Whenever I could, I arranged to meet Arthur at his office. I never tired of remembering the night I stole in and found my letters, and as often as not, Arthur would make a quick trip to the bathroom before we left for lunch and I could test fate and my reflexes by reading one or two of the letters in his absence. (I didn’t have the courage to steal them, though finally I did take them for a day and Xerox the lot of them.) I waited with confused patience for Arthur to tell me how desperate his life at home had become, but he only expressed his sorrow in asides—in shrugs, in sighs, by calling his wife “your mother,” as if she were nothing more. I’d been warned by Dr. Ecrest not to involve myself in my parents’ woeful marriage, and of all the psychiatric advice that had come my way none was easier and more natural to follow. I was content to return my father’s kisses of greeting and farewell, to feed greedily upon the sentimental anguish of his love for me: it was a pure father’s love, effortless and insane. He asked only that I be his son; he scarcely knew how I adored him. Whenever we met for lunch we spoke only of me, and then one day near the end of November I walked into my father’s office and he told me he had decided to leave Rose. He sat behind his desk with his hands folded in front of him, like the President giving a little TV chat from the Oval Office. His hair was carefully combed and he wore a new brown sports jacket with wide lapels; he looked like one of those older men who decide to change their “image.” Only this was Arthur, and no gesture of his could be entirely free of whimsy: he looked like a good-natured blind man who’d been dressed by someone who didn’t know him very well. “Last night,” he said, in a voice that seemed a mixture of news commentator and graveside eulogizer, “after twenty-seven years of marriage—many of them, most of them, David, nearly all of them good years—your mother and I decided it would be best for everyone if we were to separate.”
I nodded, but couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say. My father’s eyes were on me; I wanted to brush my face, as if to clear away a swarm of mayflies. The tall dusty window behind him was all lemon glare. His phone began to ring but he didn’t answer it.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He glanced down at the phone and it stopped ringing.
We went to a bar and grill beneath the street level on Wabash Avenue. In an area mostly inhabited by clerks, professionals, and businessmen, this was the most proletarian restaurant around. The entrance looked like an abandoned subway stop. You walked down a flight of studded iron steps and then pushed through a peeling green door. Inside, it was cavernous, an underground universe of hardworking men. Drinks cost a quarter or thirty- five cents and the bar alone could seat two hundred people. The smell of beer mixed with the smell of sausages; the smoke from hundreds of cigarettes mixed with the haze from the steamplates. Nearly everyone was dressed in work clothes: flannel shirts rolled to the elbow and ribbed long-sleeved undershirts; zipper jackets with a first name stitched over the right breast; ankle- high, steel-tipped shoes with the laces wrapped around the tops. My father was the only man in business clothes and I was by far the youngest.
We got our food from the cafeteria serving line. Boiled potatoes, a thick delicious sausage called a thüringer, peas, and rice pudding. I found a small empty table and Arthur went to the bar and bought a pitcher of beer. I took our food off the brown plastic tray and noticed my hands were shaking.
“You know,” Arthur said, as we began our meal, “I’ve never been able to figure out what this place is called, and I’ve been eating here most all my life. After Prohibition they called it the Step Down Bar and Grill, and after that it was sold and it was called something else, I don’t even remember. You notice there’s no sign? And some of these guys working here were working here before I even heard of this place—and they don’t know what the hell it’s called.
“You want to know something?” my father said. “I’m just remembering this is where I took Rose the first day I met her.”
I speared a few peas but didn’t bring them to my mouth. My father remembering that didn’t agree with my memory of my parents’ meeting, but I couldn’t exactly recall what I’d been told. A May Day parade? A picnic?
“It’s something we never told you,” my father said, “but your mother was married when she was a very young girl. It was to a rich fellow named Carl Courtney, a real William Powell type and as stuck up as a rooster. They got married in Philadelphia. Rose was working fifty hours a week and doing her best to support her crazy mother; Courtney was working maybe two hours a week and getting dough from his mother, old Virginia Courtney who owned a radio station and was quite a reactionary character. It was a very short marriage and it didn’t add up to anything. But I guess she loved him in a way because he was a bastard heel and she went along with it. About a year into their marriage Courtney got a job—through his mother—with the Tribune right here in Chicago and Rose came out with him. She was already a Communist and Courtney was really nothing more than an isolationist playboy, but she stuck with him, telling herself that maybe she could change him, until he started running around.” Arthur looked at his plate and remembered he was supposed to be having lunch. He cut the end off of his thüringer but then put his fork down and took a long swallow of beer.
“Running around with other women?” I said.
“You name it. Secretaries and showgirls, crazy women without a care in the world. Sometimes he only came home to change his clothes.”
“God,” I said. I felt a very specific grief for Rose, as if it had always existed within me but I was only now discovering it. Had I always known? Was it something I’d heard them talk about when they thought I was asleep? I had a sudden recollection of myself stretched out in the back seat of one of our old cars as we drove at night on one of those long restless vacations we used to take and my parents were talking in edgy murmurs and my mother was…crying? and my father was making emphatic gestures that I saw reflected in the dark windshield and…But then the memory was gone, replaced by the effort of trying to remember.
“Did any of my psychiatrists know that Mom was married before?” I asked. My question puzzled me. What difference would it have made? When Jade told me that she had talked with Hugh and they’d decided it would be best if I stayed away for a month, the first thing I asked her was when they’d had the conversation.
“No. We didn’t say.”
“Why was it a secret?”
“Rose didn’t want anyone to know. It made her ashamed.”
“Then why are you telling me now?”
Arthur shrugged. “Are you sorry I’m telling you?”
“No.”
“It’s being here.”
“We’ve been here so many times.”
“It’s being here today. I’m sorry if I told you something you’d rather do without. But today my marriage is over, so I’m talking about things that maybe I shouldn’t.”
We were silent for a while. I finished the beer in my glass and poured another. Arthur’s glass was practically full but I topped it off. I touched the food on my plate and it was cold.
“I was her lawyer for the divorce,” Arthur said. “That’s why we came here. To talk about it. I didn’t even know her, but a gal she was close to in Philadelphia had a brother in the Party here, and Rose went to him and said she needed a lawyer and he sent her to me. That was Meyer Goldman, by the way, who sent Rose to me.”