“Look familiar?” Ann asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s from the house. Maybe we weren’t using it during your tenure. It’s part of a quilt—all that’s left of it—Grandmother gave me when I set off for Bryn Mawr. Very sentimental. I’ve been defending it like the Grail these past couple years. From Keith. I told you Keith just left here, didn’t I? Yesterday.”
“Is Keith still the Butterfield historian?” My voice cracked slightly.
“Of course. He brings a portable tape recorder on his visits now and attempts to interview me. I feel like a perfect idiot speaking into the microphone. Immortality without revision? Who needs it?”
I felt my cheeks go hot. Every word she said made her more familiar to me and I was struck with the image of myself falling to my knees before Ann and pressing her hand to my lips—a knight returned to his Queen.
She turned around and patted the glass that covered the quilt. “Don’t feel
too
bad about it being burned. It was on its way to oblivion anyhow, like most of what we owned. The only thing was that this was the quilt I had on my bed when Hugh got back from the war. The night he just appeared. He’d been in Baltimore recovering and I hadn’t even gone down to visit him. I didn’t know
what
our relationship was, or what it was supposed to be. But when he appeared I knew
something.
We didn’t even get under the covers and that was the night that sealed all of our fates because that’s when Keith was conceived.”
“Is that why he wants it? The quilt?”
“Naturally. Evidence. Talisman. Keith’s theory is that if I hadn’t gotten myself pregnant, then Hugh and I would never have married. And according to Keith this gives me a tripartite role: part son, part father, part husband. Proving, I suppose, that all gall
is
divided into three parts.”
A laugh exploded out of me like a sneeze. “That’s wonderful,” I said.
“I’ve used it a hundred times, the line, that is. Is that what you meant?”
“Ann,” I said. I could think of nothing else to say; my mind was dull gray light.
She allowed the silence to continue. Then: “What brings you to New York, David?”
“You.”
What did I expect? For her to hold her hand out to me? To confess that she’d hoped for my arrival? She nodded, as if my declaration concerned only me. Ann’s opaque gestures had always, in my eyes, been a sign of her elegance and artfulness. Yet now with my life breaking beneath the weight of my vast load of unexpressed feeling, I wanted her to be less herself and more what I needed. I looked at her and felt myself sinking—and it was like waiting for a cat to rescue you from drowning.
“How could I bring you to New York?” she said, finally.
“I wanted to see you, talk to you.”
“Ah. But that’s not
me:
that’s
you.”
“I don’t try and fool myself. I wasn’t sitting on the plane thinking you were going to find it easy, seeing me. I’ve been here since one trying to get the courage to call you.”
“That’s because you’re not in love with me and so you still can remind yourself there’s a difference between
you
and
me.
If you were in love with me, if you felt something you’d just assume I did, too.”
I bowed my head. I thought I was just lowering my eyes to collect my thoughts but when my head tilted down it stayed there.
“Have you come to quiz me about the others?” Ann asked.
There was no place to be polite and so I said, “Partly.”
“And what else, then?”
“To be with you. I miss you all the time and hearing from you makes me miss you more.” Finally, I could look up again. Ann’s features had softened. She touched her glasses as if to remove them and reveal herself to me, but her hand dropped into her lap and she sighed.
“I’m being mean to you. I feel it,” she said. “Covering for myself. This way if anyone finds out you were here and asks any questions I can recall all the mean and teasing things I said and I’ll get their approval. The last thing I’d want to say is I was glad to see you.”
“But is that it? How do you feel?”
“Let’s see. You already know where Sammy is. You should see him, David. What a solid oak. He’s literally the most responsible person I know. I suppose that story about him tearing up the check makes him out to be a hothead…but that’s not Sammy at all. Sammy always negotiates from a position of strength—quiet strength. He’s so obviously blessed; very few people feel as at
home
on earth as he does. Compared to him, the rest of us are like freaky little wayfarers, hangers-on. Sometimes I think the world was made for Sammy and maybe five thousand others to exercise their intelligence in.”
“What’s Beaumont, New York, like?” I asked. I don’t know why I chose to ask that—probably nervousness. I leaned forward, my folded hands dangling between my knees.
“A prep-school town. Dirty river, red brick factory, slanting houses, townies, orchards. And Keith. You know where Keith is, too. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, or half- know. In Bellows Falls. He’s got a job in a furniture factory and he’s learning a lot and mashing his fingertips as well. He makes chairs, rocking chairs. Strange, from Keith. He never had much interest in building things. I think he started trying to build something when he was a little boy, but Hugh—old helpful Hugh—tore the hammer out of his hands, to show him an easier way, of course, and I suppose it was a symbolic castration since that’s my last memory of Keith building anything.”
But he was building a stereo receiver the night I looked in from the porch, the night I saw you all…the night I set the fire. I looked away, uncertain if Ann remembered this or not, wondering if she was teasing me deliberately.
“Electronic things, once in a while,” she went on. “But no birdhouses or rabbit traps, or anything that took saws and hammers. But now he’s quite adept. He’s built most of his own furniture, too. He lives in a rotten but really beautiful old farmhouse. Keith’s idea was to make it the new family headquarters but so far none of us have taken him up on it. He’s got a few chickens running around out back complaining about anything and everything and also, wonder of wonders, a full-time lady, a girl from town. Sort of an Ingrid Ochester type, you know, Hugh’s girl. Passive, compliant, a little sad, but satisfied with herself and stubborn as a wart. I shouldn’t say that. It sounds as if I resent her and I don’t, not Keith’s girl, I mean. She’s very good for Keith and if she’s a little drab then so is he, as I’ve always known. He’s very lucky to have someone who cares about him.
“And Jade is well, in school, studying ethology, as of the last time, that is. She’s given to changes of mind, threatens constantly to drop out of school and, receiving no objections from me or Hugh, decides each time to stay on.”
“What school?”
“And”
continued Ann, raising a finger to silence me, “Hugh. Hugh is still off rattling around the USA, leading a life of utterly
passé
bohemianism. It’s in its last stages, however. Come September they go to live in Utah with this fellow named Whitney St. Martin—or who calls himself that, at least. I’m sure it’s a made-up name. He probably has a long and very tacky police record, Whitney. It’s an experimental community, set in a hundred or so barren acres. Hugh will be the doctor. The place is called Autonomy House. Did I already say that? Autonomy House. It’s for professional people only, drug-free, no alcohol. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, architects, writers, I suppose writers. I think Hugh mentioned there would be writers. Maybe he was including poor Ingrid in that category, though I should think doctor’s mistress would be profession enough.
“They’ll all live in those Buckminster Fuller-type domes and live the life of professionals in an ideal community. According to Hugh, it’s not a think tank but…a
do
-tank. Do-tank! It makes me want to commit serious acts of terrorism. Not only the goopiness of it, but Hugh’s actually paying for this. That’s Whitney St. Martin for you. Each of the carefully chosen and screened professionals is assessed thirty-five thousand dollars for the privilege of living in this white-collar utopia. Supposedly, Hugh will be able to charge people who use his services, but only nominally. And there’s a lot of expense besides the thirty-five thousand, which is only an entrance fee. The economics are terribly complicated and I promised myself not to learn much more about it since the little I already know turns my intestines into Belgian lace.
“You see? Everyone is doing quite well. Our independence is—I don’t know what to call it. Staggering. I think I’m turning into a Keith; I can’t
believe
how seldom we need each other.”
“What school does Jade go to?”
“David.”
“OK. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t ask.”
“That’s right.”
“I can’t exactly
help
it.”
“How convenient.”
“It’s not that.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want you to ask. I don’t want you to hint or pry. I don’t want you poking around or trying to trick me or playing on my thoroughly mixed feelings about you. It’s…it’s very likely that if I did tell you about Jade you wouldn’t feel very good about it. But you must realize that, don’t you?”
I felt her words like a blow to the face. Injury and humiliation. The helplessness of my circumstances never failed to astonish me; the life of constant emotional peril never lost its peculiar terror. I felt abruptly close to tears. Here at last with Ann, I realized I was only half capable of listening to her. If the deliberate meanness of the sudden mystery she’d created could cause me such pain, where did I ever get the idea that I could listen rationally to the truth?
It was understood that my life was not to be discussed. It was, after all, only a mass of loneliness and the least attractive kind of solitude, whereas Ann’s was alive with struggle and readjustment.
I had always been more than eager to extend myself and show avid interest in every detail of Ann’s life—her first sexual encounter (a young doorman in her parents’ apartment house), what she did with the money she made from the first story she sold to
The New Yorker,
why she got the willies whenever she shopped at Marshall Field, and the gauzy waking dreams she had when she was stoned and listening to Vivaldi, some of which inspired her to write haikus onto notecards, notecards that would end up in the trash but not before I was given a chance to read them. I never felt neglected or taken too lightly. In a world filled with people, in a house bursting with visitors, she had chosen to lay out the pieces of her life (delicately, artfully, coyly) in front of me. It was my reactions she courted, my fledgling sensibilities she had selected to interpret the mysteries of her character. I felt immensely privileged; I was certain there were things she told me that no one else knew—she confided in me not so much the depth of her private thoughts as their
tone.
Hugh and others might have known her secrets in more detail, but I was given a chance to learn the exact pitch in which she spoke to herself.
There was nothing about her, nothing that she said (or didn’t say) that struck me as anything less than vital. And I didn’t study Ann because I was in love with her daughter. I didn’t devote myself to understanding Ann as a way of foreseeing the future of my lover’s character. I don’t think it ever really occurred to me that Jade was going to be like Ann, any more than I thought I would be like Arthur or Rose. Ann was unique, unduplicatable, wry, secure, haughty, vulnerable, and so explicitly calculating that her every word and gesture, in my eyes at least, was incandescent with significance.
That afternoon and into the evening we talked about her life alone in New York. Until it went bankrupt, her family had run a charity called the United States Foundling Homes, a kind of combination orphanage and vocational school that would have seemed more at home in a Dickens novel than in the sunny USA. It was Ann’s father who sped the dissolution of the Foundling Homes—he awarded himself a salary high enough to verge on embezzlement—but it turned out to be fortunate for Ann because it was the recently dead Mr. Ramsey’s money she lived on now. Her legacy afforded her $850 a month, and she talked about living on a finite sum, of buying her clothes in thrift shops, pilfering sugar from restaurants, and of living with a general overall material pessimism that turned out to be justified—though $850 every month seemed like a more than adequate sum to me, Ann claimed that she never made it through a month with anything left over. “I haven’t eaten on the last day of a month since I moved here.” We talked about the prices of things, of shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue and then taking the bus down to the “Jewish Lower East Side” to see if she could find something similar, of sitting in the stratosphere in Carnegie Hall, and having to keep up her payments to Blue Cross. (I interjected that my father’s lover had been hospitalized for weeks and that I hated to think what her bills were, but Ann let it pass without a curious tilt of her head.) She talked about the price of typing paper, the price of ribbons, the cost of Xeroxing and postage, and I said I was glad she was writing again.
“I’m glad too,” she said. “I’ve gotten close to selling two of them to
The New Yorker.
They send a very sweet rejection letter. Full of encouragement and such. I would be encouraged, too, if they hadn’t grabbed what I sent them twenty-five years ago. It’s true what they say about early success: it
is
a jinx.”
“That’s a comfort to me, at least,” I said.
“One of the little quote unquote literary magazines printed a story of mine last month. But no money. Enough glory to stuff a hummingbird, but they didn’t even refund my postage.”
“Still,” I said, “it’s great to be published. What magazine? Do you have a copy? Let me see it.”
“No. I don’t want to. It’s not a very good magazine. I don’t know why I sent them a story. And it’s a terrible story. I did it all wrong. From now on, once
The New Yorker
turns a story down I’m going to either redo it or throw it away. They publish stories that are written the way I want to write.”
“I’d still like to read the story.”