Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

FANNY CAME DOWNSTAIRS to look for me. I was at the northern windows, looking through the mullions down the valley to the faint red line along the mounds and little peaks of the ridge beyond the valley. The sun was going to come up, and I was looking for it.

Fanny stood behind me. I could hear her. I could smell her hair and the sleep on her. The crimson line widened, and I squinted at it. I heard the dog limp in behind her, catching up. He panted and I knew why his panting sounded familiar. She put her hands on my shoulders and arms. I made muscles to impress her with, and then I let them go, and let my head drop down until my chin was on my chest.

“I didn’t think you’d be able to sleep after that,” Fanny said.

“I brought enough adrenaline home to run a football team.”

“But you hate being a hero, huh? You’re hiding in here because somebody’s going to call, or come over, and want to talk to you — her parents for shooting sure, sooner or later. Or is that supposed to be part of the service up at the playground? Saving their suicidal daughters. Almost dying to find them in the woods and driving too fast for any weather, much less what we had last night. Getting their babies home. The bastards.” She was crying. I knew she would be, sooner or later. I could hear the soft sound of her lashes. She sniffed and I could feel her arm move as she felt for the tissues on the coffee table.

“I have them over here,” I said. “On the windowsill.”

“Yes.” She blew her nose, and the dog thumped his tail. He seemed to think it one of Fanny’s finer tricks, and he had wagged for her for thirteen years whenever she’d done it. “Well, you’re going to have to talk to them.”

“I will,” I said. “I will.” The sun was in our sky now, climbing. We had built the room so we could watch it climb. “I think that jackass with the smile, my prof? She showed up a lot at his office, the last few weeks. He called her ‘my advisee,’ you know? The way those guys sound about what they’re achieving by getting up and shaving and going to work and saying the same thing every day? Every year? Well, she was his advisee, I bet. He was shoving home the old advice.”

“She’ll be okay,” Fanny said. “Her parents will take her home and love her up and get her some help.” She began to cry again, then she stopped. She blew her nose, and the dog’s tail thumped. She kept a hand between my shoulder and my neck. “So tell me what you’ll tell a waiting world. How’d you talk her out?”

“Well, I didn’t, really. I got up close and picked her up and carried her is all.”

“You didn’t say any thing?”

“Sure I did. Kid’s standing in the snow outside of a lot of pills, you’re gonna say something.”

“So what’d you say ?”

“I told her stories,” I said. “I did Rhetoric and Persuasion.”

Fanny said, “Then you go in early on Thursday, you go in half an hour early, and you get that guy to jack up your grade.”

IS VISITING old parents like visiting old friends? Ginger and Charlie were talking about her mother and father while hot, wet wind poured into the car and took the sound of their voices away from one another. They kept calling, “What?” The radio was playing Haydn. They were driving up a hill and were at last in the shade for a while, were dropping into tired silence, when the station changed. Ginger looked at Charlie, but his hands were on the wheel and not the tuner. It was something in the air — radio waves or great explosions on the surface of the sun — or a secret hand in a secret place turning the dial invisibly from Haydn to an instant of rock and roll and to a voice that spat cruel syllables and then back to Haydn again, but with hissings, electrical squeaks.

Ginger said, “I’m turning it off.”

They drove without speaking. Charlie waited for the radiator or the battery or all of the tires to explode. Nothing happened. He took the proper turns, and they were there when they’d said they would be.

Charlie had for twenty-five years thought of Ginger’s mother as someone who strode. Now she walked slowly, with a kind of sideways hitch in her pace. She had broken a leg two years before, and though she was recovered, she also wasn’t. While she had moved about, she’d been safe, he thought. But because she’d been pinned to a chair for some months, whatever it was that one fled had caught her. Her thin lips twisted as if the leg, or her sense of what Charlie was seeing, gave her pain. Ginger’s father, once a tall, athletic man, now was curving at the shoulders and walked with uncertainty, as if his balance were afflicted. The hardening arteries that isolated his heart were also affecting his feet: a man filled with blood could still not get enough where it was needed, and he walked as if his feet were tender, bruised. It seemed as though a wind were blowing at him, at both of them, and that each time it gusted they were almost knocked down.

They all hugged. Ginger and Charlie reported on their daughters; one was in a dance camp for the summer, the other was a waitress at a bar near Provincetown. Ginger’s father said, in his deepest professional voice — he had been a labor negotiator — that he still didn’t like the idea of Sue Ellen’s working in a saloon.

“It’s a respectable resort, Daddy,” Ginger said when they sat on the porch and drank tall drinks. Insects buzzed at the screen. The leaves hung limp on the maples. Her father opened the collar of his dark knitted sports shirt. He rubbed at the V of his pale chest as if to wipe away the heat. Charlie knew that batteries in a pacemaker underneath the chest were beating this man’s heart.

Ginger’s mother said, “He thinks Sue Ellen’s twelve years old.”

“Add seven,” Charlie said. “Actually, add about twenty-five. I’m not thinking about any thing. I’m trusting her. She’s a great kid. Trust is—”

“I can’t wait for it,” Ginger said.

“Overrated,” Charlie said.

“I always trusted Ginger ,” her mother said.

“Yes,” Charlie said, “but you learned your lesson, didn’t you?”

They were laughing now, at what wasn’t funny, at what was only another way of naming what scared them, and they were not talking about her parents’ health or their growing burden: this large Colonial house and its twenty acres; the garden, which demanded tending; the lawn, which Charlie would mow in the morning — the general maintenance, kept up only by hiring strangers, at whose mercy they more and more were. They drank their drinks, they told each other news. Ginger and her mother left, refusing offers to help with making dinner. Ginger’s father watched Charlie pour more gin, and he accepted soda water with lemon, and they sat and listened to catbirds shriek. They talked about Aida, the younger girl, who did tap, ballet, modern, and even ballroom dancing at the camp in the Berkshires. Charlie spoke of missing Aida but also of his pleasure at being alone with Ginger for a summer. Ginger’s father, in turn, spoke of how they still sometimes realized all over again that Ginger didn’t live with them. He said it gently, then shook his head, as if to signal how absurd he thought himself to be.

“Fathers,” Charlie said.

“The softest, most demanding species of man,” his wife’s father said. “Nothing’s worse.” He adjusted a cushion at his back. Charlie watched his father-in-law’s biceps and forearms under the pale skin. There was good muscle, but the skin was softening. He looked at its scabs and bruises, moles and spots and furrows, puckers.

“You did a good job,” Charlie said.

“You’re kind to say it. I did try to shut up a great deal.”