Frederick Busch Short Stories

This week, I want to look at three short stories by Frederick Busch: Ralph the Duck, Are We Pleasing You Tonight, and Domicile.

Busch, a prolific writer of novels and short stories, was an acclaimed American author and teacher who died in 2006. Ralph the Duck, published in his 1985 story collection Absent Friends, is included in the 2014 edition of The Stories of Frederick Busch, edited by Elizabeth Strout—as are the other two.

Busch once said that fiction that means something must be about serious matters—life and death.

Ralph is about an unnamed narrator who is employed as a security guard by an also unnamed Northeastern university. It is told in first person and uses the simple past tense. The tone is ironic and comic, and then sharply intense. The main action occurs in a scene in which the narrator is called upon to get a suicidal young woman to safety during a major winter storm. He must convince her to accompany him, despite her having taken an overdose of pills, and then has to drive her through the dangerous storm to a hospital. Certainly, this is a dramatic enough premise. However, the scene begins more than halfway through Ralph, with the line: “It was the worst of the winter’s storms, and one of the worst in years.” This placement certainly suggests that Ralph is about more than the rescue. And then there’s the title.

In any case, some writers might organize this story differently, beginning with the dramatic rescue. One of Busch’s many strengths is the way he writes action sequences, and the drive through the blizzard with the girl vomiting out the window is excellent. But (and maybe I’m beating a dead horse here—neigh!) he begins Ralph at an earlier point, thereby privileging the character of the narrator over the plot.

The story’s first paragraph begins: “I woke up at 5:25 because the dog was vomiting.” In a nice piece of foreshadowing, the narrator carries “seventy-five pounds of heaving golden retriever to the door and poured him unto the silver, moonlit snow.” (The narrator carries the nauseous young woman through the storm to his truck). This first line poses the question: why did he wake up because the dog was vomiting? As a dog owner, I can report that the sound of vomiting does tend to get one’s attention—but not if the dog is in a different room. Something about the dog vomiting wakes the narrator—what is it? The story does not ask will he or won’t he wake up because the dog was vomiting. The first line also answers who is speaking? —“I,” and when? —at “5:25.”

The story quickly establishes the character of the unnamed narrator and the dog, and a woman who is named Fanny, whom we realize is the narrator’s wife. In this first scene, she has slept on the couch because the couple had a fight the previous night. (Did the dog wake her?) The narrator says, “I would apologize because I always did, and then she would forgive me if I hadn’t been too awful…and then we would stagger through the day, exhausted but pretty sure we were all right.”

There’s a sense here of a couple who care about each other but who are often in conflict, and we don’t know why. It develops other questions—what is this conflict about? What exhausts them?

Then, after a line break, we get several paragraphs of explanation about the narrator. Because of his job working for the university, he can take a course for free each semester. He makes the interesting statement, “I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way—it would have taken me something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate.” This use of the conditional tense—easy to miss at first reading—implies that he is telling the story from the future, a future in which he did not complete his degree. This is not followed up on but seems pretty significant.

Also, he explains that in the time of the story, he was taking an American Literature course from an unnamed professor who writes on one of the narrator’s papers: “You are not an unintelligent writer.” The narrator finds him patronizing and absurd. The professor decides the narrator must have served in the military in Vietnam and killed people, for him, an exciting and romantic idea. The narrator humors him and never clarifies whether or not he was a veteran.

Then, after another line break, the story presents a scene of the narrator at home after work and remembering a young woman threatening suicide whom he convinced to live. (actually the same woman previously mentioned but an earlier incident). Within this scene, we get the first mention of the child he and Fanny had. He thinks of the young woman as “someone’s child. Which made me think, of course, of ours.” There’s no mention of this child’s fate, except that we know she hasn’t appeared.  

Here, the story is asking we the readers to make meaning. We know the couple at the heart of the story are struggling with a painful issue, and we now know that they had, or have, a child.

Next, we have several scenes that show more about the nature of the narrator’s marriage to Fanny—caring, close, and the nature of the narrator—independent, passionate, resentful of being patronized by his professor. And we learn more about Ralph the Duck.

The narrator writes an essay for the class entitled Ralph the Duck.

“Once upon a time there was a duck named Ralph who didn’t have any feathers on either wing. So when the cold wind blew, Ralph said Brrr and shivered and shook…Oh, the mommy said. Here. I’ll keep you warm. So she spread her big feathery wings and hugged Ralph tight, and when the cold wind blew, Ralph was warm and snuggly and fell fast asleep.”

Unfortunately, the professor gives the narrator a “D,” although there’s a sense that the narrator was being provocative in submitting it. When he tells Fanny the situation, she is extremely touched—there is hugging.

Again, we don’t receive other information about the meaning of the Ralph the Duck story but must make it ourselves. It seems likely that this was a children’s story the narrator read to his daughter, now deceased. Or perhaps a story he wanted to tell her about protecting her from the cold when she has no feathers.

I think I should stop here. My point is about how good writing includes the reader in a process of meaning-making. It’s a delicate balance of how much to show and how much to leave out or hint at. Without enough clues, a story can just be too mysterious; too many, and a story can insult a reader’s intelligence by explaining everything. Ralph is a finely balanced beastie.

Till next time.

#RalphTheDuck #FrederickBusch #AlanBray