by Laura Argiri
Doriskos himself was up at first light, blearily drinking coffee in the dawn chill of the kitchen and thinking how he’d been snatched from consummation by the jaws of chastity—was that a mixed metaphor?—and this time against his will. And oh, that precious freedom from fear, which came so seldom and which, last night, had been allied with opportunity and desire! Gone, and for how long? It made him want to pound his head on the stone kitchen wall. If it hadn’t been aching already, he might have. He sat there and cursed, among other things, modernity and its special-delivery telegrams.
When Simion came down, he kissed Doriskos on the cheek, a mute acknowledgment of the events of last night. (In some curious way, the aborted consummation seemed to have moved them along in their intimacy, though fragilely, imperfectly—a progress shaded with tragedy, like a wartime wedding under an arc of swords. That was the metaphor that Doriskos’s visual imagination gave him—an arc of swords, a flutter of black veiling.)
“Has the mail come yet? I’m sure there’ll be either mail to follow that wire, or more wires. I’m his executor, there are things I’ll have to do. I don’t know what…”
Doriskos hurried to get the mail. “Something from the Troll of Haliburton. And another letter, from Georgia.”
Frowning, Simion chose his father’s letter and got up to read it nearer the stove, the quicker to dispose of it. Taking a deep, distasteful breath, he scanned John Ezra’s missive. “One of your teachers, one Karseth, saw fit to write to me and advise me of your fine progress. Karseth sounds like a foreign name, a Jewish one at that—do they allow Jews at that college? It would be like you to want to attend a college that has Jews. You never cease to amaze me at how you manage to fool all these ridiculous scholars, who have made over you all your life. Kindly remember, however, that I am quite undeluded on this score and unimpressed with you and your monkey-tricks. I was forced to return a letter, thanking him for his compliments but advising him of your bad proclivities and the baseness of your moral nature. And, may I reiterate, that if any hearsay reaches me concerning you and the low barmaids and drabs of the place, it will go very ill with you, that I warrant.”
Simion tore it ceremoniously into sixteen pieces for an auto-da-fé. “Piss on your teeth,” he murmured to the charring pieces, as if they were John Ezra in person. “You’ve never even seen a Jew!”
“What does it say?”
“Father thinks there are Jews here.”
“Your father has the most peculiar and uninteresting preoccupations. Oh, I forgot,” said Doriskos. “I found a package on the doorstep earlier this morning. I think I put it down on the foyer table. The box was coming apart.”
Don’t tell me, Simion thought, that dear Father is sending me a present. Probably a chastity belt or a hair shirt in the latest Armageddon cut. John Ezra, whose tracts were a fair representation of his taste, was in the habit of giving ghastly presents. Simion remembered one primer given him by his parent; probably authored by the same clean-living New Englanders who inspired The Scarlet Letter, it contained cheerful rhymes intended to promote cautious life and terrorized death, and crude but unpleasant illustrations well calculated to disturb the infantile readership’s sleep. “In the Graveyard there be / Smaller Graves than me,” he recalled, grimacing. But he brought the box into the parlor, holding the splintery crate with care; he thought that if it contained something ghastly he would wrap it up in print paper and send it to Topher and Peter as a sort of bonne bouche. But no, it was not from Haliburton, but from Savannah also. He undid the cords, and his fingers met with the cold, slick surfaces of ceramic—Lincoln’s Niarchos tiles. There was Achilles binding the hurt arm of Patroclus in the midst of a litter of armor pieces; the leering soldier, all white pleated skirt and amber-brown muscles, bringing the captive Helen her bath water. The others. There was no note with them. Simion opened the other letter, which had come by the fast post.
It was a notice of death from Snow’s Establishment. It was written in a script as delicate as Valenciennes lace—“undertaker’s script,” as Simeon Lincoln had too appropriately called finicking, effeminate handwriting. Lincoln himself had written a surprisingly large and virile hand. This Valenciennes lace made a gray wash of itself before Simion’s eyes as he guessed its intelligence; then he compelled himself to read. His eye skitted down to the signature: Dr. Pierre Legare.
I regret to inform you, it began.
“Oh,” thought Simion, “don’t they all say that? They’ll say, ‘I regret to inform you that Saint Peter has seen fit to decline your kind application!’ God damn you for being useless and charging ten prices for those cures that don’t cure!” And part of Simion’s mind flew off immediately, a wailing bird of anguish, while its articulate part continued by gracious New England sunlight to read the missive.
Your friend has fought the good fight and has passed on to his Maker.
Mr. Lincoln left his affairs in excellent order, with a valid will which names you his sole heir. He appropriated money for the shipment of his library, his pianoforte, and other objects of value to you at 113 Temple Street, New Haven, Connecticut, directing that a certain box of tiles should be the first parcel. If this address is not your proper one, please inform us of the correct address. You will receive also the deeds to his town house at 15 East Street, Savannah, and his beach house on Caroline Island, in the state of Georgia. It may not be entirely easy to arrange to have the body moved because of the season and the heat; I will offer what assistance I can with these arrangements. Mr. Lincoln directed in his will that there be no Christian burial ceremonies, but these arrangements are entirely your province. Now I can only offer you my condolences as—
“I think I need to go outside and take a walk by myself,” Simion said as Doriskos reached a tentative hand to him. He felt as if kindness would somehow hurt him as much as callousness now, just as any touch hurts the surface of a new burn. He went upstairs and got quickly into his street clothes. It occurred to him, as he propelled himself down Chapel Street, that he was absolutely alone in the world with Doriskos now. The notion frightened him, and he felt wicked for his fright. Bits of his own behavior last night came back to him, and that frightened him too. Pain and panic bonded in him as he neared the post office, which he entered. There he bought a postcard, borrowed a pen, and scrawled a vitriolic, if truncated, greeting to John Ezra.
Father: I received your kind letter with details of your recent slurs on my character. I don’t want you writing to me any more. I have hated you all my life, and if it didn’t mean having to look at and smell you, nothing would give me more pleasure this minute than to spit on you in person. I do not know what Dr. Karseth’s religious persuasion is, but I’m sure he’d despise you as much as I do. Simeon Lincoln is dead of the consumption, and I wish it were you. If you send any more letters concerning me to anyone, I will sue you for libel.
He went into Moriarty’s, his eyes hurting and a cold sweat collecting on his brow. He meant to ask for a brandy and soda, but found himself requesting a glass and a whole bottle of the syrupy brandy. It would probably take that much to achieve relief. The server gave him a dubious look, and Simion heard his own cold and unreasonable voice say, “Well, I can have it if I can pay for it, can’t I?” He held out a five-dollar note, which covered the price of the rotgut and a resplendent tip, and the bargain was struck. After a couple of glasses, he began to understand John Ezra’s predilection for getting pig-drunk: It really did ease the pain. The day ended for him when he heard the proprietor’s voice, filtering through the wavering haze: “Damn his soul, he’s drunk half the bottle and passed out!”
“I certainly hope so,” Simion thought, on his way down.
By the time Doriskos traced his difficult charge to the tavern, the wind was whistling its way meanly toward another storm like the previous night’s. As he opened the door, he heard the proprietor cursing out the opportunistic servitor: “Johnny Dawkins, I’m in the business of selling food and drink, not poisoning undergraduates, a
nd whatever possessed you to sell to one straight out of the nursery—”
Doriskos was afraid he’d come to the right place. He had. He sighted Simion’s new pewter-colored broadcloth coat and golden head; he’d bent forward limberly and now lay facedown on the table, his toneless hand yet around a half-glass of what looked like the dregs of the worst brandy in all of Connecticut. Doriskos scooped him up, only half hearing the apologies of the proprietor, and bore him out to the carriage and home.
When Simion got himself squiffed on his first evening in Doriskos’s house, it had seemed unintended, joyous, quite innocent really. It had been the opposite of this ugly and calculated self-poisoning. Doriskos himself had been almost as timid in the field of drink as in that of sex, being wary of anything that eroded his control, and he had never been drunker than two shallow glasses of champagne could make him; he’d never drunk to the pass-out point in his life. He didn’t know what would happen. He kept vigil as Simion slept without moving for ten hours, then woke up—helplessly, appallingly sick.
Later, Simion would tell him that he had been in such pain that he didn’t even remember the death for several hours. He’d poisoned himself, and his flesh made a no-holds-barred effort to throw the poison out at one end or another. Trembling, he crouched over one chamber pot and threw up convulsively into another, and between the spasms he was conscious of a headache so bad that he would have called it unendurable if he’d been able to think in words. His protracted heaves made his nose bleed.
Doriskos knelt behind him to hold him up so that he wouldn’t fall or choke and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, the blood from his face. When the worst of this seemed over, Doriskos cleaned him up and helped him into his nightclothes; he sank quickly into an extinguished, exhausted sleep. Doriskos sat by him a long time, contemplating the boy’s devastated face, his hair still wet at the sides from the tears that his pain had squeezed out of him. Doriskos’s throat ached with pity, and he was full of self-reproach for his own sense of helplessness, his lack of recourse.
Waking the next day, Simion still had the headache. He also had enough sentience to be ashamed of the nuisance he was creating—nuisance being a genteel euphemism for mounds of dirty towels and sheets, brimming pots he was too weak to drag to the privy himself, and trays of broth and poached eggs he couldn’t swallow. And with every retch, he was reminded of how much he needed someone to take care of him: He did a piss-poor job of it himself! Kiril was more than mildly annoyed with him. “It’s one thing if you get the grippe,” said Kiril, ever the gentleman’s gentleman but very tired of ferrying foul towels to the laundress’s house. “It’s another if you poison yourself. Enough,” said Kiril, “is enough.”
Finally, the hangover had hung over so at such debilitating length that Doriskos felt compelled to take action.
“I’m going to get Dr. Karseth,” he said, having just tried to help Simion sit up and seen him give up the effort, dizzy if he so much as lifted his head.
“I think…you better not. He’ll think ill of us. Even more than he already does, that is. He’ll think you did something improper to me.”
“Well, I haven’t, and I think I shall have to hazard his opinion,” said Doriskos. “Will you be all right for the ten minutes I’ll need to get him?” And, accepting no protests, he went.
What he did not know was that Moses had just received and read John Ezra’s letter concerning his son’s potential libertinage, and he and Helmut had been exclaiming over it, half-amused, half-appalled, and all amazed.
“God in heaven! As if he were writing about a Parisian courtesan of forty!”
“Rather than an American courtesan of seventeen,” said Karseth wickedly. “I’m sure that the top of the old gentleman’s head would spin off if someone acquainted him with Simion’s real inclinations. Peculiar how these parents who suspect their son of that always write about the things they needn’t worry about—yellow-paper-novel piffle about barmaids and whores. I’ve had other such letters, though I think this one wins the prize for sheer vitriol. He must loathe the poor little rascal. I’d wager he used to beat merry Hell out of him, too. And all because he has beautiful eyes and an inborn predilection for batting them at gorgeous lunatic artists rather than barmaids and drabs!”
“I’m sure that in this season of his life, Simion could be trusted with an entire harem in nothing but dangling crystal earrings and jasmine cologne. Though perhaps not a few years from now.”
These were the speculations interrupted by Klionarios’s pull on the bell and delicate account of Simion’s “drinking beyond his capacity.” With an expression of bland superiority, prominently not referring to their last conversation, Moses accompanied Doriskos to his house and shut him out of Simion’s room, then took a stunned look at the apparition in the bed.
“Klionarios—has he done anything to you?” asked Moses, sans preliminaries.
“Oh, good Lord God, no,” said Simion, in feeble impatience. “Doesn’t anyone ever consider that I might do things to myself? I drank some brandy, and I don’t seem able to get over it. I can’t eat or drink, and my head keeps spinning. I’ve vomited until my nose bled. And every time I think the throwing-up part of it’s over, back it comes like an artillery charge, and he’s holding my head and cleaning up instead of doing his work.”
“How much brandy are we talking about here?”
“Half a bottle,” said Simion with level adolescent defiance.
“What, only half a bottle? You look as if you just rose from the goddamned dead,” said Karseth, outraged at the idea of someone with this kind of constitution going so far out of his way to undermine it. “You look as if you drank a keg.”
“What?” asked Simion, playing stupid.
“Never mind, don’t let me give you ideas. Why should you drink half a bottle of brandy?”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“Exactly, but my morbid curiosity demands an explanation. Why did you?”
“A death. Someone I was fond of.”
“You’re quite sure that the august Mr. Klionarios has nothing to do with your half-alive condition?”
“Heavens, no. He didn’t offer me the brandy! I went out and bought it. He’s always stuffing me with chops and hot chocolate and other things with nutrition and value and all that, but now I can’t swallow anything, and I’m getting dried out.”
“You certainly are just about as dehydrated as a person can be and still talk sense,” said Karseth. He laid his hand on Simion’s forearm and almost winced. “I can tell by your loose skin alone, and the way your eyes are sunk back into your head.” He took out his watch, clucked over his patient’s thready pulse, and looked long and hard into his eyes.
“My doctor back where I lived before I came here said that I have stomach ulcers,” Simion contributed. “I probably made them worse with the brandy. I oughtn’t to have. I’ve always had a bad stomach.”
“He probably made them worse, he says,” remarked Karseth, as if to himself. He listened carefully to Simion’s heart sounds, then applied himself to checking out the bad stomach. He was gentle, but his examination hurt everywhere, to one extent or another. Every wrenched muscle in Simion’s body protested his probing hands.
“It hurts everywhere,” Simion finally told him. “It’s plagued me all my life. There’s the grinding pain down in the guts that feels like I’ve swallowed a basket of rocks, and there’s the nausea and fluttering sensation further up, and the feeling that my stomach’s full of slime, and the stabs and jabs just under the ribs. Usually it’s just one at a time, but now it’s all in play. But, believe me, if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. It’s nothing to do with Professor Klionarios. I…needed not to think about that death, so I went to drinking.”
“Was it worth this kind of pain to be rid of your thoughts?” asked Karseth.
“I’ve been reconsidering that matter. I expected a bad six hours, but not a hellacious two days.”
Karseth contemplated him in sile
nce for what seemed a long time. Then he noted, “Well, you seem to have overpaid. If you had a dimmer brain and a better constitution, I’d let you suffer it through and hope you’d learn your lesson about poisoning yourself. As the case is, I don’t dare let this go on a second longer than it must, so I’m going to offer you some heavy sedation and hope that you’ll have the sense never to do something like this to yourself again. I’m going to ask your good friend Klionarios to go and ask Helmut for some meat stock—”
“Don’t bother him unless you just want it yourself,” Simion interrupted. “I certainly can’t drink it.”
“It’s just clear broth, and I think you will be able to take it. My plan is to give you something that’ll make you sleep for most of the next day. In the interval between the medicine and the sleep, your various discomforts will diminish. You won’t feel your stomach so much. You may be able to swallow some broth then. Have you any experience of hypodermics?”
“No.”
“Well, your good luck in that respect has come to an end.” Karseth stepped out of the room, and from what Simion could hear, he asked Doriskos in quite a civilized manner to go for the soup and heat it. Simion watched him as he began to assemble his hypodermic syringe, then decided he’d be happier not seeing this. Karseth was right, it hurt quite a lot, a sort of protracted hornet sting. However, the opiate was like some blue tincture of pure peace traversing his veins, and his physical misery receded far away as a pool of sleep spread in his head. When Doriskos brought the cup of broth, he was able to drink most of it. He was drowsing when he remembered that there was something important he should do, though he couldn’t remember quite what. Finally he did, and groped through the bed-table drawer for his wallet. Though he seemed by now to be floating in some thick liquid rather than lying in a bed and breathing air, he thumbed through his billfold and found a dollar note.