Barbara fell silent. Whoever lay sick on the other side of the curtain had visitors now; I heard their quarrelsome, unhappy voices. A doctor was being paged over the public address. And I realized, with a sense of real panic, that I was about to burst into tears. Like an icy pond whose thickness you’ve misjudged, my composure gave way beneath the weight of my feelings—and I was stranded. I stared hard at the curtain that divided the room and I listened to the voices. “Now what?” a man’s voice was saying. “Another one and another one and another one?”
There was a light tap on the open door. It was Barbara’s sister Rita and Barbara’s children, Wayne and Delia. Rita looked old. Her hair was white and uncared for and she was partly crippled. Though she was skinny, she used a big black cane thick enough to aid an enormous man. Her raincoat was open; the lining was coming out. She looked embarrassed and annoyed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “They would not listen. I told them they couldn’t see you tonight but—”
“Hi, Mom,” said Wayne. His hair could not have been cut any shorter. He wore huge, brown-framed glasses and a white shirt with buttons on the collar points. His was the kind of face they put on posters urging people to contribute to the Negro College Fund. Delia seemed to be staking her emotional territory on the other side of the spectrum. Her hair was in an Afro, she wore a red scoop-necked tee shirt, blue jeans, and torn sneakers. It looked as if she’d had lipstick on and somebody had at the last minute scrubbed it off.
“We swore on the Bible,” Delia said. “We said to God every night we will come to see you, Mama.” She went to the bedside and laid her head against Barbara’s shoulder. As she did, she looked back at me and smiled.
My father introduced me to Rita, Wayne, and Delia. Rita held only my fingertips when I offered my hand. Wayne was cool and businesslike. And when I offered my hand to Delia, she clasped her arms behind her back and said, “No!” It was only a child’s foolishness and teasing, but it made me feel very awkward.
Barbara was allowed only a half hour of visitors and most of it was already gone. I thought her children would want to be alone with her for a while. And now that they were a family, I didn’t feel I belonged there any longer. I announced that I was leaving. Barbara tried to convince me to stay and then Arthur said he’d leave with me. But it seemed he wanted to stay for the last few minutes to be near Barbara and to be near the children and go home with them when the nurse said it was time to leave. I made up an excuse of having someone to meet. I said goodbye to everyone with a clumsy wave and walked into the corridor, moving quickly and hoping I was heading toward an exit. My hands were shaking. I thought it was only the strangeness of being with my father’s new family, but when I was waiting at the elevator and had a moment to consider the evening I realized that for the past half hour I’d been remembering it had been in this very hospital and perhaps on this very floor that three and a half years ago all of the Butterfields had been treated for the smoke and the flame and the shock and the terror I had inflicted on them.
A few weeks later it was Thanksgiving. Every year my parents had the same group of friends to their house for Thanksgiving dinner, and as the day approached my original certainty that this year’s dinner was canceled gave way to a growing dread that my mother was going ahead with the party, even though her life had snapped in half. Finally, at two o’clock on Thanksgiving, I put aside the long letter I was writing to Ann and called my mother.
“Hello?” Rose said. Her voice sounded soft and girlish.
“Hi. It’s me. What’s up?” I’d seen her a few days before, but she never called me and when I called her she usually seemed indifferent.
“What do you mean, what’s up? I’m cooking.”
“So the party’s on for this year?”
“Of course it is. Why? Do you have other plans?”
“No. It’s just that you never called me. I didn’t know if you were going to have it this year.”
“And so you made other plans.”
“No. I said I didn’t. What time should I be over?”
Rose was silent and then, sounding a little uncertain, she said, “Oh, four. Isn’t that when we always have it?”
I showered, washed my hair, and shaved, because Rose was always annoyed if I was less than extremely clean and it wasn’t something I wanted to hear that day.
My letter to Ann lay in fragments on the kitchen table, scrawled on notebook paper, scraps of shopping bag, and onionskin paper that absorbed the ink from my pen and made every word blurry and soft, like lights through the fog. I had already received my second letter from her—in response, more or less, to mine to her in which I’d begged her to tell me where Jade lived:
Hugh appeared yesterday. Dressed in the uniform of his new ego—jeans, blue work shirt with red embroidered heart, tan boots with pointy toes: Ya-Hugh! He stunk to high heaven of some brain-damaged strawberry perfume which he readily confessed was his new girl’s, Ingrid. “You wear her perfume?” asked I, waltzing into a nice left hook. “No,” said Hugh. “It rubs off on me.” He’d just spent some time with Keith and their fake obsession is The New Case against you. No new evidence, naturally, just new arguments, new and deeper logic. They jaw on and on about this New Case with the same vacant dreaminess that the little kids on Blackstone used to talk about buying an ounce of pot, when they had no idea where to get it and no money to pay for it.
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.