Sacrament

  “Not a word.”

  Pat glanced at Will, smirking. “So,” he said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “You were telling me about Webster.”

  “It can wait. You’ve got a purposeful look on your face. What’s happening?”

  “I have to go to England. I’m catching a flight out tonight.”

  “This is sudden.”

  “My father’s got a problem. Somebody decided to beat the shit out of him.”

  “You were here on the night in question,” Patrick said. “I’ll swear to it.”

  “I mean badly, Pat.”

  “How badly?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out when I get there. So that’s my story. Now back to Webster.”

  Patrick sighed. “I had a heart to heart with him today. He’s been great. We’re always in line if somebody comes along with some new medication. But,” he shrugged, “I guess we’ve run out.” He looked at Will again. “It’s a mess, Will. Getting sick. We’ve all seen so much of it, and we all know how it goes. Well, it’s not going to happen to me.” This sounded like Patrick at his defiant best, but there was no resilience in his voice, only defeat.

  “I had a dream, a couple of nights ago. I was in a forest, a dark forest, and I was naked. Nothing sexual about it. Just naked. And I knew all these things were creeping up on me. Some were coming for my eyes. Some were coming for my skin. They were all going to get a piece of me. When I woke up, I thought: I’m not going to let that happen. I’m not going to sit there and be picked at, piece by piece.”

  “Have you talked to Bethlynn about any of this?”

  “Not about the conversation with Frank I’ve got a session with her tomorrow afternoon.” He leaned his head back on the headrest, and closed his eyes. “We’ve talked about you a lot, you’ll be pleased to know. And she was always pretty acute about you, before she met you. Now she’ll be useless. Like the rest of us, flailing around trying to work out what makes you tick”

  “It’s no great mystery,” Will said.

  “One of these days,” Patrick said lazily, “I’m going to have a blinding revelation about you, and everything’ll suddenly make sense. Why we stayed together. Why we came apart.” He opened one eye and squinted at Will. “Were you at the Penitent last night, by the way?”

  Will wasn’t sure. “Maybe,” he said. “Why?”

  “A friend of Jack’s said he saw you coming out, looking like you’d just done some serious mischief. Of course, I protected your honor. But it was you, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t remember, to be honest.”

  “My God, that’s something I don’t hear very often these days. Everybody’s too clean and sober. You don’t remember? You’re a throwback, Will. Homo Castro, nineteen seventy-five.” Will laughed. “A primitive simian with an oversized libido and a permanently glazed expression.”

  “There were some wild nights.”

  “There certainly were,” Patrick said with gentle relish. “But I don’t want to do it again; do you?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly. I did it, and it was great. But it’s over. At least for me. I’m making a connection with something else now.”

  “And how does that feel?”

  Patrick had again closed his eyes. His voice grew quiet. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “I feel God here sometimes. Right here with me.” He fell silent; the kind of silence that presages something of significance. Will said nothing. Just waited for the something to come. At last, Patrick said, “I’ve got a plan, Will.”

  “For what?”

  “For when I get very sick.” Again, the silence, and Will waiting. “I want you here, Will,” Patrick said. “I want to die looking at you, and you looking at me.”

  “Then that’s what’ll happen.”

  “But it might not,” Patrick said. His voice was calm and even, but tears had swelled between his closed lids and ran down his cheeks. “You might be in the middle of the Serengeti. Who knows? You might still be in England.”

  “I won’t—”

  “Ssh,” Patrick said. “Let me just get all of this said. I don’t want somebody telling you what did or didn’t happen and you not knowing whether to believe them or not. So I want you to know: I’m planning to die the way I’ve lived. Comfortably.

  Sensibly. Jack’s with me on it. So’s Rafael, of course. And, like I said, I want you here, too.” He stopped, wiped the tears off his cheeks with the heels of his hands, and then continued in the same contained manner. “But if you’re not, and there’s some problem, if Rafael or Jack get into trouble somehow—we’re trying to cover all the legal issues to make sure it doesn’t happen but there’s still a chance—I want to be sure you’ll get it sorted out. You’re good with that kind of stuff, Will. Nobody pushes you around.”

  “I’ll make sure there’s no problem, don’t worry.”

  “Good. That makes me feel a lot happier.” Without opening his eyes, he reached out and unerringly took Will’s hand. “How am I doing?”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  “I don’t like weepers.”

  “You’re allowed.”

  There was another silence, lighter this time, now that the deal had been struck. “You’re right,” Patrick finally said. “I’m allowed.”

  Will glanced at his watch. “Time to go,” he said.

  “Go, baby, go. I won’t get up if you don’t mind. I’m feeling a little frail.”

  Will went and hugged him, there in the chair. “I love you,” he said.

  “And I love you back.” He had caught fierce hold of Will’s arms and squeezed hard. “You do know that, don’t you? I mean, you’re not just hearing the words?”

  “I know it.”

  “I wish we’d had longer, Will—”

  “Me too,” Will said, “I’ve got a lot of stuff I’d need to tell you about, but I’ve got to catch this plane.”

  “No, Will, I mean I wish we’d had longer together. I wish we’d taken the time to know one another better.”

  “There’ll be time,” Will said.

  Pat held on to Will’s arms another moment. “Not enough,” and then, reluctantly loosening his grip, let Will go.

  I

  i

  Home to England, and the summer almost gone. August’s stars had fallen, and the leaves would follow very soon. Riot and rot in speedy succession.

  You’ll find the years pass more quickly as you get older Marcello—the resident wise old queen from Buddies in Boston—had told him an age ago. Will hadn’t believed it, of course. It wasn’t until he was thirty-one, maybe thirty-two, that he’d realized there was truth in the observation. Time wasn’t on his side after all; it was gathering speed, season upon season, year upon year.

  Thirty-five was upon him in a heartbeat, and forty close on its heels, the marathon he’d thought he was running in his youth mysteriously became a hundred-yard dash. Determined to achieve something of significance before the race was done he’d turned every minute of his life over to the making of pictures, but they were of small comfort. The books were published, the reviews were clipped and filed, and the animals he had witnessed in their final days went into the hands of taxidermists.

  Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.

  And yet he could still blithely wish hours of his life away when he was bored. Sitting in first class on the eleven-hour flight, he wished a hundred times it was over. He’d brought a bagful of books including the volume of poems Lewis had been distributing at Patrick’s party, but nothing held his attention for more than a page or two. One of Lewis’s short lyrics intrigued him mainly because he wondered who the hell it was about:

  Now, with our fierce brotherhood annulled,

  I see as if by lightning, all

  The perfect pains we might have made,

  had our love’s fiction lived another day.

  It certainly had the authentic ring of Lewis’
s voice about it.

  All his favorite subjects—pain, brotherhood, and the impossibility of love—in four lines.

  It was noon when he arrived: a muggy, breathless day, its oppressiveness doing nothing for his stupefied state. He claimed his baggage and picked up a rental car without any problem, but once he got onto the highway, he regretted not also hiring a driver. After two nights of less than satisfactory sleep, he was aching and short-tempered; within the first hour of the four-hour trek north, he was several times perilously close to a collision, the fault always his. He stopped to pick up some coffee and some aspirin and to walk the stiffness out of his joints. The weight and heat of the day were beginning to lift; there was rain beyond Birmingham, he heard somebody say, and worse to come. It was fine by him: a good heavy downpour, to cool the day still further.

  He got back into the car in an altogether brighter mood, and the next leg of the journey was uneventful. The traffic thinned, the rain came and went, and though the view from the motorway was seldom inspiring, on occasion it achieved a particularly English grace. Placid hills thumbed out of the clay, all velvety with grass or patched with straggling woods; harvesters raised ocher dust as they cut and threshed in the fields. And here and there, grander sights: a ridge of naked, sun struck rock against the grimy sky; a rainbow, leaping from a water-meadow. He felt a remote reminder of those hours on Spruce Street, wandering two revelatory blocks to Bethlynn’s house. There wasn’t anything like the same level of distraction here, thank God, but he had the. same sense that his gaze was cleansed; that he was seeing these sights, none of which were unfamiliar, more clearly than he had ever before. Would it be the same when he got to Burnt Yarley, he wondered. He certainly hoped so. He wanted to see the place made new, if that were possible; to which end he didn’t let himself stew in expectation of what lay ahead, but kept his thoughts in the moment: the road, the sky, the passing landscape.

  It became harder to do, however, once he got off the highway and headed into the hills, the clouds broke, and the sunlight moved on the slopes as if commanded, the light beautiful enough to bring him close to tears. It amazed him that having put so many journeys between his heart and the spirit of this place, laboring for more than two decades to discipline his sentiments, its beauty could still steal upon him. And still the clouds divided, and the sun joined up its quilt piece by gilded piece. He was passing through villages he now knew, at least by name.

  Herricksthwaite, Raddlesmoor, Kemp’s Hill. He knew the twists and turns in the road, and where it would bring him to a vantage point from which to admire a stand of sycamores, a stream, the folded hills.

  Dusk was imminent, the last of the day’s light still warming the hilltops but leaving to the blues and grays of dusk the valleys through which he wound his way. This was the landscape of memory; and this the hour. Nothing was quite certain. Forms blurred, defying definition. Was that a sheep or a boulder? Was that a deserted cottage or a clot of trees?

  His only concession to prophecy had been to prepare himself for a shock when he got into Burnt Yarley, but he needn’t have concerned himself. The changes wrought upon the village were relatively small. The post office had been remodeled; a few cottages had been tarted up; where the grocer’s had once stood there was now a small garage. Otherwise, everything looked quite familiar in the streetlight. He drove on until he reached the bridge, where he halted for a moment or two. The river was high; higher, in fact, than he ever remembered it running. He was sorely tempted to get out of the car and sit for a few minutes before covering the final mile. Maybe even double back three hundred yards and fortify himself with a pint of Guinness before he faced the house itself. But he resisted his own cowardice (for that was what it was) and after a minute or two loitering beside the river, he drove home.

  ii

  Home? No, never that. Never home. And yet what other word was there for this place he’d fled from? Perhaps that was the very definition of home, at least for men of his inclination: the solid, certain spot from which all roads led.

  Adele was opening the door even as he got out of the car.

  She’d heard him coming, she said, and thank goodness he was here, her prayers were answered. The way she said this (and repeated it) made him think she meant this literally, that she’d been praying for his safe and swift arrival. Now he was here and she had good news. Hugo was no longer on the danger list. He was mending quite nicely, the doctors said, though he’d have to stay in hospital for at least a month.

  “He’s a tough old bird,” Adele said fondly, as she puttered around the kitchen preparing Will a ham sandwich and tea.

  “And how are you bearing up?” Will asked her.

  “Oh, I’ve had a few sleepless nights,” she admitted almost guiltily, as though she had no right to sleeplessness. She certainly looked exhausted. She was no longer the formidable no-nonsense Yorkshire woman of twenty-five years before. Though he guessed her to be still shy of seventy, she looked older, her movements about the kitchen hesitant, her words often halting. She hadn’t told Hugo that Will was coming (“Just in case you changed your mind at the last minute,” she explained), but she had told his doctor, who had agreed that they could go to the hospital to see him tonight, though it would be well past visiting hours.

  “He’s been difficult,” she said heavily. “Even though he’s not fully with us. But he knows how to rub people up the wrong way whether he’s sick or well. He takes pleasure in it.”

  “I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with this on your own. I know how difficult he can be.”

  “Well, if he wasn’t difficult,” she said, with gentle indulgence, “he wouldn’t be who he is, and I wouldn’t care for him. So, I get on with it. That’s all we can really do, isn’t it?”

  It was simple enough wisdom. There were flaws in any arrangement. But if you cared, you just got on with it.

  Adele insisted she drive to the hospital. She knew the way, she said, so it would be quicker. Of course she drove at a snail’s pace, and by the time they got there it was almost half past nine.

  Relatively early by the standards of the outside world of course, but hospitals were discrete kingdoms, with their own time zones, and it might as well have been two in the morning: The corridors were hushed and deserted, the wards in darkness.

  The nurse who escorted Will and Adele to Hugo’s room was chatty, however, her voice a little too loud for the subdued surroundings.

  “He was awake last time I popped my head in, but he may have gone back to sleep. The pain killers are making him a little groggy. Are you his son, then?”

  “I am.”

  “Ah,” she said, with an almost coy little smile. “He’s been talking about you, on and off. Well, rambling really. But he’s obviously been wanting to see you. It’s Nathaniel, right?” She didn’t wait for confirmation, but withered on blithely—something about how they moved him to a shared room, and now the man he’d been put in with had been discharged, so he had the room to himself, which was lucky, wasn’t it? Will murmured that yes, it was lucky.

  “Here we are.” The door was ajar. “You want to just go in and surprise him?” the nurse said.

  “Not particularly,” Will said.

  The nurse looked confounded, then decided she’d misheard, and with an asinine smile, breezed off down the corridor.

  “I’ll wait out here,” Adele said. “You should have this moment alone, just the two of you.”

  Will nodded, and after twenty-one years stepped back into his father’s presence.

  II

  There was a meager lamp burning beside Hugo’s bed, its sallow light throwing a monumental shadow of the man upon the wall.

  He was semi recumbent amid a Himalayan mass of pillows, his eyes closed.

  He’d grown a beard and nurtured it to a formidable size. A solid ten-inches long, trimmed and waxed in emulation of the beards of great, dead men: Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy. The minds by which Hugo had always judged contemporary thought and art, and found it wa
nting. The beard was more gray than black, with streams of white running in it from the corners of his mouth, as though he’d dribbled cream into it. His hair, by contrast, had been clipped short and lay flat to his scalp, delineating the Roman dome of his skull. Will watched him for fifteen or twenty seconds, thinking how magisterial he looked. Then Hugo’s lips parted, and very quietly he said, “So you came back.” Now his eyes opened and found Will. Though there was a pair of spectacles at the bedside table, he stared at his visitor as though he had Will in perfect focus, his stare as unrelenting as ever, and as judgmental.

  “Hello, Dad,” Will said.

  “Into the light,” Hugo said, beckoning for Will to approach the bed. “Let me see you.” Will duly stepped into the light of the lamp to be scrutinized. “The years are showing on you,” he said.

  “It’s the sun. If you have to tramp the world at least wear a hat.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “Where were you lurking this time?”

  “I wasn’t lurking, Dad. I was—”

  “I thought you’d deserted me. Where’s Adele? Is she here?” He reached out to pluck his glasses off the nightstand. In his haste he instead knocked them to the ground. “Damn things!”

  “They’re not broken.” Will said, picking them up.

  Hugo put them on, one handed. Will knew better than to help. “Where is she?”

  “Waiting outside. She wanted us to have a little quality time together.”

  Now, paradoxically, he didn’t look at Will, but studied the folds in the bedcover and his hands, his manner perfectly detached. “Quality time?” he said. “Is that an Americanism?”

  “Probably.”

  “What does it mean exactly?”

  “Oh, . . .” Will sighed. “Are we reduced to that already?”

  “No, I’m just interested,” Hugo said. “Quality time.” He pursed his lips.

  “It’s a stupid turn of phrase,” Will conceded. “I don’t know why I used it.”

  Stymied, Hugo looked at the ceiling. Then, “Maybe you could just ask Adele to come in. I need a few toiletry items brought—”