Endless Love

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 puree of sweet potatoes with a crust of small colored marshmallows. Standing next to the stove were five bottles of Cotes du Rhone, 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.”