I knew enough to understand that his life was something of a secret he didn’t tell me, I also knew enough at nine to accept his silence as a gift: peace, which my mother withheld by offering the truth, in codes I couldn’t crack, of her discontent.

I remember the dreamy, slow progress of the car on heat-shimmered highways, and my elbow — this never was permitted when we all drove together on Long Island — permanently stuck from the high window. We slept one night in a motel that smelled like iodine, we ate lobster rolls and hot dogs, I discussed the probable settlement of Mars, and my father nodded gravely toward my knowledge of the future.

He gave me close escapes — the long, gray Hudson which almost hit us, because my father looked only ahead when he drove, never to the side or rear, as we pulled out of a service station; the time we had a flat and the jack collapsed twice, the car crashing onto the wheel hub, my father swearing—“God damn it!”—for the first time in my hearing; and the time he let the car drift into a ditch at the side of the road, pitching us nose-down, rear left-side wheel in the air, shaken and stranded until a farmer on a high tractor towed us out and sent us smiling together on our way. My father bared his teeth to say, “It’s a lucky thing Mother isn’t here,” while I regretted the decorum I had learned from him — I was not to speak without respect of the woman with binoculars who had journeyed from us.

I thought of those binoculars as we approached the vague shapes of weathered gray buildings, wished that I could stare ahead through them and see what my life, for the next little while, might offer. But the black Zeiss 12 × 50s were thousands of miles from us, and really further than that: they were in my memory of silent bruised field trips, when my father’s interest would be in covering ground, and my mother’s would be expressed in the spraddle-legged stiffness with which she stared at birds up a slope I knew my father wanted to be climbing.

Bill Brown was short and mild in silver-rimmed glasses. He wore a striped engineer’s cap with a long bill, and he smiled at everything my father said. Molly Brown was taller than Bill, and was enormously fat, with wobbling arm flesh and shaking jowls and perpetual streaked flushes on her soft round cheeks. Their daughter, Paula, was fourteen and tall and lean and beautiful. She had breasts. Sweat, such an intimate fact to me, stained the underarms of her sleeveless shirt. She wore dungarees that clung to her buttocks. She rolled the cuffs to just below her knees, and I saw the dusk sun light up golden hairs on her shins. She had been assigned to babysit me for the visit. I could not imagine being babysat by so much of everything I had heard rumored, and was beginning to notice in playgrounds, secrets of the other world.

We ate mashed potatoes and a roast that seemed to heat the kitchen, which, like the other rooms in the house, smelled of unwashed bodies and damp earth. I slept that first night on a cot in Paula’s room, and I was too tired even to be embarrassed, much less thrilled, by the proximity; I slept in purest fatigue, as if I had journeyed on foot for weeks to another country, in which the air was thin. Next day, we walked the Brown’s land — I could not take my eyes from Paula’s spiny back and strong thighs as we climbed fences, as she helped me, her child-assignment, up and over and down — and we ate too much hot food, and drank Kool-Aid (forbidden, because too sugary, at home), and we sat around a lot. I rejoiced in such purposelessness, and I suspected that my father enjoyed it too, for our weekend days at home were slanted toward mission; starting each Saturday morning, we tumbled down the long tilted surfaces of the day into weeding and pruning and sweeping and traveling in the silent car to far-off fields to see if something my mother knew to be special was fluttering over marshes in New Jersey or forests in upstate New York.

My father, who made radio advertisements, spoke a little about his work, and Bill Brown said in his pleased soft voice that he had heard my father’s ads. But when Bill said, “Where do you get those crazy ideas, Frank?” my father turned the conversation to potato farming, and the moth collection which Bill and Molly kept together, and the maintenance of trucks. I knew that my father understood nothing about engines. He was being generous again, and he was hiding again while someone else talked of nothing that mattered to the private man who had taught me how to throw a baseball, and how to pack a knapsack, and how — I know this now — to shelter inside other people’s words. And there was Paula, too, smoking cigarettes without reprimand, swinging beside me on the high-backed wooden bench that was fastened by chains to the ceiling of their porch. I breathed her smoke as now I’d breathe in perfume on smooth, heated skin.

In reply to a question, my father said, “Angie’s in Colorado.

“All the way out there,” Molly said.

Bill said, “Well.”

“Yes, she had a fine opportunity,” my father said. “They gave her a scholarship to this conference about bird migration, I guess it is, and she just couldn’t say no.”

“I’d like to go there sometime,” Paula said, sighing smoke out.

“Wouldn’t you, though?” Molly growled in her rich voice. “Meet some Colorado boys and such, I suspect?”

“Give them a chance to meet a State of Maine girl , don’t forget,” Paula said. “Uncle Frank, didn’t you want to go to Colorado?”

My father’s deep voice rumbled softly. “Not when I can meet a State of Maine girl right here, hon. And don’t forget, your father and I already spent some time in Colorado.”

“Amen that it’s over,” Bill said.

“I saw your father learn his manners from a mule out there, didn’t I, Bill?”

“Son of a bitch stepped so hard on my foot, he broke every damned bone inside it. Just squatted there, Frank, you remember? Son of a bitch didn’t have the sense to get off once he’d crushed it. It took Frank jumping up and down and kicking him just to make him wake and look down and notice he already done his worst and he could move along. Leisurely, as I remember. He must have been thinking or something. I still get the bowlegged limps in wet weather. I wouldn’t cook a mule and eat one if I was starved to death.”

“Well, didn’t she—” Paula said.

“Angie,” I said. I felt my father look at me across the dark porch.

“Didn’t Angie want to come up here and meet us?” Paula asked.

Molly said, “Couldn’t you think of any personal questions you would like for Frank to answer for you?”

“Well, I guess I’m sorry , then.”

“That’s right,” Molly said.

“It was one hell of a basic training,” Bill said. He said it in a rush. “They had us with this new mountain division they were starting up. Taught us every goddamned thing you could want to know about carrying howitzers up onto mountains by muleback. How to get killed while skiing. All of it. Then, they take about three hundred of us or so and send us by boat over to some hot jungle. Ship all our gear with us too, of course. So we land there in the Philippine Islands with snowshoes, skis, camouflage parkas, light machine guns in white canvas covers , for gosh-sakes, and they ask us if we’d win the war for them.”