“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.