by John Irving
Yet the male nurse, who was attending so carefully to my dead friend, was not that same Mephistopheles--nor were the ministrations Charles made to poor Tom's remains of a deviant or sexual nature. Charles was fussing over the Hickman catheter dangling from Atkins's unmoving chest.
"Poor Tommy--it's not my job to remove the Hickman," the nurse explained to Elaine and me. "The undertaker will pull it out. You see, there's a cuff--it's like a Velcro collar, around the tube--just inside the point where it enters the skin. Tommy's cells, his skin and body cells, have grown into that Velcro mesh. That's what keeps the catheter in place, so it doesn't fall out or get tugged loose. All the undertaker has to do is give it a very firm jerk, and out it comes," Charles told us; Elaine looked away.
"Maybe we shouldn't have left Tom alone," I told the nurse.
"Lots of people want to die alone," the nurse said. "I know Tommy wanted to see you--I know he had something to say. I'll bet he said it, right?" Charles asked me. He looked up at me and smiled. He was a strong, good-looking man with a crew cut and one silver earring--in the upper, cartilaginous part of his left ear. He was clean-shaven, and when he smiled, Charles looked nothing at all like the man I knew as Mephistopheles--a Mineshaft thug-enforcer.
"Yes, I think Tom said what he had to say," I told Charles. "He wanted me to keep an eye on Peter."
"Yes, well--good luck with that. I'm guessing that'll be up to Peter!" Charles said. (I'd not been entirely wrong to mistake him for a bouncer at the Mineshaft; Charles had some of the same cavalier qualities.)
"No, no, no!" we could hear young Peter crying all the way from the kitchen. The girl, Emily, had stopped screaming; so had her mom.
Charles was unseasonably dressed for December in New Jersey, the tight black T-shirt showing off his muscles and his tattoos.
"It didn't seem that the oxygen was working," I said to Charles.
"It was working only a little. The problem with PCP is that it's diffuse, it affects both lungs, and it affects your ability to get oxygen into your blood vessels--hence into your body," the nurse explained.
"Tom's hands were so cold," Elaine said.
"Tommy didn't want the ventilator," Charles continued; he appeared to be done with the Hickman catheter. The nurse was washing the crusted Candida from the area of Atkins's mouth. "I want to clean him up before Sue and the kids see him," Charles said.
"And Mrs. Atkins--her cough," I said. "It's just going to get worse, right?"
"It's a dry cough--sometimes it's no cough. People make too much of the cough. It's the shortness of breath that gets worse," the nurse told me. "Tommy just ran out of breath," Charles said.
"Charles--we want to see him!" Mrs. Atkins was calling.
"No, no, no," Peter kept crying.
"I hate you, Charles!" Emily shouted from the kitchen.
"I know you do, honey!" Charles called back. "Just give me a second--all of you!"
I bent over Atkins and kissed his clammy forehead. "I underestimated him," I said to Elaine.
"Don't cry now, Billy," Elaine told me.
I tensed up suddenly, because I thought Charles was going to hug me or kiss me--or perhaps only push me away from the raised bed--but he was merely trying to give me his business card. "Call me, William Abbott--let me know how Peter can contact you, if he wants to."
"If he wants to," I repeated, taking the nurse's card.
Usually, when anyone addressed me as "William Abbott," I could tell the person was a reader--or that he (or she) at least knew I was "the writer." But beyond my certainty that Charles was gay, I couldn't tell about the reader part.
"Charles!" Sue Atkins was calling breathlessly.
Elaine and I, and Charles, were all staring at poor Tom. I can't say that Tom Atkins looked "peaceful," but he was at rest from his terrible exertions to breathe.
"No, no, no," his darling boy was crying--softer now.
Elaine and I saw Charles glance up suddenly at the open doorway. "Oh, it's you, Jacques," the nurse said. "It's okay--you can come in. Come on."
Elaine and I saw each other flinch. There was no concealing which Jacques we thought had come to say good-bye to Tom Atkins. But in the doorway was not the Zhak Elaine and I had been expecting. Was it possible that, for twenty years, Elaine and I were anticipating we might see Kittredge again?
In the doorway, the old dog stood--uncertain of his next arthritic step.
"Come on, boy," Charles said, and Jacques limped forward into his former master's former study. Charles lifted one of Tom's cold hands off the side of the bed, and the old Labrador put his cold nose against it.
There were other presences in the doorway--soon to be in the small room with us--and Elaine and I retreated from poor Tom's bedside. Sue Atkins gave me a wan smile. "How nice to have met you, finally," the dying woman said. "Do stay in touch." Like Tom's father, twenty years ago, she didn't shake my hand.
The boy, Peter, didn't once look at me; he ran to his father and hugged the diminished body. The girl, Emily, glanced (albeit quickly) at Elaine; then she looked at Charles and screamed. The old dog just sat there, as he'd sat--expecting nothing--in the kitchen.
All the long way down that hall, through the vestibule (where I only now noticed an undecorated Christmas tree), and out of that afflicted house, Elaine kept repeating something I couldn't quite hear. In the driveway was the taxi driver from the train station, whom we'd asked to wait. (To my surprise, we'd been inside the Atkins house only for forty-five minutes or an hour; it had felt, to Elaine and me, as if we'd been there half our lives.)
"I can't hear what you're saying," I said to Elaine, when we were in the taxi.
"What happens to the duck, Billy?" Elaine repeated--loudly enough, this time, so that I could hear her.
Okay, so this is another epilogue, I was thinking.
"We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep," Prospero says--act 4, scene 1. At one time, I'd actually imagined that The Tempest could and should end there.
How does Prospero begin the epilogue? I was trying to remember. Of course Richard Abbott would know, but even when Elaine and I got back to New York, I knew I didn't want to call Richard. (I wasn't ready to tell Mrs. Hadley about Atkins.)
"First line of the epilogue to The Tempest," I said, as casually as I could, to Elaine in that funereal taxi. "You know--the end, spoken by Prospero. How's it begin?"
" 'Now my charms are all o'erthrown,' " Elaine recited. "Is that the bit you mean, Billy?"
"Yes, that's it," I told my dearest friend. That was exactly how I felt--o'erthrown.
"Okay, okay," Elaine said, putting her arms around me. "You can cry now, Billy--we both can. Okay, okay."
I was trying not to think of that line in Madame Bovary--Atkins had absolutely hated it. You know, that moment after Emma has given herself to the undeserving Rodolphe--when she feels her heart beating, "and the blood flowing in her body like a river of milk." How that image had disgusted Tom Atkins!
Yet, as hard as it was for me to imagine--having seen the ninety-something pounds of Atkins as he lay dying, and his doomed wife, whose blood was no "river of milk" in her diseased body--Tom and Sue Atkins must have felt that way, at least once or twice.
"YOU'RE NOT SAYING THAT Tom Atkins told you Kittredge was gay--you're not telling me that, are you?" Elaine asked me on the train, as I knew she would.
"No, I'm not telling you that--in fact, Tom both nodded and shook his head at the gay word. Atkins simply wasn't clear. Tom didn't exactly say what Kittredge is or was, only that he'd 'seen' him, and that Kittredge was 'beautiful.' And there was something else: Tom said Kittredge was not at all who we thought he was, Elaine--I don't know more," I told her.
"Okay. You ask Larry if he's heard anything about Kittredge. I'll check out some of the hospices, if you check out St. Vincent's, Billy," Elaine said.
"Tom never said that Kittredge was sick, Elaine."
"If Tom saw him, Kittredge may be sick, Bi
lly. Who knows where Tom went? Apparently, Kittredge went there, too."
"Okay, okay--I'll ask Larry, I'll check out St. Vincent's," I said. I waited a moment, while New Jersey passed by outside the windows of our train. "You're holding out on me, Elaine," I told her. "What makes you think that Kittredge might have the disease? What don't I know about Mrs. Kittredge?"
"Kittredge was an experimenter, wasn't he, Billy?" Elaine asked. "That's all I'm going on--he was an experimenter. He would fuck anyone, just to see what it was like."
But I knew Elaine so well; I knew when she was lying--a lie of omission, maybe, not the other kind--and I knew I would have to be patient with her, as she had once (for years) been patient with me. Elaine was such a storyteller.
"I don't know what or who Kittredge is, Billy," Elaine told me. (This sounded like the truth.)
"I don't know, either," I said.
Here we were: Tom Atkins had died; yet Elaine and I were even then thinking about Kittredge.
Chapter 13
NOT NATURAL CAUSES
It still staggers me when I remember the impossible expectations Tom Atkins had for our oh-so-youthful romance those many summers ago. Poor Tom was no less guilty of wishful thinking in the desperation of his dying days. Tom hoped I might make a suitable substitute father for his son, Peter--a far-fetched notion, which even that darling fifteen-year-old boy knew would never happen.
I maintained contact with Charles, the Atkins family nurse, for only five or six years--not more. It was Charles who told me Peter Atkins was accepted at Lawrenceville, which--until 1987, a year or two after Peter had graduated--was an all-boys' school. Compared to many New England prep schools--Favorite River Academy included--Lawrenceville was late in becoming coeducational.
Boy, did I ever hope Peter Atkins was not--to use poor Tom's words--"like us."
Peter went to Princeton, about five miles northeast of Lawrenceville. When my misadventure of cohabiting with Elaine ended in San Francisco, she and I moved back to New York. Elaine was teaching at Princeton in the academic year of 1987-88, when Peter Atkins was a student there. He showed up in her writing class in the spring of '88, when the fifteen-year-old we'd both met was in his early twenties. Elaine thought Peter was an economics major, but Elaine never paid any attention to what her writing students were majoring in.
"He wasn't much of a writer," she told me, "yet he had no illusions about it."
Peter's stories were all about the suicide--when she was seventeen or eighteen--of his younger sister, Emily.
I'd heard about the suicide from Charles, at the time it happened; she'd always been a "deeply troubled" girl, Charles had written. As for Tom's wife, Sue, she died a long eighteen months after Atkins was gone; she'd had Charles replaced as a nurse almost immediately after Tom's death.
"I can understand why Sue didn't want a gay man looking after her," was all Charles said about it.
I'd asked Elaine if she thought Peter Atkins was gay. "No," she'd said. "Definitely not." Indeed, it was sometime in the late nineties--a couple of years after the worst of the AIDS epidemic--when I was giving a reading in New York, and a ruddy-faced, red-haired young man (with an attractive young woman) approached me at the book signing that followed the event. Peter Atkins must have been in his early thirties then, but I had no trouble recognizing him. He still looked like Tom.
"We got a babysitter for this--that's pretty rare for us," his wife said, smiling at me.
"How are you, Peter?" I asked him.
"I've read all your books," the young man earnestly told me. "Your novels were kind of in loco parentis for me." He said the Latin slowly. "You know, 'in the place of a parent'--kind of," young Atkins said.
We just smiled at each other; there was nothing more to say. He'd said it well, I thought. His father would have been happy how his son turned out--or as happy as poor Tom ever was, about anything. Tom Atkins and I had grown up at a time when we were full of self-hatred for our sexual differences, because we'd had it drummed into our heads that those differences were wrong. In retrospect, I'm ashamed that my expressed hope for Peter Atkins was that he wouldn't be like Tom--or like me. Maybe, for Peter's generation, what I should have hoped for him was that he would be "like us"--only proud of it. Yet, given what happened to Peter's father and mother--well, it suffices to say that I thought Peter Atkins had been burdened enough.
I SHOULD PEN A brief obituary for the First Sister Players, my hometown's obdurately amateur theatrical society. With Nils Borkman dead, and with the equally violent passing of that little theater's prompter (my mother, Mary Marshall Abbott)--not to mention my late aunt, Muriel Marshall Fremont, who had wowed our town in various strident and big-bosomed roles--the First Sister Players simply slipped away. By the eighties, even in small towns, the old theaters were becoming movie houses; movies were what people wanted to see.
"More folks stayin' home and watchin' television, too, I suppose," Grandpa Harry commented. Harry Marshall himself was "stayin' home"; his days onstage as a woman were long gone.
It was Richard who called me, after Elmira found Grandpa Harry's body.
"No more dry-cleanin', Elmira," Harry had said, when he'd earlier seen the nurse hanging Nana Victoria's clean clothes in his closet.
"I musta misheard him," Elmira would later explain to Richard. "I thought he said, 'Not more dry-cleanin', Elmira'--like he was teasin' me, ya know? But now I'm pretty sure he said, 'No more dry-cleanin', Elmira'--like he knew then what he was gonna do."
As a favor to his nurse, Grandpa Harry had dressed himself as the old lumberman he was--jeans, a flannel shirt, "nothin' fancy," as Elmira would say--and when he'd curled up on his side in the bathtub, the way a child goes to sleep, Harry had somehow managed to shoot himself in the temple with the Mossberg .30-30, so that most of the blood was in the bathtub, and what there was of it that spattered the tile in other parts of the bathroom had presented no insurmountable difficulty for Elmira to clean.
The message on my answering machine, the night before, had been business as usual for Grandpa Harry. "No need to call me back, Bill--I'm turnin' in a bit early. I was just checkin' to be sure you were all right."
That same night--it was November 1984, a little before Thanksgiving--the message on Richard Abbott's answering machine was similar, at least in regard to Grandpa Harry "turnin' in a bit early." Richard had taken Martha Hadley to a movie in town, in what was the former theater for the First Sister Players. But the end of the message Grandpa Harry had left for Richard was a little different from the one Harry left for me. "I miss my girls, Richard," Grandpa Harry had said. (Then he'd curled up in the bathtub and pulled the trigger.) Harold Marshall was ninety, soon to be ninety-one--just a bit early to be turning in.
Richard Abbott and Uncle Bob decided to turn that Thanksgiving into what would serve as a remembrance of Grandpa Harry, but Harry's contemporaries--the ones who were still alive--were all in residence at the Facility. (They wouldn't be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner in Grandpa Harry's River Street home.)
Elaine and I drove up from New York together; we'd invited Larry to come with us. Larry was sixty-six; he was without a boyfriend at the moment, and Elaine and I were worried about him. Larry wasn't sick. He didn't have the disease, but he was worn out; Elaine and I had talked about it. Elaine had even said that the AIDS virus was killing Larry--"in another way."
I was happy to have Larry along for the ride. This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.
Richard had invited some foreign students from Favorite River Academy for our Thanksgiving dinner; it was too far for them to go home for such a short school vacation--therefore, we were joined by two Korean girls and a lonely-looking boy from Japan. The rest of us all knew one another--not counting Larry, who'd never been to Vermont before.
Even though Grandpa Harry's River Street house was practically in the middle of town--and
a short walk to the Favorite River Academy campus--First Sister itself struck Larry as a "wilderness." God knows what Larry thought of the surrounding woods and fields; the regular firearm season for deer had started, so the sound of shooting was all around. (A "barbaric wilderness" was what Larry called Vermont.)
Mrs. Hadley and Richard handled the kitchen chores, with help from Gerry and Helena; the latter was Gerry's new girlfriend--a vivacious, chatty woman who'd just dumped her husband and was coming out, though she was Gerry's age (forty-five) and had two grown children. Helena's "kids" were in their early twenties; they were spending the holiday with her ex-husband.
Larry and Uncle Bob had perplexingly hit it off--possibly because Larry was the exact same age Aunt Muriel would have been if Muriel hadn't been in the head-on collision that also killed my mom. And Larry loved talking to Richard Abbott about Shakespeare. I liked listening to the two of them; in a way, it was like overhearing my adolescence in the Favorite River Academy Drama Club--it was like watching a phase of my childhood pass by.
Since there were now female students at Favorite River, Richard Abbott was explaining to Larry, the casting of the Drama Club plays was very different than it had been when the academy was an all-boys' school. He'd hated having to cast those boys in the female roles, Richard said; Grandpa Harry, who was no "boy," and who'd been outstanding as a woman, was an exception (as were Elaine and a handful of other faculty daughters). But now that there were boys and girls at his disposal, Richard bemoaned what many theater directors in schools--even in colleges--are often telling me today. More girls like theater; there are always more girls. There aren't enough boys to cast in all the male parts; you have to look for plays with more female parts for all the girls, because there are almost always more girls than there are female roles to play.
"Shakespeare was very comfortable about switching sexes, Richard," Larry said provocatively. "Why don't you tell your theater kids that in those plays where there are an overabundant number of male parts, you're going to cast all the male roles with girls, and that you'll cast the female roles with boys? I think Shakespeare would have loved that!" (There was little doubt that Larry would have loved that. Larry had a gender-lens view of the world, Shakespeare included.)