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
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.”
“H
“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
