“David.”
Yes.
“Take care of my Charles. Will you do that for me?”
Yes, he promised, relieved that more hadn’t been asked from him, and that Peter hadn’t taken the opportunity to deliver some devastating observation he’d made, some truth about himself that David would never be able to forget. Of course I will.
Peter made a soft dismissive noise. “？‘Of course,’？” he murmured.
I will, he told Peter, fiercely. I will. It was important that Peter believed him. But as David was promising him, Peter was already looking away, toward the sound of Charles’s reentry, reaching his arms toward his friend in a gesture so childlike, so loving, that forever after, David was unable to imagine him in any other way: Peter, his arms open and empty, bundled like a toddler about to go out and play in the snow, and walking toward them, to fill them with his presence, Charles, his face crumpling, looking only at Peter, as if nobody else existed in the world.
* * *
They lay in bed that night, he and Charles, not touching, not speaking, their preoccupation so complete that, had anyone seen them, he would have mistaken them for strangers.
Peter was gone, lifted downstairs by his nurse and the assistant and accompanied by David and Charles, fed into a car that Charles had called for him. And then the car had driven away, back to Peter’s warm, cluttered second-floor apartment in an old house on Bethune Street near the river, with its crumbling staircase and painted brick facade, and David and Charles had remained on the sidewalk in the cold. He had always known that the end of the evening would be the end of Peter in their lives—in Charles’s life—and now that it had actually happened, it seemed too abrupt, too abbreviated, like something out of a fairy tale: a clock striking midnight and the world being misted with gray, potential lives together dissolving into nothingness.
They had stood there, together, long after the car had vanished from sight. It wasn’t so late, but the cold had kept almost everyone indoors, and only a few stray people, wrapped in black, passed before them. Across the street, the park glittered with snow. Finally, he had taken Charles’s arm. It’s chilly, he said. Let’s go back inside. “Yes,” Charles agreed, his voice faint.
Back inside, they shut off the living-room lights, Charles did a check of the back-door locks as he always did, and then they climbed the stairs to their room, undressed and dressed, and brushed their teeth in silence.
Around them, the night thickened and settled. Eventually, after what felt like an hour, he heard Charles’s breathing change, grow slow and deep, and when he did, he got out of bed and went quietly to the closet, retrieved the letter from his bag, and crept downstairs.
For a while he sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, holding the envelope in both hands. This was his last moment of ignorance, of pretending, and he didn’t want it to end. But finally, he turned on the lamp, and removed the sheet of paper, and read what it said.
He woke to the sound of his name and Charles’s palm on his cheek, and when he opened his eyes, he knew from the clarity of light that filled the room that it was snowing again. Before him, on the ottoman, sat Charles, wearing his robe and what they called his old-man pajamas, striped blue cotton with his initials stitched in black on the breast pocket. Charles never came downstairs until he had combed his hair, but now it stood about his head in clumps, so that David could see the white of his scalp where the hair had become thin at the crown.
“He’s gone,” Charles said.
Oh, Charles, he said. When?
“About an hour ago. His nurse called me. I woke up, and looked over, and you weren’t next to me”—he began to apologize, but Charles put his hand on his arm, stopping him—“and I was disoriented. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. But then I remembered: I was in my house, and it was the day after the party, and I had been waiting for this call—I knew what it would be. I had just thought it would be tomorrow, not today. But it wasn’t—he never even made it to the airport.
“So I didn’t answer it. You didn’t hear it ring? I just lay there and listened to the phone ringing and ringing and ringing: six, ten, twenty times—I’d turned the answering machine off last night. It was so loud. Such an insistent, rude noise: I never realized. Finally, it stopped, and I sat up, on the edge of the bed, and listened.
“I found myself in that moment thinking of my brother. Oh, right—you don’t know. Well, when I was five, my mother gave birth to another son. My brother, Morgan. She and my father had been trying to have a child for years, I later learned. Ten weeks before her due date, she went into labor.
“Back then—this would have been 1943—there was nothing you could do for such a premature baby: There was no such thing as neonatal care; the incubators were primitive compared to what we have now. It was extraordinary he was alive at all. The doctor told my parents he would die within forty-eight hours.
“No one told me this, of course. These days, I’m always shocked by how much information parents give their children, information those children aren’t yet equipped to understand. When I was a child, I knew nothing, and the people who looked after me were charged with keeping me ignorant. What I learned I gathered from whispers and eavesdropping. And yet I don’t remember feeling frustrated; I would never have considered my parents’ lives part of mine. My world was the fourth floor, with my toys and books. My parents were visitors; the only adults who belonged were my nanny and my tutor.
“But even I knew that something was wrong—I knew from the way the adults whispered in the hallway, falling silent when they spotted me; the way even my nanny, who loved me, seemed distracted, looking toward the door when the maid came in with my lunch, raising her eyebrows inquiringly at her, tightening her mouth when she shook her head in response. Downstairs, everything was silent. The servants—this was long before Adams’s time—spoke in low voices, and for three days, I went to bed without being taken downstairs to be presented to my parents first.
“On the fourth day of this, I decided I was going to sneak downstairs and figure out what was happening. And so I pretended to be asleep when Nanny came to check on me that night, and then I waited and waited, until I heard the last maid walking upstairs toward her bedroom. And then I got out of bed and tiptoed down to my parents’。 As I did, I noticed a faint light, candlelight, coming from the parlor next door to their room, and as I noticed that light, I also heard a small, strange sound that I couldn’t identify. I crept closer to the parlor. I was so careful, so quiet. Finally, I was at the door, which was ajar, and I looked inside.
“I saw my mother, sitting on a chair. There was a candle on the table by her side, and in her arms, she held my brother. The thing I remember thinking later was how beautiful she looked. She had long, reddish hair that she always wore pinned up, but now it hung about her like a veil, and she was wearing a lilac-colored silk robe and a white nightgown beneath it; her feet were bare. I had never seen my mother look like this—I had never seen my parents in any way other than how they wanted me to see them: fully dressed, capable, competent.
“In her left arm, she was cradling the baby. But in her right hand she was holding an odd instrument, a clear glass dome, and she would fit the dome over the baby’s mouth and nose and then squeeze the rubber bulb attached to it. That was the sound I’d heard, the rubber bulb wheezing as it filled and emptied with air, air she was giving to Morgan. She kept up a steady rhythm, and she didn’t rush: not too fast, not too much. Every ten squeezes or so she would stop for a second, and I could hear, barely, the baby’s breath, so quiet.