Endless Love

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 thuringer, 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 thuringer 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.”