It was hard to fathom why Delacorte had died at St. Vincent’s, when Mrs. Delacorte could clearly have provided more comfortable hospice care for him in her own Park Avenue apartment. “Carlton always objected to feeling privileged,” Mrs. Delacorte explained. “He wanted to die like Everyman—that’s what he said. He wouldn’t let me provide him with hospice care here, even though they could probably have used the extra room at St. Vincent’s—as I told him, many times,” she said.
They no doubt did need the extra room at St. Vincent’s, or they soon would. (Some people waited to die in the corridors there.)
“Would you like to see Carlton’s room?” Mrs. Delacorte asked me, when we both had a drink in hand, and I don’t drink—nothing but beer. I had a whiskey with Mrs. Delacorte; maybe it was bourbon. I would have done anything that little woman wanted. I even went with her to Delacorte’s childhood room.
I found myself in a museum of what had been Carlton Delacorte’s privileged life in New York, before he’d been sent “away” to Favorite River Academy; it was a fairly common story that Delacorte’s leaving home had coincided with his parents getting a divorce, about which Mrs. Delacorte was candid with me.
More surprising, Mrs. Delacorte was no less candid about the prevailing cause of her separation and divorce from young Carlton’s father; her husband had been a raving homo-hater. The man had called Carlton a fairy and a little fag; he’d berated Mrs. Delacorte for allowing the effeminate boy to dress up in his mother’s clothes and paint his lips with her lipstick.
“Of course I knew—probably long before Carlton did,” Mrs. Delacorte told me. She seemed to be favoring her right buttock; such a deep intramuscular injection had to hurt. “Mothers know,” she said, unconsciously limping a little. “You can’t force children to become something they’re not. You can’t simply tell a boy not to play with dolls.”
“No, you can’t,” I said; I was looking at all the photographs in the room—pictures of the unguarded Delacorte, before I knew him. He’d been just a little boy once—one who’d like nothing better than to dress and make himself up as a little girl.
“Oh, look at this—just look,” the little woman suddenly said; the ice cubes were clicking together in her near-empty glass as she reached and untacked a photo from a bulletin board of photographs in her departed son’s bedroom. “Look at how happy he was!” Mrs. Delacorte cried, handing me the photo.
I’m guessing that Delacorte was eleven or twelve in the picture; I had no difficulty recognizing his impish little face. Certainly, the lipstick had accentuated his grin. The cheap mauve wig—with a pink streak—was ridiculous; it was one of those wigs you can find in a Halloween-type costume shop. And of course Mrs. Delacorte’s dress was too big for the boy, but the overall effect was hilarious and endearing—well, not if you were Mr. Delacorte, I guess. There was a taller, slightly older-looking girl in the photograph with Delacorte—a very pretty girl, but with short hair (as closely cut as a boy’s) and an arrestingly confident but tight-lipped smile.
“This day didn’t end well. Carlton’s father came home and was furious to see Carlton like this,” Mrs. Delacorte was saying as I looked more closely at the photo. “The boys had been having such a wonderful time, and that tyrant of a man ruined it!”
“The boys,” I repeated. The very pretty girl in the photograph was Jacques Kittredge.
“Oh, you know him—I know you do!” Mrs. Delacorte said, pointing at the oh-so-perfectly cross-dressed Kittredge. He’d applied his lipstick far more expertly than Delacorte had applied his, and one of Mrs. Delacorte’s beautiful but old-fashioned dresses was an exquisite fit. “The Kittredge boy,” the little woman said. “He went to Favorite River—he was a wrestler, too. Carlton was always in awe of him, I think, but he was a devil—that boy. He could be charming, but he was a devil.”
“How was Kittredge a devil?” I asked Mrs. Delacorte.
“I know he stole my clothes,” she said. “Oh, I gave him some old things I didn’t want—he was always asking me if he could have my clothes! ‘Oh, please, Mrs. Delacorte,’ he would say, ‘my mother’s clothes are huge, and she doesn’t let me try them on—she says I always mess them up!’ He just went on, and on, like that. And then my clothes started disappearing—I mean things I know perfectly well I would never have given him.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know about you,” Mrs. Delacorte said, “but I’m going to have another drink.” She left me to fix herself a second whiskey; I looked at all the other photos on the bulletin board in Delacorte’s childhood bedroom. There were three or four photographs with Kittredge in the picture—always as a girl. When Mrs. Delacorte came back to her dead son’s room, I was still holding the photo she’d handed me.
“Please take it,” she told me. “I don’t like remembering how that day ended.”
“Okay,” I said. I still have that photograph, though I don’t like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.
DID I TELL ELAINE about Kittredge and Mrs. Delacorte’s clothes? Did I show Elaine that photo of Kittredge as a girl? No, of course not—Elaine was holding out on me, wasn’t she?
Some guy Elaine knew got a Guggenheim; he was a fellow writer, and he told Elaine that his seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street was the perfect place for two writers.
“Where’s Post Street?” I asked Elaine.
“Near Union Square, he said—it’s in San Francisco, Billy,” Elaine told me.
I didn’t know San Francisco at all; I only knew there were a lot of gays there. Of course I knew there were gay men dying in big numbers in San Francisco, but I didn’t have any close friends or former lovers there, and Larry wouldn’t be there to bully me about getting more involved. There was another incentive: Elaine and I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep looking for Kittredge—not in San Francisco, or so we’d thought.
“Where’s your friend going on his Guggenheim?” I asked Elaine.
“Somewhere in Europe,” Elaine said.
“Maybe we should try living together in Europe,” I suggested.
“The apartment in San Francisco is available now, Billy,” Elaine told me. “And, for a place that will accommodate two writers, it’s so cheap.”
When Elaine and I got a look at our view from the eighth floor of that rat’s-ass apartment—those uninspiring rooftops on Geary Street, and that bloodred vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio (the neon for HOTEL was burned out before we arrived in San Francisco)—we could understand why that two-writer apartment was so cheap. It should have been free!
But if Tom and Sue Atkins dying of AIDS struck Elaine and me as too much, we couldn’t stand what Mrs. Delacorte had done to herself, nor have I ever heard that such a drawn-out death was a common suicide plan of the loved ones of AIDS victims, particularly (as Larry had so knowingly told Elaine and me) among single moms who were losing their only children. But, as Larry also said, how would I have heard about anything like that? (It was true, as he’d said, that I wasn’t involved.)
“You’re going to try living together in San Francisco,” Larry said to Elaine and me, as if we were runaway children. “Oh, my—a little late to be lovebirds, isn’t it?” (I thought Elaine was going to hit him.) “And, pray tell, what made you choose San Francisco? Have you heard there are no gay men dying there? Maybe we all should move to San Francisco!”