Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“You said that you understand Nora’s ah…”

“Plight?”

“Yes. Plight. Did you mean you’re a single parent?”

“Whose husband left. I raised the boys myself. Tim’s in the navy and Barry goes to Hobart. He — my husband — said that he felt like all the air in the house was gone. After that , he told me about his girlfriend in Syracuse. She was salesperson of the year that year for the Stickley furniture showroom. Yeah. So I know how Nora feels, more or less. How is she about it?”

He closed his eyes and spoke slowly, but still his voice was unsteady when he talked about his child. “Not confident.”

“Getting left will create that effect,” she said in a dry monotone. “And not just on Mommy. Behold: Jeremy’s cape.”

He looked at the chairs against the near wall and at the clothes closet, open to display its low, bare hooks. “Oh,” he said. “You meant—”

“ Voilà , I meant. They both need a cape.”

“And his is gone.”

“And so is hers,” she said. “Does Mrs. Bing Royce visit our perhaps claustrophobic municipality? Jeremy never mentions her.”

He thought again of striking and of cradling the sweet, insincere face. He shook his head: acting could still be sincere, he thought. And he thought that he was hoping so. He said, “No. Not for some years. She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes. Thank you. Well, it sounds like we’re all pretty damned sorry, Muriel.”

“It sounds like we all need a measure of comfort,” she said. She looked directly into his face. She seemed sad, not bold, but her voice was even and determined when she asked, “Should I tell you the way to my house?”

He knew the village well and didn’t want to. He thought of Nora as trapped here. He thought, often, of insisting that she come to live with him in New York, and he knew that he was afraid she might give in. He believed — it might, he thought, be all he believed — that he could not share his bereavement yet. His sadness seemed all that was left of Anna, his wife. So here he was, fugitive comfort to his child, driving through the village large enough to contain several churches, one of them fundamentalist Protestant, one Roman Catholic, one the traditional Baptist that housed the nursery school, a small Presbyterian church of elegant white clapboard, and no synagogue, of course, or mosque. The Methodists had established themselves in the next village to the north, five miles up on the commuting road to Syracuse. People here drove to Syracuse or Utica, or they repaired computers locally, or staffed the insurance company or hospital, cut cordwood, ran a snowplow, and a few on the outskirts still farmed.

He thought a lot about churches these days. He wished he could believe in leaving his sorriest thoughts in the dim, comforting coolness of one. But he couldn’t. All he left, in the basement of a church, was his worried grandson, and all that Jeremy had left behind was his cape. His daughter’s husband was an architect in Syracuse. He lived, now, with an interior designer who had worked on one of his homes. They went to church every week, Nora had told him with scorn.

“But maybe it’s not supposed to be like taking out the pails for the weekly trash pickup,” he snarled as he drove. “You’re supposed to be a pilgrim in church. You’re supposed to love something. Or somebody. Acknowledge the damned cosmic whatever-it-is.” He didn’t know whether he was disgusted with himself, or Nora, or her nearly former husband, or this theatrical woman whose limbs he thought of, whose jumper and sweater he described to himself as he drove the village, taking far longer than he needed to reach her house. He thought about her brave little scarf and was confused by the cruelty of his thoughts about her since, obviously, he was also drawn — through these well-tended streets — to Muriel Preston. He went past one after another Greek Revival, Cape Cod, and Queen Anne house, most very well kept and all of them brightened, now, by the orange maples and copper oaks and yellow poplars that flared as the year swung around October and dropped toward another upstate winter in which Nora would worry about Jeremy’s health and Jeremy would worry about everything. And Bing, he knew, would think not only of them, as the snows sealed the village in again, but also of Muriel Preston, no matter what happened.

It was about to happen now, he thought, parking in front of the narrow gray shake-shingled house with its small porch littered with wind-blown, bright leaves. It was going to happen now.

Her living room was small and shadowed. She still wore the jumper, but had removed her white cotton turtleneck sweater, and her chest above the bib of her dress was red with warmth. The scarf was knotted loosely about her neck. It was a grown-up woman’s neck, with some less-than-taut flesh beneath the smoothness of the scarf. He thought he could smell her bare shoulders and arm when she brought him his wine.

“I like red wine,” she said. “Is that all right? It’s a big, rich Pommard that I can’t afford. Except I love it. I’ve saved it for a special occasion. So here we are inside of it. In the occasion, that is, not the wine. You understood that.”

“I understood that.” He would have sipped laundry bleach or buttermilk. He’d felt a little drunk while parking the car. Make that unsteady, he amended.

She was barefoot now. Her toes were stubby on small feet. She sat on the sofa, two white linen cushions to his left. There were muddy-looking canvases in gilt frames, and photographs of boys and the young men they’d become. Lemon peel, he thought, and the almond soap they give you in the bathroom of the Georges V in Paris, that was what the skin of her shoulders smelled like.

She sipped her wine and smiled. “It’ll open out plenty more,” she said. “Give it a while.”

He looked at his watch but didn’t note the time.

“Bing,” she said, “give it a while.”

He nodded. He smiled. He drank the wine. As if he were about to sign a document that was the engine of great consequence, he wondered what was going to become of Nora and Jeremy. What was in store for him?

She poured more wine for them, reaching to the coffee table and scenting the air of her living room. Her eyes moved sideways at him as he breathed her. He couldn’t tell whether he was intended to see her observing him or whether she had merely looked. She smiled as if to herself when she sat back. She was careful, in the adjustment of her hem, to cover her knees.

“Does Jeremy talk to you?” she asked.

“About — you mean about his feelings?”

“He says you’re wise. That’s his word for you: ‘wise.’”

“We talk a lot. When he asks about his father, it destroys me. It’s like watching a sick puppy, or a wounded bird. Words don’t work when they’re devastated like that.”

“No,” she said, “you’re wrong. You do give him comfort.”

“The goddamned cape gave him comfort. I beg your pardon.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’ve heard that locution before.” She sipped wine. “I survived it.”

They sat, they drank, and then she stood to pour a little wine they didn’t need yet.

He said, “You think of yourself as strong, then.”

“Bold, I think you mean. Licentious, even. Do you feel… rushed?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s all right if you did, because it’s possible I am a little forward with you. Anyway, I do feel competent, I’d say.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’d say, too.”

“At what, would you say?”

“Living your life, I guess.” He moved his arm, and it touched her jumper, for she still stood, holding the wine bottle. “Making your way.”