The Secret History (95 page)

I had started to date Sophie Dearbold, my senior year of school, and during my last term I moved into her apartment off-campus: on Water Street, just a few doors down from Henry’s house, where his Madame Isaac Pereire roses were running wild in the back yard (he never lived to see them bloom, it occurs to me, those roses that smelled like raspberries) and where the boxer dog, sole survivor of his chemistry experiments, ran out to bark at me when I walked by. Sophie had a job, after school, with a dance company in Los Angeles. We thought we were in love. There was some talk of getting married. Though everything in my subconscious was warning me not to (at night I dreamed of car crashes, freeway snipers, the glowing eyes of feral dogs in suburban parking lots) I restricted my applications for graduate fellowships to schools in Southern California.

We hadn’t been out there six months when Sophie and I broke up. I was uncommunicative, she said. She never knew what I was thinking. The way I looked at her sometimes, when I woke up in the morning, frightened her.

I spent all my time in the library, reading the Jacobean dramatists. Webster and Middleton, Tourneur and Ford. It was an obscure specialization, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved—of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed—was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays were strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality:
The Malcontent. The White Devil. The Broken Heart
. I pored over them, made notes in the margins. The Jacobeans had a sure grasp of catastrophe. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. I felt they cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world.

I had always loved Christopher Marlowe, and I found myself thinking a lot about him, too. “Kind Kit Marlowe,” a contemporary had called him. He was a scholar, the friend of Raleigh and of Nashe, the most brilliant and educated of the Cambridge wits. He moved in the most exalted literary and political circles; of all his fellow poets, the only one to whom Shakespeare ever directly alluded was he; and yet he was also a forger, a murderer, a man of the most dissolute companions and habits, who “dyed swearing” in a tavern at the age of twenty-nine. His companions on that day were a spy, a pickpocket, and a “bawdy serving-man.” One of them stabbed Marlowe, fatally, just above the eye: “of which wound the aforesaid Christ. Marlowe died instantly.”

I often thought of these lines of his, from
Doctor Faustus:

and of this one, spoken as an aside on the day that Faustus in his black robes went to the emperor’s court:

When I was writing my dissertation, on Tourneur’s
The Revenger’s Tragedy
, I received the following letter from Francis.

I had not seen him in three years. The letter was postmarked Boston, four days earlier. I dropped everything and drove to the airport and got on the first plane to Logan, where I found Francis in Brigham and Women’s Hospital recuperating from two razorblade cuts to the wrist.

He looked terrible. He was pale as a corpse. The maid, he said, had found him in the bathtub.

He had a private room. Rain was pounding on the gray windowpanes. I was terribly glad to see him and he, I think, to see me. We talked for hours, about nothing, really.

“Did you hear I’m going to get married?” he said presently.

“No,” I said, startled.

I thought he was joking. But then he pushed up in his bed a bit and riffled through his night table and found a photograph of her, which he showed to me. Blue-eyed blonde, tastefully clad, built along the Marion line.

“She’s pretty.”

“She’s stupid,” said Francis passionately. “I hate her. Do you know what my cousins call her? The Black Hole.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the conversation turns into a vacuum whenever she walks into the room.”

“Then why are you going to marry her?”

For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he said: “I was seeing someone. A lawyer. He’s a bit of a drunk but that’s all right. He went to Harvard. You’d like him. His name is Kim.”

“And?”

“And my grandfather found out. In the most melodramatic way you can possibly imagine.”

He reached for a cigarette. I had to light it for him because of his hands. He had injured one of the tendons that led to his thumb.

“So,” he said, blowing out a plume of smoke. “I have to get married.”

“Or what?”

“Or my grandfather will cut me off without a cent.”

“Can’t you get by on your own?” I said.

“No.”

He said this with such certainty that it irritated me.

“I do,” I said.

“But you’re used to it.”

Just then the door to his room cracked open. It was his nurse-not from the hospital, but one that his mother had privately engaged.

“Mr. Abernathy!” she said brightly. “There’s someone here who wants to see you!”

Francis closed his eyes, then opened them. “It’s her,” he said. The nurse withdrew. We looked at each other.

“Don’t do it, Francis,” I said.

“I’ve got to.”

The door opened, and the blonde in the photograph—all smiles—waltzed in, wearing a pink sweater with a pattern of snowflakes knit into it, and her hair tied back with a pink ribbon. She was actually quite pretty. Among her armload of presents were a teddy bear; jelly beans wrapped in cellophane; copies of
GQ, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire:
good God, I thought, since when does Francis read magazines?

She walked over to the bed, kissed him briskly on the forehead. “Now, sweetie,” she said to him, “I thought we’d decided not to smoke.”

To my surprise, she plucked the cigarette from between his fingers and put it out in the ashtray. Then she looked over at me and beamed.

Francis ran a bandaged hand through his hair. “Priscilla,” he said tonelessly, “this is my friend Richard.”

Her blue eyes widened. “Hi!” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you!”

“And I about you,” I said politely.

She pulled up a chair to Francis’s bed. Pleasant, still smiling, she sat down.

And, as if by magic, the conversation stopped.

Camilla showed up in Boston the next day; she, too, had got a letter from Francis.

I was drowsing in the bedside chair. I’d been reading to Francis,
Our Mutual Friend
—funny, now I think about it, how much my time with Francis at the hospital in Boston was like the time that Henry spent at the hospital in Vermont with me—and when I woke up, awakened by Francis’s exclamation of surprise, and saw her standing there in the dreary Boston light, I thought that I was dreaming.

She looked older. Cheeks a bit hollower. Different hair, cut very short. Without realizing it, I had come to think of her, too, as a ghost: but to
see
her, wan but still beautiful, in the flesh, my heart gave such a glad and violent leap that I thought it would burst, I thought I would die, right there.

Francis sat up in bed and held out his arms. “Darling,” he said. “Come here.”

The three of us were in Boston together for four days. It rained the whole time. Francis got out of the hospital on the second day—which, as it happened, was Ash Wednesday.

I had never been to Boston before; I thought it looked like the London I had never seen. Gray skies, sooty brick townhouses, Chinese magnolias in the fog. Camilla and Francis wanted to go to mass, and I went along with them. The church was crowded and drafty. I went to the altar with them to get ashes, shuffling along in the swaying line. The priest was bent, in black, very old. He made a cross on my forehead with the flat of his thumb.
Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return
. I stood up again when it was time for communion, but Camilla caught my arm and hastily pulled me back. The three of us stayed in our seats as the pews emptied and the long, shuffling line started toward the altar again.