A.
Ann’s letter did everything an important letter is supposed to: it changed my luck, my confidence, it changed my place in the world. In school, my teachers finally recognized me when we met in the halls and suddenly people in my classes were talking to me—asking to see my notes for Tuesday’s lecture, asking me to coffee, to lunch, and inviting me with some slight shyness to get together with four or five other students and review the material for an upcoming test, as if it would be
me
who’d be doing
them
the favor. Even when I was picketing, some of the people who passed looked at me as if I really existed, and a few stopped to tell me that they wouldn’t ever buy a pair of nonunion trousers. One old man coming out of Sidney Nagle’s with a plain gray box in a red and white bag put his thin hand on my arm and said, “I’m sorry. I just bought a pair of Redman pants. My son-in-law gave me a list. It’s not for me. For me, I would never. But the son-in-law doesn’t know union from Joe Blow. I’m sorry.” And he stood there gazing at me until I realized what he wanted and I touched his hand and smiled. I was forgiving other people!
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.