Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I sat on the bed beside her. But she sat up taut, so I moved away. “It’s the heat,” she said.

“It looks like more than the heat, Anya.”

“It’s the heat because it’s more than the heat. He has a bad heart. He’s been seeing doctors.”

“What are they planning to do?”

“Nothing. Medication. They say he’s too old for the kind of surgery he needs.”

And that, as much as Leonard’s condition, was what made her start to weep. I think she had been waiting in that darkened bedroom filled with cigarette smoke and the hum of air-conditioning for someone to whom she could state that cruelty: that she, a slender woman in shorts and a halter, a woman with a young throat atop a body that was no disgrace despite the varicose veins, a woman who for years had conducted in perfect French an affaire with a man of gentle elegance — she, such a woman, now faced the continuation of a lesson she had received when my father left us years before. The lesson was about things running down — respect and trust and strength, and finally time.

I said, “Anya, can I ask you something?”

She sniffed and wiped her face with the back of a pale beautiful wrist. “When you ask if you can ask, Susu — Suzanne — it means you know you shouldn’t ask it. Do you really need to?”

I said, “Do you and Leonard make love?”

She exploded into tears then, perhaps because her answer — not the impertinence or heartlessness of the question — was another segment of the lesson she must learn. “We used to,” she said, as she tried to catch her breath.

“He can’t anymore?”

“Suzanne!”

And her genuine dignity, a surprising muscularity of tone, her wonderful slight carriage, the beauty of her hair and neck, and certainly the specter of Poughkeepsie and my sense of the blackness beyond what I managed to know — all brought me into her arms, leaning over her, smelling her hair, wishing that I wept only for her.

HER LETTERS TO SCHOOL described his frailty and determination. My visits home confirmed them. They were together a great deal, and Leonard came to 50th Street with gifts — a book, a pen from Mark Cross, a scarf purchased at Liberty on one of his transatlantic trips. I grew accustomed, over that first year of school and then the others, to his slower walk, a loss of tension in his bearing, his need to pause and catch his breath, the permanent pallor of his face, his need for naps. His illness aged my mother, and I accepted that as well: I felt ten years older than I was, and it seemed appropriate to me that my mother should not look young. Leonard worked harder than before, and Anya tried to convince him to retire.

I was studying in my room at home one weekend, with the door ajar, when I heard her ask him, again, to slow his pace. He snapped at her, “I have to provide for a wife —remember? She’s getting on, like us.”

That was in my sophomore or junior year, and on the New York Central to Poughkeepsie that Sunday evening I stared out the window at the Hudson, which in the last sunlight looked like ice although it was nearly May, and I thought as hard as I could about Leonard’s wife. I knew that he had been married to her for some thirty years. I knew that their child was grown and away. I knew that they maintained a home in Westchester County but that Leonard, complaining of fatigue, had furnished an apartment in the east forties where he stayed during the week. I knew that he often found a reason for staying in the city over weekends as well — that is, he found an alibi to broadcast in Westchester; I knew the reason. I wondered how much his wife knew, and I fell asleep refusing to believe that she didn’t know it all.

I spent a week preparing for final exams, and made use of one of Leonard’s lectures. This one had been on the Dead Sea scrolls. He had lent me three books and had told me what he knew. As I studied, I heard the low sweet voice, smelled the breath of decay, saw the round-shouldered posture he more and more assumed, and the sad ironic smile — a kind of shyness, I concluded — on the handsome white face. And I studied history, and Platonic posturings—“‘But, sirs, it may be that the difficulty is not to flee from death, but from guilt. Guilt is swifter than death’”—and thought, again, that Dryden really needn’t have bothered. I was studying Leonard Marcus, my mother’s lover, and wondering why he, who had in spirit left his wife, was of a different category of being from my father, who had left his wife in fact. It pleases me to remember that, although I couldn’t answer the question, I knew that Leonard Marcus was different. And thinking of my small rattled mother, or of Leonard’s low devoted tones caressing the history of the Jefferson Administration, say, or of the angry assertion of his wife’s need for money in old age, I am now — callow an impulse as it is — proud.

Leonard was not allowed to drink, and I had sworn myself to ignore his married life. We renounced those imperatives together in New York after he had returned from a business trip to Paris, and after I had begun my first semester at Columbia Law. Leonard called me at John Jay Hall and asked me to meet him at the Top of the Towers. I dressed nervously and too stylishly, and was quiet as we rode the elevator to the top of the Beekman Arms. We sat at a little table on the terrace and looked over the stone balustrade at the river, which, from that enormous distance, looked clean. The entire city looked clean and manageable, and knowing that it was an illusion helped me swear to myself that for this shrinking man who always, now, was out of breath, I would sustain whatever illusions he required of me. The winds up there were strong, despite the heat of late September, and I thought Leonard shivered. But when I suggested that we move indoors, he smiled that shy smile, shrugged his shoulders, and ordered drinks. He bought me a brandy Alexander, as if I were half child and we were combining the magic of a milkshake and the necessity that a dignified law student enjoy strong drink.

I felt like someone’s daughter.

Leonard held my hand, then put it down as you would place Baccarat on a marble table — with deference to its quality, with care because it was fragile. And he began — precisely as if he were telling me of the rebel zealot Jesus, or of the building of Washington, or of the regulations governing off-shore fishing in Europe — to deliver another lecture. But this one was about his life.

“My wife is named Belle. Did you know that? She’s a very tall woman, nearly as tall as you are. But she has bad feet, something to do with the instep, it’s terribly painful, and she tends to shuffle. For some reason, that makes her look shorter. When I tell you this, you should try to see her as someone who is short. She has friends on Long Island, younger than she — younger than I — who are very much involved in the restoration of Colonial furniture. Do you care about Colonial furniture?” He actually paused, waited to know, and I am quite certain that he did wonder, even at the moment, about my interests. I shook my head and lit another Chesterfield — he had to cup his hands around mine to shelter the flame from the wind — and then Leonard continued.

“This happened last week, before I went to Paris. Did you know I’d been there? I’ll have to tell you about it. A ship seems to have disappeared, although the client insists it was sold to the Egyptians, under Panamanian registry, for purposes involving proscribed shipments to Northern Ireland. Our adversaries insist that the bill of lading was received and entered at Marseilles. The original owners are Americans — it’s out of Eric Ambler, did you ever read him?” He laughed and threw his hands up, shook his head. “It’s nonsense, and they’re all crooks. But I want you to know about last week, before my trip. Belle was supposed to spend the weekend with her friends, and they asked if I could drive out with them. It was time to say yes, and I did, and we met at their apartment, at University Place, to go together to their house on the Island. You know how I’ve been — sometimes my energy is pretty poor.” This time he didn’t smile.