The Secret History (83 page)

I drove Charles to the hospital in the red Corvette. He was bright-eyed and quiet, staring straight ahead, his right cheek pressed to the cool window-glass. In the waiting room, while I looked through magazines I’d seen before, he sat without moving, staring at a faded color photograph from the 1960s which hung opposite, of a nurse who had a white-nailed finger pressed to a white-lipsticked, vaguely pornographic mouth, in a sexy injunction to hospital silence.

The doctor on duty was a woman. She’d been with Charles for only about five or ten minutes when she came from the back with his chart; leaning over the counter, she consulted briefly with the receptionist, who indicated me.

The doctor came over and sat beside me. She was like one of those cheery young physicians in Hawaiian shirts and tennis shoes that you see on TV shows. “Hello,” she said. “I’ve just been looking at your friend. I think we’re going to have to keep him with us for a couple of days.”

I put down my magazine. This I hadn’t expected. “What’s wrong?” I said.

“It looks like bronchitis, but he’s very dehydrated. I want to put him on an IV. Also we need to get that fever down. He’ll be okay, but he needs rest and a good strong series of antibiotics, and to get those working as soon as we can we should give him those intravenously, too, for the first forty-eight hours at least. You both in school up at the college?”

“Yes.”

“Is he under a lot of stress? Working on his thesis or something?”

“He works pretty hard,” I said cautiously. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing. It just looks like he hasn’t been eating properly. Bruises on his arms and legs, which look like a C deficiency, and he may be running low on some of the B vitamins as well. Tell me. Does he smoke?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. At any rate, she wouldn’t let me see him; she said she wanted to get some blood work done before the lab technicians left for the day, so I drove to the twins’ apartment to gather some of his things. The place was ominously neat. I packed pajamas, toothbrush, shaving kit, and a couple of paperback books (P.G. Wodehouse, who I thought might cheer him up) and left the suitcase with the receptionist.

Early the next morning, before I left for Greek, Judy knocked at my door and told me I had a call downstairs. I thought it was Francis or Henry—both of whom I’d tried to reach repeatedly the night before—or maybe even Camilla, but it was Charles.

“Hello,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Oh, very well.” His voice had a strange, forced note of cheeriness. “It’s quite comfortable here. Thanks for bringing the suitcase by.”

“No problem. Do you have one of those beds you can crank up and down?”

“As a matter of fact I do. Listen. I want to ask you something. Will you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“I’d like you to get a couple of things for me.” He mentioned a book, and letter paper, and a bathrobe which I would find hanging on the inside of his closet door—“Also,” he said hurriedly, “there’s a bottle of Scotch. You’ll find it in the drawer of my night table. Do you think you can get it out this morning?”

“I have to go to Greek.”

“Well, after Greek then. What time do you think you’ll be here?”

I told him I would have to see about borrowing a car.

“Don’t worry about that. Take a taxi. I’ll give you the money. I really appreciate this, you know. What time should I expect you? Ten-thirty? Eleven?”

“Probably more like eleven-thirty.”

“That’s fine. Listen. I can’t talk, I’m in the patients’ lounge. I have to get back to bed before they miss me. You will come, won’t you?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Bathrobe and letter paper.”

“Yes.”

“And the Scotch.”

“Of course.”

Camilla was not at class that morning, but Francis and Henry were. Julian was there when I arrived, and I explained that Charles was in the hospital.

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
But at this news he appeared genuinely concerned. “Poor Charles,” he said. “It’s not
serious
, is it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is he allowed any visitors? I shall telephone him this afternoon. Can you think of anything he might like? Food is so dreadful in the hospital. I remember years ago, in New York, when a dear friend of mine was in Columbia Presbyterian—in the bloody Harkness Pavilion, for goodness’ sake—the chef at the old Le Chasseur used to send her dinner to her every single day.…”

Henry, across the table, was absolutely inscrutable. I tried to catch Francis’s glance; he slid me a quick look, bit his lip and glanced away.

“… and flowers,” said Julian, “you’ve never seen so many flowers, she had so many I could only suspect that she was sending at least some of them to herself.” He laughed. “Anyway. I suppose there’s no need to ask where Camilla is this morning.”

I saw Francis’s eyes snap open. For a moment I was startled too, before I realized that he’d assumed—naturally, of course—that she was at the hospital with Charles.

Julian’s eyebrows went down. “What’s wrong?” he said.

The utter blankness which met this question made him smile.

“It doesn’t do to be too Spartan about these things,” he said kindly, after a very long pause; and I was grateful to see that, as usual, he was projecting his own tasteful interpretations upon the confusion. “Edmund was your friend. I too am very sorry that he is dead. But I think you are grieving yourselves sick over this, and not only does that not help him, it hurts you. And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or—if death is a journey to another place—that you will not see him again?”

He opened his lexicon and began to search for his place. “It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,” he said. “You are like children. Afraid of the dark.”

Francis didn’t have his car with him, so after class I got Henry to drive me to Charles’s apartment. Francis—who came too—was nervous and on edge, chain-smoking and pacing in the foyer while Henry stood in the bedroom door and watched me get Charles’s things: quiet, expressionless, his eyes following me with an abstract
calculation that entirely precluded the possibility of my asking him about Camilla—which I had determined to do as soon as we were alone—or, in fact, of asking practically anything at all.

I got the book, the letter paper, the bathrobe. The Scotch I hesitated over.

“What’s the matter?” said Henry.

I put the bottle back in the drawer and shut it. “Nothing,” I said. Charles, I knew, would be furious. I would have to think of a good excuse.

He nodded at the closed drawer. “Did he ask you to bring that to him?” he said.

I did not feel like discussing Charles’s personal business with Henry. I said: “He asked for cigarettes, too, but I don’t think he ought to have them.”

Francis had been pacing in the hall outside, prowling restlessly back and forth like a cat. During this exchange he paused in the door. Now I saw him dart a quick worried glance at Henry. “Well, you know …?” he said hesitantly.

Henry said to me: “If he wants it—the bottle, that is—I think you’d better go ahead and take it to him.”

His tone annoyed me. “He’s sick,” I said. “You haven’t even seen him. If you think you’re doing him a favor by—”

“Richard, he’s right,” said Francis nervously, tapping a cigarette ash into his cupped palm. “I know about this a little bit. Sometimes, if you drink, it’s dangerous to stop too suddenly. Makes you sick. People can die of it.”

I was shocked by this. Charles’s drinking had never seemed so bad as all that. I did not comment on this, though, only said: “Well, if he’s that bad off, he’ll do a lot better in the hospital, won’t he?”

“What do you mean?” said Francis. “Do you want them to put him in a detox? Do you know what that’s like? When my mother came off drink that first time, she was out of her head. Seeing things. Wrestling with the nurse and yelling nutty stuff at the top of her lungs.”

“Hate to think of Charles having DTs in the Catamount Memorial Hospital,” said Henry. He went to the night table and got the bottle. It was a fifth, a little less than half full. “This will be cumbersome for him to hide,” he said, holding it up by the neck.

“We could pour it into something else,” said Francis.

“It would be easier, I think, if we bought him a new one. Less chance of it leaking all over everything. And if we get him one of those flat ones he can keep it under his pillow without much trouble.”

It was a drizzly morning, overcast and gray. Henry didn’t go with us to the hospital. He had us drop him off at his apartment—he had some excuse, plausible enough, I can’t remember what it was—and when he got out of the car he gave me a hundred-dollar bill.

“Here,” he said. “Give Charles my love. Will you buy some flowers for him or something?”

I looked at the bill, momentarily stunned. Francis snatched it from me and pushed it back at him. “Come on, Henry,” he said, with an anger that surprised me. “Stop it.”

“I want you to have it.”

“
Right
. We’re supposed to get him a hundred dollars’ worth of flowers.”

“Don’t forget to stop at the package store,” said Henry coldly. “Do what you like with the rest of the money. Just give him the change, if you want. I don’t care.”

He pushed the money at me again and shut the car door, with a click that was more contemptuous than if he’d slammed it. I watched his stiff square back receding up the walk.