The Stories of Richard Bausch (52 page)

I hate being this way, feeling this confusion of anger and regret. It’s why I’d rather he keep to his life and let me keep to mine. When I got married—against his strenuous objections—I told him I didn’t want anything from him at all, and aside from the loan so we could buy this house, I’ve kept to it. We paid the loan back in the first year. We live modestly, which is the way we want it; we have always stood on our own and paid our own way.

Tom comes back with two martinis, and they start talking about Europe. Daddy goes on about the charms and pleasures of Rome. He thinks he may want to live there again. During the last ten years or so he’s divided his time between Key West and the big sprawling ranch-style house he and what’s her name, the actress he was married to for a while, built in the hills above Santa Monica. But now he says he’s a little tired of the States. California bores him. Key West is all tourists these days. He might sell the houses and set himself up in Rome again.

“Rome,” says Tom, who has never seen it. “Be fun to live in Rome, I guess.”

“Rome’s a long way from movieland,” I say. “Aren’t you going to make any more movies?”

My father shrugs.

“I always wanted to see Venice,” Tom says.

“You said that once,” my father tells him. “I remember.”

Tom looks down into his drink, embarrassed. A kind, gentle man who happens never to have been overseas.

I was born
in Rome. I don’t remember much about living there, though we stayed until I was almost seven, when my father moved us all to New York. But he took James and me back to Italy during the summer of 1957, when James was sixteen and I was twelve. We stayed two months. He was unhappy about something, on a short fuse the whole time. I was in awe of him, of course, and though I didn’t know the word, I thought he was omniscient. Certainly he knew how to read my mind. All I wanted to do was please him, and yet it seemed that everything I said caused him irritation and worry.

The woman he paid to watch us while he was off at the theater was German, and frightening. She wore an eye patch, and when he was gone she sometimes took it off to scare me. She always pretended to have forgotten it, but there was a gleam in her one eye. Her name was Brigitte (pronounced Brig-git-ee), and she’d been in the bombing of Berlin. She told me about it all, how she’d come from a rich Bavarian family, an old name, the name of a chain of German banks, though they were all either dead or poor now and the banks were owned by Western corporations. She was very bitter about the West. My father liked her efficiency, the fact that she kept everything so clean and took no guff, as he put it, from the younger citizens (his pet name for us). She took no guff from me. James was a different story altogether. James made her miserable, mostly by pretending not to notice her and by seeming to mistake her meaning all the time: he was always innocent, and his disobedience was always a mistake. And then of course he’d apologize in that empty way, when the apology is a weapon. “I know what you’re doing, don’t think I don’t,” Brigitte would say to him.

“What?” James would say, with his persecuted look. “What did I do? I thought you said we could go out after dinner.”

“I said no, you could not go out.”

“I didn’t hear you right, then. Really. I was sure you said ‘Go out.’ That’s what I heard, anyway. ‘Go out.’ I’m really sorry.”

“You did it on purpose,” I would say to him, desperate to keep him close. It only made him more determined to get away. About me, he couldn’t have been less concerned: I was an irritation to him, a sloppy, crying kid
always fighting him, always conniving to keep him from his escapes out into the frantic streets of Rome.

“The little girl says you knew you were disobeying me,” Brigitte would say.

And James would answer her. “Oh, you going to believe a child over me?”

“I believe you wish to deceive me,” said Brigitte, her face frowning into the black eye patch.

My father would come home to this frazzled, barely sane crank and listen to her reports on us: the little girl is too timid all the time and won’t think for herself; the boy is devious and dishonest. “You need to spend more time at home, sir,” said Brigitte, gathering her things and refusing to look at any of us, busding out the door like someone whose mind is made up and will not return.

But she was always back in the morning, ready for more.

One evening I walked into the living room of that apartment on the Via Venetia and found my father grappling with her. She was bent over the back of the sofa, and he was holding her there, one hand tight along the side of her jaw. Her eye patch was on, and I couldn’t see much else of her face. “Marilyn,” my father said, stepping back. “What’re you doing out of bed?”

I said nothing.

“Go back to bed,” he told me, standing there while she straightened herself, pulling her dress down and brushing it against her thighs as if to wipe dust away.

“Do you hear me, kid? Go on to bed.”

I did what he told me, and lay awake in that high-ceilinged room, so far from everything I knew, beginning to experience the eerie feeling that unlike other children I lived in a world where nothing was forbidden, where all impulses were equal, and equally possible to follow. I lay awake trembling, feeling the dark like something palpable, and when I went to sleep, finally, I dreamed of him and that woman in aspects of a kind of weird domesticity, not quite understanding any of it. When I woke the next morning, without knowing how or why, I understood that Brigitte would not be our babysitter anymore.

But I was wrong.

The following morning, she was there, twice as frightening as before and with a new confidence as if she were winning some game between us, drawing my father away. There were nights during that period, long nights
with James gone on one of his forays into whatever trouble he could find, when everything she said and did convinced me that she would lure my father into something like a renunciation of me, as I knew he had renounced my dead mother. She seemed certain of it, certain of her place in the scheme of things. And of course she was wrong. A few days before we left, my father started bringing the actress home with him; the actress started sleeping over. And Brigitte became again the vaguely censorious, bustling figure going out the door in the evenings.

That was in Rome, the awful summer of 1957.

My father went back twice more and lived there again in the mid-sixties. By then he was married to the actress and I was in college, trying to keep people from guessing that I happened to be his daughter.

“So what’s
1951
about?” Tom asks him now.

“The McCarthy hearings. The destruction of a man. Marilyn, do you remember David Shaw?”

“A political play,” Tom says.

“Not exactly.”

“You know what I remember about the McCarthy hearings?” I say. “Those awful pictures of the holocaust on television.”

They both look at me.

“The hearings were on television at about the same time as that Walter Cronkite thing that showed all the pictures of the death camps,” I tell them.

“Do you remember David Shaw?” my father says to me.

I tell him no.

“He played guitar. Sang country songs. He sat in our living room and played them. And you loved him. You don’t remember him?” I do in fact vaguely remember. “Yes,” I say. “A little.” “The play’s about him.”

“I think those holocaust films were later,” Tom says. “Weren’t they?”

“No,” I say. “I remember. I thought the two things were connected. The Army-McCarthy Hearings and those horrible pictures of the ovens.”

“I don’t recall what was on television,” my father says. “But the play is about David Shaw.”

“What about him?” I say.

“He was blacklisted,” says my father.

Then Tom says, “You know, James turned up here recently.”

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe he just blurted it out like that.

My father nods, not quite looking at either of us. “That so,” he says.

“He’s been staying with us,” Tom says.

“How is he?”

Tom looks at me.

My father clears his throat and says, “I said, ‘How is he?’”

“He’s all right,” I say. “I don’t know what to tell you. Where to begin.”

“He was on his way to Santa Monica,” Tom says. “But then we told him you were in Rome.”

“Is he thinking maybe he’d like to see me before I die?”

“He’s been hurt,” Tom says. “I mean, he’s got a war wound, sort of.”

“A
war
wound.”

“Lebanon,” I say. “He says he was doing something for the government.”

“Jesus Christ,” my father says.

“It’s the left arm,” Tom says. “It looks okay, but he can’t move it.”

“Where is he now?”

“In town,” I say.

My father sits forward, puts his fingers to his nose, sniffs loud, looks at Tom. “I’d like another drink,” he says.

Tom fixes it. While he’s gone my father sits staring at the wall.

“I didn’t know quite how to tell you,” I say, and realize that it’s the simple truth.

“Well—in fact I’d heard he was in the Middle East.” When I stare at him, he shrugs. “I know a lot of people.”

Tom comes back in with two more drinks. “Marilyn tell you about the job interviews?” he says. “James went to town for two interviews. He thinks he wants to live here in Point Royal.”

My father drinks, swallows, seems to savor it. I look at his thick knuckles cradling the glass. These are not the hands of a man who works with books and papers; they look craggy and tough—the hands of a peasant farmer. He’s extremely proud of this. He wears workshirts, flannels, denim overalls, wishing to accentuate the blocky, rustic look of his face and frame. Today he’s wearing jeans and a gray turtleneck. His hair is drooping from the bare place in front, and he sweeps it across his brow with one muscular hand. It seems to me now
that something about him has always frightened me, and perhaps it’s this hayseed persona he likes to assume. I know what complexities lie under the homespun surface. “So,” he says. “James was headed for Santa Monica.” It’s as if he’s merely trying to make conversation now.

“That’s what he told us,” I say.

He drinks, looking off. Across from us is a print Tom bought of houses in snow. I can guess what my father thinks of it, yet I feel like speaking up, saying something. I don’t quite know what I’m supposed to feel now, but I don’t want to let him see me worried about what his opinions are. I don’t care what his opinions are. He’s had four marriages, including the actress, and I don’t even know who he’s seeing these days. My mother was the first, and she died the year he left us. It was illness. There wasn’t any connection. But I was six years old and I made a connection. As far as I’m concerned, his life is a series of public disasters.

“The prodigal returns,” he says.

“What about David Shaw?” I say.

He shrugs.

Tom says, “The destruction of a man. Actually, I like that as a title.”

“No. The tide’s
1951.”

“What happened to David Shaw?” I say.

“Well, you’ll have to see the play,” he tells me.

When I was fourteen, he wrote a play in which my mother is portrayed as a character in the story of a writer’s success—a small but tender contribution to the career. It was this play that set James against him for good—the whole country thinking of our mother as the dizzy but instinctively intelligent and sexually starved blond in
The Brace.
The big literary prize winner, and the actress he married won the Tony award playing this creation of his, this fantasy figure nothing like the real woman. James remembers her better than I do, and his rage is deeper than mine. I am mostly angry because I haven’t had a normal life—because of his hatred of the life I’ve worked for here.

And he does hate it. He sits here on my sofa looking at the snow scenes on the wall and chewing the mints I’ve set before him, hating everything about the house, my husband and his job selling textbooks—our television and our fenced yard and the kids going to public school. The soap operas I
used to watch whenever he was visiting, just to make his outrage complete. He doesn’t even joke about it anymore: I’m a disappointment to him. I wonder sometimes if he sees my mother in me. In his play, she’s not quite capable of a real thought without the help of the romantic figure who is remembering her in the first scene—the one where the sad, poetic figure stands over the grave and utters her name, utters the name of his sorrow, or words to that effect. But she provides the nourishment at the right time, and she senses something of his appetite for life, his rarity, his difference from her—his vividness and passion, his grave, all-consuming hunger for experience, his need. She senses these things, and something in her own limited emotional makeup mirrors them. Ironically, she dies before these possibilities in her soul can be released, but her simple-hearted, intuitive nurturing of the protagonist’s aspirations proves instrumental. The artist learns that Love tends toward the particulars, the simple and the straightforward. Complexity is evil. Blah blah blah.

They teach this play in the colleges now. And my mother isn’t immortalized in it, she’s plagiarized. She doesn’t even get to say her own lines.

“More to drink?” Tom says, and it dawns on me that we’re all waiting for James to come back from town.

“I’d love some,” my father says.

Tom brings the gin and vermouth and the ice bucket and sets it all on the coffee table before them. Now they sit next to each other, and I move to the chair across the room.

“So tell me about James,” my father says, drinking.

“There are things
he
should tell you,” I say.

“I want to know what I can before I see him.” He doesn’t even seem upset or nervous. He has always managed, even for his timidness about the matters of daily life, to glide through things as if trouble were habitat, the air he breathed.

“All right,” I say. “There was a wife. They broke up. James spent some time in a hospital for nerves because of it.”

“Breakdown?” he says.

“He just said he spent some time in a hospital,” I say.