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
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.
