Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Because I was their date, and because they were well-bred boys, Bert and Ira came quite promptly from the church where they had settled nothing. They had played a violent and harmless game, and the tails of their shirts hung out of their pants like triangular clubhouse banners. Ira’s fringes of hair were aloft, and Bert’s thick, glossy hairdo hung in front of his eyes. They stood to regard me. Bert snapped his head back, and his hair sat down in place like a well-trained, well-groomed dog. Ira pushed at his shirt, which in its whiteness, now that the sun was down, seemed to glow.

It was the fact of so much darkness, more than the glare of the lights, that made me blink. I supposed it was an automatic timer that suddenly lit the stumpy white steeple and the hemlocks that bristled at the walls. Bert raised an arm. Ira shrugged, then shook his head. They came along the walk toward me. Or maybe someone inside, I speculated, some cordial Christian host, with patience for the needful, or the faithless, or the faithful making their return, had thought to light us on our way.

I waited for the bells in the steeple to ring out the day. Ira came, winded and disheveled, to stand with me beside his car. Then Bert Wragg, Jr., joined us, flushed and smiling, perfect and at ease in our neighborhood, as he had been inside my home, my history, and me.

“Listen,” I told them, pointing up.

The man of the world and the man bereft of it looked, expectantly, while I waited for the bells in the steeple to ring. But none, in another minute, had sounded. I checked my watch and they, in response, each looked at theirs. We waited together, looking up and then at each other.

Often, of course, there are no bells.

A MAN RIDES INTO THE NIGHT, he meets a mysterious stranger, his life is changed or it isn’t. Nobody tells him which.

For example: when he ran away from home on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. He was at the Eleventh Street window of their apartment, trying to look through the sycamore trees, and through the nimbus-on-grit glare of the streetlight, toward Greenwich Avenue. He saw what you’d expect. He saw himself, rippling as he moved in the crazy, unclean mirror that the window made. He saw the widow’s peak, or thought he did. He saw the pale, shapeless head. But he knew it was him. His guess: he’d know him almost anywhere.

Leslie, behind him in the living room, asked, “What are you looking for?”

He said, “How’d you know I wasn’t looking at? ” Then he said, “You really want to know?”

She said, “I really don’t, I suppose. I suppose we’re not going up to Madison tomorrow and pick out a print for your birthday.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll have thrown a scene.”

“I’m not throwing a scene, Leslie.”

“You’re getting ready to throw a scene, Hank. And I’ll end up crying. My face’ll look like you beat me, so you’ll be too embarrassed for us to go outside in the morning. You’ll spend all Saturday sulking because we didn’t get you anything for your birthday. Which you’ll decide by Saturday night you do want to celebrate. So we’ll go out. We’ll go to a new place and you’ll fall in love with our waitress, and I’ll get surly and we’ll hate dinner.”

He inspected them in the window glass. He looked for his former lover, stunned wordless, as he had been a number of years before, in a number of borrowed and rented rooms. All he could see of his wife and former graduate student now was her face and brushy haircut floating behind him and to the left, seeming to sit on his shoulder like a second head. He smelled her breath, which was like a spicy vermouth. He smelled her soap, which reminded him of mangos.

A summer wind he thought of as oily moved the plane tree’s smaller branches. He thought he could see, through himself and the streetlamp, the lights of a cab turning in toward them from Greenwich. He was thinking about the time he saw his father lifted by winds off the face of Mount Washington. He hadn’t known he was recalling it, nor did he know why it should come to mind now. But he couldn’t imagine, suddenly, not thinking of it all the time — how his father’s dark khaki poncho had filled with the wind that had taken him off.

That had been thirty-six years ago in Franconia, New Hampshire, on the trail from Mizpah Springs up through the boulder fields below the harshest part of the ascent to the hut called Lakes of the Clouds. In the hut there had been an old upright piano, and simple food, and the tall, strong college boys and girls who had carried provisions in pack baskets up to the huts that were run by the Appalachian Mountain Club. The students raced up the trails, he remembered. He remembered hearing the thud of their cleated, heavy boots. He remembered smelling the sweat of a tall, blond woman who had seemed to him then to be almost as old as his father. He had been thrilled by her scent. You heard them coming up the trail, and you stepped aside, feeling lesser than they.

Now, in New York, still a bystander, he was smelling mangos and vermouth. “If you ask me what I was saying,” she said, “I’ll claim self-defense after I stab you, tonight, while you sleep.”

It was time for him to turn around and smile at her and gently take hold of her upper arms, or the back of her neck, and pull her toward him and sink, somehow, through this panic, this utter ignorance of what he ought to be doing, and get to them . He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he suspected he could always find them in her. And finding them, of course, he’d find himself.

But he kept thinking of himself, the boy at eight, in the sudden summer rainstorm on Mount Washington’s lower face, standing alone, blown against a boulder five feet high by the coiling about of the same wind that had taken his father from sight. He stood at the window, and he couldn’t turn around until her smeary face had moved from the reflection. Then he turned and looked at the room they had furnished. He walked through it to their little foyer, and he unlocked the door, and he left. He walked to Fourteenth Street, where their car was garaged.

As he drove uptown, proud that he’d remembered in the Seventies how to cut west with Broadway through Columbus to the Henry Hudson, he realized he had no idea how you drive to New Hampshire from New York. He was one of those Manhattanites who understood the subways and made it a matter of honor to use them, despite the hour. He knew the underground map, but he had no sense of direction, and all he understood was that he was driving uptown, the Hudson River on his left, with bunched, dense, unreadable Harlem on his right and the George Washington Bridge beyond it.

As he followed the signs to the bridge, then guessed and took the leftmost ramp that led to it, he accepted that he was driving to New Hampshire. He had believed, on leaving the house, that he was going to take a walk. Now, even while he aimed himself away, he was surprised. He wanted to look at the surface of the river, but he was made anxious by the lights and speed of the traffic. He saw a tugboat, he thought. He thought it was pushing a barge on which a mound — was it garbage? — rode low in the water. Maybe he’d expected to see it. He knew of so many error-laden first-person accounts that historians had banked on, to their grief. People rarely saw what they claimed to.

But he had seen his father on the wind, he thought. It was something he knew. He knew, too, that he would pull over when he could and telephone Leslie. He would tell her, “Don’t worry.” She would swear in the rhythms he knew, and he would grin. “Don’t worry,” he’d say. “I was in some kind of fear fantasy, heading for New England. But it’s all right. I’m all right. It was nothing more than dread. I’ll be home soon, and I’ll tell you the whole stupid story.”