Part One 9 страница

Barbara fell silent. Whoever lay sick on the other side of the curtain had visitors now; I heard their quarrelsome, unhappy voices. A doctor was being paged over the public address. And I realized, with a sense of real panic, that I was about to burst into tears. Like an icy pond whose thickness you’ve misjudged, my composure gave way beneath the weight of my feelings—and I was stranded. I stared hard at the curtain that divided the room and I listened to the voices. “Now what?” a man’s voice was saying. “Another one and another one and another one?”

There was a light tap on the open door. It was Barbara’s sister Rita and Barbara’s children, Wayne and Delia. Rita looked old. Her hair was white and uncared for and she was partly crippled. Though she was skinny, she used a big black cane thick enough to aid an enormous man. Her raincoat was open; the lining was coming out. She looked embarrassed and annoyed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “They would not listen. I told them they couldn’t see you tonight but—”

“Hi, Mom,” said Wayne. His hair could not have been cut any shorter. He wore huge, brown-framed glasses and a white shirt with buttons on the collar points. His was the kind of face they put on posters urging people to contribute to the Negro College Fund. Delia seemed to be staking her emotional territory on the other side of the spectrum. Her hair was in an Afro, she wore a red scoop-necked tee shirt, blue jeans, and torn sneakers. It looked as if she’d had lipstick on and somebody had at the last minute scrubbed it off.

“We swore on the Bible,” Delia said. “We said to God every night we will come to see you, Mama.” She went to the bedside and laid her head against Barbara’s shoulder. As she did, she looked back at me and smiled.

My father introduced me to Rita, Wayne, and Delia. Rita held only my fingertips when I offered my hand. Wayne was cool and businesslike. And when I offered my hand to Delia, she clasped her arms behind her back and said, “No!” It was only a child’s foolishness and teasing, but it made me feel very awkward.

Barbara was allowed only a half hour of visitors and most of it was already gone. I thought her children would want to be alone with her for a while. And now that they were a family, I didn’t feel I belonged there any longer. I announced that I was leaving. Barbara tried to convince me to stay and then Arthur said he’d leave with me. But it seemed he wanted to stay for the last few minutes to be near Barbara and to be near the children and go home with them when the nurse said it was time to leave. I made up an excuse of having someone to meet. I said goodbye to everyone with a clumsy wave and walked into the corridor, moving quickly and hoping I was heading toward an exit. My hands were shaking. I thought it was only the strangeness of being with my father’s new family, but when I was waiting at the elevator and had a moment to consider the evening I realized that for the past half hour I’d been remembering it had been in this very hospital and perhaps on this very floor that three and a half years ago all of the Butterfields had been treated for the smoke and the flame and the shock and the terror I had inflicted on them.

A few weeks later it was Thanksgiving. Every year my parents had the same group of friends to their house for Thanksgiving dinner, and as the day approached my original certainty that this year’s dinner was canceled gave way to a growing dread that my mother was going ahead with the party, even though her life had snapped in half. Finally, at two o’clock on Thanksgiving, I put aside the long letter I was writing to Ann and called my mother.

“Hello?” Rose said. Her voice sounded soft and girlish.

“Hi. It’s me. What’s up?” I’d seen her a few days before, but she never called me and when I called her she usually seemed indifferent.

“What do you mean, what’s up? I’m cooking.”

“So the party’s on for this year?”

“Of course it is. Why? Do you have other plans?”

“No. It’s just that you never called me. I didn’t know if you were going to have it this year.”

“And so you made other plans.”

“No. I said I didn’t. What time should I be over?”

Rose was silent and then, sounding a little uncertain, she said, “Oh, four. Isn’t that when we always have it?”

I showered, washed my hair, and shaved, because Rose was always annoyed if I was less than extremely clean and it wasn’t something I wanted to hear that day.

My letter to Ann lay in fragments on the kitchen table, scrawled on notebook paper, scraps of shopping bag, and onionskin paper that absorbed the ink from my pen and made every word blurry and soft, like lights through the fog. I had already received my second letter from her—in response, more or less, to mine to her in which I’d begged her to tell me where Jade lived:

Hugh appeared yesterday. Dressed in the uniform of his new ego—jeans, blue work shirt with red embroidered heart, tan boots with pointy toes: Ya-Hugh! He stunk to high heaven of some brain-damaged strawberry perfume which he readily confessed was his new girl’s, Ingrid. “You wear her perfume?” asked I, waltzing into a nice left hook. “No,” said Hugh. “It rubs off on me.” He’d just spent some time with Keith and their fake obsession is The New Case against you. No new evidence, naturally, just new arguments, new and deeper logic. They jaw on and on about this New Case with the same vacant dreaminess that the little kids on Blackstone used to talk about buying an ounce of pot, when they had no idea where to get it and no money to pay for it.

I walked the seven long blocks to Ellis Avenue. I arrived at my mother’s apartment and was going to ring the doorbell to get buzzed in, but I did have the keys and by the time I was in that much too familiar entranceway I had lost the spirit of independence. My mouth had a peculiar taste in it and it connected me to the huge dead center of my childhood. I let myself in and walked the three flights of stairs, and then let myself in to the apartment, knocking softly as I opened the door.

The atmosphere was brocaded by the smells of cooking. Thick, nostalgic, and eternal, the aroma of turkey and sweet potato struck me like some pathetic irony—a welcome mat in front of a bombed-out house. I closed the door behind me and listened for voices. I had hoped not to be the first to arrive. I walked down the long narrow hall toward the living room.

Rose was on the sofa, reading The National Guardian and listening to the radio. She wore glasses with round lacquered frames, a green pants suits and a gray shirt, and she sat with her small legs crossed. The room was in its customary wreath of shadows and the only light burned from the lamp positioned right behind Rose’s shoulder.

“Hello,” I said. “Looks like I’m early.”

“That’s because you were so anxious to come,” said Rose. She didn’t look up from her newspaper but I could tell she wasn’t reading. The FM station was drifting in and out; static bit at the edges of Beethoven’s Third.

I unzipped my Army surplus jacket and threw it on a chair.

“Hang it up please,” said Rose.

“In a second. Who’s supposed to be here?”

“I decided not to invite anyone,” said Rose, folding her paper.

“How come?” I sat next to her on the sofa.

“I don’t think people are very interested in showing their faces at my house right now,” said Rose. “And I’m not exactly in the mood to work like a dog so they can eat me out of house and home.”

“I thought you invited everyone,” I said.

“Maybe you’d like to have dinner with your father’s new family? I’m sure they’ll have a full house. That is, if you’re invited.”

“I want to be here.”

“Were you? Invited?”

I shook my head and my mother’s eyes registered a dim, injured pleasure. It was clear to me that my father hadn’t invited me to dinner because he knew my mother needed me more than he did—and it unnerved me to see what an effort it was not to make that very point.

“Well, don’t feel bad,” she said, with mock consolation. “Your father’s very busy now. You can’t blame him for not having much time for you.”

“It’ll be nice having dinner, just the two of us,” I said.

Rose nodded and looked away, into the soft, formless darkness of the living room.

“I’m tired of inviting the same people to this house, year after year,” she said. “The same broken-down crew. I’m tired of the same old…I don’t know what. No one’s ever understood my marriage to Arthur and I’m not going to degrade myself with a lot of explanations. I don’t want to see their silly faces when the turkey comes out and Arthur’s not here to carve it. And what if I have trouble pulling the cork out of the wine? That was Arthur’s job.”

“I could do that,” I said.

“No. That’s not the point.”

Slowly, I made my way around the apartment, turning on the lights. My mother wanted to eat in the kitchen but I set the dining room table with a tablecloth and the best dishes. I lit candles and took the fern that hung in the apartment’s sunniest window and made it the centerpiece. Rose called out to announce the turkey was done and I helped her remove the enormous bird from the oven—a turkey that could have easily fed a dozen famished guests. The vegetables were still cooking in a huge enameled pot: slowly, peas and pearled onions bobbed and jiggled in the dark water. There was a basket full of warm rolls and raisin bread and a purée of sweet potatoes with a crust of small colored marshmallows. Standing next to the stove were five bottles of Côtes du Rhône, one with the foil stripped away and a corkscrew turned into the cork, awaiting someone’s hands to pull it out.

“God, Mom,” I said, “you made so much.”

“I know all about it. Just eat as much as you want and don’t worry about the rest.”

It took us a long while to get all the food onto the table. The candles were burning much too quickly. The turkey was before us, with the chestnut stuffing simmering in its cavity, and we served everything else while waiting to see who would be given the responsibility of carving. The symmetry of playing my father’s abandoned role made me shy to touch the long gleaming knife. But finally Rose said, “You don’t want any meat?” and I pulled myself out of my chair and began to cut at the bird. I’d never carved in my life. The small chickens I occasionally prepared for myself—or bought precooked from the supermarket—I was quite content to hack and pull apart in the solitude of my apartment. I felt a hesitance almost as intense as despair as I imagined the mess I was about to make of our meal. But the knife was wonderfully sharp and there was enough soft white meat on the breasts for me to avoid cutting through any bones.

“Very nice,” said Rose.

I put a couple of pieces of turkey on her plate. Then I served myself. And finally I uncorked the wine and we concentrated on the meal.

Near the end, Rose put down her knife and fork and the sharpness of the noise proved how silent we’d been.

“I had no idea I’d made so much food,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll have leftovers.”

“You can’t find small turkeys. That’s the problem. They make them for large parties. A waste…”

“We’ll have sandwiches. It’ll be great for me. I won’t have to cook for a while.”

“I wish I didn’t have to worry about money. All my life…” she stopped herself and fixed me with a severe, proud stare. “Let’s get something straight, David.”

I nodded, feeling the pressure of a vast, content-less anxiety, an anxiety that suddenly seemed as much a part of my emotional universe as gravity was of the universe at large.

“I’m aware that your father has told you I was married before I married him. And I’m also aware of how he portrayed my situation. Poor, naive, poverty-struck little Rose marrying a rich playboy who dragged her through the slime and made a fool of her. I hope you know your father well enough to realize that his…well I don’t know what—his ego! His ego makes him believe—or at least say, that’s how it went between Carl Courtney and me. He needs to think of me that way. Defenseless. Sad. And maybe a little stupid? Maybe. But what really happened is different and I think I can be the judge of that.

“Carl was rich and spoiled and maybe he didn’t have a totally honest bone in his body—but he adored me. He worshipped the ground I walked on. Some people said he was the handsomest man in Philadelphia. You know how long we knew each other before we drove out to Bucks County and got married? Twenty- five days. I’ll bet your father didn’t tell you that. And I’ll bet he didn’t tell you that Carl was crazy about me. And I loved him.

“What Carl really was was a poet but he was too rich for that and so he ended up looking like a fool. He tried to work as a newspaperman but it wasn’t serious. Nothing was. That was the trouble. Not what your father likes to believe, about Carl committing adultery. The adultery we made up to get the divorce and Carl was too much of a gentleman to argue. I had to leave him.”

“Dad helped you get the divorce?”

“He made sure I wasn’t given a penny of Carl’s money. No settlement. No alimony. Nothing. The Courtneys would have been glad to pay me to get out of their family. They would have laughed all the way to the bank, as the saying goes. Not that I wanted his money. But Arthur! Arthur had no right to negotiate that kind of settlement. Carl’s brother, Dennis—his wife was a dope addict and the family gave her an annuity for life to divorce Dennis!”

“Dad wanted you all for himself. He didn’t want some other man’s money involved. And you were Communists, after all. What did the Courtneys’ money come from?”

“That’s not the point!”

“Maybe Dad was worried if you had alimony you wouldn’t marry him.”

“No. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“No one understood. I loved Carl. He was a beautiful man. I had never seen such beauty in a man. Ever! I could never feel the way with Arthur that I did with Carl. And it wasn’t just the physical thing, though what’s the use in pretending that wasn’t important. No one will ever know how beautiful I was when I was with Carl. Everybody fell in love with me when I was with Carl.”

I was frightened. I suspected that Rose wanted to imply she had never altogether loved my father, that his thick, earnest body had never pleased her. I didn’t want to hear it. In Rockville there was a boy named Paul Schulte whose mother had told him that she’d never had an orgasm. “Your papa’s tool is unusually slender,” she’d told him, and Paul was obsessed with the information. He often threatened to castrate himself and send his cock to his mother so she could see it was no grander than his father’s, and for all I knew he’d gone through with it. He was still in Rockville when I left. Of course it was wrongheaded to blame his mania on his mother’s one remark, but Paul served to remind me that it is not for nothing that sons shrink from too precise an understanding of their mothers’ unhappiness. I could tolerate hints and I could absorb my own speculations, but if Rose were to come right out and say that my father had been an incompetent lover I feared the knowledge would pierce something deep and defenseless in me and change me in ways I wouldn’t know how to control.

Dutifully, I stood up to slice our second helpings when the phone began to ring. Generally, Rose was unusually responsive to the telephone; often if she was just a few steps from it, she’d run toward it when it rang. But now, with the phone on its third, its fourth, its fifth ring, she made no motion to get up and I, feeling it was somehow expected of me, put the knife down and went into the kitchen to answer.

It was Alberto Nicolosi, one of my mother’s oldest friends. Along with the Rinzlers, the Sterns, and the Davises, the Nicolosis were inevitable Thanksgiving guests at our house.

“Hello,” said Alberto, “is this David?”

“Yes. Alberto?”

“Hello, David. I’m not used to your voice over the telephone. Forgive me.”

“It’s OK. How are you?”

“Just fine. Are you there with your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, good. And others? There are others?”

“Not this year. It’s just the two of us.”

“I suspected. You know, every year Rose makes us dinner on Thanksgiving. Now we have just finished our own not too traditional I’m afraid dinner and we were thinking of your mother…”

“Yes?”

“Tell me. Do you think it would be worthwhile if we came for a visit? We have a cake. We could bring it over and Rose could make her coffee.”

“I think that would be wonderful, Alberto.”

“You’re sure? We were going to go to the opera. My brother is with us. But it seems so strange not to see Rose today.”

“Come right over. I’ll tell my mother you’re on your way.”

Rose was clearing the table when I returned. She had placed the slice of breast I’d just taken off back onto the frame of the bird, and she’d poured the wine out of her glass and into mine.

“That was Alberto,” I said. “He and Irene want to come over.”

“But we’re finished with dinner.”

“So are they. They’re bringing over a cake so we can all have dessert together.”

Rose was silent.

“Al’s brother is with them. They’re bringing him, too.”

She walked quickly into the kitchen with a load of dishes. When she came back she said, “They’re coming now?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I suppose I better wash my face.” She pressed her hand against her cheek.

“You look fine.”

“Oh, I know what I look like. Oh well. Here come Irene and Al, coming to eat me out of house and home. Irene’s a terrible cook and I’m sure they’re starved. I hope you’ll be nice to them, David. Your father loves to make fun of them. But they watched you grow up. They love you and you should treat them with respect.”

“But I think they’re wonderful.”

“Yes. I know all about it. Just remember they’re human beings with as many feelings as you. They’re two of my oldest friends, David. And they’re precious to me.”

The Nicolosis arrived while Rose was in the bathroom. Alberto wore a herringbone overcoat and a Russian fur cap. His hair was long and silvery and his eyes were a dark, purplish blue. He smelled of pipe tobacco and cologne. Irene, erect, thin, and getting brittle, wore a black cape. Her lipstick was fire-engine red and her white hair swept back in two large waves. Arthur once said that Irene’s hair was so well trained she could probably make it stand up and bark. Alberto’s younger brother looked chilled and deferential. He shook hands and nodded and smiled shyly as Alberto explained that he spoke no English.

As I took their coats, Rose emerged from the bathroom.

“Well, look who’s here,” she called, in a crazy, gay voice. She extended both of her hands like a tea room hostess. “Will you look what the cat dragged in?”

“And you must be Alberto’s brother,” Rose was saying, even before she reached them.

“His name is Carlo,” said Alberto, “but I’m afraid he has no English.”

“Oooo,” said Rose, furrowing her brow and tilting her head, as if the news was very sad. “Oh well. At least he can eat cake and drink my good coffee.”

If she could only be quiet and calm herself, I thought, and stop forcing people away from her. I hung the coats in the closet and when I closed the door and looked down the hall, Alberto had Rose in his arms. He held her tightly and seemed to be rocking her back and forth. Rose was on her tip-toes and as Alberto continued in his embrace she patted him lightly on the back, as if it were she who was comforting him.

 

 

 

Early the next year, I made contact with two more Butterfields. The first was Keith, whose name I found in the Bellows Falls, Vermont, telephone directory. It was a number I’d tried a few times before, but I’d never gotten an answer. I kept it on my list, though, and even put a check next to it because Vermont seemed like a place Keith would live—Vermont, or Oregon, somewhere you could paddle a canoe, backpack, and not have to compete, a clean isolated place with a tradition of loneliness and family history. And one evening, one manic blizzardy night, I called that Vermont number again and a voice that was unmistakably Keith’s answered on the eighth ring.

“Hello, Keith,” I said. I wanted to hear more, to make certain.

“Hello? Who is this?” He was a perfect, clear tenor; he should have been a folklorist, a collector of nineteenth-century American mountain songs, but he was too awkward to play the banjo and a thousand times too shy to sing even to himself.

“It’s me.” I heard a dog barking behind him; Keith clapped his hand over the phone and said, “Shush, Ambroise.” Then, in a sharper voice, he said to me, “Who is this?”

“It’s me. It’s David Axelrod.”

“I thought so.”

Then I said a stupid thing. I said, “Don’t hang up,” which made him do exactly that. I called him right back but he just let it ring. That same night I wrote him a short letter, apologizing for calling him and asking if I could someday—not necessarily soon—come to see him and talk with him. He sent my letter back torn into pieces, though when I inspected my envelope I thought I detected that it had been opened. He put it all into another envelope and added a note of his own saying, “I know for a fact that you are on parole and you are not allowed to bother me or anyone in my family. If I ever hear from you again you may as well know I’ll be calling the police here and in Chicago.”

Then in March I learned where Sammy Butterfield was. When I’d thought about it without any clues I had guessed he was in some respectable prep school, on his way to Harvard, and then Harvard Law, and then Congress. I still took entirely seriously the ambitions he held when he was twelve years old. In fact, when I hunted around for traces of Sammy I called Choate and Exeter and a few other upper-class schools, but I got nowhere with that and I simply didn’t know enough about those kinds of schools to try many others. As it turned out, he was in upstate New York in a place called the Beaumont School. There was a story about him that I read on the bus one evening coming home from work. It was a UPI wire story and when I checked in the library a couple days later, I saw the same story in papers from New York to Los Angeles.

STUDENT REJECTS ENDOWMENT;

 

DONOR LIFELONG FRIEND OF AGNEW

 

Beaumont, New York…Roman Domenitz, a prominent Maryland businessman and longtime associate of Vice- President Agnew, came to the Beaumont School to present the exclusive New York boys preparatory school with a half million dollars. Mr. Domenitz, president of Rodom Industries, was making the donation in memory of his son Laurence Domenitz, who died of leukemia last year while in his senior year at the Beaumont School.

Samuel Butterfield, president of the junior class, was chosen by the Beaumont students to accept the check from Mr. Domenitz, in a ceremony marking the prestigious school’s 100th anniversary. Speaking on a stage that included Vice- President Agnew, young Mr. Butterfield stated, “We don’t need Domenitz’s money.” As he tore up the check, Mr. Butterfield recounted charges recently leveled against Domenitz by such organizations as the National Urban League, the Congress on Racial Equality, and the NAACP.

The presentation ceremonies were held in Bigelow Auditorium on the spacious Beaumont campus. In attendance were the families of the Beaumont student body as well as Beaumont School alumni, including General Meryle Woods and Roger V. Addison, founder of Addison International. When Butterfield tore up the half-million-dollar check, there was an uproar in the auditorium and police and school officials were forced to cancel the proceedings and evacuate the hall. “We had the beginnings of an incident on our hands,” remarked Dana Mason, the Headmaster of the School.

Samuel Butterfield was not available for questioning. His father, Dr. Hugh Butterfield of Camden, New Jersey, when asked to comment on his son’s actions, said, “Sammy always does what he believes in.”

Until now, Beaumont School has not been touched by the tide of student protest that has swept American schools and colleges over the past several years. In his remarks preceding the presentation ceremonies, Vice-President Agnew commended the school for its reputation for “scholarship, sportsmanship, and citizenship.” Earlier on, Agnew described the student protest movement as “the most prolonged panty raid in the history of America.”

Along with the story was a picture of Sammy, such as you would find in a school yearbook. His light hair was cut Sir Lancelot style and his face had the opacity of someone who can conceal everything but his features themselves from the camera. With his blue eyes, silky eyebrows, abrupt nose, and a polite, practically vacant smile, he had a face worthy of a film star, except his was as devoid of vanity as it was of whiskers—which is to say, vanity may have been beneath the surface but he had yet to cultivate it. I did my best to follow up on the story, but no one at any of the newspapers could tell me if Sammy had been expelled. I called Ann to tell her news of Sammy had reached Chicago—“And if they’re printing it here,” I said, “that means it’s everywhere, probably even China”—and to ask her if Sammy had gotten kicked out of school.

“I know what you’re getting at,” Ann said. Her voice sounded dreamy, a little stoned. It was snowing everywhere north of Florida but she sounded like someone lying in the sun. “I don’t like you calling me, David. It’s too strange and it’s always unexpected. It’s not fair. It always means you’re prepared to talk and I’m not. But if you have to call me, at least make sure you’re not calling to trick me out of information about my kids.”

I wrote Sammy in care of the Beaumont School, congratulating him on tearing up Agnew’s pal’s check. When I was a novelty to the Butterfields, I used to trade on the fact of my parents’ political past. As far as I was concerned, I’d absorbed enough Marxism through osmosis to teach them all quite a bit about left-wing politics. But, as I wrote to Sammy, “here you are committing acts of real courage and I haven’t made a political gesture since high school, and even that was a silent vigil outside of a military installation in Evanston when I was with five hundred other people and no possible harm (or blame) could have befallen me.” Sammy didn’t answer my letter, or acknowledge it, but neither did he send it back torn into eighths. I knew I was beguiling myself, but I took this as a kind of encouragement. A week later, I sent him a letter to Jade and asked him to forward it to her.

A letter from Ann.

Dear David,

Poor you. First to have me hang up on you and then having to trudge down to the post office to get my letters which don’t fit into your mailbox. I’ve always helped myself to the privilege of irresolution when it came to you. You always seemed to revel in my ambivalence while the others tore out their hair. You were so certain that beneath my capriciousness I was a typical Yankee lady, as sure of her emotional priorities as she is of her lineage. I wonder if you still feel that. I would hope so. I’m certain no one else does. But now with yourself on the receiving end of my whimfulness, you’ll want to forget the pleasure you once took in the odd syncopation of my feelings.

Syncopated feelings? God, there is no one on either side of the grave upon whom I’d inflict that little phrase, except you. I realize you’ll put up with anything and you would do nothing to threaten this correspondence of ours. I finally understand why some women—or are they all just girls?—answer those box-numbered pleas from prisoners that run in the underground papers and write letters to some total stranger serving time in a penitentiary. Our history being what it’s been, there’s something about a bird in a cage that appeals to women.

Hugh was back in town—speaking of what appeals to women. His girl of the moment, Ingrid Ochester, is about twenty-seven, though she looks as old as Hugh. God only knows what’s aged her. She doesn’t really seem to do anything and her only worries are if the glaze will hold on her pots and vases and if her eight-year-old son will land safely in one of his constant shuttles between Ingrid and his father, a Pepsi exec in Saudi Arabia. Ingrid is the sort of woman I could never know, under any circumstances. Comfortable, vague, she seems to come out of nowhere, from nothing. Her past is full of towns like Camden, New Jersey; her parents summered in Easton, Maryland. They made their money selling sofas.

Hugh and I came from very different worlds, but in our case there was, at least, a pleasing polarity. He was from New Orleans and I was from New York, but our families both were faded rich (very faded) and they haunted and nagged at us in similar ways. But Ingrid and Hugh? Who could say what they hold in common; I can never even keep it straight how they met. There was somebody’s cousin, a flat tire…But clearly Ingrid is smitten—all of the kids say so—and Hugh revels in it like a cat on his fifth canary.