Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He was giving a demonstration, I realized. With his helpless, implausible smile, he was showing me his lapsed world of women. He was broken, and he shook with medication, but he dreamed, it was clear, of one more splintered vial of amyl nitrate on the sweaty bedclothes of a praying mantis from Fort Lee, New Jersey. He had confected a ride with a leggy blonde in a black, convertible Jeep on US 1 in Maine. And if the foreman of the forestry crew would talk to him in front of her tired and resentful men, he would chat up that lady and touch, as if by accident, the flesh of her sturdy, tanned arms.

That was why I backed another pace. That was why I turned and went along the duck walk behind my father, leaving the wreckage of the maple tree and walking toward my car. I wanted to be driving away from him — locked inside with the windows shut and the radio up — before he could tip his cap, and show me his ruined, innocent face, and steal what was left of my life.

THIS WAS THE YEAR in which Ronald Reagan thought to honor the S S dead with a wreath in a German graveyard, and when I was in charge of funding grants to sculptors and musicians in both Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We had a dozen proposals on, shall we say, the theme of remembering who, from 1936 to 1945, had died the most and worst. And Bert Wragg, Jr., had brought me with him, for luck and for sex with an older woman, while he interviewed and auditioned in New York.

I rang my brother and missed him at his law firm on Clinton Street. Soon he rang back, chivvying me, at once, to recollect.

“Everything goes in a circle,” he said. “Remember? Remember when Daddy said that in Prospect Park when you got lost?”

“Since when did you call him Daddy? We never called him Daddy, did we? And I was six years old, Ira.”

Ira said, “Fine. Pop. Fine. Six. You remember calling him Pop?”

“Of course.”

“The point is not what I happen to be calling my father in conversation with his daughter,” he said.

“This is not a conversation. This is an interborough harangue.”

“Now, I believe, you move on to calling it blackmail. Am I right? As in emotional blackmail, et cetera. Or would that scare the newsboy off? Getting involed with a family where verbal cockfights, in a manner of speaking, are always taking place?”

“You want me to repeat that? So anyone who happens to be standing within six or eight feet could hear me saying newsboy?”

“Up to you,” Ira said. “All I hear is people objecting to every other word I use.”

“You’re the one calling names.”

“You’re making me seduce my own sister.”

“That, big fella, is what they call incest. It’s illegal. It’s immoral. It’s disgusting.”

“’At’s amore,” he sang, in not too bad an imitation of Dean Martin lightly toasted on sixties TV.

It was a routine we had used when we were in one another’s company, with dates, during his years in college — Desi and Lucy, but as brother and sister, the ditzy redhead and the serious, clever, somewhat bamboozled guy. He was between Wife Two and a paunchy, sad time of dating widows and the former wives of other cuffed but not quite beaten men. I was going to remain unmarried forever, though I had no interest in solitude. I was back in New York — in Manhattan, to my brother’s disappointment — while he was in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and determined to take me and Bert Wragg, Jr., from our hotel on Central Park South back to Flatbush, where Ira and I had grown up, sometimes even together.

I said, “We’d have to go tonight. We’re really booked.”

Bert Wragg, Jr., sat at the foot of the bed and crossed his legs. They were bare, except for navy-blue garters with a red stripe through the center. He was putting on high navy socks that would come over his calf. I had not seen garters on a man since I was a blackboard monitor in the sixth-grade class of Miss Fredericks in P.S. 152. The man had been my father, and I had peeked around the corner of my parents’ bedroom to win a bet: Ira had insisted our father — whom we did call Pop — put his horn-rimmed glasses on before his socks, and I had bet on socks before sight. I won, and I provoked a one-inch rise in my father’s bushy brows. We used to wager, too, on who could bring his elastic forehead higher. Ira usually won. He won the baseball cards I bought to cause him to covert them. I didn’t care to carry or collect them, though I liked the waxy taste of the gum with which they were packed, and they caused Ira to bet with me, which meant that he had to talk to me as if I was not from the Planet Jerk. So: Pop, the garters, and Bert Wragg, Jr., naked from the waist down, his penis regarding me from the nest of his folded groin, and I thought of the circle Ira said our father had described, and I agreed to subject my anchorman-in-waiting, my boyfriend from the middling market of Minneapolis — St. Paul by way of Ames, Iowa, and Syracuse University to what would at best be a sentimental journey, and to what at the very worst would be a long night with Ira Bloom.

I heard him snort into the phone and whisper, “Myrna, can he really hear you?”

“The newsboy? Yes.”

“Are you in love?”

“More than likely.”

“A healthy kind of love, or the dark, clammy lust you get yourself into?”

“Latter, no doubt.”

“So you call one thing another? Love is lust? Or vicey versey?”

“I think there isn’t a y sound, Ira. Just—”

“Could you listen without correcting me? Incorrect as I doubtless am? Could you listen, please? Just, are you coming with the newsboy or without? And I am not being raunchy, I did not intend to be raunchy, and don’t even begin to correct my raunch. Are you or are you not. Period.”

“We will both be downstairs. We will walk outside in, say forty minutes.”

“Half an hour, max,” he said.

“We will ride to Brooklyn. We will look. We will then take you to dinner. So you should — wait a minute. Bert? Does Ira need a tie?”

“Not for the Park Bistro,” Bert said.

Ira said, “I heard him. How does a talking head on Minnesota TV, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, yawn, know what to wear in my city?”

“Maybe that’s why they’re trying him out in New York, Ira.”

Bert had stood up, and I thought I must look like a mean bit of business in my open, pearly rayon robe to have aroused him so. Of course, I thought, it could also be the thought of his own ruggedly gorgeous face on many millions of TV screens in the greater New York metropolitan area. That’s what I liked about Bert Wragg, Jr. He was not above regarding himself in the optimum light, and he was young enough to find his gaze persuasive.

IN THE LONG black car, a Buick, Ira told us, we headed downtown. When we passed Delancey, I knew Ira was taking us over the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was not quite direct, but it would give him a chance to point out to Bert a landmark beloved of hayseeds.

I’d imagined myself next to Ira, with Bert hidden away from my brother in the shadows of the backseat. But Bert had gone for the front, neglecting to hold my door, almost shouldering me out of the way. His awkward posture reminded me of something I couldn’t name, and it wasn’t until the end of the afternoon that I remembered: a boy, my date, a Nelson Someone in a workingman’s bar in Poughkeepsie, stepping in front of me to fight with someone who had expressed distate — quite rightly, I thought at the time — for college kids gone slumming.

Bert said, “Ira, I’m curious.”

“Speak to me, Bert. I’m here as a — what is it, Myrna, in museums and churches?”

“Docent, dear. Little wives and widows who wear white gloves and show you the stained-glass windows.”