The Secret History (75 page)

Those days, I took an enormous relish in my new-found freedom. Now it appeared that we were safe a huge darkness had lifted from my mind. The world was a fresh and wonderful place to me, green and bracing and entirely new, and I looked at it now with fresh new eyes.

I went on a lot of long walks by myself, through North Hampden, down to the Battenkill river. I liked especially going to the little country grocery in North Hampden (whose ancient proprietors, mother and son, were said to have been the inspiration for a famous and frequently anthologized horror story from the 1950s) to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons—a waste of time. I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was
young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

On one of those afternoons I wandered by Henry’s house and found him in his back yard digging a flower bed. He had on his gardening clothes—old trousers, shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow—and in the wheelbarrow were tomato plants and cucumber, flats of strawberry and sunflower and scarlet geranium. Three or four rosebushes with their roots tied in burlap were propped against the fence.

I let myself in through the side gate. I was quite drunk. “Hello,” I said, “hello, hello, hello.”

He stopped and leaned on his shovel. A pale flush of sunburn glowed on the bridge of his nose.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Putting out some lettuces.”

There was a long silence, in which I noticed the ferns he’d dug up the afternoon we killed Bunny. Spleenwort, I remembered him calling them; Camilla had remarked on the witchiness of the name. He had planted them on the shady side of the house, near the cellar, where they grew dark and foamy in the cool.

I lurched back a bit, caught myself on the gatepost. “Are you going to stay here this summer?” I said.

He looked at me closely, dusted his hands on his trousers. “I think so,” he said. “What about you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, but only the day before I had put in an application at the Student Services office for an apartment-sitting job, in Brooklyn, for a history professor who was studying in England over the summer. It sounded ideal—a rent-free place to stay in, nice part of Brooklyn, and no duties except watering the plants and taking care of a pair of Boston terriers, who couldn’t go to England because of the quarantine. My experience with Leo and the mandolins had made me wary, but the clerk had assured me that no, this was different, and she’d shown me a file of letters from happy students who had previously held the job. I had never been to Brooklyn and didn’t know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city—any city, especially a strange one—liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Henry was still looking at me. He pushed his glassses up on his nose. “You know,” he said, “it’s pretty early in the afternoon.” I laughed. I knew what he was thinking: first Charles, now me.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Are you?”

“Of course.”

He went back to his work, sticking the shovel into the ground, stepping down hard on one side of the blade with a khaki-gaitered foot. His suspenders made a black X across his back. “Then you can give me a hand with these lettuces,” he said. “There’s another spade in the toolshed.”

Late that night—two a.m.—my house chairperson pounded on my door and yelled that I had a phone call. Dazed with sleep, I put on my bathrobe and stumbled downstairs.

It was Francis. “What do you want?” I said.

“Richard, I’m having a heart attack.”

I looked with one eye at my house chairperson—Veronica, Valerie, I forget her name—who was standing by the phone with her arms folded over her chest, head to one side in an attitude of concern. I turned my back. “You’re all right,” I said into the receiver. “Go back to sleep.”

“Listen to me.” His voice was panicky. “I’m having a heart attack. I think I’m going to die.”

“No you’re not.”

“I have all the symptoms. Pain in the left arm. Tightness in chest. Difficulty breathing.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to come over here and drive me to the hospital.”

“Why don’t you call the ambulance?” I was so sleepy my eyes kept closing.

“Because I’m scared of the ambulance,” said Francis, but I couldn’t hear the rest because Veronica, whose ears had pricked up at the word
ambulance
, broke in excitedly.

“If you need a paramedic, the guys up at the security booth know CPR,” she said eagerly. “They’re on call from midnight to six. They also run a van service to the hospital. If you want me to I’ll—”

“I don’t need a paramedic,” I said. Francis was repeating my name frantically at the other end.

“Here I am,” I said.

“Richard?” His voice was weak and breathy. “Who are you talking to? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Now listen to me—”

“Who said something about paramedic?”

“Nobody. Now listen.
Listen
,” I said, as he tried to talk over me. “Calm down. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I want you to come over. I feel really bad. I think my heart just stopped beating for a moment. I—”

“Are drugs involved?” said Veronica in a confidential tone.

“Look,” I said to her, “I wish you’d be quiet and let me hear what this person is trying to say.”

“Richard?” said Francis. “Will you just come get me? Please?”

There was a brief silence.

“All right,” I said, “give me a few minutes,” and I hung up the phone.

At Francis’s apartment I found him dressed except for his shoes, lying on his bed. “Feel my pulse,” he said.

I did, to humor him. It was quick and strong. He lay there limply, eyelids fluttering. “What do you think is wrong with me?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. He was a bit flushed but he really didn’t look that bad. Still—though it would be insane, I knew, to mention it at that moment—it was possible that he had food poisoning or appendicitis or something.

“Do you think I should go into the hospital?”

“You tell me.”

He lay there a moment. “I don’t know. I really think I should,” he said.

“All right, then. If it’ll make you feel better. Come on. Sit up.”

He was not too ill to smoke in the car all the way to the hospital.

We circled around the drive and pulled up by the wide floodlit entrance marked
Emergency
. I stopped the car. We sat there for a moment.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I said.

He looked at me with astonishment and contempt.

“You think I’m
faking,
” he said.

“No I don’t,” I said, surprised; and, to be honest, the thought hadn’t occurred to me. “I just asked you a question.”

He got out of the car and slammed the door.
We had to wait about half an hour. Francis filled out his chart and sat sullenly reading back issues of
Smithsonian
magazine. But when the nurse finally called his name, he didn’t stand up.

“That’s you,” I said.

He still didn’t move.

“Well, go on,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He had a sort of wild look in his eye. “Look here,” he finally said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“
What?
”

“I’ve said I’ve changed my mind. I want to go home.”

The nurse was standing in the doorway, listening to this exchange with interest.

“That’s stupid,” I said to him, irritated. “You’ve waited this long.”

“I changed my mind.”

“You were the one who wanted to come.”

I knew this would shame him. Annoyed, avoiding my gaze, he slammed down his magazine and stalked through the double doors without looking back.

About ten minutes later an exhausted-looking doctor in a scrub shirt poked his head into the waiting room. I was the only person there.

“Hi,” he said curtly. “You with Mr. Abernathy?”

“Yes.”

“Would you step back with me for a moment, please?”

I got up and followed him. Francis was sitting on the edge of an examining table, fully clad, bent almost double and looking miserable.

“Mr. Abernathy will not put on a gown,” said the doctor. “And he won’t let the nurse take any blood. I don’t know how he expects us to examine him if he won’t cooperate.”

There was a silence. The lights in the examining room were very bright. I was horribly embarrassed.

The doctor walked over to a sink and began to wash his hands. “You guys been doing any drugs tonight?” he said casually.

I felt my face getting red. “No,” I said.

“A little cocaine? Some speed, maybe?”

“No.”

“If your friend here took something, it would help a lot if we knew what it was.”