“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.”
“His children?”
“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 strangers. You’ve taken dope. You gave your heart to another family.”
Yet there must have been more than fear that caused me to join Rose in that conspiracy of silence, because I felt no temptation to speak to my father about his “other family.” On a certain level, I didn’t believe that any such hidden household existed and I was protecting Rose by keeping her ravings private. But if Arthur had a lover and was waiting for the best time to dismantle his life, it was his part to bring that news to me. I was not anxious to share the secrets of his starving heart. Though he had of course never told me his capacity for love had not been tapped, that it had remained curled within him, that it had been reabsorbed by his body and turned into belly, that the unused love had collapsed his arches and grayed his hair, that it had thickened his voice and swollen his knuckles, turned him into a quipster, a sigher, a snuffler at the movies, a tag-along and a drag-behind, I had always felt this to be true, and from the moment I had my first intimation of romance I mourned Arthur’s loss. I was eight or nine years old and the radio was playing Johnnie Ray singing: “If your sweetheart / Sends a letter / Of Goodbye /It’s no secret / You’ll feel better / If you cry.” Arthur put his paper down to listen for a moment and then he smiled at me. And I knew that even though the song was cheap and “made for a profit,” it meant something to my father, was taking him by surprise and laying its clammy hands on him. More than once, more than a thousand times, I had longed for my father to honor the unreasonable impulses of his love-soaked heart and break out into some high-flung adventure—to chase after the waitress whose walk he studied with such instinctual longing, to write a letter to Ava Gardner whose films he’d see three, four, sometimes five times over, to live the life of popular romance with picnics near the waterfall and long, spinning embraces. Once, in what turned out to be the middle of my time with Jade, I was in my bedroom, dreamily and pointlessly filling out applications to college, when Arthur drifted in. I looked up from my desk and saw his reflection in the night-backed window. “Hello,” I said. “Happy?” he asked. The question didn’t sound like it hid a trap and so I nodded. Arthur shook his head—my father, that is, my father shook his head—and he said, “I envy you.” I thought then as I was to think later: It was too late in his life for me to help and if I couldn’t help, then where was the profit in caring?
Saturday, seven days after my return, there was a little reception in my honor. Clearly, it had been Rose’s idea. She had been urging me all week to make contact with the people who had watched me grow up, who had written me birthday notes in Rockville and sent me presents, and who now wanted to enjoy the relief of my return. Rose, a loyal, principled friend, felt she owed her friends a glimpse of me, and I think she was domestically strategic enough to realize that a day with family and lifelong friends might have a sentimentally sobering effect on her husband, might fill Arthur’s winged heart with the baffling weight of the shared past. When I emerged from my bedroom that day—feeling as if this might be the day I would go out on my own, take a walk, buy a book, feeling, that is, more confident but holding that elusive confidence in my palm like the contents of a broken egg—Rose was already at the Co-Op buying food and Arthur, dressed in tan trousers and a sleeveless tee shirt, was pulling our old torpedo-shaped vacuum cleaner around the living room and scowling at the carpet. “We’re having the old bunch over,” he said above the roar of the vacuum. “Some fun, huh?” And he raised his eyebrows comically, inviting me to share an irony he refused to explain.
And oh my parents’ melancholy friends! Olga and Leo Greenbladt, Millicent Bell, Tom and Natalie Foster, Harold Stern, James Brunswick and whoever it was he happened to be married to, Connie Faust, Irene and Alberto Nicolosi. They were the people I’d known all my life, better, or at least with more constancy, than I knew my schoolmates or my scattered, distant relatives. If I had been married it would have been these people, my parents’ friends from the Communist Party, who would have sat grinning in the folding chairs at the nonreligious ceremony, and if I’d been struck dead it would have been their tired, slightly haunted eyes watching my ashes scatter in the wind. In the old days—old days for me, that is, but for them it was The End—I listened to their incomprehensible discussions at monthly meetings and played the role of servant, passing through the smoke- dense room in my aqua pee-jays, carrying a tray of salami and cheese. Then I’d be sent to my room with a bottle of Canada Dry and a little turquoise dish filled with miniature pretzels. These were the faces who beamed at me over the shine of birthday candles; these were the scuffed shoes and massive knees lined beneath our dining room table where I crawled in a mild social panic hoping to retrieve a dropped Brussels sprout. These were the voices and the aromatic pipe tobacco in the back seat of the old car during rides to the country; these were the hands that grabbed for the check at the pizzeria; these were the names on the bottom of astoundingly corny graduation cards. Here were my parents’ friends resting their feet and drinking Italian coffee after a nervous Saturday helping the Negroes picket Woolworth’s. And here they were again, visiting me before I shipped off to Rockville, squeezing my hand, memorizing my face, bringing fictitious regards from their children who I’d never bothered to know. (My father’s way of leaning away from the truth of his life was to discourage my making friends with his friends’ children: “Make friends with real people. Forget these red-diaper babies.” But I needed little discouragement. Those boys and girls were not my type, nor was I theirs: they were serious, respectful, unused to wasting time, uncomfortable with the mean jokes I amused myself with.)