Part One 4 страница

My parents took me home to their shadowy apartment on Ellis Avenue, a street which many no longer considered safe. From time to time, Rose and Arthur had talked of moving but it seemed reactionary to quit the backsliding neighborhood. My parents had lived in the same apartment all their married life. It was in a massive stone building and its white was the color of an old tombstone. About a block away was a physics research lab where some of the work on the first atomic bomb had been done and across the street was one of the University of Chicago’s libraries. But we were at the western edge of the University’s territory and all around us were empty lots where buildings once stood and the woeful evidence of families living with not nearly enough money. The professors and their families were gone from our building as well, and when we pulled in front of it (after a roundabout route that took us as far as possible from the Butterfields’ old block) I noticed that whoever had moved into the ground-floor apartment had pasted yellow paper over their windows and that the heavy oval glass in the building’s street door was badly cracked, as if it had been struck by a rock or a bullet.

I followed my parents up the stairs, holding my valise. Someone was cooking curry on the first floor and as we approached the second landing I heard “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge. Arthur led the way, gripping the dark wooden banister with one hand and bouncing his keys in the other. Rose seemed to walk with new cautiousness; she lifted her feet higher than necessary at each step and as I lagged back and tried to calm myself I noticed a tiny wet leaf plastered to the sole of her high- heeled shoe. The halls were painted a pale butterscotch color and our shadows bent and swelled as we climbed to the third floor. I tried to feel cheerful by saying to myself, “I’m home, I’m home,” but my inner voice sounded skeptical and timid and I was only making things worse.

If my parents themselves gave off accidental evidence of having changed, of having lost patience with their long and puzzling relationship, the apartment itself reflected none of this. As soon as we were inside, my pulse slowed to half its rate. The sensory overload of the long trek was behind me and I was immediately incurious. I knew in an instant that nothing had altered in those rooms. The smells were the same—paste wax, old books, coffee, and Rose’s Evening in Paris talcum powder—and the air conditioners wheezed at the same pitch they always had. The same pictures were on the walls: a Utrillo reproduction, a Guernica, and five portraits of working hands done by a local lithographer named Irving Segal—hands on rakes, hands on lathes, hands holding knotted ropes. Even the knickknacks were solidly in place: the chunk of quartz on the bookcase next to Scottsboro Boy and the little limestone toad from Mexico squatting next to the Letters of Lincoln Steffens. The cherrywood coffee table was still two feet in front of the brown sofa and on top of the table was, as always, the blue pottery vase stuffed with cattails.

I dropped my suitcase onto the pale green rug and sat on the sofa. “Well,” I said, “I see you’ve got the same old cat.” It was the punchline to an old family joke—the little boy who runs away from home and returns before anyone notices he’d left.

“Would you like to see your room?” Rose asked. While I was in Rockville she had appointed herself the guardian of my room. Sometimes, as a way of saying goodbye, she’d said, “Your room is waiting for you, David.” When they gave the apartment a paint job Rose made certain that the pale blue matched the original color without the slightest variation. When the painters left, Rose took color snapshots of the whole apartment and three of my room and delivered them to me at Rockville. Though I never mentioned the pictures to her—her gesture struck me as somehow out of character, too explicit—those color pictures had survived the steady attrition of my belongings and were now at my feet in the tan suitcase.

“May as well,” I said.

It’s the same. It was the backdrop of a recurring dream. It was as if the same air I had left behind still filled the little square chamber, waiting for me to please breathe it again. This was beyond preservation—the room had been embalmed. The bed was still covered by a copper corduroy spread. There were still only two pictures on the wall, both ripped from books. One of Ty Cobb, demonstrating his open grip, taken from The Encyclopedia of Baseball, and another of Monk Eastman, the notorious Jewish gangster, razored from a book called The Gangs of New York. The wooden floors were painted and waxed and, that night, when I turned on the lights, they would dully reflect the electric glare. There was the red and green braided rug and the white dresser, the bowl-shaped glass cover over the ceiling light, the three-legged blond wood desk, the plum-colored coffee mug filled with pens and pencils. My bookcase was still intact, holding boyhood books about prehistoric animals and astronomy, the novels of John R. Tunis as well as the worthy books my parents had given me on holidays and which were unread—though I’d opened each page by page so they wouldn’t look unappreciated.

“My God,” I said, in not much more than a whisper, but we were so quiet and so uncomfortably conscious of one another that I might as well have shouted it.

“Recognize it?” said Rose, with a brief nervous laugh. “We wanted it to be just like you remembered.”

“It is,” I said, and impulsively took her hand and squeezed it. It was the first time we’d touched since leaving Rockville and I could tell she didn’t want me to let go.

Arthur opened the narrow closet and ran his hand over the empty wire hangers, an innkeeper’s gesture.

“Plenty of room,” he said.

Obligingly, I looked at the closet and nodded. Toward the side were some of my old clothes.

Rose was gazing around the room and it looked as if she’d suddenly regretted keeping it so frozen in time. Yet how to change it? What would that have meant? What would it have made them?

“Do you like it like this?” she asked, softly.

“Yes. It’s just like it was. I really feel like I’m home.”

“You are home,” said Arthur, huskily.

And then, when we least needed it, an enormous silence descended. I sat on the edge of my bed and waited for what I hoped was a polite interval before saying, “I guess I’d like to lie down for a while.”

My parents exchanged quick glances, but not nimbly enough to escape detection, like old illusionists helplessly exposing the rigged banality of their tricks. They were regretful not to have planned something definite for my homecoming. But who could they have asked? There was no family to speak of.

“You’re not hungry?” said Arthur.

“I couldn’t even look at food.”

“Maybe a drink.” Arthur checked his watch. Two o’clock. An indecent time for alcohol. But it was Saturday and certainly an occasion.

“No. I get drunk too easy.”

“We stock other things besides booze,” said Rose, smiling and folding her arms.

“I’m just going to rest.”

“Well,” she said. “OK.” Her voice trailed off but her smile remained perfectly firm.

“Well,” said Arthur, throwing his hands before him and then clapping them together, like someone making a good choice, “you rest up.”

As they left, Rose said, “Should we wake you for dinner?”

“No problem,” I said, “I’m sure I won’t sleep.”

“Open or closed?” said Arthur, touching the door.

I pretended to think about it. “Closed.”

The door closed with a soft click; finally I was on my own. I listened to their footsteps go away and then I was up and across the room. I opened my old desk drawer. It was filled with letters. I grabbed them all and leafed through them, first quickly and then, with mounting disappointment, very slowly. All of the letters were addressed to me but none were the ones I wanted—they were birthday greetings from years before, Christmas cards, letters from a South Korean pen pal I had kept up with until my parents asked me to stop, letters from my grandfather.

I’d asked my parents, long ago, if they’d kept the letters from Jade. These letters had been submitted to the court during my hearing and had actually been officially marked as evidence. They’d helped keep me out of jail, helped to prove the extraordinary emotional pressures I was under. But what had happened to them afterwards?

Once more I flipped through the letters, with a wrist-and- thumb dexterity developed trading baseball cards. It would have been too easy, too kind to find them straight off. They must be somewhere else. I opened my dresser. Top drawer: three new pairs of Esquire socks and a couple unopened packets of Fruit of the Loom underpants. Second drawer: an old white shirt back from the laundry, folded and bound by a strip of heavy turquoise paper. Third drawer: empty. The important thing is to guard against jumping to conclusions. Not to think ahead of myself. Quietly, though my hands would not quite behave, I closed the drawers and went to the window.

I sat on the sill, moved the brown curtain to the side, and like a thief, a spy, I looked down at the street. The rain had stopped. A black teenager was walking by with a steel, four- pronged comb stuck in the back of his helmet-like hairdo. In a strange way, I had forgotten about black people. All the staff at Rockville were white and the only black patient who had been there during my stay was a girl named Sonia Frazier, whose father taught logic at Northwestern. Sonia had twig-like scars starting at her wrist and going more than halfway up her arm from countless suicide attempts. Failed suicides suffered a generally low status among the other patients—they were not considered serious people—but Sonia overcame this by not speaking to anyone about anything. She sometimes played the guitar and one day, quite unexpectedly, she sang English folk songs for an hour. By the time she was finished nearly all of Rockville had gathered into the Common Ground to hear her soft, penetrating voice. I admired her remove and guessed that she too wanted her solitude so she might savor secret memories and irrevocable decisions, and whenever we met I nodded at her, as if we were allies in a secret spiritual war. Sometimes she returned my sign. A couple of months into her stay, her parents withdrew her from Rockville. I happened to be crossing the main entranceway as the three of them left, each carrying two large plaid suitcases, each looking determined and scared. I went to her side, touched her on the shoulder, and said, “I think you’re a great person.”

I sat at my window now in a state of terror and the terror would not recede. I stared down at Ellis Avenue until it was blurry. I simply could not imagine setting foot on the street below. Two professorial-looking men walked by, one swinging an unopened black umbrella, the other with a raincoat hooked onto a finger and slung over his shoulder, like a TV star. People and their lives. People and their pictures of themselves. It was astounding and it gave me motion sickness to think of it. How could I ever find a place among them and how could I learn to want to? I had nothing to say to anyone; everything I cared about was exclusive. I thought of suddenly braving it, of just going outside and asking the first person I saw—what? Anything. Directions. To the Museum of Science and Industry. Yet what a poor choice, even in fantasy. It was in that very museum that Jade and I had spent our first afternoon alone, in that palace of progress with its towering lobby and the genuine World War I fighter planes hanging from the ceiling on steel cables. Holding hands—it was really more like touching fingers—we had ridden the jolting trolley through the replica coal mine and then, later, spoke to each other in whispers, each facing a scientifically molded sheet of Plexiglas separated by some two hundred yards. Our murmurs had carried with miraculous intimacy and fidelity: it sounded as if we whispered to each other in bed, though we did not know that yet. Finally, we strolled through a gigantic model of the human heart, in the company of twenty tee-shirted children from Camp Wigwam. We walked slowly through the ventricles, listening to the omnipresent thumping that came through a hidden speaker, touching the modeled veins. Jade, in whose house medical gossip was detailed and incessant, presented one of her father’s far-flung theories about the Healthy Heart while I, my mouth so parched that I dared not speak, marveled at our journey through affection’s symbolic locus and felt an overwhelming jolt of pure consciousness—I knew from the start that I loved her and knew, as well, that I would never fall back from that love, never try, never want to.

I sat with my forehead pressed onto the window and my full weight was supported by one sheet of glass. With a sudden recoil I sat up straight—I’d imagined myself tumbling out. I looked out at the street again and then pulled down the shade.

The room was mostly dark now and I stood in that darkness. Soon, I knew, I would be ransacking the apartment looking for those few letters, but the search would have to wait. I’d have to be alone. And time passed so slowly—there was no reason to hurry. For the moment it was all I could do to stand where I was, in my stuffy, stupid room, and feel the tears—when had they started?—rolling down my face. I hoped my parents wouldn’t barge in and find me like this. But there was no question of stopping myself. I hadn’t the strength, nor the cunning disregard for the self’s deepest wound. I sat on the bed and blindly groped for the pillow. I wrenched it free from the covers and pressed it to my face. Then I opened my throat to its full aching aperture and sobbed into that soft mound and its millions of feathers.

Rose worked as a librarian in a high school on the Southwest Side, and because it was summer and the time of her vacation, it fell to her to remain home with me during those first humid days of my return. Eventually, I would have no choice but to put my life in order. My release from Rockville was only a new kind of parole. I was required to see a psychiatrist twice weekly, remain in contact with a parole officer, and either enroll in college or get a full-time job. I was not to leave Chicago without the court’s permission and I was not to make any attempt to contact any of the Butterfields. But in the meanwhile, I lurked about the apartment, sleeping late, watching TV, and eating with the blind cosmic appetite of an enormous parasite. How Rose suffered my languor. She believed in will power as deeply as Galileo believed in gravity, and the overgrown boy in cocoa brown pajamas staring at reruns of “The Lucy Show” was the apple that falls from the tree only to hover in mid-air.

The weather was repulsive. The temperature was in the nineties and the sky was the color of soiled bandages. Our air conditioners were on perpetually and they dripped cool gray water into the pans we’d placed beneath them. Everything felt damp and slightly soft; the ink from the newspapers came off on your hands.

I could not bring myself to leave the house. I slept as late as I could. When I woke I’d force myself back to sleep, pushing my consciousness back down with the hunger of a man licking the last crumbs off of his plate. Then, when I couldn’t take my bed or my room any longer, I’d stagger into the living room, turn on the TV, and lie on the couch, picking at a bunch of oblong green grapes or devouring a box of Ritz crackers. Rose tried to get me to go out. She suggested lunch at a nearby restaurant; she looked at the movie listings with me and asked me what I wanted to see. She claimed to have made appointments for me—with her friend Millicent Bell, who worked at Roosevelt University, or with Harold Stern, who had offered to get me a job with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union. But I wasn’t ready to leave the house and I told her. I never noticed her making a call to cancel one of these so-called appointments; I suppose she was trying to appeal to my sense of order or trying to make me feel there were real live people out there, waiting to see me and make my life real. She offered to take me shopping and when I refused that, she went to my room and took all of my old clothes out. She brought them into the living room and dropped them on the floor and forced me to go through each piece and decide with her that practically none of them fit me any longer—I’d gotten taller in Rockville and I wasn’t quite thin any longer. This was on my third day home, and after I admitted that my clothes didn’t fit me—and assured her that quite soon I would allow her to buy me new ones—Rose gathered them in her arms to dispose of them in the cellar.

“You could give them away, you know,” I called after her as she lugged them toward the door.

“Charity is for the ruling class,” she answered.

“Sharing’s not!” I shouted, suddenly electric with frustration and shame.

I listened to her heels clatter down the stairs. For the first time since arriving home, I was truly alone in the apartment. I had searched my room and hadn’t found any of the old letters to and from Jade, and now at last I could look elsewhere. I ran to the bookcases and opened the sliding cabinet doors at their base: folded tablecloths; aqua and burgundy burlap napkins from Mexico; a few old copies of The National Guardian; a chessboard and a White Owl cigar box for the chess pieces; dozens of little boxes of delicate pink birthday candles; boxes of checks; boxes of unsharpened pencils; a portable sewing kit, housed in heavy, shiny paper and decorated by a drawing of an elephant waving its trunk; envelopes; empty spiral notebooks. Just the kind of innocent, chaotic accumulation that at another time might have made me grin with pleasure—my parents’ hidden clutter was utterly beyond reproach. It was like prying open a locked diary only to read recipes and descriptions of nature, or hearing someone murmur in his sleep, “I must remember Ezra’s birthday.”

I closed the cabinets, turned on the TV, and flung myself onto the sofa, trembling in the wake of the missed opportunity. Rose stalked back into the apartment. I could tell that her temper had subsided and she no longer had the impulse to remove my old clothing, but she still had another armload to go and it would have been too complicated not to follow through. She avoided my eyes and gathered the last of them and was gone.

I raced into my parents’ bedroom. Even on bright days it was a dark room but today it looked submarine. I switched on the overhead light, which was covered with a convex square of cloudy cut glass. There had never been any sign of activity in that room. They dressed and undressed in the bathroom down the hall. There was no desk, no telephone, and the only chair was an old wooden one pressed against the wall, which had never, as far as I knew, supported human weight. The floors were carpeted and the bed stood in the middle of the room, between a closet on one side and a dresser on the other. There were two Irv Segal lithographs of toiling hands on the wall but no mirror. The bed itself was made so tightly that it looked as if you’d need a penknife to roll back the covers at night. Racing both against time and my own admonishment, I searched through their yellow lacquered dresser. What unvarying innocence! First drawer: socks, shorts, tee shirts, handkerchiefs, and a bottle of Arrid deodorant that Arthur evidently felt was too personal to store in the common medicine cabinet. Second drawer: Arthur’s shirts. Third drawer: nylon stockings, one pair still attached to a garter belt, brassieres, panties, a lady’s shaving kit. Fourth drawer: an empty wristwatch case, an empty photograph frame with its glass cracked, and stacks of manila envelopes. For a few pounding moments I was certain I’d found my letters. But the envelopes held canceled checks, old income-tax statements, snapshots of me as an infant and a child, old leases, automobile registrations, insurance forms, a loan agreement from the Hyde Park Bank, an envelope marked “Arthur’s Will”…

“What now?” said Rose.

I was seated on the floor and the envelopes were in my lap. I was silent for a moment, wondering without terribly much fear if inspiration might present me with a brilliant alibi. I had never had any deep attachment to the truth, especially when my personal welfare was at stake. Yet since having confessed to starting the fire on the Butterfields’ porch, my sense of personal protection had become sporadic: I rarely felt that more damage could be done to my life than had already been done. “I’m looking for my letters,” I said. “My old letters to Jade.” I looked up at my mother, prepared for her fury—the only part of my parole she approved of was the stipulation I keep the Butterfields out of my life. I was ready to be screamed at, slapped, even threatened with being sent back to Rockville; I was ready for tears, for panic and grief and even compassion. It really didn’t matter to me.

But Rose didn’t seem to hear my confession, or else she did not absorb it. Perhaps she had forgotten the letters, or perhaps as far as she knew they’d been disposed of long ago. She swayed in the doorway to her bedroom. Her eyes blinked slowly behind her glasses and her arms were folded over her chest in that school- teacherish way that was second nature to her now.

“I suppose this was your father’s idea,” she said.

“Dad’s idea?” I said, pouncing on the notion as if it might prove my innocence.

“Dad’s idea?” she said, tilting her head, making a face, and trying to mimic my voice. It was, as far as I’d let myself know her, completely unlike my mother to do a thing like that.

I stood up, still holding the envelopes. “I honestly don’t know what…”

“Checking his will?” she said. She smiled and pointed her chin at the documents in my arms. “I thought you’d be curious to find out if you were still in it. How about the insurance? Did you check that too? You could have asked me, you know. I would have told you. But your father made you promise not to talk to me about it. And like a good little boy you kept your trap shut. Well? Did you have a nice look?” She stepped carefully across the room and pulled the envelopes away from me—for some reason I resisted for a moment. She yanked them away with a surprising jolt of strength.

“Here we are,” she said, choosing the envelope that said “Arthur’s Will” and letting the others drop and fan out onto the floor. “You won’t find any mention of his new family. Or in the insurance. That comes later.”

“His new family?”

“Please don’t lie. Your father told me he’s had a nice little discussion about it with you. And you’re so happy for him. Your father has finally found his true love. Now you’re a team. ‘I’m happy for you, Dad.’ That’s what you told him. He’s got everything he always wanted. A silly woman who waits on him hand and foot and two little brats who wouldn’t mind calling him Daddy.”

“H is children?”

“You know they’re not his. Why do you join with him against me? I know you love him and not me, but don’t you understand that when he leaves here to join them he won’t have any time for you? He won’t have time. He’ll forget you just like he forgot me. You don’t have any idea what the world is like, do you? Here,” she said, handing the will to me, “you’re not going to find any answers in this. Or in any of these packs of lies,” she added, kicking at the envelopes on the rug.

That day and the next and through the days that followed, Rose made no further mention of Arthur’s other family. I waited for her to approach me again—to apologize, to clarify, to pull me a notch or two deeper into her sorrow. But her small, watchful face showed no trace of those raging moments in her bedroom and I came to see her as one of those patrons of a nightclub who are coaxed on stage, hypnotized, made to cluck like a hen and bay like a hound, and are then sent back to their table without a glimmer of remembrance. It astounded and offended me that she could turn her revelations into a needle in a haystack, but I must admit I was grateful, too. What would Rose be, freed of the bonds of her natural restraints? I feared her. Now, finding me sprawled in front of the TV, all she could do was comment on the stupidity of the shows. But wouldn’t it be just as likely that she’d wrap her small hard fingers around my arm and say, “You never respected the things I believed in. You blabbed family secrets to strangers. You’ve taken dope. You gave your heart to another family.”

Yet there must have been more than fear that caused me to join Rose in that conspiracy of silence, because I felt no temptation to speak to my father about his “other family.” On a certain level, I didn’t believe that any such hidden household existed and I was protecting Rose by keeping her ravings private. But if Arthur had a lover and was waiting for the best time to dismantle his life, it was his part to bring that news to me. I was not anxious to share the secrets of his starving heart. Though he had of course never told me his capacity for love had not been tapped, that it had remained curled within him, that it had been reabsorbed by his body and turned into belly, that the unused love had collapsed his arches and grayed his hair, that it had thickened his voice and swollen his knuckles, turned him into a quipster, a sigher, a snuffler at the movies, a tag-along and a drag-behind, I had always felt this to be true, and from the moment I had my first intimation of romance I mourned Arthur’s loss. I was eight or nine years old and the radio was playing Johnnie Ray singing: “If your sweetheart / Sends a letter / Of Goodbye /It’s no secret / You’ll feel better / If you cry.” Arthur put his paper down to listen for a moment and then he smiled at me. And I knew that even though the song was cheap and “made for a profit,” it meant something to my father, was taking him by surprise and laying its clammy hands on him. More than once, more than a thousand times, I had longed for my father to honor the unreasonable impulses of his love-soaked heart and break out into some high-flung adventure—to chase after the waitress whose walk he studied with such instinctual longing, to write a letter to Ava Gardner whose films he’d see three, four, sometimes five times over, to live the life of popular romance with picnics near the waterfall and long, spinning embraces. Once, in what turned out to be the middle of my time with Jade, I was in my bedroom, dreamily and pointlessly filling out applications to college, when Arthur drifted in. I looked up from my desk and saw his reflection in the night-backed window. “Hello,” I said. “Happy?” he asked. The question didn’t sound like it hid a trap and so I nodded. Arthur shook his head—my father, that is, my father shook his head—and he said, “I envy you.” I thought then as I was to think later: It was too late in his life for me to help and if I couldn’t help, then where was the profit in caring?

Saturday, seven days after my return, there was a little reception in my honor. Clearly, it had been Rose’s idea. She had been urging me all week to make contact with the people who had watched me grow up, who had written me birthday notes in Rockville and sent me presents, and who now wanted to enjoy the relief of my return. Rose, a loyal, principled friend, felt she owed her friends a glimpse of me, and I think she was domestically strategic enough to realize that a day with family and lifelong friends might have a sentimentally sobering effect on her husband, might fill Arthur’s winged heart with the baffling weight of the shared past. When I emerged from my bedroom that day—feeling as if this might be the day I would go out on my own, take a walk, buy a book, feeling, that is, more confident but holding that elusive confidence in my palm like the contents of a broken egg—Rose was already at the Co-Op buying food and Arthur, dressed in tan trousers and a sleeveless tee shirt, was pulling our old torpedo-shaped vacuum cleaner around the living room and scowling at the carpet. “We’re having the old bunch over,” he said above the roar of the vacuum. “Some fun, huh?” And he raised his eyebrows comically, inviting me to share an irony he refused to explain.

And oh my parents’ melancholy friends! Olga and Leo Greenbladt, Millicent Bell, Tom and Natalie Foster, Harold Stern, James Brunswick and whoever it was he happened to be married to, Connie Faust, Irene and Alberto Nicolosi. They were the people I’d known all my life, better, or at least with more constancy, than I knew my schoolmates or my scattered, distant relatives. If I had been married it would have been these people, my parents’ friends from the Communist Party, who would have sat grinning in the folding chairs at the nonreligious ceremony, and if I’d been struck dead it would have been their tired, slightly haunted eyes watching my ashes scatter in the wind. In the old days—old days for me, that is, but for them it was The End—I listened to their incomprehensible discussions at monthly meetings and played the role of servant, passing through the smoke- dense room in my aqua pee-jays, carrying a tray of salami and cheese. Then I’d be sent to my room with a bottle of Canada Dry and a little turquoise dish filled with miniature pretzels. These were the faces who beamed at me over the shine of birthday candles; these were the scuffed shoes and massive knees lined beneath our dining room table where I crawled in a mild social panic hoping to retrieve a dropped Brussels sprout. These were the voices and the aromatic pipe tobacco in the back seat of the old car during rides to the country; these were the hands that grabbed for the check at the pizzeria; these were the names on the bottom of astoundingly corny graduation cards. Here were my parents’ friends resting their feet and drinking Italian coffee after a nervous Saturday helping the Negroes picket Woolworth’s. And here they were again, visiting me before I shipped off to Rockville, squeezing my hand, memorizing my face, bringing fictitious regards from their children who I’d never bothered to know. (My father’s way of leaning away from the truth of his life was to discourage my making friends with his friends’ children: “Make friends with real people. Forget these red-diaper babies.” But I needed little discouragement. Those boys and girls were not my type, nor was I theirs: they were serious, respectful, unused to wasting time, uncomfortable with the mean jokes I amused myself with.)