Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

My father seemed apprehensive on Saturday, though as usual he worked in the garden, wearing his World War II fatigues. He’d begun to talk about how few men his age could still get into their army-issue clothes. Pausing often to catch his breath, he clipped what rarely needed cutting back, he painted a portion of the high fence that screened us from our neighbors, he mulched and raked and swept; he made time away in a place that was away, and he thought to himself about matters of which he never spoke to me. Or so I concluded. His face, when he worked, was someone else’s, and I often watched him with curiosity. I never worked beside him, though: I was the usual thirteen. He was showered and dressed quite early, and he was early at his inventory of liquors and mixers and pickled onions and candied fruits and ice. I wore clean corduroys and a shirt with a starched collar that irritated my neck. I was watching wrestling on television while my father made the living room ready for peanuts and drinks, and while my mother slowly dressed.

I saw my father look at the ceiling only once — I was reminded of his upward glance during their argument — and I don’t know if he was thinking of my mother upstairs. But I was. For I was listening, over the cries of the fans of Bruno Sammartino, to her feet. She was already in her high-heeled shoes, and I listened to their slow, lassitudinous rhythm as she drifted from her bureau to her closet mirror, then back to her bureau drawers again. Her footsteps at first seemed almost random. She surely didn’t dance on her bedroom’s parquet floor. But something under the percussion of her heels did suggest to me a kind of dance — she moved from here to here , from here , then, to there , and purpose changed her position, though nothing like a plan. Bruno, fighting clean while his lighter longer-haired opponent used illegal blows and outlawed holds, persevered, then triumphed. He used his famous flying dropkick, and he won. I watched the referee count the opponent out. As the canvas slammed with the final count, and as Bruno sprang to his bare feet, I understood: I had heard my mother thinking . The sharp and aimless-seeming sounds of her staccato shoes had been, in fact, an accompaniment kept by her body for the thoughts — and hadn’t they been stabbing thoughts — that were sounding inside as she picked out earrings or brushed at her glossy brown hair. All at once, my mother’s footsteps upstairs grew purposeful. She marched across the floor. On our groaning stairs, she came down.

My father, as if signaled, went to the hall closet for his sportcoat. He turned to my mother and said, “You look nice.”

“I look fantastic,” my mother said.

I stayed with a tag-team wrestling match and didn’t look up for a while. But they’d both looked pretty good to me, and awfully nervous, and I hoped, suddenly, that I wouldn’t hear Rudy’s car at the curb, and that he wouldn’t come. It was the first time I had not wanted to see him. It was the first time I’d considered whether to want to see him or not. I was enough of a child to think of grown-ups — and surely of Uncle Rudy — as climate, neighborhood, a feature of my life, and not what I voted on. My own will made me itch.

And I did hear the faintest protest of brakes, I thought. And I surely heard feet that shuffled against the broad brick steps outside, and that thumped on the wooden floor of the porch, and that shushed on the mat before our door as the doorbell rang. My father answered the door, and his voice was full of bonhomie. My mother joined him — the sound of her feet across the foyer reminded me of black men who tap-danced on Ed Sullivan’s show — and she was cordial, though grave. I turned the set off and went to be a cute nearly-nephew to Uncle Rudy and the woman my mother had known in advance she would hate.

I hugged Rudy; I usually did. He looked at me and, as usual, he beamed. “You look like a million bucks, fella!” he said, so clearly glad to see me that I almost hugged him again. I did put my hands on his shoulders and squeeze, and he said, “By Jesus, I love ya!” I noticed three things as he spoke — the heat of my reddening face as my field of vision included the woman with Rudy; my mother’s teeth on her lip; the new woman’s height and stunning beauty. “Meet Genevieve! Michael, this is Genevieve. I completely love her. I wanted you to meet her because I wanted the two of you to love each other. Isn’t this great?”

Genevieve was taller than Rudy, taller than my mother and me. She and my mother shook hands gingerly, I noticed. My father actually took Genevieve’s hand and raised it to his lips. My mother bit hers. Rudy smiled and smiled, and he pounded my father’s shoulder and rubbed the back of my head and told us all how grand things were. Genevieve stood without moving, as if she were a mannequin. Her hair was the blackest I have ever seen. Her skin was so pale, it looked like the waxy yellow-white of an antique doll’s. Her eyes were very large and dark in an oval face that was slightly rounded at the cheekbones, but slender nevertheless. Her figure, slim according to the standards of Hollywood in the fifties, still required my attention, and her suit, made of something white and fine, struck me as unusual. When we sat in the living room, I stared at her legs, which were very long and slender and on which she wore smoke-colored stockings. I had never seen hose like that except in magazines purchased by the fathers of my friends. I looked at her every time I thought I could study her without getting caught. She sat on our yellow sofa next to Rudy, and she said little. He touched her often, and I watched his beefy hands. When she spoke, Genevieve talked about European cities, and music I hadn’t heard of. Rudy often spoke of her as though she weren’t there. Looking at my mother, his old friend, he would reach out and tap my mother’s knee, then say, “Isn’t she a dreamboat? She’s my dreamboat. I treated her for a sore throat! Imagine! I looked down her throat, and I wanted to climb in after the tongue depressor!”

“Rudy, you’re disgusting,” my mother said.

“But you’re honest, Rudy, aren’t you,” my father said as he mixed more drinks. “You’re an honest man.”

I remember Rudy as a brilliant man. He seemed that way that night, in spite of his playing what I would later think of as the middle-aged fool. Light came off his glasses as he sat up higher on the sofa. His eyes grew wider, and I watched as he saw what was invisible to me. My mother was saying something patronizing to Genevieve, who nodded but didn’t reply. Rudy said to my father, “You have the sound of a man with something to say.”

“Oh, no,” my father said, opening a bottle of club soda. “No, I’m a CPA. I just work with numbers. You know. My work involves nothing more than what adds up.”

Rudy said, “As in two plus two equals four, and no latitude for interpretation?”

My father passed a tall iced drink. “Twos are twos,” he said. “Fours are fours. That’s it. Yes. And I’ve worked with those numbers.”

Rudy said, “And for some time?”

“Yes, for some time.”

Rudy said, “I wonder if I know what you mean.”

“Oh, sure,” my father said. “Yes. You do.”

Rudy raised his glass and looked at my father with a smile of, I think, admiration. “Here’s to your guts,” Rudy said. He drank, then raised his glass again. “ Salud . And here’s to your perspicacity.” He drank again, then turned to Genevieve. “Hon? You know what that means? Perspicacity?”

My father sipped his drink, then quietly left the room. My mother watched him. She said, in a voice that imitated the sounds we make when we jest, “Are you two fighting again?”