Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I said to the State Department officer, “Would you tell me again, please?”

That’s how I learned that my wife, Belinda, anthropology-sociology professor on leave and part-time free-lance journalist, had gone to Beirut and was now a prisoner of some group on whom the Department of State sought further information. That was when I began to think of distances — the width of oceans, the length of borders, the prairies inside lives — as personal facts, and not just my patients’ reports, or my wife’s.

I said, “She’s alive?”

“When they keep them there, they’re alive, Dr. Dugan. Dead, they come straight home.”

“She wouldn’t want to come straight home, either way,” I said. I chuckled, but he didn’t laugh back politely. He said that someone had been sent, early that morning. I was not alone, he said.

I telephoned Kate, and then I canceled patients for the day. I thought of the man the State Department had sent. He’d have to come a winding, hesitant route. He would, as so many strangers to our cold, bleak countryside do, drift and get lost, then recover, wandering on, doubting his direction, feeling compelled to continue. He would take a route along the ground like those my patients take in time and language when they try to tell their story to me. He’d already have flown from Washington to Syracuse, or Washington to one of the New York airports, and then to Hancock in Syracuse. He’d drive the seventy-five miles in his rental car — on Route 81, then 690, then some of Route 5, then lots of 92 to 20, 20 to 12B, 12B to 12, in slow traffic through small towns, and in the wide barren spaces in between. We are so far from everyplace.

I collected Linda at the central school, and I told her. She was flushed, at first, because she’d been stared at by other adolescents as she left class early. She grew pale, then, and in the stairwell, at the main doors, she said, with dry lips clacking, “But who wants her?”

“Nice try,” I said. We went for Melissa, who was in the elementary building. As she walked into the office, Lissa, seeing us, began to cry. “It’s okay, baby,” I said. I kept saying it. “Baby, it is fine.”

Linda said to her, “She isn’t dead.”

Melissa cried harder.

“We’ll talk about it,” I said. “She isn’t sick, and she isn’t hurt.”

“And she isn’t coming home,” Linda said.

I told her, “Thank you.”

In the car, after a few blocks, after listening hard and riding silently, Melissa asked, “But who kidnaps mothers ?”

And Linda had a question, too: “You think they’ll rape her?”

I asked Melissa, “Do you know what Linda’s talking about?”

“Do I like know what rape is?”

“Yes.”

“Mostly,” Lissa said.

I had to park across the street because the cars and trucks of the news people were in our drive and on our lawn. A sheriff’s deputy led us through the onlookers and rural anchor-folk. Linda was grinning, I noticed, and she slowed against my arm as they questioned us; I pushed her home. Melissa said nothing. Her face was very pale, and her large eyes looked dark. In that way, she might have been Kate’s daughter. She wasn’t.

Kate arrived from her pediatrics clinic, and I nodded at the deputy who called for permission to bring her along. When Linda saw her she said, “God!” Kate dodged the same fat little man I’d pushed past; he’d told me he was a reporter from a fundamentalist Christian radio station. She stood before a fellow from our local Progressive Country and Western Sounds station as he shouted into her eyes and nose, “Dr. Karagoulis! What do you think of Mrs. Dugan being kidnaped?” She shook her head. “What are you doing here, Dr. Karagoulis, if we may inquire?”

Kate said something so low, I couldn’t hear it. The deputy brought her, and we went in. Kate put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me.

“Jesus,” Linda said.

Melissa said, “Hi, Kate!” Kate stooped to kiss her, and then she walked to Linda, whom she hugged, then kissed on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” Kate told her.

“Tell my mother,” Linda said.

“All right,” Kate said.

“Sure. While she’s in Lebanon.”

Kate said, “Wasn’t that cunning of me.”

“What’d you tell the reporter?” I asked her.

“I said I was making a house call.” She wore white twill slacks and a soft white man-tailored shirt, white socks, and shiny brown penny loafers. “I am,” she said, opening her large medical bag and presenting a smelly brown paper sack streaked with oil. She handed it to Lissa, who unpacked long submarine sandwiches and Hostess Twinkies.

Linda, who ate nearly as much as Kate, turned away, as if sickened by food. Then she turned back. Kate took cans of cream soda from her bag. “I thought we might force ourselves,” she said. We went into the back room, which was big and sloppy and filled with soft furniture. Kate took the ringing phone and unhooked it from its terminal. “I’ll hook it up when I call my service,” she said. “You guys go disconnect the other phones, please.”

Linda said, “I might be expecting a call.”

The telephone rang, and Kate stared down at Linda, who was at least six inches shorter than she. Melissa said, “I’ll show you how to do it, Lin.”

“I better not miss any calls,” Linda said.

Kate only nodded. And when they had left, and as the other three telephones one by one stopped ringing, Kate and I stood, trying to squeeze some private talk into what would be a public day. Finally, she asked, “Do you think it has to do with us?”

“ She has to do with us,” I said. “We have to do with her. We’re her symptoms. Whether or not we—”

Kate said, “Whether or not we’re responsible for her situation.”

“Her situation’s an extension of her mind. No. I don’t accept this blame.”

“Well, I don’t want to,” Kate said. “But—”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah, but.”

“But what?”

“What, Daddy?” Melissa asked, behind us.

“But I don’t think I’m gonna get my sandwich,” I said. “If that’s the man from Washington.” Bernie, our 130-pound Newfoundland, was roaring in the foyer.

It was the deputy, and with him, shielded by him from the newspeople, was Mr. Pontrier from Washington, with his courteous introduction, and his letter from our senior Senator, and from the Secretary of State, and his verbal greetings from — he pronounced it as a single word — the-President-himself. Kate and the girls were gone when we went through to the kitchen. He laid his coat over a chair, and I ground coffee beans and set out mugs and milk and sugar and spoons, paper napkins. I threw away the greasy bag they’d left. It reminded me of the brown bag into which I’d put Belinda’s hair two weeks before she left. I had driven with it to the hospital, where I’d found Kate on pediatrics rounds. She’d been palpating the abdomen of a struggling infant, and I’d watched her close her eyes, as if to will her senses to her fingertips. In the corridor, I showed her the bag. Looking inside, she’d recoiled. “She cut it off,” I’d told her. “She left it strewn through my underwear drawer.” Kate had stared and stared, and tears had run from her enormous eyes. She’d wept, I remembered thinking, because perhaps she’d thought I didn’t know how to. It didn’t occur to me until Belinda was kidnaped that Kate might have wept for Belinda.

When I turned around in the kitchen, Pontrier had opened his attaché case and had put on the kitchen table his pad and pen, a tape recorder, and two sets of glasses in soft leather sleeves. “Will not wear bifocals,” he said, whinnying, showing his large teeth and pink gums. “Won’t admit my age. Shouldn’t say that to a shrink.”