The Stories of Richard Bausch (51 page)

Meg reads. “‘I cried and sighed under the lids of these lonely eyes/Because I knew I’d miss your lavish thighs.’”

For a few moments they can say nothing. Milly, coughing and sputtering into the cotton smell of the sheets, has a moment of perceiving, by contrast, the unhappiness she’s lived with these last few months, how bad it has been—this terrible time—and it occurs to her that she’s managed it long enough not to notice it, quite. Everything is suffused in an ache she’s grown accustomed to, and now it’s as if she’s flying in the face of it all. She laughs more deeply than she ever has, laughs even as she thinks of the Harmons, and of her grief. She’s woozy from lack of air and breath. At last she sits up, wipes her eyes with part of the pillowcase, still laughing. The baby’s fussing, so she works to stop, to gain some control of herself. She realizes that Meg is in the bathroom, running water. Then Meg comes out and offers her a wet washcloth.

“I didn’t see you go in there.”

“Quiet,” Meg says. “Don’t get me started again.”

Milly holds the baby on one arm. “I have to feed Zeke some more.”

“So once more I don’t get to hold him.”

They look at each other.

“Poor Larry,” Meg says. “Married to a philistine. But—just maybe—he did the right thing, coming here.”

“You don’t suppose he heard us.”

“I don’t suppose it matters if he did. He’d never believe we could laugh at one of his
poems.”

“Oh, Meg—that’s so mean.”

“It’s the truth. There are some things, honey, that love just won’t change.”

Now it’s as if they are both suddenly aware of another context for these words—both thinking about Wally. They gaze at each other. But then the moment passes. They turn to the window and Meg says, “Is Larry out there? What’ll I tell him anyway?” She crosses the room and looks through the little peephole in the door. “God,” she says, “the Harmons are here.”

Mrs. Harmon
is standing in front of the door with Larry, who has apparently begun explaining himself. Larry turns and takes Meg by the arm as she and Milly come out. “All the way from Champaign to head it off,” he says to Mrs. Harmon. “I hope I just avoided making the biggest mistake of my life.”

“God,” Meg says to him. “If only you had money.” She laughs at her own joke. Mrs. Harmon steps around her to take the baby’s hand. She looks up at Milly. “I’m afraid we went overboard,” she says. “We went shopping for the baby.”

Milly nods at her. There’s confusion now: Larry and Meg are talking, seem about to argue. Larry wants to know what Meg thinks of the poem, but Milly doesn’t hear what she says to him. Mrs. Harmon is apologizing for coming earlier than planned.

“It’s only an hour or so,” Milly says, and then wonders if that didn’t sound somehow ungracious. She can’t think of anything else to say. And then she turns to see Mr. Harmon laboring up the stairs. He’s carrying a giant teddy bear with a red ribbon wrapped around its thick middle. He has it over his shoulder, like a man lugging a body. The teddy bear is bigger than he is, and the muscles of his neck are straining as he sets it down. “This is for Wally,” he says with a smile that seems sad. His eyes are moist. He puts one arm around his wife’s puffy midriff and says, “I mean—if it’s okay.”

“I don’t want to be divorced,” Larry is saying to Meg.

Milly looks at the Harmons, at the hopeful, nervous expressions on their faces, and then she tries to give them the satisfaction of her best appreciation: she marvels at the size and the softness of the big teddy, and she holds the baby up to it, saying, “See? See?”

“It’s quite impractical, of course,” says Mr. Harmon.

“We couldn’t pass it up,” his wife says. “We have some other things in the car.”

“I don’t know where we’ll put it,” says Milly.

“We can keep it here,” Mrs. Harmon hurries to say. She’s holding on to her husband, and her pinched, unhappy features make her look almost frightened. Mr. Harmon raises the hand that had been around her waist and lightly, reassuringly, clasps her shoulder. He stands there, tall and straight in that intentionally ramrod-stiff way of his—the stance, he would say, of an old military man, which happens to be exactly what he is. His wife stands closer to him, murmurs something about the fireworks going off in the distance. It seems to Milly that they’re both quite changed; it’s as if they’ve come with bad news and are worried about hurting her with more of it. Then she realizes what it is they are trying to give her, in what is apparently the only way they know how, and she remembers that they have been attempting to get used to the loss of their only child. She feels her throat constrict, and when Larry reaches for her sister, putting his long, boy’s arms around Meg, it’s as if this embrace is somehow the expression of what they all feel. The Harmons are gazing at the baby now. Still arm in arm.

“Yes,” Milly tells them, her voice trembling. “Yes, of course. You—we could keep it here.”

Meg and Larry are leaning against the railing, in their embrace. It strikes Milly that she’s the only one of these people without a lover, without someone to stand with. She lifts the baby to her shoulder and looks away from them all, but only for a moment. Far off, the sky is turning dusky; it’s getting near the time for rockets and exploding blooms of color.

“Dinner for everyone,” Mr. Harmon says, his voice full of brave cheerfulness. He leans close to Milly, and speaks to the child. “And you, young fellow, you’ll have to wait awhile.”

“We’ll eat at the motel restaurant and then watch the fireworks,” says Mrs. Harmon. “We could sit right here on the balcony and see it all.”

Meg touches the arm of the teddy bear. “Thing’s as big as a
real
bear,” she says.

“I feel like fireworks,” Larry says.

“They put on quite a show,” says Mr. Harmon. “There used to be a big
field out this way—before they widened the street. Big field of grass, and people would gather—”

“We brought Wally here when he was a little boy,” Mrs. Harmon says. “So many—such good times.”

“They still put on a good show,” Mr. Harmon says, squeezing his wife’s shoulder.

Milly faces him, faces them, fighting back any sadness. In the next moment, without quite thinking about it, she steps forward slightly and offers her child to Mrs. Harmon. Mrs. Harmon tries to speak, but can’t. Her husband clears his throat, lifts the big teddy bear as if to show it to everyone again. But he, too, is unable to speak. He sets it down, and seems momentarily confused. Milly lightly grasps his arm above the elbow, and steps forward to watch her mother-in-law cradle the baby. Mrs. Harmon makes a slight swinging motion, looking at her husband, and then at Milly. “Such a pretty baby,” she says.

Mr. Harmon says, “A handsome baby.”

Meg and Larry move closer. They all stand there on the motel balcony with the enormous teddy bear propped against the railing. They are quiet, almost shy, not quite looking at each other, and for the moment it’s as if, like the crowds beginning to gather on the roofs of the low buildings across the street, they have come here only to wait for what will soon be happening in every quarter of the city of brotherly love.

Tonight, a little
more than a month after my one brother turns up out of the blue—ten years older and looking it, with a badly mangled arm from a bomb blast at a church in Beirut—our difficult and famous father arrives from Italy, on yet another of his unannounced stopovers. He calls from the airport to say he’s hired a cab and is coming. This time, he says, he’s headed back to Santa Monica, having spent the last four months in Rome. When I’m through talking to him, I give the handset to my husband, who puts it back in its cradle and then gives me a look. We smile. Daddy doesn’t know James has been staying with us. James is in town somewhere and doesn’t know the old man’s breezed in. “This is going to be something,” I say.

A little later we watch the old man climb out of the cab and work to get his luggage from the trunk. When my husband moves to go out and help him, I take his arm above the elbow. “Tom,” I say. “Wait. Let the cabbie do it.”

We stand there, the welcoming committee, and I’m thinking how I’ll choose the moment to tell my father that his son is visiting, too.

Tom holds the door open, and I step out.

“Don’t say anything,” I say. “Let me do the talking.”

“You’re enjoying this too much,” Tom says. “I don’t think you should get such pleasure out of it.”

“It’s a reunion,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “Wicked,” smiling at me.

Daddy fumbles around in the pockets of his suit while we watch from the porch. “All right,” I say. “But watch him make us pay for the cab. Again.”

“Listen to you. You can’t keep the admiration out of your voice,” Tom says. A moment later he says, “I hope we can think of this as a positive thing. Maybe we ought to let them both just stumble onto each other.”

“I’d like to film it,” I say, and Tom shakes his head.

My father’s coming up the walk now, and the cabdriver’s leaning against the idling taxi, obviously waiting for his fare. It’s getting toward dusk, and there are shadows out in the street. Above the trees I can see the faint outline of the moon, and I think of convergences, chance meetings, and how my father will think I somehow arranged the whole thing. He’ll probably blame me for not telling him over the telephone so he could choose to travel on.

“Hey,” he says, stepping up onto the porch. His step is slow, and he seems to sag. He looks sleepless and worn out, and there’s a faintly jaundiced cast to his skin, a darkness around the eyes. Apparently travel doesn’t agree with him the way it used to. It’s as if he’s not coming from Europe and all sorts of honors and interviews—and a long, successful run of one of his plays—but from a job he hates and has to go back to.

And I’m about to tell him James has come home. They haven’t spoken in almost twenty years, since long before James dropped out of sight altogether.

I stand aside and pull the screen open for him and smile, thinking I’ll tell him before he says anything. But then I find I can’t do it yet. The time is just not right; to say anything now would be somehow aggressive. I myself haven’t seen him in more than a year. “Marilyn,” he says. And then he nods at Tom. “Tom.” For a moment it’s like all the other times, and I hear the something condescending in his voice as he says Tom’s name, as if the man I chose to marry was a little boy with dirt on his face. Tom takes his bags and starts upstairs with them.

“I need some change to pay the driver,” my father says.

“I don’t know why you insist on the taxi,” Tom says. “I’d pick you up.”

“Wouldn’t want to trouble you, Tom.” My father smiles, all affability and consideration. He told me once that he respects Tom for the fact that Tom isn’t capable of understanding what he does and is therefore not in awe of it. He meant it as a compliment, I’m afraid; it was one of his careless observations. He has never been a man with much access to his effect on other people, for all the famous sensibility of the plays.

Now, I give him a twenty-dollar bill and watch him go out to pay the cabbie. He comes back with a five and hands it to me.

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t be silly,” I say.

“Don’t I get a hug?” he says. I hug him. He smells of cigar smoke. His shoulder, when I touch it, is slack: there’s only bone under the skin. I put my lips to his cheek, and he pats my arm, turning a little, as if already looking for a way out. In spite of everything, and regardless of what you might’ve read or heard about him, my father is essentially a timid man. I can see that he’s uneasy, and it makes me sorry for my own thoughts.

“Got to sit down,” he says.

“How long can you stay this time?” Tom wants to know.

“Just a day or two. I have to get back home to work.”

“What are you working on?” Tom asks him, heading for the kitchen and the drinks.

“Another play. What else?”

“What’s it about?” I ask.

He looks at me. He knows something’s up now. He smiles and says, “The usual troublesome stuff.”

“Can’t I be curious about it?” I say.

“It’s just that this is slightly out of character for you, isn’t it?” he says.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I tell him.

We’re moving into the living room. I’ve put mints in a glass bowl on the coffee table, and fruits and cheeses on a platter. Just the kind of middle-class thing about which he has always found something disparaging to say. He seems to appreciate it now, lifting a strawberry and putting it, whole, into his mouth.

“What’s the title of the new play?” I ask him.

He says, “1951,” giving me another look. Nineteen fifty-one is the year
my mother died. “It’s not about her,” he adds. “I wouldn’t go over that ground again.”

I offer him the little bowl of mints and realize that I’m nervous. I hate the tremor in my fingers. I put the bowl down too quickly, and it makes a little bump. I can’t help thinking of it as an advantage he has now. We sit together on the sofa, and Tom gets the children to come in one by one to kiss him, and to be exactly as mannerly as we taught them to be. My father says their names—John; Ellie; Morgan—and it strikes me that it’s as if he’s performing, as if they ought to be touched by the fact that he hasn’t forgotten them. Although it’s going to be full dark soon, I send them out to play in the yard. John is the oldest, and I tell him to watch the other two. He herds them out, being the older brother with them, acting like the responsibility gives him a headache. For a while we hear their voices outside. The whole thing feels rehearsed, and it embarrasses me. I’m starting to think how I have to give him my news just to cut my losses.