ON the fourth day in Duke Hospital, Wade took a sharp fast turn for the worse. He was mostly unconscious or, when he woke for snatches, he was wildly reeling through scraps of lunacy and terror. His lungs were chocked with microscopic creatures, drinking his life; and a rank web of tubes brought him full-time oxygen, drugs and nourishment. Hutch and Ann visited several times a day and stood alone or together by the bed to watch the course of a war they couldn’t speed or hinder. They saw Dr. Ives at least once in the course of each day or night. Her reliable warmth and her pale clear eyes seemed a kind of outrage in the rackety life of a huge hospital, a place that was less a refuge than a nonstop foundry steeped in gloom and producing at contradictory rates of urgency and torpor some mysterious artifact, never shown to humans.
But with all her sympathy and ungrudging words, Dr. Ives never gave them an atom of excess hope for time or rescue. The nearest she came to a firm prognosis was to face them both in the hall outside and say “You might want to think about last arrangements. Wade could go any minute or fight his way back for a few weeks or months.” This crisis was simply uncallable—Wade was drastically weak before it started. His kidneys and liver had suffered from the two years of toxic drugs; they were functioning far below par now and could fail at a moment’s notice.
All that Dr. Ives would allude to, by way of a future, was that, when she asked Wade if he’d made a living will with his plain intentions should he lose all consciousness, he’d only smiled and said “I somehow doubt this is curtains. Don’t order the coffin unless they’re on sale.” And she’d added that, over the past decade, AIDS patients had taught her something she’d never quite trusted before—within certain limits an adult, even a very young child, can choose the day, sometimes the instant, to let death in. Her sense was that Wade was gearing up to make that choice.
Both Ann and Hutch thanked her, silently acknowledging that almost no male American physician—skittish as they were at the risk of error—would have made that considerate a prediction.
THE night of the fourth day, Hutch had stayed well past the legal nine o’clock in the chair near Wade, in reach of his shoulder, though the boy hadn’t spoken since midafternoon. And Hutch left only when the splendid young black nurse named Hannah Bertram convinced him again that he’d be no good to Wade or anyone if he didn’t go home and try to rest—she’d call him if anything changed either way. As always before he left Wade’s side, Hutch bent and kissed the boy’s tall brow. It was so dry and thin-skinned that it felt like actual bone to normal lips. On the chance that a single cell in Wade’s mind was still keeping watch, Hutch said “I’m going no farther than the telephone. Keep resting, Son; I’ll be here when you need me.”
In his trance, Wade heard that. He thought No, nobody’s ever been near, not when I’m truly needy. Drugged as he was, it was almost the truth; but even when he heard Hutch turn to leave, Wade kept his own counsel, a handsbreadth from death, still refusing to yield. Why? Why not now?
16
BACK home Hutch had drunk two ounces of scotch and watched the news on television—the daily butcher’s bill of children shot at random and beat by their kin, women raped by strangers or close relations, dead human fetuses paraded in priests’ arms past abortion clinics, men burned for their race or their choice of partner, women pounded to pulp by mates or sons. In its muffled horror, a daily dose of such meaningless leering had come to be oddly calming for Hutch—like an evening spent at a knockout production of some fifth-rate Jacobean tragedy: a feast of cadavers in velvets and lace, their chalky faces specked with the ulcers of syphilis. But toward the end of this night’s news, tucked in before the zany sportscaster, came the story of a young Chapel Hill man—known to be in the early stages of AIDS—who’d burned himself, his bedridden mother, the collie dog and their gnomish bungalow all to the ground just this past morning.
It was so god-awful, if Hutch hadn’t felt exhausted, he’d have laughed. As it was, when he rose to switch off the set, a clear thought pierced up through his mind like an iron spike. Wade dies tonight. It felt as true as any thought he’d had since childhood. Hutch stood in place, letting the shock drain off through half a minute. Then he thought Thank God—thank God for Wade’s sake, his own sake and Ann’s. Hutch felt the dazed but spacious relief he’d felt at the sight of his own father’s death—Thank Christ he’s gone. Should he drive back and sit out the night beside Wade’s bed or wait here for Hannah’s call near morning? Wait here and lie down anyhow.
Before Hutch took the first step toward his bedroom, his mind brought up a whole second thought. For the first time since they’d hauled Wade’s papers down from New York, he recalled the big box and the record book that Ivory had kept in the kitchen. Far as Hutch knew, they still lay shut on the floor of Wade’s closet. Do I open them now? What would the need be? Any will or notes about last wishes could wait till the end. But it came to Hutch powerfully, tired as he was, that there might be something in the sizable box which would clear a final block between them while Wade was still breathing—some possible light on Wyatt Bondurant, Wyatt’s hatred of Hutch; or some slight clue to the unknown life that Wade concealed in the midst of all those years when Hutch and Ann had hardly seen him.
To break the seal on that box now, with Wade alive, could only be right if Hutch really hoped that the boy would last through a stretch of sane days for healing the years of silence between them—if Hutch and his son’s old laughing case could someway return. I beg for that, yes.
17
IT was two in the morning before Hutch had gone through all the papers. Either Wade was a neater man than the pack rat child he’d been, or he’d weeded these papers in recent months, or someone else had weeded them for him. There were none of the pointless souvenirs that litter most drawers—receipts, matchbooks, hazy snapshots of vague and inexplicably grinning strangers. Every letter that Hutch could recall sending Wade seemed to be here, a thick handful of letters from Ann; early letters from Hutch’s grandmother Eva, from family friends like Polly Drewry and Alice Matthews, Strawson and Grainger. There was even a diary Wade had kept in his first stay at summer camp at the age of ten, a detailed record of thirty days that still had the power to summon a taste of the hopeless misery of a homesick child—a misery Wade had never confessed.
There was nothing from his college days and little in writing to represent his early years in New York. There was, though, an unsealed envelope of photographs of young men, all in various stages of undress and many of them naked, all taken in rooms Hutch was almost sure he could recognize as Wade’s—Wade’s first small apartment on Bleecker Street and Seventh Avenue, above a Greek nightclub. The faces, white and black, were strangers to Hutch; but none of the dozen-odd photographs had the musky thrusting air of real pornography. Most of the men had the startled and slightly bruised air common to undressed Americans, a people not quite at ease in their skin—surely no Mediterranean poise in the body’s frank grandeur or the perky indifference of Amazon tribes who wear their genitals matter-of-factly as household implements, handy conveniences. The single other shared quality that Hutch could see in the photographs was a high proportion of striking faces and cared-for bodies, the equal of a swarm of lesser classical heroes or minor gods. Wade told the class he’d slept with only two men. Maybe these are Wyatt’s. But did Wyatt know Wade in the Bleecker Street days?
What held Hutch longest were the letters from Wyatt. Hutch hadn’t realized till tonight that the two men had been separated so often, but each had occasionally traveled in his work (Wyatt was a book designer at Pantheon), and a thick run of letters survived from their weeks and days apart through the years together. Like most modern letters, Wade’s and Wyatt’s mainly amounted to less than the average long-distance phone call—some quick reminder of a bill to be paid, a line of greeting on a birthday or an anniversary apart, a joke overheard or some cryptic direction like Act your own way; do what tastes true.
There was one long letter in Wyatt’s imposing and impe
tuous hand in dark brown ink, pages that looked like credible news from a general pausing in the midst of battle to scrawl a command—say, Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville or Shaka Zulu in full lion skin. It amounted to a scorching self-justification, written in late 1984 from the opposite end of the two men’s apartment, at what seemed the first big impasse they’d reached. The final sentences were only the starkest from a blistering sequence.
Wade, If you think I’ve agreed to go on being the sweeper-up of the dry little turds from your meager past while you glide on with an appetite at least the equal of a starved hyena’s, you’ve got less mind than even I thought you had. I burn my push broom, here and now. Scour up your own shit or pack your boxes, clear out of my place and leave your key in the vase by the door. I want you to stay but not like this—not another day, not to mention a night.
And like the long-unsuspected Rosetta stone of Wade’s estrangement from his parents, there was one last incendiary letter, separate from the others, at the bottom of the box. It was dated New Year’s Eve 1985; and even before Hutch read a word further, he knew that the letter was written at the end of Wyatt’s only visit to Durham with Wade.
They’d come down on December 27th to spend a week. Hutch and Ann had met Wyatt several times at dinner in New York; and those hours had seemed to go smoothly enough, though Wyatt said little and smiled to himself too often for comfort. But in Durham suddenly on the morning of New Year’s Eve, Wade had walked into the kitchen to say that Wyatt was having to leave unexpectedly. Hutch and Ann wondered at the time if Wyatt had somehow taken offense—they’d spent the previous day at Strawson’s with a visit to Grainger’s—but Wade said “No, Wyatt has family duties.” And Wyatt himself departed with thin smiles and thanks for all. When Wade left a few days later, on January 4th, it marked the end of his last really natural meeting with his parents till eight years later when he came home dying. The interim meetings had sooner or later turned skittish or silent. And neither Hutch nor Ann had ever seen Wyatt again, not face-to-face.
The relevant letter still smoked on the page.
Wade,
You know I didn’t want to come along on that scenic voyage through upper Dixie, but you said you’d run interference with the Klan, the Carolina Nazis etc. and I trusted you. What I didn’t guess, and it’s partly my fault (I’m old enough to know when a road’s booby-trapped), was that the real roadblock would be your lovely family.
The times we’d met them here in the city, I thought they seemed a little brittle and a little more seedy by the month. But I didn’t plan to feel like I did from the hour I entered that handsome house in the piney woods—like the field hand buck that had ravished their darling, kinked his hair, inflated his cock and rinsed his brain in indigo till all he could want was The Negro Organ of Generation and Wyatt Bondurant’s grinning eyes with the white teeth above it.
I know you think I’m criminally wrong or ridiculously off track anyhow. I can see your mother and father have never done a deed that they’d call impolite, not to mention cruel. I can see what’s lovable and likable about them—they look good, smell good, talk smart and funny; and roll with the punches life throws their way. I can imagine they sit down Sundays in some well-furnished church—Episcopal, I bet—and come out thinking they stand a fair chance of eternal life near God in Glory, a dignified Paradise with no voice raised and loyal colored washerwomen for the white satin robes.
My mother, as you know, believes the same nonsense—especially since we moved her to Sea Cliff, that crumbling beachhead of the old Anglo lower middle class. But I bet you all of my life’s possessions that, come Judgment Day—if Judgment comes—my mother winds up in an eighteen-karat martyr’s crown being fanned by coal-black pickaninny cherubs while your two progenitors are rushed up against a concrete wall by blazing archangels and mowed to a pulp with whatever brand of automatic weapon the angels are issued for simple justice.
That doesn’t mean that I qualify as a justice agent on Earth for now, and it does not mean what I know you’ll say—that I see racists in every skin that’s not beige-to-black. What I realized it meant last night, when we got back from that drive to the country to see poor old Mr. Grainger Walters, was that any people who could use ninety-some years of one man’s life like it was a substance they could wear to protect their hands and eyes from the winter wind—and him a frail man that’s your father’s cousin, and yours as well, and that your family’s turned into a tame crippled monkey in a dry little shed you threw up around him, a shed that’s really nothing but his last cage in a century of cages—well, what it told me was Wyatt Bondurant, you are out of your element. Swim fast for the shallows.
I know I’ve got every fault on Earth myself, in triplicate flaming letters on the sky. I know I’ve asked you to live beside me and put up with it. I know we spent our adult time, before we met, living lives that my dear ignorant mother would think lead to ruin, if she knew the facts. I know we’ve already done together more than a few things that every Gallup poll says most Christians abominate (many Jews and Muslims thrown in)—not just with our bodies attached to each other.
You know what other act I mean and its coming result that I still dread for my sisters sake—she’s paid too much already for her life.
But I want you. From here on out. I want you free of that courteous Murder Incorporated you grew up in and that’s round your feet this very minute like a pet anaconda crushing you to ooze as you sit reading in their tasteful rooms. Get out while you can and come back, come home to me. At least I love you and tell you the truth.
Till I see you here, or whether I see you
again or not, I’m nothing but
Take-Him-or-Leave-Him Wyatt
When he’d read through it twice. Hutch knew his first response was right—again a focused sense of elation that boiled up through him. He’d been found out, in one of the vital cores of his life, for the first full time by a watchful witness other than Ann. Hutch had always known that, if the universe was just, his and his loved ones’ chances of escaping execution in the first round of burnings were virtually nil. His sense of the appalling poison of slavery—a freezing poison that had no antidote, in his own life, his family’s fate, and the whole nation’s ruin—had been born in Hutch and had only grown. He saw, as plainly as he saw the oak floor, the unstemmable progress of the spreading stain of human chattel on his home country through nearly four centuries and its outward seepage now through the nation and the world beyond. And here in Wade’s enormous pain and Hutch’s powerlessness to ease it, here surely at last was the measured stroke of vengeance—a vengeance delivered far too late to teach or mend.
What it came to of course was unthinkably simple. An entire people from a vast continent had been seized by the millions, abducted, molested, raped in every conceivable posture and forced to tend the fruit of those unions or watch them sold into still crueler hands, worked under torture, then freed in a cataclysmic war to live abandoned—in fact, abandoned—by master and righteous liberator through all the years since. So while a great earth-movement of freedom had lifted millions in the past thirty years, hundreds of thousands of unmoved, unreached but justified sons of those dead slaves were foraging still in tight bands of vengeance, exacting their due and the unpaid loans of an impatient fate from generations that were undreamt of when the first black Africans strode in chains onto these mild shores, their endless exile.
Recalling the conversation with his seminar back in April, Hutch knew his conviction was hardly fresh—it was, spoken or not, the central theme of American life, its history and literature for nearly four centuries with no sign of flagging. Even the wound from the systematic slaughter of millions of native Indians had begun to heal almost everywhere except on the stunned reservations themselves. But the force that endured as the legacy of slavery, in every city and town tonight, had swelled to a din still unsuspected in the books and visions of older prophets who’d barely seen beyond their own moment, from John Brown and Lincoln to F
aulkner and Baldwin. A whole irresistible limb of one strong race—a matchless arm, say—was moving now like a gleaming scythe to level the rows of the guilty, the great-grandchildren of the guilty, and the pure newborn.
Hutch also knew that all he’d managed to do about the horror and its constant survivals in his own existence and his family relations was pitifully small—a trim set of fairly consistent kind acts, more decorous than lasting, and a steady effort at trying to understand all the minds involved: the male and female overlords’ minds, the male and female slaves and their present heirs, a single mind like Grainger Walters’ or half-crazed Wyatt’s or Wade’s sacrifice to the wrongs of his kin or Hutch’s own mind that had grown its callus early and accepted the service of a part-black kinsman who nonetheless lived in exposed solitude.
Hutch’s whole life then amounted to long years of quiet assent to the most colossal act of theft and murder in human history—assent by Hutch and, again, all he’d loved except maybe Wade. But in sixty-three years of Hutch’s life no one but Wyatt had pointed toward that lasting assent and called its name, an unstopped crime.
For the first time ever—with Wyatt’s dead unanswerable voice aimed level at Hutch in the empty house this late spring night, and the wreckage of his son’s life strewn round his feet—the chance that poor Strawson had also been right bore in on Hutch as another giant failure. “I loved you, Hutchins. Have you lost that? I’d have spent my whole life bearing your weight, if you’d said the word.”
Hutch had leaned instead on a woman strong enough to bear six men for however long their lives might take—no, he’d never leaned; that had been half the trouble. Ann had asked for burdens that he’d never give her. Had he truly borne, in childhood, too much of his father’s pain to volunteer for much of a burden from anyone else? Could he somehow have managed full trust in Straw or another man, the kind of trust he’d placed on their bodies forty years back? Wade and Wyatt plainly managed it; it killed them both. But that was the outcome of nothing more fatal than the accidental convergence of time with one especially crafty virus, no condemnation of their human bent or choice. Hutch and Ann had likewise ended each other’s lives—at least their chances of usable nearness, a merciful contingency of care and trust—for now and maybe from here on out.
The Promise of Rest Page 18