The Secret History (94 page)

“Open up in there.”

Charles, drunkenly, mumbled something and tried to raise his head. Henry bit his lip. He went to the window and looked out the corner of the shade.

Then he turned around. He still had the pistol. “Come here,” he said to Camilla.

She looked at him in horror. So did Francis and I.

He beckoned to her with his gun arm. “Come here,” he said. “Quick.”

I felt faint.
What’s he doing?
I thought, bewildered.

Camilla took a step away from him. Her gaze was terrified. “No, Henry,” she said, “don’t …”

To my surprise, he smiled at her. “You think I’d hurt you?” he said. “Come here.”

She went to him. He kissed her between the eyes, then whispered something—what, I’ve always wondered—in her ear.

“I’ve got a key,” the innkeeper yelled, pounding away at the door. “I’ll use it.”

The room was swimming.
Idiot
, I thought wildly, just
try the knob
.

Henry kissed Camilla again. “I love you,” he said. Then he said, out loud: “Come in.”

The door flew open. Henry raised the arm with the gun. He’s going to shoot them, I thought, dazed; the innkeeper and his wife, behind him, thought the same thing, because they froze about three steps into the room—but then I heard Camilla scream, “
No
, Henry!” and, too late, I realized what he was going to do.

He put the pistol to his temple and fired, twice. Two flat cracks. They slammed his head to the left. It was the kick of the gun, I think, that triggered the second shot.

His mouth fell open. A draft, created by the open door, sucked the curtains into the gap of the open window. For a moment or two, they shuddered against the screen. Then they breathed out again, with something like a sigh; and Henry, his eyes squeezed tight, and his knees giving way beneath him, fell with a thud to the carpet.

EPILOGUE

Alas, poor gentleman,
He look’d not like the ruins of his youth
But like the ruins of those ruins.

–JOHN FORD,
The Broken Heart

I
MANAGED
to get out of taking my French exams the next week, due to the very excellent excuse of having a gunshot wound to the stomach.

They said at the hospital that I was lucky, and I suppose I was. The bullet drilled me clean through, missing my intestinal wall by a millimeter or two and my spleen by not much more, exiting about an inch and a half to the right of where it came in. I lay flat on my back in the ambulance, feeling the summer night flash by warm and mysterious—kids on bikes, moths haunting the street lamps—and wondering if this was what it was like, if life sped up when you were about to die. Bleeding richly. Sensations fading round the edges. I kept thinking how funny, this dark ride to the underworld, the tunnel illuminated by Shell Oil, Burger King. The paramedic riding in the back wasn’t much older than I was; a kid, really, with bad skin and a downy little moustache. He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn’t be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.

Henry died, of course. With two bullets to the head I don’t suppose he could have done much else. Still, he lived more than twelve hours, a feat which amazed the doctors. (I was under sedation, this is what they tell me.) Such grave wounds, they said, would have killed most people instantly. I wonder if that means he didn’t want to die; and if so, why he shot himself in the first place. As bad as it looked, there in the Albemarle, I still think we could have patched it up somehow. It wasn’t from desperation that he did it. Nor, I think, was it fear. The business with Julian was heavy on his mind; it had impressed him deeply. I think he felt the need to make a noble gesture, something to prove to us and to himself that it was in fact possible to put those high cold principles which Julian had taught us to use.
Duty, piety, loyalty
,
sacrifice
. I remember his reflection in the mirror as he raised the pistol to his head. His expression was one of rapt concentration, of triumph, almost, a high diver rushing to the end of the board; eyes tight, joyous, waiting for the big splash.

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greek.
. Beauty is harsh
.

I did end up graduating from Hampden, with a degree in English literature. And I went to Brooklyn, with my guts taped up like a gangster (“Well!” said the professor, “this is Brooklyn Heights, not Bensonhurst!”) and spent the summer drowsing on his rooftop deck, smoking cigarettes, reading Proust, dreaming about death and indolence and beauty and time. The gunshot healed, leaving a char mark on my stomach. I went back to school in the fall: a dry, gorgeous September, you wouldn’t believe how beautiful the trees were that year: clear skies, littered groves, people whispering whenever I walked by.

Francis didn’t come back to school that fall. Neither did the twins. The story at the Albemarle was simple, it told itself, really: suicidal Henry, struggle for the gun, leaving me wounded and him dead. In a way I felt this was unfair to Henry but in another it wasn’t. And it made me feel better in some obscure way: imagining myself a hero, rushing fearlessly for the gun, instead of merely loitering in the bullet’s path like the bystander which I so essentially am.

Camilla took Charles down to Virginia the day of Henry’s funeral. It was, incidentally, the same day that Henry and Charles were to have appeared in court. The funeral took place in St. Louis. None of us was there but Francis. I was still in the hospital, half-delirious, still seeing the overturned wine glass rolling on the carpet and the oak-sprigged wallpaper at the Albemarle.

A few days before, Henry’s mother had stopped in to see me, after she’d been down the hall to see her own son in the morgue. I wish I remembered more of her visit. All I remember is a pretty lady with dark hair and Henry’s eyes: one of a stream of visitors, real and imagined, living and dead, who drifted in and out of my room, clustering around my bed at all hours.
Julian. My dead grandfather. Bunny, indifferent, clipping his fingernails.

She held my hand. I had tried to save her son’s life. There was a doctor in the room, a nurse or two. I saw Henry himself, over her shoulder, standing in the corner in his old gardening clothes.

It was only when I was leaving the hospital, and found the keys to Henry’s car among my things, that I remembered something she’d tried to tell me. In going through Henry’s affairs, she’d discovered that before he died, he was in the process of transferring the registration of his car to my name (which fit neatly with the official story—suicidal young man, giving away his possessions; no one, not even the police, ever tried to reconcile this generosity with the fact that, when Henry died, he believed himself in danger of losing the car). At any rate, the BMW was mine. She’d picked it out herself, she said, as a present for his nineteenth birthday. She couldn’t bear to sell it, or to see it again. This she tried to tell me, crying softly in a chair beside my bed as Henry padded about in the shadows behind her; preoccupied, unnoticed by the nurses; rearranging, with meticulous care, a disordered vase of flowers.

You would think, after all we’d been through, that Francis and the twins and I would have kept in better touch over the years. But after Henry died, it was as if some thread which bound us had been abruptly severed, and soon after we began to drift apart.

Francis was in Manhattan the whole summer that I was in Brooklyn. During that time we talked on the telephone maybe five times and saw each other twice. Both times were in a bar on the Upper East Side, directly downstairs from his mother’s apartment. He didn’t like to venture far from home, he said; crowds made him nervous; two blocks away, he said, and he started to feel as though the buildings were going to collapse on him. His hands fidgeted around the ashtray. He was seeing a doctor. He was doing a lot of reading. The people at the bar all seemed to know him.

The twins were in Virginia, sequestered at their grandmother’s, incommunicado. Camilla sent me three postcards that summer and called me twice. Then in October, when I was back at school, she wrote to say that Charles had stopped drinking, hadn’t had a drop for over a month. There was a Christmas card. In
February, a card on my birthday—conspicuously lacking in news of Charles. And then, after that, for a long time, nothing.

Around the time I graduated, there was a sporadic renewal of communications. “Who would’ve thought,” wrote Francis, “that you’d be the only one of us to make it out with a diploma.” Camilla sent her congratulations, and called a couple of times. There was some talk from both of them about coming up to Hampden, to watch me walk down the aisle, but this did not materialize and I was not very surprised when it didn’t.