I sat on the opposite end of the couch. For a time, we listened to the whipcracks and sizzlings of the fire.
“Thank you for the book. I looked at it before I went to sleep last night,” he said.
“You’re welcome. I bought a few for the shop.”
“Carlo is a friend, you know. Did I mention that? We’ve been out of touch a year or so, but I’ve stayed at his house on Lake Como. He’s done a very thorough job; I’ll have to write him a note.”
“The pictures are stunning,” I said. “They make even me a little curious at what I may be missing.”
Mal continued to focus on the fire. He smiled. “Operas are miracles, you know. How they come together, all those meticulous arts enfolded in one . . . A small miracle, mind you, not one of the big ones, not like babies and whales. I’m convinced of it, but my mother tells me I’m blaspheming.”
“I heard about that. She’s very dogmatic. She has to be.”
“Yes . . . yes,” Mal said slowly, “but she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. That operas are a
proof
of something divine.”
“She means that miracles aren’t a proof. Aren’t proofs of God, by their very intent, heretical? She means they’re a demonstration. An end unto themselves.”
“No, a random grace. Something like that.” He sighed. The few words he’d uttered so far had chilled me. His voice sounded different, too calm. It felt as if he had gone away on one of those modern retreats which cleanse the brain but shrivel the soul.
After a long silence, he said, quite gaily, “So let me guess. While I was in the clutches of several Dr. Frankensteins—tubes in and out the wazoo—you were off somewhere with the ponytail, yes?”
“The . . . excuse me?” I’d known the pleasantry couldn’t last.
“The fetching ponytailed boy—man, definitely man—you entertain from time to time. Though I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“I . . .”
At last, he looked straight at me. “Why have you taken such pains to hide him? Do you pay him? You’re not homely enough to be that desperate.” He smiled, as if he felt sorry for me. “Did you forget that my windows look into yours as well? The physics of reciprocity?”
“There’s plenty of your life you’ve kept from me,” I said.
“Was there some part of my life you knew about and wanted to know better? My privileged status at countless shallow cocktail parties, all that kissy-kissy closeness with famous and semifamous artists, was that something you wanted to share? I didn’t think you cared about such things. I thought better of you. Or did you want in on my late-night crying jags?” He said all this with an almost happy calm, no sarcasm, no sorrow.
“Yes,” I said. “I was with the ponytail—Tony. I don’t know why I thought I’d fooled you.”
“Why fool me to begin with?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because it’s habit. Because hiding things is a habit with you. Even hiding things from yourself, hiding your head in the sand. What kind of a life do you have? Eating and walking and dreaming in a quarter-mile radius, just like a dog on a stake. Hanging out with Ralph Quayle, E.S.Q., Petty Emperor of Bank Street. Going home every Christmas to be with your nice but myopic brothers. People who can never quite love you, I’m sorry to say, because they will never quite understand you.”
I did not answer. My power to defend myself had seized up like an ill-used joint. Out of the cerebral blue came my old mantra, my marching orders. Upright, upright, upright. Looking rigorously ahead, never down or to the side, had failed me. Dismally. I had meant it as a way to survive, and maybe I had, but I had not kept an eye on my footing, only on my direction.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ll never know how sorry I am. I made the mistake of thinking—”
Mal interrupted, but wearily. “Well, I’m still alive, that should be something, shouldn’t it? Though I do keep thinking of the drug they gave me to paralyze me, to keep me from fighting the ventilator. I’m not supposed to have any memory of that; I was in too deep a state of trauma, I’m told. Or of those electric smackeroos they applied to my chest . . . Now that, talk about miracles, now that starts you up again, I mean
wham
.”
I saw Mal, lying on a table, clinically dead, and I saw Lucinda, pleading “Anything! Do anything, please!” and honestly, would I have overruled her? Or wasn’t she there yet? Would I have been there first? Would Mal be dead now and I feel somehow proud, like a soldier who’d followed his orders under heavy fire? Wasn’t it best that he was still here, as he admitted, kept among the living no matter what the methods?
“Now. It’s time to talk about this thing.” I looked up from my lap. Mal was pointing at the hospital bed. “Meet Death,” he said to me. “Death,” he said to the bed, “meet my dear friend Fenno.”
I wanted to laugh but didn’t.
“Do you know what my T-cell count is now? One hundred. In school, that’s a perfect score, A-plus. But this isn’t school. I’m a party of pathogens just waiting to happen. Ever heard of cryptococcal meningitis? Well. Just the sound of the name gives you a notion.
“So Mom, she’s nothing if not a planner. She’s brought in her lovely hospice people. I had a visit in my hospital room. A girl named Mary—how quaintly perfect—who looks like Candice Bergen times two. After she left, my teeth began to chatter.” Mal raised his eyebrows, as if inviting me to comment, but he went on.
“You know, sheets, just bedsheets on my legs can be excruciating. It’s sort of like having a sunburn but worse. The hairs on my legs bore down into their follicles like tiny pins. Carlo’s book? To read it, I had to set it beside me on pillows. Sometimes I’m certain my eyelids are crushing my eyeballs, and when I climb stairs, every little gismo in my knees puts up an independent protest. There’s so much physical
pressure
. I don’t want to die, but I would love to trade in my body—for just about anything. Last week, or two weeks ago, I’ve lost track—anyway, before this crisis, my tiny inner guests who trashed their suite so rudely—I was out at Montauk with friends—yes, real, true-blue friends you’ve never met, and I’m sorry if somehow this made you feel bad, not meeting them all, I’m sorry. . . . Did it ever occur to you that I kept you from the rest of my life so I could keep you to myself?” He paused to regard me fiercely, angrily, but he clearly did not want me to answer because, just as quickly, he looked away.
“We went to the beach. There was a break in the cold, the sun was heavenly, so we took chairs and blankets and a thermos of cocoa. One of the children had that fabulous idea. The ocean was this incredible blue, a kind of not-quite-black, waves chopping all around, and this one sleek speedboat bouncing along. They waved, we waved. . . . It was so white, so . . . jaunty. It would leap on a wave and hover, for long moments, entirely free of the water. Like a high note held impossibly long. . . .”
He took a drink of water from the glass his mother had set on the table before she went out. “God how I envied that boat. So solid, so buoyant, so jazzy-looking. I just wanted to
be that boat. I wanted to swap my body for that fiberglass hull, those polished rails, those racing stripes, that perfectly planed wooden deck. It felt like lust, I wanted it so badly. I’d have given up my brain, no problem. If I hang on much longer, I’ll be giving that up anyway, you know.”
The telephone, which Lucinda had also set close to Mal, rang. “Hello, Dad,” he said. “Yes, I’m home. Yes, I hope so. No, she isn’t.” They spoke, about the superficial details, for five minutes or so. Mal promised that his mother would call back when she returned.
He asked me to bring him a couple of pillows from his bed. I helped him arrange them so that he could recline on his back facing the fire. He winced as he rearranged his limbs.
I put another two logs on the fire and prodded them until their bark gave in to the flame.
“I told Susan,” said Mal, “I feel like three aspirin would kill me. She told me not to be deceived. The body can be quite resourceful in stopping just short of that final surrender, unwilling to evict its oldest tenants. Not like any landlord I’ve ever known.” He laughed faintly.
I could not have spoken if someone had held the brass poker to my jugular vein. I fussed about in every way I could find that kept my back to Mal, sweeping up ashes, straightening the basket of papers and kindling, examining an amethyst egg on the mantel as if I had never admired it before. But my defense was pointless.
“Basta,”
he said at last, confirming my fears.
“Basta, basta, basta
—as my old friend Carlo and his compatriots would say.
Basta.”
This time the word sounded gentle, not angry. Almost sentimental.
THIRTEEN
E
VER BENT ON AUTONOMY,
Mal wanted to be alone in the end, but this did not mean he could do without help. Months before, he had gone to one of his doctors (Dr. Susan, I presumed, but he would not say) and expressed what he saw as his very rational despair. He had been told that doctors cannot ethically give out certain information, but a week or so later the doctor had asked about insomnia and pain, dispensed certain drugs, and warned Mal explicitly how to make sure he did not overdose or combine drugs that should not be combined.
That week he kept mostly to his bed—his own. Contemptuously, he made the hospital bed a waystation for miscellaneous books, magazines, coats and other items of clothing. The gypsy caravan, he called it.
There were visitors every day; from my desk in the shop, I would sometimes see them ring his bell and go up, emerging within the hour. I saw one man step out onto the pavement, cover his face for a moment, look upward at nothing and sigh a voluminous sigh, his breath a visible cloud of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief. Lucinda spent as much time with Mal as he would allow; he had strictly forbidden her to miss any classes. Jonathan, whose limp demeanor I excused to fear, returned north the day after Mal came back to his flat. The sister had planned a visit but then was banned because one of her children caught the flu.
On Wednesday, Mal took his parents to a matinee of a Noël Coward play. The Senator (whom I would not meet until Mal’s memorial service) flew up from Washington for the day. On Thursday, Mal asked to be left alone until evening. He wrote letters, I suppose, since he gave me several to mail when I came by to fix dinner. Most of them were rich with stamps, addressed to France, Italy, Switzerland; one to Chile. As it turned out, he wasn’t hungry, and we watched
An American in Paris,
which happened to be on the telly; Lucinda arrived during the opening titles. I had moved the television back into the bedroom, so the three of us sat on the bed, propped against pillows.
Mal beamed when Gene Kelly and that obscure but quintessential Frenchman stood up from their café chairs to sing “’S Wonderful.”
“Is there anything in our culture these days that expresses this much silly joy?” he asked. “Anything like this that we’re allowed to say we love without being smirked at?”
“Thank heaven your culture isn’t mine!” Lucinda said. “Anyone who’d say they didn’t love this I would erase from my address book.”
Mal snorted. “Not if they had deep pockets.”
Gently, she slapped him on the arm. “You are one mean child.” She rested her cheek on his shoulder.
I excused myself and went to the loo. I sat on the closed toilet until I felt calm again.
Friday evening, I put on my grandfather’s tuxedo. It had been cleaned but not worn since the night Mal had borrowed the shirt. It was early yet, and I sat in my living room with Rodgie beside me on the couch and Felicity perched on a hand. I did not allow her up on a shoulder, afraid she might soil my suit, though she was rarely so inconsiderate. With my other hand, I stroked Rodgie; glutton for affection, he groaned and pushed his head up against my palm. I stared at the clock; leaning beside it was a postcard I had received that day from Tony.
Thanks for your presence,
it read.
You make me glow. Surprises me every time. I’m selling you by the dozen, you might like to know. See you back there in a month. (Don’t ask for royalties, rich boy.)
I surveyed my living room and had a flash of objectivity in which I saw how dull it looked.
I was to go by Mal’s flat first, then Lucinda’s. We would take a taxi to a restaurant that overlooked the northern reaches of Central Park, to a gala benefit, dinner and dancing, raising money so that disadvantaged children could take music lessons. Mal had received the invitation. He told us (though I was in on the pretense) that the two of us needed a fine night out. Lucinda had passed her midterms; a week of warm wind goaded us toward spring. There were things to celebrate, he said, and so, knowing how much Lucinda loved dancing, he had bought the tickets. We were forbidden to decline.
I said good-bye to the animals and turned off all the lights but one. Halfway down the stairs, I stopped. I returned to my flat. Felicity was settling onto her perch, helping herself to her fruit cup, picking out morsels of banana, her favorite. Grapes would be next, then apples.
I put a banana in the pocket of my overcoat and held out my hand. “Come, lass.” She flapped her wings as we left the flat, nervous and eager. Before we went outside, I folded her inside my coat against my chest.
Mal had all his lights on; I wondered if his sight was failing, too. When I let my coat fall open and Felicity saw where she was, she let out a long, loud call and flew. She made a low swift circuit of the living room and shot back toward the bedroom. She flew laps, calling out with obvious delight. Parrots’ memories, it’s said, are as sharp as their lives are long. Mal was sitting on the couch. He watched her with a smile until she made a landing, at last, on my shoulder. I moved her onto the back of the couch, next to Mal.
“Well, doctor, the transfer is complete,” he said. He reached up slowly to scratch Felicity’s neck. He moved now as if underwater; even this small motion must have hurt. “Thank you,” he said.
We had an hour before I would leave to meet Lucinda. I still had not made up my mind if it would be right to try and dissuade him. But I could not get past imagining the words “Are you sure” or “Don’t you think.” He would outtalk me, as he always had. And he would be angry.
I could hear Mal’s breathing. His lungs, which had not recovered fully from the trauma of his infection (and probably never would), were as terminally tired as his limbs; only his mind seemed agile now. This, Mal had argued, was essential. It was what he called the fulcrum point. You do not wait until your mind goes, too.
“You’re staring at me,” he said. “As if you’re a bystander to a wreck.”
“I just don’t want to believe . . .”
Mal closed his eyes. A fringe of tears formed on the lashes. He wiped them away. “Shut up,” he said quietly. “Shut up and will you for fuck’s sake live. I am not going to dwell on you now, though I could say a few things. I am simply going to order you to live. Fucking, pissing, shitting live.”
His crying was an awful sound, because he would not accept it. His pride had not tired, either.
I sat beside him. I put a hand on his hands, which were clenched in his lap. He did not pull them away. With a deep harsh breath, he stopped crying.
Felicity had flown across the room and settled on one of the chrome railings of the hospital bed. Mal looked at her and said, “I wish it would rain.”
I asked him if he wanted a fire, and he said no. He asked me to help him back to the bedroom, into his bed. Felicity followed us, landing on a chair. She watched us intently for a few seconds; something was odd about the way these flightless creatures moved and spoke today, something was out of the ordinary, but we did not hold her interest for long.
“I want you to tell me everything, so I know you know the script,” said Mal. I reviewed it all, as if I were his dutiful son, and then I fetched everything he told me he would need. I counted out the pills—morphine and, as Mal liked to call them, his Klaus Barbitols—and put them in a saucer beside the bed. I poured vodka into the purple glass pitcher from Venice. I pushed the empty vials down into the kitchen rubbish, which I would tie up and take outside when I left.
I peeled the banana I had brought and put it on another saucer, which I set on Mal’s desk in the bedroom, next to a ramekin I’d filled with water. His computer was gone—given away, perhaps, like the flute.
“You’re leaving her?” said Mal.
“Unless you don’t want me to.”
“Oh I’d like her to stay. I may hear her sing yet.” He looked at me. “You’d never clip her wings, would you?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
He said quietly, “She was deprived of the jungle and her fellow creatures, and for that I’ve sometimes felt guilty. I would never—never—take from her the gift of flight.”
For so many months, I had believed I was waiting for his death, as if I just wanted to finish a chapter in my personal story. Not like the end of Mum’s life, when I had childishly imagined so many scenarios of healing: sudden remission, a diagnostic error; presto, a new magic bullet of a drug!
“I’ve been a terrible friend,” I said as I stood at the foot of Mal’s bed.
“No,” he said. “You’ve been an excellent friend. Fallible but excellent. What you have been terrible at is something else, something we’re not going to talk about now. There’s no more time for you, I’m sorry.” He spoke with abrupt strength, and I knew that from the moment I closed his door behind me until my appointed return in the morning, I would play out a thousand of the same wishful scenarios I had for Mum.
“Take this quilt off the bed. I don’t want it ruined,” he said.
I pulled Lucinda’s quilt off his legs. I folded it—the assembly of all those fine dresses, those evenings of dance and festivity—and laid it on a wooden trunk which I knew held clean sheets and blankets and a gold silk dressing gown, a gift from a long-ago fly-by-night lover. Too ludicrous to wear, said Mal, but much too fabulous not to keep. I had come to know this home as well as any I’d ever lived in myself.
He told me to go. Just before I reached the door, I heard him laugh his exhausted laugh. I looked back toward the bedroom. He said, “She’s tickling me.” He sat on the edge of his bed, Felicity on his shoulder, shoving her beak behind his ear. “Go,” he said again, his face a brief illusion of joy.
Lucinda opened her door with a similar expression: the smile of a girl greeting the boy of her dreams. She looked so magnificent, it broke my heart. She spun around and said, “How about
this,
young man?” as she held out the wide shiny skirt of a dress that shimmered both orange and green in the light. “I just learned the name of this fabric. It’s called ‘doupioni silk’—like something a maharanee would wear. I saw it in the window of this vintage shop around the corner. I hardly came equipped with a ball gown!”
She told me I looked handsome. I helped her on with her coat, and she took my arm in a manner befitting the era of her dress. In the taxi, she began to talk about Mal. I had vowed to find a way to talk of other things—her vocation, her husband, her religion, her politics, her quilting, anything else—but I felt too numb to make the effort.
The restaurant had an extraordinary view. On this cold black night, the park looked like a velvet sea, with patches of phosphorescence where lamps shone up through the skeletal trees. A quartet played all the songs Lucinda loved: Gershwin, Porter, Jerome Kern. When we danced (I was glad for my strict boyhood training), she sometimes sang the lyrics over my shoulder. “You’re such a good sport to do this,” she said at one point as we looped about the floor. “I’m almost falling in love.”
“I’m not a good sport. I’m having a lovely time, too,” I said. On any other night, this would have been true.
I ordered champagne with our dinner; Mal had told me that this was the one thing she would drink to excess. He hoped it would make her sleep late. After two glasses, she became teary and said, “Two more months. That’s all I’m bargaining for when I pray. His doctor told me that wasn’t an unrealistic hope. Just till we’ve had some real spring.”
I gave her my handkerchief. “You’ve been through a lot. I admire you incredibly.”
She blew her nose. “Oh no. I’ve led a completely charmed life until now. I have been the antithesis of Job.”
“I know about Jonathan’s cancer,” I said. “That must have been an ordeal. I’m sure you still worry about him.”
Lucinda set down her glass. “What cancer?”
“His . . . Hodgkin’s? The summer before Mal was to go off to Juilliard?”
She looked out the window at the view. Her expression was impossible to read. “Mal told you Jon had Hodgkin’s disease?”
“He said that’s why he stayed up north instead of . . .”
“That’s not . . .” She sipped champagne. “Sometimes Mal tells odd lies, his imagination gets a little out of control. He has such an imagination.” She shook her head, looking perplexed.
I felt disoriented at her revelation but wanted, yet again, to flee from discussing Mal—especially, right now, from discussing how honest or dishonest he might be. I told her it was time to dance again.
We closed down the party, as I had been instructed we should do. The last song was “A Hundred Years from Today.” Lucinda did not sing the words; I hoped she didn’t know them.
Don’t save your kisses,
warns the song.
Be happy while you may
.
In the taxi, Lucinda leaned against my coat, crying and reminiscing about her son as a baby. She was saying, “You know, I breast-fed that child,” when we stopped in front of her building. “Almost no one did back then, you know. Not in Boston, where we were living while Zeke finished his degree. He did it like a natural, Mal, he just came out knowing what to do, how to survive. He did everything early and well—walk, talk, everything. My other children had to be coached and nurtured along. But that’s Malachy: he just knows
how,
he’s just so . . . masterful. And a know-it-all. Never stops correcting people. I tried to break that habit when he was little, I told him it would make him lonely, but would he listen? Well, what a silly question, right?”
She refused to let me see her upstairs; the temperature had plummeted, and she was sure I’d never get another taxi. I could not find the right thing to say before we parted; when I saw her again, circumstances would surely have estranged us. In the end, we just held each other like old friends after a reunion.
INCHES AWAY FROM MY SKULL,
rain gives the roof a good thrashing. I sit with my boxed-up father in my lap. Mal was packaged the same way, but Lucinda chose a high-end container, cherry with a coffinlike finish, even if it was to serve its purpose for only a few months. It did not take her long to forgive me my complicity—either because she was in fact a saint or because Mal had explicitly asked her to in a letter left beside his bed. Up in Vermont that June, after we dropped the ashes in Lake Champlain, after I brushed the last of them from my clothes, after the mass Lucinda arranged, she showed me the letter. It began,
Dear Mom, Before anything else, I have to demand this one thing: Burn me. Get rid of this body. I don’t care what you do by way of rites
—
have Kenny Rogers call a square dance, I don’t care
—
but burn me.