Because despite the fact that the children were dying themselves, they had gone and bought trouble anyway. Getting home free had been denied them, not having to apologize had. All they could hope for now was to cover their ass.
“Hey,” Benny called, “where you off to then? Lydia? Charley? Hey, Noah,” he called.
“Let them,” Rena said. “Benny?”
“Yeah,” he said, “sure,” watching them leave.
The buddy system had broken down completely. Noah had thrown his arm about Tony Word’s shoulder. Janet Order fell into step between Pluto and Mickey and dared them to speak once they’d left the confines of the room and were in the hall again. Pluto kept his own counsel, but Mickey Mouse, grown into his part, said he thought all of them had done a wonderful job.
“Do you think you could hold me?” Rena asked.
“Hold you?”
“I shouldn’t ask. I know I’m a mess.”
“Listen,” he said, “are you going to be all right?”
“After that night,” she said, breathing brokenly, “we explored the hotel, when we had all that fun…”
“What?” Benny said. He could hardly hear her. “What?”
“Oh,” said the fastidious girl, “look at this bed. What I’ve done to the sheets.” Some of her handkerchiefs, wadded, stained, had shaken loose from the sleeves of her dress, from her collar and waistband, from the hem of her skirt. They lay about her like ruined flowers, exploded ordnance. “Please,” she said, “hold me. Just till they find us.”
He held her, and it hurt where even her frail weight pressed against his chest, his belly, his heart. He held her, and she told him she’d never taken her eyes off him that day they’d all undressed on the island. He held her, and she told him she loved him.
“Oh, Benny, the good die young,” Rena Morgan said, and died.
He was with her when Mary Cottle and the others found them.
“She said she loved me,” Benny told them when they walked in.
“Oh,” Mr. Moorhead said. “Oh, God. Oh,” he said, as if suddenly it was all quite clear to him.
Which it was.
Because everything has a reasonable explanation. The physician had determined to bring no one along who he was not certain could survive the trip. It was her respiration, her terrible heavy breathing that had caused her spasms and loosed the poisons in her chest, the mucus and biles, the clots of congestion hanging together and preserving her life by the strings of the ordinary. The great prognostician had simply failed to factor her desire into the equation. He had missed his prognosis because he hadn’t taken her sighs into account, the squalls, blasts, and aerodynamics of passion, all the high winds and gale- force bluster of love.
8
Bale wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, who felt, that is, he must earn his rewards. As a kid he hadn’t dutifully done his vegetables in order to get to the meat, or eaten all his meat up in order to tuck away dessert. He wasn’t anal enough for rigmarole and would occasionally, though he was never particularly fond of greens, use the spoon he’d just dipped into his trifle to take up his salad. “Eating around” was his term for the habit. Though this wasn’t a habit either. He had no habits and noticed that Liam had inherited the tendency. (It delighted him, even when his boy was in hospital, to watch the child — the hospital trays with the meal’s portions isolated and set in the tray’s hollows and pockets like paints spread out on a palette made this easy to keep track of — and know that this piece of business came from him, from Eddy, or at least from his, the Bales’, side of the family.) It wasn’t exactly a blockbuster heritage and he made no great claims for it, but it was amusing nevertheless to be able to identify and claim — though he didn’t do this either — the trait as strictly his own contribution. Because Ginny, he’d noticed, ate in accordance with secret and, within terms of the discipline, totally arbitrary principles of her own, or at least of her side of the family. He’d made no study, of course — he wasn’t compulsive — but had observed that, though it was unknown to him and perhaps even to her, she had a sort of game plan, changed as often as good code. Sometimes it was as elementary as eating everything on her plate from left to right. Sometimes he didn’t realize until days afterward — he wasn’t compulsive, he wasn’t compulsive and he wasn’t anal; he had a good head for menus is all — that she had eaten her food alphabetically, or along the points of the compass.
So why had he waited almost a year to open that letter she’d left for him the day she’d gone off in the taxi, the letter he had assumed, assumed now, assumed at the time, would explain everything? Because he already knew why she’d left. Indeed, if Ginny hadn’t left him it could only have been a matter of time till he’d left Ginny. Liam had been a remarkable child. In health remarkable: bright, good, cheerful, pleasant, thoughtful, generous, obliging, and kind. And in sickness remarkable too: all he’d been in health plus a saint of suffering. In sickness and in health. A self-contained marriage of true mind. (He might have taken vows, though he was better than that, better than vows.) To have remained together after Liam died would have been a constant reminder that they were not as good as Liam, that they’d been brought low. If time was to do its job and heal all things, then first the wound had to be taken off, covered over, removed. Liam must die and the Bales must separate.
So he knew why Ginny had left and why, it could even be, she’d taken up with Tony the Tobacconist. At the time he hadn’t known that she had. Otherwise he’d probably have ripped open the letter at once, skipping over all the stuff that was sure to be there (“…and the short of it, Eddy, is that Liam was simply too good. We should never have been able to recover from his loss. Even if we never mentioned his name again, darling, we should be reminded every time we called each other’s. We’re both young and don’t deserve to live in the shadow of his loss another thirty…”) to get to the juicy parts.
So why? Who’d deliberately left his son’s scrapbook at home, photos from the papers of the ill head-bandaged boy, and which, according to the very letter of his own topsy-turvy laws of reasoning, eschewing the good memories, preserving the bad, he could easily have afforded to bring along with him, but who’d left it instead unlooked-for in Putney, or for Ginny to take with her, her dead dowry, to her tobacconist, and who carried on his person only the black, dissolving shards of the memorial brassard, little more now than a kind of officially sanctioned death dust? So why? Why the letter? Who by inclination, and all the sugarotropism of those familial, historic, biologic, Balean, sweet- seeking genes, took dessert with his soup, appetizer with his coffee?
Because while he wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, wasn’t dutiful about his veggies or anal enough for rigmarole, he had, in fact, a sense of the last, a knowledge and feel, that is, real as his pride in his own continuity in good Liam’s eating patterns, for the conclusionary ripeness — an instinct, that is, for when worse came to worst.
So maybe he was anal, or at least retentive, squirreling away the best if not for last then for when it was most needed.