“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.
