Endless Love

1

When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved—I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now, years have passed and the night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.

It was a hot, dense Chicago night. There were no clouds, no stars, no moon. The lawns looked black and the trees looked blacker; the headlights of the cars made me think of those brave lights the miners wear, up and down the choking shaft. And on that thick and ordinary August night, I set fire to a house inside of which were the people I adored more than anyone else in the world, and whose home I valued more than the home of my parents.

Before I set fire to their house I was hidden on their big wooden semicircular porch, peering into their window. I was in a state of grief. It was the agitated, snarling grief of a boy whose long rapturous story has not been understood. My feelings were raw and tender, and I watched the Butterfields through the weave of their curtains with tears of true and helpless longing in my eyes. I could see (and love) that perfect family while they went on and on with their evening without seeing me.

It was a Saturday night and they were together. Ann and her husband, Hugh, sat in front of the empty fireplace, on the bare pumpkin pine floor. (How I admired them for leaving their good wooden floors uncovered.) Ann and Hugh, sitting close, paged through an art book, turning the pages with extraordinary slowness and care. They seemed enraptured with each other that night. At times, their relationship seemed one of perennial courtship; hesitant, impassioned, never at rest. They seldom took each other for granted and I had never seen married people whose moments of closeness had such an aura of triumph and relief.

Keith Butterfield, my age, the oldest son, and whose passing curiosity in me had been my original admittance into the Butterfield household, also sat on the floor, not far from his parents, where he fussed with the innards of a stereo receiver he was building. Keith, too, seemed to be moving slower than normal, and I wondered if I was seeing them all through the gummy agony of a dream. Keith looked to be exactly what he was: the smartest boy in Hyde Park High School. Keith couldn’t help learning things. He could go to a Russian movie and even as he concentrated on the subtitles he’d be picking up twenty or thirty Russian words. He couldn’t touch a wristwatch without wanting to take it apart; he couldn’t glance at a menu without memorizing it. Pale, with round eyeglasses and unruly hair, in blue jeans, black undershirt, and beatnik-y sandals, Keith laid his hands on the spread-out parts of the stereo, as if he wanted not to build it but to cure it. Then he picked up a small screwdriver and looked at the overhead light through the mango-colored plastic handle. He pursed his lips—sometimes Keith looked older than his parents—and then he got up and went upstairs.

Sammy, the younger son, twelve years old, was sprawled out on the couch, naked except for a pair of khaki shorts. Blond, bronze, and blue-eyed, his prettiness was almost comically conventional—he looked like the kind of picture little girls tuck into the corner of their mirror. Sammy was somewhat outside the Butterfield mold. In a family that cultivated its sense of idiosyncrasy and its sense of personal uniqueness, Sammy’s genius already seemed to be taking the form of profound regularity. Athlete, dancer, paperboy, bloodbrother, and heart throb, Sammy was the least retiring, the least internal Butterfield; we all really did believe, even when he was twelve, that one day Sammy would be President.

And then there was Jade. Curled into an armchair, wearing a loose, old-fashioned blouse and a pair of unflattering shorts that reached almost to the knee. She looked chaste, sleepy, and had the disenfranchised air of a sixteen-year-old girl at home with her family on a Saturday night. I scarcely dared look at her; I thought I might simply hurtle myself through the window and reclaim her as my own. It had been seventeen days since I’d been banished from their home and I tried not to wonder what changes had taken place in my absence. Jade looked at the wall; her face seemed waxy, blank; the nervous knee jiggle was gone—cured by my banishment?—and she sat unnervingly still. She had a clipboard wedged between her narrow hip and the side of the chair, and she held in her hand one of those fat ballpoint pens that have three separate cartridges, a black, a blue, and a red.

I still believe the statement that gives the truest sense of my state of mind that night is that I started the fire so the Butterfields would have to leave their house and confront me. The trouble with excuses, however, is that they become inevitably difficult to believe after they’ve been used a couple of times. It’s like that word game children discover: you repeat a word often enough and it loses all meaning. Foot. Foot. A hundred times foot, until finally what is foot? But even though the truth of my motive has worn a little thin (and through its diaphanous middle I can detect other possible motives), I can still say that indeed the clearest thought I had when I lit the match was that starting a fire on the porch was somehow a better way of rousing the Butterfields from their exclusive evening than a shout from the sidewalk or a stone against the window—or any other desperate, potentially degrading signal I might make. I could picture them: sniffing the smoke sent off by the pile of old newspapers, trading glances, and then filing out to see what the trouble was.

This was my strategy: as soon as the papers catch fire, I hop off the porch and run down the block. When I’m at a safe distance, I stop to catch my breath and begin strolling back toward the Butterfields, hoping to time my arrival with their emergence from the house. I’m not sure what I planned to do then. Either jump right in and help put out the little fire, or stand transfixed, as if surprised to see them, and hope that Jade or Ann would see me, wave, invite me in. The point was not to allow them to go another day without seeing me.

I don’t recall debating this plan of action. Nerved-out and lovesick, I simply proposed it and then a short time later was lighting a match. I waited for a moment (my legs shaking from their desire to vault off the porch and run like hell) to make certain the fire had really taken hold. The flame lifted the corners of that stack of papers page by page, increasing the depth of its penetration but not the breadth. I could have put it out by stepping on it a couple of times and I came close to doing so, not out of foresight but panic. I remember thinking: This will never work.

The flame, after burrowing through a few layers, at last made its move to the heart of the pile—it seemed to have found the perfect dry bridge to race across. It was still not an impressive fire, by any means. It would not have done for cooking a trout and, at the point I fled and left it to its own nitrous fate, you would have been hard-pressed to toast a marshmallow over such a feeble flame. But the fire had established itself; it was not likely to shrink to nothing at the slightest breeze, nor did it seem destined to extinguish itself. It was real, alive, and I leapt off the porch and onto the tall unkempt grass that distinguished the Butterfields’ patch of lawn. I turned back for a moment to look at the house, gothically eccentric, a New England frame house in the middle of Chicago, then at the softly lighted living room window, still empty of curious faces, and then at the stack of newspapers, gauzy now behind the first sheet of smoke and capped by a rooster comb of flame. And then I ran.

The Butterfield house was on Blackstone in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. I ran north, knees locked, toward 57th Street. As far as I remember, I passed no one. And no passer-by walked near the Butterfields to notice those smoldering papers. Hyde Park had not yet turned into an indoor society because of crime- fear. You still had accidental meetings in the street, and though the University of Chicago already had its own private police force and a separate busline to transport students around the neighborhood, Hyde Park was an open, busy place, even at night. (Jade and I, before her parents accepted our love affair and all of its inflexible demands, often walked those streets at two, three, even four in the morning, leaning on parked cars to kiss, embracing and even lying on top of each other on darkened porch stoops, and we never felt unsafe—our only fear was interruption.) But that night, when one watchful pedestrian could have changed everything, I had that long block to myself.

When I reached 57th Street, I went into the second stage of my plan. I paced slowly on the corner for perhaps a minute—though knowing my tendency to rush when I’m uncertain, it was probably less time than that. Then, while trying to invent a quick, plausible excuse for being on that block in case Jade or any other Butterfield asked me, I walked south, retracing my tin-soldier steps back to their house. My heart was clapping with lonely, lunatic intensity but I can’t say that by then I was wishing I’d never struck that match. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Jade in seventeen days (though when Hugh Butterfield had told me, as he banished me from the house, that he and Jade had decided I would have to stay away for thirty days, I had unfounded but powerful suspicions they had engineered a separation that might never end). This banishment, this sudden expulsion from the center of my life, was the core of all thought and feeling. And while misgivings and second thoughts buzzed around my determination, they were as ineffectual as houseflies. I was scared that I’d done such a strange thing as burn the newspapers that had collected on the Butterfield porch, but there is no sense calling this nervousness, this surprise-with-myself, regret. My major concern was that the ploy would work.

I stood in front of their house. The sidewalk was fifteen yards from the porch and I could see perfectly well that the flame had not gone out. But neither had it grown. A steady haze of smoke wafted off the newspapers, yet still no Butterfields had been aroused by it. I had an impulse to sneak back onto the porch and blow on the flame or perhaps loosen up the papers so they could catch fire more easily. But I didn’t want to nudge chance with too firm a hand. Since my whole faked-up meeting was to be based on the pretense of coincidence, I wanted to leave a little room for the quirky meanderings of fate: if I engineered things too carefully, I might not be able to imitate astonishment when the time came. I walked past the house, southward this time to the corner of 59th.

On 59th Street I did see people walking around, but no one I knew. I saw a rather glamorous older woman (meaning, then, a woman in her twenties) walking a large, nervous red dog. She wore sunglasses, a floppy straw hat, and smoked a cigarette out of a long black and silver holder. I think I may have stared at her, just to occupy my thoughts. She cocked her head and smiled at me and said hello. Her voice startled me and I experienced that quick intestinal collapse you sometimes get in bed when you think you are falling. I made a brisk British military nod (that month’s mask, picked up in the psychological warehouse that stored other people’s discarded personalities) and I thought: I’m getting the timing screwed up. My life would have had to be a movie for the plan to really work the way I wanted—I wanted to time my passing the Butterfields’ house just as they were coming out. But I felt there was some split-second urgency involved and so I quickly started out toward the house, first at a trot and then at a dead run.

Was I running for the sake of my masterplan or did I somehow know that the fire I’d set had leapt out of control? Did I smell smoke or did the part of me that had understood from the beginning the consequence of my actions finally fight its way through the thicket of wilfulness and heartsickness to scream its alarm? I ran and now my heart was not beating with a lover’s mournful nervousness but it seemed to bound against my chest like a furious dog against a fence.

I don’t understand how fire works; I haven’t learned the scientific explanations for its cunning and greed. A lick of flame can scurry like a cat while it hunts for the choicest morsel of fuel. An infant flame is subject to the government of the elements. But by adolescence, fire is as brave and artful as a revolutionary band, snatching easy victories here, extending the limits of its power there, consolidating, attacking, brightening with triumph. At its full force, its victory over the stable world complete and everything from Doric columns to magazine racks within its mercy, fire is messianic—it rules over its domain with a blistering, totalitarian authority and seems to believe that all of creation ought be in flames. By the time I reached Jade’s house, the fire I’d set was not in its uncontrollable maturity but it had advanced to its daredevil adolescence. The central flame, headquartered in the stack of newspapers, had sent attack parties of smaller flames to menace the house itself. Points of flame scattered along the side of the house and fluttered like small orange pennants. A circle of fire had been dispatched to the floor of the porch and seemed to race around the newspapers for a short time, and then, thrilled with the very fact of its existence and drunk with the berserkness of its cause, spread out in a dozen different directions.

I backed away. I already felt the heat on my face, burning through the passive warmth of the August air. I backed off until I slipped off the curb and rammed myself against Hugh’s car, a ten-year-old Bentley that he nursed and loved to excess and beyond. I rubbed my back—a moron checking for a bruise on his spine while everyone he loves sits in a burning house. The flames that darted this way and that on the house itself were all on the feeble side, but there were so many of them and they had enough confidence in their power to continually divide themselves. And then, almost as if the fire was controlled by a dial like the flame on a gas stove, in an instant the flames—all of them—tripled in size and power. I let out a cry and rushed toward the house.

The porch was already half covered with flame—there were shoots of fire everywhere, an intermediate garden of fire. I flung the screen door open and tried to open the big wooden door, which was usually unlocked (not as a gesture of trust but an accommodation to the constant human traffic). Tonight, however, the door was locked. I pounded on it with my fists and shouted—no, not “Fire!” but “Let me in! Let me in, goddamnit! Let me in!”

Sammy opened the door. He was, in fact, on his way out because now, finally, they all smelled smoke. “David,” he said, and put up his small hands as if to stop me.

I pulled him out onto the porch and then ran into the house. The small, cluttered foyer already smelled of smoke and when I made the familiar right turn into the living room, Hugh was backing away from the window with his hand over his eyes.

“We’re on fire,” I said. (Hugh was later to testify that I’d said this in a “casual” tone of voice. It seems incredible; but I don’t remember.)

The living room was hotter than any summer’s day. It didn’t so much seem that smoke was rushing in as that the air itself was turning into smoke. The fire, with its tactical instinct, had surrounded the frame of the largest window on the outside, maneuvering toward the easiest entry into the house. It raced around the pulpy, half-rotten wood, multiplying its intensity, dancing, dancing like warriors working themselves up before a battle, until the heat was powerful enough to explode the window and a long orange arm reached in and turned the curtains to flame.

It is here, at this point, when the window blew out and the curtains caught fire, that the sequence of events become irretrievable. We were, I would suppose, like any other group of people in a burning house, fighting back our terror with the worthless fantasy that really nothing so terribly serious was happening. Only Hugh, who had fought in a war and had spent time in a prison camp, only Hugh knew firsthand how sometimes ordinary life is completely overturned. The rest of us, even as we breathed in the heat and the smoke, even as our lungs burned and our eyes teared and we heard the crackle of the wood, held onto the possibility that disaster would suddenly stop in its tracks, turn around, and disappear.

I forced myself to be calm as I went to Jade’s side, and I put my arm around her in the manner of someone taking charge during an emergency—but really, all I wanted to do was touch her.

“How are you?” I said, putting my lips near her ear. Her hair smelled from the curling gel she had set it with; her neck looked naked and vulnerable.

“I’m OK,” Jade said, in her low, porous voice. She did not look at me. “Except I’m…high. I’m very, very high.” She covered her eyes against the smoke and coughed. “And scared,” she said.

Perhaps there had been something more than Jade had said, but I knew immediately that the family had not been smoking grass: for the past couple months, Ann had been in correspondence with her cousin in California, trying to seduce him into sending her some of the laboratory LSD he had access to, and tonight, with all ceremony and seriousness, they had swallowed it, ingesting the spirit of the new consciousness in a square of chemically treated blotter paper, just as they from time to time ingested the spirit of Christ in the form of an Episcopalian wafer. Now, suddenly, horribly, I understood the pages of that art book being turned in slow motion and Jade’s waxed features as she had sat immobile in the chair.…

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-priced 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.

It’s a measure, I think, of “my side’s” moral disarray that Rose’s suggestions were taken seriously. I don’t know why, but my parents and the lawyers still seemed to hold the hope that I’d be judged innocent. Not only did I refuse to testify that the Butterfields were the immoral, freebooting scum my mother described them as (“Immature, subjective jackasses—even the children are immature”) but I didn’t have any desire to be judged innocent. I don’t mean to make myself sound more calculating and self-possessed than I was (it had been a month of sweating and weeping; there were teethmarks at the top of my bedsheet and a drawerful of unsendable letters), but I wanted to be punished. I knew the fire was accidental but it was not as accidental as it should have been, and I wanted some agency outside of all of us to intervene and take over the job of making me suffer for what had happened. I thought my fate in the hands of the police and the courts would drain some of the vividness from the hatred the Butterfields held toward me. With someone else to punish me, someone else to say I was bad and unfit to live with decent people, then Jade and the rest could allow themselves to drift toward the other side, my side, to stop punishing me in their hearts.

So I would not say that the Butterfields were on acid that night and I would not volunteer anecdotes about the far-flung Butterfieldian lifestyle. Ted Bowen, a lawyer very much like my father, with his sturdy amber teeth, peppermint breath, and the one long uninterrupted eyebrow growing from temple to temple, arranged for a private meeting with me. He took me to a working-class cafeteria on 53rd Street and, in a long speech that was both tender and formal, informed me of the consequences of a guilty verdict. He described juvenile detention and the humiliations I might suffer. “These are guys from the bottom of the heap, David. Simple socialist theory will tell you what that does to a person. They have nothing, they believe in nothing, and they’ll kill you for a half of a cigarette.” Then he leaned forward and gave me one of those I-wouldn’t-be-telling-you- this-if-I-didn’t-think-you-could-take-it looks. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about homosexuality.…” And with that his voice trailed off and his eyes looked so sad and so astoundingly serious that out of sheer nervousness I smiled.

When I thought of how I’d set fire to those newspapers on the Butterfields’ porch, it seemed fair (that is, not cowardly, not evasive) to say that I wasn’t in my right mind. And the root of this temporary insanity? Clearly, it was my love for Jade—a love blocked and turned frantic by my banishment from the Butterfields’ house. Love, that is to say love thwarted, severed me from my senses. The fire was not mischief, not hatred, not some crazy act of revenge.

From the time I learned to love Jade and was drawn into the life of the Butterfield house, straight through to the wait for my case to come before the judge, there was nothing in my life that wasn’t alive with meaning, that wasn’t capable of suggesting weird and hidden significances, that didn’t carry with it the undertaste of what for lack of anything better to call it I’ll call The Infinite. If being in love is to be suddenly united with the most unruly, the most outrageously alive part of yourself, this state of piercing consciousness did not subside in me, as I’ve learned it does in others, after a time. If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules. Everything was terrifyingly complex; everything was terrifyingly simple. Nothing went unnoticed and everything carried with it a kind of drama. This agony, this delight did not recede when Hugh told me it would be best if I kept away from Jade for a month, nor did it quiet down after the fire and the weeks I spent in limbo—not knowing what was going to be done with me and, above all, not being able to see her. But the actual decision by Judge Rogers slipped by the perpetual watchfulness of my overstimulated consciousness. I had no idea that a ruling was near, and the whole affair was suddenly (“I guess we were lucky,” said Rose) decided behind my back—a deal between Ted Bowen, the district attorney, and Rogers.

No prison. No juvenile home. And, if my parents were willing to pay for something private, no state institution. I was judged psychologically irresponsible and assigned to a psychiatric hospital for one year, until my eighteenth birthday, after which my case could be reviewed. It was not even a real conviction; the time in the nuthouse was parole.

My parents’ aversion to psychiatry was so deeply ingrained and so reflexive that they could have just as easily related to my being sent to a seminary. (“Let’s consider ourselves very, very lucky,” my mother said through her tears, but I knew that she would soon be thinking—if she wasn’t already—that as deadly as prison might have been, it would have been something I could hold in common with Stalin, with Eugene Dennis, with the Spanish Freedom Fighters, and thousands of other revolutionary heroes, whereas time in a mental institution would put me in league with some chain-smoking wisecracker, Oscar Levant, say, some pampered little fool in love with his own feelings.) I was, however, relieved at the judge’s decision and felt, by and large, that I’d been treated fairly. I could have imagined a complete excusal—and often I fantasized it, the judge saying, “David didn’t mean to do it,” and leaving it at that—but the prospect frightened me. I thought a measure of punishment would be best, all around, and I was grateful that this punishment would be in a private hospital, with rolling green lawns and adolescent flip-outs from privileged, tolerant homes. The judge had indicated that my assignment to psychiatric care could be reviewed after a year, but I felt that with any luck and one or two sympathetic ears to hear the truth of my feelings, to sense the enormity and stability of my feelings, I would be out in a few months, ready to pick up the thread of my life at the point at which I’d snapped it.

The judge devised his sentence after a parole officer interviewed anyone who might give the court a sense of my character. (“It’s like a cockamamie FBI check-up,” said Arthur. “The FBI,” said Rose, nodding and looking at me with sorrowful intensity—trying to remind me of who I really was.) The parole officer spoke to the psychologists who’d tested me. And he spoke to me. (He was a young man, Japanese, longing to pass for friendly. “Why do you think you set their house on fire, Dave?” he said, in a cagey voice, as if it were the first time anyone had put the question so directly. I stammered out the beginnings of a reply and then lowered my face into my hands and wept—out of habit, partly, because I cried constantly during those weeks, out of helplessness, and, in a peculiar yet undeniable way, out of boredom, because that fire, for all of its horror and devastation, was just a part of my life, a part of my heart’s passionate destiny, and it seemed atrociously unfair that now it was all that was important.)

The parole officer spoke to my teachers at Hyde Park High School, who told him I was a good student. He spoke to my few friends and he spoke to my friends’ parents. I don’t know what he learned—that I liked astronomy, jazz, baseball, that I read books, baked cakes, and liked to turn the volume off the TV and supply absurd, dirty dialogue in a variety of voices. He asked me to give him the names of past girlfriends and he spoke to them and their parents. I doubt very much that Linda Goldman told of relieving me of my virginity in her family’s paneled basement—one of the only paneled basements in Hyde Park. The Goldmans were business people and devoted their basement to pleasure: a wet bar, two couches, a Ping-Pong table, and an octagonal poker table covered in tropical green felt with circular recesses for stacking chips. No, I don’t think Linda breathed a word of our afternoon’s struggle; I don’t even know that she remembered it. All that could have distinguished my turn from all of the other afternoons she’s spent with such tender self- destructiveness was the sound of her father’s voice rolling through the heat ducts, saying, “I could have sworn there was a chicken leg in the refrigerator. I could have sworn it.” As to other friends, including girlfriends, they were a part of the world originating with my parents. Though my father in particular didn’t want me to be a typical “red-diaper baby,” that is to say, a child of Communists who associates exclusively with other children of Communists, the pressure of the times and my parents’ own nervousness left me, by default, with a vast majority of friends whose parents were friends of my parents. And, of course, none of them said anything to the parole officer that put me in a bad light. The parents, Rose and Arthur’s friends for decades, were probably expert in their testimony, and the children, having learned by osmosis the careful language of political harassment, were probably smooth and earnest and absolutely faultless in answering their questions.

Judge Rogers gave us a week to conclude my adolescence in Chicago and get me ready for Rockville Hospital, which was about one hundred miles downstate in the town of Wyon, Illinois. I was still, of course, forbidden to contact any of the Butterfields—or even to make enquiries after them. It was made clear to me that the Butterfields, Hugh in particular, had been the outraged party in my case. Hugh had petitioned the court a number of times; the only evidence that had tempted Rogers to be less lenient with me had come from Hugh. This wounded me without surprising me and I felt that terrible sickness you get when you must acknowledge the righteousness of your attacker. I understood and, in my woozy, isolated, heart-mad way, even endorsed Hugh’s complaints against me, his right to want me punished with crushing severity—but I also had to believe that Hugh was alone in this, that Ann, and certainly Jade, did not align with him. But as to making a desperate attempt to reach them—I didn’t even know where to begin. I didn’t know where they lived. Were they in a hotel? Had they divided up and stayed now in two or three separate houses? Had they gone to stay with Hugh’s parents in New Orleans, or with Ann’s mother in Massachusetts?

I wrote a hundred letters I didn’t dare send. I wrote to Keith, to Sammy, to Hugh. I wrote more than a dozen letters to Ann and more than seventy-five to Jade. I wrote apologies. I wrote explanations, rationales, and attacks on myself that might have exceeded their most bitter impulses. I wrote love letters—one of which was signed in the smeary blood of a sliced fingertip. I begged and remembered and I pledged myself with an exile’s choking ardor. I wrote at dawn, I wrote in the bathroom, I woke in the desolate middle of the night and wrote and wrote. I wrote poems, some copied, some composed. I made it clear to the world that what Jade and I had found in each other was more real than any other world, more real than time, more real than death, more real, even, than she and I.

Then, on a Friday, the day before my parents were to drive me down to Wyon, a letter arrived for me. It was cleverly concealed in a Student Peace Union envelope, of which I was a member and with which my parents associated the better things of my former life. It was casually, impersonally addressed D. Axelrod, and it arrived with an issue of the Saturday Review, which I’d been given a subscription to by friends of my parents on my seventeenth birthday. My mother handed me both the magazine and the Student Peace Union envelope—a little meanly, I thought, for what could it have contained? An announcement for a meeting I would not be free to attend? I tore open the letter in full view of my parents and there, in a script so perfectly devoid of idiosyncrasy that it was hard to believe it was written by a human hand, much less a young, trembling hand, was a letter from Jade:

“David, oh David, I want you to be all right.”

I wasn’t to hear another word from her for as long as I was in custody.

2

The man who built Rockville Hospital was named James Marshall Nelson. He built it along sleek modernist lines (modern in the 1920-ish, Bauhaus sense, that is), shooting for and achieving a plush functionalism: curving staircases that were nearly impossible to fling yourself down; wooden floors with the somber walnut tone of inherited wealth and the high gloss of immaculate efficiency. It is said that Nelson built the hospital for himself because he suspected he was going mad and he wanted a hospital he could call home. Nelson, an heir to a rural banking fortune, had served in World War I and after that so-called Great War ended he stayed in Europe, where he apparently was introduced to Sigmund Freud. Freud did not analyze Nelson, but when the young heir returned home he nevertheless called himself one of Freud’s disciples and he devoted his wealth and soul to something called the Wyon Mental Hygiene Foundation.

When Rockville was built, Nelson used his considerable wealth to recruit a number of psychiatrists. I’ve often wondered what sort of doctor would have consented to set up his practice in Wyon, Illinois. The farmers and businessmen who were within range of the hospital’s services would rather have hung themselves from the rafter of a barn than set foot in the place. It was used occasionally by local drunks who wanted a place to sober up, rather than be teased at home or in jail. And it quickly gained a certain folkloric notoriety: mothers threatened to send misbehaving children there, husbands suggested to reluctant wives that they spend some time at Rockville, and, naturally, there were persistent stories of the place being haunted, of orgies, of hidden German generals, of rapes and transformations.

When the banks failed in 1929, Nelson’s banks failed with the best and the worst of them. The Foundation was quickly penniless, and the last of the staff departed leaving a fifty-bed hospital with forty-nine empty beds—the only patient was James Marshall Nelson himself. He lived alone in Rockville, transferring himself from his room to the chief physician’s stern little suite. He treated himself and took voluminous notes on the progress of his self-analysis—these notes, edited by his cousin Marie Nelson Abish, were published in the 1950s under the title of The Interior Pilgrim. The jottings seem to be the product of a mediocre, compulsively theoretical, and thoroughly impersonal mind—though Abish may have deleted her cousin’s warmth and agony out of some panicky sense of propriety.

Yet Nelson was vindicated. Though Rockville remained empty for years, not long after the appearance of The Interior Pilgrim, it was purchased by a group of psychiatrists whose discomfort with the mental health establishment (coupled, I suppose, with a sound business sense) led them to set up their own hospital. Though the surrounding farmlands and the newly burgeoning suburbs still offered no indigenous constituency, Rockville was soon known throughout the Midwest as one of the most humane, progressive institutions—a place where parents might send a baffling, tumultuous child and feel not only guiltless but hopeful. It was a place to be healed; the staff, including nurses and orderlies, were sympathetic to the range of human variety, and it was an unwritten motto that what one day is considered deviation might be recognized the next as sheer genius. Of course, those whose treatment was founded on such gentle grounds were bound to be privileged. The hospital tried to provide funds for an occasional under-class patient—a conscience-taxing process because the Rockville staff truly believed that nowhere else could a distressed young person find comparable care and it wasn’t easy to choose between the hundreds of petitioning, penniless patients. And what of those who were turned away? It was like condemning them to mistreatment, even abuse; it was like closing the doors to the Ark.

Had it not been for my grandfather’s money, I don’t see how I could have gone to Rockville. Even with their savings and the money put aside to help me with college, Rose and Arthur couldn’t have paid the $25,000 a year it cost to stay there. (Or so I assume. I never knew for certain what their financial situation was. Of all the vulgar, undignified things I was trained not to discuss, money was the most forbidden. I wasn’t answered when I asked how much my toys, my shoes, or even the meat on my plate cost. And if I’d asked them for a look at their Hyde Park Bank for Savings passbook, I would have been treated—to put it vulgarly but accurately—as if I’d requested they not flush the toilet so I might examine their feces.) But Arthur’s father, Jack Axelrod, had money, and though Arthur broke with his father by joining the Communist Party in the middle of law school, Jack remained, in a sporadic, long-distance way, my grandfather—expressing his thwarted tenderness as a kind of bogus Jewish tribalism: “You’re my only grandson. The others had girls.” Jack, retired from business and living a lonely life of leisure in one of those Florida retirement villages, had framed photos on his wall of my Uncle Harris, Uncle Seymour, and Aunt Hannah, and, where the picture of Arthur should logically have hung, a picture of me.

Resentful and maybe even a bit respectful of the alien values by which I was being raised, he never knew what to send me on birthdays or at Hanukkah and so twice a year he’d sent me $25—in cash, as if people like us might not know how to use a bank. I kept this money in a special savings account and one day, in the middle of my dolorous thirteenth summer, impulsively withdrew it to buy a plane ticket to Florida, leaving in the middle of the day with my bathing suit under my jeans and without a word to my parents. Jack kept me and my secret for two days, introducing me to his card-playing partners and winking at me to let me know these were not people who he really liked, watching me swim in his pool, and letting me have a half glass of imported beer with my supper. I told him I wanted to live with him, though I could not say why. I didn’t trust him to understand. And if he would understand, then I would have betrayed my parents to an enemy. I suppressed no tales of abuse or neglect. The truth was—or felt like—that I wanted to live with him because I was bored with my parents, bored with their gentle reminders, their sighs, their careful, closed faces. I was bored with how easily fooled they were, how effortlessly pacified and lied to, and I was bored with how they never told the truth of their lives to me. They were people whose central lie has it that nothing is wrong, nothing is strange, nothing is un- explainable or uncommon. I could have told my parents that every night I dreamed of traveling in a flying saucer and I woke every morning to find a small red stone in my closed hand, and they would have said, “Don’t worry, that’s very common at your age.” It seemed a much brighter prospect to live with my grandfather, with his memories of Europe and his rapacious commercial past of turning one dollar into two and two into twenty, and his frightening, exhilarating stories of firing a cutter who looked at him “funny” and firing another who grabbed a woman’s breasts, to live with that soft-bellied, granite-fingered man beneath the untiring sun, with the fragrant fuzz of imported beer on my lips and the lazy murmurs of the not-too-distant Atlantic in my ears.

I wrote often to Jack while I was in Rockville, inconsequential, newsy letters, beginning Dear Zadie and ending Your loving Grandson. These letters were composed with a false, utterly trumped-up sense of strategy—it added spine to the dull pudgy days to make myself believe that it was up to me to keep Jack on my side in order to ensure his continued financial support. This was completely absurd, of course, but I needed to believe that my life required clever maneuvers on my part, that it would somehow benefit me to keep track of nuances. Like a lonely paranoid with a hundred rituals and a hundred intrigues, I built a bathosphere of strategy in which I might live with some fearful, keen-eyed purpose beneath the overwhelming murky sea of my true circumstances. Not only did this include the needless buttering up of Jack Axelrod, but it meant sniffing food, refusing aspirin tablets or vitamins, though there was no reason whatsoever to think the doctors or staff would slip some tranquilizer into me—drugs, isolation, shock therapy, and all other forms of medical punishment were virtually unheard of at Rockville, and even if such things happened I was hardly a candidate for such treatment, being one of the more docile members of that “therapeutic community.” The vigilance added tone and made me feel like a soldier, a prisoner of war, and the we-aim-to-please letters to my grandfather were a part of my grand diplomacy—a diplomacy that sought a truce not between me and the rest of the world but between the part of myself that was learning to conform to life in an institution and the part of myself that was stiff with shame.

I wondered if my letters to Jack Axelrod were opened and read by the Rockville staff and I wondered if the brief, meticulously typed notes he occasionally sent in reply were also scrutinized. If I’d wanted to send him a message of passionate sedition I suppose I could have slipped it to my parents on one of their biweekly visits and had them mail it in the wild, thundering freedom of the Outside World. I don’t know what I could have said to my grandfather that would have raised any suspicions (I knew that my sincerity as a patient was in doubt), though I did feel our living situations had something in common: he in his balmy planned community with strangers in the communal garden, me learning to play the guitar and singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” with peers such as I would not have known or looked twice at under any other circumstances. But Rose and Arthur were not likely co-conspirators if I wanted wide, risky contact with Jack; they were uneasy with my relationship with him and the one weekend he flew north to visit me, they stayed home.

Of course the letters I truly longed to send I didn’t even dare seal into envelopes: the letters to Jade. Even if I’d known where to send them, I wouldn’t have risked detection—those pages and pages and pages of frantic scrawlings were the core of my secret life in Rockville and I never knowingly hinted at it, not even to Dr. Clark, the psychiatrist in charge of my case, who I actually liked and spoke to five hours a week. I prayed that Jade would know that I was writing those unreceivable letters. I believed, because I had to, in all sorts of mental miracles, like detailed telepathy or the power of my rich electrical thoughts to send to her a vivid, unmistakable sign—a heart-shaped constellation, a speaking wind, or a caterpillar that would find her alone in a field of tall grass, crawl up her arm and stop at the elbow, turn its hard black goggles toward her and implant in her consciousness not only the fact of my ceaseless, obsessional thoughts but their content as well. Perhaps if someone had told me that my stay in Rockville was going to be two years, or five, or even ten, I would have found the cunning and courage to get word to Jade. But from the moment I was installed in my room and began unpacking my rolled-up socks and folded tee shirts (it was a pine dresser with a sweet Butterfieldian aroma), I began anticipating my release, my return to Jade. I did not dream of this release as something that was months away—I felt it could happen any day, any day at all.

I didn’t want to do anything to draw suspicion. Like Rose, I believed I belonged in a prison more than a nuthouse, and was damn grateful to be stuck in the latter. My psychiatrist mentioned that the fear of anal rape is the most vivid terror people experience when they contemplate prison—more horrible than separation from loved ones, loss of time, collapse of career, etc. I don’t know quite what Clark was leading toward, whether he considered this a holdover from our pasts as baboons or if he meant to suggest that the phobia was the Halloween mask of a latent desire. But the fact is I did cringe at the thought of being served up to a cellblock of crazed prisoners. There is something so unbelievably cruel about fucking someone in the ass. Of course the opening is there and, I suppose, handy. But it takes advantage of the body. It’s like making faces at a blind man. I know that one is suspect no matter what one says about things like this. If you say you like anal fucking, it’s a bit strange, and if you bother to say that the idea is horrible then that is somehow even stranger. But I had to think about it when my case was pending and it wasn’t certain if I’d get by on my plea of insanity or if I’d be sent to Joliet. I have never been on either end of a brutal sexual transaction—even the old high-school stunt of getting a girl drunk and grabbing her cunt struck me as crazy and wrong. (Though I realize that a lot of the drunk girls wanted nothing more.)

Once when Jade and I were making love in her bedroom, around the time when we first got the double bed, and we’d been making love for so long that she was as wet as a river inside and could hardly feel me anymore and I could hardly feel her but we needed, for reasons that really weren’t physical, to keep on making love, she turned over on her belly and raised herself on her knees. I thought she was asking me to come in from behind, where the tilt of the vagina gives the illusion of newness and tightness, as we had done so many times. Her back was soaked with sweat and the sheets were like slush. I was panting and sweating myself and sore all over but I didn’t want to stop, neither of us did. The friction, our need of it, wasn’t really connected to pleasure at that point. It was more of an attempt to erase our bodies and explode out of them into pure matter. It was afternoon, there was soft light in her little room, and when she spread her legs and offered her rump to me I looked at the back half of her vagina, with the dark brown hair sopping wet and poking out in curly spikes. I’ll never understand exactly what the sight of her body did to me, I mean why it worked the way it did, but its effect was so powerful, so unfailingly powerful that I believed then and will always believe that I was born to see it, to look at her face, throat, breasts, genitals, and feel a heat and spaciousness that no word in my vocabulary can even begin to express. I think that after all of that wet, wet fucking I was only three-quarters hard but the sight of her backside restored me to my unanimous erection and at once I began to move myself into her. But she stopped me and said something a little bewildering, like Put it in the other one, something uncharacteristically peek-a-booish like that, but which I completely understood. I didn’t want to say no but I was immediately nervous. We’d never done that before, and I didn’t want to leave her alone in her willingness to go somewhere new. And so I made a clumsy jab at her asshole with my cock groping in its lilac blindness. Like the first time we made love, Jade had to guide me in, only now she was pointing me toward a path my mind and heart refused to follow. I drew back. I can’t do that, I said, It’ll hurt, it’s got to hurt. Do you think so? she said. People do it all the time, not only homos. She’d been reading a book about the Mochican Indians of—where was it, Peru? They were notorious ass fuckers and not only the Spanish conquistadors but the Incas used to punish them to the point of death in order to make them fuck more productively but the Mochicans held fast to their preference. (I don’t remember if this lesson in anthropology came right there in bed or if it was later.) Jade pulled me back toward her and pressed my cock to her asshole. She grabbed the pillow with her free hand and breathed out with a kind of yogic completeness as if to open herself further to me, but it was useless because her anus was as cryptic as a belly button. I could feel its stunned rejection of my approach. You see? I said. But Jade was caught in the logic of her proposal and she stuck a finger into her vagina and pulled it out wet and moved it in a circle around her asshole. Try it now, she said. Or why not put yourself inside me the regular way so you’ll be wet too? What resourcefulness! I felt the beginnings of sexual terror. Why was she being so determined? What was the cause of this sudden stubborn hunger for a new sensation? Was she nostalgic for the stretch of an untraveled passage? Or was there buried somewhere in the core of our lovemaking a hopelessness and shame she wanted to exorcise? I don’t want to do this, I said, even as the head of my cock pressed against her ass’s wrinkled middle, lilac to mauve. It was opening to me, slightly. I must have been pressing myself in without altogether knowing I was. Her asshole was shuddering like a puppy, like a small frightened heart, and I could see, in a glimpse, her inner walls, a flash of translucent red as spectacular as slag. Why not? she asked. Her voice was muffled. She was supporting all her weight with her forehead. Don’t know, not in the mood, something like that. I was wary enough to be cautious. Suddenly she rolled over onto her back. A gray scraggly feather from the pillow stuck to the sweat between her small breasts and she plucked it by its stem and twirled it between her fingers. I thought you’d like it, she said. No, I don’t think I would, I said. My stomach was pounding like a second heart. I stretched out beside her, with my leg resting on her thighs and my arms around her. I’m not ready for it, I said. I think it would be wrong. It would hurt. It wouldn’t be right. It would be right, Jade said. Because it’s you and me and we love each other. I wanted to do it because neither of us have ever done it before. It would be ours. We were silent for a while. We could hear the casual commotion of her house. Sammy and his crew were below playing poker, screaming at each other over every card. (I hate to think what they’d have done to each other if they’d actually played for money.) Keith was on the third floor listening to Joan Baez with the volume turned up so high she sounded like a middle-aged drunk. “Don’t sing love songs / You’ll wake my mother.” The lyrics of that song curled around our slightly embarrassed silence and first I laughed and then Jade laughed. Though it was only in the future, after my release from Rockville, that I learned the real joke to those words, when Ann confessed the full extent of her obsession with Jade and me, and how she had used the heat we generated to ignite her own elusive passions.

Dr. Clark counseled against it, but I kept a calendar on my wall and put an X through each day that passed—at a minute past midnight, if I was awake. I moved through time with constant terror. It moved too swiftly, separating me from my life; it barely moved at all, keeping me distant from the day of my release. In that way, each day was a victory and a humiliation. Yet a part of me refused to live inside of time at all; something of myself remained distant from those nervous skirmishes with the passing days. I thought of this part as my best and most secret self and I would not submit it to my losing war with time, just as no sane nation sends its finest tacticians and most lyrical poets to the front lines of a raging battle. Throughout my stay in Rockville, half of me remained sheltered in the lead-lined bunker of eternity.

As it turned out, my preserving half my heart in eternity contributed to my undoing in Rockville. It meant that I’d make virtually no friends and that I was more isolated than I ought to have been, more sequestered than I wanted—the loneliness was crushing, for the most part. In a community almost exclusively inhabited by perceptive people, my decision to reserve a part of myself from the reality of our shared circumstances was noticed constantly—causing me to be shunned, attacked, razzed, ignored, or, worse, much worse, wooed, drawn out, seduced, challenged, conned. My own doctor folded his arms and shook his head when he listened to me, and more often than I care to remember said “ho-hum, David” when I offered my careful, tidy descriptions of my feelings. “What’s your favorite color?” he once asked me. “Blue,” I answered, thinking of Jade, her Oxford cloth shirt, the shade of the ink in her last letter to me. Dr. Clark leaned forward and moved his small face closer to mine—a vein the width of a child’s finger beat in his high ivory forehead, as if his heart and brain were joined like Siamese twins. “Blue?” he said, and I avoided his eyes and nodded. “I don’t believe you,” he said. He slapped his knees and stood up. His hands were on my shoulders now and I squirmed away from him. “I don’t believe your favorite color is blue. You can’t even tell the truth about that. Do you know how to tell the truth, David?”

Of course I knew how to tell the truth. But the truth of the matter was I couldn’t. I wasn’t there in the same way as the others. I wasn’t an acid casualty or a compulsive eater or someone who believed that the lawn wept at night because I had walked over it. For all the encouragement I was given to whirl freely through my feelings, to become whole again by expressing everything that was inside of me, I hadn’t in fact been placed in Rockville to discover my true unbroken self. I was there on court order and I was there to change. And I was willing to change. But I knew there were things I could not say—not if I wanted Clark to report that I was ready to go home. I could not say that I wrote secret letters to Jade. I could not say that all that “getting well” really meant to me was the chance to find Jade, to find Ann, Hugh, Sammy, Keith—but most of all Jade, to find Jade, to hold her again and make her understand, as I did, that nothing had changed. I was willing to talk about anything else, but not once did I confess that the part of me I’d been sentenced to transform was as alive and unreasonable as ever.

My belief in the truth of my love for Jade as a higher and untouchable truth kept me from the despair that clawed at the hearts of many of the patients, but it also meant that after a full year in Rockville I was still very much there and had no immediate prospects of release. Ted Bowen (working without pay, refusing the money my parents tried to press on him, and neglecting to deposit the checks they mailed to his office on Oak Street) made a number of appeals to Judge Rogers, trying to get my so-called parole commuted, but it was clear (though Rose and Arthur tried to conceal this) that my leaving Rockville wasn’t being seriously considered.

A few days after the first anniversary of my institutionalization, Rose and Arthur appeared for their Saturday visit. It was mid-September. The first touches of slate were in the sky and though Rockville’s soft golf-coursey lawn was green, its best life was gone. I still lived with a student’s attentiveness to seasons—the first cool day always made me think of the crisp promise of blank notebooks, good intentions, new teachers, reunions with friends—and the panic and despair I felt at not being set free cut deeper because it was September. The world was changing and I was not.

Rose and Arthur always seemed ill at ease and a little pathetic when they came to Rockville. They did not, of course, believe in psychiatric cures. It would have been more to their way of thinking to send neurotic teenagers into a state forest to do a little conservation work, or perhaps a year on an assembly line to ground short-circuited emotions. And the high-priced Rockville with its necessarily privileged clientele might have been invented to stimulate my parents’ scorn. They also felt the ego tenderness of most parents whose child sees a psychiatrist: they were sure I said awful things about them. They feared that I talked about their long time in the Communist Party (which I did) and that I portrayed them as cruel and uncaring (which I did not). They walked the halls of Rockville with unnaturally soft footsteps, as thief-like as my own when I used to return home at six in the morning from Jade’s. They wore dark clothing and spoke barely above a whisper if anyone else was remotely near. Dr. Clark avoided them, which frightened them in one way, but was also a relief. They’d read Clark’s book, Adolescence and Agonia, and it disturbed them. It was a chatty, aphoristic book, which enjoyed a mild success. There were no copies of it in Rockville but I subsequently read it and could scarcely recognize in it the stern, skeptical man who treated me—it was faintly anarchist in tone and put forward such suggestions as parents giving their children complete control over them one day a week. (“He writes books?” I said, one visit. “Well, it can’t be for the dough. He makes a fortune right here.” This was just the kind of cheap remark my parents needed to hear and Rose gave me a little squeeze on the arm and said, “That’s the spirit.”)

This time, however, Rose and Arthur were more uneasy than usual. I thought at first that they shared my desperation over a full year’s passing, but something in their muffled voices, stiff gestures, and coolish, guilty eyes made me suspect that their unhappiness was rooted in something more specific than despair. They looked absolutely miserable. And then I knew in an icy, uncaring instant that their unhappiness had nothing to do with me, that it was between the two of them, and that it was connected to the death of feelings between them. Once, when Rose showed up alone for a visit, she hinted briefly that the story of my father being in bed with the flu wasn’t entirely true, and the one time Arthur appeared without Rose he said quite explicitly that without her he and I might be able to speak more freely, more meaningfully. (We didn’t; he took me to the town, fed me, and then took me to a deserted back road he’d “discovered” and let me drive the car—I tried to scare him by speeding into the sunset but he just leaned back and smiled: it was so odd.) Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own. I sat in the nautical-style desk chair in my little room and looked at Rose and Arthur seated on the edge of my single bed. Arthur plucked at the nubby spread and Rose poked about her purse for Sen-Sen, and I saw that my absence had robbed them of their last excuse to remain together.

“I’ve got an idea,” Arthur was saying. “Why don’t we go to that old farmhouse we pass on our way out here?” He was looking at Rose, but now he turned to me. “It’s been preserved, nothing changed since eighteen twenty-something. All the original furniture, everything. It might be interesting.”

“Sounds like it could be fun,” Rose said. She said it with a frown, as if to put us on notice: even if she enjoyed the antique farmhouse, her spirits would remain low.

“Why do we have to go anywhere?” I asked. “It’s always a drag. You two spend half the day driving down here and then as soon as you arrive we get in the car and drive some more.”

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Arthur said. “It’s a beautiful day. We can walk around here.”

“I’d think you’d want to get out and see the world for a couple hours,” Rose said.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me. A guy who’s here has a pretty fair telescope back home and his parents are bringing it next week. There’s pretty good visibility here at night and as we all know I have a lot of time, especially at night. The nights are nice and long and we have supper at five thirty so that gives us even more time at night. You have no idea how much of it we have, time.”

“I hate when you get like this,” said Rose.

“Like what?”

She shook her head.

“Like what?” I repeated.

“You’re not the only one in the world who’s upset about this whole situation.”

“Drop it, you two,” said Arthur. Suddenly, his psychological politics seemed more clumsy and transparent than ever: how he loved to place himself between Rose and me, as if only he kept us from killing each other. It was true, he had stopped my mother and me from fighting countless times, yet he had never brought us closer and the distance he allowed us to maintain was as important as the truces. “I think we should get some fresh air. Before long, winter.” He pressed his lips together and swallowed; he hadn’t meant to suggest that another season lay in wait for me.

“Of course we couldn’t simply sit around,” I said. “We couldn’t talk. Tha’s what was so amazing to me about the…” I paused, letting my parents become anxious about the taboo that was about to be broken “…the Butterfields. To be with a family that actually talked to one another.”

“That’s a new one,” said Rose.

“It’s not a new one. You remember what you remember and I remember what really happened,” I said. “After all, I’ve had more of an occasion to talk about the past and remember it. Professional help, you know. The Butterfields were interested in each other and there was nothing you couldn’t say. You weren’t asked not to mention things and if you said something that maybe wasn’t so nice you weren’t told, ‘That’s not a nice thing to say.’ We always lost track of the time because I’d be talking or Ann would or one of the boys…or anyone else. Everyone talked and everyone listened and you had ideas and thoughts and feelings you never had anywhere else because there was nowhere else where anyone would care or would listen.”

“Oh, they cared so much about you,” said Rose.

“There’s no need to argue about this,” said Arthur.

“A bunch of fools in love with their feelings, is what they were,” said Rose, reddening, leaning forward. “And they didn’t give two cents about you.”

“When they let me stay with them I felt my life had been saved,” I said.

“Well maybe you did, but you were wrong.” Rose paused. “As you can see.”

“OK,” said Arthur. “That’s it.” He put up his hands.

“I’d rather be here than turn out to be what I would have if…”

Rose nodded. “If what?”

“If I hadn’t known them. If I’d been what you wanted me to be.”

“We’re putting on a wonderful show for the whole school,” said Arthur.

I slammed my open palms on the desk violently. I got up and knocked the chair over. I picked it up and thought I might throw it—at my parents, through the window, against the wall. My parents were silent. They looked at me with that mixture of embarrassment, disgust, and envy we feel when someone gives vent to their ugliest, most unreasonable feelings. I let the chair drop and walked toward my parents. I certainly wasn’t going to do them any great harm, though I did have a fleeting vision of taking them by the shoulders and shaking them.

“David,” said my father, with pointed neutrality.

Rose planted her small feet squarely on the floor and leaned back, like a drunk trying to sit erect and miscalculating the angle.

“I never asked you for anything,” I said.

“David,” said Arthur, letting his voice drift toward its natural warmth.

“I’ve been here more than a year and you haven’t done anything to help me.”

Quickly I turned away from them and walked back toward my desk and righted the chair.

“I think we should leave while the day’s still nice,” said Rose.

“Good. Go home. I want you to go home,” I said.

“Don’t pull this,” Rose said.

“We don’t want to go home,” said Arthur.

“Then visit with someone else. That way you won’t waste the long drive.”

Rose and Arthur exchanged glances and for an instant I thought they might discuss me in my presence. It had never been their way, of course. I’d almost never seen them disagree or reveal confusion. Running our tiny family on the principles of centralism, they shielded me from their uncertainties—captains of an imperiled ship staving off the panic of the passengers with buttered rolls and routine announcements.

“Well,” said Rose, with what was meant to be a sigh of finality, “are you through trying to make us miserable? As I’ve said, you’re not the only one in the world who’s upset.”

“I really don’t care,” I said. “With all my heart, I don’t care.”

“Your mother means that this whole mess is as tough on us as you,” said Arthur. He shook his head and lowered his eyes: it wasn’t what he’d meant to say, exactly.

“Do something for me,” I said.

“Our life is very sad these days,” said Rose.

“Do something for me,” I said.

“There’s no reason to discuss our personal lives at this time,” said Rose. “And I refuse to listen if you’re going to pretend you’re the only person in the world with troubles.”

“He knows that,” Arthur said.

“Do something for me,” I said once again. I thought of getting on the floor and chanting it, the way one of the orderlies had taught me to chant Coca-Cola Coca-Cola until my thoughts disappeared and my mind existed only as a pitchless hum. “Do something for me.”

“We want to,” said Arthur. “Surely you know that.”

“I want a new lawyer,” I said. “Who’s looking after my case? Who’s in charge of getting me out?”

“It’s in the hands of the court,” said Arthur. “There’s not much that can be done.”

“Who’s handling it?”

“Ted is,” said Rose. “You know that.”

“Bowen?” I said. “Bowen is a total fucking jerkoff asshole idiot. He’s been losing cases all his life—this is the kind of lawyer you get me? A Communist lawyer with as much influence as a stray dog?”

“You have no right to talk that way about Ted,” Rose said. “This is a man who’s been loyal to you. It’s time you learned who your real friends are.”

“I know,” I said. “Ted Bowen watched me grow up. Well, I don’t care. I don’t want him to have anything to do with me anymore. Don’t I have the right to fire him? I’m eighteen. If you’re too fucking loyal to tell him he’s through, then I’ll tell him.”

“You’re making a mistake,” said Arthur. “Ted’s a very capable attorney.”

“You have to say that,” I said.

“I don’t have to say that—or anything else.”

“Yes, you do. You have to say he’s good because he’s the same kind of lawyer you are.”

I glared at them both and waited for a reply. But they were silent. They didn’t sigh, or shrug, or even move their fingers. Their eyes fixed on a space three or four feet to the left of my face, like people you are shouting at in a dream.

Finally, Rose said, “Obnoxious.”

“Is it the money?” I said.

“You know it’s not,” said Arthur.

“Because if it is, I’ll get the money. Grandpa will give it to me. It’ll cost him less to pay a good lawyer than to keep me here. I want the best. I want someone smart and tough, someone with a little influence for God’s sake, someone who won’t get walked over and laughed at. I need string pulling and pressure and deals. Ted’s not the one.”

“He has an excellent record, David,” said Arthur.

“But he’s not doing anything for me.”

“You think you’re going to find some outsider and get the kind of dedication we get from Ted?” said Rose. “A man who was struggling for the rights of people before you were even born?”

“I don’t want to hear anything about it,” I said. I slapped at my shirt in that open-handed gesture of innocence and exasperation; a little coin of perspiration had formed in the hollow of my chest, trapped in its crater by the pounding of my heart and the hardness of my belly. “I want a new lawyer. I’d find one myself, but how can I? If you don’t do this for me…You have to do this for me. Tell Bowen he’s out. He has nothing to do with this anymore. The next time someone talks about my case it has to be a different kind of lawyer—not some little nobody with soup on his tie. I want the best. I want to get out of here. This is completely unfair. You better find me a new lawyer even if it’s someone you hate.”

3

They eventually got a new lawyer, and it was the kind of lawyer they truly disliked, with an office in the Wrigley Building and a picture of Mayor Daley on his wall, but even so it was practically another two years before the court gave me permission to return home.

4

They took me home in the middle of August on a day turned absurd by melodramatic weather. I sat in the back seat of their car with my tan valise on my knees, like a soldier on a crowded train. I’d been advised by my only friend in Rockville, a boy named Warren Hawkes, who had been in and out of three such places, that the best way to make the journey was to remain as lifeless as possible, and I held my mind tightly, as if in two cranial hands. Arthur drove and each time he glanced at me through the rear-view mirror he took his foot off the accelerator and the Ford slowed down. Rose said two things I remember: “This is the last time we’ll make this trip,” and, “I wonder if you’ve heard there’s been an upsurge in anti-Semitism lately.” We traveled a narrow back route, a short-cut to Chicago they’d discovered just recently; nearly ripened fields of corn thronged the sides of the road, pressing forward like spectators awaiting a parade. Above us, the thunder groaned away and first to the west and then to the north leapt platinum branches of lightning—in momentary silence and then with a great electrical crunch. The cornfields flashed, the air grew heavy, oppressive, almost purple, and before we were thirty minutes away from Rockville it was raining so hard the windshield looked as if it were being splashed with silver paint.

The weather somehow intensified my silence and made Rose and Arthur miserable on a day they’d counted on. I could feel myself failing them and in truth I didn’t want to. But I didn’t dare make a civil gesture. I was sure that if I let myself come forward at all, I would do something to disgrace myself and terrify my parents. I might holler, or cry, I might curl up in the back seat and whisper “I’m scared.” It was better, safer, to remain as inanimate as my raging senses would allow, and before long Arthur and Rose drifted into the haze of silence I’d manufactured. On and on we drove, slowed by the rain and startled now and again when the lightning broke so nearby that it sounded as if it were your own bones being snapped in two. Through the small towns, past the churches, the shopping malls, the hasty clusters of ranch-style houses, the storm and its crazy drama followed us every inch of the way. I dozed off at one point and woke with a start that was doubled by a long roll of thunder. My valise fell from my knees and balanced on the steering- column hump that went through the center of the car. I stared at my lap; the suitcase had left a perfect parallelogram of sweat. “You’re awake,” said Arthur, looking through the rear-view mirror. The car slowed down. There was a high hum beneath us and I saw we were going over a metal bridge. We were in Chicago, crossing over the Chicago River, dead now but curiously beautiful, moving beneath us like melted candle wax.

My parents took me home to their shadowy apartment on Ellis Avenue, a street which many no longer considered safe. From time to time, Rose and Arthur had talked of moving but it seemed reactionary to quit the backsliding neighborhood. My parents had lived in the same apartment all their married life. It was in a massive stone building and its white was the color of an old tombstone. About a block away was a physics research lab where some of the work on the first atomic bomb had been done and across the street was one of the University of Chicago’s libraries. But we were at the western edge of the University’s territory and all around us were empty lots where buildings once stood and the woeful evidence of families living with not nearly enough money. The professors and their families were gone from our building as well, and when we pulled in front of it (after a roundabout route that took us as far as possible from the Butterfields’ old block) I noticed that whoever had moved into the ground-floor apartment had pasted yellow paper over their windows and that the heavy oval glass in the building’s street door was badly cracked, as if it had been struck by a rock or a bullet.

I followed my parents up the stairs, holding my valise. Someone was cooking curry on the first floor and as we approached the second landing I heard “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge. Arthur led the way, gripping the dark wooden banister with one hand and bouncing his keys in the other. Rose seemed to walk with new cautiousness; she lifted her feet higher than necessary at each step and as I lagged back and tried to calm myself I noticed a tiny wet leaf plastered to the sole of her high- heeled shoe. The halls were painted a pale butterscotch color and our shadows bent and swelled as we climbed to the third floor. I tried to feel cheerful by saying to myself, “I’m home, I’m home,” but my inner voice sounded skeptical and timid and I was only making things worse.

If my parents themselves gave off accidental evidence of having changed, of having lost patience with their long and puzzling relationship, the apartment itself reflected none of this. As soon as we were inside, my pulse slowed to half its rate. The sensory overload of the long trek was behind me and I was immediately incurious. I knew in an instant that nothing had altered in those rooms. The smells were the same—paste wax, old books, coffee, and Rose’s Evening in Paris talcum powder—and the air conditioners wheezed at the same pitch they always had. The same pictures were on the walls: a Utrillo reproduction, a Guernica, and five portraits of working hands done by a local lithographer named Irving Segal—hands on rakes, hands on lathes, hands holding knotted ropes. Even the knickknacks were solidly in place: the chunk of quartz on the bookcase next to Scottsboro Boy and the little limestone toad from Mexico squatting next to the Letters of Lincoln Steffens. The cherrywood coffee table was still two feet in front of the brown sofa and on top of the table was, as always, the blue pottery vase stuffed with cattails.

I dropped my suitcase onto the pale green rug and sat on the sofa. “Well,” I said, “I see you’ve got the same old cat.” It was the punchline to an old family joke—the little boy who runs away from home and returns before anyone notices he’d left.

“Would you like to see your room?” Rose asked. While I was in Rockville she had appointed herself the guardian of my room. Sometimes, as a way of saying goodbye, she’d said, “Your room is waiting for you, David.” When they gave the apartment a paint job Rose made certain that the pale blue matched the original color without the slightest variation. When the painters left, Rose took color snapshots of the whole apartment and three of my room and delivered them to me at Rockville. Though I never mentioned the pictures to her—her gesture struck me as somehow out of character, too explicit—those color pictures had survived the steady attrition of my belongings and were now at my feet in the tan suitcase.

“May as well,” I said.

It’s the same. It was the backdrop of a recurring dream. It was as if the same air I had left behind still filled the little square chamber, waiting for me to please breathe it again. This was beyond preservation—the room had been embalmed. The bed was still covered by a copper corduroy spread. There were still only two pictures on the wall, both ripped from books. One of Ty Cobb, demonstrating his open grip, taken from The Encyclopedia of Baseball, and another of Monk Eastman, the notorious Jewish gangster, razored from a book called The Gangs of New York. The wooden floors were painted and waxed and, that night, when I turned on the lights, they would dully reflect the electric glare. There was the red and green braided rug and the white dresser, the bowl-shaped glass cover over the ceiling light, the three-legged blond wood desk, the plum-colored coffee mug filled with pens and pencils. My bookcase was still intact, holding boyhood books about prehistoric animals and astronomy, the novels of John R. Tunis as well as the worthy books my parents had given me on holidays and which were unread—though I’d opened each page by page so they wouldn’t look unappreciated.

“My God,” I said, in not much more than a whisper, but we were so quiet and so uncomfortably conscious of one another that I might as well have shouted it.

“Recognize it?” said Rose, with a brief nervous laugh. “We wanted it to be just like you remembered.”

“It is,” I said, and impulsively took her hand and squeezed it. It was the first time we’d touched since leaving Rockville and I could tell she didn’t want me to let go.

Arthur opened the narrow closet and ran his hand over the empty wire hangers, an innkeeper’s gesture.

“Plenty of room,” he said.

Obligingly, I looked at the closet and nodded. Toward the side were some of my old clothes.

Rose was gazing around the room and it looked as if she’d suddenly regretted keeping it so frozen in time. Yet how to change it? What would that have meant? What would it have made them?

“Do you like it like this?” she asked, softly.

“Yes. It’s just like it was. I really feel like I’m home.”

“You are home,” said Arthur, huskily.

And then, when we least needed it, an enormous silence descended. I sat on the edge of my bed and waited for what I hoped was a polite interval before saying, “I guess I’d like to lie down for a while.”

My parents exchanged quick glances, but not nimbly enough to escape detection, like old illusionists helplessly exposing the rigged banality of their tricks. They were regretful not to have planned something definite for my homecoming. But who could they have asked? There was no family to speak of.

“You’re not hungry?” said Arthur.

“I couldn’t even look at food.”

“Maybe a drink.” Arthur checked his watch. Two o’clock. An indecent time for alcohol. But it was Saturday and certainly an occasion.

“No. I get drunk too easy.”

“We stock other things besides booze,” said Rose, smiling and folding her arms.

“I’m just going to rest.”

“Well,” she said. “OK.” Her voice trailed off but her smile remained perfectly firm.

“Well,” said Arthur, throwing his hands before him and then clapping them together, like someone making a good choice, “you rest up.”

As they left, Rose said, “Should we wake you for dinner?”

“No problem,” I said, “I’m sure I won’t sleep.”

“Open or closed?” said Arthur, touching the door.

I pretended to think about it. “Closed.”

The door closed with a soft click; finally I was on my own. I listened to their footsteps go away and then I was up and across the room. I opened my old desk drawer. It was filled with letters. I grabbed them all and leafed through them, first quickly and then, with mounting disappointment, very slowly. All of the letters were addressed to me but none were the ones I wanted—they were birthday greetings from years before, Christmas cards, letters from a South Korean pen pal I had kept up with until my parents asked me to stop, letters from my grandfather.

I’d asked my parents, long ago, if they’d kept the letters from Jade. These letters had been submitted to the court during my hearing and had actually been officially marked as evidence. They’d helped keep me out of jail, helped to prove the extraordinary emotional pressures I was under. But what had happened to them afterwards?

Once more I flipped through the letters, with a wrist-and- thumb dexterity developed trading baseball cards. It would have been too easy, too kind to find them straight off. They must be somewhere else. I opened my dresser. Top drawer: three new pairs of Esquire socks and a couple unopened packets of Fruit of the Loom underpants. Second drawer: an old white shirt back from the laundry, folded and bound by a strip of heavy turquoise paper. Third drawer: empty. The important thing is to guard against jumping to conclusions. Not to think ahead of myself. Quietly, though my hands would not quite behave, I closed the drawers and went to the window.

I sat on the sill, moved the brown curtain to the side, and like a thief, a spy, I looked down at the street. The rain had stopped. A black teenager was walking by with a steel, four- pronged comb stuck in the back of his helmet-like hairdo. In a strange way, I had forgotten about black people. All the staff at Rockville were white and the only black patient who had been there during my stay was a girl named Sonia Frazier, whose father taught logic at Northwestern. Sonia had twig-like scars starting at her wrist and going more than halfway up her arm from countless suicide attempts. Failed suicides suffered a generally low status among the other patients—they were not considered serious people—but Sonia overcame this by not speaking to anyone about anything. She sometimes played the guitar and one day, quite unexpectedly, she sang English folk songs for an hour. By the time she was finished nearly all of Rockville had gathered into the Common Ground to hear her soft, penetrating voice. I admired her remove and guessed that she too wanted her solitude so she might savor secret memories and irrevocable decisions, and whenever we met I nodded at her, as if we were allies in a secret spiritual war. Sometimes she returned my sign. A couple of months into her stay, her parents withdrew her from Rockville. I happened to be crossing the main entranceway as the three of them left, each carrying two large plaid suitcases, each looking determined and scared. I went to her side, touched her on the shoulder, and said, “I think you’re a great person.”

I sat at my window now in a state of terror and the terror would not recede. I stared down at Ellis Avenue until it was blurry. I simply could not imagine setting foot on the street below. Two professorial-looking men walked by, one swinging an unopened black umbrella, the other with a raincoat hooked onto a finger and slung over his shoulder, like a TV star. People and their lives. People and their pictures of themselves. It was astounding and it gave me motion sickness to think of it. How could I ever find a place among them and how could I learn to want to? I had nothing to say to anyone; everything I cared about was exclusive. I thought of suddenly braving it, of just going outside and asking the first person I saw—what? Anything. Directions. To the Museum of Science and Industry. Yet what a poor choice, even in fantasy. It was in that very museum that Jade and I had spent our first afternoon alone, in that palace of progress with its towering lobby and the genuine World War I fighter planes hanging from the ceiling on steel cables. Holding hands—it was really more like touching fingers—we had ridden the jolting trolley through the replica coal mine and then, later, spoke to each other in whispers, each facing a scientifically molded sheet of Plexiglas separated by some two hundred yards. Our murmurs had carried with miraculous intimacy and fidelity: it sounded as if we whispered to each other in bed, though we did not know that yet. Finally, we strolled through a gigantic model of the human heart, in the company of twenty tee-shirted children from Camp Wigwam. We walked slowly through the ventricles, listening to the omnipresent thumping that came through a hidden speaker, touching the modeled veins. Jade, in whose house medical gossip was detailed and incessant, presented one of her father’s far-flung theories about the Healthy Heart while I, my mouth so parched that I dared not speak, marveled at our journey through affection’s symbolic locus and felt an overwhelming jolt of pure consciousness—I knew from the start that I loved her and knew, as well, that I would never fall back from that love, never try, never want to.

I sat with my forehead pressed onto the window and my full weight was supported by one sheet of glass. With a sudden recoil I sat up straight—I’d imagined myself tumbling out. I looked out at the street again and then pulled down the shade.

The room was mostly dark now and I stood in that darkness. Soon, I knew, I would be ransacking the apartment looking for those few letters, but the search would have to wait. I’d have to be alone. And time passed so slowly—there was no reason to hurry. For the moment it was all I could do to stand where I was, in my stuffy, stupid room, and feel the tears—when had they started?—rolling down my face. I hoped my parents wouldn’t barge in and find me like this. But there was no question of stopping myself. I hadn’t the strength, nor the cunning disregard for the self’s deepest wound. I sat on the bed and blindly groped for the pillow. I wrenched it free from the covers and pressed it to my face. Then I opened my throat to its full aching aperture and sobbed into that soft mound and its millions of feathers.

Rose worked as a librarian in a high school on the Southwest Side, and because it was summer and the time of her vacation, it fell to her to remain home with me during those first humid days of my return. Eventually, I would have no choice but to put my life in order. My release from Rockville was only a new kind of parole. I was required to see a psychiatrist twice weekly, remain in contact with a parole officer, and either enroll in college or get a full-time job. I was not to leave Chicago without the court’s permission and I was not to make any attempt to contact any of the Butterfields. But in the meanwhile, I lurked about the apartment, sleeping late, watching TV, and eating with the blind cosmic appetite of an enormous parasite. How Rose suffered my languor. She believed in will power as deeply as Galileo believed in gravity, and the overgrown boy in cocoa brown pajamas staring at reruns of “The Lucy Show” was the apple that falls from the tree only to hover in mid-air.

The weather was repulsive. The temperature was in the nineties and the sky was the color of soiled bandages. Our air conditioners were on perpetually and they dripped cool gray water into the pans we’d placed beneath them. Everything felt damp and slightly soft; the ink from the newspapers came off on your hands.

I could not bring myself to leave the house. I slept as late as I could. When I woke I’d force myself back to sleep, pushing my consciousness back down with the hunger of a man licking the last crumbs off of his plate. Then, when I couldn’t take my bed or my room any longer, I’d stagger into the living room, turn on the TV, and lie on the couch, picking at a bunch of oblong green grapes or devouring a box of Ritz crackers. Rose tried to get me to go out. She suggested lunch at a nearby restaurant; she looked at the movie listings with me and asked me what I wanted to see. She claimed to have made appointments for me—with her friend Millicent Bell, who worked at Roosevelt University, or with Harold Stern, who had offered to get me a job with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union. But I wasn’t ready to leave the house and I told her. I never noticed her making a call to cancel one of these so-called appointments; I suppose she was trying to appeal to my sense of order or trying to make me feel there were real live people out there, waiting to see me and make my life real. She offered to take me shopping and when I refused that, she went to my room and took all of my old clothes out. She brought them into the living room and dropped them on the floor and forced me to go through each piece and decide with her that practically none of them fit me any longer—I’d gotten taller in Rockville and I wasn’t quite thin any longer. This was on my third day home, and after I admitted that my clothes didn’t fit me—and assured her that quite soon I would allow her to buy me new ones—Rose gathered them in her arms to dispose of them in the cellar.

“You could give them away, you know,” I called after her as she lugged them toward the door.

“Charity is for the ruling class,” she answered.

“Sharing’s not!” I shouted, suddenly electric with frustration and shame.

I listened to her heels clatter down the stairs. For the first time since arriving home, I was truly alone in the apartment. I had searched my room and hadn’t found any of the old letters to and from Jade, and now at last I could look elsewhere. I ran to the bookcases and opened the sliding cabinet doors at their base: folded tablecloths; aqua and burgundy burlap napkins from Mexico; a few old copies of The National Guardian; a chessboard and a White Owl cigar box for the chess pieces; dozens of little boxes of delicate pink birthday candles; boxes of checks; boxes of unsharpened pencils; a portable sewing kit, housed in heavy, shiny paper and decorated by a drawing of an elephant waving its trunk; envelopes; empty spiral notebooks. Just the kind of innocent, chaotic accumulation that at another time might have made me grin with pleasure—my parents’ hidden clutter was utterly beyond reproach. It was like prying open a locked diary only to read recipes and descriptions of nature, or hearing someone murmur in his sleep, “I must remember Ezra’s birthday.”

I closed the cabinets, turned on the TV, and flung myself onto the sofa, trembling in the wake of the missed opportunity. Rose stalked back into the apartment. I could tell that her temper had subsided and she no longer had the impulse to remove my old clothing, but she still had another armload to go and it would have been too complicated not to follow through. She avoided my eyes and gathered the last of them and was gone.

I raced into my parents’ bedroom. Even on bright days it was a dark room but today it looked submarine. I switched on the overhead light, which was covered with a convex square of cloudy cut glass. There had never been any sign of activity in that room. They dressed and undressed in the bathroom down the hall. There was no desk, no telephone, and the only chair was an old wooden one pressed against the wall, which had never, as far as I knew, supported human weight. The floors were carpeted and the bed stood in the middle of the room, between a closet on one side and a dresser on the other. There were two Irv Segal lithographs of toiling hands on the wall but no mirror. The bed itself was made so tightly that it looked as if you’d need a penknife to roll back the covers at night. Racing both against time and my own admonishment, I searched through their yellow lacquered dresser. What unvarying innocence! First drawer: socks, shorts, tee shirts, handkerchiefs, and a bottle of Arrid deodorant that Arthur evidently felt was too personal to store in the common medicine cabinet. Second drawer: Arthur’s shirts. Third drawer: nylon stockings, one pair still attached to a garter belt, brassieres, panties, a lady’s shaving kit. Fourth drawer: an empty wristwatch case, an empty photograph frame with its glass cracked, and stacks of manila envelopes. For a few pounding moments I was certain I’d found my letters. But the envelopes held canceled checks, old income-tax statements, snapshots of me as an infant and a child, old leases, automobile registrations, insurance forms, a loan agreement from the Hyde Park Bank, an envelope marked “Arthur’s Will”…

“What now?” said Rose.

I was seated on the floor and the envelopes were in my lap. I was silent for a moment, wondering without terribly much fear if inspiration might present me with a brilliant alibi. I had never had any deep attachment to the truth, especially when my personal welfare was at stake. Yet since having confessed to starting the fire on the Butterfields’ porch, my sense of personal protection had become sporadic: I rarely felt that more damage could be done to my life than had already been done. “I’m looking for my letters,” I said. “My old letters to Jade.” I looked up at my mother, prepared for her fury—the only part of my parole she approved of was the stipulation I keep the Butterfields out of my life. I was ready to be screamed at, slapped, even threatened with being sent back to Rockville; I was ready for tears, for panic and grief and even compassion. It really didn’t matter to me.

But Rose didn’t seem to hear my confession, or else she did not absorb it. Perhaps she had forgotten the letters, or perhaps as far as she knew they’d been disposed of long ago. She swayed in the doorway to her bedroom. Her eyes blinked slowly behind her glasses and her arms were folded over her chest in that school- teacherish way that was second nature to her now.

“I suppose this was your father’s idea,” she said.

“Dad’s idea?” I said, pouncing on the notion as if it might prove my innocence.

“Dad’s idea?” she said, tilting her head, making a face, and trying to mimic my voice. It was, as far as I’d let myself know her, completely unlike my mother to do a thing like that.

I stood up, still holding the envelopes. “I honestly don’t know what…”

“Checking his will?” she said. She smiled and pointed her chin at the documents in my arms. “I thought you’d be curious to find out if you were still in it. How about the insurance? Did you check that too? You could have asked me, you know. I would have told you. But your father made you promise not to talk to me about it. And like a good little boy you kept your trap shut. Well? Did you have a nice look?” She stepped carefully across the room and pulled the envelopes away from me—for some reason I resisted for a moment. She yanked them away with a surprising jolt of strength.

“Here we are,” she said, choosing the envelope that said “Arthur’s Will” and letting the others drop and fan out onto the floor. “You won’t find any mention of his new family. Or in the insurance. That comes later.”

“His new family?”

“Please don’t lie. Your father told me he’s had a nice little discussion about it with you. And you’re so happy for him. Your father has finally found his true love. Now you’re a team. ‘I’m happy for you, Dad.’ That’s what you told him. He’s got everything he always wanted. A silly woman who waits on him hand and foot and two little brats who wouldn’t mind calling him Daddy.”

“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.

“Nothing, no, that would be great.”

“What would you like?” Arthur asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t need anything.”

“Some clothes?” said Rose. “For when you start school, or whatever.”

“That would be nice,” I said.

“Clothes aren’t a present,” said Arthur. “He’d get clothes no matter. How about something special, David? Something a little off the beaten path?”

I wondered if he were tempting me deliberately. “Like what?” I said.

“Name it,” said Arthur.

“Well,” I said, leaning back and preparing my insides for the worst, “there is one thing.”

“What?” said Rose.

“And it wouldn’t cost a penny,” I said. “It’s something of mine. I’ve been looking around for it and I can’t find it.”

My parents exchanged glances; it seemed they knew what was next.

“Anyhow,” I said, “I’d like you to give it to me. It means more to me than any old Plymouth, I can tell you that.”

“What are you talking about?” said Rose.

“A bunch of letters. The letters from Jade. The ones you showed to the judge.” My voice was suddenly unstable, feathery, and overheated—not a voice that could command attention. “And I think there were some letters I sent to her. I’d like to have them, all of them.” I took a deep, notched breath and added, “They’re mine,” because they were, they were completely and irrevocably mine, and it tore at my tenderest parts to have to ask for them.

Rose and Arthur explained as simply and calmly as they could that the letters were gone and I, to prevent making a fool of myself, tried to look as if I believed them and, at the same time, to prevent myself from losing all hope, told myself they were clearly lying.

Later that evening we sat in the kitchen over a light supper. Rose and Arthur yawned frequently from exhaustion and tension. No one was hungry and with the topic of the letters having been instantly elevated to a taboo, there was nothing anyone cared to talk about.

Rose was the first to leave the table. Then I went into the living room and turned on the TV. Arthur followed and sat at a respectful distance from me on the sofa.

“Did you talk to What’s His Face about a job?” Arthur asked.

I nodded. A White Sox game was on, tied 6 to 6 in the fifteenth inning.

“You know there’s no rush,” said Arthur. “You don’t have to get a job. I hope you know that.”

“I’ve got to get a job. That’s what they told me. It has to look like I’m getting adjusted.”

“You’ll adjust. It doesn’t have to happen right away. I told you what it was like for me when I came home from the Army.”

I nodded, but Arthur went on.

“I was of course glad to be back. The war was over and I was alive. I had people I wanted to see and places to go. The whole country was celebrating. But I couldn’t do it. Everyone thought your mother and I were having a little second honeymoon but the truth was I couldn’t leave the house. It was the damndest thing. I was just stuck here as if I was paralyzed.”

“I know, I know,” I said. And then, looking away from the TV but not quite at my father, I said, “But there’s a big difference between coming home from World War II and coming home from a fucking insane asylum where you’ve been sent because you burned your girlfriend’s house down. No one wants to see me.”

Arthur shook his head. “Stop it. With an attitude like that you can’t expect very much.”

“That’s fine. I don’t expect anything.”

“Don’t you understand? Everyone is willing to grant that what’s behind you is behind you. Look at all the people here today. I know you don’t care very much about them but that’s not the point. They were all happy to see you again. It was almost like you’ve never been gone.”

“Right. I noticed.”

“Now it’s your turn, David. It’s time for you to realize to yourself that what’s in the past is in the past.”

“I don’t think I know what the past is. I don’t think there’s any such thing.”

“You want to know what the past is?” said Arthur. “It’s what’s already happened. It’s what can’t be brought back.”

“The future can’t be brought back, either. Neither can the present.”

“I’ll show you what the past is,” said Arthur. He clapped his hands together once, waited a moment, and then clapped them again—the sound was hollow, forlorn. “The first clap was the past,” he said with a subdued yet triumphant smile. If we had shared the sort of life that Arthur had wanted for us it would have contained hundreds of conversations just like this one.

“Then what was the second clap?” I said. “That’s the past too, isn’t it? And right now, while I’m saying this, isn’t this the past too, now?”

Rose came in holding that week’s National Guardian. She wore a light blue robe and her summer slippers; she was smoking her nightly Newport. “I’m going to bed now,” she announced. It was something she used to say to hurt Arthur, to make him feel he was being avoided and to emphasize the point that they wouldn’t be making love. There had been a time when Rose had felt she could protect her position in the marriage, and protect her privacy, by simply (and it was simple) withholding her love. But now that her love was no longer sought there was no advantage to be gained in rationing it. It was clear that the power she once had was not real power—it had been bestowed upon her, assigned. It had all depended on Arthur’s wanting her, depended on his vulnerability to every nuance of rejection. He had, she realized now, chosen her weapon for her. He had given her a sword that only he could sharpen.

Arthur checked his watch. “OK,” he said. “Good night.” Then, to me, “I think we’d better turn down the TV so we won’t keep your mother up.”

I sat forward quickly and turned off the set. “I’m going to wash the dishes.”

“There’s a million dishes,” said Arthur. “Save them for the morning.”

“I don’t see anything wrong in doing them now,” said Rose. “It’s about time people started pitching in around here.”

“I agree.”

“It doesn’t have to be done now,” said Arthur.

“What do you care?” said Rose. “You don’t lift a finger around here. You’re like a rabbi sitting around for people to wait on you.”

Arthur forced a burst of air through his lips, to signify a superior laugh that supposedly just happened to escape, and then shook his head to signify patience wearing thin.

I went into the kitchen. At the party, plastic forks and paper plates had been used, but still nearly every dish in the house was soiled. Ordinarily, they would have put them into the dishwasher, but even after the rain the night was too hot and they couldn’t run the air conditioner and the dishwasher at the same time. I felt relieved to be alone and felt somehow clever for not having retreated to my room.

I turned on the water, hot and loud, and stared at the window over the sink. (The window looked out on an airshaft, which my mother found depressing, so she had pasted on the window a picture of Leningrad, clipped from Life magazine.) I squirted some emerald soap onto a big tawny sponge, then picked up a flowered cake dish, washed it clean, and ran it beneath the hot water. As the water touched my hands I felt my eyes go molten and then I bowed my head and cried. Before, when I had wept, I thought of Jade, and wondered where she was and if I would ever see her again, or I thought about all the time that had been lost, or I thought about how absurd and awkward I felt, how out of place and helpless, or I just remembered past happiness—happiness that had been mine and no longer was. But now, standing before the sink in a cloud of steam, I thought only of those letters, picturing the ink upon the page, recalling the endearments. Those letters were all that I had that wasn’t invisible. They were the only tangible proof that once my heart had wings. I had known another world. It is impossible to give it a name. There are words like enchantment, words like bliss, but they didn’t say it, they were stupid words. No words really said it. There was nothing to say about it except that I had known it, it had been mine, and it still was. It was the one real thing, more real than the world. I was crying steadily now, aware that I wasn’t really alone, trying not to make too much noise. I felt myself sinking, literally falling to pieces. I tried to direct my thoughts toward anger with Arthur and Rose for separating me from those letters, for destroying them in a panic, or hiding them, or for whatever they had done, but the anger, even the hatred seemed thin, insignificant. I tried to turn my thoughts toward my own helplessness, my inability to get on with life, to begin again. But the truth was that I had no will and no intention to begin life again. All I wanted was what I’d already had. That exultation, that love. It was my one real home; I was a visitor everywhere else. It had happened too soon, that was for certain. It would have been better, or at least easier, if Jade and I had discovered each other and learned what our being together meant when we were older, if it happened after years of tries and disappointments, rather than that vast, bewildering leap from childhood to enlightenment. It was difficult to accept, and it was frightening too, that the most important thing that was ever going to happen to me, the thing that was my life, happened when I was not quite seventeen years old. I wondered where she was. I thought about those letters, in a trashcan, in a dump, or in a fire. My hands were paralyzed beneath the hot-water tap and they were turning red.

“Do you need some help with those?”

It was Arthur. I didn’t dare face him; I tried to stop crying and I shook with the effort.

“I’ll grab a towel. You wash and I’ll dry,” Arthur said. He was standing next to me now. His shirt was open and the long dark hairs on his chest glistened with sweat. He glanced at me briefly—then dried the one dish in the drainer.

Desperately, I tried to compose a sentence in my mind: I guess I haven’t made much progress with these dishes, is what I came up with. But I couldn’t say it. My tears had become familiar to me yet I couldn’t control them. They had a life of their own. I washed another dish and handed it to my father and he dried it.

“David,” he said. I shook my head and he fell silent. We were silent for a few dishes, for all of the dishes, and then I began on the glasses. I was getting myself under control; my breathing was regular again. I glanced over at my father. His eyes were cloudy and his lips were pressed until they looked ivory and transparent. Oh God, I thought, with a flash of annoyance, he’s worried about me, he wants me to take him off the hook.

“I’m exhausted,” I said. It wasn’t much of an excuse but at least it was true.

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the hot glass in his hand. He turned the dishtowel around and around inside of it, until it cracked a little. “Talk to me, David,” he said, in a voice full of holes.

I knew how to avoid the curiosity—or even the concern—of others and could do it as easily as a cheat can deal off the bottom of the deck: it was basic, rudimentary, and sometimes I did it even when I didn’t altogether want to. I watched myself doing it. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.

“Anything. Whatever’s on your mind.”

I shrugged. I was going to start bawling again and I didn’t know how to stop myself—I didn’t know how to want to. I placed the sponge and a soapy glass on the side of the sink and pressed my hands over my face. I felt the tears running through my fingers, warm and oily.

“I wish I could help you.”

“I’m just very tired,” I said, though I don’t know if it was understandable. I was sobbing heavily now and speech was washed away.

“Is it the party?” Arthur asked. “Did you feel strange with all the people here?”

I shook my head.

“Tell me, David. Talk about it with me. Let me in.” He leaned forward and turned off the water.

“I’m in love,” I said, through my hands and tears.

He touched my shoulder. “I know, David,” he said. “I know.” Then—and I don’t know how to explain this—I heard something that he didn’t say, I heard, “I am, too.”

“What can I do for you, David?” my father asked. “Please. What can I do?”

I heard my mother come into the kitchen. I waited for her to say something but she felt excluded and shy. I turned to face her, with my red ugly eyes. She stepped back and touched her face, looking at me open-mouthed, both embarrassed and ashamed. I turned back toward the window. I felt the misery radiating inside of me, going deeper, getting fiercer and more immense, and I was suddenly very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I rubbed my forehead; I clenched my teeth; and then, suddenly, horribly, without even a moment’s warning—or perhaps just one moment, a freezing, sweating instant—my insides contracted and sent spewing up the day’s gin. My vomit splattered onto the sides of the sink and sunk into the soap bubbles.

“Oh God,” said Rose, only half in disgust.

My father grabbed my elbow to support me if I were to swoon. “Press your tongue behind your bottom front teeth,” he said, urgently. I heard a scraping sound behind me. My mother was pulling a chair away from the kitchen table.

“Sit,” she said, in that stern, bossy voice some people adopt when they want to sound reassuring and which has never reassured me.

“I’m all right,” I said, hoarsely.

“You’re not all right,” said Rose.

“If he says he’s all right then he’s all right,” said Arthur, squeezing harder on my elbow.

I turned on the faucet and drank from it, shamelessly squishing the water around in my mouth and then spitting it into the sink. Then I ran some water on my wrists, filled my cupped hands with water, and threw it inaccurately onto my face.

“Are you sick, David?” Rose asked.

I leaned against the sink. Staring into the dark, stinking water, I said, “Why did you throw my letters away?” I waited for an answer but there was silence. Their silence somehow encouraged me—I didn’t want an easy answer and now they seemed to be struggling with my question, my accusation. “Why did you do it?” I said, my voice getting steadier. “I mean, why? That’s all. Why?”

I stood up straight. The sickness was gone. Arthur was looking at Rose, he seemed to be demanding that the answer come from her. I followed his eyes to her guarded face and now both of us were staring at her.

“We did what we thought was best,” she said, calmly, but with an unstable, evasive quality right at the center of her voice.

“Best for who?”

“We didn’t want them around,” she said.

“Then best for you?” I said. “You threw them away because getting rid of them—my letters—was best for you?”

“Why do you want them?” she said, gripping the back of the chair she’d pulled out for me. I thought: I am that chair. And I watched her fingers go white from squeezing it. “Why do you want to repeat every mistake you made, to, to…wallow in something that just about ruined your life?”

“Wallow?” I said, my voice rising in volume and pitch.

“I don’t want to argue over words,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

“I don’t care what you mean,” I said. “I want you to know what I mean. Those letters were mine. They were all I had. I just want you to know that I’ll always want them, I’ll always know that you did this. Nothing will make this memory go away. What’s happening right now, in this room, happens forever.” I stared hard at her; my eyes colored the air between us. It seemed for a moment that she might cry but she clamped her mouth shut and tried to think of how to answer me.

“Don’t you speak to me in that way,” is what she finally said.

“We try to do what we think is best,” Arthur said.

“Oh stop it, stop it, for God’s sake, you are both such liars.” I heard my voice as an alien thing, the words clumsily attached to my emotions. My truest, most solid impulse was to push them down, to kick at them, to cause them some physical agony—I knew there was no inner pain I could inflict that would match mine. And I knew, as well, that I was not going to hurt them, I was not even going to touch them.

“You’re not allowed to see her anyhow,” said Rose. “If you even try to, they can revoke your parole.”

“They’re not going to revoke my parole for reading old letters.”

“We’re afraid for you,” Arthur said. “That’s why the letters aren’t here.”

There was nothing to say. I didn’t want to argue with them. It might have been good for me to enunciate my fury but I wasn’t interested in that sort of psychological housekeeping. I was angry but I was peculiarly bored with my anger. It was connected to a part of my world that I didn’t care very much about—it didn’t connect me to the letters. If I couldn’t live in the center of the life I had known, once, the only life I believed in, then I would rather live in dreams. And so I may have said more. The argument may have sputtered on for another few minutes, but I no longer cared and I don’t remember anything about it. I was gone, elsewhere. I was listening to my heart beat—it was pounding, really. It was going faster than it should but I followed its beat and it took me in, took me away. My eyes remained on Arthur and Rose but what I saw was Jade walking through that enormous model heart in the Museum of Science and Industry, touching the veins with her small hands, gazing this way and that, her mouth a little open, stumbling but not seeming to notice that she had. Then we walked home, back to her house on Dorchester. I took her hand, and she stroked mine with her thumb, knowing that if I wasn’t reassured I would lose courage and let it go. When we reached her house she said she hoped her whole family was home. I asked her why and she said she wanted them all to see me. I was so startled that I asked her why and she did me the kindness of pretending she didn’t hear. Then we walked up to the big wooden porch that circled halfway around the house, like a broken Saturn ring. There were bicycles parked on the porch. A wicker couch, yellow with white cushions. A footstool, a flyswatter, an open book. On a little oak table was a glass of iced coffee, milky, with ice cubes stacked in it like bricks. There were tiny flies swimming around the top of the glass, their wings the size of commas, trying to stay alive. Jade saw this—we both looked in the glass at the same instant, but that kind of thing would always happen to us, until it would no longer surprise us but just make us laugh—and she said something like Oh those poor things, or Poor little beasts—the whole family liked that word: beasts—and she threw the coffee over the railing, emptying it out onto their overgrown lawn. Just then Ann came out. It had been her coffee. She had only gone in for a cigarette…

In the middle of the night I woke up, completely. I had been dreaming about Jade. I knew when I dreamed about her. It felt as if a wheel was turning inside of me. I tried to catch the images before they sank back into unknowing but it was like trying to pluck moonlight off of the water. It wasn’t the dream that woke me, though. It was something that my father had said earlier in the kitchen. “That’s why the letters aren’t here,” he’d said. I could hear him saying it and I could see his face, now, the look of pleading, as if he’d been asking me to see through him, to interpret him, to just be patient and give him a chance to be my hero. I kicked the sheet off of me and got out of bed. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I couldn’t stay down with my new knowledge. It rushed through me. “That’s why the letters aren’t here.”

But where? There seemed only one logical place: Arthur’s office.

I was frightened—of letting myself down, of betraying myself. I dressed and wondered how I could get from the apartment to my father’s office. I had no money. I wasn’t certain how the buses ran or even if they were still going. The elevated train ran twenty-four hours but I was afraid to ride it. I stood at my window. The glass felt cooler; the rain must have broken the heat. It was two in the morning and no sign of anyone on the street. An almost full moon was out, touching the broken clouds with chromium glow.

I crept out of my room and into the darkened hall. I could hear my father’s deep buzzing snores. Rose must have been sleeping too: if she’d been awake, she’d have poked her husband in the ribs to silence him. Touching the walls for balance, I made my way down the hall, past their bedroom, and toward the entrance foyer. Arthur had taken to leaving his briefcase and keys next to the door. This presumed forgetfulness was new, and I didn’t know if it came from the erosion of age or the delirium of his new romance. But when I reached the door and groped in the dark for the little table upon which he kept his things, all I felt was the smooth, slightly oily surface of the wood. It was Sunday; there was no need to lay out his things.

I stood in the hall. A layer, and then another, of darkness receded and I could see shapes now. The plastered-over beams in the ceiling, the picture frames on the wall, the soft obsidian gap that was the entrance to the kitchen. I slipped off my shoes. My heart was like a barrel end-over-ending down a flight of stairs. With a murderer’s stealth I crept down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom.

Before Rose and Arthur lost control over me and could no longer stop me from spending my nights at the Butterfields’, I had sneaked into and through the apartment a hundred times. I knew just where to step. I knew which spots on the floor twittered beneath my weight and I knew how fast to open a door to stop the hinges from creaking. My way was not the soundless, shadowy glide it had once been—the door to their room, even though ajar, groaned slightly when I pushed it open and the doorknob touched the wall with a hollow click—but in less than a minute I was standing in the faint moonlight of my parents’ bedroom, my feet planted at the edge of their bed’s long shadow, and I had done nothing to ruffle their slumber.

My father wore no night shirt and the cover on his side of the bed had slipped down, revealing his soft, hairy chest and the dark birthmark (the “chocolate patch” of my childhood) on the top of his ribcage. His large head sunk into the center of his pillow and his chin was slightly raised. His snores were steady and sounded every bit as loud as those given out by those big dopey, innocent animals in old cartoons. It was the sound of the fake snore I used to give when I meant to say I was bored. Next to him, Rose slept in her nightgown. She slept on her side with her half-closed fists touching Arthur’s shoulders. Her breathing was regular, deep, and absolutely soundless; oxygen filled her lungs and fed her blood with botanical silence. The light of the moon, divided into twelve bars by the Venetian blinds, quivered slightly on the wall. I stood before my parents’ unconscious forms, my heart beating with a terror more befitting a patricide.

My parents were the very models of tidiness and “good habits.” Newspapers, if not to be saved permanently, were thrown out immediately after reading. A glass that was used for a midday drink of juice was always rinsed out and placed in the blue plastic drainer. Lights were not left to burn in empty rooms and no unoccupied shoe would ever dare show more than its very tip, peeking out from beneath a fringed bedspread. And so as I surveyed their room, looking for a wallet that might pay my way downtown and a set of keys that would allow me to enter my father’s office, I saw nothing but clear surfaces—no piles of change, no rings of keys, no dropped (or even carefully folded) clothing.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I crept across their bedroom, casting my shadow first over the square of broken moonlight on the wall and then laying it like a sword over my parents’ sleeping faces. Finally, I opened their closet. The scent of mothballs, the lumpy darkness. I reached forward, rustling the hanging clothes, chiming the metal hangers. Blind, I felt a suit or a dress wrapped in the dry cleaner’s crackling plastic, a silkish shirt, cool and melancholy to the touch, my mother’s nylon robe. Then came my father’s suit, colorless, made of mystery-fabric, but unmistakably his. I stuffed my hand into its pockets—empty.

There was a break in my father’s snoring. I turned toward the bed. Rose rolled away from Arthur and raised one half- closed hand above her head, grazing the bedboard with her knuckles before dropping her unformed fist onto the pillow. Arthur’s body seemed to veer toward hers, as if to follow its tiny nocturnal migration, but his journey toward her steady, familiar warmth was only hinted at. He remained flat on his back and the snores returned, deeper now, as if coming from a more resigned part of him.

O mother, O father. To be standing in your room. Conscious of you as you were conscious of me during my slumbers, to watch your progress in the womb of sleep, to have the power to plant invisible kisses on your nearly blank faces, or to kneel at your sides and practice the grief of your deaths. I stretched out my hand, as if to touch you, to steady your hold on sleep. My hand completely erased you from my sight, and I marveled at this as I had as a child when I could prove my thumbnail was larger than the moon. I felt myself filling with emotion, as a room might fill with light.

With my back to my parents again, I searched through the unvarying blackness of their closet, and though I must not have stood there very long (because Arthur’s sport jacket was the eighth piece of clothing I inspected and in it I found his wallet and his keys) I would not have been surprised to face the room again and find it lightening with the first spray of dawn. With Arthur’s heavy, tarnished ring of keys on my thumb and a mint- fresh twenty-dollar bill, I slipped out of the room, moving so silently that I was only intermittently conscious of myself.

I closed their door with a soft, final click and went to the end of the foyer. I turned on a light and opened the Yellow Pages to find the number of a taxi fleet. I chose the one with the largest ad and after I spoke to the dispatcher I sneaked into the kitchen and drank what was left of the Gordon’s gin straight from the bottle.

A few minutes later I was sitting on the steps in front of our apartment building, breathing the free night air. It was my first time out on my own but the momentousness of the occasion barely grazed me as it passed. It was three in the morning and whoever was having a late Saturday night was having it elsewhere. The street was empty. The first headlights I saw coming down Ellis Avenue belonged to the cab I’d called, a battered yellow hulk with a checkered fringe painted around its roof.

“Hello,” I said, opening the back door. I wasn’t so stupid as to think that you greeted cab drivers like that, but I did it anyhow. I had put myself in a trance to make it through the time separating my calling the cab and its arrival and I needed to make contact with someone outside of me. The driver was a youngish man. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled and had a pony tail. A huge portable radio next to him competed with the two-way radio from which his company’s dispatcher honked and squeaked like an electronic goose. The driver nodded at my hello and placed his hand on the meter’s lever so he could pull it the moment my backside touched his upholstery. “I’ve got to get downtown,” I said, still not getting into the cab. I was afraid to. My first time out of the house alone should have been a walk around the neighborhood in the sunlight, not a cab ride downtown in the hot darkness, with stolen money and stolen keys in my pocket.

I got in the back seat, gave the driver the address, and began to tremble. I tried to put myself in an adventurous frame of mind, to imagine a trenchcoat on my shoulders and a cigarette plugged into the corner of my mouth—a man with a mission, a man alone. But those second-hand images could only flicker, they could not sustain me. I couldn’t even bear to look out the window, and each time the cab made a turn I felt my insides lurch. My legs were crossed tightly and I hugged myself, with my elbows digging into my ribs and my hands clutching my biceps. I heard a weak, low moan and it took me a moment to realize that it was coming from me.

Too soon, we were in front of my father’s office. It was on Wabash underneath the elevated tracks. I looked out of the cab’s rear window at the deserted street. The streetlights shined down on emptiness. The stores had steel gates over the windows.

“Four-fifty,” said the driver, not turning around.

“All I’ve got is a twenty,” I said, digging it out of my pants.

The driver muttered something and opened a cigar box next to his portable radio and thumbed through a stack of bills. Next to the cigar box was a billy club with nails driven halfway in. He began counting out my change.

“Say, I wonder if you could wait,” I said. “I won’t be very long.”

“The meter’s off,” he said.

I stopped to consider what this meant; it made no sense to me.

“I’ll be about ten minutes. Then I’m going right back to Hyde Park. It’ll be hard for me to get a cab. Could you please wait? Here. Take the twenty, OK? That way you’ll know I’m coming back.” I handed him the twenty and put my hand on the back door handle but didn’t open it. I wanted him to reassure me that he would wait. “OK?” I said.

He put the twenty on the dashboard and turned off his motor, the lights.

I’d been to my father’s building dozens of times. As a young boy I’d pretended to be his partner, lunging for the phone whenever it rang, stuffing my shirt pockets with his pens, riding on the sliding library ladder. It was a small, whitish building, filled with the offices of marginal enterprises: importers of knickknacks, jewelry repair, the editorial offices of a Serbo- Croatian newspaper, a chiropractor, a Hong Kong tailor. I tried the street door on the off-chance it was unlocked, but it wasn’t. There were seven keys on my father’s ring and the first one I tried unlocked the door. (A measure of my state of mind was the intense, practically religious exultation I felt at this.) Inside, I found myself beneath a flickering fluorescent light. I listened for footsteps—perhaps they kept a maintenance man on twenty- four-hour duty. I stood there, transfixed, much longer than necessary. Something in me wanted to stay right there, to not walk up the one flight of stairs to my father’s office. It was the first time in three years that someone in control didn’t know exactly where I was; now, at last, my aloneness was complete and it terrified me. The only cord connecting me to the known world was that cab outside—or had it already left? I didn’t dare look and finally the thought of the driver making off with my money and abandoning me was more palpably frightening than anything else and I ran to the steep, dingy stairway and raced up it three steps at a time.

It was dark on the second floor, a solid, unvarying darkness. I staggered forward and kicked a wash bucket that had been left in the corridor. It went crashing down the hall and I covered my ears and said, “Shhh.” I waited for the darkness to recede. I stared ahead, blinking slowly, trying to tame the blackness with the intensity of my need to see. Slowly, I began to make out shapes. I could see the glass on the doors along the wall. My father’s office was the third one down and I made my way toward it. This time, though, I wasn’t so lucky with the choice of keys. I went through the seven keys three times around before I got the door to open.

I turned on the overhead light and regarded my father’s small office, I knew that I must move quickly, but that was all I knew. I didn’t know which way to turn. I closed the door behind me. I went to his desk and forced myself to sit in his swivel chair: my body was so stiff with fright that it was hard to seat it. Then I went through his desk drawers. I rifled through reams of blank paper, stacks of yellow legal pads, blank contracts, forms, packets, pads, boxes of pencils, balls of twine, envelopes, folders. Somewhere in the middle of going through his desk I took the phone off the hook—I’d imagined it ringing and what that would do to me. I didn’t look very carefully. I was too scared to search well, but I satisfied myself that the letters weren’t in Arthur’s desk. I went across his small office to the file cabinets. They were locked but the key, a small slender one, was on the ring. The files were packed. I looked under Axelrod, under Butterfield, under David, and under Jade. Finding nothing, I even looked under Letters. Everything seemed innocent and impersonal and suddenly I was filled with a boiling sadness for my father and his files, for the work he had done, for the tender, perishable details of his life.

His file cabinet was three gray metal drawers and two of them were sufficient for the alphabet. I opened the third. There were old staplers, phone books, a flashlight, a scarf…But in the back of it was a locked metal box, the size of a bread loaf. I picked it up and I knew that if my letters existed, they were in that box. The keyhole told me that it took a key the size of the one that had opened the file cabinets, but there was only one key like that on the ring. I tried it but it didn’t fit. I don’t really remember what I did next. I was no longer able to move in any deliberate way. I went to the bookcase and randomly removed some volumes, thinking the key might be hidden behind one of them. I picked up ashtrays, fell to my knees and peered beneath the office’s two green chairs. I paced wildly around and around, slapping crazily at my thighs and talking to myself, like a prisoner in the violent ward. Somewhere along the way I must have organized my senses enough to sit at his desk again and go through the drawers because soon I was inspecting the top middle drawer where, on a little interior shelf, which it shared with two sharpened pencils and a roll of mints, I found the key. I closed my fist around it, closed the drawer, and then collapsed onto the desk and burst into tears.

But there was no time for that. Still weeping, I made my way across the room again and, no longer with any energy left to hope, I opened the box.

Jade, our letters were there, all of them, folded and packed into a long brown envelope. Your handwriting was next to mine and I held them both and the words that we wrote.

When I finally left the office and went down to the street, the taxi was still waiting. The driver sat sleeping at the wheel, his chin touching his chest. I watched him for a moment and imagined he dreamed of someone he loved. The night had turned cool and the wind touched me as if for the first time. The sky was slatey, with a few bluish stars poking out of it. The moon, practically full, hovered on top of a nearby office building, like a bright cold dome. I looked at that moon as I had so many nights before, for prisoners love the moon, but now I was not looking at it as a prisoner, and not just as a dreamer, but as a free man, a pilgrim, a navigator charting his course.

5

Left to my own devices, I don’t know what I would have done with my life. But so much was required of me: I had to enroll in school, I had to see a psychiatrist twice a week, I had to stay in contact with my parole officer, and I needed a part-time job. Everything was too mandatory, pressing, and I resented it with a deep, helpless passion.

With the help of my mother’s friend Millicent Bell, I got into Roosevelt University and was even allowed to apply some of my work at Rockville toward college credits. Roosevelt is a big downtown college, with a student body made up of part-time workers, married people, and a lot of people over forty. There was no campus and because there was no obvious place to meet and talk, it was difficult to make friends with the people you shared classes with—or, in my case, easy not to. I studied astronomy, though Roosevelt was not much of a school for that. I took math, physics, and I did well in my courses, but none of my instructors seemed to recognize me from one class to the next. Even the guards at the planetarium where I showed up two or three times a week to stare at the dome full of lucious points of fire and light never remembered me, never returned my nods.

My psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Ecrest, and I liked him as much as you can like a psychiatrist you don’t want to be seeing. The parole officer assigned to look after my progress was a nominal Japanese named Eddie Watanabe. Eddie had shoulder- length hair, wore blue jeans, and had one of those peace symbols around his neck, the kind they sell on streetcorners, large as a grapefruit and dangling from a piece of rawhide. It was his strange contention that his being a parole officer represented a victory for “our side.” I would have loved to tell him exactly what I thought of his Beatle song lyrics, his freshly shampooed hair that looked as soft as a night cloud, his fake-o belief in “bein’ straight with each other,” and the enthusiastic, utterly humiliating bicep-squeezes he forced me to endure whenever I told him something he could categorize as “super news.” But Eddie, like so many before him, had a great deal of power over me—exactly how much, I hoped never to test.

My parents’ friend Harold Stern got me a job with his union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Harold, who liked to taunt my parents’ crowd with the assertion that only he had contact with the working class (and, thus, with reality), had always seemed shifty and arrogant, but he really came through for me and got me a job only a couple of blocks from Roosevelt University. I was hired to carry a picket sign in front of a clothing store on Wabash Avenue called Sidney Nagle. Sidney Nagle sold a line of cheap men’s trousers called Redman Pants, and the purpose of the picket was to inform customers that Redman workers were on strike and to ask them not to buy Redman products. It would have been more gratifying to my romantic sense of trade unionism if the store had a rich clientele, but the customers (most of whom ignored me and my sign) appeared far more humble than my parents or any of their friends, and Mr. and Mrs. Nagle, who ran the store with just one employee, seemed like a thoroughly desperate, unprosperous old couple. They stared at me with outrage and grief whenever the opportunity arose and I had a dreadful suspicion that if I were to see their bare forearms, I would find fading blue numbers.

I started working for the union not more than a week after sneaking into my father’s office. The fact that I was out in the world and behaving like a normal person reduced a bit of the tension at home, though my parents were not quite self-conscious enough to hide their own unhappiness. In order to be at work on time, I had to set my alarm clock in advance of the official time, and Rose and Arthur, willing to help me make my adjustments, set all of the other clocks in the apartment ahead as well, including the one in their bedroom and Arthur’s wristwatch. If once my parents lived with the belief that they were an epoch in advance of the general population and if that certainty had dissolved along with their political faith, they now lived, quite demonstrably, at least ten minutes ahead of history.

I often thought I could not have found a more difficult job. Every day I saw thousands of faces. Sometimes, the crowds shimmered before me like heat off a highway and at other times each face was momentous and distinct, like those faces in a crowd in an old steel engraving, each rendered in perfect, bewildering detail. It was the sort of job ideally made for obsessively thinking how pitiful my life was, of remembering Jade and longing for her, and accusing even the most distant stars for keeping us apart. I tried to entertain myself: one day I counted black people; the next day I counted people under twenty; and the next I tallied the people with noticeable deformities. I predicted how many women in the space of an hour would pass holding white pocketbooks, how many couples holding hands, how many stoned people. I searched my mind for things to recite. I asked my friends, and the Romans, and the countrymen to loan me their ears and I claimed to have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. Sunlight passed through the elevated tracks over Wabash, dividing itself into soft bars of light, falling onto the street like rungs in a gauze ladder. I tried to find this extremely beautiful. But it seemed far too inconsequential, too unintentional, and finally it awaited some missing ingredient to make it lovely, something pre-existent in the eye of the beholder. It waited to be beautiful for someone else.

Everyone I ever knew was elsewhere. Now and then I’d feel a start within me and it seemed certain that that face coming into view was someone I’d gone to school with, or an intern from Rockville, or someone who used to live on Ellis Avenue, or even a shopkeeper I’d once bought a Stevie Wonder record from. But it never turned out to be the case. Even when I stopped hiding my face and remained recognizable by anyone who might place me, no one broke stride in passing. The only curious eyes focused on my picket sign.

I had prepared myself to be startled regularly by apparitions of Jade. I don’t know where this knowledge came from—probably from a song or a movie—but it was my understanding that the hungry heart manufactured mirages. If you see someone in a gray skirt and blue shirt…or someone five foot four with small breasts…with turquoise studs in her earlobes…walking with her eyes down and cast to the right…with biscuit-colored hair, but curly like Little Lulu’s. I saw all of these likenesses, and more. I heard voices that could conceivably have been confused with hers, and one girl could practically have been on her way to a masquerade dressed up as Jade. She wore Jade’s khaki trousers with the wide elastic waistband and Jade’s green and red tee shirt; she walked with her eyes fixed to the right of her feet; she carried a cigarette, which might very well have been a Chesterfield. Her hair was much shorter than Jade’s but the very discrepancy in length revealed a more telling similarity: a brown mole on the back of the neck, just above the shoulder, that was pure, pure Jade. But I wasn’t tempted; not for one instant did I confuse these impostors with the real thing and now I couldn’t understand those who claimed to see their lovers everywhere. People took these mistakes as passion’s proof, yet now it seemed that to mistake a stranger for your lover was really an absurd kind of narcissism. How could one not know? How could there be any mistake? Pigeons in a flock picked their mates without confusion, penguins and titmice were not prone to optical illusions, or any other illusions, for that matter. They knew, and so would I.

The Chicago Public Library was only a couple of blocks from the Sidney Nagle store and I passed most of my lunch hours there. Since I had no idea what to do with the money I made, I was seized with frugality and liked the idea of spending less than fifty cents on lunch and reading for free to pass the time.

One day I discovered that the library had telephone directories from what seemed like every city in the United States. As casually as possible, I looked at the New Orleans directory to see if Hugh or any other Butterfields were listed—New Orleans was the city of his birth and perhaps Hugh had reconstituted the family in some moss-choked ancestral mansion. There were Butterfields in New Orleans, though no Hughs. There was a Carlton Butterfield, an E. Roy Butterfield, a Horace, a Trussie, and a Zachariah. I wondered if any of these were related to Hugh. Was his father still alive? Still running the coffee warehouses, still drinking from morning to night, still listening to Mozart with tears in his cloudy blue eyes? I stared at that cluster of Butterfields in the New Orleans directory and my heart beat hard but slowly, as if resisting the best it could the infusion of adrenalin seeing those names created: even a handful of bogus Butterfields put me closer to my friends than I’d felt in more than three years. I thought of Carlton, E. Roy, and the rest, reading the Times Picayune beneath the moving shadows of a ceiling fan, drinking thick black coffee out of clear glass cups, wearing white suits and smelling of bourbon. I stared at the names and tried to remember if Hugh had ever told me his father’s name.

Well, where would the family go after leaving Chicago? If not New Orleans…There had been talk of San Francisco. Idle, I thought, but who knew? Ann had a cousin who ran a psychiatric clinic in Berkeley: he was the source of the LSD the Butterfields had taken the night of the fire. I took down the San Francisco directory and looked for Butterfields. Again, the name was represented, but no Hugh, no Ann, no Keith, Sam, or Jade. I stopped to remember Ann’s cousin’s name: I’d paid attention to the correspondence because at least one hit of the LSD would have gone to me if it had arrived before my banishment. Ramsey (Ann’s family name). Gordon Ramsey. There was a G. Ramsey DVM on Polk Street. Could it be? Had Gordon given up psychopharmacology for distemper shots?

I went slowly, haphazardly, and did my best not to admit how central it was becoming to my life, but every weekday, without fail, I spent time in the library looking for Butterfields in the phonebooks. I found Butterfields in Los Angeles, Butterfields in Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Dallas. I bought a pocket- sized spiral notebook and wrote the address and phone number of any name that seemed likely. H. Butterfield in Denver, an actual Keith Butterfield in Boston and another one in Milwaukee, and Ann F. Butterfield in St. Louis (the F. made no sense but I recorded the number anyhow), a strange yet heart-kicking Jane Butterfield in Washington, D.C., and so on, back and forth across the nation.

As long as I was living with my parents, I didn’t dare make long-distance phonecalls, nor was I in a position to receive private mail. Sporadically, I called numbers from phonebooths in the Roosevelt University lobby, and one day I turned a twenty- dollar bill into quarters and spent an hour at least calling far- flung strangers. Hugh? I’d say, knowing at once from the enfeebled hello that Denver’s H. Butterfield was no one I knew. I called that Jane Butterfield in Washington and said, “Excuse me, I’m calling Jade—not Jane.” “Who’s that?” said a small child’s voice.

At the end of September, I moved out of my parents’ apartment and into a furnished two-room apartment on 55th and Kimbark. It was a dismal place, but I could afford it. I was glad to be on my own, though I was lonelier than I’d ever imagined. I hadn’t yet made any friends at school—I didn’t have any nodding acquaintances, really—and the retired suit maker who picketed in front of Sidney Nagle with me didn’t like or approve of me. I’d gotten my job through connections and it was generally something the union gave to retired members, to supplement pensions and social security. My only co-worker’s name was Ivan Medoff and he looked the way Jimmy Cagney would have looked if Cagney had been Jewish and worked in a factory for thirty-nine years. The only social gesture Medoff made in my direction was to say one day, “I told my wife I was here working with a youngster and she says I should maybe ask you to have dinner sometime.” He didn’t take it further and I didn’t press it, though I waited for him to name the day because I would have accepted.

My loneliness was at once vague and total. I never missed a class and soon forced myself to ask questions of the instructors, just to hear myself talk to another person. I looked forward to my appointments with Dr. Ecrest, and when he asked me if I’d be interested in joining a therapy group he was forming on Wednesday evenings I almost said yes, on the chance I might make friends in the group. My parents made a ritual appearance at my apartment for dinner, which I cooked for them on my two-burner stove and served in the cracked turquoise and white plates supplied by my landlord. I found more occasions than I would have guessed to make the walk to their house—picking up a sweater, borrowing spoons, spontaneously accepting an old dictionary they’d offered to give me before I’d moved out—and more often than not my arrival coincided with dinner. They both seemed involved with their jobs and though I knew they were in a sad, difficult time, they looked no more unhappy than two old dolls in an attic. I was an absolute pig in how I refused to recognize their misery, but it was what they wanted of me.

Near the end of October, I had a phone installed. Soon, I thought, I’d be in the Chicago directory. It would be widespread proof that I was out of the hospital and living on Kimbark. It would be public record and Jade could know.

As is well known, the telephone is a gloomy hunk of plastic and copper if it doesn’t ever ring. My parents had my number and they’d call often, but no one else called me. Oh yes, once my parole officer Eddie Watanabe called and put our appointment off for a week, but other than that the phone was as quiet as the old, stern sofa and chairs the landlord had left for me.

What the phone did provide was a constant temptation to call names from my list of Butterfields. I made these calls with an altogether frantic sense of guilt, as if I were compulsively dabbling with an addictive drug or losing myself in pornography. Each time I dialed I told myself it was the last and then I’d tell myself just one more. I don’t know how long I would have kept at it if I’d come up empty each time, but ten days after getting my phone I found Ann in New York.

There were only a few Butterfields in the Manhattan directory. One of them was a K. Butterfield, which could have been Keith, but I’d tried it from a phonebooth two or three weeks before. I also looked for Ramseys, however, and I had quite a few of those. Ann was listed as A. Ramsey, 100 E. 22nd Street. I remember that when I first wrote it down I thought it was one of the more promising entries, but for some reason it took me a long while to call it, as if I required the lengthy frustration of not finding anyone before deserving success.

Or perhaps it was sheer terror. I called her in the evening. She answered on the second ring and I knew from her hello that I’d found Ann. As soon as I heard her voice I pressed the button down on my phone, like a sneak pinching out a candle’s flame. I sat gawking at the phone, as if it would ring, as if it would be Ann. Then I paced my rooms and tried to understand what had happened, how by dialing New York City’s area code and seven small numbers I had completely changed my life. I grabbed a jacket and ran outside. Walking aimlessly, I passed a bar on 53rd Street and thought to go in for a drink—I’d forgotten for a moment that at twenty I was too young to be served. I drifted south. Soon I was on Dorchester, near to where the Butterfields once lived. But as I got closer to where their house had stood I lost all courage and, sweating crazily, I trotted back home.

I called her as soon as I was in, still wearing my jacket, panting from the run. This time, she didn’t say hello.

“Who is this?” she said.

“Hello, Ann.” My voice was tiny and inconsequential.

She was silent for a moment. “Who is this?”

I cleared my throat. I wasn’t near a chair so I squatted down on my haunches. “This is David Axelrod.”

She was silent. You never knew with Ann if those long pauses were proof of amazement or if her speechlessness was a device, a way of turning what you’d just said into an internal echo. I remembered this about her and a ripple of emotion went through me: I knew her.

“Hello, David,” she said. She sounded as if her eyebrows were raised and her head was tilted to the side.

“Am I bothering you?” I asked.

“Where are you?”

“I’m home. I’m in Chicago. On Kimbark.”

“So they let you out.”

“Yes. Since August.” I waited for her to say something and then I asked, “How do you feel about that?”

“About you being out?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s only parole,” I said.

“Oh? I thought being sent to that hospital was parole.”

We were silent again; I listened to the soft electronic rustle of the long-distance lines.

“Well, tell me,” I blurted out. “How’ve you been?”

“David, this is too strange.” And with that, Ann hung up.

I was stunned for a moment but I redialed her number. She picked up without saying hello.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and then I burst into tears. I thought I was only apologizing for the phonecall but as my tears came I realized I wanted to apologize and be forgiven for everything.

“David,” Ann said, “I can’t hate you.”

I tried to stop crying to consider what she’d said, but the tears, once begun, refused to be controlled. I took a deep breath that was broken in two by a sob and then I simply covered my eyes and cried. I turned away from the phone and when I placed it to my ear again Ann had already broken the connection.

Ten days later, a letter from Ann. It was so thick that the mailman couldn’t fit it into my box. He left me a yellow slip and after school I picked it up at the post office. Some of it was typed and some was written—in four different pens. I was up past dawn rereading it. The pages were fastened by a huge shiny paperclip and on top, written on a torn scrap of paper, was this note: “Finally decided if I didn’t send this I’d be writing it for the rest of the year. Don’t know what to make of it—impetuous, improvident, but now it’s yours. A.”

David, I’m amazed you’ve found me! Living here on East 22nd, in this cramped, expensive apartment, under what language so daintily designates as my “maiden name,” I felt—until I heard your voice and threw the phone into its cradle, in terror—I felt rather safe from any spontaneous visitations from my Butterfield past. Not just safe from you—you haven’t been an issue, really, locked away as you’ve been—but simply and unspecifically safe.

I am alone, for the time. All of the Butterfields have scattered—that’s as specific as I’ll be, though if you’ve found me then I suppose you’ve scared up a couple more of us. In fact, I’d put me as the trickiest to find, since Hugh, Keith, and Sammy are still Butterfields. I had no particular need for more independence (and now could use a bit less), nor did I feel burdened by dragging the Butterfield name behind me, but I did want to do something rash, something that would distinguish this particular, this final separation from all the other fits and separations that preceded it. I wanted Hugh to know that I had depleted my forgivenance, just as humankind is depleting the earth’s resources. All of my indulgence was gone and I was down to the bottom of me, the driest and most tender part, the most breakable and, I suppose, the meanest. I wanted him to know that and I’m not regretful for having given him the heave. Even though it was only after Hugh had made it abundantly clear that I could in no way interfere with his incessant poking around for his true and elemental self—which in Hugh’s case meant running around with his heart on a string like a little boy trying to launch a kite. Sometimes I suspect my pressing for the divorce and forsaking his name was my way of giving some dignity and finality to his awful carryings-on and in a funny way giving him one last chance to come to his senses. But Hugh by then had precious few senses to come back to. He didn’t respond at all to my announcement that I was reverting to Ramsey; it annoyed me so that I tried to convince the kids to drop his name, too. What a joke that was. Sammy’s was the perfect response: And what? Change my driver’s license?

I shouldn’t have been so short with you on the telephone. I felt compromised just hearing your voice. The others would never have forgiven me if I’d been friendly—but who am I fooling? They’d forgive this letter even less. I’ve always had a particular, a special sense of myself when I spoke to you: you hear things the others like to ignore, or misunderstand, and so I like to say them to you.

And you! Back in Chicago. I don’t think I could ever go back there. Chicago is a house full of kids and a lawn no one would mow. Hugh’s been back, though. Now that he travels around, like a peddler, though with nothing to sell, of course. Nothing at all. He’s quit his practice and he works when he and his current girl run out of money. He washes dishes, loads trucks. Anything. But Hugh went to Chicago with a purpose and that was you. He’d heard your case was coming up. I suppose you know that when the trouble all came, Hugh got to know the prosecutor fairly well and they’ve remained friends? Hugh learned there was a good chance you’d be getting out of the hospital and he did his best to revive the case against you. He mentioned this to me in his last call, and since we’re on the subject, I may as well add he was bitterly upset because he knew he’d lost and that you were on your way out. Didn’t I tell you you were making a dangerous foe in Hugh? How could you have been so arrogant as to mistake his slowness for laxness? You think that astrology is a joke but Hugh is a classic Taurus. And not a bad clairvoyant. The only reason I didn’t fall into a faint when you called is that months ago Hugh predicted you’d find me and get in touch and in a weird way I’ve been waiting to hear from you ever since.

Though I’m quite poor, I’m alone and so I can afford a few of my pet indulgences. (Really, I should have been Catholic; no one has a more quantitative sense of pleasure.) It has taken me this long to fully realize that I am never likely to be un-poor—unless, of course, that proverbial rich old man with a twenty-four-carat hole in his heart comes kneeling into my life. Hugh and I started off together with virtually no money but it never seemed altogether serious. We both assumed we were rich, and as educated Protestants we also assumed that the whole society—if not the cosmos—had a stake in keeping us buoyant. We consoled ourselves with that classic semantic sleight-of-hand: we weren’t poor, we were broke. Which in our case made as much sense as a shipwrecked family describing themselves as “on a camping trip.”

I learned to walk away from many luxuries—and each child caused me to evacuate another set of expensive yearnings. Yet the one that would never die (I protected it like an endangered species) was my love for expensive chocolate. It survived my love of well-made books, magazine subscriptions, alligator purses, and English cigarettes; chocolate survived turquoise and gold, as well as the simpler pleasures of a first-run movie or sending the shirts out to the Chinese laundry. But not only did my adoration of good chocolate survive my other pleasures—it surpassed them. No whiff of a fresh book or feel of Irish linen touched me quite so deeply as the melting, the slow darkening dissolve, of a good piece of Swiss chocolate beneath my tongue.

Since everyone in your family professed to believe in sharing (what ardent egalitarians you people were!), you were more than a little shocked to learn that I hid my chocolate from my own family. I used to savor my hidden sweets and, in truth, as much melted or went stale as got eaten. I felt a definite jolt when I passed a spot where some was hidden. Sometimes, talking to Hugh or one of the kids, with my hand resting on the maple sewing box that held, stuffed beneath the felt snips and empty spools, five dollars’ worth of Austrian semi-sweet, I felt a blush spreading like a stain across my face and my heart would literally pound. I would think: My God, I’m giving it away. I’m found, ruined! It was like passing one’s lover on the street and he is with his wife and you are with your children—that frightening and that pleasurable. Secrets offer the solace of privacy and possibility. They are the x in your equation, the compassionate unknown. Those caches of hidden candy, those untapped resources stood in for all of the others I pretended were available to me. Even before you made our house your own, the search for my chocolates was a family sport. Sometimes I’d sleep late, come down, and find the house in shambles. The search for my store of chocolate was a ritual, and like other tribal games, no one in that big drafty falling-down house ever quite outgrew it. Even Hugh got in on the act. But no one had a knack for finding my stashes like you had. Of all the people who traipsed through—family, the kids’ friends, the cleaning woman we hired for a month when I had what Hugh liked to call a nervous collapse and what I called simply coming to my senses, and the odd-lots of runaways and dropouts who seemed to land with us because our openness and curiosity was inevitably taken as laxness—of all the dozens with and without names, with and without scruples or conscience, you were the only one who could regularly unearth what I’d hidden. You hadn’t been courting Jade for more than a week before you began producing evidence of my stealth. I mean, David, you discovered chocolate that I’d forgotten. You found the bar at the bottom of the Kleenex box, then the semi-sweet buds in the bookcase, stuffed behind the antique Britannica that no one used because the language was too high-falutin’ for the kids to copy their school papers out of. You found the chocolate in the basement wedged behind a rusty snow shovel and wrapped in rags to protect it from the mice, and you guessed with no apparent effort which brick was loose in the fireplace. Once the others got you into the spirit of the search, the only place safe from you was my bedroom, where I occasionally tucked something into my underwear drawer and where you were—well, what were you, David?—too delicate, too tactful, or too tactical? to look. I must admit it was better to be raided by you. At least you made certain that most of it found its way back to me. You liked to present me with what I’d hidden. You were like a dog with a stick: throw it! hide it! I know you!

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and I’ve decided that because you were starting out fresh, with no resentments or hurt feelings, you could muster an understanding of me that in some ways surpassed my family’s—the rest were too anxious to discover I was somehow warmer, more capable, that I had a secret store of womanliness, motherliness, and selflessness, and they saw everything through a mist of expectations. I always thought you had some special instinctual understanding of me—though what we call understanding is as often as not appreciation decked out in robes. With you I could talk with the confidence that everything I said wasn’t going to be automatically husked for the kernel of true meaning. I could joke with you and talk around what I meant. I could hint—what a relief that was. All of the rest of them were so bloody explicit.

And you were the only one who was genuinely thrilled that I’d been a writer. When you found that I’d once sold two stories to The New Yorker, you went that very day to the University of Chicago library to read what I’d published and came back to the house that night with damp, chilly white-on-black photocopies of those old stories. Who weren’t you courting, is what I want to know. Those stories were more than eighteen years old but they trembled in your hands and looked new and alive as if they’d just rolled off the press. You gazed at them and at me as if I were still the person who had composed them. You wanted to talk about everything; you interviewed me as if I were Rebecca West, asking me what had inspired me and asking me why I’d chosen one word and not another.

I was the first person you’d ever met who had published anything, and I knew your enthusiasm was naive but I cherished it and drew it out of you. I made us a pot of coffee and we drank Tia Maria out of those orange juice glasses that Sammy had swiped from a cafeteria. Who were you? I mean then, that night. My daughter’s high- school sweetheart. Another newcomer to our household. But you seemed to promise so much. Your big intense eyes and the absolutely masterful trick of slowing your flattery down with little stammers. Before long the family, including Hugh and then Jade, went upstairs to bed, and you and I were alone beneath the kitchen light in an otherwise darkened house. It was nearly eleven but we were far from exhausting our conversation. It felt so damned wonderful to be talking about those stories, and you, I see now, were very cleverly staking a claim, marking off for yourself not only spatial territory but temporal territory as well. In a night you established a crucial precedent—that is, it was no longer expected that you would leave at a normal, decent hour. I remember hoping that Hugh would be asleep by the time I came to bed because I’d sensed earlier that evening that he wanted to, as he actually liked to say, “have me,” and I was not in the mood at all. At all. And I remember wondering if Jade lay in her bed, cursing me for monopolizing her new beau. But it just felt too damn right to be drinking and talking with you for me to worry about the others. I told myself that if old Hugh wanted me so badly he could come down for me, and if Jade suffered teen-age jealousy then she could confront me with it, and if you, beneath the opacity of your charm, sensed you should be somewhere else—home or with Jade—then you could simply pick yourself up and go there. I was so happy.

I know you feel we somehow lured you into accepting the ways of our family, lured you into becoming one of us. And others, I suppose, feel the same way, that we got what we deserved from you because we tempted you into waters that finally were over your head. The fire you set was, to some, I suppose, the flames of the hell we so richly deserved. I know that your innocence was not proved (or provable) but even your sentence—treatment rather than punishment—seems to hold within it a certain condemnation of us, as if you were driven mad by the circumstances of your life in our household. I see it otherwise.

There was something about you that exacerbated every muted struggle, all of the divisions, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings that until then had hung in a precarious balance among us. I still don’t wholly understand how you did it. Our house was always open for all manner of roughneck and maladjusted teens, for grubby little geniuses, for the science fair winners and the folk singers, and every kid who passed through us had an effect—to be sure—but no one played Prometheus to our huddled masses, no one really changed the way we felt about each other, and no one ever caused us to renegotiate the complex of treaties that held us together—as all families are held together, if there is no single, dictatorial power.

I think it was how you were changing us, more than any other factor, that finally caused Jade to confront Hugh and say, “Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you be a father and say no? Get me out of this.” I know you like to believe that the decision to quarantine you from our house for a month was basically Hugh’s, with perhaps Keith’s jealousy and my perverse nostalgia for the old rules thrown in. But it was really Jade who wanted it, Jade who felt everything was slipping away: Hugh and I were actually too stoned and too obsessed with what we so proudly hailed as “Our New Sexual Freedom” to make any decisions. Our lives were hanging so abruptly, so convulsively, that just hanging on was like a rodeo stunt; we felt brave, certainly, and completely in advance of our contemporaries—we didn’t have a good friend our own age, by then. But we also felt utterly shaky and so new to our new ways of living that we didn’t feel adult enough to devise codes of behavior for Jade, or for you, or for anyone else. At that point, the best we could do was Judge Not Lest We Be Judged. And it took Jade staggering into our room with a fistful of my newly acquired Thorazines (perfect for short-circuiting bum trips) to prod us into action. “What should I do?” Hugh asked her, with that helplessness he liked to think represented open-mindedness. I occupied myself with prying the Thorazines out of Jade’s hand—God, they could seep through the skin of her wet palms and put her into shock. And by the end of the evening, Hugh would have stepped in and been a Daddy such as Jade longed for and he would prove the efficacy of his Daddyhood by keeping you away from our house for a full thirty days and, as well, keep Jade away from you for the duration.

But of course it was already too late. Jade was trying to do more than make a last-ditch retreat into daughterdom, and she had more on her mind than somehow recovering her balance—connected to her need to be cared for by us, to live more normally, was her suspicion that a girl her age oughtn’t to have a lover and certainly oughtn’t to have that lover in her own home. With you in her bed, Jade had no place to be a young girl; with the traces of your lovemaking on her every night she could never sleep the innocent pink sleep she often felt she needed. Yet it was only partly her own self she wished to save by banishing you for the month: it was for all of us, especially Hugh and me.

Everyone who ever came traipsing through our lives brought a message and a challenge, taught us something. Maybe it was because Hugh and I met when we were in college, but we were born students, taking notes on the life we glimpsed through others. It was the privilege of having an open house; even the desperadoes came bearing gifts. Hugh and I, and to a lesser extent our kids, let this rich antic life stream around us; we acknowledged the runaways, the curious, the overnight visitors, as if they were so many minstrels wandering through a vast medieval fair. We were susceptible, we were, in fact, suckers—totally willing to believe that teenagers and even the kids Sammy’s age were planting the seedlings of a new consciousness and that we, Hugh and I, were lucky to be learning from them. But no one of them had the effect on us that you did. It took us by surprise, or rather you did, because compared to such characters as Alex Ahern and Crazy Hector and that Billy Sandburg who beat on his belly like a bongo drum and rolled his eyes back so far that only cloudy white showed in his sockets, compared to some of the real daredevils and casualties we saw, you were relatively a straight arrow. It took me weeks to become interested in you, now that I think of it.

You knew you were up against a lot of competition and it wasn’t enough for you to court Jade. You had to make yourself interesting—indispensable!—to the rest of us. Of course you could go a long way toward seducing each of us and you could outdistance the other passers-through in terms of sheer charm—no one else could have possibly tried so hard, no one else had your determination or cared about making an impression nearly so much. So it was botany and folk music with Keith—while he could still stand you—and karate workouts with Sammy, and Jewish novelists with me, and a kind of fawning obsequiousness for Hugh, which, unfortunately for you and your strategy, could never quite wriggle free of the superiority complex that spawned it. And for all of us Latvian folk tales you made up to get us laughing and Marxist dogma to impress us with your erudition and to inform us that while you seemed to be living for no principle loftier than your own pleasure you were, in fact, guided by huge historical considerations. Beneath it all, you were a revolutionary something-or-other, and you knew we would be enchanted by your ideals, by their certainty and their hidden promise of a transcendent life. Scorning the liberals was, at least for us, a version of strolling around Hyde Park blasted out of our minds: a way of being in the world and above it at the same time, immune to comparison or judgment.

But forget Latvia and the Russian Revolution, forget Gimpel the Fool and your periodic thank yous to Hugh for his hand in winning World War II. The thing that made you vivid to us, in the end, was the one thing you did effortlessly. And that was loving Jade. And it was Hugh, you should know, who recognized it first—not the love, which I saw as inevitable when all you two were doing was wanting each other, but the weird, unique force the two of you generated, which Hugh saw months before we finally banished you from the house.

It was one thing to allow our daughter the freedom to express love (especially when she had such a hard time expressing it within the family), but quite another matter to see this liberty catapult her into a relationship every bit as intense as what Hugh and I called “mature love.” We were OK on letting her be sexual, OK on letting her find her individuality outside of the family structure, but I must say Hugh and I were assuming Jade would begin her sexual life with some sort of puppy love, something more quintessentially adolescent, which was to say something filled with doubts, lapses in concentration, some connection that more distinctly expressed the peculiar mixture of child and woman she was at that time. We felt as if we’d given a child permission to experiment with a little chemistry set only to find she was an undiscovered genius—solving ancient alchemical riddles, bonding once incompatible molecules, filling the cellar with luminous smoke. We simply had no idea of what we were in for; we totally underestimated the incredible emotional reach she was capable of. We were too accustomed to seeing Jade in one way. Yawning, slightly withdrawn, orderly, conservative, evasive, with not much of a relationship with her own body, save worrying abstractly over her weight and lamenting the smallness of her breasts.

It drove Hugh mad; it tore him in half. It absolutely galled him to think of his precious daughter naked in bed with a boy. Left alone, I’m sure that Hugh’s incestuous fantasies would have atrophied. But having Jade embrace the sexual life just when she was at the juncture between childhood and womanhood triggered a deep, conflicted, painful yearning in Hugh, and he wanted you to go away because he wanted it to go away. He’d been raised to believe it was OK to be protective and even possessive about your daughter, but poor Hugh was too closely attuned to the truth and ambiguity of his own feelings: more purely passionate than anyone in his family, he could not ignore the measure of sheer jealousy in his feelings about you and Jade.

But, on the other hand, you two had the same effect on poor Hugh that you had on nearly everyone else. That is, you made him recall the most inarticulate, unreasonable romantic hopes he had ever had. All that was betrayed and lost, all that was refined and diminished, all of that raging wilderness of feeling came rushing back to Hugh. I was different; seeing you two in love only made me mourn for the person I never was, for the risks I’d never taken, for my life more or less on the sidelines. But Hugh actually recognized himself in you two. Actual faces, actual moments, the precise emotional content of broken promises came back to him. With me it was mere jealousy; but Hugh experienced all the ecstasy and sorrow of memory.

Hugh was wide open for the sucker punch of your example. I saw him reeling and I took advantage. I encouraged him to believe that our lives might safely hop track, that instead of growing older we might grow younger, and instead of becoming more encumbered we might catapult into a vast, vast freedom. The house, our precariously balanced budget, the carefully tended and mended clothes hanging in our closets, the boiled eggs, the tarnished spoons, the Klee prints in their homemade frames—none of it, I argued, need define the real limits of our life. We could do anything.

And the rest, as they say, is history. I took one lover and he took a dozen. I smoked a joint and he smoked a pound. I hinted at the contradictions in my character and he poured forth torrents of confession. I shed a tear and he wept copiously. And then when I began to wonder if perhaps we were being a tad indulgent and letting our paternal responsibilities go a little too much, Hugh went into a shuddering panic, reaching out for the familiar controls that now eluded him, or wouldn’t respond to his touch. What happened to the family meetings? Who was ironing his shirts? He said he felt like the pilot of a fighter whose tail’s been hit—loss of altitude, sudden shifts of direction, the high whistle of impending doom.

Who knows what form that impending doom would have taken if it hadn’t been for you? A nervous breakdown? A bad trip? (Ah-ha! I can see you starting to wriggle, imagining that you’re being let off the hook. Only it’s not your sense of guilt that ought to be relieved, but your megalomania. How dare you even imagine that you and only you were enough to unravel our family.) Yet, in the end, you were the perfect messenger for our special domestic ruin. If it was at least in part on your inspiration that we began to step over the old limits of married life, there was a berserk symmetry in that it was you who finally dragged us further from our old ways than we’d ever intended to travel. It was us who wanted to prove that our lives weren’t circumscribed by the walls of our house, by the clothes in our closets, by the Klee prints in the homemade frames. And it was you with a flick of the wrist who turned it all to ash.

A.

6

Ann’s letter did everything an important letter is supposed to: it changed my luck, my confidence, it changed my place in the world. In school, my teachers finally recognized me when we met in the halls and suddenly people in my classes were talking to me—asking to see my notes for Tuesday’s lecture, asking me to coffee, to lunch, and inviting me with some slight shyness to get together with four or five other students and review the material for an upcoming test, as if it would be me who’d be doing them the favor. Even when I was picketing, some of the people who passed looked at me as if I really existed, and a few stopped to tell me that they wouldn’t ever buy a pair of nonunion trousers. One old man coming out of Sidney Nagle’s with a plain gray box in a red and white bag put his thin hand on my arm and said, “I’m sorry. I just bought a pair of Redman pants. My son-in-law gave me a list. It’s not for me. For me, I would never. But the son-in-law doesn’t know union from Joe Blow. I’m sorry.” And he stood there gazing at me until I realized what he wanted and I touched his hand and smiled. I was forgiving other people!

As to the people who kept an eye on my life, I had no intention of telling any of them that I’d made contact with Ann, just as I told no one of the night I’d recovered Jade’s and my letters. My parents were not the probing sort and they knew there was nothing to gain by venturing unexpectedly beneath the surface of my life. Eddie Watanabe actually told me that viewing my progress was just the kind of thing that made being a parole officer worthwhile; he liked to rattle off my recent accomplishments, punctuating the list with little sharp squeezes of my bicep. You’ve got a job. Squeeze. You’ve got a job with a union. Squeeze. You’re in college. Squeeze. You’re interested in astronomy. Squeeze. You’ve got your own pad. Squeeze. You’re making friends. Squeeze. All right, tell me. Got a girl yet? Silence. A grin and the hardest squeeze of the series. As for my new friends, my fear of slipping back into isolation often tempted me toward a burst of intimacy, in the way we can throw our self-revelations like a net over others. But they knew nothing of Ann, nothing of Jade, nothing of the fire and my three years in Rockville. I’d begun my new relations in a mood of extreme secrecy and even as I got bored with the lies in my flimsy autobiography, I told myself that my new friendships were too fragile to withstand sudden changes in my story. As far as they were concerned, I’d been out of school for three years with no particular purpose, which was fine and absolutely right for the times, though they may have wondered why someone who’d just spent years getting high and hitchhiking (or whatever they imagined I’d done) wasn’t looser than I was, had no stupendous tales to tell.

The most likely to detect the new light in my innermost heart was Dr. Ecrest, and for a while I could feel his intelligence tracking me. I must say, Dr. Clark did his best for me when he referred me to Dr. Ecrest, especially because their methods were so divergent. Clark favored dreams, free association, and took notes without looking at you with the blinds drawn and the curtains three-quarters closed. Ecrest was tall, his forehead was creased; he looked like an ex-baseball player, or the kind of waiter who warns you that today’s fish isn’t altogether fresh. His thin, wiry black hair was dryer than a doll’s; he risked setting it on fire whenever he lit a Kent. Although he was large, his voice sounded unnaturally sonorous, just as some teen-age boys sound as if their voice is too deep for their body. He worked in a fully lit office and there was no couch for me to lie on and pretend I was speaking to myself. We sat in cheap- looking armchairs, facing each other dead on. I often thought that Dr. Ecrest would have been equally at home reading Tarot cards or the lines on my palm. Take the dusty blinds from his windows and put up dark flowered curtains, take down the diplomas and the certificates and put up a pale orange gypsy dress, spread out to show all the embroidery. He was a clairvoyant, in the way that people who end up peering into crystal balls or massaging the lumps on your skull are clairvoyants: he had the animal understanding of silence and that powerful, yet oddly emotionless, sympathy that allowed him to enter into other people’s thoughts. He could have spent his life in carnival tents or drumming his long fingers on a felt-covered table in a reconverted store front, except that he’d had the energy and money to go to medical school.

It was never clear if Ecrest thought of himself as possessing “powers,” and if he acknowledged his uncanny perceptions I don’t know how comfortable he was with them. Walking me to the door at the end of a session, he once touched me lightly on the shoulder and said, “Try not to eat crap. Eat good food, OK?” And when I looked back at him he seemed to blush and he glanced quickly at the floor. Once when I saw him I’d missed both school and work that day and he said, “So what did you do all day?” I asked, “Why?” And he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, very softly. The day after I sneaked into my father’s office to read the letters from Jade, Dr. Ecrest asked me if I’d been to my father’s office yet. I looked at him with guilt and shock and Dr. Ecrest said that he was only thinking I might find work with Arthur until something else came along.

When I began compiling my list of Butterfields and Ramseys, I lived in horror that Ecrest might guess—so sure was I that he would fathom my small private life that I came a dozen times close to blabbing it. It was only when I contacted Ann and then received her letter that the stakes of my secret were raised immeasurably and I built an obdurate mental barrier between Ecrest and that part of myself that lived only for reunion. I felt like a youth in a medieval saga engaged in a battle of wits with a wizard: we talked about Rose, we talked about Arthur, we talked about that time of my childhood when I claimed to have gone deaf, and all the while our unconsciouses played falcon and field- mouse. I never really knew if my suppressions were successful.

The day after Ann’s letter arrived, Ecrest suddenly and for the first time picked up Dr. Clark’s obsession with my sexual abstinence. “I’m speaking to you man to man,” he said, “not doctor to patient. How much longer can you continue denying yourself? You can’t live without warmth.” “Warmth?” I said, sending him a shut up message. “Yes. Sexual expression. David, you don’t even masturbate.” We were silent for at least a minute. My intrigues huddled within me like guerilla warriors, hiding behind other thoughts. Finally, I thought of something to say: “If we’re going to talk man to man and not doctor to patient, then I don’t think you should charge me for this hour.”

My father’s office was near my school and once or twice a week we’d meet for lunch. It made me uneasy to see Arthur so much more than I was seeing Rose, especially since she’d always felt excluded from the friendship between my father and me. But the fact (if not the truth) was that Rose didn’t want to see much of me. She’d always had a horror of over-mothered children, and now that that was no longer an issue she told herself the best thing for me was to find my own way, or “role,” as she would put it.

Whenever I could, I arranged to meet Arthur at his office. I never tired of remembering the night I stole in and found my letters, and as often as not, Arthur would make a quick trip to the bathroom before we left for lunch and I could test fate and my reflexes by reading one or two of the letters in his absence. (I didn’t have the courage to steal them, though finally I did take them for a day and Xerox the lot of them.) I waited with confused patience for Arthur to tell me how desperate his life at home had become, but he only expressed his sorrow in asides—in shrugs, in sighs, by calling his wife “your mother,” as if she were nothing more. I’d been warned by Dr. Ecrest not to involve myself in my parents’ woeful marriage, and of all the psychiatric advice that had come my way none was easier and more natural to follow. I was content to return my father’s kisses of greeting and farewell, to feed greedily upon the sentimental anguish of his love for me: it was a pure father’s love, effortless and insane. He asked only that I be his son; he scarcely knew how I adored him. Whenever we met for lunch we spoke only of me, and then one day near the end of November I walked into my father’s office and he told me he had decided to leave Rose. He sat behind his desk with his hands folded in front of him, like the President giving a little TV chat from the Oval Office. His hair was carefully combed and he wore a new brown sports jacket with wide lapels; he looked like one of those older men who decide to change their “image.” Only this was Arthur, and no gesture of his could be entirely free of whimsy: he looked like a good-natured blind man who’d been dressed by someone who didn’t know him very well. “Last night,” he said, in a voice that seemed a mixture of news commentator and graveside eulogizer, “after twenty-seven years of marriage—many of them, most of them, David, nearly all of them good years—your mother and I decided it would be best for everyone if we were to separate.”

I nodded, but couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say. My father’s eyes were on me; I wanted to brush my face, as if to clear away a swarm of mayflies. The tall dusty window behind him was all lemon glare. His phone began to ring but he didn’t answer it.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He glanced down at the phone and it stopped ringing.

We went to a bar and grill beneath the street level on Wabash Avenue. In an area mostly inhabited by clerks, professionals, and businessmen, this was the most proletarian restaurant around. The entrance looked like an abandoned subway stop. You walked down a flight of studded iron steps and then pushed through a peeling green door. Inside, it was cavernous, an underground universe of hardworking men. Drinks cost a quarter or thirty- five cents and the bar alone could seat two hundred people. The smell of beer mixed with the smell of sausages; the smoke from hundreds of cigarettes mixed with the haze from the steamplates. Nearly everyone was dressed in work clothes: flannel shirts rolled to the elbow and ribbed long-sleeved undershirts; zipper jackets with a first name stitched over the right breast; ankle- high, steel-tipped shoes with the laces wrapped around the tops. My father was the only man in business clothes and I was by far the youngest.

We got our food from the cafeteria serving line. Boiled potatoes, a thick delicious sausage called a thüringer, peas, and rice pudding. I found a small empty table and Arthur went to the bar and bought a pitcher of beer. I took our food off the brown plastic tray and noticed my hands were shaking.

“You know,” Arthur said, as we began our meal, “I’ve never been able to figure out what this place is called, and I’ve been eating here most all my life. After Prohibition they called it the Step Down Bar and Grill, and after that it was sold and it was called something else, I don’t even remember. You notice there’s no sign? And some of these guys working here were working here before I even heard of this place—and they don’t know what the hell it’s called.

“You want to know something?” my father said. “I’m just remembering this is where I took Rose the first day I met her.”

I speared a few peas but didn’t bring them to my mouth. My father remembering that didn’t agree with my memory of my parents’ meeting, but I couldn’t exactly recall what I’d been told. A May Day parade? A picnic?

“It’s something we never told you,” my father said, “but your mother was married when she was a very young girl. It was to a rich fellow named Carl Courtney, a real William Powell type and as stuck up as a rooster. They got married in Philadelphia. Rose was working fifty hours a week and doing her best to support her crazy mother; Courtney was working maybe two hours a week and getting dough from his mother, old Virginia Courtney who owned a radio station and was quite a reactionary character. It was a very short marriage and it didn’t add up to anything. But I guess she loved him in a way because he was a bastard heel and she went along with it. About a year into their marriage Courtney got a job—through his mother—with the Tribune right here in Chicago and Rose came out with him. She was already a Communist and Courtney was really nothing more than an isolationist playboy, but she stuck with him, telling herself that maybe she could change him, until he started running around.” Arthur looked at his plate and remembered he was supposed to be having lunch. He cut the end off of his thüringer but then put his fork down and took a long swallow of beer.

“Running around with other women?” I said.

“You name it. Secretaries and showgirls, crazy women without a care in the world. Sometimes he only came home to change his clothes.”

“God,” I said. I felt a very specific grief for Rose, as if it had always existed within me but I was only now discovering it. Had I always known? Was it something I’d heard them talk about when they thought I was asleep? I had a sudden recollection of myself stretched out in the back seat of one of our old cars as we drove at night on one of those long restless vacations we used to take and my parents were talking in edgy murmurs and my mother was…crying? and my father was making emphatic gestures that I saw reflected in the dark windshield and…But then the memory was gone, replaced by the effort of trying to remember.

“Did any of my psychiatrists know that Mom was married before?” I asked. My question puzzled me. What difference would it have made? When Jade told me that she had talked with Hugh and they’d decided it would be best if I stayed away for a month, the first thing I asked her was when they’d had the conversation.

“No. We didn’t say.”

“Why was it a secret?”

“Rose didn’t want anyone to know. It made her ashamed.”

“Then why are you telling me now?”

Arthur shrugged. “Are you sorry I’m telling you?”

“No.”

“It’s being here.”

“We’ve been here so many times.”

“It’s being here today. I’m sorry if I told you something you’d rather do without. But today my marriage is over, so I’m talking about things that maybe I shouldn’t.”

We were silent for a while. I finished the beer in my glass and poured another. Arthur’s glass was practically full but I topped it off. I touched the food on my plate and it was cold.

“I was her lawyer for the divorce,” Arthur said. “That’s why we came here. To talk about it. I didn’t even know her, but a gal she was close to in Philadelphia had a brother in the Party here, and Rose went to him and said she needed a lawyer and he sent her to me. That was Meyer Goldman, by the way, who sent Rose to me.”

“I love Meyer Goldman,” I said.

“You never met him.”

“But you told me about him. He was the one who smoked pot, right? He played saxophone. He knew Mezz Mezzrow. He wore black and white shoes and he pulled the waist of his pants up so high he looked like he was nothing but legs.”

“Curly red hair and a mouthful of rotten teeth. Poor Meyer. Even after the Party expelled him he was always in trouble and he always came to me. Write a letter to his landlord. Call up the musicians’ union and scream anti-Semitism. This and this and that and that, I thought it would never stop. I wasn’t even supposed to talk to him, you understand. When someone was expelled you weren’t supposed to talk to him. I didn’t give a damn about that, but the things he’d come to me for. And each time he made sure to remind me, ‘If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have Rose.’” Suddenly, my father put his hand to his forehead, as if he’d been struck by a stone. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I was so much in love then.”

I had an impulse to reach across and touch him, just as he wanted to hold me whenever I showed my sorrow. But I held myself back. I didn’t want to interrupt his remorse. It reminded me too much of my own and once it did that, I wasn’t as close to him as I should have been.

“So you helped her get divorced?” I said.

“I did everything and I knew as much about it as you do.It wasn’t my kind of law. I got her moved out of Courtney’s house. I found her a place with a very good woman, a sculptor, a very generous, warm person.”

“Libby Schuster,” I said.

“I told you about Libby Schuster?”

“Something. I remember her.”

Arthur’s hand moved as if it had been touched by something invisible. His eyes moistened. “You never met her. She died just a little after you were born. Meyer too, Meyer died in 1960, in California, Meyer Goldman. Libby was old but Meyer was young, maybe fifty, fifty-two. It wasn’t necessary. A waste.”

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.”

“And so you made other plans.”

“No. I said I didn’t. What time should I be over?”

Rose was silent and then, sounding a little uncertain, she said, “Oh, four. Isn’t that when we always have it?”

I showered, washed my hair, and shaved, because Rose was always annoyed if I was less than extremely clean and it wasn’t something I wanted to hear that day.

My letter to Ann lay in fragments on the kitchen table, scrawled on notebook paper, scraps of shopping bag, and onionskin paper that absorbed the ink from my pen and made every word blurry and soft, like lights through the fog. I had already received my second letter from her—in response, more or less, to mine to her in which I’d begged her to tell me where Jade lived:

Hugh appeared yesterday. Dressed in the uniform of his new ego—jeans, blue work shirt with red embroidered heart, tan boots with pointy toes: Ya-Hugh! He stunk to high heaven of some brain-damaged strawberry perfume which he readily confessed was his new girl’s, Ingrid. “You wear her perfume?” asked I, waltzing into a nice left hook. “No,” said Hugh. “It rubs off on me.” He’d just spent some time with Keith and their fake obsession is The New Case against you. No new evidence, naturally, just new arguments, new and deeper logic. They jaw on and on about this New Case with the same vacant dreaminess that the little kids on Blackstone used to talk about buying an ounce of pot, when they had no idea where to get it and no money to pay for it.

I walked the seven long blocks to Ellis Avenue. I arrived at my mother’s apartment and was going to ring the doorbell to get buzzed in, but I did have the keys and by the time I was in that much too familiar entranceway I had lost the spirit of independence. My mouth had a peculiar taste in it and it connected me to the huge dead center of my childhood. I let myself in and walked the three flights of stairs, and then let myself in to the apartment, knocking softly as I opened the door.

The atmosphere was brocaded by the smells of cooking. Thick, nostalgic, and eternal, the aroma of turkey and sweet potato struck me like some pathetic irony—a welcome mat in front of a bombed-out house. I closed the door behind me and listened for voices. I had hoped not to be the first to arrive. I walked down the long narrow hall toward the living room.

Rose was on the sofa, reading The National Guardian and listening to the radio. She wore glasses with round lacquered frames, a green pants suits and a gray shirt, and she sat with her small legs crossed. The room was in its customary wreath of shadows and the only light burned from the lamp positioned right behind Rose’s shoulder.

“Hello,” I said. “Looks like I’m early.”

“That’s because you were so anxious to come,” said Rose. She didn’t look up from her newspaper but I could tell she wasn’t reading. The FM station was drifting in and out; static bit at the edges of Beethoven’s Third.

I unzipped my Army surplus jacket and threw it on a chair.

“Hang it up please,” said Rose.

“In a second. Who’s supposed to be here?”

“I decided not to invite anyone,” said Rose, folding her paper.

“How come?” I sat next to her on the sofa.

“I don’t think people are very interested in showing their faces at my house right now,” said Rose. “And I’m not exactly in the mood to work like a dog so they can eat me out of house and home.”

“I thought you invited everyone,” I said.

“Maybe you’d like to have dinner with your father’s new family? I’m sure they’ll have a full house. That is, if you’re invited.”

“I want to be here.”

“Were you? Invited?”

I shook my head and my mother’s eyes registered a dim, injured pleasure. It was clear to me that my father hadn’t invited me to dinner because he knew my mother needed me more than he did—and it unnerved me to see what an effort it was not to make that very point.

“Well, don’t feel bad,” she said, with mock consolation. “Your father’s very busy now. You can’t blame him for not having much time for you.”

“It’ll be nice having dinner, just the two of us,” I said.

Rose nodded and looked away, into the soft, formless darkness of the living room.

“I’m tired of inviting the same people to this house, year after year,” she said. “The same broken-down crew. I’m tired of the same old…I don’t know what. No one’s ever understood my marriage to Arthur and I’m not going to degrade myself with a lot of explanations. I don’t want to see their silly faces when the turkey comes out and Arthur’s not here to carve it. And what if I have trouble pulling the cork out of the wine? That was Arthur’s job.”

“I could do that,” I said.

“No. That’s not the point.”

Slowly, I made my way around the apartment, turning on the lights. My mother wanted to eat in the kitchen but I set the dining room table with a tablecloth and the best dishes. I lit candles and took the fern that hung in the apartment’s sunniest window and made it the centerpiece. Rose called out to announce the turkey was done and I helped her remove the enormous bird from the oven—a turkey that could have easily fed a dozen famished guests. The vegetables were still cooking in a huge enameled pot: slowly, peas and pearled onions bobbed and jiggled in the dark water. There was a basket full of warm rolls and raisin bread and a purée of sweet potatoes with a crust of small colored marshmallows. Standing next to the stove were five bottles of Côtes du Rhône, one with the foil stripped away and a corkscrew turned into the cork, awaiting someone’s hands to pull it out.

“God, Mom,” I said, “you made so much.”

“I know all about it. Just eat as much as you want and don’t worry about the rest.”

It took us a long while to get all the food onto the table. The candles were burning much too quickly. The turkey was before us, with the chestnut stuffing simmering in its cavity, and we served everything else while waiting to see who would be given the responsibility of carving. The symmetry of playing my father’s abandoned role made me shy to touch the long gleaming knife. But finally Rose said, “You don’t want any meat?” and I pulled myself out of my chair and began to cut at the bird. I’d never carved in my life. The small chickens I occasionally prepared for myself—or bought precooked from the supermarket—I was quite content to hack and pull apart in the solitude of my apartment. I felt a hesitance almost as intense as despair as I imagined the mess I was about to make of our meal. But the knife was wonderfully sharp and there was enough soft white meat on the breasts for me to avoid cutting through any bones.

“Very nice,” said Rose.

I put a couple of pieces of turkey on her plate. Then I served myself. And finally I uncorked the wine and we concentrated on the meal.

Near the end, Rose put down her knife and fork and the sharpness of the noise proved how silent we’d been.

“I had no idea I’d made so much food,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll have leftovers.”

“You can’t find small turkeys. That’s the problem. They make them for large parties. A waste…”

“We’ll have sandwiches. It’ll be great for me. I won’t have to cook for a while.”

“I wish I didn’t have to worry about money. All my life…” she stopped herself and fixed me with a severe, proud stare. “Let’s get something straight, David.”

I nodded, feeling the pressure of a vast, content-less anxiety, an anxiety that suddenly seemed as much a part of my emotional universe as gravity was of the universe at large.

“I’m aware that your father has told you I was married before I married him. And I’m also aware of how he portrayed my situation. Poor, naive, poverty-struck little Rose marrying a rich playboy who dragged her through the slime and made a fool of her. I hope you know your father well enough to realize that his…well I don’t know what—his ego! His ego makes him believe—or at least say, that’s how it went between Carl Courtney and me. He needs to think of me that way. Defenseless. Sad. And maybe a little stupid? Maybe. But what really happened is different and I think I can be the judge of that.

“Carl was rich and spoiled and maybe he didn’t have a totally honest bone in his body—but he adored me. He worshipped the ground I walked on. Some people said he was the handsomest man in Philadelphia. You know how long we knew each other before we drove out to Bucks County and got married? Twenty- five days. I’ll bet your father didn’t tell you that. And I’ll bet he didn’t tell you that Carl was crazy about me. And I loved him.

“What Carl really was was a poet but he was too rich for that and so he ended up looking like a fool. He tried to work as a newspaperman but it wasn’t serious. Nothing was. That was the trouble. Not what your father likes to believe, about Carl committing adultery. The adultery we made up to get the divorce and Carl was too much of a gentleman to argue. I had to leave him.”

“Dad helped you get the divorce?”

“He made sure I wasn’t given a penny of Carl’s money. No settlement. No alimony. Nothing. The Courtneys would have been glad to pay me to get out of their family. They would have laughed all the way to the bank, as the saying goes. Not that I wanted his money. But Arthur! Arthur had no right to negotiate that kind of settlement. Carl’s brother, Dennis—his wife was a dope addict and the family gave her an annuity for life to divorce Dennis!”

“Dad wanted you all for himself. He didn’t want some other man’s money involved. And you were Communists, after all. What did the Courtneys’ money come from?”

“That’s not the point!”

“Maybe Dad was worried if you had alimony you wouldn’t marry him.”

“No. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“No one understood. I loved Carl. He was a beautiful man. I had never seen such beauty in a man. Ever! I could never feel the way with Arthur that I did with Carl. And it wasn’t just the physical thing, though what’s the use in pretending that wasn’t important. No one will ever know how beautiful I was when I was with Carl. Everybody fell in love with me when I was with Carl.”

I was frightened. I suspected that Rose wanted to imply she had never altogether loved my father, that his thick, earnest body had never pleased her. I didn’t want to hear it. In Rockville there was a boy named Paul Schulte whose mother had told him that she’d never had an orgasm. “Your papa’s tool is unusually slender,” she’d told him, and Paul was obsessed with the information. He often threatened to castrate himself and send his cock to his mother so she could see it was no grander than his father’s, and for all I knew he’d gone through with it. He was still in Rockville when I left. Of course it was wrongheaded to blame his mania on his mother’s one remark, but Paul served to remind me that it is not for nothing that sons shrink from too precise an understanding of their mothers’ unhappiness. I could tolerate hints and I could absorb my own speculations, but if Rose were to come right out and say that my father had been an incompetent lover I feared the knowledge would pierce something deep and defenseless in me and change me in ways I wouldn’t know how to control.

Dutifully, I stood up to slice our second helpings when the phone began to ring. Generally, Rose was unusually responsive to the telephone; often if she was just a few steps from it, she’d run toward it when it rang. But now, with the phone on its third, its fourth, its fifth ring, she made no motion to get up and I, feeling it was somehow expected of me, put the knife down and went into the kitchen to answer.

It was Alberto Nicolosi, one of my mother’s oldest friends. Along with the Rinzlers, the Sterns, and the Davises, the Nicolosis were inevitable Thanksgiving guests at our house.

“Hello,” said Alberto, “is this David?”

“Yes. Alberto?”

“Hello, David. I’m not used to your voice over the telephone. Forgive me.”

“It’s OK. How are you?”

“Just fine. Are you there with your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, good. And others? There are others?”

“Not this year. It’s just the two of us.”

“I suspected. You know, every year Rose makes us dinner on Thanksgiving. Now we have just finished our own not too traditional I’m afraid dinner and we were thinking of your mother…”

“Yes?”

“Tell me. Do you think it would be worthwhile if we came for a visit? We have a cake. We could bring it over and Rose could make her coffee.”

“I think that would be wonderful, Alberto.”

“You’re sure? We were going to go to the opera. My brother is with us. But it seems so strange not to see Rose today.”

“Come right over. I’ll tell my mother you’re on your way.”

Rose was clearing the table when I returned. She had placed the slice of breast I’d just taken off back onto the frame of the bird, and she’d poured the wine out of her glass and into mine.

“That was Alberto,” I said. “He and Irene want to come over.”

“But we’re finished with dinner.”

“So are they. They’re bringing over a cake so we can all have dessert together.”

Rose was silent.

“Al’s brother is with them. They’re bringing him, too.”

She walked quickly into the kitchen with a load of dishes. When she came back she said, “They’re coming now?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I suppose I better wash my face.” She pressed her hand against her cheek.

“You look fine.”

“Oh, I know what I look like. Oh well. Here come Irene and Al, coming to eat me out of house and home. Irene’s a terrible cook and I’m sure they’re starved. I hope you’ll be nice to them, David. Your father loves to make fun of them. But they watched you grow up. They love you and you should treat them with respect.”

“But I think they’re wonderful.”

“Yes. I know all about it. Just remember they’re human beings with as many feelings as you. They’re two of my oldest friends, David. And they’re precious to me.”

The Nicolosis arrived while Rose was in the bathroom. Alberto wore a herringbone overcoat and a Russian fur cap. His hair was long and silvery and his eyes were a dark, purplish blue. He smelled of pipe tobacco and cologne. Irene, erect, thin, and getting brittle, wore a black cape. Her lipstick was fire-engine red and her white hair swept back in two large waves. Arthur once said that Irene’s hair was so well trained she could probably make it stand up and bark. Alberto’s younger brother looked chilled and deferential. He shook hands and nodded and smiled shyly as Alberto explained that he spoke no English.

As I took their coats, Rose emerged from the bathroom.

“Well, look who’s here,” she called, in a crazy, gay voice. She extended both of her hands like a tea room hostess. “Will you look what the cat dragged in?”

“And you must be Alberto’s brother,” Rose was saying, even before she reached them.

“His name is Carlo,” said Alberto, “but I’m afraid he has no English.”

“Oooo,” said Rose, furrowing her brow and tilting her head, as if the news was very sad. “Oh well. At least he can eat cake and drink my good coffee.”

If she could only be quiet and calm herself, I thought, and stop forcing people away from her. I hung the coats in the closet and when I closed the door and looked down the hall, Alberto had Rose in his arms. He held her tightly and seemed to be rocking her back and forth. Rose was on her tip-toes and as Alberto continued in his embrace she patted him lightly on the back, as if it were she who was comforting him.

7

Early the next year, I made contact with two more Butterfields. The first was Keith, whose name I found in the Bellows Falls, Vermont, telephone directory. It was a number I’d tried a few times before, but I’d never gotten an answer. I kept it on my list, though, and even put a check next to it because Vermont seemed like a place Keith would live—Vermont, or Oregon, somewhere you could paddle a canoe, backpack, and not have to compete, a clean isolated place with a tradition of loneliness and family history. And one evening, one manic blizzardy night, I called that Vermont number again and a voice that was unmistakably Keith’s answered on the eighth ring.

“Hello, Keith,” I said. I wanted to hear more, to make certain.

“Hello? Who is this?” He was a perfect, clear tenor; he should have been a folklorist, a collector of nineteenth-century American mountain songs, but he was too awkward to play the banjo and a thousand times too shy to sing even to himself.

“It’s me.” I heard a dog barking behind him; Keith clapped his hand over the phone and said, “Shush, Ambroise.” Then, in a sharper voice, he said to me, “Who is this?”

“It’s me. It’s David Axelrod.”

“I thought so.”

Then I said a stupid thing. I said, “Don’t hang up,” which made him do exactly that. I called him right back but he just let it ring. That same night I wrote him a short letter, apologizing for calling him and asking if I could someday—not necessarily soon—come to see him and talk with him. He sent my letter back torn into pieces, though when I inspected my envelope I thought I detected that it had been opened. He put it all into another envelope and added a note of his own saying, “I know for a fact that you are on parole and you are not allowed to bother me or anyone in my family. If I ever hear from you again you may as well know I’ll be calling the police here and in Chicago.”

Then in March I learned where Sammy Butterfield was. When I’d thought about it without any clues I had guessed he was in some respectable prep school, on his way to Harvard, and then Harvard Law, and then Congress. I still took entirely seriously the ambitions he held when he was twelve years old. In fact, when I hunted around for traces of Sammy I called Choate and Exeter and a few other upper-class schools, but I got nowhere with that and I simply didn’t know enough about those kinds of schools to try many others. As it turned out, he was in upstate New York in a place called the Beaumont School. There was a story about him that I read on the bus one evening coming home from work. It was a UPI wire story and when I checked in the library a couple days later, I saw the same story in papers from New York to Los Angeles.

STUDENT REJECTS ENDOWMENT;

DONOR LIFELONG FRIEND OF AGNEW

Beaumont, New York…Roman Domenitz, a prominent Maryland businessman and longtime associate of Vice- President Agnew, came to the Beaumont School to present the exclusive New York boys preparatory school with a half million dollars. Mr. Domenitz, president of Rodom Industries, was making the donation in memory of his son Laurence Domenitz, who died of leukemia last year while in his senior year at the Beaumont School.

Samuel Butterfield, president of the junior class, was chosen by the Beaumont students to accept the check from Mr. Domenitz, in a ceremony marking the prestigious school’s 100th anniversary. Speaking on a stage that included Vice- President Agnew, young Mr. Butterfield stated, “We don’t need Domenitz’s money.” As he tore up the check, Mr. Butterfield recounted charges recently leveled against Domenitz by such organizations as the National Urban League, the Congress on Racial Equality, and the NAACP.

The presentation ceremonies were held in Bigelow Auditorium on the spacious Beaumont campus. In attendance were the families of the Beaumont student body as well as Beaumont School alumni, including General Meryle Woods and Roger V. Addison, founder of Addison International. When Butterfield tore up the half-million-dollar check, there was an uproar in the auditorium and police and school officials were forced to cancel the proceedings and evacuate the hall. “We had the beginnings of an incident on our hands,” remarked Dana Mason, the Headmaster of the School.

Samuel Butterfield was not available for questioning. His father, Dr. Hugh Butterfield of Camden, New Jersey, when asked to comment on his son’s actions, said, “Sammy always does what he believes in.”

Until now, Beaumont School has not been touched by the tide of student protest that has swept American schools and colleges over the past several years. In his remarks preceding the presentation ceremonies, Vice-President Agnew commended the school for its reputation for “scholarship, sportsmanship, and citizenship.” Earlier on, Agnew described the student protest movement as “the most prolonged panty raid in the history of America.”

Along with the story was a picture of Sammy, such as you would find in a school yearbook. His light hair was cut Sir Lancelot style and his face had the opacity of someone who can conceal everything but his features themselves from the camera. With his blue eyes, silky eyebrows, abrupt nose, and a polite, practically vacant smile, he had a face worthy of a film star, except his was as devoid of vanity as it was of whiskers—which is to say, vanity may have been beneath the surface but he had yet to cultivate it. I did my best to follow up on the story, but no one at any of the newspapers could tell me if Sammy had been expelled. I called Ann to tell her news of Sammy had reached Chicago—“And if they’re printing it here,” I said, “that means it’s everywhere, probably even China”—and to ask her if Sammy had gotten kicked out of school.

“I know what you’re getting at,” Ann said. Her voice sounded dreamy, a little stoned. It was snowing everywhere north of Florida but she sounded like someone lying in the sun. “I don’t like you calling me, David. It’s too strange and it’s always unexpected. It’s not fair. It always means you’re prepared to talk and I’m not. But if you have to call me, at least make sure you’re not calling to trick me out of information about my kids.”

I wrote Sammy in care of the Beaumont School, congratulating him on tearing up Agnew’s pal’s check. When I was a novelty to the Butterfields, I used to trade on the fact of my parents’ political past. As far as I was concerned, I’d absorbed enough Marxism through osmosis to teach them all quite a bit about left-wing politics. But, as I wrote to Sammy, “here you are committing acts of real courage and I haven’t made a political gesture since high school, and even that was a silent vigil outside of a military installation in Evanston when I was with five hundred other people and no possible harm (or blame) could have befallen me.” Sammy didn’t answer my letter, or acknowledge it, but neither did he send it back torn into eighths. I knew I was beguiling myself, but I took this as a kind of encouragement. A week later, I sent him a letter to Jade and asked him to forward it to her.

A letter from Ann.

Dear David,

Poor you. First to have me hang up on you and then having to trudge down to the post office to get my letters which don’t fit into your mailbox. I’ve always helped myself to the privilege of irresolution when it came to you. You always seemed to revel in my ambivalence while the others tore out their hair. You were so certain that beneath my capriciousness I was a typical Yankee lady, as sure of her emotional priorities as she is of her lineage. I wonder if you still feel that. I would hope so. I’m certain no one else does. But now with yourself on the receiving end of my whimfulness, you’ll want to forget the pleasure you once took in the odd syncopation of my feelings.

Syncopated feelings? God, there is no one on either side of the grave upon whom I’d inflict that little phrase, except you. I realize you’ll put up with anything and you would do nothing to threaten this correspondence of ours. I finally understand why some women—or are they all just girls?—answer those box-numbered pleas from prisoners that run in the underground papers and write letters to some total stranger serving time in a penitentiary. Our history being what it’s been, there’s something about a bird in a cage that appeals to women.

Hugh was back in town—speaking of what appeals to women. His girl of the moment, Ingrid Ochester, is about twenty-seven, though she looks as old as Hugh. God only knows what’s aged her. She doesn’t really seem to do anything and her only worries are if the glaze will hold on her pots and vases and if her eight-year-old son will land safely in one of his constant shuttles between Ingrid and his father, a Pepsi exec in Saudi Arabia. Ingrid is the sort of woman I could never know, under any circumstances. Comfortable, vague, she seems to come out of nowhere, from nothing. Her past is full of towns like Camden, New Jersey; her parents summered in Easton, Maryland. They made their money selling sofas.

Hugh and I came from very different worlds, but in our case there was, at least, a pleasing polarity. He was from New Orleans and I was from New York, but our families both were faded rich (very faded) and they haunted and nagged at us in similar ways. But Ingrid and Hugh? Who could say what they hold in common; I can never even keep it straight how they met. There was somebody’s cousin, a flat tire…But clearly Ingrid is smitten—all of the kids say so—and Hugh revels in it like a cat on his fifth canary.

That’s what is so absurd about him. He is still amazed women fall in love with him and his ego is so weak (yet so insatiable) that he treats every dalliance as the affair of the century. Each time he feels himself the object of some lady’s affections, Hugh will seize the moment with all the rashness and power of his heart. For a man as dead-on attractive as Hugh, he has been dumped by an extraordinary number of women. He holds on with such intensity that your average young lady—who like your average young man simply wishes to enjoy life, for God’s sake—beats a hasty retreat. You know nearly as well as I do how wildly serious Hugh can be. How deeply he likes to think, how exactly he likes to remember, how fine and painful the calibrations of his emotions. A brooder, the silent type, Hugh’s liable to do things like get up in the middle of dinner, come to your chair and stand you up, and then put his arms around you and embrace you with great strength and solemnity, while you try not to chew your mouthful of food. Well, most women can’t take that kind of stuff.

There comes a certain point in one’s courtship with Hugh when one realizes this is not just something Hugh does to woo you, but this is actually the way he is. The cataloguing of events—our tenth paella dinner, the fifth anniversary of finding the house, our fifth anniversary of signing the papers for the house, our fifth anniversary of moving into the house. It doesn’t stop, it’s not some stunt, it goes on and on. Seventeen years of marriage and I’d put down my book and have to confront Hugh’s earnest blue eyes, staring silently at me from across the room, trying to fathom me. “Do you want to talk?” I’d say. But he didn’t; he wanted to “communicate.” Coming from a world of The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, and adding to the general conversational din all my life, Hugh’s overwhelmingly significant silences had for me a deep sonority. And while my relationship to them gradually became ironic and subversive, I never truly tired of them. I never ceased to believe that his way was a higher path and that he had something crucial to teach me.

I used to believe that it was Hugh who pursued me, but the truth is that even his Cambridge pursuit was incurably diffident. Hugh sought me out after I published a story in a local lit. magazine called “Birth Pains.” The magazine was printed in blue ink on yellow paper and my contribution was so arch and pretentious—the usual twaddle about a me-ish young woman dying from her own cultivation and refinement—that I stayed out of sight for a week afterwards. But Hugh managed to find my piece enchanting and tracked me down. A stranger, he wrote me a formal note and asked to meet me for a daiquiri—in my story, the heroine drinks dozens and dozens of daiquiries—at the Parker House. The idea of meeting this well-mannered and apparently well-meaning stranger was too seductive to resist and I appeared at the Parker House wearing a black dress and a string of lilac-tinted glass beads. Hugh was in a double-breasted wheat-colored suit, holding a copy of “Birth Pains,” and drawling to beat the band. (He sensed I would respond to the cliché of the Southern Gentleman.) He advised me as to the extent of his admiration for my story, asked me how I had achieved my anemic, third-hand effects, and, on the whole, interviewed me rather as you yourself did many years later when you came home with those photocopies of my New Yorker stories. Except then I was a young, ornery girl in a hotel with a stranger, and a half hour into our conversation (and halfway through my second daiquiri—a perfectly horrid drink, of course) I was hoping that Hugh would make his praise complete by suggesting we take a room.

If I’d known then what I soon enough learned, it wouldn’t have been any more complicated than my saying, “Oh Hugh, I need to be with you”—Hugh would have been at the front desk in an instant, gulping so hard that his Adam’s apple would be leaping forth like a cuckoo clock. I had no idea of the depths of his shyness and susceptibility: in matters of the flesh, Hugh has always needed permission. The permission granted, he can be the goat of all goats, but before then he is withdrawn, or so tepidly flirtatious that it becomes inconceivable that a real libido lurks beneath. If it hadn’t been for his great good looks, Hugh would have been miserable: all he could do was make himself available; he could not reach out and take. But how was I to know? It took weeks of thought and frustration before I realized that if I was going to have Hugh, then I must initiate it. Thus the famous dinner party in which I announced as I lit the candles: “Abandon all hope of leaving, ye who enter here.”

God, I must be just a little bit lonelier than I thought. Going on about Hugh like this. It’s near the first anniversary of our divorce. That must be it. We sold the house, sold the ten scabby acres in Mississippi that Hugh’s father gave us on our wedding, and stood like waifs in a divorce court in Chicago, lying through our straight white teeth to the judge so our story would be less complicated and unseemly. Hugh’s girl waited outside, double-parked in her infernal van, and I splurged on a taxi to O’Hare so I could get the hell out as quickly as possible.

The divorce was inevitable once the house was gone, just as precious papers get tattered and lost if you don’t have anyplace to store them. That big house on Dorchester had a domestic magnetism at its core that could keep us together—and even in a kind of ramshackle balance. It was our homeland, our space station—well, you remember the magic of that house. We were so lucky to find it and losing it was terrible for us—especially coming at a time in our lives when we needed walls more than ever before, needed the feel of familiar wood, the low comforting groans of our old house’s cellar, the mélange of sky and branch that hung so peacefully before our front window. The house was a touchstone, the progenitor of memory; it had a quality of preservation, of preserving us, our lives, our promises. Driving us out of there was like driving a tribe from its ancestral home: the rituals of community dried up like empty pods. Without the familiar doors to walk through and slam, quarrels went on and on, deepened in import and acrimoniousness. Ah, the arguments in hotels, with the maids in the next room and the Kiwanis Club in the hall. The late-night whispers in my brother’s house in Maine—even with my brother and his family in Boston and we Butterfields on our own for a few days, we tiptoed and mumbled, washing our cups as soon as we used them. We were refugees without a cause, more interested in blame than in bonds.

It’s our link, you know, mine and yours. The blame. I suppose that’s why you feel so free to contact me and why, to me, speaking to you again seems so natural and inevitable. We are, I would suppose, karmic twins. It was you—and you alone—who set the fire, but we’ll never know what could have been saved if it hadn’t been for my cousin’s Care Package from California. When my cousin’s package arrived with ten trips, ten 250-microgram doses of pharmaceutically pure LSD…Well, as I remember it, we all felt excited and privileged. We had all been curious—no, more than that: we all were committed to taking it. The only trouble had been our fear of buying it from some lunatic on the street, some flaky teen just as liable to sell us strychnine or horse tranquilizer. But with the genuine article at hand—and the weird blessing of having it come from a lab—we were set. It was my cousin, my letter, and the package had been addressed to me. But we all discussed it, all decided it would work best—be less divisive, less strange and exclusive—if we took it as a family. We were all prepared to learn something miraculous and transforming, and it was a measure, I thought, of our enduring commitment to remain a family that we wanted to take the journey together.

Yet, as it happened, we were as helpless as rabbits on a highway when the time came for us to act swiftly and well. We turned this way and that and learned something that turned out to be impossible to absorb: with life seeming to totter on the edge of oblivion, we were not a family at all—it was each for himself, in a state of panic, fear, and terrible isolation. We were not any of us really capable of holding a thought, but I’m sure all of us felt, to one degree or another, that we were being punished for our transgression against the brain’s holy chemistry, that the fire was a foretaste of the hell we had condemned ourselves to. I’ve often wondered (and lamented) why we were so godawful bloody helpless to get ourselves out of the house in good order and I keep coming back to the emotional memory of deserving the worst.

Speaking of blame. I think I’d like to defend myself against your accusation. I quote: “…when I began spending nights at your house you decided that Jade wasn’t getting enough sleep and your solution was to get us a double bed, a used bed from the Salvation Army which we sprayed for bugs and drenched in Chanel No.5.”

My idea? Perhaps the Chanel No. 5 was my idea—it was certainly my Chanel. But the bed was Jade’s idea—and, I daresay, yours. Does it seem at all likely to you that it was me who dreamed up the idea of getting a double bed? Do you have any memory of my proposing it to you? Or are you calling my lack of objection to the idea a form of advocacy? You don’t understand. I realized you two were hardly sleeping—but that seemed connected to the bizarre power of your love for each other. You made me crave sleeplessness because I recognized what it was in you two—a refusal to be separated. It was the privacy of sleep that horrified you. You didn’t want to sleep. Those long late-night walks. We thought you were trying to tire yourselves out but now I realize the purpose of those two- mile strolls. You were reviving yourselves, probably stopping at the Medici for a cup of espresso before coming home.

Jade had always been such a deep sleeper. On weekends, it would be nothing unusual for her to sleep until four in the afternoon. She slept in school, she slept on buses, on family outings. Like an old man, she’d doze off at the movies. Naturally, we noted her semi-narcolepsy and realized it was an escape—from her too-rapid growing up, from all of the countless details of life that displeased her, and from us. Once, when she was nine or ten, I found her asleep in the bathtub and I shook her awake, partly because I was afraid she could drown herself like that and partly because I’d been waiting an hour for her to get out of the bathroom. She looked at me with all the defiance she could muster—which was considerable, even then—and said, “I need my sleep.” She was very possessive about her sleep and she defended it as if it were property. If she could have hidden it the way I hid my chocolates there would have been dreams and packets of unconsciousness stashed everywhere. In a household where everything was shared and talked about and where there was much more need than there was ability to satisfy needs, Jade dug her heels into a universe in which she was unapproachable, uncriticizable, and unknowable.

So after years of accommodating her semi-narcolepsy, we then, with you on the scene, had to adjust to Jade’s sleeplessness. When the first symptoms appeared—a certain icing-like quality to her eyes, as well as her own direct testimony that she was getting about twenty hours of sleep a week—Hugh took the homeopathic route and began giving her infinitesimal doses of stimulants. Herbal stimulants to begin with, brewed in with her tea, and then, relaxing his principles, he even crushed in a little bit of dexadrine. Hugh assumed that her body was keeping itself awake because of some internal crisis, some need for wakefulness, and following the homeopathic edict of treating like with like, Hugh attempted to relieve her body of its need to create these symptoms by creating them artificially—thus, he hoped, defusing the control center of her insomnia. Then he set off on homeopathic chase number two, which is a kind of folksy psychoanalysis—usually Hugh’s strongsuit, for some odd reason.

Hugh developed the suspicion that your lovemaking was leaving Jade in a perpetually excited, that is to say unsatisfied, state. This didn’t go very far in explaining your sleeplessness, but your sleeplessness wasn’t awfully much in question. This continual sexual incompleteness may have been sheer fantasy on Hugh’s part, a kind of compromise virginity, but nevertheless he tried to delicately draw her out about her “night life,” as he called it. Jade spared him the realization that he had overstepped his actual courage, that he was not a WASP Freud, willing to face the truth no matter what its content or consequence, and she simply dummied up on the topic of your sex life. She knew, I think, that Hugh wanted to hear that each night you left her dangling, yearning, and whether it was true or not it was more than she could say—her loyalty to you and the world you both now lived in was too fierce—she was virtually patriotic about the emotional ground you’d portioned off for yourselves: My love affair right or wrong! So she sidestepped his questions, the subtle ones, that is, and when he resorted to frontal attack, she screamed, “You’re taking things away from me. You’re making mine into yours.” It was Jade’s genius to use Hugh’s own language when she fought him. Jade dressed in the uniform of Hugh’s troops and fought him from the trees and bushes, whereas I fought him like the colonial British army, straight up and down in a clearing and decked out in red.

And the sleeplessness continued. The nights when you weren’t with us were no better. Jade would go to bed early, clearly anxious for an uninterrupted night, but then there would have to be at least one phonecall to you and as often as not, after an hour or two of sleep, she’d be at her desk composing a letter to you, or drawing your face, or writing a poem to you—sometimes even trying to catch up in her schoolwork. Hugh was convinced that Jade’s short-term memory was unraveling, that she had gotten paler by two full shades. He was even waffling on the question of whether or not to subtly dose her with barbiturates—he was slower to use drugs medically than he was socially.

Well, this was the climate when Jade approached us and asked for a real bed for her room, a double bed as would befit a lady who shared her sleeping quarters with a lover. It’s strange that our compliance in this small matter is what you chose to rattle in my face—and not the far more significant matter of our allowing you into our daughter’s room in the first place. You approve, it would seem, of our belief in the sexual rights of young people, but raise an eyebrow at our choice of furniture. And what about your own terribly moral parents? What was on their minds when they failed to stop you from virtually moving into our house? At least Hugh and I knew where our daughter was—could actually hear her in her room, if we listened closely enough. The truth is that no one had the heart to keep you two from being everything to each other, and the energy of your connection was strangely overpowering. Since we did not believe that making love is a sin or a crime, all we could have objected to was that you and Jade weren’t yet ready somehow for the pleasures of the flesh—but how could we say that when we were nearly mad with envy over your love for each other? You were all of our half-forgotten romantic fantasies suddenly incarnate; denying you would have been like denying ourselves.

And so, yes, I did agree to it, the bed. I believed in you two, in your gestures and in the world you created. It wasn’t until the bed arrived in that Salvation Army truck and was installed in Jade’s little room that I realized Jade’s arguments were wholly based on trickery. Having a double bed didn’t make a dent in her sleeplessness. Nothing could have put you two to sleep. Love—or is it only romance?—is a psychedelic. It’s the flying carpet, the rope trick. It is that singular, and no one who sees it—which means, of course, believing it—can ever hope to be the same. You two stoned-out beasts reigning up there in your used bed. There have been times, David, when I think that just that, just the fact of you two, never minding what it all led to, but just seeing you two and feeling what you meant to each other, and knowing that love is a state of altered consciousness, has been more than I can honestly absorb. And that in certain ways it has destroyed my life.

Ann

8

January is when time begins, and spring is when life begins and, for me, the first day of spring was the day I sneaked into a travel agency on Jackson and State to buy a plane ticket to New York. It was a cold April day, gray, slushy, but the most extravagant promises turned slowly in the belly of the wind. I paid for the ticket with a new hundred-dollar bill, feeling as furtive as a spy. I bought the ticket under a false name and kept the day of departure open. I felt brilliant, brave, and absolutely imperiled. The act of stepping outside the law provoked my imagination and released torrents of fearful criminal passion. I wondered if there was a permanent all-points bulletin out on me and if the sweet-faced woman who sold me the ticket wasn’t in fact looking at a newswire photo of me taped beneath the Formica ledge of the counter. I shoved the ticket into my coat pocket and quick- stepped out with my head down.

I hid my ticket in my apartment and dreamed of my departure. I thought I was going to be quite a bit braver than I turned out to be. Like a person doomed to fail, I thought of the hundred things that could go wrong. I thought of my parole officer Eddie Watanabe making a surprise visit to my school and finding me vanished. I thought of being arrested for jaywalking on 42nd and Broadway and having it discovered I was in New York breaking parole. I thought of Ann slamming her door in my face and calling the police. These were the variables and I was right to think about them, but I could not stop myself. My imagination of disaster tormented me as if it were a separate, vicious self. I longed to stop thinking of consequences, just as we must do when we dive from high boards, leap on our skis down steep sunblind slopes, or play any of the other daredevil games we’ve invented as metaphors for love.

I tried to prepare myself. I packed my suitcase. I bought The New York Times and The Village Voice. I leafed through books of photographs of New York. When I heard a jet pass overhead, I searched the skies for it. I methodically withdrew money from my small savings account, as if it were being monitored by federal agents. I said to Dr. Ecrest, “You know what? I’d like to go to New York.” He asked why and I quickly shrugged, cursing myself for so profitlessly risking detection. I really liked him and it had been difficult all along to keep from confessing the dozens of long-distance phonecalls I’d made and the letters I’d written and the huge, nourishing letters I’d received from Ann. It was an agony often to think how I wasted my time and Ecrest’s, especially when I felt stuck and fed up with my own character. I didn’t much believe in psychiatry, but the fact was that I’d been given a chance to talk for years to highly trained, expensive doctors and I’d made very little of it because of my commitment to keep my secrets safe.

The clothing workers union had taken me off the picket line and into their regional offices, where I worked for a fellow named Guy Parker. Guy was a few years older than me and had convinced the Amalgamated to hire him to make a thirty-minute film “depicting the Union’s struggle, from the sweatshops of the past to the challenge of the future.” Parker’s approach to the film clips and snapshots in the union’s informal archives was wholly passionate. Looking at a picture of women leaping to their death during the Triangle Factory fire, Guy would tap his big ivory finger against his high, slightly flushed brow and muse, “Each one of these gals had a family. You know, parents, husbands, boyfriends, maybe kids. Each one. A life. And then out the window. Think of it.” Guy wanted every incident to work into a Big Scene. Negotiations bored him, cooperative housing projects made him practically whinny with impatience: he needed strikes, boycotts, fires, goons, death tolls. Parker’s vision of union history was one of unstinting hysteria; I suggested we call his movie Oh My God! Here Come the Bosses!

However, working for Guy was a lot better than pacing in front of a store, and since I was Parker’s researcher there was an implicit understanding that sooner or later my work would take me to New York, where the national office of the union had a “treasure trove” of photographs and documents and where such early union heroes as Alma Hillman and Jacob Potofsky still lived.

Guy knew nothing and cared less about my personal life—though he liked the way I listened and often asked me out for dinner or drinks. Nevertheless, because fate is not only fickle but also flirtatious, Guy incessantly referred to my upcoming New York trip, alluding to it one day, postponing it the next, until I was half-convinced that the whole deal was an elaborate trap and I refused to react to his promises any more. However, I did use the possible opportunity as a means of putting my toe into the water of consequence if I were to suddenly use my own ticket to fly east. Meeting with Eddie Watanabe, I casually mentioned that “my work” might send me to New York for a week or so. And Eddie, answering so quickly that I wondered if he hadn’t been expecting me to say this, said, “No way, David. No way on earth.”

“Why not?” I said. “Even if I got a written statement from my boss that I had to go to New York?”

“No way, no how.”

Two weeks later, I met again with Eddie. It was evening and spring had receded. A chilly rain was falling and the sky was a dark porcelain blue and looked as if a thunderclap might shatter it into a thousand pieces. Rather than meet at Eddie’s office, we were going to have our talk at the Wimpy’s in the shopping center near my apartment. Eddie was already seated in a booth when I came in. He wore a suburban car coat of a slightly gauzy wool, with long narrow wooden buttons. He’d just gotten a haircut. He was wearing his hair like a businessman now and his practically translucent golden ears looked larval and vulnerable. He smelled of peppermint and new car. As I sat down, he thrust his hand out for me to shake.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not late. I was early.” He snapped his fingers to get the waitress’s attention, like a clumsy boy trying to act tough and worldly for his date. The waitress came over and took out her order pad, making it a point not to look at us. Eddie ordered coffee and I asked for a root beer.

“How come you wanted to meet here?” I asked. Wimpy’s had been one of the principal Hyde Park hangouts for years and Jade and I had eaten a hundred hamburgers there, some of them while seated in the very booth Eddie and I now occupied.

“I like meeting outside of my office. I get depressed sitting in my office all day. And I get the idea that the place puts you up tight. I’d like you to really relax and get loose with me and maybe, just maybe, you understand, you’d have a bit more luck being honest with me if we were to have our meeting in a nicer place.”

There were not many things in the world I despised more than listening to Eddie Watanabe.

The waitress brought our order and placed it before us. Eddie dropped a saccharine tablet into his coffee and stirred it from the bottom up, as if ladling the sediment from the bottom of a pot of soup.

“You still dreaming about going to New York?” he asked.

In a moment’s confusion, I forgot I’d spoken to him about it last time and I felt exposed, panicked. But then I recalled our discussion and I shrugged.

“What’s that mean?” he asked. “A shrug could mean yes or it could mean no or maybe it means you don’t feel like answering. So?”

“It means I haven’t been thinking about it. What’s the use?”

“That’s the spirit. What’s the use is exactly how you should look at it. I was getting worried about you, if you don’t mind hearing the truth. You’re an intelligent guy, you know.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Oh, a lot. That’s been one of my theories since I got into this business, that the system doesn’t work for the guy with the higher than average intelligence. Either it breaks him into bits or he figures out a way to scout around it, but there’s no blessed way on earth the system we’ve got now, as it exists I mean, at the present time, is going to meet the punishment needs of the guy with the higher than average intelligence. That’s why a guy like yourself, David, is a personal challenge for me, professionally speaking. I can learn ten times as much about penology from an intelligent guy like yourself than I can from some goofball who gets busted trying to rob Mr. Goldberg’s grocery store.”

“Ah, do I detect a bit of anti-Semitism?”

“Screw. I’m not anti anything. If anything, I’m anti-anti and you know it. Jesus, David, you don’t know when you’ve got a good thing. Especially seeing as you’ve got a parole officer whose been doing his share of standing up for you lately.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“OK,” said Watanabe with a rather theatrical sigh, “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I may as well.” This was his customary preamble when he wanted to inform me of my lack of rights.

“Tell me,” I said.

“All right. The father was in town this week.”

“The father? Whose?”

“Butterfield’s.”

“Hugh was here?”

“That’s right.

“You saw him?”

“No way. I’m not interested in him. My thing is you, not him. You.”

“How do you know he was here if you didn’t see him? Did he call you?”

“OK. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t sure I was going to, but since you’re asking. Butterfíeld is tight with Kevin DeSoto. You know, the D.A. who prosecuted you. DeSoto’s into that weird kind of medicine Butterfíeld specializes in. So Butterfíeld blows into town and—”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. From nowhere. What’s the difference? Anyhow, he shows up at DeSoto’s office and he says he has new information for a case against you.”

“What kind of case? My case is over. I can’t be put on trial again.”

“Butterfield wants to have your parole revoked.”

“What’s he saying? What’s his reason?”

“Who knows? DeSoto won’t say. It’s probably nothing, right?”

I nodded.

“But Butterfield is hot and bothered that you’re not locked up in a dungeon and getting nothing but bread and water. DeSoto lets him know that you’re on a tight parole and then DeSoto calls my boss and talks it over and then my boss meets with Butterfield.

“This Butterfield thinks you’re going to get mixed up with his family again. He’s pretty damn emotional, the way I hear it. You’d think it was yesterday, the fire you set. When my boss said we had no intention of revoking your parole, Butterfield practically went nuts. He said you hadn’t been punished. That the hospital we had you in was like a country club. He said you were free to do whatever you wanted. And then you know what he said?”

I shook my head, but I knew.

“He said you wrote his son a letter.”

“That’s a total lie,” I said, quickly and with great feeling.

“I figured. In fact, that’s what I called it when my boss asked my opinion. A lie. I said Butterfield was underestimating your intelligence. The guy was a little nuts, the way he was going on. There he is in my boss’s office, taking up my boss’s valuable time and just standing there beating himself on the chest and saying that he’s made himself a promise that you’ll never see his daughter or anyone else in his family for as long as he lives. My boss says, ‘That’s our job, Mr. Butterfield, not your job.’ And Butterfield screams that we’re not doing our job and that makes it his job.”

Eddie finished his coffee and shrugged. “Whew,” he said, shaking his head. “Just thinking about how the man hates you makes me worried.”

“Why does it make you worry?”

“I’m not sure. It just does. Doesn’t it you? Doesn’t it make you worry?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I wish I was that cool. It gives me the creeps.”

The next day was Saturday and I awoke in tears. The dream that usually woke me was one of meeting Jade. She would see me, turn, and flee, and I would race after her, sometimes through Hyde Park, sometimes through a forest. Soon she’d outrun me and disappear but my running never slackened.

This time, however, I dreamed I was weeping in my old room at Rockville. It was sunny and warm and I sat at my childish wooden desk with my head in my hands, crying. There was a knock at the door and I woke up, alone and in the dark because my bedroom was in the back and never got any sunlight. As I came awake, I heard my sobs like the bark of a lonely dog a country mile away.

The tears I shed that morning, rigid in the banal discomfort of my own personal neglect (the lumpy mattress, the stale sheets, the uncovered foam-rubber pillow with its refrigerated zipper), were all I could make of the catastrophic hunger I felt for Jade.

From the moment I set the fire, all of my life was an argument against keeping my love alive. I tried to hold on to what I believed was uniquely mine, fearing that when I lost it I would be nothing at all. But now, I could feel how much of my resolve was already gone. And I could also feel a part of me beginning to wish that my love would finally start to recede. It lay on me like an intolerable heat; it pressed my thoughts like a fever that wouldn’t break. It was worse than mourning because grief was corrupted by hope; I could not even turn my love into memory.

I couldn’t stop myself from longing for her. The feel of her small hard toes as I knelt before her with the tarnished-nickel nail clipper, the oak-colored birthmark on her inner thigh, the double orbit of platinum hairs that circled her belly button. “Trust me,” she said the time we made love and she wouldn’t let me come and she was on top with her hands on my shoulders, moving slower and slower like all human time running down and I was kicking at the mattress as if I were being electrocuted, and the way she said my name as if it were a secret, not softly, yet sometimes in a roomful of people only I’d hear it, which was just one of the thousand things we could never explain—all of these images I thought I was preserving so we could still have them when we were reunited, but now they came unbidden, they did with me whatever they wanted, and they ruled me with their limitless command.