To Paradise (28 page)

He went to the sofa and sat where Charles had sat, the cushions
still warm beneath him. Charles had been holding Peter’s hands, but he did not. And still—
still:
Even as Peter gazed at him, he could think of nothing to say, nothing that was not impossible. It would have to be Peter who spoke first, and, finally, he did, David leaning toward him to hear what he would say.

“David.”

Yes.

“Take care of my Charles. Will you do that for me?”

Yes, he promised, relieved that more hadn’t been asked from him, and that Peter hadn’t taken the opportunity to deliver some devastating observation he’d made, some truth about himself that David would never be able to forget. Of course I will.

Peter made a soft dismissive noise. “ ‘Of course,’ ” he murmured.

I will, he told Peter, fiercely.
I will.
It was important that Peter believed him. But as David was promising him, Peter was already looking away, toward the sound of Charles’s reentry, reaching his arms toward his friend in a gesture so childlike, so loving, that forever after, David was unable to imagine him in any other way: Peter, his arms open and empty, bundled like a toddler about to go out and play in the snow, and walking toward them, to fill them with his presence, Charles, his face crumpling, looking only at Peter, as if nobody else existed in the world.

They lay in bed that night, he and Charles, not touching, not speaking, their preoccupation so complete that, had anyone seen them, he would have mistaken them for strangers.

Peter was gone, lifted downstairs by his nurse and the assistant and accompanied by David and Charles, fed into a car that Charles had called for him. And then the car had driven away, back to Peter’s warm, cluttered second-floor apartment in an old house on Bethune Street near the river, with its crumbling staircase and painted brick facade, and David and Charles had remained on the sidewalk in the cold. He had always known that the end of the evening would be the end of Peter in their lives—in Charles’s life—and now that it had
actually happened, it seemed too abrupt, too abbreviated, like something out of a fairy tale: a clock striking midnight and the world being misted with gray, potential lives together dissolving into nothingness.

They had stood there, together, long after the car had vanished from sight. It wasn’t so late, but the cold had kept almost everyone indoors, and only a few stray people, wrapped in black, passed before them. Across the street, the park glittered with snow. Finally, he had taken Charles’s arm. It’s chilly, he said. Let’s go back inside. “Yes,” Charles agreed, his voice faint.

Back inside, they shut off the living-room lights, Charles did a check of the back-door locks as he always did, and then they climbed the stairs to their room, undressed and dressed, and brushed their teeth in silence.

Around them, the night thickened and settled. Eventually, after what felt like an hour, he heard Charles’s breathing change, grow slow and deep, and when he did, he got out of bed and went quietly to the closet, retrieved the letter from his bag, and crept downstairs.

For a while he sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, holding the envelope in both hands. This was his last moment of ignorance, of pretending, and he didn’t want it to end. But finally, he turned on the lamp, and removed the sheet of paper, and read what it said.

He woke to the sound of his name and Charles’s palm on his cheek, and when he opened his eyes, he knew from the clarity of light that filled the room that it was snowing again. Before him, on the ottoman, sat Charles, wearing his robe and what they called his old-man pajamas, striped blue cotton with his initials stitched in black on the breast pocket. Charles never came downstairs until he had combed his hair, but now it stood about his head in clumps, so that David could see the white of his scalp where the hair had become thin at the crown.

“He’s gone,” Charles said.

Oh, Charles, he said. When?

“About an hour ago. His nurse called me. I woke up, and looked over, and you weren’t next to me”—he began to apologize, but
Charles put his hand on his arm, stopping him—“and I was disoriented. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. But then I remembered: I was in my house, and it was the day after the party, and I had been waiting for this call—I knew what it would be. I had just thought it would be tomorrow, not today. But it wasn’t—he never even made it to the airport.

“So I didn’t answer it. You didn’t hear it ring? I just lay there and listened to the phone ringing and ringing and ringing: six, ten, twenty times—I’d turned the answering machine off last night. It was so loud. Such an insistent,
rude
noise: I never realized. Finally, it stopped, and I sat up, on the edge of the bed, and listened.

“I found myself in that moment thinking of my brother. Oh, right—you don’t know. Well, when I was five, my mother gave birth to another son. My brother, Morgan. She and my father had been trying to have a child for years, I later learned. Ten weeks before her due date, she went into labor.

“Back then—this would have been 1943—there was nothing you could do for such a premature baby: There was no such thing as neonatal care; the incubators were primitive compared to what we have now. It was extraordinary he was alive at all. The doctor told my parents he would die within forty-eight hours.

“No one told me this, of course. These days, I’m always shocked by how much information parents give their children, information those children aren’t yet equipped to understand. When I was a child, I knew
nothing,
and the people who looked after me were charged with keeping me ignorant. What I learned I gathered from whispers and eavesdropping. And yet I don’t remember feeling frustrated; I would never have considered my parents’ lives part of mine. My world was the fourth floor, with my toys and books. My parents were visitors; the only adults who belonged were my nanny and my tutor.

“But even I knew that something was wrong—I knew from the way the adults whispered in the hallway, falling silent when they spotted me; the way even my nanny, who loved me, seemed distracted, looking toward the door when the maid came in with my lunch, raising her eyebrows inquiringly at her, tightening her mouth
when she shook her head in response. Downstairs, everything was silent. The servants—this was long before Adams’s time—spoke in low voices, and for three days, I went to bed without being taken downstairs to be presented to my parents first.

“On the fourth day of this, I decided I was going to sneak downstairs and figure out what was happening. And so I pretended to be asleep when Nanny came to check on me that night, and then I waited and waited, until I heard the last maid walking upstairs toward her bedroom. And then I got out of bed and tiptoed down to my parents’. As I did, I noticed a faint light, candlelight, coming from the parlor next door to their room, and as I noticed that light, I also heard a small, strange sound that I couldn’t identify. I crept closer to the parlor. I was so careful, so quiet. Finally, I was at the door, which was ajar, and I looked inside.

“I saw my mother, sitting on a chair. There was a candle on the table by her side, and in her arms, she held my brother. The thing I remember thinking later was how beautiful she looked. She had long, reddish hair that she always wore pinned up, but now it hung about her like a veil, and she was wearing a lilac-colored silk robe and a white nightgown beneath it; her feet were bare. I had never seen my mother look like this—I had never seen my parents in any way other than how they wanted me to see them: fully dressed, capable, competent.

“In her left arm, she was cradling the baby. But in her right hand she was holding an odd instrument, a clear glass dome, and she would fit the dome over the baby’s mouth and nose and then squeeze the rubber bulb attached to it. That was the sound I’d heard, the rubber bulb wheezing as it filled and emptied with air, air she was giving to Morgan. She kept up a steady rhythm, and she didn’t rush: not too fast, not too much. Every ten squeezes or so she would stop for a second, and I could hear, barely, the baby’s breath, so quiet.

“I don’t know how long I stood there, watching her. She never looked up. The expression on her face—I can’t describe it. It wasn’t despairing, or sorrowful, or desperate. It was just—nothing. But not blank. Attentive, I suppose. As if there were nothing else in her
life—no past, no present, no husband or son or house—as if she existed only to try to pump air into her baby’s lungs.

“It didn’t work, of course. Morgan died the next day. Nanny told me about it at last: that I’d had a brother, and that his lungs had been faulty, and that he had died, and that I wasn’t to be sad because he was now with God. Later, when my mother was dying, I learned that my parents had fought; that my father had disagreed with her trying, that he had forbade her from using that instrument. I don’t know where she got it from. I don’t know that she ever forgave him: for not believing, for dissuading her from trying. My father, I learned, hadn’t even wanted to bring him home from the hospital, and when my mother fought to do so—they donated so much to the place that they wouldn’t deny her—he had disapproved of that as well.

“My mother wasn’t a sentimental woman. She never spoke of Morgan, and after he died, she eventually recovered herself. Over the decades, she ran charities, she hosted dinners, she rode horses and painted, she read and collected rare books, she volunteered at a home for unwed young mothers; she made a life in this house for me and my father.

“I never considered myself much like her, and neither did she. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she’d sometimes say to me, and she always sounded a little rueful. And she was right—I was never one of those gay men who found an affinity with their mothers. Except for the fact that we never discussed who I loved, I
did
have a kinship with my father. For a long time, I was able to pretend that we never talked about who I was, or part of who I was, because we had so many other things to talk about. The law, for example. Or business. Or biographies, which we both liked to read. By the time I stopped pretending, he was already dead.

“But lately, I’ve been thinking about that night more and more. I wonder if I’m actually more like her than I knew. I wonder who will hold that little air pump for me when it’s my turn. Not because they think it’ll revive me, or save me. But because they want to try.

“I was sitting there, thinking all of this, when the phone rang again. This time I got up and answered it. It was Peter’s new
day-shift nurse—a nice guy. I’d met him a few times. He told me Peter had died, and that it had been peaceful, and that he was very sorry for my loss. And then I hung up and I went looking for you.”

He was quiet, and David realized that it was the end of his story. As Charles had talked, he had looked out the window, which had become a screen of white, and now he turned to David again, and David pressed his back into the sofa’s cushions and beckoned to Charles, who lay down next to him.

They were silent for a long time, and although David was thinking many things, he mostly thought about how good this moment was, lying next to Charles in a warm room, with snow outside. He thought that he should tell Charles that he would hold the air pump for him, but he couldn’t. He wanted so much to give Charles something, some measure of the consolation that Charles had given him, but he couldn’t. Much later, he would wish, again and again, that he had said something, anything, no matter how clumsy. In those years, fear—of sounding dumb, of being inadequate—kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.

“I came down here,” Charles finally said, “I came down here and found you. And”—he took a breath—“and you were asleep, with a letter on your chest, beneath your hand. And—I took it from you, and I read it. I don’t know why. I’m sorry, David.” He was quiet. “And I’m sorry for what’s in it. How come you never told me?”

I don’t know, he said, at last. But he wasn’t angry that Charles had read his letter. He was relieved—that Charles knew, that, once again, Charles’s decisiveness had made a difficult task easier.

“So—your father. He’s still alive.”

Barely, he said. For now.

“Yes. And your grandmother wants you to come see him.”

Yes.

“And that place he lived in—”

It wasn’t what you were thinking, he interrupted Charles. I mean, it was. But it wasn’t. How could he tell Charles? How could he make
him understand? How could he make Lipo-wao-nahele sound like something different, something better, something saner than what it was? Not a folly, not make-believe, not an impossibility, but something his father—and even he—had once believed in with all the hopefulness they had, a place where history was meaningless, a place that would finally feel like home, a place where his father had gone in anticipation as much as in fear. He couldn’t. His grandmother had never understood it; Charles certainly wouldn’t, either.

I can’t explain it, he said at last. You wouldn’t understand.

“Try me,” said Charles.

Well, maybe, he said, but he knew he would. Charles knew how to help everyone—what if he knew how to help David, too? What was the point of loving him, of being loved back, if he wasn’t going to try?

But first, he had to eat something; he was hungry. He wriggled himself off the sofa, and held out his hand for Charles, and as they went to the kitchen, he thought of his father again. Not as he was in the care home he lived in now; not as he had been in the last days of his stay at Lipo-wao-nahele, his eyes vacant, his face streaked with dirt; but as he had been when they lived together in their house, when he was four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, when they were a father and a son, and he had never had to consider anything other than the fact that his father would always take care of him, or at least would always try, because he had promised he always would, and because he knew his father loved him, and because that was the way of things. Loss, loss—he had lost so much. How would he ever feel complete again? How could he make up for all those years? How could he forgive? How could he be forgiven?