“That’s why I say, in a way, that I’m not only a son but the father too,” Keith said. “Because it started with me.”
“Then you must be dead,” Sammy said. His voice was so naturally deep; he didn’t have to touch it with his personality in order to give it its meanings. “They must be putting you in the furnace right about now so they can put your ashes in the old urn. Right? Because my father’s dead and you can only have one father. So you must be dead.”
“Do I really have to be a referee?” Ann said. “I’m going to be so worried about everyone else I’m not going to have my own feelings.”
“I don’t like it when he goes on like that,” Sammy said.
“I don’t much care for it, either. But Keith likes it, and I don’t want to have to draw the line one place or another.”
“Can I take this home with me?” Keith said, holding the framed piece of quilt away from him, offering it to Ann.
“As far as I’m concerned, yes. If you want it so damned badly. But you’ll have to square it with Jade and Sammy.”
Robert Butterfield walked across the room and stood in front of me. “You’re David?” he asked, careful to make his voice unmistakably accepting. When I nodded, he put his hand out to me. “I’m Hugh’s brother, Robert. Ann told me what a help you’ve been. You stepped in when the family couldn’t be here. It means a great deal.” When Hugh was feeling wilful or lonely, we all used to say, his southern accent would sprout, like those wonderful mushrooms that come out after every rain. But here was Hugh’s older brother, still living in New Orleans, with less of an accent than David Brinkley. Straight on, his face was rectangular, at once open and shy, massive and vulnerable. He shook my hand with a gentleness that nearly tipped the fragile balance I’d achieved. Here was all of the gigantic sweetness of Hugh looking at me.
“I’m aware of the complications involved in your participation in this sad ceremony,” Robert was saying. “But as our father said, ‘When you get above the lowest vegetable orders, life turns into a holy mess.’ David, I’d like you to meet my son Hugh.” Robert reached around and draped his immense arm over his son’s shoulders. Hugh was dressed in a light blue suit and wore a tie decorated with tiny flowers. His hair was pure yellow, from tip to root, front to back, and his eyes were gray and blue. At fifteen, he was only a few inches shorter than his father, and from the size of his hands and feet it was probable that, one day, he too would be enormous. I wondered if the elder Hugh, my Hugh, conventionally large, had been small for his family.
“It’s nice to meet you,” said Robert’s son, with a shy, formal half smile. He seemed absolutely ill at ease and had probably considered affixing himself to each of us who had gathered at Ann’s, even me. I put my hand forward and solemnly he shook it. I gazed into his open, slightly frightened face and was aware of (or imagined) the other eyes that were upon me: Keith’s, Ingrid’s.
“Hugh’s one of our middle sons,” Robert said. “We’re eleven in all. Six boys and three young ladies, Christine and me. The rest arrive tonight.” He let out a low sigh. It was as if the thought of his arriving family had touched off a quiver of happiness in him before he remembered the occasion of their journey.
I had been clutching a brown paper bag filled with three large bottles of club soda and three of tonic water. I felt the weight only as a general numbness, and when Ann asked me if I’d remembered to pick up mixers I had to think for a moment.
“Oh, they’re right here,” I said.
“I was wondering what you were holding in there,” she said, with a kind of embryonic brightness that made me fear all the others might turn on us. I knew that Ann was asking me to conspire with her, to move back with her a step or two and view everything with a kind of private, wounded mirth. Surrounded by tragedy, overcome by everyone else’s grief as well as her own, Ann was nostalgic for her irony: she longed for a taste of it, as if that small space that irony places between consciousness and emotion contained the only air she could comfortably breathe. She waited for me to say something, but I only looked at her and then at the bag I was holding, which was dark with moisture. “Well, good,” Ann said. “You brought it. I’ll put it all in the kitchen.”
“No, I will,” I said.
“No, I will,” said Keith. He was at my side in an instant and took the bag from my arms. “I’d like to talk to you,” he said, just above a whisper.
I nodded. “Good.”
“I’ll put this shit away and then we’ll go to Mom’s room and talk.”
“Ann, Ann,” Ingrid was saying, “we have to be clear about everything.” She was rubbing the side of her face and holding her sister’s hand. “We have to make ground rules.”
Ann folded her arms in front of her and nodded. “You’ve been saying that all afternoon, Ingrid. As far as I can see, there’s nothing to be decided. You chose the chapel. The ashes are being divided up. What more is there?”
“There’s a lot. Everything. Everything.” Ingrid looked at her sister—a chubby, mild, nunnish-looking woman—and her sister closed her eyes in that way that means “Go ahead and say it.”
Keith brushed my arm with the back of his hand. “Come on. We’ll talk.”
“Where you going?” Sammy asked.
“We’ll be right back. Stay here,” said Keith.
Sammy shook his head and looked disgusted.
I followed Keith into Ann’s bedroom and he closed the door behind us. I felt that gesture of closing the door was the beginning of a reprimand—we were certainly not here to exchange confidences as equals—and the dull bloated thud of the heat- warped door felt like one of those ambiguous affronts to your dignity, a hearty slap on the back or a pinch on the cheek.
The windows in Ann’s bedroom, framed by sheer white curtains, looked out onto a reddish brick wall. The glass in the windows had the clean look windows have in houses that haven’t been occupied yet, and you could see the wall with such vivid clarity that it became beautiful, strangely exciting. I turned and saw that Keith was staring at me, his mouth refined down to a thin, pale line.
“So,” said Keith. “Mom tells me you materialized Friday afternoon. Is that true?”
I felt, acutely, that Keith was doing wrong to check my version against what Ann had said, but I nodded. “Late Friday afternoon.”
“Mom says it was about three.”
I paused. “I don’t know. Probably it was.”
“Was she real surprised to see you?”
“What do you think?”
Keith shrugged, and lifted one of the corners of his mouth in a little twitchy smile. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. If I knew…” his voice was absorbed by his largest instinct, which was to say nothing to me.
“She was surprised.”
“Well,” Keith said, drawing out the word, like a small-town cop on television, that long drawl of folksy menace, “I guess it was the next step.”
“I don’t know what you’re going after, Keith. Tell me what you want to know and I’ll tell you.”
“All I’m saying is I guess it was the next step. I mean, if you were busy writing me letters—I mean to me, and you know how I feel—then I guess Mom got quite a few of them. Quite a few. Is that right?”
I had a suspicion that Ann had said something to the contrary. Perhaps she’d confessed only to a note; likely as not, she’d said she never replied. “I found out where you lived in the telephone book.”
“I know. But that’s not how you found Mom. She’s not listed under her name.”