The head of Wade’s bed was cranked up high. He slowly groped back with one hand and found the picture frame; the feel of the gilded wood told him what was there. His crooked smile was a gauge of the pleasure he took in its memory. “Don’t you like this a lot? But no, don’t thank me—I couldn’t draw, even when my hands worked. This was done by Hutch, before he wrote poems. I think he was fourteen. I can look at it more or less endlessly.”
Both Cam and Mait silently noted that Wade had never mentioned his blindness to either of them.
Cam said “He had some serious gifts; has he kept up his art through the poetry years?”
Confused as Wade had begun to be lately, he treated the question with greater care than Cam intended. Finally Wade pulled his hand back off the picture and extended the fingers toward where he thought Cam stood.
Cam was nearby and took the hand, holding it as lightly as any moth wing—by now it was plainly that easy to ruin.
Wade said “My father is Hutchins Mayfield, born in 1930, month of May, twelfth day.” For a long moment that seemed his only finding. But he suddenly withdrew his fingers from Cam’s hand; his dead hot eyes found Cam’s face—its locus at least. “My father saw through the world long before he had me. When he drew that picture, he still believed something he’d thought of in childhood—that there was something buried, buried and worth finding—beneath the world: the part we can see, beneath the skin. Or so he told me when he gave me the picture; that was the Christmas I left home for good. The only other thing he said was he wanted me to have it as a memory of him and his mother Rachel Hutchins. She died just a few minutes after he was born, so he never really saw her, and God knows I didn’t.” Though still Wade hadn’t acknowledged his blindness, he gave a high laugh.
It took him awhile to refocus his mind. “The picture was drawn near where Rachel lived—near Goshen, Virginia: a really gorgeous piece of the Earth. Hutch and I drove up there several times when I was a boy. That was when I got the idea of having at least one daughter that I could name Rachel—my favorite name, for girls anyhow. God had other plans for my plumbing fixtures. But those trips to Goshen were my best days till I knew Wyatt. Wyatt Bondurant—you’ve heard about him, right?—was best of all: we killed each other.” Nothing in Wade’s face betrayed the pain of that, though he’d stopped again. Then his hand went back a second time and pointed to the picture. “Look at how spooky the drawing is, all there in the middle—all those thick leaves down the side of the mountain, like some dense screen they wove with leaves over something they’re hiding. I asked Hutch what was hid there in the middle—” Wade waved a final time at the picture; then he went cold silent.
Cam studied the drawing and didn’t speak.
But Mait asked Wade “Did he say what was there?”
And Wade remembered; it hooked in his mind, and his skull ducked eagerly. “He said ‘It’s a giant that’s dreaming the world.’”
Mait said “That’s an idea almost all children have, through the whole world apparently. I know I had it when I was five. I thought the dreamer was a great gold dragon, and somedays I would literally walk around, light on the sidewalk, not to wake it up. I knew I’d vanish when the dragon stopped dreaming. I’d forgot till last year when I took a course in world religions; the teacher said most cultures have the same idea—we’re all somebody’s, or something’s dream: a giant’s or a butterfly’s, paused on a rose in the warm sun of some perfect place.”
Wade nodded, a little calmer again but earnest still. “I’m there,” he said. “Believe it; I’m there. I’m dreaming all this.”
Cam said “‘dream is dreaming us’—who said that?”
Mait said “Me, I told you—no, an African Bushman said it to some big anthropologist, in the 1920s.”
Wade’s head ducked Yes again and again.
Cam thought Oh Wade, if this is a dream, for God’s sake wake up and save mankind; but he understood Wade was past clear reason, so he told him “Dream on.”
Wade said “Christ, no—oh, wake me please.” But as Cam looked toward Mait, really disturbed, Wade laughed in a voice very much like his old voice—kind and all but endlessly pleased. As he heard the sound, Wade thought That’s my last laugh.
Cam was late for work, so he took the laugh as permission to leave. He bent to kiss Wade’s forehead and asked him the riddle he’d heard only yesterday from another blind man at the hospice, scarecrowed worse than Wade. “What’s the difference between Cleveland, Ohio and the S.S. Titanic?”
Wade’s eyes were still trying to find human faces, though they couldn’t now, but his grin survived. “I give up—what?”
Cam said “Cleveland had a better orchestra”; then he scissored to the door in three comic strides as if he were seen. From there he looked back. Just those few seconds away from Wade had eased Cam’s mind; and when he saw him, the sight was shocking one more time—worse than any he’d seen in five years of military service or his months at the hospice: a grown man weighing maybe eighty-five pounds, not ready to die. The eyes were still wide open and hunting. Cam kissed the palm of his own hand and held it to Mait and Wade. “You two get a very tight grip on yourselves and hold it till I’m back.”
Wade laughed. “Oh Christ, a grip! I wish I could. It’s been ten months since I touched the old rascal.”
Before he thought, Mait said “I make up for everybody.” Laughter covered them all as Cam left.
But Wade’s mind managed to hold the thought till they heard Cam shut the front door. Then he turned to Mait. “I said ten months but I can’t remember when my cock worked.” It was only a fact; Wade hadn’t had sex with Wyatt since nearly two years ago, and even self-service had proved impossible for—what?—long months, maybe more than a year. If the urge dug at him, he’d try to reward it; but almost always, before he could run the mental pictures to fire him onward, he’d recall that his cum was now a poison, a lethal substance; and that would down him. Oddly today, that long-lost pleasure seemed the least of Wade’s problems. The better memories of his times with Wyatt seemed more or less sufficient now, the times when Wade could remember to let himself dwell on those thousands of indescribably excellent junctures with Wyatt.
Mait said “I sometimes wish my rascal didn’t work at all.”
That soon, Wade was puzzled. “What rascal you mean?”
“My red fire hydrant, the flaming weenie that runs my life.”
“Oh child, don’t let it. It’s the whole wrong century for that lovely failing.” Those were far more words of real warning than Wade had attempted in all the years since the plague arrived; they left him empty.
At such stalled moments Mait had learned to sit still and wait till Wade either dozed or regained his footing on breath and clarity and could speak again.
The eyes stayed open and the lips were gapped, no sign of pain or suffocation though. Finally the bony head turned to Mait and worked at a smile. “You talk. Let me listen.”
So Mait took that as maybe a last chance to hear the answers he’d never got from anyone more likely to know the truth than this aggrieved man, vanishing by the instant where he lay. Mait said “You can just nod or shake your head a little, but help me please. I trust you, Wade.” Mait took a long breath, then was shamed to think of his own body’s ease in a room like this—his healthy ease and opulence in young skin and joint. Still he said to Wade “You regret your life?”
Wade replied at once, a silent No.
“You sorry you were queer?”
Wade said “Still queer—queer, dead or alive. The answer’s No. I loved most of it; I was one strong lover. I don’t just mean sex either but love—I could evermore watch the person I loved and figure his needs and set out to fill them. Damned nearly did too, till the time it really sunk in we were sick. I’d have loved Wyatt right on, cell for cell—we were past hurting each other any worse—but he called it off, stopped sex on a dime like it was a skate.” Wade imitated a braking skate with his long right fingers. Then he shut hi
s eyes. “You understand Wyatt killed himself?”
Hutch had told Mait that much, days ago. Now was no time to ask for more; Wade was plainly exhausted. So Mait raised a hushing finger, then recalled that Wade couldn’t see it. “Are we some kind of monsters—you, me, Cam, Wyatt, whatever percent of the human race we constitute?”
Wade very slowly signified Yes.
“Truly? Actual felons?”
“Not felons, except in the idiot terrified law, just not quite Homo sapiens either but mostly well-meaning monsters, I think—a different and partly benign neighbor-species. Monster in that sense. Better at some things, worse at others.”
Mait said “Aside from this new plague, what’s the worst thing about us?” When Wade stalled a moment, the boy pushed on with the Yes or No rite. “Adultery, alley-cat promiscuity?”
Wade shook his head No.
“You don’t regret knowing so many men?”
Wade said “I told you—I knew two other men besides myself. Exactly two. Few lily-white martyrs were chaster than me.”
Mait smiled, though he couldn’t stop himself. “But all we think and talk about is sex—the queers my age at least.”
“You ever sit down with two other straight guys, anywhere else but the State Department? Every coffee break is a pussy op—pussy and money: all they talk about. No classic queer that ever lived was as hipped on cock as straights on cunt. I doubt Plato told many cock-jokes.”
“I bet Socrates did.” Mait laughed, real cheer.
Wade joined him, the best he could—his lungs were still weak. When he’d rested awhile, he suddenly knew the answer to Mait’s flatfooted question. “If straight men weren’t hardwired for women, with all women’s training and doubts and plumbing problems, they’d fuck as many times a day as the most crazed queer on the south side of Eighth Street. No, what’s wrong with queers—the only wrong thing they don’t share with straights—is nothing but children. Queers don’t make children, not as a rule. I figured you’d noticed.”
Mait said “Oh yes. But that didn’t seem to throw too big a monkey wrench into some of the Homo Great’s working plans—”
Wade shut his eyes and, in his most bored voice, reeled off a stretch from the sacred litany of queers. “Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Handel—”
Mait took up the chant. “Sophocles, Virgil, Shakespeare, Melville, Whitman, Tchaikovsky, Mann, Auden, Britten, Barber, Copland—”
Wade raised a finger. “Mann and Melville and Shakespeare had children.” Wade’s blank face slowly produced a grin; he beamed it toward Mait. “Reminds me of a joke—why did God make queers?”
Mait said “I give up.”
“Because he looked down at the Earth one day, well after that dust-up in the Garden of Eden; and he said to himself ‘They’re just getting nowhere at all with the arts.’”
Mait laughed but was still too riled by Wade’s diagnosis of the great lack in queerdom. He said “Now back to us not having children. A good many straights are born barren as coal mines; they sometimes manage whole faithful lives together.”
Wade smiled for an instant longer but then went stiller than any sunk ship. In a long wait, his eyes seemed to fill with the only water left in his body—too few tears to run.
Mait started to change his tack. “For me, the main problem seems to be—”
Wade raised his whole right hand from the sheet and moved it toward Mait, three or four inches nearer.
Mait took it, as Cam had, with serious caution not to crush the stark bones.
And then Wade agreed. “It’s children, truly, most of the time—just not having children underfoot for years at a time, leaning hard on you for life itself. In general a queer’s got nothing at home but one other man and him the same model as you in the head—the same age and, deep-down, the same brand of wiring: same instincts, same thoughts, same unstoppable testosterone boil-ups that sabotage a whole day or night in a flash. I’d have been a fair father to a likable child; I had things to tell.”
“You could still tell me. I’m going nowhere.”
Wade shook his head and withdrew the hand. “My mind’s burnt up, Son.”
“So I should have children?” Mait was as poised to act as any hot axe.
Again Wade was silent, refusing to face him.
“What’s so urgent about more children? Children, all sizes and shades, are starving by the million from right here near us to the high snows of Asia.”
Wade shook his head in furious denial. “Someway. Have children. One child anyhow.”
Mait could think Wade’s crazy—keep that in mind. But the answer caught in his mind like a gaff.
22
NEXT morning when Hutch had phoned home from Richmond, spoken with a confident-sounding Mait and even with Wade, who was weak but sprightly, he felt safe enough to pause on his drive home and run a brief errand. After an early hotel breakfast, Hutch drove toward the street in the dead heart of town where—ninety years ago—old Robinson Mayfield, his great-grandfather, had lived with the girl Polly Drewry who’d nursed him through the last days of TB and warmed his body, though he’d never married her. Polly herself had stayed on in the house, vital as a lit lamp and brave as a sled dog, when old Rob died. Then she’d stayed on as housekeeper, and eventual common-law wife, to old Rob’s son. Hutch’s grandfather Forrest—a Latin teacher and an amateur poet with a certain gift, however restrained by his time and reading.
Over long years Polly had proved to be the soul who could give Forrest all the love he’d failed to find in his young wife Eva Kendal, who’d abandoned Forrest when their son was born—young Rob, Hutch’s father. When Polly had finally outlived Forrest, she’d lingered on in the same house still—alone but industrious, a talented seamstress and all but indomitable veteran of time. Once his father had died and Hutch was home from England for good, he’d finally done what the family should have done ages ago—deeded the Richmond house to Polly, paid her annual taxes and otherwise helped her with small sums of money and irregular visits through the rest of her days till, in her late eighties, she lost clear sense of who she was and what was expected of an elderly spinster. Even then, she generally recognized Hutch on his unpredictable look-ins till she died upright in her sewing chair in 1980, having all but finished a needlepoint cushion she was stitching for Wade, who was then a boy. It bore a plain message, threaded in green, in her own forthright script—May You Never Know Sorrow.
Though Hutch hadn’t tried to find the house since Polly’s funeral, this morning he found it easily—disheveled as it was and derelict in its tiny yard of shattered glass and knee-high weeds. He stopped by the curb and paused to think of what the actual house had been when his kin owned it (Polly had left the house to Wade; Wade had turned it over to Hutch, and an agent then sold it for less than a song). Since there was no other human in sight in the early sun. Hutch sat in his car, with some amazement, for at least two minutes in quiet respect to the several powers that had lit those rooms through nearly a century of his family’s life. No single one of them had ever matched Polly for sheer satisfaction in the passage of time and for an apparently native gift of love without hunger or even demand, the love commended by virtually all the world’s religions but scarce as pure water—now as forever.
While Hutch waited a few yards distant from where Polly Drewry had led a life as openhearted as any since the saints, he missed her intensely and thought Nobody left alive on Earth can help Wade die the way Polly could have; bring her back just long enough to see Wade through. Hutch’s longing and practical need were so strong that, in the next instant, he saw Polly’s likable tidy body and her intact face, here on the cobblestone street before him and clear as she was till her mind had clouded. She was dressed in black from neck to ankle; and she carried a small leather overnight satchel in her powerful left hand, ready to serve.
Hutch well understood she was not really there, not palpably, though some real part of her presence was there—her healing
eyes and her readiness. He also knew this was maybe the only vision of his life, the single all but credible return of someone irrecoverably gone and lost. So he held both palms toward the warm windshield to offer the sight whatever piece of his own life it might accept in a bargain for help. Take anything left alive in me but come here. Nobody known to me but you can send the dying out in an honor that precludes no trace of love. Hutch knew he was nudging the thin edge of sanity; he was calm in the knowledge.
As the sight faded slowly, he thought of the only conceivable substitute—his long-dead mother’s great friend Alice Matthews in Petersburg, south of here on his route (with the years, Hutch had come to assume that his mother and Alice had been some brand of lovers, before his mother met Rob anyhow). As different from Polly as Eve from Ruth in the Hebrew Bible, still Alice had meant almost as much as Polly to Hutch in his childhood and youth. Lately their correspondence had come down to Christmas cards and occasional phone calls.
Hutch hadn’t seen Alice for three or four years, though she’d phoned on his birthday this past May and said she was nearly eighty-nine years old, still living in her own apartment and battling to stand on her own till she “quit.” Hutch recalled that Alice often referred to death as simply quitting; it seemed an accurate personal banner for someone as forceful through a long life as she; Hutch hadn’t told her about Wade’s illness.
The Promise of Rest Page 21
