Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

A man had appeared to stand outside the car. He was tall and broad, and I bent to the window to see all of him. He wore a wrinkled black suit, a rumpled white shirt, and a gray straw fedora with a ribbon that reminded me of Bert’s garters. The frames of his glasses were clear plastic. His smooth-shaven face looked responsive to humor. He was someone I would ask for directions in a foreign country, I thought. It was dusk in New York, and he was home from work, I figured, and here we were, parked outside his house. He was the kind of man who came down steps to defend his home. Ira turned his key to send a current through the car, and Bert pushed the switch that rolled his window down.

I waited for a torrent of Yiddish, or Hebrew. I waited for thick, guttural inquiries or demands. The householder bent, straightened, bent again to stare, and muttered.

He bent again and looked in. His face made it clear that unlikelihood had descended onto Brooklyn. He said, “Bert Wragg!”

Ira said, “Son of a bitch .”

Bert never hesitated. “Hi, hello. Now, where do we know each other from?” As he spoke, he opened the door and stepped out and up. Ira looked at me, and I looked back. We should have laughed, and then, I thought, it would have been all right. As it was, he stared suspiciously, and I offered my expression of utter innocence, and we locked each other out.

By the time I joined them, Bert was introducing Heschie, short for Herschel I decided, who had rented from a doctor’s widow for six years on Cleveland Avenue in St. Paul. Heschie, who then decided we should call him Hesch, had bought the house of our parents from the junior high school science teacher who had bought it from them.

“His wife died,” he told us. “Who needs a house without a wife?”

Ira nodded his agreement. “I used to bounce a ball against those steps,” he said.

“No, that was me. I’m the girl who used to live here. I used to live here when I was a girl,” I said.

Heschie had a wen on his forehead and it seemed to pulse red when he was pleased. Nodding to me, he turned to Bert. He boomed, in a voice that sounded nothing like Bert’s but surely was meant to be, “‘Good evening, this is Bert Wragg. And I have news for you.’” He said, “Imagine, in the flesh, with behind him in tow a Jewish girl from the neighborhood, Mr. Bert Wragg, the voice of all Minnesota.”

“I grew up other places, Hersch. I’m no more Minnesota than you are.”

“Except,” Hesch said, pulling at his jacket sleeves as if his body chafed in the dark gabardine, “my boy and my girl, so they wouldn’t talk like me or Ada, this of course is the name of my wife, they listened to you when they finished with dinner before I came home. I was in Special Collections at the U: Hebraica. I’m educated, but not so religious, miss, so you’re safe. Here is no barbarism or from Luddites or other refusers of progress. We own and operate two word processors, each possessing sixty-four megs of RAM, and I am tenured at Brooklyn College, just a walk from here — well, of course you know where is a walk and isn’t. A walk in the jungle, perhaps, if you know what I mean, but nevertheless a walk. But — but— ah : the subject at hand. Raised as we were from backward and Orthodox, we could not instruct our children in acclimating to the local mores, the patterns of speech. You understand. But you , Mr. Bert Wragg, you were their teacher. Thanks to you, my daughter— a girl , and in Minnesota! — became president of her seventh-grade class.”

Ira had moved away, but not in concession to Bert. I knew where he’d gone. In 1950 or so, our pop, a Marine, had come home after his outfit had taken terrible losses near Pusan. He had posed for a photograph by our mother, and he had shyly smiled, but I had come, once I knew the story of his war, to not believe the pleasure that his smile suggested. I have chosen, instead, to see sorrow in his eyes. Ira kept the picture on his bureau, at least on any bureau of his that I had seen. Pop had stood in the driveway to be photographed, and Ira had gone there, to the cracked, grainy cement with its grassy stripe down the center that was mostly packed earth and some weeds. I thought of the stripe down Heschie’s hatband, and the stripe on Bert’s garters and Pop’s.

I took Ira’s arm and smelled the starch in his shirt and the sweat underneath. He put his arm around my waist. Heschie was leading Bert into my childhood house, and I wanted to be there. It occurred to me that a moment of intimacy with Bert in my girlhood room would be priceless pleasure, or maybe treason, or the combination of both that is the heart of adolescence. But I stayed where I was, held of course by more than Ira’s arm.

We stared, side by side, down the driveway toward the garage, as if we looked at someone who smiled back at us.

Ira sighed. I said, “Life biting you, Ira?”

“In the ass,” he said. “Hard. But nobody suspects.”

“How could they,” I asked, “with you so even of temper and low of key? Are you lonely?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry for yourself?”

“Of course.”

“Any chance of seeing the kids?”

“Weekends,” he said.

“Well, it’s something. And where does she live with them?”

“Lexington.”

“In Kentucky.”

“That’s the one,” Ira said.

“Will you ever see them?”

“From, as they say, time to time.” Then he asked, “Myrna, are you guys moving here?”

I pulled his arm tighter around my waist. “If he gets the job. There are a lot of men as good-looking as he is, and several women almost as good-looking, and three or four who are as smart as he is, and it’s pretty iffy. He’s scared. He doesn’t let on.”

“But if he gets the job,” Ira said.

“If he does, and if we stay together, and if I want to not work for the foundation anymore, and if I can get a job with someone here, and if I want to live with him, and if he wants to live with me. If we can survive the age difference. Then, I’d say, it’s a maybe.”

“You got so brave,” he said. “I’m at the point, now, where I get frightened from waking up frightened.”

“I’m callous and cold,” I said. “I’m selfish.”

“I wonder if Pop was scared. I think about him every day, all of a sudden. I’ve begun to, I don’t know, study him in some weird, scary fucking way. He’s like a — what’s the word?”

“Dead father,” I suggested.

BECAUSE WE HAD promised Heschie upon leaving that Mr. Bert Wragg would see where he worked, Ira took us along Eighteenth to J, then up past Ocean to Campus Road. Near where it ran into Flatbush Avenue, we looked at the pretty campus, and at adjacent Midwood, where Ira and I had gone to high school.

“Over there,” Ira said, pointing at the little building across from Midwood. I remembered lining up for first or second grade, my legs shaking with fear, outside the entrance marked GIRLS. He told Bert, “We went to grade school, P.S. 152, fully staffed by several dozen virgins over fifty plus Mr. Gottlieb with his big mustache. You had to give Heschie an autograph, right?”

Bert said, “We traded.”

“Your signature,” Ira said, “for what?”

“He took me up to Myrna’s room.”

I said, “He did?” I felt myself blush very hard as Ira started us off along Flatbush Avenue in the general direction of the river. Changing lanes, he hummed to himself. I thought of Bert in my girlhood room. It was very exciting, as I’d expected. As I hadn’t, it also felt uncomfortable, unhappy, like watching the broad, hairy back of the muscular hand of a grown-up man slide up beneath the party skirt worn by a girl of eight.

“It’s his son’s room. It smells like old socks, with maybe a trace of sperm.”