Scott Spencer - Endless Love

“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.

“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.