“David, this is too strange.” And with that, Ann hung up.
I was stunned for a moment but I redialed her number. She picked up without saying hello.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and then I burst into tears. I thought I was only apologizing for the phonecall but as my tears came I realized I wanted to apologize and be forgiven for everything.
“David,” Ann said, “I can’t hate you.”
I tried to stop crying to consider what she’d said, but the tears, once begun, refused to be controlled. I took a deep breath that was broken in two by a sob and then I simply covered my eyes and cried. I turned away from the phone and when I placed it to my ear again Ann had already broken the connection.
Ten days later, a letter from Ann. It was so thick that the mailman couldn’t fit it into my box. He left me a yellow slip and after school I picked it up at the post office. Some of it was typed and some was written—in four different pens. I was up past dawn rereading it. The pages were fastened by a huge shiny paperclip and on top, written on a torn scrap of paper, was this note: “Finally decided if I didn’t send this I’d be writing it for the rest of the year. Don’t know what to make of it—impetuous, improvident, but now it’s yours. A.”
David, I’m amazed you’ve found me! Living here on East 22nd, in this cramped, expensive apartment, under what language so daintily designates as my “maiden name,” I felt—until I heard your voice and threw the phone into its cradle, in terror—I felt rather safe from any spontaneous visitations from my Butterfield past. Not just safe from you—you haven’t been an issue, really, locked away as you’ve been—but simply and unspecifically safe.
I am alone, for the time. All of the Butterfields have scattered—that’s as specific as I’ll be, though if you’ve found me then I suppose you’ve scared up a couple more of us. In fact, I’d put me as the trickiest to find, since Hugh, Keith, and Sammy are still Butterfields. I had no particular need for more independence (and now could use a bit less), nor did I feel burdened by dragging the Butterfield name behind me, but I did want to do something rash, something that would distinguish this particular, this final separation from all the other fits and separations that preceded it. I wanted Hugh to know that I had depleted my forgivenance, just as humankind is depleting the earth’s resources. All of my indulgence was gone and I was down to the bottom of me, the driest and most tender part, the most breakable and, I suppose, the meanest. I wanted him to know that and I’m not regretful for having given him the heave. Even though it was only after Hugh had made it abundantly clear that I could in no way interfere with his incessant poking around for his true and elemental self—which in Hugh’s case meant running around with his heart on a string like a little boy trying to launch a kite. Sometimes I suspect my pressing for the divorce and forsaking his name was my way of giving some dignity and finality to his awful carryings-on and in a funny way giving him one last chance to come to his senses. But Hugh by then had precious few senses to come back to. He didn’t respond at all to my announcement that I was reverting to Ramsey; it annoyed me so that I tried to convince the kids to drop his name, too. What a joke that was. Sammy’s was the perfect response: And what? Change my driver’s license?
I shouldn’t have been so short with you on the telephone. I felt compromised just hearing your voice. The others would never have forgiven me if I’d been friendly—but who am I fooling? They’d forgive this letter even less. I’ve always had a particular, a special sense of myself when I spoke to you: you hear things the others like to ignore, or misunderstand, and so I like to say them to you.
And you! Back in Chicago. I don’t think I could ever go back there. Chicago is a house full of kids and a lawn no one would mow. Hugh’s been back, though. Now that he travels around, like a peddler, though with nothing to sell, of course. Nothing at all. He’s quit his practice and he works when he and his current girl run out of money. He washes dishes, loads trucks. Anything. But Hugh went to Chicago with a purpose and that was you. He’d heard your case was coming up. I suppose you know that when the trouble all came, Hugh got to know the prosecutor fairly well and they’ve remained friends? Hugh learned there was a good chance you’d be getting out of the hospital and he did his best to revive the case against you. He mentioned this to me in his last call, and since we’re on the subject, I may as well add he was bitterly upset because he knew he’d lost and that you were on your way out. Didn’t I tell you you were making a dangerous foe in Hugh? How could you have been so arrogant as to mistake his slowness for laxness? You think that astrology is a joke but Hugh is a classic Taurus. And not a bad clairvoyant. The only reason I didn’t fall into a faint when you called is that months ago Hugh predicted you’d find me and get in touch and in a weird way I’ve been waiting to hear from you ever since.
Though I’m quite poor, I’m alone and so I can afford a few of my pet indulgences. (Really, I should have been Catholic; no one has a more quantitative sense of pleasure.) It has taken me this long to fully realize that I am never likely to be un-poor—unless, of course, that proverbial rich old man with a twenty-four-carat hole in his heart comes kneeling into my life. Hugh and I started off together with virtually no money but it never seemed altogether serious. We both assumed we were rich, and as educated Protestants we also assumed that the whole society—if not the cosmos—had a stake in keeping us buoyant. We consoled ourselves with that classic semantic sleight-of-hand: we weren’t poor, we were broke. Which in our case made as much sense as a shipwrecked family describing themselves as “on a camping trip.”
I learned to walk away from many luxuries—and each child caused me to evacuate another set of expensive yearnings. Yet the one that would never die (I protected it like an endangered species) was my love for expensive chocolate. It survived my love of well-made books, magazine subscriptions, alligator purses, and English cigarettes; chocolate survived turquoise and gold, as well as the simpler pleasures of a first-run movie or sending the shirts out to the Chinese laundry. But not only did my adoration of good chocolate survive my other pleasures—it surpassed them. No whiff of a fresh book or feel of Irish linen touched me quite so deeply as the melting, the slow darkening dissolve, of a good piece of Swiss chocolate beneath my tongue.
Since everyone in your family professed to believe in sharing (what ardent egalitarians you people were!), you were more than a little shocked to learn that I hid my chocolate from my own family. I used to savor my hidden sweets and, in truth, as much melted or went stale as got eaten. I felt a definite jolt when I passed a spot where some was hidden. Sometimes, talking to Hugh or one of the kids, with my hand resting on the maple sewing box that held, stuffed beneath the felt snips and empty spools, five dollars’ worth of Austrian semi-sweet, I felt a blush spreading like a stain across my face and my heart would literally pound. I would think: My God, I’m giving it away. I’m found, ruined! It was like passing one’s lover on the street and he is with his wife and you are with your children—that frightening and that pleasurable. Secrets offer the solace of privacy and possibility. They are the x in your equation, the compassionate unknown. Those caches of hidden candy, those untapped resources stood in for all of the others I pretended were available to me. Even before you made our house your own, the search for my chocolates was a family sport. Sometimes I’d sleep late, come down, and find the house in shambles. The search for my store of chocolate was a ritual, and like other tribal games, no one in that big drafty falling-down house ever quite outgrew it. Even Hugh got in on the act. But no one had a knack for finding my stashes like you had. Of all the people who traipsed through—family, the kids’ friends, the cleaning woman we hired for a month when I had what Hugh liked to call a nervous collapse and what I called simply coming to my senses, and the odd-lots of runaways and dropouts who seemed to land with us because our openness and curiosity was inevitably taken as laxness—of all the dozens with and without names, with and without scruples or conscience, you were the only one who could regularly unearth what I’d hidden. You hadn’t been courting Jade for more than a week before you began producing evidence of my stealth. I mean, David, you discovered chocolate that I’d forgotten. You found the bar at the bottom of the Kleenex box, then the semi-sweet buds in the bookcase, stuffed behind the antique Britannica that no one used because the language was too high-falutin’ for the kids to copy their school papers out of. You found the chocolate in the basement wedged behind a rusty snow shovel and wrapped in rags to protect it from the mice, and you guessed with no apparent effort which brick was loose in the fireplace. Once the others got you into the spirit of the search, the only place safe from you was my bedroom, where I occasionally tucked something into my underwear drawer and where you were—well, what were you, David?—too delicate, too tactful, or too tactical? to look. I must admit it was better to be raided by you. At least you made certain that most of it found its way back to me. You liked to present me with what I’d hidden. You were like a dog with a stick: throw it! hide it! I know you!