The Short History of a Prince (30 page)

He gathered her up and held her, and she took to him, collapsing in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, Susan.”

She reached behind him for a tissue and blew her nose. “How is it,” she said into his neck, “that I can know him, and not know him? That we can sit down and talk to one another as if we’re picking up where we left off? Do you think we’d hate each other in real life?”

“Probably not for at least two weeks.” The radiator knocked and hissed as if it were censuring Walter’s answer. “Maybe three,” he said, after a minute.

“I’m so cold. I just want to get into bed.”

He handed her the white flannel gown from her suitcase. “Other than that, did you have a nice dinner?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It was lovely.” She turned away from him and lifted her sweater over her head. He had seen her in leotards since she was ten and he knew her shape better than his own. She was fiddling with the hooks, having trouble getting out of her bra.

“Do you really need one of those things.” He spoke to the carpet about her brassiere.

“Thank you, I do not discuss my cup size or anything else about my breasts with anyone other than my gynecologist. You are as cynical about love as your students are. If you must know, I bought new underwear specifically for this night. Here, look at it.” She threw the strip of black lace over her shoulder.

Walter picked it up and examined it. “There’s not much here in terms of support,” he said.

“I thought it might add to the fun,” she said plaintively. She fastened the four white lamb buttons above the yoke of her nightie. “I suppose, really, at the root of this, Walter, I’m worried about what happens next, when I’ve got that made-up, shellacky look of middle age, when I’m not the star of my boondock company, when I’m not Mr. V’s best girl, when I’m at home without a performance.” She bent over, let her hair fall to the floor and vigorously brushed it. “Maybe that’s it,” she said from her upside-down position. “I used to think I’d go gracefully, but I’m not so sure. I think I might be scared, really scared. I think I’m terrified. And you’re right, I’d probably be complaining about Lester after two weeks, or else one of us would die of cancer.”

“You might find a whole new avenue when you retire,” Walter began, helpless, he knew, to comfort her.

“I’m so tired all of a sudden,” she said, straightening up. “I haven’t slept in days, thinking about this night, and fretting about my foundations. Will you hold me, again, when we’re sleeping?”

At 9:45 they got into the double bed, turned out the lights and kissed, puckered lips to puckered lips. He pulled the covers over her. She was on her side, with her back to him. He moved closer, and without the rest of him touching her he put his arm around her waist. He guessed that she must feel rejected, twice in one evening, by Lester, and also by himself. It was illogical of her to feel spurned by him, but that did not make the sensation any less keen. It wasn’t that she had ever wanted him, but she might think she was repulsive to him. He probably shouldn’t touch her foot with his foot or get any nearer; feet were intimate and he was already close enough. He should try to let her know how generally desirable she was. Daniel came to him then: Walter imagined for a minute that he was his brother, alive, in bed with his wife, the high school sweetheart, that their marriage had evolved to a fond and nonsexual relationship. He kissed her hair, and stroked through it with his fingers. It seemed right to touch her hair. Daniel might have done such a thing before falling asleep. “That’s nice, Walter,” she said. “That feels good.”

He wondered if she would have cheated on Daniel. She would have been his very own sister-in-law, and he would have been forced to forgive her for her high school transgressions. He wondered if Julian
would knock at the door of Room 1709 at the Richmond Hotel. He felt a small knot in her hair and he carefully pulled it apart. If Julian appeared at the window, hovering there seventeen flights above-ground, Walter would explain that he was still a homosexual even though he was in bed with a beautiful woman. It occurred to him that it was fitting that he and Susan had come for something they both hoped for, and thought they wanted, and found only each other. They had always been stuck with each other. If they’d known that at the end it would always be just the two of them, how much sooner they would have arrived at their destination, at their quiet sleep, their long blank dream.

Seven

FEBRUARY
1973

A
lthough many of Daniel’s friends were preoccupied that autumn and winter he was ill, it wasn’t true that every one of them had fallen away. It seemed so to Susan, seemed that they had abandoned him, that they couldn’t claim to be sincere and faithful if they didn’t call him at night or stop by several times a week. Daniel’s friends—the Overachievers, Walter called them—were athletes, musicians and National Merit finalists. They were busy at their senior year, at the business of football, swimming, school government, homework, the orchestra, the student newspaper and college applications. Some of them who had visited infrequently in October and November had been given a talking-to by their parents in January, and had come to understand the gravity of his situation. Chris Nelson played basketball that winter, and he often wrote Daniel from a few blocks away, giving him blow-by-blow accounts of the games. Maura Peterson copied her European History notes and delivered them at the end of each week, and David Horton came over on Saturdays, at first to catch Daniel up in calculus, and later, when they let the math go, he came to play chess.

Susan felt as if Daniel were in a tank, and the old friends were looking in on him, their faces pressed against the glass, their noses
squashed, their lips flattened and enlarged. They thought they could approximate real life while they observed him. She hated the way they tried to shoot the breeze, as if in the McCloud living room they were so charitably dramatizing the schoolyard scene, waiting for the first bell to clang. She hated the blowzy entrance, lots of stamping of the feet, and the hearty question, How’s it going? Walter too could feel their enthusiasm, all the way up in his room, but he didn’t hold their cheer against them. Good humor was in short supply around the house, and in his book there was nothing wrong with importing a little.

At school in January, one of the friends ventured to say, “He’s so sick he might die.” The word “die” silenced the group walking down the hall. There was no echo in a sound like
die
. It was heavy, a real sinker. They walked on without talking. What does he think? They stood at their lockers, wondering, trying to turn the dials around and around through their sticky combinations. What does he feel? How will he look? When they went to visit Maplewood Avenue some of them did come into the living room all nerves and bravado, gibbering about wrestling, the student-council vote to ban smoking in the courtyard, the coming orchestra trip to Italy. Susan was right about their being frightened, frightened both of Daniel and of the thing that was taking him. As the disease progressed their coming required courage. What Susan believed she saw, and what galled her, was their fake largesse, their phony selflessness, their belief that they would return to their classmates transformed, charged with knowledge after the contact.

On the occasional days Daniel made it to school he walked slowly through the corridors. His clothes, no matter that Joyce continued to buy smaller sizes or shrink his pants in the hot dryer, seemed to drape over his bones and trail after him. In the seven minutes they had to change classes Susan rushed to meet him, to walk him to his next room. Her own teachers excused her habitual tardy slips and did not mark her down a grade when her work was late. Mr. Reynolds bought her lunch in the faculty cafeteria, and made her sit in the meeting room and eat while he watched over her. That special treatment confirmed for Walter that Daniel was already exerting a power that was normally associated with ghouls, sneaks who did their work during
nocturnal visits and through Ouija boards. Who could tell, then, what additional benefits might shower down upon Susan when Daniel actually died, when his spirit was set loose into the night air?

She wore long rayon skirts to school, and pearl- or pink-colored blouses in a fabric that had a sheen, and her black patent-leather sling-backs. It looked to Walter as if water would roll right off her slick front. She and Daniel walked the halls, her arm through his, and it would hardly have surprised anyone, or seemed out of line, if she had put up her hand, all the fingers firmly together, and turned it slightly back and forth, a royal wave along the parade route. No more movement in that wave than the quiver of a dog’s nose catching a scent in the wind. Walter went in a circle around the building rather than pass the imperial couple going to European History or German. He would have liked to pitch a bowling ball at the two of them, as well as the attendants, the old friends who followed at a respectful distance. In one strike the whole entourage would go down. But he also half wanted to drag along the hall, calling, nearly out of steam, like a lacerated soldier, “Susan! Susan!”

She would be unable to do anything for him, he knew. She was like a character in a horror film, the first victim in town whose soul is plucked from her body and taken to another planet, nothing left behind but a zombie in lustrous silks. From his back-row seat Walter watched her in their American Literature class. She stared at the anthology until tears ran down her cheeks, the poor girl with real adult problems, or else she shut down all together, put her head on the desk, resting for that next long, slow walk with her Casanova.

In the afternoons Walter and Mitch rode the train together into the city without her. She did not go to ballet school that winter. The Kentons never asked after her, and Walter assumed that she had phoned in, giving them her eloquent excuse for giving up her art. She had a patient to nurse, a higher calling than the dance. Maybe she talked to them every week, with updates, with blood pressure and temperature stats, the white-cell count. There was no telling how far ahead she tried to see, or what she spoke about in her Planet X brainless state.

Walter once said to Mitch that Joyce might as well formally adopt Susan, to get a little payback from the additional teenager she was
constantly feeding. Mitch had looked so pained Walter craned his neck to see better, wanted to go closer, to catch the expression that was so novel, wounded pride, the little bubble of the self punctured. Walter dropped his book, sputtering something about how Susan wasn’t over that much, it only seemed as if it was every single day, including weekends, breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In fact, she was always at his house. Joyce had gained something like a daughter, and in addition the acquaintance of Susan’s mother, Lou Ann Claridge. Walter had never warmed to Mrs. Claridge, a woman who played games, golf and cards, a housewife who spent her summer mornings on a lawn chair out in the yard, baking in the sun. Joyce seemed to think that with the bit of strength she had for the outside world it was important to cultivate Susan’s mother. It occurred to Walter in a horrifying moment that Joyce had the impression that Susan was the sort of girl who would get the ballet out of her system in good time, and make an excellent wife and mother. She was courting Susan to be Daniel’s bride, to be Walter’s sister-in-law, a permanent fixture. “Oh God,” he said out loud in his bedroom. “Not that. No! Please help Daniel marry a nice sorority girl, a waitress, a librarian, a reformed prostitute, anyone but her. Please, not
her.”

In later years Walter wondered how both the McClouds and the Claridges could have stood by while Susan came to a complete stop at Daniel’s bedside. Joyce, he imagined, lunching with Lou Ann in the dining room, discussing draperies and the country club set, was trying, wordlessly, through the elaborate salads, fruits and marshmallows suspended in the Jell-O, to communicate her plea: let us have Susan, for a time, give her up to us. Walter thought that under normal circumstances Joyce would have been protective, not only of her son, but also of a girl who stood to lose her reputation. She would have been polite and distant to a frivolous person like Lou Ann Claridge. But Joyce was not following her own general rules that winter. When Susan came over she sent her right up to Daniel’s bedroom. It was puppy love, she must have said to herself, nothing wrong with it. When the couple was downstairs it never occurred to her that Mrs. Gamble, in her living room, running the Hoover, was watching the make-out sessions through the small square panes of the leaded windows.

One afternoon in February, Mrs. Gamble hardly had to strain to see Susan stretched out on the sofa, her head in Daniel’s lap, while the boy traced her features. He was memorizing her nose, Mrs. Gamble theorized, the arch of her blond eyebrows, the bulb of her lower lip, so he would recognize her in their next incarnation. When he bent over and kissed Susan and she clasped her arms around his neck, Mrs. Gamble’s heart constricted. No parent was at home at 646 Maplewood Avenue, and the girl was hoisting herself up, climbing into his lap, her legs to either side of him, her little man in the boat no doubt smack against his John Thomas. It was appalling that what seemed delicate and tight in a girl would open, come alive, take on a hunger of its own. She was clutching his head to her breast, and beginning, slowly at first, to rock against him, and then faster, and he, with his head turned, his fluttering eyes closed, gasped and moaned, and at long last gave one anguished cry. Right there for the world to see! Mrs. Gamble heard the noise of it through two sets of storm windows and the twenty feet of grass between them. In spite of her indignation she felt her knees buckle and she had to sit down. All through dinner she could not say a word, couldn’t banish the memory of Susan’s rippling skirt, and underneath, she imagined, the fresh tear in the girl’s sacred membrane. “It is not natural,” she said out loud, “that a boy, as sick as he is, can rise to the occasion.”