“Did he have a lover? Before you, I mean.”
“Kevin and I were never lovers. I don’t even know him that well. I’m here ’cause he hasn’t got anybody else. He had a lover.”
“Did his lover die? What was his name?”
“Martin.”
“Kevin,” she said, “you’re going to be all right now. All you have to do is go to the light. Do you see the light? Your mother’s there, Kevin, and your father, and Martin—”
“Mark!” David cried. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid, it wasn’t Martin, it was Mark, Mark, that was his name.”
“That’s all right, David.”
“I’m so damn stupid—”
“Look into the light, Kevin,” she said. “Mark is there, and your parents, and everyone who ever loved you. Matthew, take his other hand. Kevin, you don’t have to stay here anymore, darling. You did everything you came here to do. You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to hold on. You can let go, Kevin. You can go to the light. Let go and reach out to the light—”
I don’t know how long she talked to him. Fifteen, twenty minutes, I suppose. Several times he made the cawing sound, but for the most part he was silent. Nothing seemed to be happening, and then I realized that his terror was no longer a presence. She seemed to have talked it away. She went on talking to him, stroking his brow and holding his hand, and I held his other hand. I was no longer listening to what she was saying, just letting the words wash over me while my mind played with some tangled thought like a kitten with yarn.
Then something happened. The energy in the room shifted and I looked up, knowing that he was gone.
“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, Kevin. God bless you, God give you rest. Yes.”
“Sometimes they’re stuck,” she said. “They want to go but they can’t. They’ve been hanging on so long, you see, that they don’t know how to stop.”
“So you help them.”
“If I can.”
“What if you can’t? Suppose you talk and talk and they still hold on?”
“Then they’re not ready. They’ll be ready another time. Sooner or later everybody lets go, everybody dies. With or without my help.”
“And when they’re not ready—”
“Sometimes I come back another time. And sometimes they’re ready then.”
“What about the ones who beg for help? The ones like Arthur Fineberg, who plead for death but aren’t physically close enough to it to let go?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The thing you want to say. The thing that’s stuck in your throat, the way his own unwanted life was stuck in Kevin’s throat. You’re holding on to it.”
“Just let it go, eh?”
“If you want.”
We were walking somewhere in Chelsea, and we walked a full block now without either of us saying a word. Then she said, “I think there’s a world of difference between assisting someone verbally and doing anything physical to hasten death.”
“So do I.”
“And that’s where I draw the line. But sometimes, having drawn that line—”
“You step over it.”
“Yes. The first time I swear I acted without conscious intent. I used a pillow, I held it over his face and—” She breathed deeply. “I swore it would never happen again. But then there was someone else, and he just needed help, you know, and—”
“And you helped him.”
“Yes. Was I wrong?”
“I don’t know what’s right or wrong.”
“Suffering is wrong,” she said, “unless it’s part of His plan, and how can I presume to decide if it is or not? Maybe people can’t let go because there’s one more lesson they have to learn before they move on. Who the hell am I to decide it’s time for somebody’s life to end? How dare I interfere?”
“And yet you do.”
“Just once in a while, when I just don’t see a way around it. Then I do what I have to do. I’m sure I must have a choice in the matter, but I swear it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel as though I have any choice at all.” She stopped walking, turned to look at me. She said, “Now what happens?”
“Well, she’s the Merciful Angel of Death,” I told Carl Orcott. “She visits the sick and dying, almost always at somebody’s invitation. A friend contacts her, or a relative.”
“Do they pay her?”
“Sometimes they try to. She won’t take any money. She even pays for the flowers herself.” She’d taken Dutch iris to Kevin’s apartment on Twenty-second Street. Blue, with yellow centers that matched her scarf.
“She does it pro bono,” he said.
“And she talks to them. You heard what Bobby said. I got to see her in action. She talked the poor son of a bitch straight out of this world and into the next one. I suppose you could argue that what she does comes perilously close to hypnosis, that she hypnotizes people and convinces them to kill themselves psychically, but I can’t imagine anybody trying to sell that to a jury.”
“She just talks to them.”
“Uh-huh. ‘Let go, go to the light.’ ”
“ ‘And have a nice day.’ ”
“That’s the idea.”
“She’s not killing people?”
“Nope. Just letting them die.”
He picked up a pipe. “Well, hell,” he said, “that’s what we do. Maybe I ought to put her on staff.” He sniffed the pipe bowl. “You have my thanks, Matthew. Are you sure you don’t want some of our money to go with it? Just because Mercy works pro bono doesn’t mean you should have to.”
“That’s all right.”
“You’re certain?”
I said, “You asked me the first day if I knew what AIDS smelled like.”
“And you said you’d smelled it before. Oh.”
I nodded. “I’ve lost friends to it. I’ll lose more before it’s over. In the meantime I’m grateful when I get the chance to do you a favor. Because I’m glad this place is here, so people have a place to come to.”
Even I was glad she was around, the woman in gray, the Merciful Angel of Death. To hold the door for them, and show them the light on the other side. And, if they really needed it, to give them the least little push through it.
The Night and the Music
We left halfway through the curtain calls, threading our way up the aisle and across the lobby. Inside it had been winter in Paris, with La Bohème’s lovers shivering and starving; outside it was New York, with spring turning into summer.
We held hands and walked across the great courtyard, past the fountain shimmering under the lights, past Avery Fisher Hall. Our apartment is in the Parc Vendome, at Fifty-seventh and Ninth, and we headed in that direction and walked a block or so in silence.
Then Elaine said, “I don’t want to go home.”
“All right.”
“I want to hear music. Can we do that?”
“We just did that.”
“Different music. Not another opera.”
“Good,” I said, “because one a night is my limit.”
“You old bear. One a night is one over your limit.”
I shrugged. “I’m learning to like it.”
“Well, one a night’s my limit. You know something? I’m in a mood.”
“Somehow I sensed as much.”
“She always dies,” she said.
“Mimi.”
“Uh-huh. How many times do you suppose I’ve seen La Bohème? Six, seven times?”
“If you say so.”
“At least. You know what? I could see it a hundred times and it’s not going to change. She’ll die every fucking time.”