Of course, I’d seen Delacorte when he was cutting weight for wrestling—when he looked like he was starving—but he was really starving now. (It suffices to say that I knew what the Hickman catheter in Delacorte’s skeletal birdcage of a chest was for.) They’d had him on a breathing machine, Mrs. Delacorte had told me when we were en route to his room, but he was off it for now. They’d been experimenting with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Mrs. Delacorte had also explained; Delacorte was on morphine, either way.
“At this point, the suction is very important—to help clear secretions,” Mrs. Delacorte had said.
“At this point, yes,” I’d lamely repeated. I was numb; I felt frozen on my feet, as if I were still standing paralyzed on Seventh Avenue in the falling snow.
“This is the guy who was going to be Lear’s Fool,” Delacorte was struggling to say to his mother.
“Yes, yes—I know, dear, I know,” the little woman was telling him.
“Did you bring more cups?” he asked her. I saw he was holding two paper cups; they were absolutely empty cups, his mother would later tell me. She was always bringing more cups, but there was no need for rinsing and spitting now; in fact, when they were trying the morphine under his tongue, Delacorte wasn’t supposed to rinse or spit—or so Mrs. Delacorte thought. He just wanted to hold the paper cups for some foolish reason, she said.
Delacorte also had cryptococcal meningitis; his brain was affected—he had headaches, his mom told me, and he was often delirious. “This guy was Ariel in The Tempest,” Delacorte said to his mother, upon my first visit to his room—and on the occasion of every later visit. “He was Sebastian in Twelfth Night,” Delacorte told his mom repeatedly. “It was the shadow word that prevented him from being Lear’s Fool, which was why I got the part,” Delacorte raved.
Later, when I visited him with Elaine, Delacorte even reiterated my onstage history to her. “He didn’t come to see me die, when I was Lear’s Fool—of course I understand,” Delacorte said in a most heartfelt way to Elaine. “I do appreciate that he’s come to see me die now—you’ve both come now, and I truly appreciate it!” he told us.
Delacorte not once called me by name, and I truly can’t remember if he ever did; I don’t recall him once addressing me as either Bill or Billy when we were Favorite River students. But what does that matter? I didn’t even know what his first name was! Since I’d not seen him onstage as Lear’s Fool, I have a more permanent picture of Delacorte from Twelfth Night; he played Sir Andrew Aguecheek—declaring to Sir Toby Belch (Uncle Bob), “O, had I but followed the arts!”
Delacorte died after several days of near-total silence, with the two clean paper cups held shakily in his hands. Elaine was there that day, with Mrs. Delacorte and me, and—coincidentally—so was Larry. He’d spotted Elaine and me from the doorway of Delacorte’s room, and had poked his head inside. “Not the one you were looking for, or is it?” Larry had asked.
Elaine and I both shook our heads. A very tired Mrs. Delacorte was dozing while her son slipped away. There was no point in introducing Delacorte to Larry; Delacorte, by his silence, seemed to have already slipped away, or else he was headed in that direction—nor did Elaine and I disturb Mrs. Delacorte to introduce her to Larry. (The little woman hadn’t slept a wink for God knows how long.)
Naturally, Larry was the AIDS authority in the room. “Your friend hasn’t got long,” he whispered to Elaine and me; then he left us there. Elaine took Mrs. Delacorte to the women’s room, because the exhausted mother was so worn out she looked as if she might fall or become lost if she went by herself.
I was alone with Delacorte only a moment. I’d grown so accustomed to his silence, I first thought that someone else had spoken. “Have you seen him?” came the faintest whisper. “Leave it to him—he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!” Delacorte breathlessly cried.
“Who?” I whispered in the dying man’s ear, but I knew who. Who else would Delacorte have had on his demented mind at that instant, or almost the instant, of his death? Delacorte died minutes later, with his mother’s small hands on his wasted face. Mrs. Delacorte asked Elaine and me if she could have a moment alone with her son’s body; of course we complied.
Bullshit or not, it was Larry who later told us that we shouldn’t have left Mrs. Delacorte alone in the room with her son’s body. “A single mom, right—an only child, I’m guessing?” Larry said. “And when there’s a Hickman catheter, Bill, you don’t want to leave any loved one alone with the body.”
“I didn’t know, Larry—I’ve never heard of such a thing!” I told him.
“Of course you haven’t heard of such a thing, Bill—you’re not involved! How would you have heard? You’re exactly like him, Elaine,” Larry told her. “The two of you are keeping such a distance from this disease—you’re barely bystanders!”
“Don’t pull rank on us, Larry,” Elaine said.
“Larry is always pulling rank, one way or another,” I said.
“You know, you’re not just bisexual, Bill. You’re bi-everything!” Larry told me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.
“You’re a solo pilot, aren’t you, Bill?” Larry asked me. “You’re cruising solo—no copilot has any clout with you.” (I still have no idea what Larry meant.)
“Don’t pull rank on us, Mr. Florence Fucking Nightingale,” Elaine said to Larry.
Elaine and I had been standing in the corridor outside Delacorte’s room, when one of the nurses passed by and paused to speak to us. “Is Carlton—” the nurse started to say.
“Yes, he’s gone—his mother is with him,” Elaine said.
“Oh, dear,” the nurse said, stepping quickly into Delacorte’s room, but she got there too late. Mrs. Delacorte had done what she wanted to do—what she’d probably planned to do, once she knew her son was going to die. She must have had the needle and a syringe in her purse. She’d stuck the needle into the end of the Hickman catheter; she’d drawn some blood out of the Hickman, but she emptied that first syringe into the wastebasket. The first syringe was mostly full of heparin. Mrs. Delacorte had done her homework; she knew that the second syringe would be almost entirely Carlton’s blood, teeming with the virus. Then she’d injected herself, deep into her gluteus, with about five milliliters of her son’s blood. (Mrs. Delacorte would die of AIDS in 1989; she died in hospice care in her apartment, in New York.)
At Elaine’s insistence, I took Mrs. Delacorte uptown in a taxi—after she’d given herself a lethal dose of her beloved Carlton’s blood. She had a tenth-floor apartment in one of those innocuously perfect buildings with an awning and a doorman on Park Avenue and East Seventy- or Eighty-something.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have a drink,” she told me. “Please come in.” I did.