“His children?”
“You know they’re not his. Why do you join with him against me? I know you love him and not me, but don’t you understand that when he leaves here to join them he won’t have any time for you? He won’t have time. He’ll forget you just like he forgot me. You don’t have any idea what the world is like, do you? Here,” she said, handing the will to me, “you’re not going to find any answers in this. Or in any of these packs of lies,” she added, kicking at the envelopes on the rug.
That day and the next and through the days that followed, Rose made no further mention of Arthur’s other family. I waited for her to approach me again—to apologize, to clarify, to pull me a notch or two deeper into her sorrow. But her small, watchful face showed no trace of those raging moments in her bedroom and I came to see her as one of those patrons of a nightclub who are coaxed on stage, hypnotized, made to cluck like a hen and bay like a hound, and are then sent back to their table without a glimmer of remembrance. It astounded and offended me that she could turn her revelations into a needle in a haystack, but I must admit I was grateful, too. What would Rose be, freed of the bonds of her natural restraints? I feared her. Now, finding me sprawled in front of the TV, all she could do was comment on the stupidity of the shows. But wouldn’t it be just as likely that she’d wrap her small hard fingers around my arm and say, “You never respected the things I believed in. You blabbed family secrets to strangers. You’ve taken dope. You gave your heart to another family.”
Yet there must have been more than fear that caused me to join Rose in that conspiracy of silence, because I felt no temptation to speak to my father about his “other family.” On a certain level, I didn’t believe that any such hidden household existed and I was protecting Rose by keeping her ravings private. But if Arthur had a lover and was waiting for the best time to dismantle his life, it was his part to bring that news to me. I was not anxious to share the secrets of his starving heart. Though he had of course never told me his capacity for love had not been tapped, that it had remained curled within him, that it had been reabsorbed by his body and turned into belly, that the unused love had collapsed his arches and grayed his hair, that it had thickened his voice and swollen his knuckles, turned him into a quipster, a sigher, a snuffler at the movies, a tag-along and a drag-behind, I had always felt this to be true, and from the moment I had my first intimation of romance I mourned Arthur’s loss. I was eight or nine years old and the radio was playing Johnnie Ray singing: “If your sweetheart / Sends a letter / Of Goodbye /It’s no secret / You’ll feel better / If you cry.” Arthur put his paper down to listen for a moment and then he smiled at me. And I knew that even though the song was cheap and “made for a profit,” it meant something to my father, was taking him by surprise and laying its clammy hands on him. More than once, more than a thousand times, I had longed for my father to honor the unreasonable impulses of his love-soaked heart and break out into some high-flung adventure—to chase after the waitress whose walk he studied with such instinctual longing, to write a letter to Ava Gardner whose films he’d see three, four, sometimes five times over, to live the life of popular romance with picnics near the waterfall and long, spinning embraces. Once, in what turned out to be the middle of my time with Jade, I was in my bedroom, dreamily and pointlessly filling out applications to college, when Arthur drifted in. I looked up from my desk and saw his reflection in the night-backed window. “Hello,” I said. “Happy?” he asked. The question didn’t sound like it hid a trap and so I nodded. Arthur shook his head—my father, that is, my father shook his head—and he said, “I envy you.” I thought then as I was to think later: It was too late in his life for me to help and if I couldn’t help, then where was the profit in caring?
Saturday, seven days after my return, there was a little reception in my honor. Clearly, it had been Rose’s idea. She had been urging me all week to make contact with the people who had watched me grow up, who had written me birthday notes in Rockville and sent me presents, and who now wanted to enjoy the relief of my return. Rose, a loyal, principled friend, felt she owed her friends a glimpse of me, and I think she was domestically strategic enough to realize that a day with family and lifelong friends might have a sentimentally sobering effect on her husband, might fill Arthur’s winged heart with the baffling weight of the shared past. When I emerged from my bedroom that day—feeling as if this might be the day I would go out on my own, take a walk, buy a book, feeling, that is, more confident but holding that elusive confidence in my palm like the contents of a broken egg—Rose was already at the Co-Op buying food and Arthur, dressed in tan trousers and a sleeveless tee shirt, was pulling our old torpedo-shaped vacuum cleaner around the living room and scowling at the carpet. “We’re having the old bunch over,” he said above the roar of the vacuum. “Some fun, huh?” And he raised his eyebrows comically, inviting me to share an irony he refused to explain.
And oh my parents’ melancholy friends! Olga and Leo Greenbladt, Millicent Bell, Tom and Natalie Foster, Harold Stern, James Brunswick and whoever it was he happened to be married to, Connie Faust, Irene and Alberto Nicolosi. They were the people I’d known all my life, better, or at least with more constancy, than I knew my schoolmates or my scattered, distant relatives. If I had been married it would have been these people, my parents’ friends from the Communist Party, who would have sat grinning in the folding chairs at the nonreligious ceremony, and if I’d been struck dead it would have been their tired, slightly haunted eyes watching my ashes scatter in the wind. In the old days—old days for me, that is, but for them it was The End—I listened to their incomprehensible discussions at monthly meetings and played the role of servant, passing through the smoke- dense room in my aqua pee-jays, carrying a tray of salami and cheese. Then I’d be sent to my room with a bottle of Canada Dry and a little turquoise dish filled with miniature pretzels. These were the faces who beamed at me over the shine of birthday candles; these were the scuffed shoes and massive knees lined beneath our dining room table where I crawled in a mild social panic hoping to retrieve a dropped Brussels sprout. These were the voices and the aromatic pipe tobacco in the back seat of the old car during rides to the country; these were the hands that grabbed for the check at the pizzeria; these were the names on the bottom of astoundingly corny graduation cards. Here were my parents’ friends resting their feet and drinking Italian coffee after a nervous Saturday helping the Negroes picket Woolworth’s. And here they were again, visiting me before I shipped off to Rockville, squeezing my hand, memorizing my face, bringing fictitious regards from their children who I’d never bothered to know. (My father’s way of leaning away from the truth of his life was to discourage my making friends with his friends’ children: “Make friends with real people. Forget these red-diaper babies.” But I needed little discouragement. Those boys and girls were not my type, nor was I theirs: they were serious, respectful, unused to wasting time, uncomfortable with the mean jokes I amused myself with.)
To protest the vicious social wound I felt this impromptu party was inflicting on me, I withdrew from the household after eating a long, sticky breakfast. I closed myself in my room—a ten by fourteen chamber that was beginning to tell more of the unpleasant truth about my physical self than a shoe or an old shirt would tell—where I dozed, read, and wondered what to wear. The reception was set for three o’clock (a time no one could expect to be given a real meal) and as the hour approached I began to think seriously of dressing for it. Rose had thrown away most of my old clothes but a blue suit bought for my high-school graduation had survived her raid. I put on a white shirt, a narrow black tie, and my old suit. There was no mirror in my room—the only mirror in the house was on the medicine chest; you’d have to leap into the air to see how your pants fit—but I checked my ghost-like reflection in the window glass. The suit was clearly too small for me and the sight of its snug fit—its tightness at the thigh, its narrowness at the shoulder and chest, the cuffs’ clumsy suspension above the tops
of my shoes—filled me with a strangely powerful sense of unease. That tight blue suit ambushed me with the reality of my time away.
I lay in bed, fully dressed now, staring at the ceiling and stroking my narrow tie. The tie was altogether unfashionable but I doubted that my parents or any of their friends would notice. That set had a conscious disregard for fashion and products. (It had only been recently, for example, that Arthur learned a TV dinner wasn’t just anything you happened to be eating while watching the set.) I dozed off. While I slept, a few of the guests arrived; I might have slept through the day if my mother hadn’t awakened me.
“David?” she whispered through the door.
“I’m up,” I said. “Are they here?”
“May I come in?” Without waiting for an answer, Rose entered, contrary to established Axelrodian etiquette. She wore a U-necked pale green dress and green and white shoes. She held a glass of whiskey and water, clutching at it through the thickness of three cocktail napkins. “You’re wearing a suit,” she said, closing the door behind her.
“Observant,” I said.
“It’s much too hot, David. And that’s a wool blend suit. Look how you’re perspiring. Why not take that old thing off and freshen up with a nice cool damp washcloth?”
“No, I want to wear this,” I said, with all the maturity and sense of fair play that had made me such a hit at home.
The door buzzer went off. I could hear familiar voices from the living room. Laughter. A high, rapid hoot, like a mezzo- soprano owl. Then a man’s voice—Harold Stern’s—saying, “No. Don’t laugh yet. This isn’t the funny part.” This was followed by more laughter, over which a woman’s voice emerged to say, “Who the hell cares if it’s the funny part. We’re laughing now, aren’t we?”
“OK,” Rose said to me, after a panicky glance at the closed door, “you look fine. Why not just pop into the washroom and throw a little water in your face?”
As for the party itself, it went so smoothly and without incident that it could just as well not have happened. No one had an unexpected thought or said an unpracticed word; no one got drunk or ate too much; no cigarette ash was accidentally flicked onto the rug. I was allowed to drink my fill but I could not become drunk. I was led over to the sofa and placed next to Millicent Bell, who was later to help me enroll in Roosevelt University. I was also led into a conversation with Harold Stern, who would get me a job with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Yet I did nothing to secure these favors that day. They were mine because I was Rose and Arthur’s only child and because I’d been so silent and adorable passing out smoked meats during Party meetings in the past, during the best days of all of their lives.
Daylight lingered in the windows and the reception in my honor seemed never to end. What one could or could not ask about my long absence was a mystery to my parents’ deferential friends. The deepest into the personal area anyone dared wade was a hearty Welcome Home, that would have been just as suitable if I’d returned from a two-year study of socialist genetics at the University of Leningrad. Even those who had written me and sent me presents during my stay in Rockville avoided touching the truth of my absence. Did they fear what might accidentally appear in their own eyes if they mentioned my incarceration—the tears, or perhaps the scorn? Or were they respecting my mother’s ardent desire that everything, everything in all the world, be absolutely as normal as possible? History owed Rose a normal afternoon and even the children of my parents’ friends were determined to keep anything reminiscent of pain at bay. Meredith Tarnovsky, sixteen and finally beautiful, with the pure, animal attractiveness of someone whose sexual drive is not yet social but purely hormonal, was just returned from a few weeks in Cuba, where she’d cut sugar cane and attended lectures. She was often at my elbow, talking to me about Castro, who I actually happened to like, though not with Meredith’s wholehearted passion. Her dark eyes glistened, the perfume of her bath lifted off her soft skin, the Havana sun had turned all the soft hairs on her arm bright platinum. I drank gin after gin, wondering if the purpose of this party was to encourage me to violate my long celibacy and drag Meredith into my room. “You were in Cuba,” I said to her, “and I was in a fancy little nuthouse. Talk about your separate paths, huh?” She lowered her eyes and shook her head. Meaning what? That it was ironic? Sad? Or that we weren’t supposed to talk about it? The other representative of my “peer group” was Joe Greenbladt, an ex-runt who once was called Little Joey Greenbladt and who now, at twenty- two, towered over me. He wore a red shirt, powder blue corduroys, and cowboy boots. I’d never had enough to do with him to join the ranks of his childhood tormentors, yet today he avoided me and glanced at me with a certain dark irony as if his presence in my parents’ apartment was somehow settling an old score. He was apparently a great favorite in my parents’ set. Meredith may have gone to Cuba but Joe (Josef on his birth certificate) had read all of Kapital and referred to the civil rights movement as “the Negro question” and to his own friends as “today’s youth.” Joe’s parents, Leo and Olga, remembered my birthday while I was in Rockville and now and then had sent me a book or a magazine. The year before, they’d gone to the Soviet Union and brought back a small reel tape recorder, which they gave my parents to give to me. Along with the tape recorder was a taped message. “Helloooo, David, this is Olga speaking to you.” “And this is Leo.” “David,” Olga had continued, “we’ve just returned from the Soviet Union. We had the most marvelous experiences, too numerous to mention. It was very cold but our hotel was perfectly warm. And the people, David, the people…” “Very happy,” Leo said. “Joyous and dignified.” I had listened with tears in my eyes, overwhelmed by the stupidity and tenderness of their message. Without realizing, I’d lain my hand on the machine and it got in the way of the reel. Olga and Leo’s voices got slower, lower, and they sounded now like stroke victims—that preview of their mortality had gone through me like heat lightning.
Around seven, the rains began. The sky turned a vivid electric green and the rain pounded against the windows and battered against the air conditioner. Like a pack living in the wild, the guests moved in unison, making plans to leave, to share rides, to drop each other off. It seemed the rain panicked them, though I suppose they were seizing a good excuse to leave. Tom and Natalie Foster were the last to go and even they were gone fifteen minutes after the rain began—they’d lingered only to gossip about the Tarnovskys, Meredith’s diminutive, gaudily dressed parents. The Tarnovskys owned a movie theater on the North Side and had taken to booking in an occasional sex film to pay expenses. “We told them it would come to this,” Tom Foster said, feigning sadness and concern.
When they finally left, Arthur closed the door and leaned on it. “The first to arrive and the last to leave,” he said.
Rose laughed loudly. “What a pair of characters.” Then she said, “Hmmmmn,” as if she’d overheard herself and found it puzzling.
I sat on the sofa eating a piece of ham that I’d placed on an apricot sweet roll and drinking a gin and tonic. I felt blurry but not tired enough to sleep.
“Well, how did you like it?” said Rose as she began her rounds, collecting glasses and emptying ashtrays.
Arthur stood at the window and gazed out at the rain. I wondered if he wanted to look quite that dramatic. “It wasn’t much of a party for you, was it?” he said.
“It was fine,” I said.
“Everyone was so glad to see you,” Rose said.
Arthur paddled across the room and lowered himself into what we still called Arthur’s Chair. He heaved a glutinous sigh and placed his smallish feet on the battered oxblood ottoman. “It could have been a lot worse,” he said.
“No, it was good,” I said, injecting some conviction into my voice.
“You know,” said Rose, in her “family secret” voice, “your dad and I have been shopping around for a welcome home present for you.” She sat really quite close to me on the sofa. “Would you like to know what it is?”
“
You don’t have to buy me anything,” I said. “You’ve already spent a goddamned fortune on me.”
“On this party?” asked Arthur.
“No. On the new lawyer. On Rockville.”
“Well, money has to be spent on something, doesn’t it, Arthur?” Rose said.
“Not necessarily, but I know what you mean,” Arthur said.
“Are you interested in what we’re getting for you?” Rose asked me.
“Sure.”
“A little car.”
“A little car?” I said, holding up my thumb and forefinger.
“Not quite that small,” Arthur said, smiling—I was never more his son than when I made a simple joke, especially if it was at my mother’s expense.
“If you’re not interested…” said Rose.
“I’m interested. It would be great. But I don’t even have a license. Mine expired.”
“What does that matter?” said Rose. “You’ll bone up and take the test. You were a wonderful driver.”
“Yes,” I said, “like driving you crazy.”
“Or driving me to drink,” said Arthur.
“Are you happy about the car?” asked Rose.
“Yes. But I don’t want you to get it. I don’t need presents.”
“It’s Millicent Bell’s car, you know,” my mother said. “A green Plymouth sedan. As soon as her new car’s delivered, we get to pick up yours.”
“So it’s a slight case of hurry-up-and-wait,” said Arthur.
“That’s not the worst thing that ever happened in this world,” said Rose, with a brave, incongruous smile. “But how about this? In the meanwhile we’ll get you something else, another welcome home present. What would you say to that?”
“Fieldmouse,” I said.
“What?” Rose said.
Endless Love Page 7
