River Under the Road
Page 1
Dedication
To Peter Hutton (1943–2016)
Rama, your shadow still falls across the table
Epigraph
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. . . .
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
I found a river under the road.
—ANA EGGE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1: The Farewell Brunch
Chapter 2: French Style
Chapter 3: Lessons Learned
Chapter 4: Potluck on Turquoise Court
Chapter 5: Wedding in White
Chapter 6: Lights in the Trees
Chapter 7: Stained Glass
Chapter 8: The Rabbit and the Jewel
Chapter 9: Raising Money for a Lost Cause
Chapter 10: Sightlines
Chapter 11: Mimosa Sunday
Chapter 12: What Was Buried
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Scott Spencer
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
The Farewell Brunch
SUNDAY, AUGUST 29, 1976
* * *
You’re Invited!
Come for a real New York Brunch at our house and say Adios Au Revoir Arrivederci Sayonara
to our son—and to Hell with RSVP.
Just Be There.
* * *
THADDEUS SUSPECTED HIS PARENTS WERE DISAPPOINTED he wasn’t going further with his education, but he was wrong. Sam and Libby never for a moment thought Thaddeus was going to get a graduate degree, though law school would not have been out of the question. But the life of a scholar? Professor Kaufman? It was not how they saw him. He was charming, he loved fun, pleasure, jokes; he was not the boy of their dreams. In truth, love him as they did, had he not been flesh of their flesh, he was not someone with whom they would ordinarily have been close. Not to mention his mushy liberal politics, his unscientific, unsocialist belief that out of the goodness of their hearts people might share and share alike, live and let live. He was a moderate. A prospector forever on the lookout for common ground. Weeks ago, during the bicentennial patriotic orgy, people his age were insisting that America acknowledge its deficiencies—stop the war, end poverty, own up to epic political corruption—while Thaddeus and his girlfriend spent most of the day in bed, rising only to try their hands at baking a red white and blue layer cake that succeeded solely in bespattering the immaculate Kaufman kitchen.
“Here’s what I believe,” he had the nerve to tell them, when he had overheard them debating various theories of history. Maybe he was drunk, or high—they suspected he indulged in his generation’s rather contemptible distractions. He was draped over the brown sofa. His girlfriend had slipped past them, down the main hallway and into his bedroom. “The whole purpose of history or progress or whatever we want to call it is to create conditions in which people can love each other, and enjoy life. Pleasure is the most we can ever hope for. It’s what makes us human. And love, too. Love is the ultimate pleasure. It’s the milk and honey of the emotions!”
“Oh please,” Libby had said. “Milk and honey my foot. You sound like an idiot.”
“It’s what I believe,” he said, with a lazy grin that struck Libby as distinctly postcoital.
Maybe he was a bit of a fool. They worried over that possibility. As a child there were nights when he literally danced before them, his little feet scraping at the floor, his arms making blurry circles before him. His model was Sammy Davis Jr. Their model might have been any president carved in stone. Sammy Plays Mount Rushmore! They would sit on the sofa, letting him sing and dance, their shoulders back, their chins held high, like Resistance fighters about to be executed. They always clapped too soon, before the finale, which would find him on one knee, his arms outspread. And the jokes! Where did he find them? Did he make them up? Shaggy dogs, guys walking into bars, the talking baby. When he was eleven, Libby found a book hidden under his mattress—The Toastmaster’s Guide to Laffs—and, her heart racing, her mouth a rictus of revulsion, she carried it to the trash can and disposed of it as if it were the vilest sort of pornography.
And now New York, thus the good-bye brunch they were getting ready to host, in their long, dark apartment, with its preponderance of hallways, its heavy furniture, sagging bookshelves, and murky purple-and-blue Persian carpets.
In a few days, Thaddeus would be gone and they would be alone together. It was not a prospect they dreaded. They would be returned to their original state, living one-on-one, just the two of them. They imagined noontime lovemaking, a luxurious privacy, never ever to be interrupted. Sam talked about learning French. Libby planned to buy a piano.
Not that he would be unmissed. He was their son! And he was good at the shop, a pleasant-looking kid, nice build, square shoulders, black hair, blue eyes, an open face. He had a ruddy, Russian look to him, according to Sam; to Libby he looked like the suitor in a silent movie. But he liked the customers and the customers manifestly enjoyed his genuine friendliness, his interest in them, his warmth, his desire to make them laugh. He remembered so many of their names, a feat that was amazing and a little weird, like double-jointedness. He gazed admiringly at the books the customers chose before bagging them. He flirted with the loveless. He joshed with the infirm. He listened with what seemed like rapt attention to the garrulous. He made calls to other shops if someone couldn’t find what they needed at Four Freedoms. He made room on the obligatory bulletin board for the flyers and index cards that people wanted to post, announcing upcoming madrigal concerts or dining room sets for sale. He played with their dogs, slipped pennies or nickels to their children. “That boy of yours could charm the birds out of the trees,” a professor said to Libby one day in late July. By then she had heard so much commentary about her son’s gregarious, people-pleasing, hail-fellow-well-met personality that her own basically contentious nature sprang to the fore and while she was writing up his sales receipt—Carl Sandburg’s two-volume biography of Lincoln—she somehow added an extra dollar to the total.
“I like my birds in the trees,” she replied, handing him his change.
IN COLLEGE, IT HAD STRUCK Thaddeus as odd and sort of tacky how many people leading comfortable, privileged lives went after their parents with hammer and tongs, swapping late-night stories of idiocy and abuse, portraying the people who gave them life as tax cheats, hypocrites, dumbbells, racists, penny-pinchers, sloppy kissers, warmongers, anal-retentives, or emotional zeros who thought only weaklings cried (his own parents). Maybe his friends had a right to their bellyaching, but that sort of score-settling was not his way, and besides, what would be the absolute worst thing he could say? That Sam and Libby Kaufman made him sad? That there was a stultifying aura of self-denial in their household? That they steadfastly refused to laugh at his jokes? Not his riddles or knock-knock jokes, nor his Jerry Lewis imitations, not even his Lenny Bruce riffs, which he performed for them verbatim until he finally knew better. So his parents were a bit of a drag, yet he simply did not have the heart to criticize them. Especially since he knew their lives had been damaged, horribly damaged, perhaps ruined. He could feel what they felt, he could all but see the hole that had been bored into the center of their world. Misfortune had slapped the smiles off their faces, shortened their tempers, and fostered in them a resentment of everyday life that was as hard as granite, yet weightless and unacknowledged.
They had a baby and the baby died. A fairy tale composed in the foulest pit of hell: the baby died and they lived unhappily ever after. That’s why picnics were a pain in the ass, that’s why fashion was for suckers
, that’s why dancing was for fools, and comedy was for idiots.
Life was endured, like a spanking or a blood test.
It had taken Thaddeus six years to finish college. Actually six and a half—he graduated after summer school and received his diploma in the mail, then stayed in Ann Arbor and worked in a record store and on a novel. He took records home from work and taught himself to appreciate genres that were new to him—opera, bluegrass. More to enjoy! Writing was a kind of torment, but he reassured himself that one day it would bring him pleasure. It would not necessarily make him rich, but there were other rewards—pride, praise. An amazing woman who might think he was a genius.
His return to Chicago was really a first stop—his destination was New York. But first he had to save some money. He moved back home to work at his parents’ bookshop, and did not kid himself into believing they were thrilled to have him in their apartment. They were hospitable in a “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” kind of way. Sam and Libby Kaufman did in fact love Thaddeus to the best of their ability, and as to their needs—well, identifying their needs was a bit trickier. They needed him to be pleasant and courteous and clean and it was the least he could do. They needed him to never mention his sister. And they needed him not to make too many emotional demands on them. From time to time, he wished they would love him a bit more, but their hearts were not whole, so how could he expect them to love him wholeheartedly?
The baby. There was no getting away from the baby. Hannah died when she was five months old, swiftly, horribly. Sam and Libby didn’t believe in God, but they had believed in nature, in its logic, its evolutionary journey toward perfection. But this? This was the worst of nature, the very worst. Mother Nature was a filthy beast. Their child. Their baby. Her little body overwhelmed by pneumonia—how not to imagine the bacteria raging through the fourteen pounds of her like an invading army, burning everything in its path? What was the purpose of pneumonia, anyhow? What earthly good did it do? And if it served no purpose and did no good—why did it exist? They were rational people, not scientists but scientific. They accepted disease and death, and they saw the benefits of mortality. It was how the world progressed. Our bodies, like the bodies of monkeys and snails and everything else that lived and died, were the fuel that ran the great engines of evolution. But a baby?
His parents were versed in history, classical music, radical politics. Perhaps if Leon Trotsky had written a pamphlet about infant care they would have known more about that particular field of study, but he hadn’t and they didn’t. Though Hannah was their second child, they didn’t know very much about infants and their delicacy—their firstborn had been sturdy and easygoing, he slept through the night, ate happily, never was sick. They didn’t realize how lucky they were, and how untested. By the time they realized that Hannah was in the clutches of an infection that she was powerless to fight, and they had stopped trying to bring her fever down with lukewarm baths, stopped chewing up baby aspirins and drooling them down her little throat, and stopped waiting for the pediatrician to return their increasingly distraught phone calls, when they finally had to admit that there was nothing more they could do but take her to nearby University of Chicago Hospitals, leaving their son asleep in his bed, it was already too late. By then Hannah’s temperature was nearly 106 degrees. Perhaps out of pity, Dr. Shuster told them that even if they had gotten her to the hospital sooner she would most likely not have survived.
When they returned many hours later, empty and hollow, they found Thaddeus on the sofa with a spoon and a jar of peanut butter, wearing underpants and socks, chortling at some unspeakable drivel on the TV set. He loved peanut butter and it was a treat to have unsupervised access to the TV. Over the years, there was some disagreement as to what Thaddeus was watching when they returned. Sam’s version had Thaddeus watching an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, shockingly racist, with an ignorant depiction of the cleaning woman in Tom’s house shrieking at the sight of Jerry, her polka-dotted bloomers exposed and a pair of dice and a straight razor falling out of her apron. As Libby had it, the boy was watching either a rerun of Leave It to Beaver, or Make Room for Daddy, or some other nauseating idealization of family life—she couldn’t tell the difference between any of those shows. But they both remembered he was there nearly naked and completely content with a tablespoon and a jar of Ann Page, a fat little Buddha with a beatific smile. They might have embraced him; he was all that stood between them and the abyss. But they couldn’t, they didn’t. He looked so happy. Madness to think so, and completely unfair, but neither stricken parent could escape the feeling that there was something wrong with a boy who could be feeding his face and laughing at the idiot box while his sister died.
Of course they never said as much, not to each other, and certainly not to him. Some things don’t have to be said.
THE FAREWELL BRUNCH WAS CONVENED at the end of August, on one of those scorching late-summer days in Chicago when the sun felt as if it were trying to force itself into the apartment, a burglar made of flame. An old air conditioner croaked and rumbled in one of the Kaufmans’ windows. The curtains were tied in a loose knot chilled and resting atop the Amana like a chignon, allowing the refrigerated air to enter the room, if only it would. The people in attendance were basically Libby and Sam’s friends, with whom they had shared their socialist past and with whom they now shared a sense of proud internal exile. To Thaddeus, they were honorary aunts and uncles.
Not everyone who had been invited was in attendance. Sam and Libby had had the idea that the occasion of their son’s going-away party might also be an occasion on which old wounds might be healed, or at least soothed. They had hoped to see their old comrade Doris Washington, but she had married a dentist who, while not Nation of Islam himself, took care of Elijah Muhammad, and now Doris was basically Black Nationalist and had cut herself off from the Kaufmans, and, they assumed, her other Caucasian friends. Also absent were Sy and Linda Cohen, who had begun their rightward drift during the Vietnam War and were now great friends of Charles Percy. The Kaufmans considered Senator Percy a country-club jerk, but the Cohens seemed eager to ingratiate themselves with their new Republican pals, and it seemed to have paid off for them—they were planning a move to D.C., where their long-standing anti-Stalinism would presumably be put to good use in one of the new think tanks. An invitation had been sent to Mario Esposito, who’d once had the nerve to fight for leftist principles in the Teamsters Union, but who now heard voices and lived with his daughter, and apparently never left her little town house in Jeffrey Manor. Pierpont Davis, Lucy Medoff, Bob and Kathy Brown, James Komatsu and his unacknowledged lover Allen Watanabe, Cal Harrington, and a half dozen others with whom Sam and Libby had shared so many meals, so many picket lines, so many late nights redolent of Chesterfields and mimeo ink, and who had either drifted away, driven by the steady wind of political defeat, or had stormed away, propelled by irreconcilable differences of theory and practice. Vietnam, Black Power, the rise of Women’s Lib, the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, the outrageous behavior of the new student rebels with their drugs and sexual obsessions, all of these things not only ended socialism as the Kaufmans understood it, but drained the vitality from their social life as well. And as the hour of the good-bye brunch approached and it was clear to them that Thaddeus’s moving to New York was not going to be the momentous occasion that would bring the old bunch back together again, Libby and Sam carried chairs away from the dining table and then pulled the table open and removed not one but two of the leaves.
Nevertheless. Here were the Mendelsohns, both leaning forward on their canes like old, smiling vaudevillians waiting for applause. Margie Mendelsohn, who always sang “We’re Here Because We’re Here” when she entered your house, had translated Being and Nothingness into Yiddish, and Herman, who, though somewhat serious about his Judaism, played organ at the Rockefeller Chapel. Here was Len Wasserman, recently forced out of his position in the economics department at the
University of Chicago and now writing a book about Keynes, with his white crew cut and aviator glasses, ferociously fit like Jack LaLanne. Mrs. Thomas was there, their formerly Negro and now Afro-American housekeeper, whose first name might have been Margaret, though none of the Kaufmans had ever used it, considering it condescending to call her anything but Mrs. Thomas. They liked to think of her as a kind of family member, though now that she was here on a Sunday it did occur to Sam that Mrs. Thomas might rather not have been invited to the farewell brunch. She was in her fifties and was there with Mr. Thomas, who worked in an underground parking garage in the Loop, and whose face was speckled, losing its pigment to vitiligo. And here was Stanley Davidson, freelance book reviewer and free-spending customer at Four Freedoms. Rounding out the party were the Gomezes, a relatively young Mexican couple dressed for a dance recital scheduled for later in the day, she in a festive skirt with a multitude of brightly colored hems, he in trousers whose legs were three times broader than his own, both in shiny shoes with Cuban heels.
And then there was Grace Cornell, the twenty-one-year-old girl from the neighborhood who Sam and Libby thought of as Thaddeus’s Summer Girl. Because he always had someone. He was always in love, or so it seemed to them. The Summer Girl was by all indications friendless. Always a bad sign, in Libby’s view. She lived a few blocks away, which was the only logical explanation the elder Kaufmans had for her place in their son’s life. As they saw her, Grace was neither beautiful, nor in possession of any special personal qualities. She was not witty or quick, and her politics, if they existed at all, were at best those of the six o’clock news. Nevertheless, Thaddeus had formed a smoochy alliance with her. He gave her piggyback rides around the apartment, scrambled eggs and fried bacon for her, and would not allow her to wash a dish or scrub a pan. He tried to amuse her with funny walks, crazy faces, and barnyard noises, and when she deigned to laugh his face reddened with happiness. He was her tummler, for crying out loud.