Dutifully, I stood up to slice our second helpings when the phone began to ring. Generally, Rose was unusually responsive to the telephone; often if she was just a few steps from it, she’d run toward it when it rang. But now, with the phone on its third, its fourth, its fifth ring, she made no motion to get up and I, feeling it was somehow expected of me, put the knife down and went into the kitchen to answer.
It was Alberto Nicolosi, one of my mother’s oldest friends. Along with the Rinzlers, the Sterns, and the Davises, the Nicolosis were inevitable Thanksgiving guests at our house.
“Hello,” said Alberto, “is this David?”
“Yes. Alberto?”
“Hello, David. I’m not used to your voice over the telephone. Forgive me.”
“It’s OK. How are you?”
“Just fine. Are you there with your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, good. And others? There are others?”
“Not this year. It’s just the two of us.”
“I suspected. You know, every year Rose makes us dinner on Thanksgiving. Now we have just finished our own not too traditional I’m afraid dinner and we were thinking of your mother…”
“Yes?”
“Tell me. Do you think it would be worthwhile if we came for a visit? We have a cake. We could bring it over and Rose could make her coffee.”
“I think that would be wonderful, Alberto.”
“You’re sure? We were going to go to the opera. My brother is with us. But it seems so strange not to see Rose today.”
“Come right over. I’ll tell my mother you’re on your way.”
Rose was clearing the table when I returned. She had placed the slice of breast I’d just taken off back onto the frame of the bird, and she’d poured the wine out of her glass and into mine.
“That was Alberto,” I said. “He and Irene want to come over.”
“But we’re finished with dinner.”
“So are they. They’re bringing over a cake so we can all have dessert together.”
Rose was silent.
“Al’s brother is with them. They’re bringing him, too.”
She walked quickly into the kitchen with a load of dishes. When she came back she said, “They’re coming now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I suppose I better wash my face.” She pressed her hand against her cheek.
“You look fine.”
“Oh, I know what I look like. Oh well. Here come Irene and Al, coming to eat me out of house and home. Irene’s a terrible cook and I’m sure they’re starved. I hope you’ll be nice to them, David. Your father loves to make fun of them. But they watched you grow up. They love you and you should treat them with respect.”
“But I think they’re wonderful.”
“Yes. I know all about it. Just remember they’re human beings with as many feelings as you. They’re two of my oldest friends, David. And they’re precious to me.”
The Nicolosis arrived while Rose was in the bathroom. Alberto wore a herringbone overcoat and a Russian fur cap. His hair was long and silvery and his eyes were a dark, purplish blue. He smelled of pipe tobacco and cologne. Irene, erect, thin, and getting brittle, wore a black cape. Her lipstick was fire-engine red and her white hair swept back in two large waves. Arthur once said that Irene’s hair was so well trained she could probably make it stand up and bark. Alberto’s younger brother looked chilled and deferential. He shook hands and nodded and smiled shyly as Alberto explained that he spoke no English.
As I took their coats, Rose emerged from the bathroom.
“Well, look who’s here,” she called, in a crazy, gay voice. She extended both of her hands like a tea room hostess. “Will you look what the cat dragged in?”
“And you must be Alberto’s brother,” Rose was saying, even before she reached them.
“His name is Carlo,” said Alberto, “but I’m afraid he has no English.”
“Oooo,” said Rose, furrowing her brow and tilting her head, as if the news was very sad. “Oh well. At least he can eat cake and drink my good coffee.”
If she could only be quiet and calm herself, I thought, and stop forcing people away from her. I hung the coats in the closet and when I closed the door and looked down the hall, Alberto had Rose in his arms. He held her tightly and seemed to be rocking her back and forth. Rose was on her tip-toes and as Alberto continued in his embrace she patted him lightly on the back, as if it were she who was comforting him.
7
Early the next year, I made contact with two more Butterfields. The first was Keith, whose name I found in the Bellows Falls, Vermont, telephone directory. It was a number I’d tried a few times before, but I’d never gotten an answer. I kept it on my list, though, and even put a check next to it because Vermont seemed like a place Keith would live—Vermont, or Oregon, somewhere you could paddle a canoe, backpack, and not have to compete, a clean isolated place with a tradition of loneliness and family history. And one evening, one manic blizzardy night, I called that Vermont number again and a voice that was unmistakably Keith’s answered on the eighth ring.
“Hello, Keith,” I said. I wanted to hear more, to make certain.
“Hello? Who is this?” He was a perfect, clear tenor; he should have been a folklorist, a collector of nineteenth-century American mountain songs, but he was too awkward to play the banjo and a thousand times too shy to sing even to himself.
“It’s me.” I heard a dog barking behind him; Keith clapped his hand over the phone and said, “Shush, Ambroise.” Then, in a sharper voice, he said to me, “Who is this?”
“It’s me. It’s David Axelrod.”
“I thought so.”
Then I said a stupid thing. I said, “Don’t hang up,” which made him do exactly that. I called him right back but he just let it ring. That same night I wrote him a short letter, apologizing for calling him and asking if I could someday—not necessarily soon—come to see him and talk with him. He sent my letter back torn into pieces, though when I inspected my envelope I thought I detected that it had been opened. He put it all into another envelope and added a note of his own saying, “I know for a fact that you are on parole and you are not allowed to bother me or anyone in my family. If I ever hear from you again you may as well know I’ll be calling the police here and in Chicago.”
Then in March I learned where Sammy Butterfield was. When I’d thought about it without any clues I had guessed he was in some respectable prep school, on his way to Harvard, and then Harvard Law, and then Congress. I still took entirely seriously the ambitions he held when he was twelve years old. In fact, when I hunted around for traces of Sammy I called Choate and Exeter and a few other upper-class schools, but I got nowhere with that and I simply didn’t know enough about those kinds of schools to try many others. As it turned out, he was in upstate New York in a place called the Beaumont School. There was a story about him that I read on the bus one evening coming home from work. It was a UPI wire story and when I checked in the library a couple days later, I saw the same story in papers from New York to Los Angeles.
STUDENT REJECTS ENDOWMENT;
DONOR LIFELONG FRIEND OF AGNEW
Beaumont, New York…Roman Domenitz, a prominent Maryland businessman and longtime associate of Vice- President Agnew, came to the Beaumont School to present the exclusive New York boys preparatory school with a half million dollars. Mr. Domenitz, president of Rodom Industries, was making the donation in memory of his son Laurence Domenitz, who died of leukemia last year while in his senior year at the Beaumont School.
Samuel Butterfield, president of the junior class, was chosen by the Beaumont students to accept the check from Mr. Domenitz, in a ceremony marking the prestigious school’s 100th anniversary. Speaking on a stage that included Vice- President Agnew, young Mr. Butterfield stated, “We don’t need Domenitz’s money.” As he tore up the check, Mr. Butterfield recounted charges recently leveled against Domenitz by such organizations as the National Urban League, the Congress on Racial Equality, and the NAACP.