Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Lissa,” I said, “this is Mr. Pontrier. He’s from the government. He’s trying to help Mommy.”

“Will they kill her? Are these the kidnappers who kill people?”

“Heavy-duty current-events awareness,” Pontrier said. “You know your civics,” he told her.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I said it as reasonably as if I were telling her that a plant was not poison oak. “Where did you hear about that, sweetie?”

“On TV,” she said. “Kate and Linda and me saw Mommy on Channel Two.”

“Mommy?”

Pontrier bent over to his case, and when his face reappeared, he was chewing on his lip and looking at the black plastic video cassette he held. “It must have leaked,” he said. “Everything does. Knew they made a couple of copies, of course. Didn’t think they would leak this fast.”

I held Melissa and furrowed her pompadour with my free hand. I kept my voice reasonable, pretending that I talked to an angry dog. Bernie, sleeping, was disturbed by my fake tranquility, and he grunted. “You’re saying that a videotape — the kind of thing—” It was what other families saw when terrorists took one of them. We were other families now, and there was no point in saying that, or almost anything else, to Pontrier, I realized. Now, at last, after the cruel arguments and breathless dark silences, after the shattered nights, finally there was nothing to say that might matter. I spoke nonetheless. I always did. I said, “There’s a tape? You people let it happen that my girls saw this tape, and I wasn’t there with them?”

Lissa said, “Kate was with us, Daddy. It was mostly like surprising. Except Mommy was crying at the end.”

“Yes,” I said. “And you’re all right?”

She nodded. She wasn’t. Kate was at the kitchen door, then. She said nothing, but held her hands out to Lissa. I kissed the top of her head and propelled her toward Kate.

I said, “Dr. Karagoulis, this is Mr. Pontrier from the State Department. Mr. Pontrier, Dr. Karagoulis.”

“House full of doctors,” he said, taking off his glasses and standing barefaced to shake Kate’s hand.

She drew Lissa to her. “Is there news?”

He shrugged. She nodded.

“She’s a doctor, too,” Kate said. “Mrs. Dugan. She has the doctorate from Chicago.”

“Isn’t that fine!” Pontrier said.

“Excuse us,” Kate said.

Pontrier looked at her as she walked away, then returned to the table, where he put on a pair of glasses, removed them, put the other pair on, and said, “My own suspicion, Doctor. They’ll kick her free. On account of she’s a woman. Messy things, women. You know. To the Arabs. Understand?”

I shook my head.

Pontrier shrugged, then looked at his list. “So what was it?” he asked. “Greenpeace? Socialist Workers? News Alliance for Jewish-Arab Amity? Lyndon Larouche? There’s so many butthead groups. Who’d she work for?”

“Work for? When she traveled? She worked for herself.”

“She free-lanced?”

“Are we talking spy novels or journalism, Mr. Pontrier?”

“Isn’t always a difference,” he said. Whinny, tooth and gum. “It make any difference to you?”

I clasped my hands on the edge of the table. I sat up straight and looked him in the eye. I didn’t like the intimacy any more than he did, and I wound up looking at the door of our refrigerator, studded with fruit-shaped magnets holding shopping lists and Lissa’s drawings and Linda’s reminders (all of them ending with exclamation marks); it was our accidental map. I said, “My wife — Belinda is not entirely well.”

“She need medication? We can try and work something out with the Red Cross.”

“Psychic well-being,” I said. “Her soul isn’t well.”

“You a religious guy, Doctor? Is this about religion?”

“Worse than that,” I said. “I’m a Freudian. He never meant to talk about the mind. Not only. He was always saying soul . That’s what analysis is about.”

“Sounds a little ripe.”

“Doesn’t it. Look. Belinda’s unhappy. I would call her clinically depressed. She’s been doing — she’s looking for something else.”

He was making notes. “For what?”

“She’d love to know. So would I.”

“Doctor, did she walk out on you?”

“She got as many commissions from as many magazines as she could. We’re not talking whacky politics, you understand. She’s a pretty typical left-wing, feminist, institution-distrusting intellectual. She wanted to find a lot of serious action and write about it. She’s been giving papers on women in cultures where the politics are basically life-and-death.”

“Washington, D.C.,” he exploded, whinnying, showing all his teeth, every wet gum, the membranes of the linings of his lips.

“Belfast,” I said. “She went there first. She did a piece for The New Republic. Then she went to Turkey. The next thing I heard, she was going to Lebanon.”

“The next thing you heard,” he said. He was a better listener than I’d thought. “So she took off on you.”

“We hadn’t lived comfortably together for several months.”

“She did move out?”

“Can I ask you: is this relevant?”

He shrugged. “Hard to know what matters,” he said. “Can’t know what’ll make a difference sometime down the road. We can drop it.”

He made a note. His pen was thin and silver, and he had turned it to make the point emerge. Now he retracted the point. “Kind of hard not to pry,” he said.

“Belinda was probably asking the same kind of question when they took her. Probably some out-of-work guy with an old gun and an older rage got tired of hearing some American woman asking his woman about her influence on his daily political life.”

“We fix it at two months she’s been gone?”

“That’s about right. You checked at Kennedy?”

“We got her going into London, then out and into Ireland. She was recorded entering Athens.”

“She went to Greece?”

He nodded. “Good place to hook up with radical elements.”

“Look she isn’t a spy .”

“That’s what Julius said about Ethel.”

“What?”

“Rosenberg. The atom spies.”

“For Christ’s sake, Pontrier, my wife is a burnt-out, sad, searching, decompensating person who used to think she struck a blow for freedom if she didn’t shave her god-damned legs !”

“She won’t be shaving her legs in Beirut,” he said, showing some quick lip lining. “Maybe it’ll bring some peace to town.”

“Are you going to tell me what you’re doing for her? What can I do? Can I see somebody?”

“Me,” he said. “Unless the President or the Secretary needs a photo opportunity with bravely smiling families of hostages and the main man trying hard not to cry while he says we’re doing everything we can. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll be your contact for our saying that.”

“No one’s life should come to that,” I said. “A case . That people forget.”

“Never mind going there,” he said. “Get ignored for a month and come home broke. Or get yourself kicked raw, die in a collapsed house with busted legs, skull fracture. Stay here. Wait. Write letters. Listen to people tell you they’re doing what they can. They will . We spring one, especially a woman, it’s political fat city. Gold.” His long hand patted my fist on the table. I recoiled from the intimacy, and he seemed surprised at what he’d done. “Doctor,” he said, putting his other glasses on, “let’s go to the movies.”

In the living room, when I turned on a reading lamp, I saw Linda at the end of the sofa, smoking. She didn’t tap nervously into an ashtray. She drew it in until the ash glowed, and she held it deep, then let it out slowly, in a long luxurious soft plume. That’s when I was sure that she’d smoked dope. I wondered if she and Belinda had smoked it together in the name of the mother-daughter bond.