by John Irving
"I should call your mother," I repeated, but I knew Elaine was right.
"Let's hear you say 'penis,' Billy."
"That's not fair, Elaine--that's different."
"Say it," Elaine said.
But I knew how it would sound. It was, is, and will always be penith to me; some things never change. I didn't try to say the penis word for Elaine. "Cock," I said to her.
I didn't call Mrs. Hadley about my pronunciation breakthrough, either. I was trying to distance myself from the disease--even as the epidemic was only beginning. I was already feeling guilty that I didn't have it.
THE 1981 ATKINS CHRISTMAS card came on time that year. No generic "Season's Greetings," more than a month late, but an unapologetic "Merry Christmas" in December.
"Uh-oh," Elaine said, when I showed her the Atkins family photo. "Where's Tom?"
Atkins wasn't in the picture. The names of the family were printed on the Christmas card in small capitals: TOM, SUE, PETER, EMILY & JACQUES ATKINS. (Jacques was the Labrador; Atkins had named the dog after Kittredge!) But Tom had missed the family photograph.
"Maybe he wasn't feeling very photogenic," I said to Elaine.
"His color wasn't so hot last Christmas, was it? And he'd lost all that weight," Elaine said.
"The ski hat was hiding his hair and his eyebrows," I added. (There'd been no Tom Atkins review of my fourth novel, I'd noticed. I doubted that Atkins had changed his mind about Madame Bovary.)
"Shit, Billy," Elaine said. "What do you make of the message?"
The message, which was written by hand on the back of the Christmas photo, was from the wife. There was not a lot of information in it, and it wasn't very Christmasy.
Tom has mentioned you. He would like to see you.
Sue Atkins
"I think he's dying--that's what I think," I told Elaine.
"I'll go with you, Billy--Tom always liked me," Elaine said.
Elaine was right--poor Tom had always adored her (and Mrs. Hadley)--and, not unlike old times, I felt braver in Elaine's company. If Atkins was dying of AIDS, I was pretty sure his wife would already know everything about that summer twenty years ago, when Tom and I were in Europe together.
That night, I called Sue Atkins. It turned out that Tom had been placed in hospice care at his home in Short Hills, New Jersey. I'd never known what Atkins did, but his wife told me that Tom had been a CEO at a life-insurance company; he'd worked in New York City, five days a week, for more than a decade. I guessed that he'd never felt like seeing me for lunch or dinner, but I was surprised when Sue Atkins said that she'd thought her husband had been seeing me; apparently, there were nights when Tom hadn't made it back to New Jersey in time for dinner.
"It wasn't me he was seeing," I told Mrs. Atkins. I mentioned that Elaine wanted to visit Tom, too--if we weren't "intruding," was how I'd put it.
Before I could explain who Elaine was, Sue Atkins said, "Yes, that would be all right--I've heard all about Elaine." (I didn't ask Mrs. Atkins what she'd heard about me.)
Elaine was teaching that term--grading final papers, I explained on the phone. Perhaps we could come to Short Hills on a Saturday; there wouldn't be all the commuters on the train, I was thinking.
"The children will be home from school, but that will be fine with Tom," Sue said. "Certainly Peter knows who you are. That trip to Europe--" Her voice just stopped. "Peter knows what's going on, and he's devoted to his father," Mrs. Atkins began again. "But Emily--well, she's younger. I'm not sure how much Emily really knows. You can't do much to counter what your kids hear in school from the other kids--not if your kids won't tell you what the other kids are saying."
"I'm sorry for what you're going through," I told Tom's wife.
"I always knew this might happen. Tom was candid about his past," Sue Atkins said. "I just didn't know he'd gone back there. And this terrible disease--" Her voice stopped again.
I was looking at the Christmas card while we spoke on the phone. I'm not good at guessing young girls' ages. I wasn't sure how old Emily was; I just knew she was the younger child. I was estimating that the boy, Peter Atkins, would have been fourteen or fifteen--about the same age poor Tom had been when I'd first met him and thought he was a loser who couldn't even pronounce the time word. Atkins had told me he'd called me Bill, instead of Billy, because he noticed that Richard Abbott always called me Bill, and anyone could see how much I loved Richard.
Poor Tom had also confessed to me that he'd overheard Martha Hadley's outburst, when I was seeing Mrs. Hadley in her office and Atkins had been waiting for his turn. "Billy, Billy--you've done nothing wrong!" Mrs. Hadley had cried, loud enough for Atkins to have heard her through the closed door. (It was when I'd told Martha Hadley about my crushes on other boys and men, including my slightly fading crush on Richard and my much more devastating crush on Kittredge.)
Poor Tom told me that he'd thought I was having an affair with Mrs. Hadley! "I actually believed you'd just ejaculated in her office, or something, and she was trying to assure you that you'd done nothing 'wrong'--that's what I thought she meant by the wrong word, Bill," Atkins had confessed to me.
"What an idiot you are!" I'd told him; now I felt ashamed.
I asked Sue Atkins how Tom was doing--I meant those opportunistic illnesses I already knew something about, and what drugs Tom was taking. When she said he'd developed a rash from the Bactrim, I knew poor Tom was being treated for the Pneumocystis pneumonia. Since Tom was in hospice care at home, he wasn't on a ventilator; his breathing would be harsh and aspirate--I knew that, too.
Sue Atkins also said something about how hard it was for Tom to eat. "He has trouble swallowing," she told me. (Just telling me this made her suppress a cough, or perhaps she'd gagged; she suddenly sounded short of breath.)
"From the Candida--he can't eat?" I asked her.
"Yes, it's esophageal candidiasis," Mrs. Atkins said, the terminology sounding oh-so-familiar to her. "And--this is fairly recent--there's a Hickman catheter," Sue explained.
"How recent is the Hickman?" I asked Mrs. Atkins.
"Oh, just the last month," she told me. So they were feeding him through the catheter--malnutrition. (With Candida, difficulty swallowing usually responded to fluconazole or amphotericin B--unless the yeast had become resistant.)
"If they have you on a Hickman for hyperalimentation feeding, Bill, you're probably starving," Larry had told me.
I kept thinking about the boy, Peter; in the Christmas photo, he reminded me of the Tom Atkins I'd known. I imagined that Peter might be what poor Tom himself had once described as "like us." I was wondering if Atkins had noticed that his son was "like us." That was how Tom had put it, years ago: "Not everyone here understands people like us," he'd said, and I'd wondered if Atkins was making a pass at me. (It had been the first pass that a boy like me ever made at me.)
"Bill!" Sue Atkins said sharply, on the phone. I realized I was crying.
"Sorry," I said.
"Don't you dare cry around us when you come here," Mrs. Atkins said. "This family is all cried out."
"Don't let me cry," I told Elaine on that Saturday, not long before Christmas 1981. The holiday shoppers were headed the other way, into New York City. There was almost no one on the train to Short Hills, New Jersey, on that December Saturday.
"How am I supposed to stop you from crying, Billy? I don't have a gun--I can't shoot you," Elaine said.
I was feeling a little jumpy about the gun word. Elmira, the nurse Richard Abbott and I had hired to look after Grandpa Harry, ceaselessly complained to Richard about "the gun." It was a Mossberg .30-30 carbine, lever-action--the same type of short-barreled rifle Nils had used to kill himself. (I can't remember, but I think Nils had a Winchester or a Savage, and it wasn't a lever-action; I just know it was also a .30-30 carbine.)
Elmira had complained about Grandpa Harry "excessively cleanin' the damn Mossberg"; apparently, Harry would clean the gun in Nana Victoria's clothes--he got gun oil on a lot of he
r dresses. It was all the dry-cleaning that upset Elmira. "He's not out shootin'--no more deerhuntin' on skis, not at his age, he's promised me--but he just keeps cleanin' and cleanin' the damn Mossberg!" she told Richard.
Richard had asked Grandpa Harry about it. "There's no point in havin' a gun if you don't keep it clean," Harry had said.
"But perhaps you could wear your clothes when you clean it, Harry," Richard had said. "You know--jeans, an old flannel shirt. Something Elmira doesn't have to get dry-cleaned."
Harry hadn't responded--that is, not to Richard. But Grandpa Harry told Elmira not to worry: "If I shoot myself, Elmira, I promise I won't leave you with any friggin' dry-cleanin'."
Now, of course, both Elmira and Richard were worried about Grandpa Harry shooting himself, and I kept thinking about that super-clean .30-30. Yes, I was worried about Grandpa Harry's intentions, too, but--to be honest with you--I was relieved to know the damn Mossberg was ready for action. To be very honest with you, I wasn't worrying about Grandpa Harry as much as I was worrying about me. If I got the disease, I knew what I was going to do. Vermont boy that I am, I wouldn't have hesitated. I was planning to head home to First Sister--to Grandpa Harry's house on River Street. I knew where he kept that .30-30; I knew where Harry stashed his ammunition. What my grandpa called a "varmint gun" was good enough for me.
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 ca
ved 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.)