Part One 6 страница

In the middle of the night I woke up, completely. I had been dreaming about Jade. I knew when I dreamed about her. It felt as if a wheel was turning inside of me. I tried to catch the images before they sank back into unknowing but it was like trying to pluck moonlight off of the water. It wasn’t the dream that woke me, though. It was something that my father had said earlier in the kitchen. “That’s why the letters aren’t here,” he’d said. I could hear him saying it and I could see his face, now, the look of pleading, as if he’d been asking me to see through him, to interpret him, to just be patient and give him a chance to be my hero. I kicked the sheet off of me and got out of bed. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I couldn’t stay down with my new knowledge. It rushed through me. “That’s why the letters aren’t here.”

But where? There seemed only one logical place: Arthur’s office.

I was frightened—of letting myself down, of betraying myself. I dressed and wondered how I could get from the apartment to my father’s office. I had no money. I wasn’t certain how the buses ran or even if they were still going. The elevated train ran twenty-four hours but I was afraid to ride it. I stood at my window. The glass felt cooler; the rain must have broken the heat. It was two in the morning and no sign of anyone on the street. An almost full moon was out, touching the broken clouds with chromium glow.

I crept out of my room and into the darkened hall. I could hear my father’s deep buzzing snores. Rose must have been sleeping too: if she’d been awake, she’d have poked her husband in the ribs to silence him. Touching the walls for balance, I made my way down the hall, past their bedroom, and toward the entrance foyer. Arthur had taken to leaving his briefcase and keys next to the door. This presumed forgetfulness was new, and I didn’t know if it came from the erosion of age or the delirium of his new romance. But when I reached the door and groped in the dark for the little table upon which he kept his things, all I felt was the smooth, slightly oily surface of the wood. It was Sunday; there was no need to lay out his things.

I stood in the hall. A layer, and then another, of darkness receded and I could see shapes now. The plastered-over beams in the ceiling, the picture frames on the wall, the soft obsidian gap that was the entrance to the kitchen. I slipped off my shoes. My heart was like a barrel end-over-ending down a flight of stairs. With a murderer’s stealth I crept down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom.

Before Rose and Arthur lost control over me and could no longer stop me from spending my nights at the Butterfields’, I had sneaked into and through the apartment a hundred times. I knew just where to step. I knew which spots on the floor twittered beneath my weight and I knew how fast to open a door to stop the hinges from creaking. My way was not the soundless, shadowy glide it had once been—the door to their room, even though ajar, groaned slightly when I pushed it open and the doorknob touched the wall with a hollow click—but in less than a minute I was standing in the faint moonlight of my parents’ bedroom, my feet planted at the edge of their bed’s long shadow, and I had done nothing to ruffle their slumber.

My father wore no night shirt and the cover on his side of the bed had slipped down, revealing his soft, hairy chest and the dark birthmark (the “chocolate patch” of my childhood) on the top of his ribcage. His large head sunk into the center of his pillow and his chin was slightly raised. His snores were steady and sounded every bit as loud as those given out by those big dopey, innocent animals in old cartoons. It was the sound of the fake snore I used to give when I meant to say I was bored. Next to him, Rose slept in her nightgown. She slept on her side with her half-closed fists touching Arthur’s shoulders. Her breathing was regular, deep, and absolutely soundless; oxygen filled her lungs and fed her blood with botanical silence. The light of the moon, divided into twelve bars by the Venetian blinds, quivered slightly on the wall. I stood before my parents’ unconscious forms, my heart beating with a terror more befitting a patricide.

My parents were the very models of tidiness and “good habits.” Newspapers, if not to be saved permanently, were thrown out immediately after reading. A glass that was used for a midday drink of juice was always rinsed out and placed in the blue plastic drainer. Lights were not left to burn in empty rooms and no unoccupied shoe would ever dare show more than its very tip, peeking out from beneath a fringed bedspread. And so as I surveyed their room, looking for a wallet that might pay my way downtown and a set of keys that would allow me to enter my father’s office, I saw nothing but clear surfaces—no piles of change, no rings of keys, no dropped (or even carefully folded) clothing.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I crept across their bedroom, casting my shadow first over the square of broken moonlight on the wall and then laying it like a sword over my parents’ sleeping faces. Finally, I opened their closet. The scent of mothballs, the lumpy darkness. I reached forward, rustling the hanging clothes, chiming the metal hangers. Blind, I felt a suit or a dress wrapped in the dry cleaner’s crackling plastic, a silkish shirt, cool and melancholy to the touch, my mother’s nylon robe. Then came my father’s suit, colorless, made of mystery-fabric, but unmistakably his. I stuffed my hand into its pockets—empty.

There was a break in my father’s snoring. I turned toward the bed. Rose rolled away from Arthur and raised one half- closed hand above her head, grazing the bedboard with her knuckles before dropping her unformed fist onto the pillow. Arthur’s body seemed to veer toward hers, as if to follow its tiny nocturnal migration, but his journey toward her steady, familiar warmth was only hinted at. He remained flat on his back and the snores returned, deeper now, as if coming from a more resigned part of him.

O mother, O father. To be standing in your room. Conscious of you as you were conscious of me during my slumbers, to watch your progress in the womb of sleep, to have the power to plant invisible kisses on your nearly blank faces, or to kneel at your sides and practice the grief of your deaths. I stretched out my hand, as if to touch you, to steady your hold on sleep. My hand completely erased you from my sight, and I marveled at this as I had as a child when I could prove my thumbnail was larger than the moon. I felt myself filling with emotion, as a room might fill with light.

With my back to my parents again, I searched through the unvarying blackness of their closet, and though I must not have stood there very long (because Arthur’s sport jacket was the eighth piece of clothing I inspected and in it I found his wallet and his keys) I would not have been surprised to face the room again and find it lightening with the first spray of dawn. With Arthur’s heavy, tarnished ring of keys on my thumb and a mint- fresh twenty-dollar bill, I slipped out of the room, moving so silently that I was only intermittently conscious of myself.

I closed their door with a soft, final click and went to the end of the foyer. I turned on a light and opened the Yellow Pages to find the number of a taxi fleet. I chose the one with the largest ad and after I spoke to the dispatcher I sneaked into the kitchen and drank what was left of the Gordon’s gin straight from the bottle.

A few minutes later I was sitting on the steps in front of our apartment building, breathing the free night air. It was my first time out on my own but the momentousness of the occasion barely grazed me as it passed. It was three in the morning and whoever was having a late Saturday night was having it elsewhere. The street was empty. The first headlights I saw coming down Ellis Avenue belonged to the cab I’d called, a battered yellow hulk with a checkered fringe painted around its roof.

“Hello,” I said, opening the back door. I wasn’t so stupid as to think that you greeted cab drivers like that, but I did it anyhow. I had put myself in a trance to make it through the time separating my calling the cab and its arrival and I needed to make contact with someone outside of me. The driver was a youngish man. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled and had a pony tail. A huge portable radio next to him competed with the two-way radio from which his company’s dispatcher honked and squeaked like an electronic goose. The driver nodded at my hello and placed his hand on the meter’s lever so he could pull it the moment my backside touched his upholstery. “I’ve got to get downtown,” I said, still not getting into the cab. I was afraid to. My first time out of the house alone should have been a walk around the neighborhood in the sunlight, not a cab ride downtown in the hot darkness, with stolen money and stolen keys in my pocket.

I got in the back seat, gave the driver the address, and began to tremble. I tried to put myself in an adventurous frame of mind, to imagine a trenchcoat on my shoulders and a cigarette plugged into the corner of my mouth—a man with a mission, a man alone. But those second-hand images could only flicker, they could not sustain me. I couldn’t even bear to look out the window, and each time the cab made a turn I felt my insides lurch. My legs were crossed tightly and I hugged myself, with my elbows digging into my ribs and my hands clutching my biceps. I heard a weak, low moan and it took me a moment to realize that it was coming from me.

Too soon, we were in front of my father’s office. It was on Wabash underneath the elevated tracks. I looked out of the cab’s rear window at the deserted street. The streetlights shined down on emptiness. The stores had steel gates over the windows.

“Four-fifty,” said the driver, not turning around.

“All I’ve got is a twenty,” I said, digging it out of my pants.

The driver muttered something and opened a cigar box next to his portable radio and thumbed through a stack of bills. Next to the cigar box was a billy club with nails driven halfway in. He began counting out my change.

“Say, I wonder if you could wait,” I said. “I won’t be very long.”

“The meter’s off,” he said.

I stopped to consider what this meant; it made no sense to me.

“I’ll be about ten minutes. Then I’m going right back to Hyde Park. It’ll be hard for me to get a cab. Could you please wait? Here. Take the twenty, OK? That way you’ll know I’m coming back.” I handed him the twenty and put my hand on the back door handle but didn’t open it. I wanted him to reassure me that he would wait. “OK?” I said.

He put the twenty on the dashboard and turned off his motor, the lights.

I’d been to my father’s building dozens of times. As a young boy I’d pretended to be his partner, lunging for the phone whenever it rang, stuffing my shirt pockets with his pens, riding on the sliding library ladder. It was a small, whitish building, filled with the offices of marginal enterprises: importers of knickknacks, jewelry repair, the editorial offices of a Serbo- Croatian newspaper, a chiropractor, a Hong Kong tailor. I tried the street door on the off-chance it was unlocked, but it wasn’t. There were seven keys on my father’s ring and the first one I tried unlocked the door. (A measure of my state of mind was the intense, practically religious exultation I felt at this.) Inside, I found myself beneath a flickering fluorescent light. I listened for footsteps—perhaps they kept a maintenance man on twenty- four-hour duty. I stood there, transfixed, much longer than necessary. Something in me wanted to stay right there, to not walk up the one flight of stairs to my father’s office. It was the first time in three years that someone in control didn’t know exactly where I was; now, at last, my aloneness was complete and it terrified me. The only cord connecting me to the known world was that cab outside—or had it already left? I didn’t dare look and finally the thought of the driver making off with my money and abandoning me was more palpably frightening than anything else and I ran to the steep, dingy stairway and raced up it three steps at a time.

It was dark on the second floor, a solid, unvarying darkness. I staggered forward and kicked a wash bucket that had been left in the corridor. It went crashing down the hall and I covered my ears and said, “Shhh.” I waited for the darkness to recede. I stared ahead, blinking slowly, trying to tame the blackness with the intensity of my need to see. Slowly, I began to make out shapes. I could see the glass on the doors along the wall. My father’s office was the third one down and I made my way toward it. This time, though, I wasn’t so lucky with the choice of keys. I went through the seven keys three times around before I got the door to open.

I turned on the overhead light and regarded my father’s small office, I knew that I must move quickly, but that was all I knew. I didn’t know which way to turn. I closed the door behind me. I went to his desk and forced myself to sit in his swivel chair: my body was so stiff with fright that it was hard to seat it. Then I went through his desk drawers. I rifled through reams of blank paper, stacks of yellow legal pads, blank contracts, forms, packets, pads, boxes of pencils, balls of twine, envelopes, folders. Somewhere in the middle of going through his desk I took the phone off the hook—I’d imagined it ringing and what that would do to me. I didn’t look very carefully. I was too scared to search well, but I satisfied myself that the letters weren’t in Arthur’s desk. I went across his small office to the file cabinets. They were locked but the key, a small slender one, was on the ring. The files were packed. I looked under Axelrod, under Butterfield, under David, and under Jade. Finding nothing, I even looked under Letters. Everything seemed innocent and impersonal and suddenly I was filled with a boiling sadness for my father and his files, for the work he had done, for the tender, perishable details of his life.

His file cabinet was three gray metal drawers and two of them were sufficient for the alphabet. I opened the third. There were old staplers, phone books, a flashlight, a scarf…But in the back of it was a locked metal box, the size of a bread loaf. I picked it up and I knew that if my letters existed, they were in that box. The keyhole told me that it took a key the size of the one that had opened the file cabinets, but there was only one key like that on the ring. I tried it but it didn’t fit. I don’t really remember what I did next. I was no longer able to move in any deliberate way. I went to the bookcase and randomly removed some volumes, thinking the key might be hidden behind one of them. I picked up ashtrays, fell to my knees and peered beneath the office’s two green chairs. I paced wildly around and around, slapping crazily at my thighs and talking to myself, like a prisoner in the violent ward. Somewhere along the way I must have organized my senses enough to sit at his desk again and go through the drawers because soon I was inspecting the top middle drawer where, on a little interior shelf, which it shared with two sharpened pencils and a roll of mints, I found the key. I closed my fist around it, closed the drawer, and then collapsed onto the desk and burst into tears.

But there was no time for that. Still weeping, I made my way across the room again and, no longer with any energy left to hope, I opened the box.

Jade, our letters were there, all of them, folded and packed into a long brown envelope. Your handwriting was next to mine and I held them both and the words that we wrote.

When I finally left the office and went down to the street, the taxi was still waiting. The driver sat sleeping at the wheel, his chin touching his chest. I watched him for a moment and imagined he dreamed of someone he loved. The night had turned cool and the wind touched me as if for the first time. The sky was slatey, with a few bluish stars poking out of it. The moon, practically full, hovered on top of a nearby office building, like a bright cold dome. I looked at that moon as I had so many nights before, for prisoners love the moon, but now I was not looking at it as a prisoner, and not just as a dreamer, but as a free man, a pilgrim, a navigator charting his course.

 

 

 

Left to my own devices, I don’t know what I would have done with my life. But so much was required of me: I had to enroll in school, I had to see a psychiatrist twice a week, I had to stay in contact with my parole officer, and I needed a part-time job. Everything was too mandatory, pressing, and I resented it with a deep, helpless passion.

With the help of my mother’s friend Millicent Bell, I got into Roosevelt University and was even allowed to apply some of my work at Rockville toward college credits. Roosevelt is a big downtown college, with a student body made up of part-time workers, married people, and a lot of people over forty. There was no campus and because there was no obvious place to meet and talk, it was difficult to make friends with the people you shared classes with—or, in my case, easy not to. I studied astronomy, though Roosevelt was not much of a school for that. I took math, physics, and I did well in my courses, but none of my instructors seemed to recognize me from one class to the next. Even the guards at the planetarium where I showed up two or three times a week to stare at the dome full of lucious points of fire and light never remembered me, never returned my nods.

My psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Ecrest, and I liked him as much as you can like a psychiatrist you don’t want to be seeing. The parole officer assigned to look after my progress was a nominal Japanese named Eddie Watanabe. Eddie had shoulder- length hair, wore blue jeans, and had one of those peace symbols around his neck, the kind they sell on streetcorners, large as a grapefruit and dangling from a piece of rawhide. It was his strange contention that his being a parole officer represented a victory for “our side.” I would have loved to tell him exactly what I thought of his Beatle song lyrics, his freshly shampooed hair that looked as soft as a night cloud, his fake-o belief in “bein’ straight with each other,” and the enthusiastic, utterly humiliating bicep-squeezes he forced me to endure whenever I told him something he could categorize as “super news.” But Eddie, like so many before him, had a great deal of power over me—exactly how much, I hoped never to test.

My parents’ friend Harold Stern got me a job with his union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Harold, who liked to taunt my parents’ crowd with the assertion that only he had contact with the working class (and, thus, with reality), had always seemed shifty and arrogant, but he really came through for me and got me a job only a couple of blocks from Roosevelt University. I was hired to carry a picket sign in front of a clothing store on Wabash Avenue called Sidney Nagle. Sidney Nagle sold a line of cheap men’s trousers called Redman Pants, and the purpose of the picket was to inform customers that Redman workers were on strike and to ask them not to buy Redman products. It would have been more gratifying to my romantic sense of trade unionism if the store had a rich clientele, but the customers (most of whom ignored me and my sign) appeared far more humble than my parents or any of their friends, and Mr. and Mrs. Nagle, who ran the store with just one employee, seemed like a thoroughly desperate, unprosperous old couple. They stared at me with outrage and grief whenever the opportunity arose and I had a dreadful suspicion that if I were to see their bare forearms, I would find fading blue numbers.

I started working for the union not more than a week after sneaking into my father’s office. The fact that I was out in the world and behaving like a normal person reduced a bit of the tension at home, though my parents were not quite self-conscious enough to hide their own unhappiness. In order to be at work on time, I had to set my alarm clock in advance of the official time, and Rose and Arthur, willing to help me make my adjustments, set all of the other clocks in the apartment ahead as well, including the one in their bedroom and Arthur’s wristwatch. If once my parents lived with the belief that they were an epoch in advance of the general population and if that certainty had dissolved along with their political faith, they now lived, quite demonstrably, at least ten minutes ahead of history.

I often thought I could not have found a more difficult job. Every day I saw thousands of faces. Sometimes, the crowds shimmered before me like heat off a highway and at other times each face was momentous and distinct, like those faces in a crowd in an old steel engraving, each rendered in perfect, bewildering detail. It was the sort of job ideally made for obsessively thinking how pitiful my life was, of remembering Jade and longing for her, and accusing even the most distant stars for keeping us apart. I tried to entertain myself: one day I counted black people; the next day I counted people under twenty; and the next I tallied the people with noticeable deformities. I predicted how many women in the space of an hour would pass holding white pocketbooks, how many couples holding hands, how many stoned people. I searched my mind for things to recite. I asked my friends, and the Romans, and the countrymen to loan me their ears and I claimed to have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. Sunlight passed through the elevated tracks over Wabash, dividing itself into soft bars of light, falling onto the street like rungs in a gauze ladder. I tried to find this extremely beautiful. But it seemed far too inconsequential, too unintentional, and finally it awaited some missing ingredient to make it lovely, something pre-existent in the eye of the beholder. It waited to be beautiful for someone else.

Everyone I ever knew was elsewhere. Now and then I’d feel a start within me and it seemed certain that that face coming into view was someone I’d gone to school with, or an intern from Rockville, or someone who used to live on Ellis Avenue, or even a shopkeeper I’d once bought a Stevie Wonder record from. But it never turned out to be the case. Even when I stopped hiding my face and remained recognizable by anyone who might place me, no one broke stride in passing. The only curious eyes focused on my picket sign.

I had prepared myself to be startled regularly by apparitions of Jade. I don’t know where this knowledge came from—probably from a song or a movie—but it was my understanding that the hungry heart manufactured mirages. If you see someone in a gray skirt and blue shirt…or someone five foot four with small breasts…with turquoise studs in her earlobes…walking with her eyes down and cast to the right…with biscuit-colored hair, but curly like Little Lulu’s. I saw all of these likenesses, and more. I heard voices that could conceivably have been confused with hers, and one girl could practically have been on her way to a masquerade dressed up as Jade. She wore Jade’s khaki trousers with the wide elastic waistband and Jade’s green and red tee shirt; she walked with her eyes fixed to the right of her feet; she carried a cigarette, which might very well have been a Chesterfield. Her hair was much shorter than Jade’s but the very discrepancy in length revealed a more telling similarity: a brown mole on the back of the neck, just above the shoulder, that was pure, pure Jade. But I wasn’t tempted; not for one instant did I confuse these impostors with the real thing and now I couldn’t understand those who claimed to see their lovers everywhere. People took these mistakes as passion’s proof, yet now it seemed that to mistake a stranger for your lover was really an absurd kind of narcissism. How could one not know? How could there be any mistake? Pigeons in a flock picked their mates without confusion, penguins and titmice were not prone to optical illusions, or any other illusions, for that matter. They knew, and so would I.

The Chicago Public Library was only a couple of blocks from the Sidney Nagle store and I passed most of my lunch hours there. Since I had no idea what to do with the money I made, I was seized with frugality and liked the idea of spending less than fifty cents on lunch and reading for free to pass the time.

One day I discovered that the library had telephone directories from what seemed like every city in the United States. As casually as possible, I looked at the New Orleans directory to see if Hugh or any other Butterfields were listed—New Orleans was the city of his birth and perhaps Hugh had reconstituted the family in some moss-choked ancestral mansion. There were Butterfields in New Orleans, though no Hughs. There was a Carlton Butterfield, an E. Roy Butterfield, a Horace, a Trussie, and a Zachariah. I wondered if any of these were related to Hugh. Was his father still alive? Still running the coffee warehouses, still drinking from morning to night, still listening to Mozart with tears in his cloudy blue eyes? I stared at that cluster of Butterfields in the New Orleans directory and my heart beat hard but slowly, as if resisting the best it could the infusion of adrenalin seeing those names created: even a handful of bogus Butterfields put me closer to my friends than I’d felt in more than three years. I thought of Carlton, E. Roy, and the rest, reading the Times Picayune beneath the moving shadows of a ceiling fan, drinking thick black coffee out of clear glass cups, wearing white suits and smelling of bourbon. I stared at the names and tried to remember if Hugh had ever told me his father’s name.

Well, where would the family go after leaving Chicago? If not New Orleans…There had been talk of San Francisco. Idle, I thought, but who knew? Ann had a cousin who ran a psychiatric clinic in Berkeley: he was the source of the LSD the Butterfields had taken the night of the fire. I took down the San Francisco directory and looked for Butterfields. Again, the name was represented, but no Hugh, no Ann, no Keith, Sam, or Jade. I stopped to remember Ann’s cousin’s name: I’d paid attention to the correspondence because at least one hit of the LSD would have gone to me if it had arrived before my banishment. Ramsey (Ann’s family name). Gordon Ramsey. There was a G. Ramsey DVM on Polk Street. Could it be? Had Gordon given up psychopharmacology for distemper shots?

I went slowly, haphazardly, and did my best not to admit how central it was becoming to my life, but every weekday, without fail, I spent time in the library looking for Butterfields in the phonebooks. I found Butterfields in Los Angeles, Butterfields in Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Dallas. I bought a pocket- sized spiral notebook and wrote the address and phone number of any name that seemed likely. H. Butterfield in Denver, an actual Keith Butterfield in Boston and another one in Milwaukee, and Ann F. Butterfield in St. Louis (the F. made no sense but I recorded the number anyhow), a strange yet heart-kicking Jane Butterfield in Washington, D.C., and so on, back and forth across the nation.

As long as I was living with my parents, I didn’t dare make long-distance phonecalls, nor was I in a position to receive private mail. Sporadically, I called numbers from phonebooths in the Roosevelt University lobby, and one day I turned a twenty- dollar bill into quarters and spent an hour at least calling far- flung strangers. Hugh? I’d say, knowing at once from the enfeebled hello that Denver’s H. Butterfield was no one I knew. I called that Jane Butterfield in Washington and said, “Excuse me, I’m calling Jade—not Jane.” “Who’s that?” said a small child’s voice.

At the end of September, I moved out of my parents’ apartment and into a furnished two-room apartment on 55th and Kimbark. It was a dismal place, but I could afford it. I was glad to be on my own, though I was lonelier than I’d ever imagined. I hadn’t yet made any friends at school—I didn’t have any nodding acquaintances, really—and the retired suit maker who picketed in front of Sidney Nagle with me didn’t like or approve of me. I’d gotten my job through connections and it was generally something the union gave to retired members, to supplement pensions and social security. My only co-worker’s name was Ivan Medoff and he looked the way Jimmy Cagney would have looked if Cagney had been Jewish and worked in a factory for thirty-nine years. The only social gesture Medoff made in my direction was to say one day, “I told my wife I was here working with a youngster and she says I should maybe ask you to have dinner sometime.” He didn’t take it further and I didn’t press it, though I waited for him to name the day because I would have accepted.

My loneliness was at once vague and total. I never missed a class and soon forced myself to ask questions of the instructors, just to hear myself talk to another person. I looked forward to my appointments with Dr. Ecrest, and when he asked me if I’d be interested in joining a therapy group he was forming on Wednesday evenings I almost said yes, on the chance I might make friends in the group. My parents made a ritual appearance at my apartment for dinner, which I cooked for them on my two-burner stove and served in the cracked turquoise and white plates supplied by my landlord. I found more occasions than I would have guessed to make the walk to their house—picking up a sweater, borrowing spoons, spontaneously accepting an old dictionary they’d offered to give me before I’d moved out—and more often than not my arrival coincided with dinner. They both seemed involved with their jobs and though I knew they were in a sad, difficult time, they looked no more unhappy than two old dolls in an attic. I was an absolute pig in how I refused to recognize their misery, but it was what they wanted of me.