Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

  We were silent while the dead who lived in my father’s thoughts passed through him: with leaflets, with saxophones.

  Finally, I asked, “When are you leaving…?” Leaving where? Home seemed childish and Rose an accusation.

  “Tonight,” said Arthur.

  “Mom knows?”

  “She knows.”

  “I mean she knows it’s tonight?”

  “Yes. And she’s known the whole thing for a long while. We waited.”

  “Because of me?”

  “We wanted you to get settled. To feel strong in your own life. We didn’t want you in that hospital thinking you didn’t have a normal home to come home to.”

  “You’ve been thinking about it that long?”

  Arthur nodded.

  And then I said what I’d known all along. “Are you in love with someone else?”

  Arthur was immobile for a moment, and then he said, in that kind of voice men use when they recite oaths, “With all my heart.”

  “Who is it? Is it someone I know?”

  “You never met her. Her name is Barbara Sherwood. She works as a court stenographer. You know that’s a very good job and a very difficult one. She’s been married. Her husband died five years ago. She lives in our neighborhood. Two children. And she’s black.”

  I folded my hands. “Are you moving in with her?”

  “I’ll stay at her house in the meanwhile. Barbara’s in the hospital right now. I’ll help look after the kids and after she gets out we shall see.” He poured the last of the beer into our glasses. Most of the food was still on his plate; it had been cut and pushed around, as if he’d been looking for something inside of it.

  “I don’t blame you, you know,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a big issue or anything, but I want to tell you I don’t blame you for doing this.”

  “It’s what I would expect,” said Arthur. “You of all people.”

  “Wait. Don’t say that. I love Mom. I don’t care what it looks like. Our relationship is what we’ve made it but I’m always going to love her.”

  “I know that. That’s not what I mean. You of all people know what it’s like to be so much in love that everything else falls away. Everyone else I know would probably think I’m acting like a bastard or just an idiot. Leaving Rose. Leaving behind all those years. You know a man my age has more of a past than a future, and when you leave the past you only have a few years to call your own. They’d think I was acting irresponsibly. People believe in our marriage, Rose’s and mine. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “They do. Of course, no one knows what’s happened. And when they find out, they’ll all regroup around Rose. I’ll be the villain. They’re really her friends anyhow, always have been. The old comrades. In a lot of ways, I was sick of that crew ever since I got back from the war.”

  “When I was born.”

  “They’re not going to understand, but you are. I guess a father has no business saying this to a son, no matter how old the son is.” His gaze passed over me, as if I was just one member of an enormous jury. “You were my inspiration. Seeing you in love reminded me.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of how I once felt about Rose and how she never ever felt about me, until I didn’t feel that way about her either. But you reminded me of how it feels. A lot of people never have it, that feeling, not even once. You know that, don’t you? But you had it—”

  “With Jade.”

  “And you reminded me that I once had it and that I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk, for a few months. Right after I helped Rose get her divorce and we were together every minute of the day. Before it came out how much she was in love with that Courtney and I had to realize it was going to take a while for her to get over it. I knew she’d get over it but it was going to take time. The magic in her heart was with him, not with me, even though she would have chosen me over him a hundred times. I understood that, but I wasn’t walking in the air anymore. I had to be too intelligent for that; you make a few reasonable decisions and you can’t make a fool of yourself any longer.”

  “I never knew that’s what you wanted.”

  “I didn’t either. I’d forgotten. You made me remember and then Barbara showed me I hadn’t missed my chance. It was like waking up twenty years younger. Not that all of a sudden my hair was thick and I didn’t need glasses and my death was far away. But I have an appetite for every single second of the day. I want you to meet Barbara. You’re going to know what I mean. I never thought this would happen. I never thought I’d be able to believe in all of this a second time. But I do. And I don’t have to be embarrassed.”

  “I know,” I said. My heart was pounding.

  “I know you know. You know it every second of your life and you won’t let yourself forget. It’s why you sneaked out of the house that night of your party to go to my office. And it’s why every time you come to my office to meet me for lunch you manage to take a look at those letters of yours and it’s why I always make sure to let you.”

  Barbara Sherwood was in the same hospital I was taken to after the fire and the room she occupied was next door to the room in which I confessed—insisted—that it had been me who’d ignited that huge, tender house. My father and I walked down the faded corridors, with the bleary overhead lights that made everything look the way it does when you haven’t really slept in nights, past the nurses who nodded at Arthur as if they knew him, past an empty stretcher with dried blood on its safety straps, past a metal table piled with food trays, breathing that high-pitched medicinal odor which some people find reassuring but which struck me as the smell of utter desperation, past the ringing phones and the Dr. Abrams Dr. Abrams please report to 404, through a little knot of visitors too nervous and distracted to move out of our way, doing little confused dances, moving left when we moved left and right when we moved right and finally frowning at Arthur’s touch and standing with their backs close to the grayish wall, which I would not have wanted to touch because it looked somehow slippery, but that was only the light. My father carried the evening paper and five Ian Fleming paperbacks tied together by a piece of yellow yarn; I kept my hands in my pockets, counting and recounting eight dimes and a quarter.

  Barbara Sherwood had the most feline face I’d ever seen on a human being. Her black hair was cut short and combed down over her high broad forehead. She had those kind of over- defined cheekbones that girls doodle in their notebooks when they are dreaming of looking like an exotic model. Her eyebrows were carefully shaped and even though she was in the hospital and probably suffering, she’d put on eye makeup that made her eyes look even larger and more slanted than they were. I didn’t know that she’d lost a lot of weight over the past months; her leanness seemed voluntary and fashionable. Her bed was cranked up so she was practically sitting. Her hospital gown was a little large; she looked like a teenager wearing her father’s shirt, though she didn’t look at all young. While her hair was black and her skin was smooth, her years lived beneath her surface, as if time had been sublimated, repressed, and was taking its due invisibly.

  “Well, here he is,” said Arthur, ushering me to her bedside. There were two chairs set up for us; the curtain separating Barbara’s bed from her roommate’s was drawn; everything had been arranged.

  I wanted to take the first initiative. I thrust out my hand. “Hello, pleased to meet you,” I said, in a bright, ringing voice, as if I was a boy who’d been taught to behave very elegantly around strangers.

  She placed her hand in mine; her fingers were cold and when I shook her hand they felt colder.

  Arthur stood there with his folded hands resting on his hard, round stomach, expressing the bliss of a figure on a Tarot card. He breathed out slowly and made a small musical sigh, as if choral music filled his head.

  “It’s good,” said Barbara. I couldn’t tell if she was
nervous and had forgotten to complete her sentence or if this was her personal style. It’s good? It’s good? I mean really! I felt instantly ironical; I’d come fully prepared to make small judgments about my father’s new lover.

  “Are they treating you all right here?” I said, the extremely influential gentleman from out of town. I glanced over my shoulder, as if to make certain that my footman was in place, holding the gigantic bouquet of long-stem American Beauties.

  “It’s homey here,” Barbara said. “Not like that other place.”

  “She was in All Saints last year,” said Arthur.

  “What a place that was,” Barbara said. “That was a place to give you the creeps. Those sisters gliding around in their long black robes and all those baby-faced priests pacing up and down the halls with the purple ribbons around their necks, wondering who they could give last rites to.” She smiled; she was missing a tooth near the front. She saw I’d noticed and said, “I fell,” and touched her mouth, remembering.

  We spoke for a few moments, with the bewildered caution of strangers who can break each other’s hearts. Barbara said my father had told her all about me, which is of course what people say in those situations, but Barbara seemed to blush for a moment, so maybe he really had. Somehow I was gotten to talk about my classes, my job for the union, and the offer from Harold Stern to leave the picket line and work part-time as a researcher for the union’s educational department. I was congratulated, encouraged, and if Barbara was half so bored as I was with the details of my life she must have feared slipping into a coma.

  She gave Arthur an impish look, like an incorrigible, truth- telling girl in a Victorian novel. But there was no little jolt of tension in the air, and no release; Arthur sat in his place, perfectly calm. He knew she was going to say that; it had probably been planned.

  “Well. Has Arthur told you about…us?”

  “He did,” I said. I cleared my throat.

  Barbara nodded, looking at me. “So? What do you think?”

  “You don’t need my permission.” I felt my father’s hand touching me with some delicacy on my elbow.

  “We’d like to know how you feel about it, though,” said Barbara. She folded her hands in her half-formed lap. Her fingers were bare and very black; the plastic identification bracelet was too large on her wrist.

  “I feel a lot of ways about it,” I said. “I feel scared for my mother.” I paused. Arthur shifted in his seat; Barbara nodded approvingly. “And I think I’m scared for my father, too.”

  “Why?” said Barbara. “Because of…” she gestured, indicating the hospital and her place inside of it.

  “I don’t know why. Because he’s changing. Because he’s different now, and he’ll get more and more different. It doesn’t make much sense. I just feel it.”

  “I won’t change,” my father said.

  “You will. You want to. And you should. You won’t be an unhappy man anymore. That has to change you. You’ll be living right in the center of your best and bravest self and maybe it’s not right for me to say this but I know, I really do know exactly what that’s like.” I felt more than a little puffed up and ridiculous but not one word of my tremulous oration came easily or fast. For all the inappropriateness of a son making a speech about his father’s romantic leap, I felt everything I said as if the words had claws that dragged along my throat as I spoke them.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Barbara said. “I knew you would because that’s how your daddy told me about you. You know, when I was waiting for you to come to see me this evening I was getting so nervous. I’ve got two children of my own and I know that when it comes to their parents, children are the rock-ribbed Republicans of the world. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s so true,” said Arthur.

  “My own children asked some pretty tough questions. Maybe I made it tougher on myself than I had to because I never wanted to lie to them. So they wanted to know how Arthur could come and be with us when he had a wife living less than a mile away. They wanted to know what kind of woman their mother was who let a man into her bedroom without the blessing of marriage. You see, their father was a religious man and though I am not, I have never interfered with their beliefs. It’s their way of keeping their father with them; when they pray to God they’re really talking to their own daddy who died when they were so small. Oh, and you know how it is with life in this city being what it is. They wanted to know how I could be with a white man.”

  “A Jew,” said Arthur. “I don’t think that helped matters along.”

  “Nothing helped matters along. They were starting to treat me as if I were an evil woman. Not doing their schoolwork, not doing their chores, not looking at me when I was speaking. You know they say you have never been chastised until you have felt the wrath of a child. I didn’t know what to do. It was getting so bad I thought I might have to stop everything with Arthur and return to my life the way it was before I met him, no matter how alone and scared I was. That’s when your daddy stepped in and made everything better when I thought nothing could. He sat with my children, my boy Wayne who’s sixteen and my girl Delia who was thirteen just last week, and he told those children that he loved their mother from the bottom of his heart and with all the care and nobility that any man ever loved a woman with. He said more than anything in the world he wanted to look after me and look after them. And he opened his arms up to my children and my children opened their arms to him, and that was that. We’re a family again. You’re too old, David, you’re a man, and I won’t tell you that I’m going to look after you because you don’t need looking after. But I want to tell you what your father told to my children and that is I love your daddy. I wanted to tell you that the man who is your father, the man who gave you life, has found a woman who is in heaven when she’s in his arms.”

  Barbara fell silent. Whoever lay sick on the other side of the curtain had visitors now; I heard their quarrelsome, unhappy voices. A doctor was being paged over the public address. And I realized, with a sense of real panic, that I was about to burst into tears. Like an icy pond whose thickness you’ve misjudged, my composure gave way beneath the weight of my feelings—and I was stranded. I stared hard at the curtain that divided the room and I listened to the voices. “Now what?” a man’s voice was saying. “Another one and another one and another one?”

  There was a light tap on the open door. It was Barbara’s sister Rita and Barbara’s children, Wayne and Delia. Rita looked old. Her hair was white and uncared for and she was partly crippled. Though she was skinny, she used a big black cane thick enough to aid an enormous man. Her raincoat was open; the lining was coming out. She looked embarrassed and annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “They would not listen. I told them they couldn’t see you tonight but—”

  “Hi, Mom,” said Wayne. His hair could not have been cut any shorter. He wore huge, brown-framed glasses and a white shirt with buttons on the collar points. His was the kind of face they put on posters urging people to contribute to the Negro College Fund. Delia seemed to be staking her emotional territory on the other side of the spectrum. Her hair was in an Afro, she wore a red scoop-necked tee shirt, blue jeans, and torn sneakers. It looked as if she’d had lipstick on and somebody had at the last minute scrubbed it off.

  “We swore on the Bible,” Delia said. “We said to God every night we will come to see you, Mama.” She went to the bedside and laid her head against Barbara’s shoulder. As she did, she looked back at me and smiled.

  My father introduced me to Rita, Wayne, and Delia. Rita held only my fingertips when I offered my hand. Wayne was cool and businesslike. And when I offered my hand to Delia, she clasped her arms behind her back and said, “No!” It was only a child’s foolishness and teasing, but it made me feel very awkward.

  Barbara was allowed only a half hour of visitors and most of it was already gone. I thought her children would want to be alone with her for a while. And now that they were a family, I didn’
t feel I belonged there any longer. I announced that I was leaving. Barbara tried to convince me to stay and then Arthur said he’d leave with me. But it seemed he wanted to stay for the last few minutes to be near Barbara and to be near the children and go home with them when the nurse said it was time to leave. I made up an excuse of having someone to meet. I said goodbye to everyone with a clumsy wave and walked into the corridor, moving quickly and hoping I was heading toward an exit. My hands were shaking. I thought it was only the strangeness of being with my father’s new family, but when I was waiting at the elevator and had a moment to consider the evening I realized that for the past half hour I’d been remembering it had been in this very hospital and perhaps on this very floor that three and a half years ago all of the Butterfields had been treated for the smoke and the flame and the shock and the terror I had inflicted on them.

  A few weeks later it was Thanksgiving. Every year my parents had the same group of friends to their house for Thanksgiving dinner, and as the day approached my original certainty that this year’s dinner was canceled gave way to a growing dread that my mother was going ahead with the party, even though her life had snapped in half. Finally, at two o’clock on Thanksgiving, I put aside the long letter I was writing to Ann and called my mother.

  “Hello?” Rose said. Her voice sounded soft and girlish.

  “Hi. It’s me. What’s up?” I’d seen her a few days before, but she never called me and when I called her she usually seemed indifferent.

  “What do you mean, what’s up? I’m cooking.”

  “So the party’s on for this year?”

  “Of course it is. Why? Do you have other plans?”

  “No. It’s just that you never called me. I didn’t know if you were going to have it this year.”