The Stories of Richard Bausch (82 page)

“Thanks for the juice.” She walked into the other room. He heard her putting her things away. He hurried to the front hallway, and waited. She came in with her bag over her shoulder. “I guess that’s it. I stayed later because I saw that I could finish today.”

“You wouldn’t like more orange juice?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks. I worked an extra hour, so let’s say forty dollars.”

As he brought the checkbook from his pocket, she stooped to pick up something from the floor, and he realized with a start that he had dislodged the check on which his mother had written. As Lynn Bassett handed it to him, she took a small step back, her eyes widening an increment. He did not think she could have seen what it said, yet he was certain something about her expression had changed.

The only thing for it was to explain.

“My mother,” he said quickly. “Her idea of a joke, I think. That’s how she signed it. As I said, she’s been a little unbalanced.”

“We’re hurting for money,” the young woman said. “I’m hurting for money.”

“I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life,” he told her.

“Embarrassed …” She seemed at a loss.

“What my mother wrote on it. See?” He held it out, and stepped over so that she was at his shoulder. “That’s what I was laughing at.”

She didn’t react at first. She seemed unsure of what was expected. Finally she lifted her eyes to his face and said, “God almighty.”

“I gave it to the teller like that. I didn’t see it.”

“It’s a wonder you didn’t get into some kind of trouble. That sort of thing could get you into a lot of trouble. I hope you know that.” Then she laughed. Her face changed, brightened, and the laugh came, and he laughed with her. They stood close in the light of the picture window and went on laughing, for what seemed a long time. A wonderful interval that brought him close to crying for happiness. “I was daydreaming,” he said. “I just walked up to the counter and handed it to the lady and stood there like an idiot. The most ridiculous thing. And they looked at me as if I had two heads or something.”

She kept laughing, gazing down at the check. “Man. That must’ve been something.”

“I was daydreaming about you, actually,” he heard himself say, unable to believe he had said the words. But he could feel the rightness of it; this accident. This was the thing that would give them to each other, this comedy of the check, their laughter over it. They might talk about it in later years. “I had—I was daydreaming about how it is with you in the house. Like we live together or something.”

Her eyes narrowed. She’d stopped laughing. “What,” she said, without inflection.

“I mean—I—” he stammered. “I was thinking about you. I wasn’t—and I handed this over to the teller, you see—the funniest thing—” He halted.

She put one hand to her mouth, and seemed to frown. “Forty dollars, please. Or my brother’ll come over here and beat the shit out of you.”

“Excuse me?” he said.

“I’m telling you the truth, man.” She stood there. “So you better listen.”

“Oh, I’ve got the money. I didn’t mean anything—my mother’s gone off the deep end,” he found the courage to go on. “Really. Crazy. They’ve got her on the psycho ward at Fauquier. You should’ve seen what I went through today. I had to do my juggling act to get her to recognize me.” Now he felt as though he had betrayed his mother, or belittled what she was
suffering. And abruptly he no longer cared. This was what had happened to him and he had borne it all so patiently, and only a moment ago they had been laughing together, and if he could only get that back. “That’s what I’m dealing with,” he went on. “Can you imagine it? If you could’ve seen the look on that lady teller’s face—”

Lynn Bassett regarded him with an expression he couldn’t read. “Look, I’m sorry I said
shit.
I hate cussing. But I can’t have a customer making passes at me. Did you—did you
say juggling
act?”

He thought of demonstrating for her, then decided that it might frighten her. “Yes,” he said. “I taught myself, with balled-up socks from the laundry when I was a kid. It’s really very easy once you get the hang of it.”

“Damn,” she said. “Well—I’ve gotta get going. Forty dollars.”

“Do you—do you live with your brother?”

“I’m trying to make enough money to go back to Montana. I came from Montana. If I can save a little and get free and clear, I’m gone. But I got roped into coming down here because I ran out of funds and he offered to put me up if I helped him, so I’ve been helping him. He gives me food and a place to stay if you want to call it that, and forty dollars a week, which doesn’t exactly make for a lot of leftover cash accumulating, you know? I came down here between semesters and never went back. It’s been almost a year.”

“I just quit graduate school,” he burst out. He was having trouble moving enough air to speak. “I couldn’t do it anymore.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” It occurred to him that he did know. He said, “It all seems like such a waste. If you don’t have anybody to share it with—you know—”

“Well, anyway,” she said, taking another step back from him. “You can always make a living in the circus.”

“Pardon me?”

“The juggling.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Of course.” He smiled. “I could show you how it’s done.”

She seemed to wave this off, then held out one hand. “Anyway—forty dollars.”

He fumbled with the checkbook. “Please forgive me.” As he wrote the check out, he said, “You’ll come back next week?”

“Next week?”

“I’d like to hire you to come regularly,” he said.

“I’ll say something to my brother.” There was such discouragement in her voice that he almost touched her shoulder. Instead, he held out the check.

“You did a wonderful job.”

“It’s just cleaning a house. And God knows I don’t have anything
ehe
to do.”

“Wonderful,” he said, before he had quite understood her. His heart leapt. “Would you like to go out to dinner or something?”

She said, “What?”

His breath caved in. He straightened, felt a band of pain across the small of his back, the muscles tightening there. “I wondered if you might like to go have dinner or something. I don’t mean it as a pass at you, really. I mean I’d like to be friends.”

She stared.

“Maybe some other time,” he heard himself say.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. Some other time.”

“Listen,” he went on, feeling the pressure to keep her there. “Would you like to see me do some juggling? I do it all the time. It keeps me sane.”

“Maybe another time for that, too,” she said.

He had reached for the angel, the cat, and he held them, standing there under her flat, impassive gaze. “It’s really a lot of fun,” he said.

“Yeah. I don’t want to see it, though. I don’t really like juggling. It makes me nervous.”

He put the figurines down too quickly, and almost dropped one. “I like you,” he got out.

She looked down. “Um—do you think you could give me a small advance—say, the next couple of weeks’ worth?”

He kept the smile on his face, where the blood coursed, and wrote another check. Two hundred dollars. He tore it out and handed it to her. He was determined, as always, to be kind.

She looked at it, then at him. “Hey, man—really.”

He waited for her to say more. She was not looking at his face, but at the amount, and the date, and his signature. She put the check in her blouse pocket.

“Stop by,” he got out. “If you feel like it—if you need anything, or you’re—you’re in the neighborhood—” He breathed, swallowed, then breathed again, and she had started to turn from him. “Next week, then?” He was suddenly conscious of the idiotic smile on his face. He wiped his hand across his lips.

“Sure.”

“I don’t know when my mother will be coming back. My father left her. She’s had a hard time of it. I’d never—I’d never do that to my wife.”

“Your wife.” Her voice was toneless, only vaguely interested.

“Oh, I’ve never been married. But if I was—I’d never treat her that way.”

“Well,” she said, going out the door. “Thanks again, man. Really.”

“Very good,” he said. “Good work, Lynn.”

Had she hesitated at the sound of her name? He couldn’t be certain. He watched her go down the sidewalk and put her things in the van, and he stood in the open door waving as she pulled away. The faintest air of puzzlement played across her features as she looked back at him; he was not so obtuse as to have missed it; and she had not indicated that she would stop by. He had to admit all of that to himself. As he had also to admit that he would probably never see her again, that she would cash the check he had made out to her and use it to go far, far away. But a person had a right to hope, even to make plans. He turned back into the house, and had the thought, before he caught himself, that next week, if she did come back, he would be more careful of her feelings; he would try to get her talking more about herself.

This is a
story I would have told grandchildren—and great grandchildren—if I’d had any. I had three wives, but no children. That’s a mystery, I suppose. As it’s a mystery that I’ve been around for more than a century and am still blessed with reasonably fair health. I also remember what I had for breakfast this morning and who I talked with. You might have to remind me who you are if you come back, but that was always true. They say the far past becomes clearer as you get older and the near past gets dim. Well, I remember some things clearer than others and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern I can figure. More than ninety years ago, when I was almost twelve years old, something happened that I knew nothing would ever erase from my memory.

When I tell you about it, you won’t ever forget it either.

In the summer of 1903—that’s right, just after the turn of the
last
century—we lived in a little three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Baltimore. My mother and father, my older sister, Livvie, and me. In mid-June, Father came down with a bad fever. He was delirious for three days,
and for a while everybody thought he was going to die. He was a young man, only thirty-four, but he got very dehydrated, and his fever kept getting higher. Then Mother came down with it as well, and Livvie and I were shuffled off to our neighbor’s house.

That was where we got sick.

Nobody knew quite what to do with us. The neighbor, Mrs. Lessing, was afraid to move us, or be near us, either. For all anyone knew, our parents were dying, we were all dying. She got so frightened that she went over to the post office and sent a telegram to her cousin, out in Frederick, and he came in with his wagon and mules and took her away. She left her maid, Anna Scott, to nurse us. Anna was a black woman of about thirty. I was nearly blind with fever and she seemed too large for the room—not heavy, but big-boned and tall, with thick features and long-fingered, smooth hands. At least the backs of them were smooth. The palms made a pleasant scratching when they moved across your face, or rested on your forehead. When the fever would let up a little during the days, she told us about the heavy mists in London, and how she had seen the terrible Tower, where people were kept for years, some waiting to have their heads cut off. She knew all the names of the kings and queens of England—Plantagenets and Stuarts and Tudors—and in the brief respite from sickness there was something wonderful about imagining palace intrigue in a faraway place. Livvie wanted more about the executions. Anna would demur for a time, denying that she knew anything so gruesome; then she would go on and say there is nothing more gruesome than the truth, and she would tell us in that soft drawl about Henry VIII’s unfortunate wives, or Mary, Queen of Scots.

I liked her, liked listening to her soft, contralto voice. She described for us the frightful conditions on the ship she came to America on as a little girl, the deaths at sea, and how they slipped the bodies over the side off a long wooden board. Her ancestors were free blacks who lived in Wales. She had stories about her father, who had trained in medicine down in Alabama, where she grew up, and had taught her some of what he knew. When she spoke of the mistress of the house, her eyes said more than her words. She had a low opinion of old Mrs. Lessing, who was as silly as she was cowardly.

“Y’all understand,” she’d say quietly. “This world is, um, upside down.”

Before it was over, she got sick, too. Her coal-colored skin gleamed with
sweat, and when she sat down on the bed to put a cool rag on my head, it was as if she had collapsed there. “Lord,” she said. “I feel low down.”

But she never stopped tending to us. She told us of growing up in Alabama, and coming north on the train, and meeting Thaddeus Marcus Adams, of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore. She liked to use the phrase. “Listen to it, darlings,” she said, running a cold rag over Livvie’s cheeks.
“Thaddeus Marcus Adams of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore.”
Sometimes she sang it, lifting my shirt from my back and washing me, her hands burning with fever. At night we waited for her, and the sound of her in the house kept me awake. She moved through my dreams, and Thaddeus Marcus Adams got mixed up in it, too. I dreamed he spoke to me, and washed my forehead. I had a memory, which I am now fairly certain was not the product of delirium, of wandering out of the room and seeing a tall, powerful-looking brown man in the upper hallway of the house. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbow, and I saw the thick veins standing out on his arms.