“What’s this?” asked Ingrid. “A will?”
“No,” said Robert. “It’s not. This is a letter from our Hugh. He sent it to us a little more than a year ago.” He unfolded it; it was typed in blue. “I took it along. It’s a rare thing, a letter from Hugh.” Robert looked down at the letter and smiled, as if he saw Hugh’s face looking out from it.
“Read it to us, Uncle Bob,” Sammy said.
“I thought I would pass it around.”
“No. Read it to us.”
“God. Then I suppose it’ll be time to drag out the old pictures, too,” said Ann. She didn’t sound displeased.
“I wish I could do this in Hugh’s voice,” said Robert. “It was his voice that made everything so special.” He looked at Sammy and nodded. “Like yours.”
“Read it, Uncle Bob.”
“‘Dear Bobbo.’” Robert stopped, looked up at Ingrid. “That’s my family name,” he said. He wiped sweat from his forehead and squinted uncertainly at the page, as if it had suddenly become less legible. “‘By now you’ve heard about the divorce and you’ve had a chance to get used to it. I feel like Cousin Derek, the time he wrecked Granddaddy’s Packard and simply moved to Charlotte for a year. Sometimes a man has got to lay low. I remember about eight years ago you and I were having a crayfish pig-out in that little place with the folding chairs right on the Ponchatrain, and you were carrying on a little about Billy Corona because he’d just walked out on Alison and you said something to the effect of what kind of shitass would leave a wife of a decade and a half and I shook my head and clucked like an old gossip on a verandah—say, the summer of ’38 with the trees in full bloom and all our values intact. Do you know what I mean? Those times in our life when everything is simple. And now here I am, doing Billy Corona one better because he left with only two children and I’m leaving three. Fairly grown children, I would say, and they’ve got more of an idea what they’d like to do with their lives than their poor old father has. Gosh, here we are, as always, in our baggy olive shorts and strawberry preserves sticking to the webs of our fingers, and calling ourselves poor old father, registered Republican. It seems so damned unlikely, doesn’t it?’” Robert’s voice broke and he turned the page over. His face was growing darker, a deep orderly flush that began at his neck and moved up, filling his face with color like wine in a glass.
“It’s so Hugh,” said Ann.
“I have a letter Pap sent me,” Sammy said. “I should have brought it.”
“I have poems, a hundred things,” said Ingrid. She covered her eyes, in grief and perhaps, in part, in shame: she had no choice but to angle for her rightful position, yet it humiliated her.
I was standing with my back to the wall, holding a glass of whiskey and soda. My legs ached and with everyone in that room weaving on the brink, I was terrified that my own tears would break free first. The sight of each face seemed to light another fuse that went leaping and hissing toward the impacted, volatile center of my consciousness: each sorrow was separate and unbearably specific, but each was finding its way to that part of me that was ready to detonate. Robert was going on with Hugh’s letter.
“‘What you heads of unbroken families don’t realize is how we wandering fathers love our children,’” Robert read, and I could tell from the way he nodded that he wanted to look at Sammy and Keith to make sure they’d heard that line, but he resisted. Then he read something else, but I don’t know what. I heard Robert’s voice as a dull, wordless murmur and I stared at his open, suffering face with an utterly improper fixity: I simply poured my attentions into the overwhelming reality of his large brown eyes, his dry grayish hair, his closely shaved, slightly jowly cheeks, and his massive chin.
Robert was committed to keeping the peace in the wake of death. He had stepped between Ann and Ingrid and had probably intervened in peace’s behalf when the squabble began about my arrival. He believed in the alchemy that turned all passions into sorrow—all jealousy, all rage, all sickness and fear transformed and laid at the silent altar of the dead. For now, he would not interrupt the rhythms of mourning to express his feeling about me: such emotions were mere luxuries of the living, and to parade them now would violate all the decorum proper to survivors. It would be later for me. Then I would feel the heavy hand on my shoulder, see the steel woven into the wool of Robert’s soft brown eyes. Later, he would judge me as Hugh would have; later, I would be put painfully in my place, accused, and disposed of.
I turned away from Robert and looked at Ingrid: she was sobbing openly now and looking back at me, her eyes puzzled behind the tears. I was certain that the memory of me standing not ten feet from Hugh was stirring within her, straining to become articulate, like those voices some people claim to hear at a séance: the windows of memory rattle, the curtains blow, the table shakes, but no one is there. She cocked her head and parted her full, colorless lips. There was disapproval in her stare and for a moment I was sure that the first layer of her memory of me had come into focus, but then I realized she was asking me to take my eyes off of her, to give her her sorrow in the artificial privacy of averted eyes. I shifted my gaze to Ingrid’s sister, a large-boned, heavy-set woman in a shapeless gray dress, dark stockings, and shiny black shoes.
It was at that moment that Keith, sitting perhaps twenty feet from where I stood, threw his tall, fragile glass at me. I don’t know if he meant to hit me or terrify me, or even if he’d considered anything at all, but the glass exploded against the wall, a foot, or perhaps even less, from my head. I thought it was glass spraying into my face but there were no cuts so I suppose it was only crushed ice. The clear base on the glass came to rest on my shoulder and later I found chunks of glass in my shirt pocket. It took a long moment to realize what had happened. I heard the crash and even had a shadowy, peripheral vision of Keith sitting forward and letting the glass fly. But it took a moment to understand that it all had to do with me. I felt the spray of liquor on my hair, my face, my shirt, and noticed, as dimly as a film projected on a black cloth, that everyone was looking at me. Robert stopped reading and Nancy clutched Ingrid’s shoulder as both of them gasped. I covered my face, finally, and turned away, stooping and shaking my head.
“Oh, Keith,” said Ann. “Keith.” Her voice sounded exhausted, more hurt than disapproving.
“He’s out! He is out of here!” Keith was shouting. I turned to face him, shaking my hands to get the moisture off of them, still half crouched as if to ward off subsequent blows. Keith was standing up and panting like a racehorse. It was awesome to see the passion and intensity of his respiration. His ribcage moved up and down like enormous wings and I don’t think I was the only one wondering what I would do if Keith suddenly keeled over. “I can’t feel anything with him here. It’s only him back again to do more harm. Jesus, it is incredible. He can’t stay. He’s out.” And then, pointing at me, he repeated: “Out, out.”
I looked at Ann. “I’ll go,” I said.
“Out, out,” said Keith. “Out, out, out.”
“Shut up,” said Sammy. He grabbed for Keith’s arm but when he missed, he didn’t try a second time.
Ann covered her eyes and shook her head. Don’t leave? Don’t stay?
“I’ll leave,” I said, as much to myself as to Keith.
I looked around the room; no one quite dared to return my gaze. I nodded, stupidly trying to act normal. In a feverish blur I saw that Keith had picked up another glass from the table and then it was sailing toward me, slowly, horizontally, the ice and whiskey cascading out, the glass capturing the lamplight. This time it collided with the wall a good distance from me. A hanging curtain of moisture appeared on the white wall. I stepped forward and crushed a large piece of glass beneath my foot; the shards scratched against the wooden floor and made a miserable, tearing noise. I covered my face—I thought I’d seen yet another glass flying at me, but Keith was standing still, his hands slightly in front of him, holding them as if I might attack him.