The Short History of a Prince (40 page)

Years later Walter would tell Lucy about the night in the middle of April, the night he and Mitch came home and between them ate a pan of macaroni and cheese, a loaf of bread and also cleaned up a half gallon of vanilla fudge twist. They left their dirty plates at the table, along with the ice cream bowls, the soggy carton, the bum end of the loaf and the plastic bag sitting in a pool of milk. Walter let the dog out and turned off the lights. He was thinking what to say when they got upstairs. He was going to whisper something to Mitch, a suitable quote, a short affectionate line. Just a little pillow talk, nothing that would threaten or bind. What it could be he didn’t know. If he could come up with a few words, a simple sentence. Something that was not corny and would still do the trick. He was going to bust apart if he couldn’t tell Mitch a fraction of his feelings and if he didn’t now and then get a tiny, tiny response, a hello, a thank-you, the hint of a smile. He wasn’t asking for an ocean or a great lake and a major tributary. A trickle, he would be satisfied with a drop or two.

They went up the back stairs. Outside it was raining and, inside, the air grew damp and chill as they climbed to the second story. Someone had left the bathroom window open, and there they were, might just as well have been hiking above the tree line into a fog. Walter coughed and cleared his throat. If only he could get to the top step and with a firm voice say the words that would bring peril to them and throw them so fondly together. In the bedroom, as usual, they took off their own clothes. They had seen each other naked for years under the pink fluorescent lights of the dressing room at ballet school, but in the darkness they always turned away from each other. Walter scrambled under his sheets, pulled the cover up to his chin. He touched his own nipples and he thought, as he often did, back to the first time Mitch kissed him, in the bushes. He tried to remember what the gentleness, the mercy, had felt like. The sensation was already as far away from him as it would be years in the future, when he wished for it in his thirties.
Was there a word or two he could say, he wondered again, to get something of that feeling back? Or was it his own body, his repulsive, thin chest, his spindly legs, that made it impossible for a person so well proportioned to love him?

He opened his eyes and looked hard at the ceiling as if on the plaster there might be the right phrase. In a Jane Austen novel, he thought, the reader had to wait for hundreds of pages for a hand to press a hand. And then he remembered the line from
Persuasion:
“I have loved none but you.” Mitch was going to grab at the sheets, as he usually did, grab where he supposed Walter’s penis lay in wait. He was coming for it, his grasping fingers opening and closing as he came, his white teeth somehow shining. What Walter saw when his friend lunged for him were those teeth gleaming as if they’d been swabbed with glow-in-the-dark compound. Those glowing incisors were probably catching the light of some distant city or cities; the quad cities, he considered, all the way over in Iowa and western Illinois. Two can be abstracted at this game, he said to himself. Mitch lay flat out on top of the sheet, on Walter, rubbing against him. Neither one of them ever made much noise. How happy Walter would have been if Mitch could have afforded one ecstatic moan. He tried to name the quad cities: there were Moline and Davenport. What were the other two? Mitch, Mitch, he silently pleaded, Say something to me, something hopelessly antiquated and romantic. Say,
Walter, I have loved none but you, ever since I laid eyes on you. For you alone I think and plan
.

Mitch went on rubbing and breathing harder and digging his nails into Walter’s bare shoulders. Walter wasn’t going to hush this time, wasn’t going to pretend they were in a convent. “What,” he cried in a whisper, “are those two other cities in eastern Iowa and western Illinois? Oh, God, Mitch—what are they? Can you, can you say them?”

He was on the verge of getting Rock Island when the back door opened. They heard the knob turn in the lock. Mitch stopped rocking and let the full weight of his forehead rest on Walter’s mouth. They heard the lights snap on, the door slam. They held their breaths and opened their eyes wide in the dark, as if eyes too, could hear.

“Or is it Bettendorf?” Walter said out loud, reaching down over the sheet to touch Mitch. In danger, he thought, breathing again. In danger perhaps something can be risked. “I have loved none but—”

There were footsteps on the back stairs and Joyce saying flatly, “I wish he’d clean up. I need to remind him.” She spoke with no trace of anger or irritation. If a dead person could talk, Walter noted, it, the corpse, would speak in the same monotone his mother now favored.

In his moist hand Walter felt Mitch’s member, as fine a dick as a stalk of asparagus out in nature, holding still in the winds on the prairie. He’d never seen a stalk of asparagus in the wind out on the prairie, but he was sure it would bring to mind Mitch’s proud big daddy. His parents were climbing slowly to the top, wearily, heaving what sounded like two sets of orthopedic shoes up the fifteen steps. “For you alone,” Walter murmured. “For you alone I—” Mitch pressed his hand hard over Walter’s mouth.

“It’s all right, Joycie,” Robert was saying outside the door.

Mitch clamped down, a last squeeze for good measure before he let go, before he rolled over the side and slipped under the bed. Walter felt his mouth with both hands, trying to touch the hurt. Mitch might just as well have socked him, bloodied his teeth, or jammed a fist down his throat. He turned over, pulled the blankets up to his back, switched on his bedside light, reached for
The Great Gatsby
and began reading.

“Walter,” his mother said from the hall, “are you in there?”

“Just about to go to sleep,” he called through a fake yawn.

“Do you mind if we come in for just a minute?”

“I’m not exactly presentable,” he started to say, but she was already in front of him in her navy peacoat, with her handbag over her wrist. She looked to have shrunk since he’d seen her last, or maybe it was his father, in his dark suit, behind, dwarfing her. Walter glanced at the floor, at Mitch’s clothes in a pile by the bed, with his own, mixed up, cuffs sweetly around a neck, pant legs comfortably intertwined.

“What are you reading?” She sat down on the bed, her rump probably right over Mitch’s private parts. Without the mattress separating his mother and his friend with the hard-on, the two of them could easily have been joined. Walter tipped the book so that she could see the cover. Robert moved forward, just into the room. This is not
like
being Lucy Ricardo, Walter thought. I
am
Lucy Ricardo. Joyce reached out and smoothed Walter’s hair. The motion, ordinary only months before, seemed charged with meaning.

“Honey?”

She wasn’t going to stop stroking his hair. She was patting him because his brother had died. Daniel, dead. Gone. What? Walter tried to say. He couldn’t speak over the noise of his beating heart. “What?” he choked.

“We’ve been away so much,” she said, tilting her head, looking at him with a fondness he found unbearable. “Do you know that we care about you? That we love you tremendously? Do you understand that?”

This wasn’t about Daniel, then, not yet. They knew about his acts of sedition. They knew about the roof, the drugs, the homo sex in the alley, the homo sex in their own house, and they were going to forgive him, just like that. They were going to blot him out with their singular compassion, overwhelm what was his wretched, bad self with their pity and kindness. Soon enough his parents were going to have their eggs in one basket. Walter was it, the one thing they’d have for their own, the runt they would somehow have to learn to treasure. All of them—Mrs. Gamble, Sue Rawson, his parents, and Saint Susan—were finding in themselves love for Walter and all because of a sick brother.

“Sure,” he whispered, “I know you do.” He wished they would blow out of the room. He closed his eyes, thinking at once to his mother: Go Stay. Keep touching my hair. Leave. And to Mitch: Love me. Love me, and while you’re at it, don’t sneeze under there or cough. Be still, and when you crawl out, come tenderly. His father scooted to the side of the bed, and sat down next to Joyce, their collective weight making the mattress dip, the bulk of it pressing into Mitch, pressing hard, Walter hoped, pressing hard into his chest.

“Daniel’s very sick,” Robert said.

Walter managed to squeak, “I guess I knew that, too.”

“He’s awfully sick and he’s going to—”

“It’s not going to be good, sweetie.” Joyce put her head down to her son’s face as she spoke. Her tears fell down his cheeks, in whole drops, as if he had made them. She made a retching noise, trying to catch her breath, trying to hold herself together. She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand, whimpering, “Dear, oh dear.” But in that
slight movement she caught sight of his clothes on the floor. She was able to say, “I’ll take your laundry.”

“No, no, no, no, no, that’s okay,” Walter said, leaning over the bed, trying to reach for the pile. “I can wear those things tomorrow, they’re fine, didn’t get them too dirty, save the soap, they’re as good as new.”

She took his hand. “Is Duke set for the night?” She asked so kindly, smiling again at him, dabbing at her blurry eyes.

The mutt. Duke might have been mashed by the Klopers’ station wagon or consumed by the Gambles’ collies. “He had his walk,” Walter muttered, and was still having it, he added, to himself: the dog, roaming the streets with a beret on his square black head, a cigarette hanging from his lips, no shirt on, tight pants, talking tough. Joyce squeezed his hand and stood up. His father slid over and kissed Walter on the cheek. That display was alarming too, something that hadn’t happened in years. “We’ll get through it, Wally,” he said. His eyes were puffy behind his glasses. Walter had never noticed the small broken vessels all over his cheeks. “I wish this weren’t happening to any of us,” Robert said. He was talking under his breath, as if he were mumbling in his sleep. “I’d give up anything, everything, to stop all of this.” Joyce came to the head of the bed and leaned over once more to kiss Walter. They couldn’t wait to get out of there, he could tell, couldn’t wait to get through with the conversation.

“It’s a good idea to get an early night,” Robert said, patting Walter’s arm. “Don’t read too long.” As if he’d come in to dispense a bit of advice he said sternly, “Reading can strain the eyes. You take it easy. You’ll end up like me, with trifocals.”

“Okay,” Walter said.

“Good night, son.”

“Okay,” he said again.

They closed the door and went back down the stairs to the kitchen. Walter turned over to the wall. His parents had probably been wanting to speak to him for some time. They would have wanted to find the right moment, and they might well have meant to talk in more detail, but his mother had begun to blubber and she’d spotted the laundry and changed the subject. His father butted in and took over on the topic of eyestrain. Walter didn’t notice Mitch come out
from under the bed or pull on his clothes. He didn’t notice him slip away, and he didn’t send out a prayer that Mitch have safe passage through the house. Over and over he read the inscription quoted at the beginning of
The Great Gatsby
.

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry, “Lover, gold hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you.”

“Then wear the gold hat,” he read again. His brother was dying downtown in a hospital bed. For the first time in his memory Walter felt a kinship with Daniel. There was a stinging rush in the understanding, up his arms, down through his chest and his abdomen. They were united by blood and by history, by simple circumstances that couldn’t be undone or changed. What was their essential brotherness could not in any way be taken from them. “If you can bounce high,” he read, “bounce for her too.” He hadn’t been to the hospital to visit his brother in a long time, not since January, when Daniel was gone two weeks having surgery. The rooms had green tile halfway up the walls, and a lighter green paint job to the ceiling. Maybe the doctors didn’t really know how to treat Daniel’s sickness, and so they were trying any trick they could think of, hoping for results. He had already had several operations, and couldn’t have much more inside him to remove. Walter imagined his brother’s body, the firm swimmer’s form hollowed out, nothing underneath the sheets but a shell of skin. The gravity of the illness was real to Walter finally because he’d been told by his parents. He was suddenly sorry for Daniel, very sorry he was going to miss all the rest of life. “Lover, gold hatted, high-bouncing lover.” Walter tried to see himself, a hazy figure at forty, walking down the street. He would wake up every morning, for years and years to come, day after day, each day, each hour, every minute his brother receding, fading farther into the past. Daniel, lying in his hospital bed, might try to imagine the future, might try to live it quickly in his head, hoping to see what everyone would become without him. They would all go on without him. Walter had had a fleeting sense of the sadness of such a thing when he’d cracked his head at Christmas, but he had
turned away from that truth. He’d let himself be distracted by Mitch, by what he supposed would be bliss. The news of death was something a person had to be told several times, he thought. It wasn’t a fact you could absorb at one sitting. He felt as if he could not now, in the time that was left, lose sight of his dying brother. Nothing, he promised, could divert his attention from Daniel.

Not in years had he wept into his pillow. He stuffed the corner into his mouth to keep from howling. The tears ran cold along his neck, trickling across his chest. He wished his mother would come again and cry down his face. He wished one more time in a childish way, believing he might get what he was about to ask. He curled up, clenched his fists and hugged himself. He wished that Daniel would wake in the morning, climb out of bed, his old sick skin falling at his feet like a robe, and beneath he’d find clean new bones, new blood, new durable and long-lasting parts filling up his empty body.