Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Sincerely,

Joanna B. Edel

When I came home, I had Joanna’s letter from the Lewis house, from Feimster and Murray and the crazy people on the corner with all the cats. I didn’t have it from the Lutheran Home or the Noels’. Mrs. Montemora had beaten me to her mailbox. I had it from Hilsenrath and Boynton and Hendricks. I had turned the corner onto Canal Street, which is also the old north-south highway, and the street had suddenly seemed unnaturally bright, the cars too terribly loud, the people outside the gas-and-electric and the drugstore like a surging mob in a movie — say, King Kong . There were too many mail slots in too many doors, too many postboxes, too many streets off Canal, and too many houses on each of the streets. I knew Joanna. Now I knew why I had heard the printer next to our word processor — it had sounded like a little electrical saw during the night. She had printed enough letters for a lot of the boxes in town. And she would have tried to reach them, stalking on her stiff, long legs, her chin up to signify her dignity, her story — Joanna’s story about the story — in her backpack and in each of her small hands.

She was late from school. Or maybe her deliveries had taken the entire day. It was almost six, and I was sitting in the perfumed squalor of her room. There were more of the letters in a pile on her desk. Dear Occupant.

I reread one, the line about Ms. Edel, who was a right on woman. Joanna, from her doorway, said, “Why are you in my room? Why are you reading my stuff?”

I said, “I’m an occupant. And how private is a letter you’ve delivered to every address in the ZIP code? Is that your hair , darling?”

It was short, ear-level on one side, a little shorter on the other. It was the color of yellow cough drops, and it looked as though it would glow in the dark. Her lips looked rigid, and her eyes were very wide. She pulled the wiry bunched hair that heaped the top of her head and she flushed as, pulling more hair, she exposed what was a quarter of a shaved scalp. “ This is my hair,” she said.

I thought for an instant that if I dyed my hair the color of hers, she would somehow be less alone in the midst of our lives. But I knew promptly that I wasn’t cut out for a cough drop. I said her name a few times.

“It just looked cool when I did it,” she said. “Nothing else. It’s not the biggest deal in the world. I like it like this, Mommy, so don’t start, all right?”

I said her name again. And then we were both wailing, and assuring each other that it was only hair for Godsakes and, after all, it was going to grow back.

That’s the story. It straggles off into Gene McClatchey’s swollen, masked, and splinted nose — broken, according to the usual sources, by his wife, who stayed awhile and then left. Sam left, too, to run a bank branch in Sidney, New York, where he lives alone and dates young secretaries and is said to look seedy. Joanna and I came to Cleveland, where her hair grew in as black and thick and springy as before. Everyone in the story thought they were going to die of it, but of course they didn’t. Once you’re in a story, you must live forever. You must choose again and again. You always do it the same.

WE WERE VERY BUSY, and the rooms were loud. Even the kitchen was loud, though our chef never stood for noise that wasn’t necessary. I kept thinking I could hear the barman whistle through his teeth — Comin round the mountain when she comes —which he often did when he made mixed drinks. We had two seven-fifteens, a party of three, and a party of two, and the three came early. The old lady led them, then came the son, and then his wife. I looked away from the wife because she was the same bad news I’d been receiving all day.

The old lady was very small, maybe under five feet tall, and her skin was that pale, tender white you only see on the extremely old. Her wraparound skirt and rayon blouse were too large, and I expected her to walk out of her scuffed, low-heeled pumps, like a kid playing Mommy in her parents’ bedroom. She didn’t shuffle, though. She had a kind of stride, although she wobbled as if the bottoms of her feet were tender. Or maybe it was balance, I remember thinking. The world was spinning a little too fast, or gravity wasn’t working right on her, and something kept pulling her slightly sideways. The son walked with his head down, as if she embarrassed him, or as if he embarrassed himself. That’s a choice, right there, isn’t it? How you call it is who you are.

“How are you?” she asked me before I could say it to her. And she asked as if she knew me. Of course, a lot of people out there thought I was someone to know. It wasn’t quite Rick’s Place, but it was a good restaurant. I ran it tight, the food was Provençal, we cooked it well and served good wines. I cultivated my tall, tough manner, and my clientele worked to make me smile. People who spend a lot when they dine out consider their money better spent when the people who sell it to them make believe they’re friends. As for my famous service, I had learned to run a squad while attached to Graves Registration, and my career had taken me from dishing out the dead to daube Aixoise .

“Ah, and you! ” I said, as if with sudden pleasure.

“Peter,” she said, “this is my son, Kent, and his wife, Linda. This is Peter,” she said to them. “He owns this lovely place.”

It was the way she said Peter. She rounded off the r just a little, and I heard New York or New Jersey — she’d say ah instead of are —and not Southport, Connecticut. I thought I recalled that she’d come, once or twice, with a handsome old man. He was burly the first time, then waxy and thin several months later. I’d forgotten them. Her son was broad and sunburned, his brown hair was bright with highlights of red and light brown from saltwater sailing.

As I seated them, his mother said, “Peter, I wonder if you would instruct our waiter to leave the fourth place setting. It’s my husband’s birthday. He died.”

“I was very sorry to hear about it.”

“You heard?”

I bowed my neck and shut my eyes an instant. I didn’t want to have to lie again.

She frowned, and her skin, I thought, might crack. Her teeth were dingy with a kind of heavy film. Her dark hair was thinning. And still, she was a pretty thing. She must have been one of those small Austrian cuties with her narrow nose and prominent cheekbones. “Tonight is my husband’s birthday,” she said. “Kent and Linda and I are having dinner with him.” She said it as though the husband had forced his way to dinner with them. He was dead, and she was sorrowful, and he’d been hers, and she was dining in his honor, but he still, according to some definition I hadn’t yet heard, was uninvited.

I turned toward the empty chair and nodded deeply. I said, “Happy birthday.” I’d fed stranger tables. I had supervised the emptying of cargo planes filled with the horribly dead, the routinely dead, the accidentally dead, and the dead who’d been murdered by people under their command. Service is service.

“Isn’t he lovely?” she asked her son and daughter-in-law about me. I tried to avoid the daughter-in-law’s eyes. Linda’s eyes. She wasn’t the twin of the kid in the papers, but she looked enough like her. I had trouble with that. I was having a bad night, and I’d had a bad day.

“He’s wonderful,” Linda said. Her voice was edgy and entertained at once. It didn’t make my night any easier. I refused to meet her eyes.

“I’ll take drink orders, and your waiter, Luc, will be over shortly,” I said. There was a line at the reservations desk, Luc for Lucien was tripping on something he was managing well enough, but I thought he might be ready to fly, there was a new kid making salads, and it had been a very bad day. In light of which, after taking their orders for Johnnie Walker Black straight up, Beefeater martini rocks, and the house white, a Chalone from Monterey, I turned to the old lady — I thought I could see through the skin of her jaw — and asked her, “Are you going all the way?”