The Secret History (84 page)

We bought Charles’s whiskey—Cutty Sark, in a flat bottle—and a basket of fruit, and a box of petit-fours, and a game of Chinese checkers, and, instead of cleaning out the day’s stock of carnations at the florist’s downtown, an Oncidium orchid, yellow with russet tiger-stripes, in a red clay pot.

On the way to the hospital, I asked Francis what had happened over the weekend.

“Too upsetting. I don’t want to talk about it now,” he said. “I did see her. Over at Henry’s.”

“How is she?”

“Fine. A little preoccupied but fine, basically. She said she didn’t want Charles to know where she was and that was all there was to it. I wish I could’ve talked to her alone, and of course Henry didn’t leave the room for a second.” Restlessly, he felt in
his pocket for a cigarette. “This may sound crazy,” he said, “but before I saw her I’d been a little worried, you know? That something maybe had happened to her.”

I didn’t say anything. The same thought had crossed my mind, more than once.

“I mean—not that I thought Henry would
kill
her or anything, but you know—it was strange. Her disappearing like that, without a word to anybody. I—” He shook his head. “I hate to say this, but sometimes I wonder about Henry,” he said. “Especially with things like—well, you know what I mean?”

I didn’t answer. Actually I did know what he meant, quite well. But it was too horrible for either of us to come out and say.

Charles had a semi-private room. He was in the bed nearer the door, separated by a curtain from his roommate: the Hampden County postmaster, as we later discovered, who was in for a prostate operation. On his side there were a lot of FTD flower arrangements, and corny get-well cards taped to the wall, and he was propped up in bed talking with some noisy family members: food smells, laughter, everything cheery and snug. More of his visitors trailed in after Francis and me, stopping, for an instant, to peer curiously over the curtain at Charles: silent, alone, flat on his back with an IV in his arm. His face was puffy and his skin rough and coarse-looking, broken out in some kind of a rash. His hair was so dirty it looked brown. He was watching cartoons on television, violent ones, little animals that looked like weasels cracking up cars and bashing each other on the head.

He struggled to sit up when we stepped into his partition. Francis drew the curtain behind us, practically in the faces of the postmaster’s inquisitive visitors, a pair of middle-aged ladies, who were dying to get a good look at Charles and one of whom had craned around and cawed “Good Morning!” through the gap in the curtain, in the hopes of initiating conversation.

“Dorothy! Louise!” someone called from the other side. “Over here!”

There were rapid footsteps on the linoleum and henlike clucks and cries of greeting.

“Damn them,” said Charles. He was very hoarse and his voice was little more than a whisper. “He’s got people there all the time. They’re always coming in and out and trying to look at me.”

By way of distraction, I presented Charles with the orchid.

“Really? You bought that for me, Richard?” He seemed touched. I was going to explain that it was from all of us—without coming out and mentioning Henry, exactly—but Francis shot me a warning look and I kept my mouth shut.

We unloaded the sack of presents. I’d half expected him to pounce on the Cutty Sark and tear it open in front of us, but he only thanked us and put the bottle in the compartment underneath his upright gray-plastic bed tray.

“Have you talked to my sister?” he said to Francis. He said it in a very cold way, as if he were saying
Have you talked to my lawyer?

“Yes,” Francis said.

“She’s all right?”

“Seems to be.”

“What does she have to say for herself?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I hope you told her I said go to hell.”

Francis didn’t answer. Charles picked up one of the books I had brought him and began to leaf through it sporadically. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I’m kind of tired now.”

“He looks awful,” said Francis in the car.

“There’s got to be some way they can patch this up,” I said. “Surely we can get Henry to call him and apologize.”

“What good do you think that’s going to do? As long as Camilla’s at the Albemarle?”

“Well, she doesn’t know he’s in the hospital, does she? This is kind of an emergency.”

“I don’t know.”

The windshield wipers ticked back and forth. A cop in a rain slicker was directing traffic at the intersection. It was the cop with the red moustache. Recognizing Henry’s car, he smiled at us and beckoned for us to go through. We smiled and waved back, happy day, two guys on a ride—then drove for a block or two in grim, superstitious silence.

“There’s got to be something we can do,” I said at last.

“I think we had better stay out of it.”

“You can’t tell me that if she knew how sick he was, she wouldn’t be over at the hospital in five minutes.”

“I’m not kidding,” said Francis. “I think we both had better just stay out of it.”

“Why?”

But he only lit another cigarette and wouldn’t say anything else, no matter how I grilled him.

When I got back to my room I found Camilla sitting at my desk, reading a book. “Hi,” she said, glancing up. “Your door was open. I hope you don’t mind.”

Seeing her was like an electric shock. Unexpectedly I felt a surge of anger. Rain was blowing through the screen and I walked across the room to shut the window.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“How’s my brother?”

“Why don’t you go see him yourself?”

She put down the book—
ah, lovely
, I thought helplessly, I loved her, I loved the very sight of her: she was wearing a cashmere sweater, soft gray-green, and her gray eyes had a luminous celadon tint. “You think you have to take sides,” she said. “But you don’t.”

“I’m not taking sides. I just think whatever you’re doing, you picked a bad time to do it.”

“And what would be a good time?” she said. “I want you to see something. Look.”

She held up a piece of the light hair near her temples. Underneath was a scabbed spot about the size of a quarter where someone had, apparently, pulled a handful of hair out by the roots. I was too startled to say anything.

“And this.” She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. The wrist was swollen and a bit discolored, but what horrified me was a tiny, evil burn on the underside of the forearm: a cigarette burn, gouged deep and ugly in the flesh.

It was a moment before I found my voice. “Good God, Camilla! Charles did this?”

She pulled the sleeve down. “See what I mean?” she said. Her voice was unemotional; her expression watchful, almost wry.

“How long has this been going on?”

She ignored my question. “I know Charles,” she said. “Better than you do. Staying away, just now, is much wiser.”

“Whose idea was it that you stay at the Albemarle?”

“Henry’s.”

“How does he fit into this?”

She didn’t answer.

A horrible thought flashed across my mind. “
He
didn’t do this to you, did he?” I said.

She looked at me in surprise. “No. Why would you think that?”

“How am I supposed to know what to think?”

The sun came suddenly from behind a rain cloud, flooding the room with glorious light that wavered on the walls like water. Camilla’s face burst into glowing bloom. A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment—mirror, ceiling, floor—was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don’t know what. And then the cloud passed over the sun again, and the life went out of everything.

“Why did you come here?” I said.

“Because I wanted to see you.”

“I don’t know if you care what I think—” I hated the sound of my voice, was unable to control it, everything I said was coming out in the same haughty, injured tone—“I don’t know if you care what I think, but I think you’re making things worse by staying at the Albemarle.”

“And what do
you
think I should do?”

“Why don’t you stay with Francis?”

She laughed. “Because Charles bullies poor Francis to death,” she said. “Francis means well. I know that. But he couldn’t stand up to Charles for five minutes.”

“If you asked him, he’d give you the money to go somewhere.”

“I know he would. He offered to.” She reached in her pocket for a cigarette; with a pang I saw they were Lucky Strikes, Henry’s brand.

“You could take the money and stay wherever you like,” I said. “You wouldn’t have to tell him where.”

“Francis and I have gone over all this.” She paused. “The thing is, I’m afraid of Charles. And Charles is afraid of Henry. That’s really all there is to it.”

I was shocked by the coldness with which she said this.

“So is that it?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re protecting your own interests?”

“He tried to kill me,” she said simply. Her eyes met mine, candid and clear.

“And is Henry not afraid of Charles too?”

“Why should he be?”

“You know.”

Once she realized what I meant, I was startled how quickly she leapt to his defense. “Charles would never do that,” she said, with childlike swiftness.

“Let’s say he did. Went to the police.”

“But he
wouldn’t.
”

“How do you know?”

“And implicate the rest of us? Himself, too?”

“At this point, I think he might not care.”

I said this intending to hurt her, and with pleasure I saw that I had. Her startled eyes met mine. “Maybe,” she said. “But you’ve got to remember, Charles is
sick
now. He’s not himself. And the thing is, I believe he knows it.” She paused. “I love Charles,” she said. “I love him, and I know him better than anybody in the world. But he’s been under an awful lot of pressure, and when he’s drinking like this, I don’t know, he just becomes a different person. He won’t listen to anybody; I don’t know if he even remembers half the things he does. That’s why I thank God he’s in the hospital. If he has to stop for a day or two, maybe he’ll start thinking straight again.”

What would she think, I wondered, if she knew that Henry was sending him whiskey.

“And do you think Henry really has Charles’s best interest at heart?” I said.

“Of course,” she said, startled.

“And yours too?”

“Certainly. Why shouldn’t he?”

“You do have a lot of faith in Henry, don’t you,” I said.

“He’s never let me down.”

For some reason, I felt a fresh swell of anger. “And what about Charles?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“He’ll be out of the hospital soon. You’ll have to see him. What are you going to do then?”

“Why are you so angry at me, Richard?”

I glanced at my hand. It was trembling. I hadn’t even realized it. I was trembling all over with rage.

“Please leave,” I said. “I wish you’d go.”