Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

  Across the room, Ann was at Hugh’s side. He was trying to pull the curtains down and she held onto his shirt and said, “Not a good idea, Hugh.” Sammy was back in the house. He stumbled and fell to his knees; he began to right himself but it was too much effort. (Or did he know that close to the floor was the safest place to be during a fire? It was the sort of thing Sammy would know.) Looking up at his parents from his hands and knees, Sammy said, “You should see it. The whole house is burning.” Ann finally pulled Hugh away from the curtains—they barely existed anyhow: they were just a sheet of flame sending out more flame. There was fire on the walls now and, a moment later, fire on the ceiling.

  When the ceiling started to burn, Ann said, “I’m calling.” She said it in a fed-up voice, a put-upon citizen forced to call in the officials. But she made no move toward the telephone in the kitchen, even though the kitchen was still free of fire. We all stayed together in the most perilous part of the house, knit together and nailed to our places by astonishment, and I was one of them.

  It seemed that that house longed to burn, just as a heart can long to be overcome with love. One moment I was saying to Jade, “Are you OK?” and the next one whole wall was covered in flame. Freely, wantonly the house yielded to the fire, donating its substance to eternity with the reckless passion of someone who’d been waiting for years for the proper suitor. If any of us were to that point still debating whether we were faced with a household mishap or an emergency, it was now certain that all previous bets were off and it was time to do what we could to save our lives.

  Sammy was on his feet. “We can’t go out the front. The porch is burning like crazy.”

  Ann was shaking her head. Annoyance had given way to grief—and a certain weariness that made me wonder if she wanted to save herself. She felt the lure of the fire, as someone on a high balcony will suddenly have a curious desire to jump off.

  Hugh was kneading the sides of his skull as if pacifying its contents. “Everyone stay together,” he said. “Hold hands.” (He repeated this two or three times.) “We go out the back door. And we stay together.”

  I took Jade’s hand. It felt like melting ice. She wouldn’t quite look at me but she gripped my hand with all her strength.

  “On the floor,” I said. “We’ll crawl out.” To my surprise, they listened to me. And then I knew: as out of control as I felt, I was the sanest person in the room.

  “I feel scared, I really feel scared,” Jade said.

  “We just have to keep our heads,” I said.

  “Oh my God,” said Hugh. “I knew we shouldn’t have. I can’t get it straight.” He dug his knuckles into his eyes.

  Sammy was on the floor, talking away to someone he imagined was next to him; he sounded perfectly in control of himself as he conversed with the apparition.

  “OK, I’m all right,” Hugh said. “I can feel myself getting all right.”

  Jade took my hand and pressed it against her breast. “Is my heart still going?” she asked in a whisper.

  “It’s incredible,” Ann said. “All we have to do is get out of here and we can’t.…” She made a short laugh.

  “Where’s Keith?” I cried.

  “He’s upstairs!” Jade said.

  We were on the floor; the room was more than half smoke, much more. I could barely see the staircase, and as I ran toward it my only hope was that by the second floor I’d find more clear space. A thousand other things must have been racing through my mind but the only one I remember was the hope that someone—Jade—would grab my leg and stop me from going up for Keith.

  I took the stairs two at a time and the smoke filled the air with deeper and more absolute authority. I felt the intensity of the heat but saw no flames—they were inside the walls and burning in toward us. Inasmuch as I could open my mouth, I called Keith’s name. On my hands and knees, I felt the heat coming up through the floor, so tangible that I thought it might actually lift me. Coughing, nauseated, I spit onto the floor. I was on the second story of the house now. Down at one end of the hall was the room where Jade and I had been sleeping for the past six months. At the other end was Ann and Hugh’s room, vast, cluttered, and open to all. In the center of the corridor, on the left, was the bathroom, and on the other side was Sammy’s small room. The door to Sammy’s room was closed and as I looked at it, it burst into flame.

  The stairway to the top floor was just past Sammy’s room, and through the layers of smoke, which were dyed by the color of the flames like fog tinted by headlights, I saw what looked like a moving figure. I called Keith’s name. I didn’t know if my voice could be heard; I could not hear it over the pounding of my blood and the sound of the fire. I crawled down the hall and tried not to think about dying—my thoughts were not brave but neither did I turn and run. The figure I’d seen had disappeared. I didn’t know if it had been obscured by new dark layers of smoke or if Keith had turned back. I wondered if he even knew that his house was on fire, knew that this danger was not illusion. I knew he must be high and no Butterfield was less likely to handle the shattering of his personality than Keith: Keith the sleepwalker, Keith the mystic, Keith the hyper. If some people’s intelligence is evidence of their mind’s strength and hunger, Keith’s genius was the product of his mind’s extreme vulnerability: everything touched him and left an impression. Any other time I would have thought that the Butterfields’ taking LSD together was simply further proof of their extraordinary openness, their willingness to become a part of their times and share in the risks of the current year. But as I thought of them stumbling aimlessly below me and looked for Keith through the sheets of darkening smoke, I judged them for that moment as harshly as I ever would. I was not remembering altogether that it was me who had started the fire.

  I forced myself toward the stairway to the third floor and Keith emerged again. His shirt was pulled over his face and he was coughing and weeping. I called out to him and he staggered toward me as if he’d been pushed from behind. My face was so hot I slapped at it, thinking in a panicky instant that my skin had caught fire.

  “Please,” moaned Keith. “I can’t see and I don’t know what to do.”

  I scuttled over to him. Keith had one arm over his eyes now and his long, thin legs bent at the knee. His other arm still reached out toward me—though I don’t know if he realized who I was. I grabbed his hand and tried to pull him down to the floor; he stiffened as if I’d shot him through with electricity.

  I shouted his name as loudly as I could and pulled again. He yanked loose of me and stepped back, like a spirit preparing to disappear into the ether.

  I struggled to my feet and reached out for him. He looked at me with a momentary flash of recognition.

  “Take my hand goddamnit,” I shouted. “Take it!”

  Keith stared at me and took another step back. I was terrified that at any instant he would burst into flames as Sammy’s door had, a human nova. I lunged for him and as I grabbed his shoulders I felt the strength leave his body. His legs buckled and he swooned into my arms. It was dead weight and I was not really equal to it. I staggered back but Keith kept coming; his forehead banged into me, his bony chest slumped against mine, and in a moment we were both on the smoking floor, he on top of me, and now my heart was wild, beating at an incredible rate as if to compensate for the eternity in which it would remain still.

  And then I heard someone pounding up the stairs. I turned my head to see Hugh rushing toward us. He was roaring Keith’s name. His ferocity was nearly as awesome as the fire; even through the smoke, his eyes shone with paranormal intensity. And though I knew that Hugh had come back to rescue Keith, as he came charging up the stairs I could not help but fear that he was coming after me—not to rescue me, of course, but to take my head between his strong capable hands and crush it. Like a madman, Hugh raised his arms above his head, breathed deeply through his clenched teeth, and brought his hands down on Keith’s back to lift him up as easily as if Keith were a sack of feathers.

  It
was the last thing I saw. Limply, with no more than instinct’s shadow, Keith tried to hold on to me as his father lifted him up, and with that faint plucking at my shirt I lost all consciousness. The world began to ooze away from me. The last thing I saw was Hugh looking down at me and then I felt his hand on my wrist. It wasn’t until he testified against me that I learned that Hugh had carried me down slung over his shoulder (with his arm around Keith, who sobbed and stumbled at Hugh’s side) and brought me outside, where the firemen were finally arriving, their sirens whooping and the red lights skittering through the trees. To his everlasting regret, Hugh had saved my life.

  I confessed it was me who’d started the fire while I was in the Jackson Park Hospital. (The Butterfields were being treated in the same hospital but I shared my room with strangers.) I told the first people I saw the next morning, which means that in the ambulance, the emergency room, and all through the night, while I drifted in and out of consciousness, I concealed that central fact. But when “I woke the next morning to find my parents sitting in folding chairs—Rose with her legs crossed and her fingers drumming on her patent leather purse, and Arthur with his large head bowed and needlepoint drops of perspiration in the bands of scalp that divided his thinning hair—I cleared my throat and said, “I started the fire.”

  They both sat up and looked at each other, and then Rose leaned forward, pursing her small full lips and shaking her head. “Shut up,” she whispered, and she glanced with conspiratorial panic at my two sleeping roommates. But I wasn’t about to leave myself open to the horrors of detection and from that moment began a process of confession, defense, and punishment that was to dominate my life for years.

  My father is what people call a “left-wing lawyer.” By 1967, both he and Rose had been separated from the Communist Party for fifteen years, but he was still a left-wing lawyer—meaning that he would never defend a rich man against a poor man and he didn’t charge his clients fancy fees. Arthur aged faster than he should have from the long hours he put in at work. He often stayed in his office until midnight and once—this was a story Rose liked to tell about him—the lightbulb in his desk lamp popped and went black and Arthur continued to sit there in his feeble, whinnying swivel chair writing down on his long yellow legal pad an inspired line of inquiry he wanted to pursue in an accident case. He was afraid that if he got up to switch on the overhead light, he might lose the rhythm. The next day, checking over his notes—now if this were a joke, they’d have been nonsense or illegible, but the three pages of blindly transcribed ideas were perfectly readable and absolutely essential to the case. It wasn’t something as bloodless as addiction to work that made Arthur put his whole heart into every case: Arthur truly longed to defend the weak against the strong. He wanted this more than money, more than glory, more than comfort. Sometimes his passion to save his clients destroyed him in court. He often grew angry and his voice would crack like an adolescent’s if he sensed a case slipping away from him.

  Arthur wanted to handle my case, just as a surgeon would need to perform a vital operation on a loved one. But this was clearly out of the question: with the charge of arson and reckless endangerment wrapped around me like a hideous ceremonial robe, I certainly needed someone more plausible to plead my defense than my own father. Arthur had done his share of favors, and when it became clear that the full complexity of wrongdoing was to be mine to untangle, two of his friends stepped forward and offered to take my case for free—Ted Bowen, whom I’d known all my life, and Martin Samuelson, who was treated by my parents as a transcendent hero of intelligence and nerve, a dialectician extraordinaire, a man who could quote Engels with the same lyrical brilliance as he could cite Hugo Black and whom my parents, in a holdover from their Party days, considered more important than they themselves, so that his interest in my case was greeted with stunned gratitude.

  Briefly, the sequence of events was this. I was arrested in the hospital and placed, without hearing, in a juvenile detention center on the West Side. There was a great deal of haggling between the police, the district attorney’s office, and my lawyers over what my legal status was: the question was if I would stand trial as an adult or be treated as a juvenile offender. I was seventeen and Martin Samuelson—this was his major effort; he soon wearied of the case and he especially grew tired of me—was successful in defining me as a juvenile so my fate would be decided not before a jury but in judge’s chambers. By now, I was out of the juvenile detention center and undergoing a marathon sequence of psychological examinations—they seemed to be a mixture of Scholastic Aptitude Tests and the kind of baffling, embarrassing questions a cornball pervert might ask a child in a schoolyard. I gave my impressions of inkblots, added columns of three-digit numbers, identified pictures of Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy, and answered True or False to questions like: “I feel I go to the bathroom more than other people.” I went through this process of psychological testing twice, the first time at the hands of a court-appointed psychologist. Then Ted Bowen arranged that I’d be retested by a private psychologist. This was Dr. White, a gentle old man with conjunctivitis. (Dr. White was the first doctor I’d ever been to who wasn’t a personal and political friend of my parents: the Party created its share of internists and dentists but few psychiatrists.)

  All the while, I was in my parents’ custody. It was the autumn I was to begin college. A few months before, I’d been accepted by the University of California, but since Jade was still in high school and bound to stay in Chicago, I had switched my choice to Roosevelt University, which was hardly a place to study astronomy but was in downtown Chicago. It didn’t matter any longer; I wasn’t going anywhere. I was told by the police, the psychologists, the lawyers, and my parents that I wasn’t under any circumstances to even try to make contact with Jade or any of the other Butterfields. At the outset, this wasn’t a difficult rule to follow. I was incapable of even imagining what it would have been to see them after what had happened. I had no illusions of their sudden compassion or their willingness to see through the act I’d committed to the innocent, lovesick spirit that had triggered it. I could not stop hoping that Jade would contact me, but she didn’t, even though it would not have been that complicated to do so.

  One day I forced myself to walk past the house in which I’d lived so deliriously and which I’d set on fire nearly causing the death of five people. The police had tied a cord from one iron porch banister to the other and from the center of the rope hung a printed sign warning people to keep away. Astonishingly, the house still stood and aside from the broken windows seemed unchanged—except it was no longer brown and white but a deep fuzzy black. The porch was gone, the wizard-cap peak of the attic was half collapsed, but other than that the Butterfields’ was structurally intact. At first, it was a relief to see this, as if it might help me begin to fill the immense emptiness that I’d created within myself that August night. But that relief was more wished for than felt, just as the wish to see a departed lover will trick you into seeing her on the street. In fact, it was a thousand times more painful that the house still stood—for it stood not as a reprieve from absolute loss but as an accusation. I was, I knew then, a member of a vast network of condemned men and women: romance had taken a wrong turn within me and led me into mayhem. I was no better than dialers of anonymous phone calls, hounders, berserk pests, ear severers, committers of flamboyant, accusatory suicides, hirers of private detectives, or a medieval king ready to deploy an army of ten thousand souls in order to gain the favor of a distant maiden—and when the fields are scorched and the bodies lie in heaps beneath the sun, the king will clutch his breast and say: I did it all for love. The relief was gone and I stared at the house and wept—though I hardly knew I was weeping because I’d done little else but weep since the day after the fire, as I suppose anybody in their right mind would.

  Of course, the question of whether or not I was in my right mind was central to my fate. Though my lawyers, like my parents, viewed psychiatry as a kind of high-price
d astrology, their dedication to my cause led them to discuss my circumstances as if I was totally victimized by the irrational navigation of my unconscious.

  My mother, however, whether out of guilt or rancor, wanted my defense based on the fact that the Butterfields were strange people and as such deserved to have terrible things happen to them. As Rose’s theory went, the Butterfields could no sooner hold me responsible for what had happened that night than a host who makes a guest falling-down drunk can hold that person responsible for a piece of broken china. The Butterfieldian milieu had been my downfall, according to Rose. This included Jade’s prescription for Enovid, and the fact that when I began spending nights in that house it was decided that Jade wasn’t getting her sleep and (in an appallingly democratic family meeting) this was solved by getting us a double bed, a used bed from the Salvation Army which we sprayed for bugs and drenched in Chanel No. 5, a bed with rollers on its legs and that moved from the east wall to the west when we made love. Rose would have given anything to prove that the Butterfields were “on dope” the night of the fire, but I never said a word about it.

  My mother was prepared to subpoena half of Hyde Park to testify against the Butterfields. I tried to mock her out of this idea but I think I knew even then that there were hundreds of people who found Hugh and Ann unsavory. Ann herself told me this. Once, taking a casual stab at ordering her unraveling life through religion, Ann attended services at a nearby Unitarian church. Though the adults in the congregation were strangers to her, she said she could feel their eyes on her when she entered and heard them whispering about her. “Distinctly,” said Ann, “I heard them distinctly. I’m not the sort who imagines things like that. There’s no profit in my believing such a thing. But I heard it quite clearly.” I told her she must have been stoned or having a reaction to Unitarianism and the foolishness of religion (I was the household’s official radical, so I could say such things). But Ann was probably right; even though she didn’t know those Unitarians, they knew her and they were judging her. They were the parents of kids who’d used the Butterfield house as a hangout, who’d run away from home and slept on the Butterfields’ couch or in the back yard, or who had learned how to smoke and say coitus interruptus at the Butterfields’. Or perhaps they were the neighbors who had seen the lights blazing in that lovely house, burning through the summer nights and mellowing into the dawn—to this day I cannot see electric light easing into the fresh day without feeling I am standing in front of the Butterfields’, gliding home after making love. And when Mrs. Who- Ha came collecting for the March of Dimes and saw Ann flat on her back listening to Tibetan ritual music, with a big square candle burning in the middle of the day—oh boy, did that get around. Everything did. The fact that Hugh and Ann had gone to Ivy League schools and had come from what we call “good families,” carried, as it turned out, a lot more weight with me, the son of lifelong Communists, than it did with anyone else. I thought that Hugh and Ann’s inherent respectability, their lean bodies and strong bones, their straight teeth, straight hair, and the incurably upper-class ping of their voices would protect them from a lot more unwholesome gossip than it did. In fact, though they had very little money, their “breeding” may have left the Butterfields open to an unkinder scrutiny than they might ordinarily have had to endure.