Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Charlie nodded in the dark. Ginger’s mother played more tape-recorded sounds — Baltimore orioles calling, her own voice saying, “It’s a soft, wet night,” a neighbor saying how she had spent her day — and then Ginger’s father’s voice returned, sounding nothing so much as pleased. It was as if he knew that one day his voice would speak about the Taiwanese, or about the man who had tried to sell him a slum in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and that his tones would be charming, his story engaging, and his body long gone. He was winsome for the future, Charlie thought. He was speaking from the grave. And there he sat, before his wife, who mourned him already, and before his daughter, mostly absent these days, whose daughters were now mostly absent as well. Charlie’s eyes ached. Jupiter glowed below the moon, and Mars above, as Ginger’s mother played the cassette.

In the darkness, Charlie could barely see any of them now. Ginger’s mother said, “I want you to hear something near the beginning of the tape. It’s sort of funny. Dad tells about the man from the aircraft company. The fellow who couldn’t tolerate dust. Did he ever tell you about that?”

“I must have bored them with that one a dozen times.”

Ginger’s voice said, “Tell it, Daddy.”

Her mother said, “Let the tape tell it. Wait. I have to find it. It’s near the beginning. Wait a minute.” She clicked buttons, reversing the tape. She pushed another button that sent it forward. She clicked and pushed, making the tape whine and jump and say fragments of sound.

Ginger said, “Daddy, go ahead.”

He began to talk while they sat back, invisible to one another. The hum and snick and sudden voices of the tape recorder played like a background tune in a shop while her mother searched the tape for his story. He was saying, “You see, his work involved the manufacture of instruments for fighter planes. One airplane in particular, an interceptor. They called it an all-weather interceptor. Well, you can imagine how an airplane that was supposed to fly in fog and rain might rely on its instruments. So of course the delicacy of their manufacture had to match the delicacy of the performance expected of them. Men were going to be sealed up, alone, ten miles in the air, surrounded by tons of metal alloy and wires and high explosives and kerosene, and they were going to rely exclusively on those instruments — except for their wits, of course. And who knows better than present company how little those can sometimes be counted on?”

As if he had rehearsed, he paused for polite laughter. Perhaps if they had sat in daylight he would have expected a smile and a nod. In the background, on the tape, Charlie heard a sound that startled him. It confused him. Ginger’s father continued, “Not to mention matters of perhaps intercepting a bomber headed for the United States, or one of our military bases in Europe. So it was crucial work. He headed — this fellow I’m speaking of — he ran the team that was in charge of the final assembling of the controls display. In their lab, they wore masks and caps and gowns to keep their hair or skin off their work. They wore gloves, of course, and the lab was immaculate. One speck of dirt, as I understand it, and some gizmo might go haywire. Boom! Millions of dollars and a human life: just ashes. So he was, not surprisingly, a very nervous man. He trembled, he said, except when he was on the job. I remember saying to him, ‘You had best love your work, then.’ The poor guy. We were writing a contract proposal for the company, and he was among the technicians’ representatives in my office one morning. We were talking about wages. It was amicable, systematic, slow. This was quite a while ago. This was almost twenty years ago, my God. He sat there, shaking and pale, watching everything. He had enormous brown eyes, I remember. He was like a great big spaniel or a retriever. He watched and he watched.

“And, all of a sudden, he sat up. He’d been slouched, looking tired, just pressing his fingers on my desk top, watching. Then he sat straight up and rubbed his fingertips together. The expression on his face was one of horror. I’m sure you can guess it. They don’t call them dusty lawyers’ offices for nothing, after all.” Ginger’s father paused. Charlie nodded and smiled, as if they sat in the light. “His fingers were covered with dust , you see. The enemy!”

Ginger’s mother said, “There!” Her father’s taped voice in the background paused, as the voices alive on the porch did, and then the tape-recorded voice of Ginger’s father said, “The enemy!”

“This thing takes forever to rewind,” Ginger’s mother complained. But Charlie was thinking that the sound he had heard a few moments ago, preserved in the muted chatter and mechanical grating of the buttons, was his own voice. It had spoken a syllable, now long past in the to-ing and fro-ing of the tape — a fragment of his daughter Aida’s name — and he could not avoid imagining that his daughters might listen to this same broken voice on a porch in a future night, when Ginger was absent, and he was, too, and when a rare pattern of planets would have reappeared to goggle from the dark.

A button clicked and the tape recorder stopped. They sat in the darkness. Ginger’s mother cleared her throat. Charlie thought of his daughters thinking of him, and then, like a delicate moth settling, a hand that reached from the darkness stroked the back of Charlie’s hand. It was a tentative touch, and the hand was very light and very little — his mother-in-law’s. She offered the softest caress. Charlie waited for more. But the small hand withdrew. Ginger yawned, and her father spoke of sleep.

RUDY MADE ME PROMISES, and they came true. He was our doctor and had always been. In his high, bright voice — a loud and happy shout no matter its announcement — he would cry, “You have the measles , hon!” Or: “We’re gonna take your tonsils out, you can eat all the ice cream you want !” Or: “Your head will feel better when it’s exactly twenty minutes past dinnertime!” When I was eight, I heard my mother describe him as a rascal. When I was ten or so, I knew that, according to my father, he was a presumptuous bastard. To me he was Uncle Rudy, and in the forties and fifties, he was at my bed when I was ill. If I were home from school with a flu or one of the many childhood diseases no one then was vaccinated against, I lay in my room and listened to the wood-cased radio with its golden crosshatched speaker: “Helen Trent” and “Our Gal Sunday” and, later in the afternoon, “Sky King” and “The Green Hornet.” On lucky days, I heard the Dodgers play — Jackie Robinson throwing to Gil Hodges — and, despite the music about me, and the radio voices, I always heard Rudy, or always thought I did. He drove the newest, sleekest cars, Packards, I remember, and Lincolns. Their windows rose and fell when Rudy pushed buttons. He parked with impunity in front of the fire hydrant at our curb. And, although they were tuned and silent cars, I always thought, when I heard Rudy climbing the steps, that I had heard his motor cough, or his brakes mildly squeak. I liked pretending that his process up the stairs was no surprise. And so it wasn’t one, for years and years.

He was light on his feet, and his step was a sort of spring. His shoes had leather heels and soles, so he clacked as he climbed, and our wooden steps made groaning noises under him. I always thought it unfair that a man who could bound like that, and click as sharply as he did, still had to walk on stairs that made him sound fat. He wasn’t thin. He couldn’t have been taller than five feet seven or eight, and he surely weighed over two hundred pounds. He frequently dieted, choosing faddish and unproven methods, and once, I remember, exciting my mother to complain for his safety. Once in a while he bought new suits to flatter a slenderer shape that he would own for a couple of months. But usually Rudy seemed round: his bald head was round, and it sat atop his big chest and belly, and his thick round legs, his little feet. I heard the feet, when he came to care for me with his magic, and then I saw his round, gold-rimmed glasses on his happy pale face.