My parents’ friend Harold Stern got me a job with his union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Harold, who liked to taunt my parents’ crowd with the assertion that only he had contact with the working class (and, thus, with reality), had always seemed shifty and arrogant, but he really came through for me and got me a job only a couple of blocks from Roosevelt University. I was hired to carry a picket sign in front of a clothing store on Wabash Avenue called Sidney Nagle. Sidney Nagle sold a line of cheap men’s trousers called Redman Pants, and the purpose of the picket was to inform customers that Redman workers were on strike and to ask them not to buy Redman products. It would have been more gratifying to my romantic sense of trade unionism if the store had a rich clientele, but the customers (most of whom ignored me and my sign) appeared far more humble than my parents or any of their friends, and Mr. and Mrs. Nagle, who ran the store with just one employee, seemed like a thoroughly desperate, unprosperous old couple. They stared at me with outrage and grief whenever the opportunity arose and I had a dreadful suspicion that if I were to see their bare forearms, I would find fading blue numbers.
I started working for the union not more than a week after sneaking into my father’s office. The fact that I was out in the world and behaving like a normal person reduced a bit of the tension at home, though my parents were not quite self-conscious enough to hide their own unhappiness. In order to be at work on time, I had to set my alarm clock in advance of the official time, and Rose and Arthur, willing to help me make my adjustments, set all of the other clocks in the apartment ahead as well, including the one in their bedroom and Arthur’s wristwatch. If once my parents lived with the belief that they were an epoch in advance of the general population and if that certainty had dissolved along with their political faith, they now lived, quite demonstrably, at least ten minutes ahead of history.
I often thought I could not have found a more difficult job. Every day I saw thousands of faces. Sometimes, the crowds shimmered before me like heat off a highway and at other times each face was momentous and distinct, like those faces in a crowd in an old steel engraving, each rendered in perfect, bewildering detail. It was the sort of job ideally made for obsessively thinking how pitiful my life was, of remembering Jade and longing for her, and accusing even the most distant stars for keeping us apart. I tried to entertain myself: one day I counted black people; the next day I counted people under twenty; and the next I tallied the people with noticeable deformities. I predicted how many women in the space of an hour would pass holding white pocketbooks, how many couples holding hands, how many stoned people. I searched my mind for things to recite. I asked my friends, and the Romans, and the countrymen to loan me their ears and I claimed to have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. Sunlight passed through the elevated tracks over Wabash, dividing itself into soft bars of light, falling onto the street like rungs in a gauze ladder. I tried to find this extremely beautiful. But it seemed far too inconsequential, too unintentional, and finally it awaited some missing ingredient to make it lovely, something pre-existent in the eye of the beholder. It waited to be beautiful for someone else.
Everyone I ever knew was elsewhere. Now and then I’d feel a start within me and it seemed certain that that face coming into view was someone I’d gone to school with, or an intern from Rockville, or someone who used to live on Ellis Avenue, or even a shopkeeper I’d once bought a Stevie Wonder record from. But it never turned out to be the case. Even when I stopped hiding my face and remained recognizable by anyone who might place me, no one broke stride in passing. The only curious eyes focused on my picket sign.
I had prepared myself to be startled regularly by apparitions of Jade. I don’t know where this knowledge came from—probably from a song or a movie—but it was my understanding that the hungry heart manufactured mirages. If you see someone in a gray skirt and blue shirt…or someone five foot four with small breasts…with turquoise studs in her earlobes…walking with her eyes down and cast to the right…with biscuit-colored hair, but curly like Little Lulu’s. I saw all of these likenesses, and more. I heard voices that could conceivably have been confused with hers, and one girl could practically have been on her way to a masquerade dressed up as Jade. She wore Jade’s khaki trousers with the wide elastic waistband and Jade’s green and red tee shirt; she walked with her eyes fixed to the right of her feet; she carried a cigarette, which might very well have been a Chesterfield. Her hair was much shorter than Jade’s but the very discrepancy in length revealed a more telling similarity: a brown mole on the back of the neck, just above the shoulder, that was pure, pure Jade. But I wasn’t tempted; not for one instant did I confuse these impostors with the real thing and now I couldn’t understand those who claimed to see their lovers everywhere. People took these mistakes as passion’s proof, yet now it seemed that to mistake a stranger for your lover was really an absurd kind of narcissism. How could one not know? How could there be any mistake? Pigeons in a flock picked their mates without confusion, penguins and titmice were not prone to optical illusions, or any other illusions, for that matter. They knew, and so would I.
The Chicago Public Library was only a couple of blocks from the Sidney Nagle store and I passed most of my lunch hours there. Since I had no idea what to do with the money I made, I was seized with frugality and liked the idea of spending less than fifty cents on lunch and reading for free to pass the time.
One day I discovered that the library had telephone directories from what seemed like every city in the United States. As casually as possible, I looked at the New Orleans directory to see if Hugh or any other Butterfields were listed—New Orleans was the city of his birth and perhaps Hugh had reconstituted the family in some moss-choked ancestral mansion. There were Butterfields in New Orleans, though no Hughs. There was a Carlton Butterfield, an E. Roy Butterfield, a Horace, a Trussie, and a Zachariah. I wondered if any of these were related to Hugh. Was his father still alive? Still running the coffee warehouses, still drinking from morning to night, still listening to Mozart with tears in his cloudy blue eyes? I stared at that cluster of Butterfields in the New Orleans directory and my heart beat hard but slowly, as if resisting the best it could the infusion of adrenalin seeing those names created: even a handful of bogus Butterfields put me closer to my friends than I’d felt in more than three years. I thought of Carlton, E. Roy, and the rest, reading the Times Picayune beneath the moving shadows of a ceiling fan, drinking thick black coffee out of clear glass cups, wearing white suits and smelling of bourbon. I stared at the names and tried to remember if Hugh had ever told me his father’s name.
Well, where would the family go after leaving Chicago? If not New Orleans…There had been talk of San Francisco. Idle, I thought, but who knew? Ann had a cousin who ran a psychiatric clinic in Berkeley: he was the source of the LSD the Butterfields had taken the night of the fire. I took down the San Francisco directory and looked for Butterfields. Again, the name was represented, but no Hugh, no Ann, no Keith, Sam, or Jade. I stopped to remember Ann’s cousin’s name: I’d paid attention to the correspondence because at least one hit of the LSD would have gone to me if it had arrived before my banishment. Ramsey (Ann’s family name). Gordon Ramsey. There was a G. Ramsey DVM on Polk Street. Could it be? Had Gordon given up psychopharmacology for distemper shots?
I went slowly, haphazardly, and did my best not to admit how central it was becoming to my life, but every weekday, without fail, I spent time in the library looking for Butterfields in the phonebooks. I found Butterfields in Los Angeles, Butterfields in Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Dallas. I bought a pocket- sized spiral notebook and wrote the address and phone number of any name that seemed likely. H. Butterfield in Denver, an actual Keith Butterfield in Boston and another one in Milwaukee, and Ann F. Butterfield in St. Louis (the F. made no sense but I recorded the number anyhow), a strange yet heart-kicking Jane Butterfield in Washington, D.C., and so on, back and forth across the nation.
As long as I
was living with my parents, I didn’t dare make long-distance phonecalls, nor was I in a position to receive private mail. Sporadically, I called numbers from phonebooths in the Roosevelt University lobby, and one day I turned a twenty- dollar bill into quarters and spent an hour at least calling far- flung strangers. Hugh? I’d say, knowing at once from the enfeebled hello that Denver’s H. Butterfield was no one I knew. I called that Jane Butterfield in Washington and said, “Excuse me, I’m calling Jade—not Jane.” “Who’s that?” said a small child’s voice.
At the end of September, I moved out of my parents’ apartment and into a furnished two-room apartment on 55th and Kimbark. It was a dismal place, but I could afford it. I was glad to be on my own, though I was lonelier than I’d ever imagined. I hadn’t yet made any friends at school—I didn’t have any nodding acquaintances, really—and the retired suit maker who picketed in front of Sidney Nagle with me didn’t like or approve of me. I’d gotten my job through connections and it was generally something the union gave to retired members, to supplement pensions and social security. My only co-worker’s name was Ivan Medoff and he looked the way Jimmy Cagney would have looked if Cagney had been Jewish and worked in a factory for thirty-nine years. The only social gesture Medoff made in my direction was to say one day, “I told my wife I was here working with a youngster and she says I should maybe ask you to have dinner sometime.” He didn’t take it further and I didn’t press it, though I waited for him to name the day because I would have accepted.
My loneliness was at once vague and total. I never missed a class and soon forced myself to ask questions of the instructors, just to hear myself talk to another person. I looked forward to my appointments with Dr. Ecrest, and when he asked me if I’d be interested in joining a therapy group he was forming on Wednesday evenings I almost said yes, on the chance I might make friends in the group. My parents made a ritual appearance at my apartment for dinner, which I cooked for them on my two-burner stove and served in the cracked turquoise and white plates supplied by my landlord. I found more occasions than I would have guessed to make the walk to their house—picking up a sweater, borrowing spoons, spontaneously accepting an old dictionary they’d offered to give me before I’d moved out—and more often than not my arrival coincided with dinner. They both seemed involved with their jobs and though I knew they were in a sad, difficult time, they looked no more unhappy than two old dolls in an attic. I was an absolute pig in how I refused to recognize their misery, but it was what they wanted of me.
Near the end of October, I had a phone installed. Soon, I thought, I’d be in the Chicago directory. It would be widespread proof that I was out of the hospital and living on Kimbark. It would be public record and Jade could know.
As is well known, the telephone is a gloomy hunk of plastic and copper if it doesn’t ever ring. My parents had my number and they’d call often, but no one else called me. Oh yes, once my parole officer Eddie Watanabe called and put our appointment off for a week, but other than that the phone was as quiet as the old, stern sofa and chairs the landlord had left for me.
What the phone did provide was a constant temptation to call names from my list of Butterfields. I made these calls with an altogether frantic sense of guilt, as if I were compulsively dabbling with an addictive drug or losing myself in pornography. Each time I dialed I told myself it was the last and then I’d tell myself just one more. I don’t know how long I would have kept at it if I’d come up empty each time, but ten days after getting my phone I found Ann in New York.
There were only a few Butterfields in the Manhattan directory. One of them was a K. Butterfield, which could have been Keith, but I’d tried it from a phonebooth two or three weeks before. I also looked for Ramseys, however, and I had quite a few of those. Ann was listed as A. Ramsey, 100 E. 22nd Street. I remember that when I first wrote it down I thought it was one of the more promising entries, but for some reason it took me a long while to call it, as if I required the lengthy frustration of not finding anyone before deserving success.
Or perhaps it was sheer terror. I called her in the evening. She answered on the second ring and I knew from her hello that I’d found Ann. As soon as I heard her voice I pressed the button down on my phone, like a sneak pinching out a candle’s flame. I sat gawking at the phone, as if it would ring, as if it would be Ann. Then I paced my rooms and tried to understand what had happened, how by dialing New York City’s area code and seven small numbers I had completely changed my life. I grabbed a jacket and ran outside. Walking aimlessly, I passed a bar on 53rd Street and thought to go in for a drink—I’d forgotten for a moment that at twenty I was too young to be served. I drifted south. Soon I was on Dorchester, near to where the Butterfields once lived. But as I got closer to where their house had stood I lost all courage and, sweating crazily, I trotted back home.
I called her as soon as I was in, still wearing my jacket, panting from the run. This time, she didn’t say hello.
“Who is this?” she said.
“Hello, Ann.” My voice was tiny and inconsequential.
She was silent for a moment. “Who is this?”
I cleared my throat. I wasn’t near a chair so I squatted down on my haunches. “This is David Axelrod.”
She was silent. You never knew with Ann if those long pauses were proof of amazement or if her speechlessness was a device, a way of turning what you’d just said into an internal echo. I remembered this about her and a ripple of emotion went through me: I knew her.
“Hello, David,” she said. She sounded as if her eyebrows were raised and her head was tilted to the side.
“Am I bothering you?” I asked.
“Where are you?”
“I’m home. I’m in Chicago. On Kimbark.”
“So they let you out.”
“Yes. Since August.” I waited for her to say something and then I asked, “How do you feel about that?”
“About you being out?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s only parole,” I said.
“Oh? I thought being sent to that hospital was parole.”
We were silent again; I listened to the soft electronic rustle of the long-distance lines.
“Well, tell me,” I blurted out. “How’ve you been?”
“David, this is too strange.” And with that, Ann hung up.
I was stunned for a moment but I redialed her number. She picked up without saying hello.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and then I burst into tears. I thought I was only apologizing for the phonecall but as my tears came I realized I wanted to apologize and be forgiven for everything.
“David,” Ann said, “I can’t hate you.”
I tried to stop crying to consider what she’d said, but the tears, once begun, refused to be controlled. I took a deep breath that was broken in two by a sob and then I simply covered my eyes and cried. I turned away from the phone and when I placed it to my ear again Ann had already broken the connection.
Ten days later, a letter from Ann. It was so thick that the mailman couldn’t fit it into my box. He left me a yellow slip and after school I picked it up at the post office. Some of it was typed and some was written—in four different pens. I was up past dawn rereading it. The pages were fastened by a huge shiny paperclip and on top, written on a torn scrap of paper, was this note: “Finally decided if I didn’t send this I’d be writing it for the rest of the year. Don’t know what to make of it—impetuous, improvident, but now it’s yours. A.”
David, I’m amazed you’ve found me! Living here on East 22nd, in this cramped, expensive apartment, under what language so daintily designates as my “maiden name,” I felt—until I heard your voice and threw the phone into its cradle, in terror—I felt rather safe from any spontaneous visitations from my Butterfield past. Not just safe from you—you haven’t been an issue, really, locked away as you’ve been—but simply and unspecifically safe.
I am alone, for the time. All o
f the Butterfields have scattered—that’s as specific as I’ll be, though if you’ve found me then I suppose you’ve scared up a couple more of us. In fact, I’d put me as the trickiest to find, since Hugh, Keith, and Sammy are still Butterfields. I had no particular need for more independence (and now could use a bit less), nor did I feel burdened by dragging the Butterfield name behind me, but I did want to do something rash, something that would distinguish this particular, this final separation from all the other fits and separations that preceded it. I wanted Hugh to know that I had depleted my forgivenance, just as humankind is depleting the earth’s resources. All of my indulgence was gone and I was down to the bottom of me, the driest and most tender part, the most breakable and, I suppose, the meanest. I wanted him to know that and I’m not regretful for having given him the heave. Even though it was only after Hugh had made it abundantly clear that I could in no way interfere with his incessant poking around for his true and elemental self—which in Hugh’s case meant running around with his heart on a string like a little boy trying to launch a kite. Sometimes I suspect my pressing for the divorce and forsaking his name was my way of giving some dignity and finality to his awful carryings-on and in a funny way giving him one last chance to come to his senses. But Hugh by then had precious few senses to come back to. He didn’t respond at all to my announcement that I was reverting to Ramsey; it annoyed me so that I tried to convince the kids to drop his name, too. What a joke that was. Sammy’s was the perfect response: And what? Change my driver’s license?
I shouldn’t have been so short with you on the telephone. I felt compromised just hearing your voice. The others would never have forgiven me if I’d been friendly—but who am I fooling? They’d forgive this letter even less. I’ve always had a particular, a special sense of myself when I spoke to you: you hear things the others like to ignore, or misunderstand, and so I like to say them to you.
Endless Love Page 10