Wives & Lovers Read online

  Wives & Lovers

  Three Short Novels

  Richard Bausch

  for Karen

  Contents

  Requisite Kindness

  Rare & Endangered Species

  Spirits

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Richard Bausch

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Requisite Kindness

  AFTER

  December 22, 1994

  THE AFTERNOON BUS from Newport News was twenty minutes late, and the first five people who got off were Navy men. Brian Hutton’s younger brother Norman was the last of them, looking leaner than Brian remembered him—though it had only been a little more than a year. Twenty-four years old now, sixteen years younger than Brian. Life at sea obviously agreed with him. His skin was tan, his eyes clear; the musculature of his upper arms showed under the uniform. Everything about him made a contrast to the older brother, whose frame had begun to sag.

  Norman said, “Hard times, Bro.”

  They embraced. “Hey,” Brian said. He felt heavy and awkward. He stepped back and reached for his brother’s duffel bag.

  “I got it,” Norman said, shouldering the bag. They stood gazing at each other. “Somehow I’d talked myself into thinking this day wouldn’t come.”

  “Almost ninety-five,” Brian said. “A good long life.”

  Norman nodded. “I still hate it.”

  “Dad and Aunt Natalie are at the funeral home. You want to clean up first, or go straight over?”

  “Whatever.”

  “It’s your call, Norm.”

  “Let’s go see them.”

  They headed across the open lot of the station with its borders of freshly plowed snow piled high. They had to shield their eyes from the sun; the air was crisp and cold. All along the highway beyond the end of the station lot were telephone poles festooned with bright Christmas ribbons and tinsel. You had to enter the terminal building to exit out onto the street, and inside, a thin-faced smiling man in a dark business suit stood next to a large cardboard box of pocketsized Bibles. The box was sitting on a plastic chair. “Praise the Lord,” he said, nodding deferentially, offering Norman one of the Bibles.

  “Beat it,” Norman muttered.

  “Pardon?”

  He walked on.

  “Pardon?” the man said to Brian.

  “Excuse me,” Brian said.

  Norman was waiting, smiling, by the door. “Check out his face, man. He’s a confused evangelist now.”

  Brian let him pass through, then turned to look at the man with the Bibles, who was staring after them. He thought of going back to apologize.

  From out on the sidewalk, his brother said, “Forget something?”

  He stepped out and they walked along the street, toward the public parking lot up the block. “Just out of curiosity, Norman, what do you think Gram would’ve said about that particular exchange?”

  Norman hefted the duffel bag higher on his shoulder. “Guy giving Bibles away in a bus station. I guess I’m home, all right.”

  “It’s Bibles, Norm. What harm is in that?”

  “I don’t like it shoved in my face like that.”

  “But really—what do you think Elena’d say?”

  “I know,” Norman said. “Okay? I know.”

  They walked on a few paces.

  “So, you were there for it,” Norman said. “What was that—what did it—” He halted.

  “I was only there at the very end. It was Dad mostly. The whole eastern seaboard was snowbound. Aunt Natalie was down in Florida with a tour group, stranded at the airport. Dad and Gram were alone and they went through it that way, the two of them.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She feels awful for not being there when it happened.”

  They crossed the street and entered the municipal parking lot. Norman shifted the duffel bag to the other shoulder. “God, I feel bad now. I don’t know what gets into me. I can’t help myself when that Bible stuff gets thrown at me, like it’s a snack food or something. Gram never did that. Not once. I’ve got a roommate, man—spouts Bible and chapter and verse all the damn time. You should see him—he doesn’t have pictures of his family or a girlfriend in his wallet, he’s got pictures of Jesus and the saints. Most of the time it’s like I’m the devil, because I want to drink a little whiskey now and then and go with the girls.”

  “Gram probably would’ve loved him.”

  “I said, ‘I know,’ okay?”

  For a few minutes Brian couldn’t recall where he put the car. He stopped and turned slowly, looking for it among the glaring shapes. The sun reflecting off the snow was brighter than it ever seemed in summer.

  “Is Mom coming back?” Norman asked.

  “It’s too far. Um, she says. Under the circumstances.”

  “I figured. Christ. What about Tommy?”

  “Tommy’s with her.”

  “Well, it’s a long way to come for a funeral. But Gram would come to theirs.”

  “It’s having to be anywhere around Dad, isn’t it?”

  “I wasn’t going to come out and say it.”

  Brian found the car, and opened the trunk. Norman threw the duffel bag in, then decided to retrieve something from it—a small metal flask.

  “My ration of vegetables,” he said. “Corn. Can’t be without it.” He twisted the cap open and took a swig, then offered it to Brian.

  “Thanks anyway,” Brian said.

  “A lot of nutrition in an acre of corn.”

  “I’ll have some later.”

  “What about Tillie?” Norman asked. “Will she be there?”

  “What do you think?”

  “So the marriage and divorce are off.”

  “Funny,” Brian said.

  “She and Gram got along though. Gram liked her.”

  Brian said nothing. They got into the car. His brother took another swig from the flask and offered it again. He waved it off, starting the car. “Damn,” Norman said. “I’d like to see Tillie.”

  “Tillie’s gone,” said Brian. Then he took the flask and drank from it, feeling the burn as it went down. Handing the flask back to his brother, he rested both hands on the steering wheel. “I’m not built for this shit,” he said.

  Norman smiled at him, holding up the flask. “That’s what you keep saying, there, bro. But you keep getting yourself into it.”

  THEY DROVE STRAIGHT TO the funeral home, which was on a quiet residential street in Point Royal, twenty-three miles down Highway 29, toward Charlottesville. The road was wet from melting snow, though you could see that in the shade it was not melting; it was encrusted there, stone solid. Several of the tall spruce trees surrounding the funeral home had broken branches from the weight of the snow, which kept thawing and then freezing again in the nights. The storm had come through three days ago. One of the spruce trees in the yard was garlanded with white Christmas lights, and the lights were on, though it was still day.

  The only other car in the parking lot was their father’s. Norman paused outside the car and adjusted his uniform, using the passenger side window as a mirror. The funeral home had an ogee roof, like a meeting hall, and a front portico supported by white columns. A long gray limo was parked in the shade of the portico. They made their way inside, and were met by a squarish, silver-haired man in a gray suit. “Elena Hutton,” Brian said to him.

  The man nodded, seeming faintly standoffish—perhaps he smelled the whiskey on them. He led them through the hall and to the left, past heavy stuffed chairs and facing couches.

  At the end of a long, narrow, dimly lit room, Henry Hutton and his sister sat side by side on two straightback chairs. The casket was mounted to their left,
in the corner, beside a massive array of flowers. Norman was first to reach them. Aunt Natalie gave forth a little cry, standing to throw her arms around him. Henry stood, too, and glanced Brian’s way before concentrating on the younger son. There was something in the old man’s expression—an obscure, brooding aversion—that made Brian feel inexplicably walled out. It had been this way since those last hours of his grandmother’s life. He watched his father talking to Norman about the bus ride north.

  “First time I took that ride I was on my way to Washington and my first job—as an office clerk over at the Department of State. The country’s all shopping malls and suburbs now. Back then it was farms. Nothing but fields and hills and trees. Beautiful country back then.”

  “Henry,” Aunt Natalie said. “Please, no more nostalgia.”

  He ignored her, putting his arm around Norman and staring off, as if he were looking at the remembered landscape. “It was beautiful country right up to the mid-sixties.”

  THEY HADN’T EVER BEEN a family that was very good at telling their feelings: Brian had always been the one who spilled everything, and his two younger brothers often teased him about it. Though he was by far the older and more experienced brother he felt, as they grew into men, increasingly insufficient around them, so much in need of their approval. And he had never found the way to seek it except through a kind of disclosure of himself, to which they invariably responded with a sardonic remark or a joke. Of course, his personal troubles had given them so much to talk about—the havoc of four failed marriages, all of which had ended in acrimony and sorrow. And this latest relationship, not a marriage, with Tillie, who had, no doubt, understood just in time what she might have let herself in for, and was gone. Gone.

  The other three were talking about Gram; and abruptly he felt selfish, standing there with his own concerns.

  He walked over to the casket and waited with his hands folded. The casket was closed, with a spray of flowers at the head: Elena had always said that when her time came she didn’t want a lot of people staring at a corpse. There was a place to kneel, but he didn’t. He murmured her name. “Elena Townsend Hutton.” Then he whispered, “I hope you’re somewhere you can hear me, Elena.”

  Henry, Norman, and Aunt Natalie approached, and they did kneel, and he saw that Norman’s eyes were brimming. He walked back to the chairs and sat down, hating his own unquietness of mind.

  He hadn’t called Tillie to tell her what had happened—he was afraid she would think of it as a ploy on his part, to get her to come back. But it was true that Tillie had always liked and admired Elena. He confessed to himself that he had at times felt restive in the old woman’s presence—wanting to be away from her worries about him, her grave consideration of him, her interest. She wasn’t the kind of family member who made demands, yet one felt the force of her hopes like some exacting requirement. During his growing up, when his father had gone off on one of his binges or his flings with other women, or his mother, Lorraine, had suffered one of her own lapses with alcohol, Elena had cared for him. There had been periods when she was both father and mother to all three boys.

  With Brian, of course, this history went back the furthest, and included several of the worst periods of his parents’ chaotic first fifteen years.

  Elena had remained engrossed in his life, in how he was leading it, and she had shown a knowing, exasperating tolerance for his failures. A forbearance that troubled him more than censure might have. It was her religion, she joked. And though she rarely spoke of that, she had kept her faith, and she assumed that the members of her family had done the same. It was practical to her. A matter of reasonable expectation and design: one observed the rituals and paid attention to the details of worship and piety, and faith took care of itself. She believed this to be true of married life as well: one observed the rituals faithfully, and everything took care of itself. Brian’s troubles with marriage were the image and reflection of his father’s, though Henry had remained married for thirty-six years and Lorraine had forgiven him over and over. Forgiven him after squalls and scenes, and with a lot of reflexive retaliation: excesses with the bottle, mostly, and Brian often wondered if there hadn’t been one or two with other men as well. They had all come to Elena again and again for solace and for something else, too—some indefinable element of kindly disapproval that reminded them while it absolved them. He had often felt as if he were starting fresh after spending time in her company, and once, at the end of his fourth marriage, he had actually put his head in her lap and wept.

  Now, sitting in the quiet, flower-heavy air of the funeral parlor, he saw an image of his mother sitting in the ash-colored light of a winter dusk, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the street. There was a glass, and an ash tray on the table, and she was crying. How old had she been then? Thirty? Certainly not much older than that. He couldn’t place it. He sat there and pictured her, and remembered wondering what might happen next. He had been nine or ten. The only child in a scary unhappy place, the only true refuge from which was Elena. Thinking of this, he had a pang of realizing again that she was gone. The others had their backs to him, kneeling by the casket.

  After an interval, his father stood, with some trouble, and came over to sit down.

  Brian said, “No one else has come by, yet, I take it.”

  “Not yet.”

  They watched Natalie and Norman stand, and begin the walk across the room to them.

  “Tillie stopped in for a while,” Henry murmured.

  Brian experienced a throat-closing thrill. “She—she did?”

  His father nodded. “Said to say hello.”

  “She—did she—she didn’t want to stay—”

  “She said to say hello, son. That’s all.”

  The two of them were quiet for a time. Without wanting to, Brian imagined how they must look from across the room: two men trying to find something to say to each other in the freighted quiet of a funeral parlor. Two failures. He had the thought. He looked at Henry—unfaithful, selfish, reckless Henry, whose wife of thirty-six years had left him at last.

  Henry said. “Stop staring. Christ.”

  “Is there something—are you unhappy with me?” Brian asked him.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Nothing—never mind.”

  They were quiet a moment.

  “Listen—” Brian began again, looking at the side of the old man’s face.

  Henry turned to him, and then stared down at his own hands. “Tillie said to say hello. Hell, your mother didn’t even do that.”

  The funeral director came in with another spray of flowers and put them in among the others. The only sound was the soft susurration the cloth of his suit made as he moved. He went out of the room. There was a hushed stirring beyond the door, people arriving. Henry cleared his throat, then took out a handkerchief, wiped his forehead, and put it back.

  Brian said, low, “I thought Mom and Tommy might come—” He stopped.

  “Hell,” Henry said. “Tom’s with her.” He leaned slightly toward Brian, as if he were about to offer a confidence, and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “You smell like a distillery. Go wash your mouth out, for Christ’s sake.”

  Brian straightened, then stood and moved to the entrance of the room, where visitors were starting to gather—they were mostly people from Elena and Aunt Natalie’s church, and from the neighborhood where Elena had lived for thirty-five of the ninety-four years. In the confusion, Aunt Natalie appeared at his side with a small plastic box of breath mints.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  “I know. I’m following orders.”

  “I won’t breathe on anyone.”

  People were moving in a procession past them now, and Aunt Natalie hurriedly put the mints in her purse and took someone’s hands, “So good of you to come,” she said.

  “Such a beautiful person,” one woman murmured to Brian. She looked older than Elena had been. She put her hand in h
is, and kept it there, a small, bony, blue-veined softness, surprisingly warm to the touch. “I used to have a donut with her on Sunday mornings. Donut and a cup of coffee. She always had a way of noticing the best things to talk about, and she could be quite wicked, too. Yes,” the woman said, almost talking to herself now, trailing off, “very funny. She made me laugh.”

  “Thank you,” Brian said.

  “How’s Miss Natalie holding up?”

  “Well, she’s hanging in there.”

  “Pardon? Where?”

  “She’s a trooper.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s an expression. I’m sorry. It means she’s tough.”

  “Yes, I’ll miss her.”

  “Natalie’s fine,” Brian said, loudly.

  “Nine?”

  “We’re going to miss Elena,” he ventured, speaking even louder, and feeling trapped.

  “Elena made me laugh.”

  “Yes.”

  “Natalie’s bearing up, is she?”

  He nodded, for lack of anything else to say.

  “It’s a good thing your father moved in with the two of them when he did,” the old woman went on. It bothered Brian that he didn’t know her name. “Poor Natalie. She deserved a vacation. She shouldn’t feel bad. You know in the beginning we thought Elena would come with us.”

  “I think she wanted to,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  Aunt Natalie had gone to the other side of the room.

  “That was all we talked about for a while,” the old woman went on. “Going to Disney World. Elena said she liked the idea of a visit to the kingdom of vulgarity. She was very funny and—well, you know.”

  “Yes,” Brian said, nodding at her.

  Others were coming in, more elderly women. People stood talking quietly in the middle of the room, and when the priest arrived they parted for him. The priest was a young, sallow-looking man with a five o’clock shadow on his chin; he carried himself with a faint air of having been put upon by the afternoon’s ceremony. A tiny piece of tissue paper adhered to the heel of his shoe. In a thin, apathetic voice, he led them all in a rosary, then offered Henry a few perfunctory words of consolation while putting on his overcoat. He had another appointment, he told them, and hurried away.