by Louis Begley
A baseball diamond filled the screen.
Is that better?
I can see. It’s just these whirs that don’t stop.
I stood at the dining room door. Dick Moses was working his way through a sort of catalogue raisonné of Charlie’s buildings, publications, and medals. Just as I thought the end had been reached, he meandered back to their days together at the School of Design. There had been a joint project for a library, which a now-forgotten chairman of the jury had had the temerity to criticize before the class as “weakly derivative.” Like all your work! was Charlie’s loud rejoinder. During Moses’s description of the ensuing pandemonium, and the clinking of glasses around the dinner table, I made my way to Charlie and said, loud enough to be heard by Edwina and the press magnate, Come upstairs for a moment, there’s a call for you from Tokyo. It’s some incomprehensible man whose name I didn’t catch. Perhaps he wants to wish you happy birthday. Toby answered and is trying to keep him on the line.
At the foot of the stairs, I told him what had happened, and returned to my place next to Edwina. My glass was empty. Feigning distraction, I drank Edwina’s, although Toby’s was full as well.
How extraordinary that you boys heard the telephone ring! I was so engrossed by our conversation, my dear Max. You really must come to lunch just with Ricky and me. One is always interrupted at large parties.
It’s Toby’s own line. I guess he is used to listening for it.
That dear child! He stayed upstairs to share in Charlie’s joy!
Minutes passed. Majestic and grim, Charlie entered the room. His voice filled it.
Your carriages are waiting. What I must do upstairs will keep me for a while. And he raised his arms, palms open, as though to bless the congregation.
I did not follow the others. Pretending to look for a book in the living room—although in fact I was sure that no one paid attention to me—I waited until the last guest was out the door and then went back upstairs to Toby’s room. Just as I had left him, immobile, he was staring at a commercial for small Ford trucks. Perhaps the game had ended. Only now he was weeping, his face was wet with tears, and he was doing nothing to dry them. Unintelligible, Charlie could be heard over the jingle from somewhere down the hall. He slammed down the receiver and came into the room.
Aha, you’re still here. Little Miss Discretion. No, forgive me. It’s just as well you lied. They’re mostly like me: cold, insincere people, barely polite enough to hide it. Get Toby into other clothes, something warm, while I also change. We will start for New York. The doctor wants to put him on some drug.
Will you call me?
He did, a few days later, after I had returned to Cambridge and my teaching. It was a neurological problem, he told me, more frightening than serious. Toby was already back at Pratt. He, Charlie, was going to Europe, Düsseldorf principally, to keep promises he had made when the city engaged him to build the new lyric arts theater. Was I planning to be away? No? That’s what he had thought, so he counted on me to look a bit after Toby. Wasn’t it strange how the world revolved? Even in Beijing he had felt there was a link between the boy and me, a dependency of a younger brother on his elder. Very beautiful, really. I might want to come to New York on some weekends. Otherwise, his driver was available; he would bring Toby to me—Billington or Cambridge, it didn’t matter. That would tide Toby over until he felt confident enough of his vision to drive a car.
And when will you return?
Certainly by Thanksgiving. I can always fly back for a few days if there is a problem.
THAT OLD WITCH, Edwina, had been at least half-right, though I refrained from writing to her about my new duties or any other aspect of the situation. She had a network of other informants, I imagined, busy on the telephone from messy lukewarm beds after the tisane, toast, and stock tables. We settled into a routine, the boy and I. After the hospital, where they stopped the black spots, he did not go back to his apartment. A friend, possibly a fellow student, moved in—to water plants, clean the aquarium, and discourage burglars from entering through the skylight. Toby had refused to have bars placed over it, claiming they would make him feel he was imprisoned in a small Max Ernst. He lived instead at Charlie’s. When I came to see him on weekends, in the city, I declined the use of the vaunted guest quarters of the River House apartment and stayed instead at the Peninsula—convenient, pompously refurbished, and half-empty, having in common with the sparkling white establishment in Kowloon only the name and occasional clumps of Hong Kong Chinese guests, done up in suede, waiting for their stretch limos to pull up—and, as he was still rather shaken and tired easily, first thing in the morning I would walk eastward to the river, the half mile I covered giving me the impression that I was managing to combine attention to my own health with watching over Toby’s. We sat together in the study. Either he managed to get his schoolwork done during the week, or his interest in it was waning. Huddled in the corner of the couch, an alpaca plaid over his shoulders, the TV volume turned down, so as to let me get on with my reading and occasional note taking, he absorbed what the pundits were saying of that month’s clownish and premonitory events. Then during lunch he would comment on Cardinal Glemp, like some transvestite Joan of Arc, emerging as the champion of the nuns of Auschwitz, the navy’s glee at having found the perfect scapegoat—a “loner” (therefore gay, not one of us) and already dead—to blame for the humiliation of the Iowa, and Ed Koch and the Evil Empire unraveling in unison. These were companionable meals, served by Charlie’s houseman. I made a point of disregarding the pills he set out for Toby. The intrusive memories of how my father ate, awakened somehow by the diet additives Toby was consuming, were harder to keep at bay.
In October, he told me that, if he was driven up and then back to the city, he could manage Billington. The leaves had just turned scarlet and ruby I moved the television set into my guest room, and it was there, he in bed and I on the chaise longue he arranged to have upholstered for me with bottle-green cut velvet, that we celebrated the New York Stock Exchange’s free fall on Friday, October 13. I say that without irony, as my State Street trustees had turned every stock that was not “our bank’s” into cash some weeks earlier. While I drank my bourbon—Toby had problems with his mouth or gums that made drinking even wine painful—I meditated on the possibility of urging them to go quickly back into the market, which suddenly seemed full of bargains. Were the black orphans and I on the road to even greater prosperity?
In fact, I found the onslaughts and retreats of Toby’s sores—most often on his face, hands, and forearms—embarrassing and scary. The former, because they were so insistently visible, and yet I never alluded to them; the latter, because they told me he was not making a recovery. When I was in Cambridge, there operated, parallel to Toby’s attendance at classes, a system of visits to his doctor (perhaps he saw more than one) and treatments, the nature of which I only surmised. That was the circle within which those eruptions were dealt with. My not wanting to know more than that was a mixture of respect for Toby’s dignity, squeamishness about illness, and fear of reaching that point where pity intersects with contempt.
I thought that Toby read me like an open book but did not take offense. Perhaps he preferred silence; I could not be sure. But did I have the right to observe in silence? Had I not assumed some sort of responsibility for how he was cared for? The law of torts is full of horror stories of Good Samaritans undertaking to be helpful to a man bleeding by the roadside, botching the job, and being held liable in damages. In moral terms, was that my case? On the telephone, Charlie’s reassurances were invariable: Toby had the best doctor in the country; he, Charlie, spoke with Toby daily and once a week with the doctor; if anything needed to be done, the doctor would tell him at once. What did that mean?
We were watching euphoric lunar figures gesticulating and embracing one another, some astride the Berlin Wall. Toby, as usual, was on the bed, covered by a light blanket. I had pulled up a chair to be near. In a moment of abandon, I slapp
ed him on the knee. He could not restrain a howl of pain. Moments later, seeing how upset I was, he managed a grin and showed me his leg. It was covered by what looked like leeches but, in reality, were hot, black, suppurating scabs.
Some days later, Charlie returned, full of stories about the spring of nations. My watch was over. The following week he telephoned again. Toby had had a transfusion, with immediate, almost miraculous, effect. Would I come to celebrate at Thanksgiving lunch in New York? I said that was not possible: I was planning a private celebration with Laura. We had been conducting a very old-fashioned courtship, writing letters each day, sometimes more often. At last, she had agreed to marry me; she was coming to Cambridge, to Bluebeard’s castle, for a long visit.
HAPPINESS: it is made of Laura’s voice. She gossips with her sister in Florence; she teases and laughs; the conversations are interminable; they call each other as soon as Laura awakens, at the end of the afternoon, and also at any time of the day if something that strikes one or the other as funny has happened; they have the sense of humor of nine-year-olds playing hopscotch. When I come home from Langdell, I am greeted by that enchanting recitative. She sings and hums in her bath, and when she irons rapidly, just as we are about to go out, one of those silk jackets that are indispensable to her wardrobe (she likes to thrust her hands into their pockets, her fingers are unbearably long, like a magician’s, I do not tire of watching them and I am grateful that they are bare of rings), while driving my car as though we were on an autostrada, and on our walks along the Charles. Her repertory of children’s songs is endless. She likes to hold my hand.
Comfortable on the window seat, she reads in the white winter sun. Plain, serviceable glasses have settled on the tip of her serious nose. Now that she will be my wife I am allowed to see them. Before, she faked it; they were always tinted, like a movie star’s. Her legs—they too are long and end in big, sturdy feet, like a Manchu woman’s, of which she is very proud—are draped over the arm of her chair or stretch out before her, modestly crossed at the ankles. The butcher and the greengrocer are her acolytes. I have known these men for almost thirty years, and now they snub me. At her command, fat gray sausages appear miraculously in the bollito misto. My students interest her; it doesn’t matter if I invite them at the last minute. She will throw another fistful or two of pasta into the water that boils in the smallest and tinniest of pots—bought by her, because mine, heavy and enameled, are too fancy. She seeks their views on President Bush, abortion rights, and the strange case of Jim and Tammy Bakker. They call her Laura; by tacit agreement, I remain Professor Strong. St. Thomas held that when a powerful emotion seizes a man’s faculties it displaces all others. There is no room in my heart, mind, or life for anyone but Laura.
In the beginning of January, there comes an angry storm. I put on high rubber boots and walk to the Law School, then telephone her when I am ready to return for lunch. She tells me we will meet halfway. Brattle Street is deserted. Finally, her silhouette, tall and gracious, appears in the swirling whiteness. She takes my arm. No hat. Huge, wet snowflakes stick to her hair and eyelashes. Quick, we must hurry. Everywhere in the house there are yellow tulips and anemones of all colors, some in vases I have never seen. How mad, how splendid to have looked for them in this weather. It was essential, she answers—I wanted you to know right away that I am very happy. I put my arms around her. Very cold and wet cheeks and nose; she hasn’t dried them. As I hold her, she whispers into my ear that a miracle has happened. She is pregnant!
A FEW DAYS LATER, Laura left for Milan. A fellow dealer wanted to bid for her gallery; she was in a hurry to wind up her business in Italy. As though startled from a dream, I heard Charlie’s voice on the telephone. He had reached me at home, late in the evening. What was my blood type? I consulted my dog tags, preserved in a file folder together with my sharpshooter medals and a group photograph of my platoon. It was the same as Toby’s. Yes, I would come to New York for the weekend and give as much blood as was allowed within the span of three days.
He was in an upstairs bedroom in Charlie’s apartment, on a hospital bed, feet elevated. I recognized the alpaca plaid. There were silk shades with silk tassels on the sconces and table lamps. The light was mauve. He had insisted on seeing me, but I was to be careful not to tire him, as this was not a good day, and to make no reference to the bed or the oxygen tank.
Death is the greatest of sculptors. His modeling knife had removed all but the most indispensable matter from Toby’s face, indenting the cheeks and lengthening and refining the nose, until it had taken the form of a coin made of yellow and gray alabaster. His eyes looked at me from arched spaces, like Romanesque crypts, of prodigious depth; one did not think there could be room for them in the skull. But the eyes themselves were clear and luminous, and so gentle that I thought that all that was good in Toby had been concentrated in them. He made a croaking sound when he greeted me, causing the nurse—a pink young woman I had not noticed so long as she had remained in a chair in the corner of the room—to crank him up to a sitting position, offer a glass of milk, and put Vaseline on his lips. He thanked her and said that was much better. Indeed, she had almost succeeded in giving him back his normal voice. I told him about the baby.
It will be a Leo, he observed. Like me.
That’s right, and when it’s baptized we will ask you to be the godfather! Perhaps both you and Arthur, if he is willing to agree to look after the kid’s religious upbringing.
Two godfathers like that! The child will be sure to grow up to do something bad.
After a while he held out his hand to me. It was a very slow gesture.
I am glad they are going to fill me up with your blood. Charlie also has the same type, so our three bloods are getting all mixed up together. I think that’s a sign. Some part of both of you will remain inside me. We are blood brothers.
You’ve been watching too many Mafia movies!
The nurse had been listening.
We’re all related like that, she said, only people don’t take time to think about it.
VI
ISTOPPED THE CAR as close as possible to the snow-bank and got out. The pickup truck, which had tailgated me ever since I entered the village, stopped also, just ahead. The chains on its wheels ground violently, sending a shower of mud. The driver rolled down his window and yelled. He had wispy yellow hair, yellow aviator glasses, and a thin nose set in the sort of delicate, old-fashioned face not uncommon among inhabitants of certain remote Berkshire villages. The words were surely insults, but I couldn’t make them out or understand the reason for his rage. I shook my head in a gesture of incomprehension and walked in the direction of the mourners trudging past the church and along the path uphill to the old cemetery. The cab door slammed. In a moment he was beside me. In his hand was an ax handle.
Fucking queer, he cried, asshole, you fucking crawl on the highway. I should have run your fucking ass off the road.
I am sorry I held you up. My car was skidding.
And then, without a logical connection, I added, This is the funeral of a friend.
Up your ass.
He spat a glob of phlegm like an eyeball on the snow, directly at my feet. I wondered if he was about to hit me. Instead, he gave me the finger and headed back toward the road. I heard him slam the door of his truck again, then the motor being raced and the clatter of chains.
The snow had been melting all week. There was still a thick crust of it on the ground, but the tombstones were bare, even the horizontal ones scattered among the pines like counters for a game played by the hand of a giant. A yellow tractor with a scoop attached to its front end stood near the hole they had made for Toby. Around it, people were shaking hands and avoiding smiles. It seemed to me that they were also avoiding contact with the woman who was clearly Toby’s mother. Rouged, her silver hair set in a permanent under a black toque, she was in a wheelchair. A female keeper and a man who looked like the driver of a rented limousine stood behind her. Around them, a void.
I approached, introduced myself, and said, How do you do. I am terribly sorry. I loved Toby.
She stared. Then her face relaxed and she held out her hand. Perhaps she thought that she had managed to recognize me.
I am very glad to see you. Isn’t it lovely here?
In deference to a look from the keeper, I bowed and withdrew. That the mother would be brought out for the occasion had not occurred to me, but who was to say that Charlie had not done the right thing even if, as Toby maintained, she understood nothing? Otherwise, I could see that the usual suspects had been assembled: representative elders from Stockbridge and Lenox, Edwina and Ricky, their suntans like airline luggage tags proving they had come directly from Florida, certain faces I had seen at Charlie’s birthday dinner. Glowering, squeezed into a heavy double-breasted black greatcoat, in his left hand pearl gray gloves and a black homburg, he received new arrivals at the side of the lady minister. I was crushed in his vast embrace.
Instinctively, we formed a semicircle facing them. The keeper pushed the wheelchair into the center. Charlie nodded approval.
Thanks to you all. Toby’s mother and I are deeply honored by your presence. Please do not expect speeches or refreshments. After the entombment, we will scatter like fallen leaves—in silence.
The minister read from a thin, worn-out book. Unable to concentrate on the familiar words, I studied her appearance. What was the significance of the color of her stole? Was it for funerals, or did it indicate rank in the church? Under her surplice one could see a brown fur coat. It was beaver, I supposed, just as perfect for the climate and this outdoor function as her laced boots of beige and white shorthaired hide, rather like what one used to see in pictures of Eskimo families standing outside an igloo.
At last, she closed her book. Some men with shovels moved forward. Charlie raised his hand to stop them, whereupon I noticed standing alone, beside a fir tree, a short gent, dressed in black like Charlie, but with a long English undergraduate’s scarf, red with odd cream stripes, wrapped around his neck. He moved forward, halted, and began to sing. A virile, very dark voice spread over the hillside. It was huge enough to fill even the emptiness above.