Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He beamed when he saw me, and he stood above my bed and looked at me, then examined me with eyes and hands. He probed, he listened, he squeezed, and always he smiled the happiest smile. His breath smelled of chewing gum, and his voice carried total conviction. He might say, “This fever will break at — wait a minute. What time is it, Michael?”

I’d consult the same clock that he was looking at and, with a grand sense of drama, tell him, in my weakest voice, “Two o’clock, Uncle Rudy.”

“This fever will break at seven o’clock tomorrow morning at the latest . Do you understand? You’ll feel better by seven tonight, and by seven tomorrow morning, you’ll have a normal temperature. Which is?”

“Ninety-eight point six,” I would recite, as if such knowledge were wisdom.

Rudy would smile as if it were. He would nod. “Perfect!” he’d shout. “You get yourself into college, and I’ll take care of med school for you. How old are you now, Michael?”

“Seven,” I would say, as if reaching past six had been a feat of art.

“Well, we’ve got some time,” Rudy would say.

And only then would he admit my mother, home from work to care for me. He always kept her outside my door because, as he often told her, he had his time alone with me, and then he had his time with her. While Rudy talked with me, my mother paced the hall. I’d hear her high-heeled shoes. And, at seven that night, I would ask for food. At seven in the morning I would register ninety-eight point six. And Rudy would have had his time alone with my mother, after his time alone with me.

Rudy’s wife, Dorothy, had always been kind to me, and though she often came with him to our house for social evenings, I didn’t think of her in any special way. At dinner, when I was thirteen, my mother announced to us that Rudy had left Dorothy. “It’s the way all these Jewish doctors do it,” my Jewish mother said with disgust. “They marry women with money who help them pay off their debts from medical school. They buy the office equipment and pay for the nurses — and you know about the nurses, yes? — and then the doctor leaves them when they’re ugly and old.”

My father said, “I would consider calling Dorothy ugly a massive favor to her.”

“She can’t help what she looks like,” my mother said.

“Maybe she can’t help it,” my father said, “but she makes Spike Jones look like Dorothy Lamour.”

“That’s stupid,” my mother said. “All the people in the world to think about, and you pick Spike Jones? Dorothy Lamour ? This is what you talk about all day in the office?”

“All day in the office,” my father said, “we talk about numbers. We say ‘six’ and ‘eleven.’ We say ‘Ninety thousand.’ But we never say Lamour or Jones, unless it’s a client’s name. And we don’t have a client named Lamour. These are names I learned after extensive reading of the World-Telegram & Sun . I hope they aren’t too far beneath us for me to be saying them at the table. How was school, Mike?”

“Excuse me?”

“Without question,” my father said, pulling his bow tie off and setting it beside his napkin on the table. “Absolutely. You’re excused. Do you think Spike Jones would divorce his wife just because her chin, where she needs to shave it a little, was falling down onto her neck?”

“Huh?”

My mother’s fork clanged on her plate.

My father, who was usually mild if not silent, and whose square face rarely carried much expression unless he grew teary while listening to Perry Como sing songs about parting, put his lips together, puffed his smooth cheeks, and widened his eyes. He looked like a fish, and I started to laugh, although I was puzzled — frightened, really — by these meat loaf and baked potato antics. My father saw my expression and he must have understood. He said, “Just wait, Michael. Wait.” And I still don’t know if he meant me to wait for seconds or for years.

My mother hardly waited seconds. She pushed the yellow Fiesta Ware pitcher so hard that water spilled from it onto a yellow, chunky Fiesta Ware plate. I thought again of our door. “You know how old he is? Rudy?”

My father answered her by smiling and nodding his head. He didn’t make the fish face, and I was grateful. I told my mother, “No.”

“This doesn’t concern you,” she said, her pretty face white, her thick lip reddening under her teeth while she waited an instant, and then said, “Forty-four.”

My father smiled broadly, then he reddened. Then he leaned back in his chair and smiled at something on the ceiling. I looked up, saw nothing, then looked down at my brown, grainy meat loaf. I waited for more. There was silence, and then my father’s voice: “I know it.”

“You know his age. Yes. But hers? Do you know hers ?”

“Oh,” my father said, as if he mugged for an audience. “You mean there’s another woman ? Well. I must say, I don’t know how old she is. I’ll bet, though, whatever her age is, it wouldn’t take too many numbers to write it or say it. And I bet you’re crazy with it.”

“I’m not crazy with it!”

“Michael, is she crazy with it, or what?”

“Don’t you do that to him.”

“ You do it to him and it’s all right. He sits here and you get crazy and it’s right. I ask him about it and I’m wrong? What is this conversation about ?”

Now, I was old enough to know that something more than minor was going on. I was also young enough to be tempted, for an instant, to cry out loud — for Rudy, or for everything my parents seemed to threaten to leave behind, or for what I couldn’t discern in the murky innuendo of their talk. But I was old enough to succumb to none of those temptations. I took a breath, I bent to my plate, and I ate the meat loaf, pulpy as usual (my mother never thought we’d have enough) with too much torn-up bread.

My mother said, “The woman is twenty-four. Rudy is forty-four. She is twenty years younger than he is. She—”

“No,” my father said. “No. You deprived me of the pleasure of announcing the fullness of this catastrophe. You really owe it to me to allow me to finish the cliché. Now, if I remember it — wait. Yes. Okay. I think I have it now. She is old enough to be his daughter. Right?”

“No. Young enough,” I said.

My father’s breath hissed. My mother said, “Michael.”

So I said, “Excuse me,” with what I thought of as dignity.

In my room, among my books and flung-about clothing and the drawings of spaceships and space suits and other apparatus of a future I saw as free of gravity and full of colorful wars, I lay on my bed and looked over the lights of our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and tried to make sense of my parents’ life together, and mine with them, and ours with Rudy. It was spring, the limbs of giant high trees were whipped by winds that came up, then died, with no preamble. At one moment, the skies were quiet; at another, they softly roared. The dark blue air looked grainy, and moving branches with their new leaves sliced the light from houses on the block behind us and made the brightening moon seem to dance in its place, low above the neighborhood. After a while, I did some homework and didn’t think of Rudy or my parents until I heard their footsteps as they climbed the stairs.

“There are dishes to be dried,” my mother said at my closed door. “Most children your age have to wash them too.”

“You all right?” my father called.

“It’s all right to come in,” I said.

I waited, but I heard their bedroom door close, and I knew that the fight — about what ? — was moving to private quarters. When they’d come up the stairs together, the house had seemed to shake. I had looked from my window as they climbed, to see whether the moon seemed to vibrate more than before. The winds had slackened, the moon had looked still, and I remember that I’d smiled with gratitude. My contentment stayed with me that night, and it came down to breakfast with me in the morning; I was prepared to let their mystery be theirs. Rudy was coming to dinner that weekend with his fiancée, as my mother called her, and I would wait until then for further clues.