To protest the vicious social wound I felt this impromptu party was inflicting on me, I withdrew from the household after eating a long, sticky breakfast. I closed myself in my room—a ten by fourteen chamber that was beginning to tell more of the unpleasant truth about my physical self than a shoe or an old shirt would tell—where I dozed, read, and wondered what to wear. The reception was set for three o’clock (a time no one could expect to be given a real meal) and as the hour approached I began to think seriously of dressing for it. Rose had thrown away most of my old clothes but a blue suit bought for my high-school graduation had survived her raid. I put on a white shirt, a narrow black tie, and my old suit. There was no mirror in my room—the only mirror in the house was on the medicine chest; you’d have to leap into the air to see how your pants fit—but I checked my ghost-like reflection in the window glass. The suit was clearly too small for me and the sight of its snug fit—its tightness at the thigh, its narrowness at the shoulder and chest, the cuffs’ clumsy suspension above the tops of my shoes—filled me with a strangely powerful sense of unease. That tight blue suit ambushed me with the reality of my time away.
I lay in bed, fully dressed now, staring at the ceiling and stroking my narrow tie. The tie was altogether unfashionable but I doubted that my parents or any of their friends would notice. That set had a conscious disregard for fashion and products. (It had only been recently, for example, that Arthur learned a TV dinner wasn’t just anything you happened to be eating while watching the set.) I dozed off. While I slept, a few of the guests arrived; I might have slept through the day if my mother hadn’t awakened me.
“David?” she whispered through the door.
“I’m up,” I said. “Are they here?”
“May I come in?” Without waiting for an answer, Rose entered, contrary to established Axelrodian etiquette. She wore a U-necked pale green dress and green and white shoes. She held a glass of whiskey and water, clutching at it through the thickness of three cocktail napkins. “You’re wearing a suit,” she said, closing the door behind her.
“Observant,” I said.
“It’s much too hot, David. And that’s a wool blend suit. Look how you’re perspiring. Why not take that old thing off and freshen up with a nice cool damp washcloth?”
“No, I want to wear this,” I said, with all the maturity and sense of fair play that had made me such a hit at home.
The door buzzer went off. I could hear familiar voices from the living room. Laughter. A high, rapid hoot, like a mezzo- soprano owl. Then a man’s voice—Harold Stern’s—saying, “No. Don’t laugh yet. This isn’t the funny part.” This was followed by more laughter, over which a woman’s voice emerged to say, “Who the hell cares if it’s the funny part. We’re laughing now, aren’t we?”
“OK,” Rose said to me, after a panicky glance at the closed door, “you look fine. Why not just pop into the washroom and throw a little water in your face?”
As for the party itself, it went so smoothly and without incident that it could just as well not have happened. No one had an unexpected thought or said an unpracticed word; no one got drunk or ate too much; no cigarette ash was accidentally flicked onto the rug. I was allowed to drink my fill but I could not become drunk. I was led over to the sofa and placed next to Millicent Bell, who was later to help me enroll in Roosevelt University. I was also led into a conversation with Harold Stern, who would get me a job with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Yet I did nothing to secure these favors that day. They were mine because I was Rose and Arthur’s only child and because I’d been so silent and adorable passing out smoked meats during Party meetings in the past, during the best days of all of their lives.
Daylight lingered in the windows and the reception in my honor seemed never to end. What one could or could not ask about my long absence was a mystery to my parents’ deferential friends. The deepest into the personal area anyone dared wade was a hearty Welcome Home, that would have been just as suitable if I’d returned from a two-year study of socialist genetics at the University of Leningrad. Even those who had written me and sent me presents during my stay in Rockville avoided touching the truth of my absence. Did they fear what might accidentally appear in their own eyes if they mentioned my incarceration—the tears, or perhaps the scorn? Or were they respecting my mother’s ardent desire that everything, everything in all the world, be absolutely as normal as possible? History owed Rose a normal afternoon and even the children of my parents’ friends were determined to keep anything reminiscent of pain at bay. Meredith Tarnovsky, sixteen and finally beautiful, with the pure, animal attractiveness of someone whose sexual drive is not yet social but purely hormonal, was just returned from a few weeks in Cuba, where she’d cut sugar cane and attended lectures. She was often at my elbow, talking to me about Castro, who I actually happened to like, though not with Meredith’s wholehearted passion. Her dark eyes glistened, the perfume of her bath lifted off her soft skin, the Havana sun had turned all the soft hairs on her arm bright platinum. I drank gin after gin, wondering if the purpose of this party was to encourage me to violate my long celibacy and drag Meredith into my room. “You were in Cuba,” I said to her, “and I was in a fancy little nuthouse. Talk about your separate paths, huh?” She lowered her eyes and shook her head. Meaning what? That it was ironic? Sad? Or that we weren’t supposed to talk about it? The other representative of my “peer group” was Joe Greenbladt, an ex-runt who once was called Little Joey Greenbladt and who now, at twenty- two, towered over me. He wore a red shirt, powder blue corduroys, and cowboy boots. I’d never had enough to do with him to join the ranks of his childhood tormentors, yet today he avoided me and glanced at me with a certain dark irony as if his presence in my parents’ apartment was somehow settling an old score. He was apparently a great favorite in my parents’ set. Meredith may have gone to Cuba but Joe (Josef on his birth certificate) had read all of Kapital and referred to the civil rights movement as “the Negro question” and to his own friends as “today’s youth.” Joe’s parents, Leo and Olga, remembered my birthday while I was in Rockville and now and then had sent me a book or a magazine. The year before, they’d gone to the Soviet Union and brought back a small reel tape recorder, which they gave my parents to give to me. Along with the tape recorder was a taped message. “Helloooo, David, this is Olga speaking to you.” “And this is Leo.” “David,” Olga had continued, “we’ve just returned from the Soviet Union. We had the most marvelous experiences, too numerous to mention. It was very cold but our hotel was perfectly warm. And the people, David, the people…” “Very happy,” Leo said. “Joyous and dignified.” I had listened with tears in my eyes, overwhelmed by the stupidity and tenderness of their message. Without realizing, I’d lain my hand on the machine and it got in the way of the reel. Olga and Leo’s voices got slower, lower, and they sounded now like stroke victims—that preview of their mortality had gone through me like heat lightning.
Around seven, the rains began. The sky turned a vivid electric green and the rain pounded against the windows and battered against the air conditioner. Like a pack living in the wild, the guests moved in unison, making plans to leave, to share rides, to drop each other off. It seemed the rain panicked them, though I suppose they were seizing a good excuse to leave. Tom and Natalie Foster were the last to go and even they were gone fifteen minutes after the rain began—they’d lingered only to gossip about the Tarnovskys, Meredith’s diminutive, gaudily dressed parents. The Tarnovskys owned a movie theater on the North Side and had taken to booking in an occasional sex film to pay expenses. “We told them it would come to this,” Tom Foster said, feigning sadness and concern.