Authors: Elizabeth Hand
He cupped his hands as though to receive an offering, and smiled.
“Oh, Oliver,” I whispered, and, weeping, buried my face in the folds of his robe.
A few minutes later the nurse arrived with Oliver’s dinner tray. Under his watchful gaze Oliver escorted me to the door. There he smiled and kissed me, then stood in the hall waving cheerfully as I walked to the elevator.
“My brother Leo’s coming to take me back to Newport,” he called after me. “Come stay with me over Thanksgiving, we’ll go hear Cooper play the Limelight—” He flexed his fingers and mimed playing a piano.
“Okay,” I said. My heart leapt at the thought of visiting him at home, of meeting his family for a holiday. “But I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He grinned and crooked a finger. “Next time, Sweeney. Bye.”
I got a bus back to North Capitol Street, got out and wandered around the campus. For some reason I was no longer afraid. I knew I could stay with Baby Joe but that would mean more talking, more discussion of what had happened the night before, and I was too tired to think about that right now. I didn’t want to think about bulls or blood or ivy or trees, about any of the things miraculous or terrible that I had seen. I wanted only to think about Oliver; about how his eyes had glowed and the way he had smiled at me; about taking the train up to Newport and staying with him and hearing his brother play stride piano in a barrelhouse; about what he had meant when he said
You’re great, Sweeney
and
I’ll love you next time. I promise.
So I waited a few hours, walking across the Strand and thinking of all the things we’d do together, thinking of all the things we’d done, Oliver and I: lying there beneath that tree, sitting there talking in the Shrine’s shadow, drinking coffee and rum there while we waited for Angelica to get out of class. When I finally went to Baby Joe’s room it was late, after midnight. I threw pebbles at the window until he came down yawning to let me in the fire door. He refused to let me sleep on the floor.
“Forget it,
hija.
My grandmother would kill me.”
So Baby Joe curled up in the room’s single worn armchair and I curled up in his bed, still thinking about Oliver, willing myself to dream of him, his crooked smile, his mad blue eyes.
That night I dreamed I was swimming in the ocean, a hundred yards or more from shore. Oliver stood on the sand in the blazing sun, and with him Angelica and Annie and Hasel and Baby Joe. They were all holding beer bottles and laughing and talking, and every now and then one of them would look up, shading his eyes until he or she saw me. Then they’d wave, absently but still happy to see me, and maybe raise a bottle in greeting. They didn’t know that I was being pulled away from them, that I could feel something black and cold clawing at my feet and dragging me; they didn’t know I was going under when, a minute later, they glanced up again and vainly searched the horizon, looking for me. They just kept on looking at the ocean, certain that I was swimming there somewhere, safe among the green and dancing waves. They never knew about the riptide or how dangerous the currents were. They never knew at all.
When I woke up someone was pounding on the door to Baby Joe’s room. My watch read twenty-five after five. Baby Joe was snoring loudly in his armchair. The window was pearled with first light. I stood groggily and walked to the door, not totally conscious that I wasn’t still in my room at Rossetti Hall, and pulled it open.
In the darkened hallway stood Annie Harmon, grey-faced and shivering in her red flannel shirt and fatigues, her hands shaking as she pushed past me through the door. She had come to tell me that, sometime around four o’clock that morning, Oliver had walked out of his room at Providence Hospital and climbed the fire stairs to the Oncology Unit. There he found a utility closet with a window that opened onto the parking lot. He jumped out, plunging five stories before he went through a metal awning and the roof of an oxygen truck parked near the entrance to the Emergency Room. There had been no signs of distress, there was no suicide letter. Nothing but a scrawled note in the margin of last Sunday’s
Washington Post Book World.
It said,
I’ll be right back.
W
HEN I LEARNED OF
Oliver’s death it was as though a door had slammed shut upon me. In the sudden darkness and echoing clang of its closing, I was blinded, deafened. The wonders of the Divine were as lost to me although they had existed only in a book I had once glimpsed, a book taken from me and put into the safekeeping of people wiser and lovelier than myself, people who would never again make the mistake of allowing it to fall into such careless hands. I would never be permitted to return to the sculpted lawns or allées of the Divine. Never again would I glimpse an angel in my room, terrible and fatal; only in dreams. Years afterward I might pass on the street someone I had known as a student, and once on a crowded subway platform glimpse Balthazar Warnick wrapped in his moth-singed chesterfield; but they did not see me, or greet me when I called out to them.
A
FTER ANNIE LEFT BABY
Joe’s room I went out and bought a liter of vodka and a six-pack of Orange Crush. I didn’t try to follow her, didn’t even wake up Baby Joe. I drank all that day and into the evening, returning at last to Baby Joe’s dorm. There I passed out behind the overgrown box tree hedge. When I woke up I did it all over again. I didn’t try to locate Oliver’s family or find out about funeral arrangements. I stumbled to the front of the dorm in search of Baby Joe, but no one answered when I knocked. Finally I went to the Shrine cafeteria and found a pay phone. I tried to call Annie, but her phone had been cut off.
I stumbled back outside. I looked up and saw pale shining spires and lapis domes rising from the grey autumn mist, the small cloaked figures of scholars and a few brave tourists on the steps of the Shrine. The immense sandstone building seemed more Sphinx-like than ever. I could feel its will bearing down on me, saying,
There is nothing for you here.
I turned, shivering, and walked away.
I had 107 dollars in my checking account, enough money to buy an Amtrak ticket home. I could only assume that Balthazar or someone else had taken care of the things in my room—thrown them out or burned them or shipped them back to New York. I still hadn’t called my parents. Except for trying to reach Annie, I hadn’t called anyone at all. I wandered across campus, thinking of Oliver, and it was as though I had died too. I saw no one I recognized, no one at all. When I tried to get back into Rossetti Hall my key didn’t work. For what seemed like hours I waited for someone to leave or enter the dorm, so that I could slip in behind them, but no one ever came. When I waited outside Baby Joe’s dorm the same thing happened. I tried calling his room, but he never answered; tried finding Hasel Bright and Annie, but I never did. Finally I returned to the Shrine cafeteria, half-expecting to be turned away from there, too, but I wasn’t.
I stayed there for three days: washing up in the rest room, sleeping in chilly alcoves of the Crypt Church when the cafeteria closed, my head pillowed on my knapsack, warming my hands by the feeble light of votive candles. I left only to buy more vodka and to check my mail at the campus post office. Nothing there but the
New Yorker
and a formal computer-generated notice of permanent suspension from the Dean’s Office.
And then, on the fourth day after Oliver’s suicide, I received a letter. A heavy cream-colored envelope addressed in an elegant calligraphic hand. My fingers trembled: I was certain it was from Angelica, but when I inspected it more closely I saw that the letters were smaller, the cursives more controlled. And it was written in dark blue ink, and I had never seen Angelica use anything but peacock blue. I fled back to the warmth of the Shrine cafeteria, bought a cup of coffee, and found a corner booth.
“Oh man,” I said beneath my breath. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly open it. “Please, god, please …”
The inside of the envelope was lined with marbled paper, blue and violet and green. The edges of the heavy rag stationery were gilt, as was a tiny monogram stamped at the top of the page.
LdR
I drew it to my face, breathing in Pelican ink and the sharp medicinal tang of eucalyptus, and began to read.
November 12, 1975
Storm King, New York
Dear Ms. Cassidy,
Angelica gave me your address; I hope that you will not find it presumptuous of me to write to you.
My daughter spoke very warmly of her time with you at the Divine. I have just learned of the unfortunate events that have befallen your little circle of friends, and also of your own academic situation. As an alumnus and trustee of the University, I feel that I may be able to be of some help to you in making your future plans, and so have taken the liberty of enclosing a round-trip plane ticket for you to come visit me at our home here in Storm King. Alas! my daughter will not be able to join us, but it is at her urging that I am writing to you, and I know that she very much would like for you to come.
If there is any scheduling problem, please let me know. Otherwise, I will arrange for a car to meet you at the airport and deliver you here on this Friday evening.
With warm regards,
Luciano di Rienzi
Wrapped in a second sheet of the same heavy smooth paper were two airplane tickets.
I went; of course I went. I was afraid not to, but even more afraid of what I might do or what I might become if I stayed at the Divine, drinking and hiding in the Shrine and slowly going insane. It felt strange, to be flying into Westchester without my parents’ knowledge. At the airport I was seized by the absurd terror that they would be there, that somehow they had found out about everything and had come to collect me and bring me in disgrace back home. But there was hardly anyone at the airport at all, besides a few weary wives come to collect their weary husbands, and a young man in a cable-knit sweater and salmon-colored golf pants, holding a sign that said
SWEENEY CASSIDY
.
“That’s me,” I said. He took my bag and I followed him to the waiting car, a navy blue Oldsmobile with
MERCURY SKYLINE LIVERY
stenciled on the side. I was a little disappointed but mostly relieved it wasn’t a limousine.
“Do you work for Mr. di Rienzi?” I asked after we had left the parking lot.
“Nope. He just hired me for tonight, and to take you back in the morning. Mind if I listen to the news?”
I shook my head. He clicked on the radio, and that was all the conversation we had. We drove north on the interstate. After an hour we pulled off Route 684 and crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge. Forty-five minutes later we arrived at Storm King.
I was expecting something grand, after the plane tickets and mysterious letter and the liveried car, something along the lines of the Orphic Lodge.
Instead, the di Rienzis’ house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a small woodsy development, high up on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson.
STORM KING ESTATES
, said a wrought-iron sign, but there was nothing quite so dramatic as an estate anywhere in sight. The other houses were pleasantly suburban, set amidst plenty of trees now bare and stark against the backdrop of browning lawns and neatly raked piles of leaves. The di Rienzis’ house stood apart from all of these, on a small rise planted with huge old rhododendrons and mountain laurels and a slender, pampered-looking Japanese maple. Behind the trees and shrubs rose a sprawling Queen Anne Victorian, a real dowager dating to the turn of the century, with grey weathered shingles and a wide porch sweeping around it on all sides. It was certainly the oldest house on the street, and it commanded a marvelous view of the river and Storm King Mountain and even the George Washington Bridge, glittering like a string of glass beads in the distance. But it was a surprisingly comforting-looking house, nothing grand or intimidating about it at all, until Angelica’s father appeared at the door.
“You must be Sweeney.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, shaking his hand. It was the first time I had ever called anyone s
ir
in my life. “You are—it was very, very kind of you to send me the tickets to come here.”
He smiled. “Well, I am very, very happy that you came. Please, come inside.”
I was shocked to see how old he was. Older than my parents, older even than my grandparents. Had Angelica ever mentioned that to me? But there was nothing frail about him—he was over six feet tall, big-boned and broad-shouldered, with an exaggerated, almost military, bearing, and his hand, while bony and blue-veined, was so strong my fingers cracked in his grasp. I protested when he bent to take my knapsack, but he ignored me and went inside, waving offhandedly to the Oldsmobile as it drove off.
“Did you have a pleasant flight? I wasn’t certain if you would have time to eat, so I have dinner ready for you.” I followed him down the hallway, too nervous to say anything but
Yes sir
over and over, like a new recruit. “At any rate airplane food is appalling, isn’t it? Let’s take this upstairs to your room, so that you can wash up if you’d like.”
He had a beautiful sonorous voice, with just the slightest Mediterranean warmth to it, and such extravagantly pronounced diction that he sounded like an exotic bird that has been trained to speak. I followed him upstairs, and then down a long hallway, where a number of photographs of Angelica hung in expensive, heavy frames. Angelica as an infant, innocent and self-contained as an egg; Angelica in a white dress for First Communion; Angelica graduating from elementary school, high school; Angelica at summer camp. Camp! I could as easily imagine her at camp as distributing alms to the poor in Calcutta; but there she was, tanned and squinting into the sun in her khaki shorts and white short-sleeved shirt with
WENAHKEE OWLS
embroidered on it. Between the photos were doors, all of them shut tight. I tried to guess which hid Angelica’s room.