“You don’t have to prove how much you hate me,” I said.
“The reason we couldn’t find Jade is she’s with Susan right now. Camping trip. They love camping trips. They like doing it outside. They do all that woodsy stuff—camping, canoeing, twenty-mile hikes.” Keith smiled, a disassociated grin, deliberately unreal.
I was standing over him now. I reached down, grabbed his shoulders, and with one motion literally lifted him out of bed.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said, holding him, with my face an inch from his. “You really don’t. If you hate me so much you shouldn’t have let your mother ask me over.”
Keith shook loose of my grip and pushed me back with his hard, blunt fingertips. “I said it was all right,” he said, showing his small, squared teeth, “only because Mom wants you. Mom needs to believe in some kind of life outside of the family, even though she knows there isn’t any.” His face flushed red again and he closed his eyes for a moment. If he had lost his composure, broken down and wept, then I would have put my arms around him…
“Keith,” I said. My mouth was dry and filled with a strong, arid taste. “I like you,” I said. “I don’t suppose it’s what you want to hear, but I liked you from the start, when we met, and whenever I think about you, which is a lot, I think…I just like you and respect…And I feel horrible about your father, about Hugh.” I stopped; I was starting to tremble. I could feel my emotions toppling out of me.
“It was me you wanted to kill, wasn’t it?” he said, softly. “When you set the fire, it was me. And I know why.”
“That’s not true. You know—”
“Because I knew you for what you were.” He drew himself up. “I don’t want to talk about it. What you did. Ruined everything. I don’t…My father is
dead.”
“Keith—”
“Don’t say my name!” he said, his voice rising. “None of this would be happening if it wasn’t…” He closed his eyes, tightly, and swung out. My arm went up to deflect his blow. He swung again and missed, but scratched the side of my face. He tried to hit me again but I caught his wrist and held it.
“Don’t touch me. Keep your hands off me, you fucking dirty creep.” He pulled away from me, but in fear I held on to him. “Let me
go.”
He swung at me with his free arm and I let him go. He put his hand on my shoulder and moved me aside. Then he walked by me, brushing into me with his shoulder, and headed back into the front of the apartment.
I waited in Ann’s room for a minute or so, not knowing what to do. Finally, I decided there were really no more decisions to be made: for good or for ill, I belonged with the others.
Ann sat next to Sammy on the sofa, her legs curled, holding him with both arms and resting her head on his shoulder. Ingrid was standing above them, trembling so terribly that the ice chattered in her glass and the carbonated water worked itself into a foam. She was glaring at Ann, and Ann was doing her best to pay no attention; it was Sammy who looked back at Ingrid, fastening his eyes on her with a kind of piercing incredulity.
“All right, all right,” Robert was saying, holding up his huge hands with ceremonial patience. “This is no way to carry on. For Hugh’s sake. Hugh, my God, he was a peaceful man. He’d be scandalized to hear us snarling at each other.” He glanced at his son and then gathered him in, draping his arm around him and holding him close. When Robert kissed his son’s hair, they both momentarily closed their eyes.
“It’s five o’clock,” Keith said, holding up his watch. “Pap’s ashes now. It’s all done.”
“Thank you very much,” said Ingrid’s sister. “We would have perished without the information.” She sensed sides were being drawn up and she wanted to assure Ingrid of her support.
Robert unbuttoned his green and white seersucker jacket. His chest was massive and there were ellipses of sweat on his jacket. He took a folded sheet of air-mail paper out of his inside pocket. He handed his drink to his son and Hugh strode over to the table to place it down, clearly pleased to be serving his father.
“What’s this?” asked Ingrid. “A will?”
“No,” said Robert. “It’s not. This is a letter from our Hugh. He sent it to us a little more than a year ago.” He unfolded it; it was typed in blue. “I took it along. It’s a rare thing, a letter from Hugh.” Robert looked down at the letter and smiled, as if he saw Hugh’s face looking out from it.
“Read it to us, Uncle Bob,” Sammy said.
“I thought I would pass it around.”
“No. Read it to us.”
“God. Then I suppose it’ll be time to drag out the old pictures, too,” said Ann. She didn’t sound displeased.
“I wish I could do this in Hugh’s voice,” said Robert. “It was his voice that made everything so special.” He looked at Sammy and nodded. “Like yours.”
“Read it, Uncle Bob.”
“‘Dear Bobbo.’” Robert stopped, looked up at Ingrid. “That’s my family name,” he said. He wiped sweat from his forehead and squinted uncertainly at the page, as if it had suddenly become less legible. “‘By now you’ve heard about the divorce and you’ve had a chance to get used to it. I feel like Cousin Derek, the time he wrecked Granddaddy’s Packard and simply moved to Charlotte for a year. Sometimes a man has got to lay low. I remember about eight years ago you and I were having a crayfish pig-out in that little place with the folding chairs right on the Ponchatrain, and you were carrying on a little about Billy Corona because he’d just walked out on Alison and you said something to the effect of what kind of shitass would leave a wife of a decade and a half and I shook my head and clucked like an old gossip on a verandah—say, the summer of ’38 with the trees in full bloom and all our values intact. Do you know what I mean? Those times in our life when everything is simple. And now here I am, doing Billy Corona one better because he left with only two children and I’m leaving three. Fairly grown children, I would say, and they’ve got more of an idea what they’d like to do with their lives than their poor old father has. Gosh, here we are, as always, in our baggy olive shorts and strawberry preserves sticking to the webs of our fingers, and calling ourselves poor old father, registered Republican. It seems so damned unlikely, doesn’t it?’” Robert’s voice broke and he turned the page over. His face was growing darker, a deep orderly flush that began at his neck and moved up, filling his face with color like wine in a glass.
“It’s
so
Hugh,” said Ann.
“I have a letter Pap sent me,” Sammy said. “I should have brought it.”
“I have poems, a hundred things,” said Ingrid. She covered her eyes, in grief and perhaps, in part, in shame: she had no choice but to angle for her rightful position, yet it humiliated her.
I was standing with my back to the wall, holding a glass of whiskey and soda. My legs ached and with everyone in that room weaving on the brink, I was terrified that my own tears would break free first. The sight of each face seemed to light another fuse that went leaping and hissing toward the impacted, volatile center of my consciousness: each sorrow was separate and unbearably specific, but each was finding its way to that part of me that was ready to detonate. Robert was going on with Hugh’s letter.
“‘What you heads of unbroken families don’t realize is how we wandering fathers love our children,’” Robert read, and I could tell from the way he nodded that he wanted to look at Sammy and Keith to make sure they’d heard that line, but he resisted. Then he read something else, but I don’t know what. I heard Robert’s voice as a dull, wordless murmur and I stared at his open, suffering face with an utterly improper fixity: I simply poured my attentions into the overwhelming reality of his large brown eyes, his dry grayish hair, his closely shaved, slightly jowly cheeks, and his massive chin.
Robert was committed to keeping the peace in the wake of death. He had stepped between Ann and Ingrid and had probably intervened in peace’s behalf when the squabble began about my arrival. He believed in the alchemy that turned all passions into sorrow—all jealousy, all rage, all sickness and fear transformed and laid at the silent altar of the dead. For now, he would not interrupt the rhythms of mourning to express his feeling about me: such emotions were mere luxuries of the living, and to parade them now would violate all the decorum proper to survivors. It would be later for me. Then I would feel the heavy hand on my shoulder, see the steel woven into the wool of Robert’s soft brown eyes. Later, he would judge me as Hugh would have; later, I would be put painfully in my place, accused, and disposed of.
I turned away from Robert and looked at Ingrid: she was sobbing openly now and looking back at me, her eyes puzzled behind the tears. I was certain that the memory of me standing not ten feet from Hugh was stirring within her, straining to become articulate, like those voices some people claim to hear at a séance: the windows of memory rattle, the curtains blow, the table shakes, but no one is there. She cocked her head and parted her full, colorless lips. There was disapproval in her stare and for a moment I was sure that the first layer of her memory of me had come into focus, but then I realized she was asking me to take my eyes off of her, to give her her sorrow in the artificial privacy of averted eyes. I shifted my gaze to Ingrid’s sister, a large-boned, heavy-set woman in a shapeless gray dress, dark stockings, and shiny black shoes.
It was at that moment that Keith, sitting perhaps twenty feet from where I stood, threw his tall, fragile glass at me. I don’t know if he meant to hit me or terrify me, or even if he’d considered anything at all, but the glass exploded against the wall, a foot, or perhaps even less, from my head. I thought it was glass spraying into my face but there were no cuts so I suppose it was only crushed ice. The clear base on the glass came to rest on my shoulder and later I found chunks of glass in my shirt pocket. It took a long moment to realize what had happened. I heard the crash and even had a shadowy, peripheral vision of Keith sitting forward and letting the glass fly. But it took a moment to understand that it all had to do with me. I felt the spray of liquor on my hair, my face, my shirt, and noticed, as dimly as a film projected on a black cloth, that everyone was looking at me. Robert stopped reading and Nancy clutched Ingrid’s shoulder as both of them gasped. I covered my face, finally, and turned away, stooping and shaking my head.
“Oh, Keith,” said Ann. “Keith.” Her voice sounded exhausted, more hurt than disapproving.
“He’s out! He is out of here!” Keith was shouting. I turned to face him, shaking my hands to get the moisture off of them, still half crouched as if to ward off subsequent blows. Keith was standing up and panting like a racehorse. It was awesome to see the passion and intensity of his respiration. His ribcage moved up and down like enormous wings and I don’t think I was the only one wondering what I would do if Keith suddenly keeled over. “I can’t feel anything with him here. It’s only him back again to do more harm. Jesus, it is incredible. He can’t stay. He’s out.” And then, pointing at me, he repeated: “Out, out.”
I looked at Ann. “I’ll go,” I said.
“Out, out,” said Keith. “Out, out, out.”
“Shut up,” said Sammy. He grabbed for Keith’s arm but when he missed, he didn’t try a second time.
Ann covered her eyes and shook her head. Don’t leave? Don’t stay?
“I’ll leave,” I said, as much to myself as to Keith.
I looked around the room; no one quite dared to return my gaze. I nodded, stupidly trying to act normal. In a feverish blur I saw that Keith had picked up another glass from the table and then it was sailing toward me, slowly, horizontally, the ice and whiskey cascading out, the glass capturing the lamplight. This time it collided with the wall a good distance from me. A hanging curtain of moisture appeared on the white wall. I stepped forward and crushed a large piece of glass beneath my foot; the shards scratched against the wooden floor and made a miserable, tearing noise. I covered my face—I thought I’d seen yet another glass flying at me, but Keith was standing still, his hands slightly in front of him, holding them as if I might attack him.
I turned quickly and walked down the long hall and let myself out. No one, of course, called to stop me. I closed the door behind me but the latch didn’t catch and it remained ajar. I didn’t dare wait for the elevator and I found the stairs in the center of the floor. I ran down a couple of flights and then had to sit down because I found that my legs weren’t really responding to me anymore. It felt as if a cluster of nerves had been severed, and I sat on the marble steps and pinched at my calves and pounded my knees for quite some time before any feeling came back.
As I left Ann’s building a taxi cab was pulling up. Its tires whined against the curb and the next thing I remember is the back door opening and Jade standing in front of me. She was larger, though not very much. Her long hair was gone. Now she had a short, athletic cut, perfectly straight, parted in the center and combed to the sides, shored off from the wind by a dark blue plastic headband. She wore a yellow blouse, opened two buttons worth at the top. Her neck was creased, three deep grooves, and then a small gold chain. Khaki pants, high-waisted and billowing. A black overnight bag, nylon. She was tan, tanned all over. Staring at me.
The cab pulled away. Jade took one step forward. Her lips parted and then came tightly together. I came slowly forward, and when I stopped, the points of my shoes were practically touching hers.
“Mom told me you were here,” Jade said.
“I am. I’m here.” And then I placed my hands on her shoulders and drew her close to me. I could feel the stutter of her resistance but it was faint. I put my arms around her, and just as I’d imagined ten thousand times, I embraced her. I wondered—fleetingly—if I was forcing myself on her. I felt her breasts against me, smelled the brilliance of her perfumes, immortalized the architecture of her bones. She rested her hands on my arms. Did not return my embrace. Did not push me away.
I held her for as long as I dared, and when I let her go I didn’t look at her because I knew she didn’t want me to. I faced straight ahead and listened first to her breathing, then to that ruminative silence as she struggled for one simple thing to say, and finally to the soft, jittery click of her footsteps as she walked toward the door to Ann’s building. I didn’t move until she was gone and then I still resisted turning around. I walked at full speed, squeezing my hands and talking to myself, running, stopping, walking again, and finally just sitting on the corner of 29th and Park, on the sidewalk with my back against a mailbox, waiting.