Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Even in the story “Reruns” where a wife has left her psychiatrist husband, and gone to Beruit, where she is kidnapped and taken hostage, the story remains tightly oriented in the town of Sherwood New York, not particularly interested in the international aspects of the world. The husband himself realizes, “We are so far from every place.” Later he reports, “I couldn’t have named one hostage.” His life is taking place in the town with three traffic lights; his life is taking place inside his office where he admits, “Being crazy’s a family project,” and inside his house where a member of the state department sits in the kitchen, and in the next room the daughters watch their mother on television.

So-called ordinary life, though, is large, and the array of situations and conflicts presented in these stories is impressive. Again and again we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors, or what goes on in the mind of another. Busch once said that what he most enjoyed as a writer was “knowing that I made someone see something in a different way.” It’s hard to imagine any reader of these stories driving past a farmhouse in upstate New York — or anywhere — without seeing it another way, which is to say honoring the possibilities that lie inside, those aspects of life that are unsayable, otherwise unknowable.

In “Name the Name” a man who is a traveling teacher, required by the state to attend to local school age children who for whatever reasons cannot make it to the classroom, takes us through an ordinary (extraordinary) day. First he goes to the home of a young pregnant girl, whose mother makes him reheated coffee, “a woman too embarrassed to look at my face. She wore polyester pants with a black and white check, a man’s gray sweatshirt over a heavy flannel shirt, and big slippers lined with synthetic fur; on top of each slipper was the face of a dog with a pink tongue. She wore no socks and the chapped red roughness of her ankles was an intimacy between us.” From there the teacher goes to the hospital to teach a bedridden girl poetry that she writes on her chalkboard is “bologna.” And he finishes his day by going to the county jail where the sixteen year old young man he is there to teach is his own son. While there was a flirtation with a nurse at the hospital, as there are often flirtations or hints of sexual liaisons outside the family, it seems the family unit is the engine running most of these stories, with the boy-man head of the household often weary.

It can be argued — and Busch seems both aware of this and in charge of it — that the claustrophobic self-loathing of these men comes close at times to narcissism; a fascination with the self that can’t transcend its setting. This is when the Brooklyn based stories provide a change of tone as well as their change in location. You will find Brooklyn trees seen through Brooklyn windows, men wearing polished wing tips, cigarettes smoked while holding glasses of brandy, and the sound of Electrolux vacuum cleaners. The men seem more cheerful, in spite of their heart conditions, or the wives they betray, or the lovers whose needs they cannot fulfill. Probably this comes from the fact that these stories tend to be narrated by a younger character, looking up at these people as a young person often does, believing that grown-ups are actually adults. The boy-man aspect is in abeyance. They tell the tale of a time gone by.

And eventually the other stories will do the same. The era that Busch writes of is, of course, passing. He noted this himself in an essay he wrote in 1984, “Fiction That’s Glossier,” bemoaning what he found in the fiction section of what was then the current magazines. He found gossip instead of beauty. He found technology instead of narrative. He found stories that merely stated problems, working “like a small machine of limited function.” He worried that the “new anti-Freudian psychopiddle that began in the 60’s and flourished during the 70’s, when it was stylish to be selfish, healthy, pretty and pretty much alone in your concerns” was now all the readers wanted. What Busch wanted was to communicate. This is why he praised Hemingway for “responsible writing, a writing that is about the essential transaction between writer and reader. It is about being human in a time of despair.”

Busch has been referred to as a “writer’s writer,” and it is hard to know exactly what this means. Ostensibly it means that he is read mainly by writers — and for good reason; one can learn a lot about dialogue, character, setting, about how little it takes on the page to render something correctly. But probably it also means that his sales were not high enough for him to be considered a writer who reached a large number of mainstream readers. This is too bad, because any reader, whether they are a writer, or a lover of humanity, a consumer of literature for the sake of it alone, has a great deal to find in here. Through the abilities of Busch, and his unfaltering benevolence, we learn that not only was he brave, he tells us something we should know: Most of us are brave. It is worth celebrating.

WHAT TO KNOW about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose. I’m a plumber. I dig for what’s wrong. I should know. And what I think of now as I remember pain is the fat young man and his child, their staggering house, the basement filled with death and dark water, the small perfect boy on the stone cellar steps who wept, the widow’s coffee gone cold.

They called on Friday to complain that the pump in their basement wouldn’t work. Theirs is shallow-well country, a couple of miles from the college, a place near the fast wide river that once ran the mill that all the houses of the town depended on. The railroad came, the town grew, the large white clapboard houses spread. By the time their seedlings were in the middle growth, the mill had failed, the houses had run to blisters of rotted wood on the siding and to gaps in the black and green roofs. The old ones were nearly all dead and the railroad came twice a day, from Utica to Binghamton, to Utica from Binghamton, carrying sometimes some freight, sometimes a car of men who maintained the nearly useless track. And the new people came, took their children for walks on the river to the stone foundations of the mill. They looked at the water and went home. People now don’t know the water as they should. I’m a plumber, I should know.

I told him I couldn’t come on a Friday afternoon in April, when the rains were opening seams and seals and cellars all through the country. Bella was making coffee for us while I took the call, and I snapped my fingers for her to turn around. She did, all broad — not fat, though — and full of colors — red in her face, yellow in her hair going gray, the gold in her tooth, her eyes blue as pottery — and I pointed at the phone. She mouthed a mimic “Today, today, today,” and I nodded, and she nodded back and poured the almost boiling water out into the instant coffee, which dissolved.

He said, “So you see, sir, we can use your help.”

I said, “Yessir, sounds like a problem.”

“No water, and we’ve got a boy who isn’t toilet-trained. It gets kind of messy.”

“I imagine.”

“So do you think you could…”

“Yessir?”

“Come kind of soon?”

“Oh, I’ll come kind of soon. It just won’t be today.”

“You’re sure you couldn’t…”

“Yessir?”

“Come today?”

“Yessir.”

“Yes sir, what?”

“Yessir, I’m sure I can’t come.”

Bella rapped on the table with her big knuckles to tell me to come and sit. I nodded, pointed at the telephone, waited for him to try once more. He was from the college — he would try once more.