The Short History of a Prince (46 page)

Walter always maintained that it had been right for their family to be together, and he never regretted those afternoons and evenings he spent with his mother and father, listening to the tortured breathing of his brother. He was not sorry, in spite of the nightmares, and the fact that for years when he thought of Daniel he often recalled the sick boy. It was not his experience that images of the healthy person soon supplanted the death scene. He knew that his relatives were looking askance at someone so young being subjected to the random cruelty of disease, and yet Walter could not have imagined taking up Aunt Jeannie’s invitation to play backgammon and stay overnight with the
cousins. He could not have explained to any of them that there was peace in the hospital room. It was a place where time seemed to have stopped, where the four of them might stay indefinitely. It was probably like being stranded in an elevator, or sharing a cabin at camp, or going to the moon in the same spaceship. Walter believed that when they came home they’d feel as if they knew the same songs, they’d have bruises in the same places, the shared memory of the northern lights and the sun rising red on the last day. Room 901 was a replication of heaven, he sometimes thought: the eternal life offered the consolation of sitting with your family in a small well-lit cubicle with kind women in white uniforms whisking in and out, and every now and then the head physician passing through to make his pronouncement. Jeannie could not have known that for Walter it was a privilege to be let into the privacy of Daniel’s final month, and that the bewilderment, the wounds came later, in all of the following years that his parents never spoke of that time in the hospital.

Either Joyce or Robert spent the night with Daniel in May, and sometimes they were both there, sleeping in recliner chairs at either side of the bed. Joyce was determined to be with him when he went. She did not want his going it alone. Walter knew without words having passed that she planned to hold Daniel’s hand as he took the last breath. He knew by the way she clutched her purse when she left, and looked at Daniel all the way out the door. When she returned there was panic in her eyes as far back as the elevator. She rushed into the room, her arms going as if she were swimming, trying to find her way to the bed, to see if he was still there.

On the Saturday of Oak Ridge’s prom Walter went to the hospital at four in the afternoon to spell his mother. She’d been in Room 901 for three days and had agreed to run back to Maplewood Avenue for a shower and a quick nap. There had been assurance from the doctor that the end was not imminent. Robert had a head cold and was on the sofa in the den at home with the thermos of chicken soup Walter had made for him. It took Joyce fifteen minutes to gather her things and find the car keys, and when she was gone Walter pulled up a chair and sat by Daniel. He looked at the short thin eyelashes, the crust between the lids, the stubble on his chin, the chapped open mouth, the bloody scab at his nose, where the oxygen tubes had irritated his skin. He
wondered if Daniel dreamed anymore, or if he had exhausted all of the material from his eighteen years. His lids looked like dried apple slices. Walter wondered if the dream was always the same, if Daniel was forever walking down a long dusty road under the hot sun to the shady place in the distance. He wanted to ask him what he thought about his life and the unexpected turn of events, if there was anything a person should do to prepare for the finish, if he had advice for his kid brother. And what, if anything, was there that Walter could do for Daniel, any small thing to make the passage smoother? He wanted to say that sometimes he was so scared he sat up in the dark shaking and crying, and other times he felt an inexplicable calm and it was as if nothing was as sad as he’d thought. He wished he could ask his brother why that was. Maybe Daniel would have explained that every terrible thing he could think of was about wanting and not having. Walter could almost hear his voice. Dan would elaborate; he’d say, “Wanting. Wanting to live, or to walk, or to see, or wanting peace, or children back from the dead, or wanting food or fame or love, a voice, a home—Humans have been made to want, Wally. But the problem with you people down below is that even if your wish is granted, even if you get the happy ending, you right away turn around and want something else, or an accessory or an improvement, a bigger diamond, a fancier car.” Daniel, Walter willed himself to believe, was already speaking to him as he would from beyond the grave.

At six o’clock the nice nurse, Betty, brought Walter a bowl of soup and some oyster crackers in a Baggie. It was so strange to sit with food in front of his sleeping brother. He held the bowl in his hands for the warmth of it. There were strands of what looked like algae floating on the top of the soup, cream of asparagus, he guessed. When there was no more heat in the porcelain, he went and stood at the window and looked down at the traffic. He thought about being older and driving past the hospital and glancing at the window, the very window on the cancer floor, knowing that another family on nine was having a similar tragedy. Maybe someone on the street with a difficult past was driving by, looking up at him, thinking the very thought. What he was living through at the moment would become something that happened long ago. How futile everything was—how empty life was! He moved so
quickly to Daniel’s bed he almost toppled over on his brother’s chest—he seized the limp hands, crying, “Don’t go, Dan! Don’t go!”

Walter didn’t hear the elevator bell, didn’t notice a sound until the swishing was right outside the door. It was the panting noise the Gamble collies made when they stood at the fence with their mouths hanging open. He was imploring his sleeping brother to live, and in his panic it seemed logical that Mrs. Gamble would bring the dogs, both to entertain Daniel and to say good-bye to him. It was not usual but he had to admit it was a great idea. The nurses couldn’t say no, couldn’t object when Mrs. Gamble was so adept at cleaning up after the animals. He cocked his head, straining to see the dogs, to get the first view of them trotting through the door, obedient at their master’s side. He had to look twice to see Susan. It wasn’t the blond dogs with the ears that had been trained to turn down in velvety triangles. It was Susan. Susan in a brassy turquoise dress. A shiny strapless hooker getup with puckers in the material on top, the place for a normal girl’s breasts. She hadn’t knocked or called or as much as peered around the corner tentatively. The dress was tight to the ankles with satin bows at the sides and festoons, he believed such decorations were called, festoons of fabric flowers dripping from the waist down the front. Her hair was piled in a cone that looked unstable, likely to tip if she did anything more vigorous than sit. She stared at Walter, as if he was the last person she’d expected to see. She was wearing blue rhinestone earrings that came to her shoulders, a blue velvet choker with a pink-and-white cameo pinned at her throat, and she’d installed one gigantic red hibiscus blossom at her left ear. Walter hadn’t talked to her since the day she’d hoped God would take him from the face of the earth. She had never called to apologize, and for his part he hadn’t said he was sorry about her grandmother’s death.

“You look—nice,” he lied.

“Thank you.” She came forward a few steps, her purple high heels sounding on the tile like coins spilling out of a pocket. With great care she shook her head haughtily. “How is he?”

Walter put his hand to Daniel’s brow and said, “Alive.”

She didn’t chastise him. She understood that his response was one of two possible answers. She came to the other side of the bed. They
stood looking at him. Walter swallowed, fighting the emptiness that seemed again to be rising in him. How curious it was, he thought, that a thing like emptiness could take up space, could overwhelm a person. He turned to Daniel to keep himself firmly in place. Funny that he looked to his brother for fortitude. Odd that he expected Dan to give him guidance.

Dan in his steel bed, nothing to be done. What to fasten on, to move away from the sorrow? Walter looked up at Susan. The dress. It was unspeakably ugly. She looked frightful in it and not least because it wasn’t a good color for her. A girl didn’t wear a slut dress unless she was going to a costume party or planning to get good and drunk and let come what may. It was Saturday, he figured, she was going out—and he realized then, he understood that the prom was about to begin. “A Night to Remember” was the slogan for the 1973 Junior Prom. That was hilarious, a scream. A night to remember. “You’re going to the dance,” he blurted. “You’re all dressed for the prom.”

“No,” she whispered. “No, Walter. I don’t exactly have a date.”

“Of course not. I didn’t think so,” he said.

“Will the nurse kick me out?”

“Betty was in here a while ago. She probably won’t come unless we buzz.”

“Could we get him to open his eyes, so he could see me?”

We shouldn’t, Walter thought at first. They might wake Daniel up to pain. But he considered how Dan was going to die any second and there Susan was shimmering like a gladiator. It occurred to him that she had meant to go overboard, that she had chosen to be an exaggerated prom girl so that Daniel, through the blur of the morphine and his sickness, could see her. “You try,” he said to Susan. “If anyone can wake him, you can.”

She took Daniel’s hand and folded it to her satiny, flat bosom. She was already starting to cry. “Daniel, I’m here. It’s our prom, you know, what we planned for. I’ve come to have this dance.”

The idea was inspired, no doubt about it, Walter thought. The drama could only have been improved if she’d brought a band along, but she was blowing it, going off course. It wasn’t going to be worth it for Dan to wake up if she was going to dissolve and be maudlin. He
went to the other side of the bed and shook Daniel’s shoulder. “Wake up, Dan. Your girl is here, your buffalo gal, the delight of your dreams.” He remembered the poem from Gatsby and he recited, “ ‘Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too.’ ” Susan gave a long honk of a sniffle and Walter said to her, “Don’t cry. Do not cry if you can possibly help it, do you hear me?”

“Okay, okay, I won’t,” she said, taking her bottom lip and holding it between her thumb and index finger.

“Wake up, Daniel,” Walter called. “You do not want to miss this. Come back for just a minute.” He shook his brother. “Look, look at Susan.” When Daniel opened his eyes, Walter grabbed both his shoulders. “Open up, stay awake, look what we have here, don’t close the shop, that’s it, wake, wake, wake.”

“Dan, Dan, dear Dan,” Susan said, coming to Walter’s side. “Remember how we were going to go dancing? Remember how we practiced in the kitchen? You had such rhythm. You were—you’re a natural!”

He tried to lift his head and when he couldn’t do that he raised his hand, reaching for the flower in her ear. He was off the mark and got her mouth, instead. She pressed his fingers to her lips and through them she said, “I’m going to hold you. And Walter’s going to put your arms around me, all right?”

She lay against him and Walter, one at a time, put his brother’s arms in place at her back and kept them there. She lay draped over him. Walter was afraid she might crush him. She might put a fraction of her weight down on his heart and he’d go up in powder. Help, God, he thought—would that be considered murder? A boy mashed by his date, or pulverized by a vulgar dress. “Careful,” he whispered to Susan. “Careful.”

She lay there on him until the elevator sounded. “That might be my mother,” Walter said from the door. “You better get off him.”

Slowly she pulled herself away. Walter watched her, thinking how it is to get a leech off a person’s leg, how it bends to the flesh and won’t easily let go. By the time she’d gotten herself upright and set Daniel’s thin white arms back at the sides of the bed he was already asleep
again. She felt her hair, to see if it was still on top of her head, and yanked at her dress, both top and bottom. When Joyce and Robert walked into the room, she was holding Daniel’s hand, gazing at him.

“Mom,” Walter began.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. McCloud,” Susan said. “I haven’t been to see Daniel—”

“We’ve got to go now.” Walter took Susan by the elbow. “Betty knows she’s here, Mom—she didn’t have to sneak or anything. Dan woke up and saw her. He couldn’t believe the, um, ensemble and the real flower. It smells, by the way.” He nudged Susan forward.

“I’m—glad,” Joyce said.

Susan was not moving fast enough, so Walter gripped her wrist and took her past his parents. “She’s got her car and she’ll drive me home. I had soup before and I’m fine. He was awake for just a minute, but he saw her.”

They were out of the room at last, going down the hall to the elevator. She could hardly walk in her sheath, the straight tube with no vents. “Why are you in such a hurry?” she whined, taking her little Japanese steps. “Stop jerking me.”

He had felt it necessary to get her away from his parents because the gown was such an embarrassment. It was gaudy and glaring and obscene in just the right way for some other girl, but on Susan the luridness seemed accidental. It was as if she had a breast hanging out without knowing, or a stain spreading on her backside. “I’m hurrying,” he said to her, “because they want to be alone with him.”

“Well, we’re out of the room now, so can we slow down? Please. I can’t walk in this thing.”

He drew her to him. It had been such a long time since he’d embraced her. He felt the satin down her back and he said, “Your dress reminds me of an item I got recently.”

“What kind of item do you have that could possibly remind you of this piece of shit, Walter? It was the best I could do at Goodwill, last minute.”

“I’ll show it to you at my house, if you can spare the time.”

She leaned against him. “Oh, I’ve got time all right.” He had noticed that her face had no color and he wondered if she would look the same when she was fifty, after the ballerina life of cigarettes and
Coke and barre work had done her in. Anyone who glanced at her might think she was old and haggard, already a widow.