Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I walked to the truck in their unkempt drive that went to the barn that would fall. I carried the corpse. I thought to get home to Bella and say how sorry I was for the sorrow I’d made and couldn’t take back. I spun the dripping mouse by its tail and flung it beyond the barn into Keeper’s field of corn stumps. It rose and sank from the air and was gone. I had primed the earth. It didn’t need the prime.

MY MOTHER’S LOVER was always exhausted, and yet he generated for me, and I think for her too, a sense of the most inexhaustible gentleness, and the strong calm I grew up thinking a prerequisite for love. He was a lawyer with offices at the foot of Manhattan, a neighborhood he knew intimately and talked about compellingly. The son of Austrian immigrants, a Jew, he lectured gently on Trinity Church and practiced maritime law, a field not famous for its renunciations of the more vulgar bigotries. He was the same age as my mother, fifty-five, when they started practicing deceptions and certainly cruelties upon his wife. And when my mother died at sixty-two, a couple of years after he did, she had suffered the most dreadful solitude, for he was necessary.

I was unplanned, unexpected, and apparently less than desirable. Born when my mother was thirty-nine, I was doubtless part of what happened not long thereafter. My father, who owned yards — a pleasure-craft boat yard, two lumberyards, and part of an undistinguished California vineyard — left my mother, and me, for a woman with inherited land in a suburb of London called Edgware. I have been there, for reasons I don’t need to make clear; it looks like Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, though less permanent — every other house seems to be in a state of rebuilding or repair — and I never will need to go back. I grew up as much my mother’s younger sister as her child. And the older I became, the more accomplished I was said to be, so my mother grew more fatigued by the world, more easily dismayed.

I have composed some recollections, for the sake of sentiment — I don’t want to lose anything now — and so I think that I recall him standing silently at the door of our apartment on East 50th Street, late one night, as they returned from the theater. He seemed reluctant to walk farther in. I think I remember his smile: lips tightly closed (he had bad teeth), the long frown-lines from the nose to the corners of his mouth (they later became the boundaries of jowls), the pale blue eyes content but ready not to be. I think I can call him ironic, in the sense that he inspired, and dealt with, several emotions at once; he never surrendered to sarcasm. He looks larger in this possible early recollection than he was but, then, I feel smaller, when I remember him, than I am. He was nearly six feet tall, but because of his short legs he looked less large when I knew him well. His head was bald, the fringe gone chestnut and white. His face was square, his neck solid but not thick. His nose was wide without being bulbous. He was a slender man with a broad chest and strong shoulders, and he dressed in dark expensive suits. His voice was deep; it could snap and yap and snarl, or it could rumble soothingly as he spoke of what he loved, and nearly always when he talked to me it was with a graveled gentleness I have heard no other man use.

For years, my mother spoke of “my attorney,” or “my legal adviser,” or, as I grew older, “our lawyer.” Then it became “Leonard Marcus says” and then “Leonard.” He came to my graduation from the Brearley School, and I introduced him as “my Uncle Leonard,” although my mother had never called him that. The night of my graduation, the three of us had dinner at the Russian Tea Room and went to a revival of Our American Friend . I thereafter left for a party with classmates, and when I came home early because I had decided to age quickly by finding myself bored with my intimate companions of four years, I found my mother waiting in the living room for a talk.

For a talk: a separate category in our lives, signaled by a silver drinks tray on the coffee table, a round stone ashtray, and a packet of Player’s cigarettes, which my mother had come more and more to smoke too many of — perhaps to remind her, in distress, of the England my father had fled to. The sailor on the packet had blue eyes, and on his hatband was the word HERO.

She wore a long challis housecoat and no slippers, and sat in a corner of the sofa with a plaid blanket held across her lap; I had bought the blanket for her in England during my pointless pilgrimage there the summer before. We greeted each other matter-of-factly, per our tacit agreement not to become hysterical until it was clearly a necessity, and for a few minutes we discussed how remarkably mature I had become, in contrast to my friends, in the course of a single evening. She made herself a drink — Calvados and soda with ice — and I made my own sophisticated bourbon and ginger ale. She lit a Player’s Navy Cut, hissed smoke out at me, and then caught her breath as I took a package of Kools from my bag and lit up too.

“Well, well,” she said.

I shrugged.

“About Leonard,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“Leonard’s at home with his wife.”

I puffed as if the cigarette were a pipe. My face beat hot, and I’m sure I felt the same sense of landslide felt by children who in their teens are asked, “Did you ever think you might be adopted, darling?” But I managed to say, as if it weren’t the second commencement of the day, “Gee, I didn’t know he was married, Anya.”

“Leonard is a married man,” my mother said, nodding, and with a note of pride in her voice — a sound I would hear again when I came home from Vassar to discuss with her my first and unspectacular coupling, with a boy from Union College.

“Has he been married — uh — all the time?”

My mother nodded and drank some brandy, said across the rim of her glass, “We have always been having an affaire .” Her French was manifest and overaccented; she was an educated woman, and never untheatrical. “He is not your uncle, darling.”

“Well, that’s all right, Anya.”

“Susu,” she said.

“Anya, would you mind very much calling me Suzanne?” I said.

So I was Suzanne, and he was not Uncle Leonard, nor simply our attorney, Leonard Marcus. And shortly, we were a domestic routine. Once the declaration had been made, it wasn’t mentioned again — by me, because I was in awe of an affaire conducted by a woman with varicose veins who was my humdrum, pretty, and flustered mother; by her, because I tried very hard that summer to rarely be home.

I worked at the neighborhood Gristede’s during the day, and at night I kept moving — the evening jazz concerts at the Museum of Modern Art, or Shakespeare in the Park, or films at the Thalia, or shopping for frights on Eighth Street in the Village, or posed and dramaturgical dates ending with kisses on the Staten Island ferry slip and several near-misses — and near-disasters — in the cars and homes of boys who belonged to poetry clubs at Lafayette or to rugby clubs at Yale.

I felt, in part, like an elder sister, or a mother even, who was giving Anya as much privacy as possible with her beau. And then, in late August, when I was beginning to shop for school and to face the fact that going to Poughkeepsie frightened me, I returned to the apartment on a Saturday afternoon after swimming at Rye with friends — I had, by then, forgiven them their youth — to find Leonard on the sofa in the living room, and Anya in a true state of fear.

His head was what I saw first, propped on a crocheted pillow that leaned against the arm rest. It was white, and I saw blue veins near the surface of the skin, and beads of perspiration that looked like oil; they didn’t run or drip. He wore his polished black wingtips, and it was their position that frightened me. They didn’t touch, nor did they lie as if he sprawled at rest; they were apart because his legs were slightly apart, the dark blue poplin suit soaked onto them by sweat, to show how thin his thighs and calves were. There was a terrible weakness in his posture, a sense of the exhaustion of resources. His hands lay on his stomach, barely, as if he hadn’t strength enough to lift his arms. His breathing was shallow — I looked to be certain that he breathed. He opened his eyes, and their blueness made his pallor seem worse. He smiled and then his lips made the shape one makes to whistle. He was showing me that he knew how he looked, and that he felt as ill as he appeared, and that he, and disability, and us together — me poised over and before him in uselessness and perplexity — were something of a joke we each understood. But no noise came from his lips. I touched my own lips with my index finger, as if hushing him, as if dispelling the confession he would make, and I turned away quickly to find Anya in the bedroom, where I knew she would be, smoking Player’s and crossing her legs.