Part Two 6 страница

“I guess I’d better be going,” I said. Ann took a deep breath, as a way of reminding me. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” I added. I was going to say something on the order of “I know you two have a lot to say to each other,” or some such social piffle, but I knew full well that everything I would say and hear would be in my memory permanently. I turned to Ingrid and nodded, then reached down and laid my hand on Ann’s shoulder. “I’ll let myself out.”

“No,” she said, springing up. “I’ll let you out. I have to, oh, lock the door.” She touched me lightly—and I suppose conspiratorially—on the elbow and we walked down the hallway to her door. Ann followed me out and pressed the button to summon the elevator for me.

“Whew,” she said. “Not at all what I expected. Hugh talks about her as if she’s something out of the Tarot and then he sends me this. Tell me, really, the truth I mean: aren’t you getting very down vibes from her?”

“She’s upset,” I said. The elevator appeared. “I’ll call in a little while,” I said. The elevator doors closed behind me. The small car started with a lurch, and then foot by foot I was sinking.

I walked down Park Avenue. I thought I would go six blocks and then turn around. By then, surely, Ann would have known and maybe I could be of use. Walking quickly, my mind a fearful void, I kept as far from the street as possible. The sound of the traffic was petrifying: more than once I had the impulse to simply sit on the sidewalk and cover my ears. The taxis in particular seemed not only dangerous but sinister. I couldn’t understand how they drove so far through the heavy traffic, passing on the left and right, breezing through stoplights, using their horns instead of their brakes. I was standing in front of Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and bar a few blocks down from Ann’s apartment. I remembered hearing or reading something about Max’s, but I couldn’t remember what. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol. Something like that…I thought of going in, ordering a drink, but the largest part of me had already decided differently. I was turned around and heading back toward Ann’s, first at a slow trot, then I was running.

I pressed the little black button next to Ann’s name with my full hand and may have buzzed a half dozen other apartments, but it was Ann’s voice that came through the intercom.

“Hello?” I could tell nothing from her voice.

“I’m early,” I said. “I came back early. Is it OK to come up?”

“But only for a minute,” Ann said. She buzzed the locked glass door open and I pushed my way through, leaving a perfect handprint on the glass. With a crook’s instinct, I wanted to stop to wipe it clean. I made a passing swipe at it with my shirtsleeve and then I resolved to tell the truth to Ann about my part—my small or large part—in Hugh’s death. I would tell the truth and escape from my lie, I thought, just as a prisoner might daily resolve to grab the guard by the throat and steal the keys to freedom.

She was waiting for me at the elevator and her eyes were swollen like bubbles. Irregular red streaks covered her face and her hands were closed into tight fists. “Hugh was hit by a car,” Ann said, just as soon as the elevator doors opened.

I stood where I was. I placed one hand on the top of my head and covered my eyes with the other. If I was trying to manufacture a reaction I’d gone too far, because she hadn’t told me the worst yet. But I wasn’t acting at all; the shock I felt was real. It was the first time I had heard the truth of what happened that afternoon said in a voice that was not my own. Hearing what happened from Ann was like the difference between seeing your face in a mirror and seeing it in a photograph.

The elevator doors began to close; I hit them with my fist and they hesitated, wavered, and opened again. I came forward and took Ann by the elbows. “Oh God, Ann.”

“This afternoon. He’s dead. Killed. Dead on arrival. He never knew what happened. No suffering. All that heart and vanity gone in an instant.”

“Oh, Ann.”

“Well come in, OK? Ingrid just left. She went to the hospital to make a death mask of him. I felt like spitting on her but I suppose she has more of a right than I do. A death mask. Who wants a death mask? I mean what sort of person? But he was more her business than mine, when he died. Christ, David. Come in. Sit with me, OK? Be my witness.”

She let me into her house, slammed the door behind us, and burst into tears. “Oh shit,” she said. “Here I go, here I go.” We were standing in her narrow hallway and I put my arms around her. “Everything’s giving way. I don’t want to feel this, I don’t. Hugh. My Hugh. Hit by a car. The poor thing, David. Shit. He didn’t want this to happen. He was still so damned interested in everything. That’s what I feel so sad about. It’s not for me. But poor Hugh enjoyed his life so much. It’s like a child’s death. No, worse.” As she spoke her voice became clearer, as if she were climbing a summit of reason. But now, perched atop it, she flung herself off in one grand, perilous phrase: “And you know I loved him so much, still. There’ll never be a man I can love like Hugh.” And with that, Ann sealed herself into an atmosphere of wild grief that held us both through the evening and into the night.

Ann’s grief was like what I had known of love: it increased itself; it wound its way to its very source. She wrung her hands and her sobs cracked in her throat with the sound of great falling trees. “I am unequal to this,” she said, more than once, but of course she wasn’t at all: she was immense in it. I had, until then, loved and admired her with an incompleteness that bordered on blindness. I had been idolizing her evasiveness, her control, and the soft satin distance she seemed to keep between her feelings and her responses. I was already too old not to know the difference between personality and character, but seeing Ann at the peak of her towering sadness I realized I was seeing her for the first time. The revelations of the night before—the confession of having watched me make love to Jade; the wobbly attempt at seduction in this very room—were immediately reduced to anecdotes. This, now, was Ann as she really was: savage, helpless, eternal.

Ann wept and I wept along—for her, with her, and for and with myself. I was too dominated by my secrets to be set free by grief: I remained always aware of the hierarchy of sorrow and knew that it would be wrong if my tears exceeded Ann’s, or even drew attention to themselves. But Ann spiraled only deeper into her feelings and I knew my own sobs would not intrude on hers. I lowered my face into my hands and cupped my hands to keep the tears from falling on the floor. I don’t know why. The weeping was like ceremonial breaths, such as might be used by a Taoist, and the afterburn of all those tears filled me with a vapor. My sobs grew louder; the tears overflowed my hands and ran down my shirtsleeves. And then I was sitting next to Ann on the sofa, sitting close to her with my arms around her, holding her to me and letting her cry on me, with my cheek against the back of her hair and my tears falling drop by drop onto her shirt. She held my forearm, and as the sobs broke inside her, she dug her fingernails into my arm: it was as if she were in labor. But as tightly as she held me, I don’t think she really knew who I was or if it mattered at all. Her hold on me was contact at its most true and elemental: like two lone wolves huddling together in a blizzard, we grabbed each other and held on to life.

“Such a stupid stupid death,” Ann said. “They were standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue waiting for the light to change and then Ingrid said he bolted off—not even across the street. Diagonally. It was like a suicide but I’m sure it wasn’t. He resented waiting with everyone else in the crowd. It was Hugh’s terrible, infantile arrogance. A free spirit. That was his idea of independence—you know, leaping over fences, walking on the grass, picking the flowers in the park and burying his big nose in them, ordering things that weren’t on the menu. That was always Hugh’s special stupidity, this doing things his own way. Remember how he used to say, ‘I’d rather do something my way than the right way’? He hated customs and rules and he hated stop lights. And so that’s what happens. Goddamnit. It’s not a man’s death. A man doesn’t get knocked on his ass crossing the street. And now I have to call his children and tell them that their father didn’t know enough to keep himself out of traffic. And now his mistress is at the hospital trying to talk someone into letting her make a death mask. I’m sure they won’t let her. They’re waiting for someone official to come in and make arrangements. That’ll have to be me, I suppose. The ex-wife. This would be a lot easier if we were still married.

“I didn’t want the divorce in the first place. I told him I’d give him one in a minute if he wanted to get married but there was no reason to do it just to live separately. I would like to go to that hospital as his wife and take care of everything. I don’t know if they’ll even listen to me. I might have to get his brother Robert up here from New Orleans. I can’t ask Keith to do it—he wouldn’t be able to. Maybe Jade. I don’t even know where she is right now. Off camping. Lake Champlain. Oh Christ. What I really want to do is go to bed. Or throw myself out of the window. I don’t want to know what this is going to feel like tomorrow.”

I sat there almost immobile, breathing deeply, with my eyes attentive through a film of tears. I wanted only to be solid, to be a wall between Ann and the chaos. All the guilt was mine to feel, every excess of self-loathing and self-pity was available to me. But guilt would be an indulgence in my case, a way of wriggling partially free of the hook of circumstance, the terrifying logic of my life, and, above all, guilt would be a gesture of obsequence to the future, a way of striking a bargain with the day when Ann and everyone else learned that Hugh was racing after me when his life was taken away.

Guilt would have been a swoon of feeling in my own behalf; I owed it to Ann to put all of that away, for now. My guilt, the eruption of my conscience, my inability to understand how I fitted into the fate of the Butterfields, all of that would have been a second assault on Ann. It was time for me to shut up and just be there with her. Nothing I had to confess was as important as Hugh’s death; the truth of the day was inappropriate for the while. That confession would only interfere with the larger fact of Hugh’s death and the grief of the woman who adored him, who joined her body with his and created new lives, who once saw in his eyes the whole of her life. After all the lunges I’d made at the separate universe of feeling, at the uniqueness of perception that stands at the center of endless love, sitting there with Ann and realizing that for the time I was a witness to Ann’s levitation over the plane of normal feelings, I felt the reality—the shifting, unnameable reality—of love, and so as Ann began to sob again and I took her in my arms and held her, I loved her and all of life with the full raging power of my reconsecrated heart.

Sometime later I got up and poured us both a drink. Ann took it in her hand and smiled at me. “You’re a good friend, David. It’s good that you’re here. I wish I could say it was what Hugh would have wanted, but really I can’t think of anyone else in the world who could be in this room right now. None of my new friends. Only you. The children. Sammy. This is a time for Sammy. Oh God, I have to call them. It has to be me.”

“I would do it for you.”

“I know.” She placed her glass on the table, still full.

“And then what?”

“Then the hospital. I should be there. And find out what I have to do.”

“Everyone will help.”

“I hope so.”

“They will.”

“I’d better call them.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“I don’t really, but I think it would be right. You shouldn’t be here while I’m telling the kids.”

I nodded.

“You better go home, David. You should be on your way back to Chicago. You’ll get in a lot of trouble. You told me so yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I know it feels like that right now, but it matters. We all have to look out for ourselves now. That’s how it’s working out. Hugh said the same thing: No more dreams of paradise; every man for himself.”

“It can’t be done.”

“You should go home.”

“I am home.”

“No. Don’t. I know what you’re feeling. And I thank you. But there’s nothing to be done. I’m going to start taking care of everything. I’m practical now. I have the rest of my life to live with what happened but now I’ve got to make arrangements. I have to make telephone calls and be strong for the kids, even if they don’t expect me to. I’m going to do that. You have to go back to Chicago. And I have to make these calls and forget for a while that it was you who was here for me during the worst—” her voice suddenly broke and she lowered her eyes and began to sob. “I’ve got to make these calls,” she said. “And you’ve got to go. That’s all there is to it.”

I wanted to protest. I wanted never to leave her, but I knew it would be wrong for her to make the calls to Keith, Sammy, and Jade with me sitting with her; they would find out and it would add a measure of foolishness and deceit where only sorrow belonged. Without question, they would all learn that I’d been in New York when Hugh was killed, and it was hard to imagine they wouldn’t speculate on the meaning of that. Perhaps by the time they began to solve the unknown in the terrible algebra of circumstance I would have already found the moment to make my own part in Hugh’s death known.

I left Ann’s apartment. I don’t know if she expected me to go back to my hotel or call American Airlines and make a reservation back to Chicago. It didn’t matter. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. The night was starless and warm. There was a restaurant in the ground floor of her building and customers walked in and out of it. I looked in through the bright open windows; the people inside looked so terribly happy. They sat at tables with little marble-based lamps and painted shades that showed street scenes of old New York: moons over church steeples, buggies drawn by proud high-stepping horses. I felt a sudden surge of desire to be in that restaurant, to be drinking wine and talking with people I knew. I wanted to be in the company of friends such as Charles Dickens imagined, people to whom I could tell my story in all its detail and who would shed tears of pity, neither judging nor forgiving me. But as quickly as the desire appeared, it receded and I turned away from the windows, shaking a little, my head beating like a huge bony heart and the taste of my body’s most appalling recesses rising to the roof of my mouth.

Across the street from Ann’s apartment were the offices of the Children’s Aid Society. The steps to the side entrance faced the entrance to her building and I sat down. The Children’s Aid Society was locked and utterly dark for the weekend, with jail- house bars on the windows. The metal banisters were peeled and rusted, and beneath the steps, going down to a chained cellar entrance, were a number of empty pint bottles showing the labels of cheap vodka and port. The steps themselves were filthy, with chicken bones, spittle, and a kind of general refuse that city life creates the way an engine creates smoke. It was a quiet street and I knew that doorways such as these were used as safe harbors by men who had no homes, but I sat down anyway. I didn’t dare pass the time by walking the streets. I wanted to be right there when Ann left her apartment. The next stop was the hospital and she might need me.

I sat where I could watch the street, west to Park Avenue and east almost to Lexington. I sat for a very long time and the night got cooler, degree by degree, ticking them off like a clock. Maybe it was because I was waiting for some homeless, tormented man to claim my perch for his bedroom, but all I could think of was that man who had placed the dimes on Hugh’s eyes and tried to bring him back to life. He had long fingers and the tips were disproportionately broad. There was a certain disease that did that to you, but I couldn’t think of which one. When he crouched down to administer his magic, the cuffs to his light gray trousers rode up and I saw his bare, scratched ankles. He had no accent; he had traded his racial cadences for psychological ones.

By now, the calls would have been made. I could feel the knowledge spreading. New tears were being shed, bags packed. By the morning they would all be here.

In a very short while I would see Jade.

But it was impossible to think of it, dangerous. To have our reunion take place at Hugh’s funeral, to present myself soaked in his blood. It was hopeless and it was my only hope. Tomorrow: Jade.

And now Ann was pushing the door out and emerging from her building. She had a long fringed blue shawl around her shoulders and she looked down the street toward Park and straight across at me. I was sitting with my elbows on my knees, my head resting in my hands. She looked at me for a few long moments, tightened the shawl around her, and then raised her hand.

We were silent in the taxi on the way to the hospital and we only glanced at each other once, when Ann took my hand and I moved close to her so she could rest her head on my shoulder.

 

 

 

The Butterfields were filing into town one at a time, first Keith and then Hugh’s older brother Robert, who’d flown in with one of his nine children, a middle son named after Hugh. They gathered at Ann’s; there was nowhere else to go and even Ingrid, her sister, and a few of Ingrid’s friends went to Ann’s.

I stayed away, utterly isolated in my hotel room. I remember that room better than myself on that day. When I conjure it up in memory, I see an empty room, a ladder of sunlight rising and falling on one wall, a pigeon lighting on a window sill and peering in through the glass, a dead fly resting in the convex glass shade covering the overhead light, a fraying light cord oozing brown fuzz, the rattle of room-service trays in the halls, voices, hundreds of voices and none of them mine. If I concentrate with all my might, I can just barely picture myself in that room: on the bed, my hands behind my head, my feet crossed, fully clothed. I see myself at the window, looking down at the street. I see myself in tears. Yet even these memories are dim and somehow unreal. All I truly know is that I stayed in my hotel, waiting for someone to call me, and, for the most part, I had ceased to exist.

I also remember writing and I think I was writing a letter to Jade. But I never found any evidence of any writing at all. I picture myself tearing some hotel stationery into shreds and watching it drift into the tin wastepaper basket, but that feels more like logic than memory. An anesthetized patient will awaken and remember being wheeled to the operating room, the overhead lights flashing by, the masked attendants, the squeak of rubber gloves. But it’s difficult to say if these images are retrieved from the unconscious or if they are invented, drawn from our sense of what the world without us must be like.

I never think of the life I’ll miss after I’m dead, or all that I missed before I was born. It’s the time I’m as good as dead during this, my one and only life, that makes me tear at my hair. It seems to me that if I carefully gathered all of the time I was entirely alive I would have amassed perhaps two years of life so far…

At four o’clock Ann called.

“You belong here,” she said. “As much as anyone. You belong with us.”

I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my hand over my eyes.

“Do you…” I stopped. “How do the others feel about me being…? I want to be with you.”

“David, I don’t know how the laws of karma work. But for some reason you were here when I needed someone. When I needed you. And today that seems bigger than anything else, the past. And everyone here agrees. I wasn’t sure you hadn’t gone back to Chicago. But really I knew you’d still be here. I can’t figure it out now but this is right and really, David, you should be here.”

“I want to.”

“Then come. Now. Right away.”

“It really is all right?”

“Yes. It’s a lot more than all right. It’s…essential. We’re getting righteously drunk. We’re gathering our forces and I need you here. If you’re worried about Keith, well, he knows I need you here, too. Also, by the way, Ingrid knows.”

“Ingrid knows what?”

“All about you.”

“What do you mean?”

“She knows you’re you and why we did that act in front of her last night. And as a citizen of Jupiter, she couldn’t care less. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about that. Look, David, I’m not giving you a choice about this. I don’t want you sitting in that hotel room all alone while this is happening. When the sun sets you won’t even turn on the lights. There’s no choice. Just come over right now.”

“I will. I want to.”

“I know you do. OK. Oh, one thing. If you pass an open deli, pick up some mixers—tonic, club soda, you know. We have to make highballs. If we keep drinking everything straight, we’re going to be dry way before Monday morning.”

Ann hung up and I held on to the phone.

When Sam Butterfield opened the door to me, I was sobbing. I didn’t want it to be that way and I’d been fighting off my tears from the time I left the hotel. It was a stupid thing that broke my defenses: when I rang the buzzer in the lobby, no one asked who it was through the intercom. It was as if it hardly mattered who was there because it would never be Hugh. The locked glass door was buzzed open and I burst into tears. I didn’t ring for the elevator. There was a bench in the lobby and I sat down, shaking my head and saying “Stop it” to myself, but it seemed I would have to be one of those mystics who can stop a bleeding wound through the powers of the mind to wrest the control of my tears from the spacious, anarchic part of myself that ruled them now. Suddenly, the elevator appeared. I staggered in and rode up to the seventh floor. I was still crying when I knocked on Ann’s door.

“Hello, David,” Sammy said. “It’s nice of you to come.”

His voice was deep, much deeper than mine. His egg-sized Adam’s apple quavered at the center of his long tanned throat: at seventeen he was already over six feet tall and though I was just an inch shorter than him, I felt him looming over me. His light brown hair was parted in the middle and gathered in back in a small Thomas Jefferson pony tail. His blue eyes looked at me through a red mist. He extended his hand and I took it. I bowed my head, ashamed to be crying and helpless to stop.

“I’m sorry, it’s a terrible thing,” I said, but I doubt it was clear. I thought I should turn around and compose myself. I felt like a huge emotional pig to be inflicting my sorrow and confusion on them. I’d been summoned to be strong and my tears were a violation of trust.

“We expected you,” Sammy was saying. “Jade’s not here yet. Mom just hooked up with her a couple hours ago.”

There was a measure of relief in learning that the moment I’d been waiting for had been moved forward a notch or two. With any luck I would have control over myself by the time Jade arrived. But the real deliverance from the ruination of my feelings was Sammy’s telling me. I knew there was no particular reason for him to let me know that Jade wasn’t there yet, no purpose except to ease the pressure on me. Sammy was comforting me, really, and I swallowed hard and tried to be worthy of it.

I looked at him and said, “I’ve missed you, Sammy, but I would have rather gone through my whole life without ever seeing you again than have to see you on a day like this.” I waited for him to say something but he just gazed mildly into my eyes and suddenly I realized I hadn’t actually said anything: my thoughts were loud and out of control, but I hadn’t even moved my lips.

When I reached the front room, Keith was sitting on the arm of the sofa holding that framed square of pink and blue quilt. His hair had darkened to a deep, opaque brown and his once frail body had a kind of obstinacy to it now. He drummed his squarish fingertips on the raw wooden frame; his sandals sank into the sofa cushion; his feet were creased and powerful-looking, and his toenails were grown out long.

“This is mine, OK?” he was saying, in his high, reasonable voice.

“Not now, Keith,” Ann said.

“But I’m the one who wants it. I’m the only one.” He stared hard at the piece of quilt. He knew I was in the room but he gave no indication.

“Hello, David,” Ann said. “Thank—”

But what she was saying was lost to me; I was listening to Keith.

“You don’t hang something like this up on your wall,” Keith was saying. “This isn’t a picture, you know. It’s not something to add color to your house. This quilt is our flag. This is the But- terfield flag. Pink and blue pyramids and the most beautiful one in the world, I think.”

“That quilt comes from my family, Keith,” Ann said. “It was made by Beatrice Ramsey and if it reminds me of anything, it’s my grandmother’s house in Hillsboro, New Hampshire.”

Keith kept his eyes fixed on the quilt and he was shaking his head. “That’s not it and you know it. That’s like saying…” his voice dropped off and suddenly he lifted his head and looked at me. He returned his attentions to the quilt in an instant. “That’s like saying…Well, I was born on this quilt.”

“No, you were not,” Ann said.

Ingrid and her sister Nancy were seated in the director’s chairs, talking to Hugh’s brother Robert. Ingrid kept her hand on Robert’s wrist and spoke to him in a rapid whisper; Robert, who was standing with his son Hugh slightly behind him, looked down at Ingrid with a kind of glassy, compromised compassion. He was an enormous man; the wineglass he held in his massive hand looked absurdly delicate, and though Ann’s ceilings were ten feet high Robert stood with his back slightly curved, out of a combination of caution and shyness. He had Hugh’s slightly worried expression when he listened, that kind of mild tightening of the forehead, that slight narrowing of the eyes that seemed to be asking, no matter what the circumstances, “Are you all right?”

“When Pap got out of the Army and he came to see you at Bryn Mawr,” Keith was saying, “you had this quilt on your bed. And then you got pregnant, with me. And that’s how we all began. All right? Now do you know what I mean?” He tapped his finger on the glass and seemed to glance at me again. “Even you said if you hadn’t gotten pregnant you might not have gotten married to Pap.”

“Not this again,” Sammy said, with no particular emotion.

“You’re getting to be an old man on this subject, Keith,” Ann said.

Keith shook his head to tell them he wasn’t listening. “And so if it wasn’t for getting pregnant with me, on this quilt, then Pap would have married that other girl and you’d be married to someone else too, or maybe not married at all.”

“But I’m not married,” said Ann, with a kind of faltering gaiety. She looked at me and shrugged, inviting me to join her in an askew angle of vision, taking refuge in the slight aloofness she assumed I was capable of.

“And if you hadn’t gotten married, then none of us would have been born,” Keith said. He had moved his face even closer to the quilt, increasing his concentration. He was saying something everyone in his family had heard on innumerable occasions but he had no way of stopping himself: he was trapped within his sense of the truth of his family and it was an everlasting mystery to him that the others found his passions meaningless. Long ago he was faced with the choice of either abandoning his obsession with origins or becoming an object of occasional ridicule, and he had made the more honorable choice of following the curve of his impulses, deepening his loyalty to the truth as it became less welcome.

Ingrid was looking directly at me, even as she held onto Robert Butterfield. She wore a dark blue skirt and those kind of sandals that have rawhide laces you wrap around your legs. She held a ball of facial tissue in her fist and cocked her head first to the left and then to the right as she looked at me: I knew that in some inarticulate way she was now remembering me. I had slipped through the net of recollection the first time because I’d been falsely identified as Ann’s young lover, but now that my identity had shifted, it was alive within Ingriďs consciousness, and I could sense her following the drift of her thoughts like a cat intently watching the ellipses of a moth.

“That’s why I say, in a way, that I’m not only a son but the father too,” Keith said. “Because it started with me.”

“Then you must be dead,” Sammy said. His voice was so naturally deep; he didn’t have to touch it with his personality in order to give it its meanings. “They must be putting you in the furnace right about now so they can put your ashes in the old urn. Right? Because my father’s dead and you can only have one father. So you must be dead.”

“Do I really have to be a referee?” Ann said. “I’m going to be so worried about everyone else I’m not going to have my own feelings.”