This is third person and primarily dialog, a phone call between the father and daughter. The reader discovers the daughter's predicament (pregnant, getting married to a 63 year old who was her professor) with the father. This in contrast to his own marriage which is in trouble.
What the story achieves with this style is the building sense of dismay (particularly if you are the parent of a girl) as the daughter relays the trifecta of bad news. The reader feels empathy for Ballinger as he takes this information in. What the story didn't achieve (for me) was clarity, it skims the surface. Ballinger turns mean on the phone with his daughter and then her fiancé. That leads me to wonder "Is this why he and Mary are separating? Because he's a jerk?". Bausch doesn't give away much from Ballinger's emotional point of view, except at the end where he lapses into a reverie in which he mourns his early marriage.
Each of the parts of Bausch's story; marriage and family starting; marriage ending are well constructed. But I didn't feel that Ballinger did anything but react predictably to the situation. I also didn't think that the brief allusions to their own ending marriage built any complexity. It just heightened the bittersweet situation that Melanie is in. You can predict her marriage will end badly (widow; supporting an elderly husband and young child, divorce) and despite Ballinger's relatively normal pathway through a long marriage (twenty two years at least) it's ending so that all feels as Ballinger's reaction.
What does Bausch actually tell us about Ballinger's marriage in a ten page story?
"The truth was that he had news of his own to tell. Almost a week ago he and Mary had agreed on a separation. Some time for both of them to sort things out." (p. 86)
"Outside the window, his wife, with no notion of what she was about to be hit with, looked through the patterns of shade in the blinds and, seeing him, waved. It was friendly, and even so, all their difficulty was in it." (p.87)
"Everything they had been through during the course of deciding about each other seemed concentrated now." (p. 94)
"Of course there are things to work on. Every marriage—"His voice had caught. He took a breath. "In every marriage there are things to work on." (p. 94)
"Who knows," Ballinger's wife said. "Maybe they'll be happy for a time." He'd heard the note of sorrow in her voice, and thought he knew what she was thinking; then he was certain that he knew. He sat there remembering, like Mary, their early happiness, that ease and simplicity, and briefly he was in another house, other rooms, and he saw the toddler than Melanie had been, trailing through slanting light in a brown hallway, draped in gowns she had fashioned from her mother's clothes."
These five short lines are really the story. Melanie's impending marriage is actually a backdrop against which Bausch builds a picture of an unhappy marriage that hasn't always been unhappy.
Is there a possibility for redemption of their marriage? Sitting on the bed sharing a common memory (Ballinger believes) would be the place where the author could have made another choice. Bausch could have chosen reconciliation for these two. It would have been sweet. But happy endings aren't possible for this couple, and one speculates for Melanie. So having this couple come together would have been forced. The authentic part about this depiction of divorce is its non-eventfulness.
"He did not know why that particular image should have come to him out of the flow of years, but for a fierce minute it was uncannily near him in the breathing silence; it went over him like a palpable something on his skin, then was gone. The ache which remained stopped him for a moment. He looked at his wife, but she had averted her eyes, her hands running absently over the faded denim cloth of her lap. Finally she stood. "Well," she sighed, going away. "Work to do." (p. 95)
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