“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.”
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.”