In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  In this frame of mind, and determined not to cry, I showed up in Short Hills, New Jersey, to pay a visit to my dying friend Tom Atkins, whom I’d not seen for twenty years—virtually half my life ago.

  With half a brain, I might have anticipated that the boy, Peter, would be the one to answer the door. I should have expected to be greeted by a shocking physical resemblance to Tom Atkins—as I first knew him—but I was speechless.

  “It’s the son, Billy—say something!” Elaine whispered in my ear. (Of course I was already struggling to make an effort not to cry.) “Hi—I’m Elaine, this is Billy,” Elaine said to the boy with the carrot-colored hair. “You must be Peter. We’re old friends of your dad.”

  “Yes, we’ve been expecting you—please come in,” Peter said politely. (The boy had just turned fifteen; he’d applied to the Lawrenceville School, for what would be his sophomore year, and he was waiting to hear if he got in.)

  “We weren’t sure what time you were coming, but now is a good time,” Peter Atkins was saying, as he led Elaine and me inside. I wanted to hug the boy—he’d used the time word twice; he had no trace of a pronunciation problem!—but, under the circumstances, I knew enough not to touch him.

  Off to one side of the lavish vestibule was a rather formal-looking dining room—where absolutely no one ate (or had ever eaten), I was thinking—when the boy told us that Charles had just left. “Charles is my dad’s nurse,” Peter was explaining. “Charles comes to take care of the catheter—you have to keep flushing out the catheter, or it will clot off,” Peter told Elaine and me.

  “Clot off,” I repeated—my first words in the Atkins house. Elaine elbowed me in my ribs.

  “My mom is resting, but she’ll be right down,” the boy was saying. “I don’t know where my sister is.”

  We had stopped alongside a closed door in a downstairs hall. “This used to be my father’s study,” Peter Atkins said; the boy was hesitating before he opened the door. “But our bedrooms are upstairs—Dad can’t climb stairs,” Peter continued, not opening the door. “If my sister is in here, with him, she may scream—she’s only thirteen, about to be fourteen,” the boy told Elaine and me; he had his hand on the doorknob, but he wasn’t ready to let us in. “I weigh about a hundred and forty pounds,” Peter Atkins said, as matter-of-factly as he could manage. “My dad’s lost some weight, since you’ve seen him,” the boy said. “He weighs almost a hundred—maybe ninety-something pounds.” Then he opened the door.

  “It broke my heart,” Elaine told me, later. “How that boy was trying to prepare us.” But as I was only beginning to learn about that goddamn disease, there was no way to be prepared for it.

  “Oh, there she is—my sister, Emily,” Peter Atkins said, when he finally let us enter the room where his dad lay dying.

  The dog, Jacques, was a chocolate Labrador with a gray-white muzzle—an old dog, I could tell, not only by his grizzled nose and jaws, but by how slowly and unsteadily the dog came out from under the hospital bed to greet us. One of his hind legs slipped a little on the floor; his tail wagged only slightly, as if it hurt his hips to wag his tail at all.

  “Jacques is almost thirteen,” Peter told Elaine and me, “but that’s pretty old for a dog—and he has arthritis.” The dog’s cold, wet nose touched my hand and then Elaine’s; that was all the old Lab had wanted. There was a subsequent thump when the dog lay down under the bed again.

  The girl, Emily, was curled up like a second dog at the foot of her father’s hospital bed. It was probably of some small comfort to Tom that his daughter was keeping his feet warm. It was an indescribable exertion for Atkins to breathe; I knew that his hands and feet would be cold—the circulation to Tom’s extremities was closing down, trying to shunt blood to his brain.

  Emily’s reaction to Elaine and me was delayed. She sat up and screamed, but belatedly; she’d been reading a book, which flew from her hands. The sound of its fluttering pages was lost to the girl’s scream. I saw an oxygen tank in the cluttered room—what had been Atkins’s “study,” as his son had explained, now converted for a deathwatch.

  I also observed that his daughter’s scream had little effect on Tom Atkins—he’d barely moved in the hospital bed. It probably hurt him to turn his head; yet his bare chest, while the rest of his shrunken body lay still, was vigorously heaving. The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Tom’s chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above the nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone.

  “These are Dad’s old friends, from school, Emily,” Peter said irritably to his little sister. “You knew they were coming.”

  The girl stalked across the room to her far-flung book; when she’d retrieved it, she turned and glared. Emily definitely glared at me; she may have been glaring at her brother and Elaine, too. When the thirteen-year-old spoke, I felt certain she was speaking only to me, though Elaine would try in vain to assure me later, on the train, that Tom’s daughter had been addressing both of us. (I don’t think so.)

  “Are you sick, too?” Emily asked.

  “No, I’m not—I’m sorry,” I answered her. The girl then marched out of the room.

  “Tell Mom they’re here, Emily. Tell Mom!” Peter called after his angry sister.

  “I will!” we heard the girl shout.

  “Is that you, Bill?” Tom Atkins asked; I saw him try to move his head, and I stepped closer to the bed. “Bill Abbott—are you here?” Atkins asked; his voice was weak and terribly labored. His lungs made a thick gurgling. The oxygen tank must have been for only occasional (and superficial) relief; there probably was a mask, but I didn’t see it—the oxygen was in lieu of a ventilator. Morphine would come next, at the end stage.

  “Yes, it’s me—Bill—and Elaine is with me, Tom,” I told Atkins. I touched his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. I could see poor Tom’s face now. That greasy-looking seborrheic dermatitis was in his scalp, on his eyebrows, and flaking off the sides of his nose.

  “Elaine, too!” Atkins gasped. “Elaine and Bill! Are you all right, Bill?” he asked me.

  “Yes, I’m all right,” I told him; I’d never felt so ashamed to be “all right.”

  There was a tray of medications, and other intimidating-looking stuff, on the bedside table. (I would remember the heparin solution, for some reason—it was for flushing out the Hickman catheter.) I saw the white, cheesy curds of the Candida crusting the corners of poor Tom’s mouth.

  “I did not recognize him, Billy,” Elaine would say later, when we were returning to New York. Yet how do you recognize a grown man who weighs only ninety-something pounds?

  Tom Atkins and I were thirty-nine, but he resembled a man in his sixties; his hair was not only translucent and thin—what there was of it was completely gray. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, his temples deeply dented, his cheeks caved in; poor Tom’s nostrils were pinched tightly together, as if he could already detect the stench of his own cadaver, and his taut skin, which had once been so ruddy, was an ashen color.

  Hippocratic facies was the term for that near-death face—that tightly fitted mask of death, which so many of my friends and lovers who died of AIDS would one day wear. It was skin stretched over a skull; the skin was so improbably hard and tense, you were sure it was going to split.

  I was holding one of Tom’s cold hands, and Elaine was holding the other one—I could see Elaine trying not to stare at the Hickman catheter in Atkins’s bare chest—when we heard the dry cough. For a moment, I imagined that poor Tom had died and his cough had somehow escaped his body. But I saw the son’s eyes; Peter knew that cough, and where it came from. The boy turned to the open doorway of the room—where his mother now stood, coughing. It didn’t sound like all that serious a cough, but Sue Atkins was having trouble stopping it. Elaine and I had heard that cough before; the earliest stages of Pneumocystis pneumonia don’t sound too bad. The shortness of breath and the fever were often worse than the cough.


  “Yes, I have it,” Sue Atkins said; she was controlling the cough, but she couldn’t stop it. “In my case, it’s just starting,” Mrs. Atkins said; she was definitely short of breath.

  “I infected her, Bill—that’s the story,” Tom Atkins said.

  Peter, who’d been so poised, was trying to slip sideways past his mother into the hall.

  “No—you stay here, Peter. You need to hear what your father has to say to Bill,” Sue Atkins told her son; the boy was crying now, but he backed into the room, still looking at the doorway, which his mom was blocking.

  “I don’t want to stay, I don’t want to hear . . .” the boy began; he was shaking his head, as if this were a proven method to make himself stop crying.

  “Peter—you have to stay, you have to listen,” Tom Atkins said. “Peter is why I wanted to see you, Bill,” Tom said to me. “Bill has some discernible traces of moral responsibility—doesn’t he, Elaine?” Tom suddenly asked her. “I mean Bill’s writing—at least his writing has discernible traces of moral responsibility, doesn’t it? I don’t really know Bill anymore,” Atkins admitted. (Tom couldn’t say more than three or four words without needing to take a breath.)

  “Moral responsibility,” I repeated.

  “Yes, he does—Billy takes moral responsibility. I think so,” Elaine said. “I don’t mean only in your writing, Billy,” Elaine added.

  “I don’t have to stay—I’ve heard this before,” Sue Atkins suddenly said. “You don’t have to stay, either, Elaine. We can go try to talk to Emily. She’s a challenge to talk to, but she’s better with women than she is with men—as a rule. Emily really hates men,” Mrs. Atkins said.

  “Emily screams almost every time she sees a man,” Peter explained; he had stopped crying.

  “Okay, I’ll come with you,” Elaine said to Sue Atkins. “I’m not all that crazy about most men, either—I just don’t like women at all, usually.”

  “That’s interesting,” Mrs. Atkins said.

  “I’ll come back when it’s time to say good-bye,” Elaine called to Tom, as she was leaving, but Atkins seemed to ignore the good-bye reference.

  “It’s amazing how easy time becomes—when there’s no more of it, Bill,” Tom began.

  “Where is Charles—he should be here, shouldn’t he?” Peter Atkins asked his dad. “Just look at this room! Why is that old oxygen tank still here? The oxygen doesn’t help him anymore,” the boy explained to me. “Your lungs need to work in order to have any benefit from oxygen. If you can’t breathe in, how are you going to get the oxygen? That’s what Charles says.”

  “Peter, please stop,” Tom Atkins said to his son. “I asked Charles for a little privacy—Charles will be back soon.”

  “You’re talking too much, Daddy,” the boy said. “You know what happens when you try to talk too much.”

  “I want to talk to Bill about you, Peter,” his father said.

  “This part is crazy—this part makes no sense,” Peter said.

  Tom Atkins seemed to be hoarding his remaining breath before he spoke to me: “I want you to keep an eye on my boy when I’m gone, Bill—especially if Peter is ‘like us,’ but even if he isn’t.”

  “Why me, Tom?” I asked him.

  “You don’t have any children, do you?” Atkins asked me. “All I’m asking you is to keep one eye on one kid. I don’t know what to do about Emily—you might not be the best choice for someone to look after Emily.”

  “No, no, no,” the boy suddenly said. “Emily stays with me—she goes where I go.”

  “You’ll have to talk her into it, Peter, and you know how stubborn she is,” Atkins said; it was harder and harder for poor Tom to get enough breath. “When I die—when your mom is dead, too—it’s this man here I want you talking to, Peter. Not your grandfather.”

  I’d met Tom’s parents at our graduation from Favorite River. His father had taken a despairing look at me; he’d refused to shake my hand. That was Peter’s grandfather; he hadn’t called me a fag, but I’d felt him thinking it.

  “My father is very . . . unsophisticated,” Atkins had told me at the time.

  “He should meet my mom,” was all I’d said.

  Now Tom was asking me to be his son’s advice-giver. (Tom Atkins had never been much of a realist.) “Not your grandfather,” Atkins said a second time to Peter.

  “No, no, no,” the boy repeated; he’d started to cry again.

  “Tom, I don’t know how to be a father—I’ve had no experience,” I said. “And I might get sick, too.”

  “Yes!” Peter Atkins cried. “What if Bill or Billy, or whatever his name is, gets sick?”

  “I think I better have a little oxygen, Bill—Peter knows how to do it, don’t you, Peter?” Tom asked his son.

  “Yes—of course I know how to do it,” the boy said; he immediately stopped crying. “Charles is the one who should be giving you oxygen, Daddy—and it won’t work, anyway!” the fifteen-year-old cried. “You just think the oxygen is getting to your lungs; it really isn’t.” I saw the oxygen mask then—Peter knew where it was—and while the boy attended to the oxygen tank, Tom Atkins smiled proudly at me.

  “Peter is a wonderful boy,” Atkins said; I saw that Tom couldn’t look at his son when he said this, or he would have lost his composure. Atkins was managing to hold himself together by looking at me.

  Similarly, when Atkins spoke, I could manage to hold myself together only by looking at his fifteen-year-old son. Besides, as I would say later to Elaine, Peter looked more like Tom Atkins to me than Atkins even remotely looked like himself.

  “You weren’t this assertive when I knew you, Tom,” I said, but I kept my eyes on Peter; the boy was very gently fitting the oxygen mask to his father’s unrecognizable face.

  “What does ‘assertive’ mean?” Peter asked me; his father laughed. The laugh made Atkins gasp and cough, but he’d definitely laughed.

  “What I mean by ‘assertive’ is that your dad is someone who takes charge of a situation—he’s someone who has confidence in a situation that many people lack confidence in,” I said to the boy. (I couldn’t believe I was saying this about the Tom Atkins I’d known, but at this moment it was true.)

  “Is that any better?” Peter asked his father, who was struggling to breathe the oxygen; Tom was working awfully hard for very little relief, or so it seemed to me, but Atkins managed to nod at his son’s question—all the while never taking his eyes off me.

  “I don’t think the oxygen makes a difference,” Peter Atkins said; the boy was examining me more closely than before. I saw Atkins inch his forearm across the bed; he nudged his son with that arm. “So . . .” the boy began, as if this were his idea, as if his dad hadn’t already said to him, When my old friend Bill is here, you be sure to ask him about the summer we spent in Europe together, or words to that effect. “So . . .” the boy started again. “I understand that you and my dad traveled all over Europe together. So—what was that like?”

  I knew I would burst into tears if I so much as glanced at Tom Atkins—who laughed again, and coughed, and gasped—so I just kept looking at Tom’s carrot-haired likeness, his darling fifteen-year-old son, and I said, as if I were also following a script, “First of all, I was trying to read this book, but your dad wouldn’t let me—not unless I read the whole book out loud to him.”

  “You read a whole book out loud to him!” Peter exclaimed in disbelief.

  “We were both nineteen, but he made me read the entire novel—out loud. And your father hated the book—he was actually jealous of one of the characters; he simply didn’t want me to spend a single minute alone with her,” I explained to Peter. The boy was thoroughly delighted now. (I knew what I was doing—I was auditioning.)

  I guess that the oxygen was working a little—or it was working in Tom’s mind—because Atkins had closed his eyes, and he was smiling. It was almost the same goofy smile I remembered, if you could ignore the Candida.

  “How can you be jealo
us of a woman in a novel?” Peter Atkins asked me. “This was only make-believe—a made-up story, right?”

  “Right,” I told Peter, “and she’s a miserable woman. She’s unhappy all the time, and she eventually poisons herself and dies. Your dad even detested this woman’s feet!”

  “Her feet!” the boy exclaimed, laughing more.

  “Peter!” we heard his mother calling. “Come here—let your father rest!”

  But my audition was doomed from the start.

  “It was entirely orchestrated—the whole thing was rehearsed. You know that, don’t you, Billy?” Elaine would ask me later, when we were on the train.

  “I know that now,” I would tell her. (I didn’t know it then.)

  Peter left the room just as I was getting started! I’d had much more to say about that summer Tom Atkins and I spent in Europe, but suddenly young Peter was gone. I thought poor Tom was asleep, but he’d moved the oxygen mask away from his mouth and nose, and—with his eyes still closed—he found my wrist with his cold hand. (At first touch, I’d thought his hand was the old dog’s nose.) Tom Atkins wasn’t smiling now; he must have known we were alone. I believe Atkins also knew that the oxygen wasn’t working; I think he knew that it would never work again. His face was wet with tears.

  “Is there eternal darkness, Bill?” Atkins asked me. “Is there a monster’s face, waiting there?”

  “No, no, Tom,” I tried to assure him. “It’s either just darkness—no monster, no anything—or it’s very bright, truly the most amazing light, and there are lots of wonderful things to see.”

  “No monsters, either way—right, Bill?” poor Tom asked me.

  “That’s right, Tom—no monsters, either way.”

  I was aware of someone behind me, in the doorway of the room. It was Peter; he’d come back—I didn’t know how long he’d been there, or what he’d overheard.

  “Is the monster’s face in the darkness in that same book?” the boy asked me. “Is the face also make-believe?”