A few minutes later the nurse arrived with Oliver’s dinner tray. Under his watchful gaze Oliver escorted me to the door. There he smiled and kissed me, then stood in the hall waving cheerfully as I walked to the elevator.
“My brother Leo’s coming to take me back to Newport,” he called after me. “Come stay with me over Thanksgiving, we’ll go hear Cooper play the Limelight—” He flexed his fingers and mimed playing a piano.
“Okay,” I said. My heart leapt at the thought of visiting him at home, of meeting his family for a holiday. “But I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He grinned and crooked a finger. “Next time, Sweeney. Bye.”
I got a bus back to North Capitol Street, got out and wandered around the campus. For some reason I was no longer afraid. I knew I could stay with Baby Joe but that would mean more talking, more discussion of what had happened the night before, and I was too tired to think about that right now. I didn’t want to think about bulls or blood or ivy or trees, about any of the things miraculous or terrible that I had seen. I wanted only to think about Oliver; about how his eyes had glowed and the way he had smiled at me; about taking the train up to Newport and staying with him and hearing his brother play stride piano in a barrelhouse; about what he had meant when he said You’re great, Sweeney and I’ll love you next time. I promise.
So I waited a few hours, walking across the Strand and thinking of all the things we’d do together, thinking of all the things we’d done, Oliver and I: lying there beneath that tree, sitting there talking in the Shrine’s shadow, drinking coffee and rum there while we waited for Angelica to get out of class. When I finally went to Baby Joe’s room it was late, after midnight. I threw pebbles at the window until he came down yawning to let me in the fire door. He refused to let me sleep on the floor.
“Forget it, hija. My grandmother would kill me.”
So Baby Joe curled up in the room’s single worn armchair and I curled up in his bed, still thinking about Oliver, willing myself to dream of him, his crooked smile, his mad blue eyes.
That night I dreamed I was swimming in the ocean, a hundred yards or more from shore. Oliver stood on the sand in the blazing sun, and with him Angelica and Annie and Hasel and Baby Joe. They were all holding beer bottles and laughing and talking, and every now and then one of them would look up, shading his eyes until he or she saw me. Then they’d wave, absently but still happy to see me, and maybe raise a bottle in greeting. They didn’t know that I was being pulled away from them, that I could feel something black and cold clawing at my feet and dragging me; they didn’t know I was going under when, a minute later, they glanced up again and vainly searched the horizon, looking for me. They just kept on looking at the ocean, certain that I was swimming there somewhere, safe among the green and dancing waves. They never knew about the riptide or how dangerous the currents were. They never knew at all.
When I woke up someone was pounding on the door to Baby Joe’s room. My watch read twenty-five after five. Baby Joe was snoring loudly in his armchair. The window was pearled with first light. I stood groggily and walked to the door, not totally conscious that I wasn’t still in my room at Rossetti Hall, and pulled it open.
In the darkened hallway stood Annie Harmon, grey-faced and shivering in her red flannel shirt and fatigues, her hands shaking as she pushed past me through the door. She had come to tell me that, sometime around four o’clock that morning, Oliver had walked out of his room at Providence Hospital and climbed the fire stairs to the Oncology Unit. There he found a utility closet with a window that opened onto the parking lot. He jumped out, plunging five stories before he went through a metal awning and the roof of an oxygen truck parked near the entrance to the Emergency Room. There had been no signs of distress, there was no suicide letter. Nothing but a scrawled note in the margin of last Sunday’s Washington Post Book World.
It said, I’ll be right back.
PART TWO
Absence
i
Pavana Lachrymae
WHEN I LEARNED OF Oliver’s death it was as though a door had slammed shut upon me. In the sudden darkness and echoing clang of its closing, I was blinded, deafened. The wonders of the Divine were as lost to me although they had existed only in a book I had once glimpsed, a book taken from me and put into the safekeeping of people wiser and lovelier than myself, people who would never again make the mistake of allowing it to fall into such careless hands. I would never be permitted to return to the sculpted lawns or allées of the Divine. Never again would I glimpse an angel in my room, terrible and fatal; only in dreams. Years afterward I might pass on the street someone I had known as a student, and once on a crowded subway platform glimpse Balthazar Warnick wrapped in his moth-singed chesterfield; but they did not see me, or greet me when I called out to them.
ii
Threnody: Storm King
AFTER ANNIE LEFT BABY Joe’s room I went out and bought a liter of vodka and a six-pack of Orange Crush. I didn’t try to follow her, didn’t even wake up Baby Joe. I drank all that day and into the evening, returning at last to Baby Joe’s dorm. There I passed out behind the overgrown box tree hedge. When I woke up I did it all over again. I didn’t try to locate Oliver’s family or find out about funeral arrangements. I stumbled to the front of the dorm in search of Baby Joe, but no one answered when I knocked. Finally I went to the Shrine cafeteria and found a pay phone. I tried to call Annie, but her phone had been cut off.
I stumbled back outside. I looked up and saw pale shining spires and lapis domes rising from the grey autumn mist, the small cloaked figures of scholars and a few brave tourists on the steps of the Shrine. The immense sandstone building seemed more Sphinx-like than ever. I could feel its will bearing down on me, saying, There is nothing for you here. I turned, shivering, and walked away.
I had 107 dollars in my checking account, enough money to buy an Amtrak ticket home. I could only assume that Balthazar or someone else had taken care of the things in my room—thrown them out or burned them or shipped them back to New York. I still hadn’t called my parents. Except for trying to reach Annie, I hadn’t called anyone at all. I wandered across campus, thinking of Oliver, and it was as though I had died too. I saw no one I recognized, no one at all. When I tried to get back into Rossetti Hall my key didn’t work. For what seemed like hours I waited for someone to leave or enter the dorm, so that I could slip in behind them, but no one ever came. When I waited outside Baby Joe’s dorm the same thing happened. I tried calling his room, but he never answered; tried finding Hasel Bright and Annie, but I never did. Finally I returned to the Shrine cafeteria, half-expecting to be turned away from there, too, but I wasn’t.
I stayed there for three days: washing up in the rest room, sleeping in chilly alcoves of the Crypt Church when the cafeteria closed, my head pillowed on my knapsack, warming my hands by the feeble light of votive candles. I left only to buy more vodka and to check my mail at the campus post office. Nothing there but the New Yorker and a formal computer-generated notice of permanent suspension from the Dean’s Office.
And then, on the fourth day after Oliver’s suicide, I received a letter. A heavy cream-colored envelope addressed in an elegant calligraphic hand. My fingers trembled: I was certain it was from Angelica, but when I inspected it more closely I saw that the letters were smaller, the cursives more controlled. And it was written in dark blue ink, and I had never seen Angelica use anything but peacock blue. I fled back to the warmth of the Shrine cafeteria, bought a cup of coffee, and found a corner booth.