“No. Don’t. I know what you’re feeling. And I thank you. But there’s nothing to be done. I’m going to start taking care of everything. I’m practical now. I have the rest of my life to live with what happened but now I’ve got to make arrangements. I have to make telephone calls and be strong for the kids, even if they don’t expect me to. I’m going to do that. You have to go back to Chicago. And I have to make these calls and forget for a while that it was you who was here for me during the worst—” her voice suddenly broke and she lowered her eyes and began to sob. “I’ve got to make these calls,” she said. “And you’ve got to go. That’s all there is to it.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted never to leave her, but I knew it would be wrong for her to make the calls to Keith, Sammy, and Jade with me sitting with her; they would find out and it would add a measure of foolishness and deceit where only sorrow belonged. Without question, they would all learn that I’d been in New York when Hugh was killed, and it was hard to imagine they wouldn’t speculate on the meaning of that. Perhaps by the time they began to solve the unknown in the terrible algebra of circumstance I would have already found the moment to make my own part in Hugh’s death known.
I left Ann’s apartment. I don’t know if she expected me to go back to my hotel or call American Airlines and make a reservation back to Chicago. It didn’t matter. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. The night was starless and warm. There was a restaurant in the ground floor of her building and customers walked in and out of it. I looked in through the bright open windows; the people inside looked so terribly happy. They sat at tables with little marble-based lamps and painted shades that showed street scenes of old New York: moons over church steeples, buggies drawn by proud high-stepping horses. I felt a sudden surge of desire to be in that restaurant, to be drinking wine and talking with people I knew. I wanted to be in the company of friends such as Charles Dickens imagined, people to whom I could tell my story in all its detail and who would shed tears of pity, neither judging nor forgiving me. But as quickly as the desire appeared, it receded and I turned away from the windows, shaking a little, my head beating like a huge bony heart and the taste of my body’s most appalling recesses rising to the roof of my mouth.
Across the street from Ann’s apartment were the offices of the Children’s Aid Society. The steps to the side entrance faced the entrance to her building and I sat down. The Children’s Aid Society was locked and utterly dark for the weekend, with jail- house bars on the windows. The metal banisters were peeled and rusted, and beneath the steps, going down to a chained cellar entrance, were a number of empty pint bottles showing the labels of cheap vodka and port. The steps themselves were filthy, with chicken bones, spittle, and a kind of general refuse that city life creates the way an engine creates smoke. It was a quiet street and I knew that doorways such as these were used as safe harbors by men who had no homes, but I sat down anyway. I didn’t dare pass the time by walking the streets. I wanted to be right there when Ann left her apartment. The next stop was the hospital and she might need me.
I sat where I could watch the street, west to Park Avenue and east almost to Lexington. I sat for a very long time and the night got cooler, degree by degree, ticking them off like a clock. Maybe it was because I was waiting for some homeless, tormented man to claim my perch for his bedroom, but all I could think of was that man who had placed the dimes on Hugh’s eyes and tried to bring him back to life. He had long fingers and the tips were disproportionately broad. There was a certain disease that did that to you, but I couldn’t think of which one. When he crouched down to administer his magic, the cuffs to his light gray trousers rode up and I saw his bare, scratched ankles. He had no accent; he had traded his racial cadences for psychological ones.
By now, the calls would have been made. I could feel the knowledge spreading. New tears were being shed, bags packed. By the morning they would all be here.
In a very short while I would see Jade.
But it was impossible to think of it, dangerous. To have our reunion take place at Hugh’s funeral, to present myself soaked in his blood. It was hopeless and it was my only hope. Tomorrow: Jade.
And now Ann was pushing the door out and emerging from her building. She had a long fringed blue shawl around her shoulders and she looked down the street toward Park and straight across at me. I was sitting with my elbows on my knees, my head resting in my hands. She looked at me for a few long moments, tightened the shawl around her, and then raised her hand.
We were silent in the taxi on the way to the hospital and we only glanced at each other once, when Ann took my hand and I moved close to her so she could rest her head on my shoulder.
13
The Butterfields were filing into town one at a time, first Keith and then Hugh’s older brother Robert, who’d flown in with one of his nine children, a middle son named after Hugh. They gathered at Ann’s; there was nowhere else to go and even Ingrid, her sister, and a few of Ingrid’s friends went to Ann’s.
I stayed away, utterly isolated in my hotel room. I remember that room better than myself on that day. When I conjure it up in memory, I see an empty room, a ladder of sunlight rising and falling on one wall, a pigeon lighting on a window sill and peering in through the glass, a dead fly resting in the convex glass shade covering the overhead light, a fraying light cord oozing brown fuzz, the rattle of room-service trays in the halls, voices, hundreds of voices and none of them mine. If I concentrate with all my might, I can just barely picture myself in that room: on the bed, my hands behind my head, my feet crossed, fully clothed. I see myself at the window, looking down at the street. I see myself in tears. Yet even these memories are dim and somehow unreal. All I truly know is that I stayed in my hotel, waiting for someone to call me, and, for the most part, I had ceased to exist.
I also remember writing and I think I was writing a letter to Jade. But I never found any evidence of any writing at all. I picture myself tearing some hotel stationery into shreds and watching it drift into the tin wastepaper basket, but that feels more like logic than memory. An anesthetized patient will awaken and remember being wheeled to the operating room, the overhead lights flashing by, the masked attendants, the squeak of rubber gloves. But it’s difficult to say if these images are retrieved from the unconscious or if they are invented, drawn from our sense of what the world without us must be like.
I never think of the life I’ll miss after I’m dead, or all that I missed before I was born. It’s the time I’m as good as dead during this, my one and only life, that makes me tear at my hair. It seems to me that if I carefully gathered all of the time I was entirely alive I would have amassed perhaps two years of life so far…
At four o’clock Ann called.
“You belong here,” she said. “As much as anyone. You belong with us.”
I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my hand over my eyes.
“Do you…” I stopped. “How do the others feel about me being…? I want to be with you.”
“David, I don’t know how the laws of karma work. But for some reason you were here when I needed someone. When I needed you. And today that seems bigger than anything else, the past. And everyone here agrees. I wasn’t sure you hadn’t gone back to Chicago. But really I knew you’d still be here. I can’t figure it out now but this is right and really, David, you should be here.”
“I want to.”
“Then come. Now. Right away.”
“It really is all right?”
“Yes. It’s a lot more than all right. It’s…essential. We’re getting righteously drunk. We’re gathering our forces and I need you here. If you’re worried about Keith, well, he knows I need you here, too. Also, by the way, Ingrid knows.”