Part One 8 страница

As to the people who kept an eye on my life, I had no intention of telling any of them that I’d made contact with Ann, just as I told no one of the night I’d recovered Jade’s and my letters. My parents were not the probing sort and they knew there was nothing to gain by venturing unexpectedly beneath the surface of my life. Eddie Watanabe actually told me that viewing my progress was just the kind of thing that made being a parole officer worthwhile; he liked to rattle off my recent accomplishments, punctuating the list with little sharp squeezes of my bicep. You’ve got a job. Squeeze. You’ve got a job with a union. Squeeze. You’re in college. Squeeze. You’re interested in astronomy. Squeeze. You’ve got your own pad. Squeeze. You’re making friends. Squeeze. All right, tell me. Got a girl yet? Silence. A grin and the hardest squeeze of the series. As for my new friends, my fear of slipping back into isolation often tempted me toward a burst of intimacy, in the way we can throw our self-revelations like a net over others. But they knew nothing of Ann, nothing of Jade, nothing of the fire and my three years in Rockville. I’d begun my new relations in a mood of extreme secrecy and even as I got bored with the lies in my flimsy autobiography, I told myself that my new friendships were too fragile to withstand sudden changes in my story. As far as they were concerned, I’d been out of school for three years with no particular purpose, which was fine and absolutely right for the times, though they may have wondered why someone who’d just spent years getting high and hitchhiking (or whatever they imagined I’d done) wasn’t looser than I was, had no stupendous tales to tell.

The most likely to detect the new light in my innermost heart was Dr. Ecrest, and for a while I could feel his intelligence tracking me. I must say, Dr. Clark did his best for me when he referred me to Dr. Ecrest, especially because their methods were so divergent. Clark favored dreams, free association, and took notes without looking at you with the blinds drawn and the curtains three-quarters closed. Ecrest was tall, his forehead was creased; he looked like an ex-baseball player, or the kind of waiter who warns you that today’s fish isn’t altogether fresh. His thin, wiry black hair was dryer than a doll’s; he risked setting it on fire whenever he lit a Kent. Although he was large, his voice sounded unnaturally sonorous, just as some teen-age boys sound as if their voice is too deep for their body. He worked in a fully lit office and there was no couch for me to lie on and pretend I was speaking to myself. We sat in cheap- looking armchairs, facing each other dead on. I often thought that Dr. Ecrest would have been equally at home reading Tarot cards or the lines on my palm. Take the dusty blinds from his windows and put up dark flowered curtains, take down the diplomas and the certificates and put up a pale orange gypsy dress, spread out to show all the embroidery. He was a clairvoyant, in the way that people who end up peering into crystal balls or massaging the lumps on your skull are clairvoyants: he had the animal understanding of silence and that powerful, yet oddly emotionless, sympathy that allowed him to enter into other people’s thoughts. He could have spent his life in carnival tents or drumming his long fingers on a felt-covered table in a reconverted store front, except that he’d had the energy and money to go to medical school.

It was never clear if Ecrest thought of himself as possessing “powers,” and if he acknowledged his uncanny perceptions I don’t know how comfortable he was with them. Walking me to the door at the end of a session, he once touched me lightly on the shoulder and said, “Try not to eat crap. Eat good food, OK?” And when I looked back at him he seemed to blush and he glanced quickly at the floor. Once when I saw him I’d missed both school and work that day and he said, “So what did you do all day?” I asked, “Why?” And he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, very softly. The day after I sneaked into my father’s office to read the letters from Jade, Dr. Ecrest asked me if I’d been to my father’s office yet. I looked at him with guilt and shock and Dr. Ecrest said that he was only thinking I might find work with Arthur until something else came along.

When I began compiling my list of Butterfields and Ramseys, I lived in horror that Ecrest might guess—so sure was I that he would fathom my small private life that I came a dozen times close to blabbing it. It was only when I contacted Ann and then received her letter that the stakes of my secret were raised immeasurably and I built an obdurate mental barrier between Ecrest and that part of myself that lived only for reunion. I felt like a youth in a medieval saga engaged in a battle of wits with a wizard: we talked about Rose, we talked about Arthur, we talked about that time of my childhood when I claimed to have gone deaf, and all the while our unconsciouses played falcon and field- mouse. I never really knew if my suppressions were successful.

The day after Ann’s letter arrived, Ecrest suddenly and for the first time picked up Dr. Clark’s obsession with my sexual abstinence. “I’m speaking to you man to man,” he said, “not doctor to patient. How much longer can you continue denying yourself? You can’t live without warmth.” “Warmth?” I said, sending him a shut up message. “Yes. Sexual expression. David, you don’t even masturbate.” We were silent for at least a minute. My intrigues huddled within me like guerilla warriors, hiding behind other thoughts. Finally, I thought of something to say: “If we’re going to talk man to man and not doctor to patient, then I don’t think you should charge me for this hour.”

My father’s office was near my school and once or twice a week we’d meet for lunch. It made me uneasy to see Arthur so much more than I was seeing Rose, especially since she’d always felt excluded from the friendship between my father and me. But the fact (if not the truth) was that Rose didn’t want to see much of me. She’d always had a horror of over-mothered children, and now that that was no longer an issue she told herself the best thing for me was to find my own way, or “role,” as she would put it.

Whenever I could, I arranged to meet Arthur at his office. I never tired of remembering the night I stole in and found my letters, and as often as not, Arthur would make a quick trip to the bathroom before we left for lunch and I could test fate and my reflexes by reading one or two of the letters in his absence. (I didn’t have the courage to steal them, though finally I did take them for a day and Xerox the lot of them.) I waited with confused patience for Arthur to tell me how desperate his life at home had become, but he only expressed his sorrow in asides—in shrugs, in sighs, by calling his wife “your mother,” as if she were nothing more. I’d been warned by Dr. Ecrest not to involve myself in my parents’ woeful marriage, and of all the psychiatric advice that had come my way none was easier and more natural to follow. I was content to return my father’s kisses of greeting and farewell, to feed greedily upon the sentimental anguish of his love for me: it was a pure father’s love, effortless and insane. He asked only that I be his son; he scarcely knew how I adored him. Whenever we met for lunch we spoke only of me, and then one day near the end of November I walked into my father’s office and he told me he had decided to leave Rose. He sat behind his desk with his hands folded in front of him, like the President giving a little TV chat from the Oval Office. His hair was carefully combed and he wore a new brown sports jacket with wide lapels; he looked like one of those older men who decide to change their “image.” Only this was Arthur, and no gesture of his could be entirely free of whimsy: he looked like a good-natured blind man who’d been dressed by someone who didn’t know him very well. “Last night,” he said, in a voice that seemed a mixture of news commentator and graveside eulogizer, “after twenty-seven years of marriage—many of them, most of them, David, nearly all of them good years—your mother and I decided it would be best for everyone if we were to separate.”

I nodded, but couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say. My father’s eyes were on me; I wanted to brush my face, as if to clear away a swarm of mayflies. The tall dusty window behind him was all lemon glare. His phone began to ring but he didn’t answer it.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He glanced down at the phone and it stopped ringing.

We went to a bar and grill beneath the street level on Wabash Avenue. In an area mostly inhabited by clerks, professionals, and businessmen, this was the most proletarian restaurant around. The entrance looked like an abandoned subway stop. You walked down a flight of studded iron steps and then pushed through a peeling green door. Inside, it was cavernous, an underground universe of hardworking men. Drinks cost a quarter or thirty- five cents and the bar alone could seat two hundred people. The smell of beer mixed with the smell of sausages; the smoke from hundreds of cigarettes mixed with the haze from the steamplates. Nearly everyone was dressed in work clothes: flannel shirts rolled to the elbow and ribbed long-sleeved undershirts; zipper jackets with a first name stitched over the right breast; ankle- high, steel-tipped shoes with the laces wrapped around the tops. My father was the only man in business clothes and I was by far the youngest.

We got our food from the cafeteria serving line. Boiled potatoes, a thick delicious sausage called a thüringer, peas, and rice pudding. I found a small empty table and Arthur went to the bar and bought a pitcher of beer. I took our food off the brown plastic tray and noticed my hands were shaking.

“You know,” Arthur said, as we began our meal, “I’ve never been able to figure out what this place is called, and I’ve been eating here most all my life. After Prohibition they called it the Step Down Bar and Grill, and after that it was sold and it was called something else, I don’t even remember. You notice there’s no sign? And some of these guys working here were working here before I even heard of this place—and they don’t know what the hell it’s called.

“You want to know something?” my father said. “I’m just remembering this is where I took Rose the first day I met her.”

I speared a few peas but didn’t bring them to my mouth. My father remembering that didn’t agree with my memory of my parents’ meeting, but I couldn’t exactly recall what I’d been told. A May Day parade? A picnic?

“It’s something we never told you,” my father said, “but your mother was married when she was a very young girl. It was to a rich fellow named Carl Courtney, a real William Powell type and as stuck up as a rooster. They got married in Philadelphia. Rose was working fifty hours a week and doing her best to support her crazy mother; Courtney was working maybe two hours a week and getting dough from his mother, old Virginia Courtney who owned a radio station and was quite a reactionary character. It was a very short marriage and it didn’t add up to anything. But I guess she loved him in a way because he was a bastard heel and she went along with it. About a year into their marriage Courtney got a job—through his mother—with the Tribune right here in Chicago and Rose came out with him. She was already a Communist and Courtney was really nothing more than an isolationist playboy, but she stuck with him, telling herself that maybe she could change him, until he started running around.” Arthur looked at his plate and remembered he was supposed to be having lunch. He cut the end off of his thüringer but then put his fork down and took a long swallow of beer.

“Running around with other women?” I said.

“You name it. Secretaries and showgirls, crazy women without a care in the world. Sometimes he only came home to change his clothes.”

“God,” I said. I felt a very specific grief for Rose, as if it had always existed within me but I was only now discovering it. Had I always known? Was it something I’d heard them talk about when they thought I was asleep? I had a sudden recollection of myself stretched out in the back seat of one of our old cars as we drove at night on one of those long restless vacations we used to take and my parents were talking in edgy murmurs and my mother was…crying? and my father was making emphatic gestures that I saw reflected in the dark windshield and…But then the memory was gone, replaced by the effort of trying to remember.

“Did any of my psychiatrists know that Mom was married before?” I asked. My question puzzled me. What difference would it have made? When Jade told me that she had talked with Hugh and they’d decided it would be best if I stayed away for a month, the first thing I asked her was when they’d had the conversation.

“No. We didn’t say.”

“Why was it a secret?”

“Rose didn’t want anyone to know. It made her ashamed.”

“Then why are you telling me now?”

Arthur shrugged. “Are you sorry I’m telling you?”

“No.”

“It’s being here.”

“We’ve been here so many times.”

“It’s being here today. I’m sorry if I told you something you’d rather do without. But today my marriage is over, so I’m talking about things that maybe I shouldn’t.”

We were silent for a while. I finished the beer in my glass and poured another. Arthur’s glass was practically full but I topped it off. I touched the food on my plate and it was cold.

“I was her lawyer for the divorce,” Arthur said. “That’s why we came here. To talk about it. I didn’t even know her, but a gal she was close to in Philadelphia had a brother in the Party here, and Rose went to him and said she needed a lawyer and he sent her to me. That was Meyer Goldman, by the way, who sent Rose to me.”

“I love Meyer Goldman,” I said.

“You never met him.”

“But you told me about him. He was the one who smoked pot, right? He played saxophone. He knew Mezz Mezzrow. He wore black and white shoes and he pulled the waist of his pants up so high he looked like he was nothing but legs.”

“Curly red hair and a mouthful of rotten teeth. Poor Meyer. Even after the Party expelled him he was always in trouble and he always came to me. Write a letter to his landlord. Call up the musicians’ union and scream anti-Semitism. This and this and that and that, I thought it would never stop. I wasn’t even supposed to talk to him, you understand. When someone was expelled you weren’t supposed to talk to him. I didn’t give a damn about that, but the things he’d come to me for. And each time he made sure to remind me, ‘If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have Rose.’” Suddenly, my father put his hand to his forehead, as if he’d been struck by a stone. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I was so much in love then.”

I had an impulse to reach across and touch him, just as he wanted to hold me whenever I showed my sorrow. But I held myself back. I didn’t want to interrupt his remorse. It reminded me too much of my own and once it did that, I wasn’t as close to him as I should have been.

“So you helped her get divorced?” I said.

“I did everything and I knew as much about it as you do.It wasn’t my kind of law. I got her moved out of Courtney’s house. I found her a place with a very good woman, a sculptor, a very generous, warm person.”

“Libby Schuster,” I said.

“I told you about Libby Schuster?”

“Something. I remember her.”

Arthur’s hand moved as if it had been touched by something invisible. His eyes moistened. “You never met her. She died just a little after you were born. Meyer too, Meyer died in 1960, in California, Meyer Goldman. Libby was old but Meyer was young, maybe fifty, fifty-two. It wasn’t necessary. A waste.”

We were silent while the dead who lived in my father’s thoughts passed through him: with leaflets, with saxophones.

Finally, I asked, “When are you leaving…?” Leaving where? Home seemed childish and Rose an accusation.

“Tonight,” said Arthur.

“Mom knows?”

“She knows.”

“I mean she knows it’s tonight?”

“Yes. And she’s known the whole thing for a long while. We waited.”

“Because of me?”

“We wanted you to get settled. To feel strong in your own life. We didn’t want you in that hospital thinking you didn’t have a normal home to come home to.”

“You’ve been thinking about it that long?”

Arthur nodded.

And then I said what I’d known all along. “Are you in love with someone else?”

Arthur was immobile for a moment, and then he said, in that kind of voice men use when they recite oaths, “With all my heart.”

“Who is it? Is it someone I know?”

“You never met her. Her name is Barbara Sherwood. She works as a court stenographer. You know that’s a very good job and a very difficult one. She’s been married. Her husband died five years ago. She lives in our neighborhood. Two children. And she’s black.”

I folded my hands. “Are you moving in with her?”

“I’ll stay at her house in the meanwhile. Barbara’s in the hospital right now. I’ll help look after the kids and after she gets out we shall see.” He poured the last of the beer into our glasses. Most of the food was still on his plate; it had been cut and pushed around, as if he’d been looking for something inside of it.

“I don’t blame you, you know,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a big issue or anything, but I want to tell you I don’t blame you for doing this.”

“It’s what I would expect,” said Arthur. “You of all people.”

“Wait. Don’t say that. I love Mom. I don’t care what it looks like. Our relationship is what we’ve made it but I’m always going to love her.”

“I know that. That’s not what I mean. You of all people know what it’s like to be so much in love that everything else falls away. Everyone else I know would probably think I’m acting like a bastard or just an idiot. Leaving Rose. Leaving behind all those years. You know a man my age has more of a past than a future, and when you leave the past you only have a few years to call your own. They’d think I was acting irresponsibly. People believe in our marriage, Rose’s and mine. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“They do. Of course, no one knows what’s happened. And when they find out, they’ll all regroup around Rose. I’ll be the villain. They’re really her friends anyhow, always have been. The old comrades. In a lot of ways, I was sick of that crew ever since I got back from the war.”

“When I was born.”

“They’re not going to understand, but you are. I guess a father has no business saying this to a son, no matter how old the son is.” His gaze passed over me, as if I was just one member of an enormous jury. “You were my inspiration. Seeing you in love reminded me.”

“Of what?”

“Of how I once felt about Rose and how she never ever felt about me, until I didn’t feel that way about her either. But you reminded me of how it feels. A lot of people never have it, that feeling, not even once. You know that, don’t you? But you had it—”

“With Jade.”

“And you reminded me that I once had it and that I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk, for a few months. Right after I helped Rose get her divorce and we were together every minute of the day. Before it came out how much she was in love with that Courtney and I had to realize it was going to take a while for her to get over it. I knew she’d get over it but it was going to take time. The magic in her heart was with him, not with me, even though she would have chosen me over him a hundred times. I understood that, but I wasn’t walking in the air anymore. I had to be too intelligent for that; you make a few reasonable decisions and you can’t make a fool of yourself any longer.”

“I never knew that’s what you wanted.”

“I didn’t either. I’d forgotten. You made me remember and then Barbara showed me I hadn’t missed my chance. It was like waking up twenty years younger. Not that all of a sudden my hair was thick and I didn’t need glasses and my death was far away. But I have an appetite for every single second of the day. I want you to meet Barbara. You’re going to know what I mean. I never thought this would happen. I never thought I’d be able to believe in all of this a second time. But I do. And I don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“I know,” I said. My heart was pounding.

“I know you know. You know it every second of your life and you won’t let yourself forget. It’s why you sneaked out of the house that night of your party to go to my office. And it’s why every time you come to my office to meet me for lunch you manage to take a look at those letters of yours and it’s why I always make sure to let you.”

Barbara Sherwood was in the same hospital I was taken to after the fire and the room she occupied was next door to the room in which I confessed—insisted—that it had been me who’d ignited that huge, tender house. My father and I walked down the faded corridors, with the bleary overhead lights that made everything look the way it does when you haven’t really slept in nights, past the nurses who nodded at Arthur as if they knew him, past an empty stretcher with dried blood on its safety straps, past a metal table piled with food trays, breathing that high-pitched medicinal odor which some people find reassuring but which struck me as the smell of utter desperation, past the ringing phones and the Dr. Abrams Dr. Abrams please report to 404, through a little knot of visitors too nervous and distracted to move out of our way, doing little confused dances, moving left when we moved left and right when we moved right and finally frowning at Arthur’s touch and standing with their backs close to the grayish wall, which I would not have wanted to touch because it looked somehow slippery, but that was only the light. My father carried the evening paper and five Ian Fleming paperbacks tied together by a piece of yellow yarn; I kept my hands in my pockets, counting and recounting eight dimes and a quarter.

Barbara Sherwood had the most feline face I’d ever seen on a human being. Her black hair was cut short and combed down over her high broad forehead. She had those kind of over- defined cheekbones that girls doodle in their notebooks when they are dreaming of looking like an exotic model. Her eyebrows were carefully shaped and even though she was in the hospital and probably suffering, she’d put on eye makeup that made her eyes look even larger and more slanted than they were. I didn’t know that she’d lost a lot of weight over the past months; her leanness seemed voluntary and fashionable. Her bed was cranked up so she was practically sitting. Her hospital gown was a little large; she looked like a teenager wearing her father’s shirt, though she didn’t look at all young. While her hair was black and her skin was smooth, her years lived beneath her surface, as if time had been sublimated, repressed, and was taking its due invisibly.

“Well, here he is,” said Arthur, ushering me to her bedside. There were two chairs set up for us; the curtain separating Barbara’s bed from her roommate’s was drawn; everything had been arranged.

I wanted to take the first initiative. I thrust out my hand. “Hello, pleased to meet you,” I said, in a bright, ringing voice, as if I was a boy who’d been taught to behave very elegantly around strangers.

She placed her hand in mine; her fingers were cold and when I shook her hand they felt colder.

Arthur stood there with his folded hands resting on his hard, round stomach, expressing the bliss of a figure on a Tarot card. He breathed out slowly and made a small musical sigh, as if choral music filled his head.

“It’s good,” said Barbara. I couldn’t tell if she was nervous and had forgotten to complete her sentence or if this was her personal style. It’s good? It’s good? I mean really! I felt instantly ironical; I’d come fully prepared to make small judgments about my father’s new lover.

“Are they treating you all right here?” I said, the extremely influential gentleman from out of town. I glanced over my shoulder, as if to make certain that my footman was in place, holding the gigantic bouquet of long-stem American Beauties.

“It’s homey here,” Barbara said. “Not like that other place.”

“She was in All Saints last year,” said Arthur.

“What a place that was,” Barbara said. “That was a place to give you the creeps. Those sisters gliding around in their long black robes and all those baby-faced priests pacing up and down the halls with the purple ribbons around their necks, wondering who they could give last rites to.” She smiled; she was missing a tooth near the front. She saw I’d noticed and said, “I fell,” and touched her mouth, remembering.

We spoke for a few moments, with the bewildered caution of strangers who can break each other’s hearts. Barbara said my father had told her all about me, which is of course what people say in those situations, but Barbara seemed to blush for a moment, so maybe he really had. Somehow I was gotten to talk about my classes, my job for the union, and the offer from Harold Stern to leave the picket line and work part-time as a researcher for the union’s educational department. I was congratulated, encouraged, and if Barbara was half so bored as I was with the details of my life she must have feared slipping into a coma.

She gave Arthur an impish look, like an incorrigible, truth- telling girl in a Victorian novel. But there was no little jolt of tension in the air, and no release; Arthur sat in his place, perfectly calm. He knew she was going to say that; it had probably been planned.

“Well. Has Arthur told you about… us?”

“He did,” I said. I cleared my throat.

Barbara nodded, looking at me. “So? What do you think?”

“You don’t need my permission.” I felt my father’s hand touching me with some delicacy on my elbow.

“We’d like to know how you feel about it, though,” said Barbara. She folded her hands in her half-formed lap. Her fingers were bare and very black; the plastic identification bracelet was too large on her wrist.

“I feel a lot of ways about it,” I said. “I feel scared for my mother.” I paused. Arthur shifted in his seat; Barbara nodded approvingly. “And I think I’m scared for my father, too.”

“Why?” said Barbara. “Because of…” she gestured, indicating the hospital and her place inside of it.

“I don’t know why. Because he’s changing. Because he’s different now, and he’ll get more and more different. It doesn’t make much sense. I just feel it.”

“I won’t change,” my father said.

“You will. You want to. And you should. You won’t be an unhappy man anymore. That has to change you. You’ll be living right in the center of your best and bravest self and maybe it’s not right for me to say this but I know, I really do know exactly what that’s like.” I felt more than a little puffed up and ridiculous but not one word of my tremulous oration came easily or fast. For all the inappropriateness of a son making a speech about his father’s romantic leap, I felt everything I said as if the words had claws that dragged along my throat as I spoke them.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Barbara said. “I knew you would because that’s how your daddy told me about you. You know, when I was waiting for you to come to see me this evening I was getting so nervous. I’ve got two children of my own and I know that when it comes to their parents, children are the rock-ribbed Republicans of the world. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s so true,” said Arthur.

“My own children asked some pretty tough questions. Maybe I made it tougher on myself than I had to because I never wanted to lie to them. So they wanted to know how Arthur could come and be with us when he had a wife living less than a mile away. They wanted to know what kind of woman their mother was who let a man into her bedroom without the blessing of marriage. You see, their father was a religious man and though I am not, I have never interfered with their beliefs. It’s their way of keeping their father with them; when they pray to God they’re really talking to their own daddy who died when they were so small. Oh, and you know how it is with life in this city being what it is. They wanted to know how I could be with a white man.”

“A Jew,” said Arthur. “I don’t think that helped matters along.”

“Nothing helped matters along. They were starting to treat me as if I were an evil woman. Not doing their schoolwork, not doing their chores, not looking at me when I was speaking. You know they say you have never been chastised until you have felt the wrath of a child. I didn’t know what to do. It was getting so bad I thought I might have to stop everything with Arthur and return to my life the way it was before I met him, no matter how alone and scared I was. That’s when your daddy stepped in and made everything better when I thought nothing could. He sat with my children, my boy Wayne who’s sixteen and my girl Delia who was thirteen just last week, and he told those children that he loved their mother from the bottom of his heart and with all the care and nobility that any man ever loved a woman with. He said more than anything in the world he wanted to look after me and look after them. And he opened his arms up to my children and my children opened their arms to him, and that was that. We’re a family again. You’re too old, David, you’re a man, and I won’t tell you that I’m going to look after you because you don’t need looking after. But I want to tell you what your father told to my children and that is I love your daddy. I wanted to tell you that the man who is your father, the man who gave you life, has found a woman who is in heaven when she’s in his arms.”