“Charles!” Sue Atkins was calling breathlessly.
Elaine and I, and Charles, were all staring at poor Tom. I can’t say that Tom Atkins looked “peaceful,” but he was at rest from his terrible exertions to breathe.
“No, no, no,” his darling boy was crying—softer now.
Elaine and I saw Charles glance up suddenly at the open doorway. “Oh, it’s you, Jacques,” the nurse said. “It’s okay—you can come in. Come on.”
Elaine and I saw each other flinch. There was no concealing which Jacques we thought had come to say good-bye to Tom Atkins. But in the doorway was not the Zhak Elaine and I had been expecting. Was it possible that, for twenty years, Elaine and I were anticipating we might see Kittredge again?
In the doorway, the old dog stood—uncertain of his next arthritic step.
“Come on, boy,” Charles said, and Jacques limped forward into his former master’s former study. Charles lifted one of Tom’s cold hands off the side of the bed, and the old Labrador put his cold nose against it.
There were other presences in the doorway—soon to be in the small room with us—and Elaine and I retreated from poor Tom’s bedside. Sue Atkins gave me a wan smile. “How nice to have met you, finally,” the dying woman said. “Do stay in touch.” Like Tom’s father, twenty years ago, she didn’t shake my hand.
The boy, Peter, didn’t once look at me; he ran to his father and hugged the diminished body. The girl, Emily, glanced (albeit quickly) at Elaine; then she looked at Charles and screamed. The old dog just sat there, as he’d sat—expecting nothing—in the kitchen.
All the long way down that hall, through the vestibule (where I only now noticed an undecorated Christmas tree), and out of that afflicted house, Elaine kept repeating something I couldn’t quite hear. In the driveway was the taxi driver from the train station, whom we’d asked to wait. (To my surprise, we’d been inside the Atkins house only for forty-five minutes or an hour; it had felt, to Elaine and me, as if we’d been there half our lives.)
“I can’t hear what you’re saying,” I said to Elaine, when we were in the taxi.
“What happens to the duck, Billy?” Elaine repeated—loudly enough, this time, so that I could hear her.
Okay, so this is another epilogue, I was thinking.
“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” Prospero says—act 4, scene 1. At one time, I’d actually imagined that The Tempest could and should end there.
How does Prospero begin the epilogue? I was trying to remember. Of course Richard Abbott would know, but even when Elaine and I got back to New York, I knew I didn’t want to call Richard. (I wasn’t ready to tell Mrs. Hadley about Atkins.)
“First line of the epilogue to The Tempest,” I said, as casually as I could, to Elaine in that funereal taxi. “You know—the end, spoken by Prospero. How’s it begin?”
“‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown,’” Elaine recited. “Is that the bit you mean, Billy?”
“Yes, that’s it,” I told my dearest friend. That was exactly how I felt—o’erthrown.
“Okay, okay,” Elaine said, putting her arms around me. “You can cry now, Billy—we both can. Okay, okay.”
I was trying not to think of that line in Madame Bovary—Atkins had absolutely hated it. You know, that moment after Emma has given herself to the undeserving Rodolphe—when she feels her heart beating, “and the blood flowing in her body like a river of milk.” How that image had disgusted Tom Atkins!
Yet, as hard as it was for me to imagine—having seen the ninety-something pounds of Atkins as he lay dying, and his doomed wife, whose blood was no “river of milk” in her diseased body—Tom and Sue Atkins must have felt that way, at least once or twice.
“YOU’RE NOT SAYING THAT Tom Atkins told you Kittredge was gay—you’re not telling me that, are you?” Elaine asked me on the train, as I knew she would.
“No, I’m not telling you that—in fact, Tom both nodded and shook his head at the gay word. Atkins simply wasn’t clear. Tom didn’t exactly say what Kittredge is or was, only that he’d ‘seen’ him, and that Kittredge was ‘beautiful.’ And there was something else: Tom said Kittredge was not at all who we thought he was, Elaine—I don’t know more,” I told her.
“Okay. You ask Larry if he’s heard anything about Kittredge. I’ll check out some of the hospices, if you check out St. Vincent’s, Billy,” Elaine said.
“Tom never said that Kittredge was sick, Elaine.”
“If Tom saw him, Kittredge may be sick, Billy. Who knows where Tom went? Apparently, Kittredge went there, too.”
“Okay, okay—I’ll ask Larry, I’ll check out St. Vincent’s,” I said. I waited a moment, while New Jersey passed by outside the windows of our train. “You’re holding out on me, Elaine,” I told her. “What makes you think that Kittredge might have the disease? What don’t I know about Mrs. Kittredge?”
“Kittredge was an experimenter, wasn’t he, Billy?” Elaine asked. “That’s all I’m going on—he was an experimenter. He would fuck anyone, just to see what it was like.”
But I knew Elaine so well; I knew when she was lying—a lie of omission, maybe, not the other kind—and I knew I would have to be patient with her, as she had once (for years) been patient with me. Elaine was such a storyteller.
“I don’t know what or who Kittredge is, Billy,” Elaine told me. (This sounded like the truth.)
“I don’t know, either,” I said.
Here we were: Tom Atkins had died; yet Elaine and I were even then thinking about Kittredge.
Chapter 13
NOT NATURAL CAUSES
It still staggers me when I remember the impossible expectations Tom Atkins had for our oh-so-youthful romance those many summers ago. Poor Tom was no less guilty of wishful thinking in the desperation of his dying days. Tom hoped I might make a suitable substitute father for his son, Peter—a far-fetched notion, which even that darling fifteen-year-old boy knew would never happen.
I maintained contact with Charles, the Atkins family nurse, for only five or six years—not more. It was Charles who told me Peter Atkins was accepted at Lawrenceville, which—until 1987, a year or two after Peter had graduated—was an all-boys’ school. Compared to many New England prep schools—Favorite River Academy included—Lawrenceville was late in becoming coeducational.
Boy, did I ever hope Peter Atkins was not—to use poor Tom’s words—“like us.”
Peter went to Princeton, about five miles northeast of Lawrenceville. When my misadventure of cohabiting with Elaine ended in San Francisco, she and I moved back to New York. Elaine was teaching at Princeton in the academic year of 1987–88, when Peter Atkins was a student there. He showed up in her writing class in the spring of ’88, when the fifteen-year-old we’d both met was in his early twenties. Elaine thought Peter was an economics major, but Elaine never paid any attention to what her writing students were majoring in.
“He wasn’t much of a writer,” she told me, “yet he had no illusions about it.”
Peter’s stories were all about the suicide—when she was seventeen or eighteen—of his younger sister, Emily.