“Ingrid knows what?”
“All about you.”
“What do you mean?”
“She knows you’re you and why we did that act in front of her last night. And as a citizen of Jupiter, she couldn’t care less. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about that. Look, David, I’m not giving you a choice about this. I don’t want you sitting in that hotel room all alone while this is happening. When the sun sets you won’t even turn on the lights. There’s no choice. Just come over right now.”
“I will. I want to.”
“I know you do. OK. Oh, one thing. If you pass an open deli, pick up some mixers—tonic, club soda, you know. We have to make highballs. If we keep drinking everything straight, we’re going to be dry way before Monday morning.”
Ann hung up and I held on to the phone.
When Sam Butterfield opened the door to me, I was sobbing. I didn’t want it to be that way and I’d been fighting off my tears from the time I left the hotel. It was a stupid thing that broke my defenses: when I rang the buzzer in the lobby, no one asked who it was through the intercom. It was as if it hardly mattered who was there because it would never be Hugh. The locked glass door was buzzed open and I burst into tears. I didn’t ring for the elevator. There was a bench in the lobby and I sat down, shaking my head and saying “Stop it” to myself, but it seemed I would have to be one of those mystics who can stop a bleeding wound through the powers of the mind to wrest the control of my tears from the spacious, anarchic part of myself that ruled them now. Suddenly, the elevator appeared. I staggered in and rode up to the seventh floor. I was still crying when I knocked on Ann’s door.
“Hello, David,” Sammy said. “It’s nice of you to come.”
His voice was deep, much deeper than mine. His egg-sized Adam’s apple quavered at the center of his long tanned throat: at seventeen he was already over six feet tall and though I was just an inch shorter than him, I felt him looming over me. His light brown hair was parted in the middle and gathered in back in a small Thomas Jefferson pony tail. His blue eyes looked at me through a red mist. He extended his hand and I took it. I bowed my head, ashamed to be crying and helpless to stop.
“I’m sorry, it’s a terrible thing,” I said, but I doubt it was clear. I thought I should turn around and compose myself. I felt like a huge emotional pig to be inflicting my sorrow and confusion on them. I’d been summoned to be strong and my tears were a violation of trust.
“We expected you,” Sammy was saying. “Jade’s not here yet. Mom just hooked up with her a couple hours ago.”
There was a measure of relief in learning that the moment I’d been waiting for had been moved forward a notch or two. With any luck I would have control over myself by the time Jade arrived. But the real deliverance from the ruination of my feelings was Sammy’s telling me. I knew there was no particular reason for him to let me know that Jade wasn’t there yet, no purpose except to ease the pressure on me. Sammy was comforting me, really, and I swallowed hard and tried to be worthy of it.
I looked at him and said, “I’ve missed you, Sammy, but I would have rather gone through my whole life without ever seeing you again than have to see you on a day like this.” I waited for him to say something but he just gazed mildly into my eyes and suddenly I realized I hadn’t actually said anything: my thoughts were loud and out of control, but I hadn’t even moved my lips.
When I reached the front room, Keith was sitting on the arm of the sofa holding that framed square of pink and blue quilt. His hair had darkened to a deep, opaque brown and his once frail body had a kind of obstinacy to it now. He drummed his squarish fingertips on the raw wooden frame; his sandals sank into the sofa cushion; his feet were creased and powerful-looking, and his toenails were grown out long.
“This is mine, OK?” he was saying, in his high, reasonable voice.
“Not now, Keith,” Ann said.
“But I’m the one who wants it. I’m the only one.” He stared hard at the piece of quilt. He knew I was in the room but he gave no indication.
“Hello, David,” Ann said. “Thank—”
But what she was saying was lost to me; I was listening to Keith.
“You don’t hang something like this up on your wall,” Keith was saying. “This isn’t a picture, you know. It’s not something to add color to your house. This quilt is our flag. This is the But- terfield flag. Pink and blue pyramids and the most beautiful one in the world, I think.”
“That quilt comes from my family, Keith,” Ann said. “It was made by Beatrice Ramsey and if it reminds me of anything, it’s my grandmother’s house in Hillsboro, New Hampshire.”
Keith kept his eyes fixed on the quilt and he was shaking his head. “That’s not it and you know it. That’s like saying…” his voice dropped off and suddenly he lifted his head and looked at me. He returned his attentions to the quilt in an instant. “That’s like saying…Well, I was born on this quilt.”
“No, you were not,” Ann said.
Ingrid and her sister Nancy were seated in the director’s chairs, talking to Hugh’s brother Robert. Ingrid kept her hand on Robert’s wrist and spoke to him in a rapid whisper; Robert, who was standing with his son Hugh slightly behind him, looked down at Ingrid with a kind of glassy, compromised compassion. He was an enormous man; the wineglass he held in his massive hand looked absurdly delicate, and though Ann’s ceilings were ten feet high Robert stood with his back slightly curved, out of a combination of caution and shyness. He had Hugh’s slightly worried expression when he listened, that kind of mild tightening of the forehead, that slight narrowing of the eyes that seemed to be asking, no matter what the circumstances, “Are you all right?”
“When Pap got out of the Army and he came to see you at Bryn Mawr,” Keith was saying, “you had this quilt on your bed. And then you got pregnant, with me. And that’s how we all began. All right? Now do you know what I mean?” He tapped his finger on the glass and seemed to glance at me again. “Even you said if you hadn’t gotten pregnant you might not have gotten married to Pap.”
“Not this again,” Sammy said, with no particular emotion.
“You’re getting to be an old man on this subject, Keith,” Ann said.
Keith shook his head to tell them he wasn’t listening. “And so if it wasn’t for getting pregnant with me, on this quilt, then Pap would have married that other girl and you’d be married to someone else too, or maybe not married at all.”
“But I’m not married,” said Ann, with a kind of faltering gaiety. She looked at me and shrugged, inviting me to join her in an askew angle of vision, taking refuge in the slight aloofness she assumed I was capable of.
“And if you hadn’t gotten married, then none of us would have been born,” Keith said. He had moved his face even closer to the quilt, increasing his concentration. He was saying something everyone in his family had heard on innumerable occasions but he had no way of stopping himself: he was trapped within his sense of the truth of his family and it was an everlasting mystery to him that the others found his passions meaningless. Long ago he was faced with the choice of either abandoning his obsession with origins or becoming an object of occasional ridicule, and he had made the more honorable choice of following the curve of his impulses, deepening his loyalty to the truth as it became less welcome.
Ingrid was looking directly at me, even as she held onto Robert Butterfield. She wore a dark blue skirt and those kind of sandals that have rawhide laces you wrap around your legs. She held a ball of facial tissue in her fist and cocked her head first to the left and then to the right as she looked at me: I knew that in some inarticulate way she was now remembering me. I had slipped through the net of recollection the first time because I’d been falsely identified as Ann’s young lover, but now that my identity had shifted, it was alive within Ingriďs consciousness, and I could sense her following the drift of her thoughts like a cat intently watching the ellipses of a moth.