TWENTY-FIVE

Henry sat in his chair. On the table beside him were a snifter of cognac, his half-glasses, and the copy of War and Peace he read for consolation. “Should you begin fearing death,” he had told me once, “pick up War and Peace and after a time all that will melt away.” That much was familiar. But the way he looked had changed, and the way I saw him.

“How did you know?” he asked tonelessly.

I lit a cigarette and gazed down at him. He wore a three-piece suit with his father’s gold chain across the vest. His eyes, shiny and translucent, stared back with shamed insistence.

“Rayfield told me part. He enjoyed that.”

Henry winced. “And what did you think?”

“That I’ve never known you.”

His mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Adam, we—my feeling for you isn’t because—”

“Oh, God, Henry.”

“I mean, you’re almost a son.”

I took a deep, harsh drag. “Then I can see Jason’s point.”

He shut his eyes. “Sit down, please.”

I didn’t move. His eyes opened. “Sit down, damn you. I won’t have you hovering like that.”

I took a long time sitting. Wisps from my cigarette twisted between us, then disappeared. Twilight and his reading lamp cast thin silver in the room. “Is it—what I am?” he asked.

“Don’t make it so easy on yourself.”

His eyebrows raised. “You think that’s easy.”

“Easy, and not the point.”

“You’re hurt then,” he said gently.

“Don’t be sentimental. There’s a black man in jail who maybe shouldn’t be. I’ve taken on Cade and Rayfield and Mooring, been beaten up by Jason, put my marriage in jeopardy and now Kris Ann, and you’ve been content to let me do that, not knowing the truth. I’ll get that now if I have to shake it out of you.”

He raised a hand to stop me. “Adam, please—”

“Hurt is a trivial word, Henry. I want to know what you’re really after. Your marriage was a fraud and you don’t give a damn about Jason. I’m a cat’s paw you’ve played against Roland.”

“Has that been too hard for you?”

There was sudden steel in his voice. Softly, I answered, “Not too hard.”

“I hope not.” He spoke without apology. “Because I couldn’t tell you.”

“Just Roland.”

“There were reasons for that.” I shrugged my indifference. “Please,” he urged. “Hear me out. I’ll explain as much as I can.”

I sat back to light a second cigarette, watching him. His chest looked small, his breathing shallow and rapid. In pale light the skin of his face—too slack beneath the eyes, drawn tight across his cheeks—made him look like a dying man. He stared fixedly away. “That boy I was with wasn’t the beginning, Adam. I’d had those feelings—wanting to touch and be touched—long before, from when I was young. They made me sick. I tried believing I wasn’t like that. My father, Roland—they were the men they wished to be. There was no one I could tell.”

I rubbed my forehead to fight the ache inside, and for a moment Henry was Eddie Halloran, smiling, listening, telling no one, winding up dead. “I married Lydia hoping to be different,” he went on. “There was someone else, I knew, but we had things in common, and I thought somehow …” His voice flattened out. “The wedding night was a disaster. I was what I had feared. Afterwards she lay awake in her pink nightgown. I could hear her breathing. Finally I couldn’t stand it. I told her about the feelings. It was as though she went into shock. She began shaking her head, saying, ‘Oh, God, no,’ over and over and asking why, why had I married her. Then she broke down. When I closed the door behind me she was still sobbing.

“The next morning I couldn’t face her. Neither of us—it just went on like that. We talked of annulment, finally. It wasn’t fair to keep her but I didn’t know what to do. I was so damned afraid of being found out. Then she told me she was pregnant. It was odd: I was shocked and then that wore off, and I was relieved. I had something to forgive now, too, and she needed me.” Henry paused, finishing in a hollow voice, “And God help me, I knew people would think it was mine.”

He looked up—for a question, something to keep him going. I just watched him. His face fell and he lapsed into a drone. “Lydia made it easier, in a sense. I asked who the father was. She tilted her chin in that pose she had, sitting right where you are now, and told me never to ask again. When we stepped from this room, the lie began, and grew until it cut across all our life. We were faithful in our way: she played the gracious hostess and I the contented husband and father. But there was little between us except appearances and less between me and Jason. She mothered him as if to say, ‘Look: here’s someone I care for.’ But when I looked at him, I saw my failure: the weakling, the one who’d let down his wife and father, the closet homosexual.” His voice was bleak. “And still I wanted to know how that would be.

“For years I wondered, playing out my part. I’d never—I’d never had a man, never had sex with anyone. The evening it happened I was driving back from a business trip. The boy was thumbing by the shoulder of the road: a tall, slim boy in blue jeans. I stopped for him. He was hungry and dirty and needed money.” Henry’s voice turned raw. “When I put my hand on him, he didn’t move. My throat was tight. He was young and empty-looking. I drove to a motel with a smirking nightman. It was dirty and there were stains on the sheets. But that blank-faced boy was exactly what I needed.

“At the moment they burst through the door I was the happiest I could remember. And then they were pulling us apart and calling me an ‘old queer.’ It was like being trapped inside someone else’s body. I rode to the station in the back of a prowl car with the boy chewing gum and a fat policeman in between. All I could think of was to be free. When we reached the station they took the boy somewhere and dragged me inside. I never saw him again.

“When they booked me I broke down, begging. They just looked away, all except for that policeman, Rayfield. He was staring at me from a corner like I made him sick. He wouldn’t stop.” A purple vein throbbed in Henry’s temple. “I imagined our friends looking at me like that. I saw Roland’s face, the contempt in it hardening. It came to me then. Of all of them, Roland was the one I’d sell my soul to keep from knowing. And only Roland could help.”

“So you called him.”

He nodded dejectedly. “He fixed it. I don’t know how. I didn’t want to. I was just grateful, then.”

“And later?”

“Later, it was done.”

I was silent. Henry’s eyes raised from the floor. “You do understand about not telling you, at least a little? I’d failed with Jason, and you at least respected me. It didn’t seem relevant to Lydia.”

He leaned forward as though reaching. I ground my cigarette as smoke died in acrid curls, lit another, and said, “Did you kill her, Henry?”

He went white. “I suppose I deserve—”

“Because Joanne Mooring says you did.”

“That’s insane—”

“Specifically, she says she waited here that night spying on Lydia and her husband. She swears that when Mooring left Lydia was still alive. So she started toward the house to confront her. And then, while you say you were sixty miles away, your black Mercedes turned up the driveway and scared her off.”

Henry seemed to shrivel in his chair. Faintly he inquired, “Why hasn’t she gone to the police?”

“That puzzled me until I learned about Jason. If Mooring’s his father all that would come out. And Joanne drinks. The police might not believe her and suspect Mooring instead. Not bad reasons. The one I believe is more complex. For years Jason received anonymous birthday presents from his real father. Suppose Mooring wants to protect Jason. Perhaps he thinks that if the police learn that it was he who made love to Lydia, they’ll suspect Jason of killing her. Jason wouldn’t have to be Oedipus then. Just a murderer.”

Henry’s hands twisted together. When I finished, he looked up, mumbling as if it didn’t matter, “But she lied, Adam.”

“How would you know?”

He flushed. “I never left Anniston. I was with someone that night.”

“With whom?”

His gaze was level. “A man.”

“A man,” I repeated.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“If that’s true, then you lied to Rayfield.”

“I suppose I did.”

“You suppose. Does Roland know?”

“He knows.”

I felt the pain in my skull leeching strength from the rest of me. “And he sat there with Rayfield and let you lie.”

“I’d do anything to hide this,” he said miserably. “That was something Roland already knew.”

“You lie to the police, to put yourself closer to the electric chair, and Roland watches.”

Henry’s hands trembled. “You talk about something you don’t understand. I’d go to cocktail parties, pretending to be happy, and all the time I’m hoping, looking for someone whose eyes don’t slide away. Furtiveness becomes a way of life.”

“That’s no answer.”

He looked across at me. “I’d found someone, Adam. A man with a wife and three children.”

I pulled out a cigarette and began tamping one end on my wristwatch. “Who is he?”

“I can never tell that.”

I looked up. “Rayfield would find that convenient.”

“It doesn’t matter.” For a moment Henry’s face was almost serene. “I love him,” he said simply.

I lit the cigarette and smoked half of it. Night had fallen. Henry sat in a circle of lamplight as if cornered by darkness. Finally I said, “Tell me what happened, leaving out his name.”

“You won’t try to find him, Adam.”

“I won’t even assume that he exists.”

“Then you don’t believe me.”

“Just tell it,” I said angrily.

Henry checked his cuffs and tie knot with quick, nervous gestures. “There’s not much to tell,” he said reluctantly. “We’d arranged to meet. He told his wife he was going on a trip. I got the room and called Lydia to say I was too tired to drive home. I’d used that excuse before; she knew what it meant. Usually she treated it with weary, almost tolerant, contempt. But this time she was intrusive, tense sounding. Who was I with, she asked. When I wouldn’t say, she grew angry. There was something we had to discuss, right now. Couldn’t it wait, I asked. She hesitated, then said, ‘It’s waited too long already.’ But I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get off the phone.” His voice was hoarse. “I just wanted to be with him. So I told her I’d be back in the morning and hung up.”

“Then you never learned what she wanted.”

He shook his head. “Jason and the will, perhaps. But I didn’t return to find out. If I had, she might have lived.”

“And now you wonder.”

“Yes.” He spoke intently. “But there’s something more. I have this terrible sense of buried connections, that what’s happened to all three of us—even Lydia’s death—is entwined with what I am. I have to know, Adam.”

In the bad light his face seemed etched with guilt and questions. I wondered how much of him I knew, how far the hidden parts had taken him, how much good there was between us. “There was a girl once,” I said, “in Florence. I was there for two weeks on a college tour, with money I’d saved working. It was good and it wasn’t. I got a pensione, spent most of my time at the Uffizi and the like. I saw the paintings. Then, the evening before I was to leave, I looked out my window to the alley below which led to a piazza. The sun was setting and for a moment before nightfall the walls of the city were dusty pink. It became dark. I was turning away when I saw her through a window across the alley. She was slim, with long dark hair like Kris Ann’s, though I didn’t know her then. She was packing. She began to undress, carefully folding her things in the suitcase, one by one until they were all folded. I watched her. When she was through she came naked to the window and for a moment looked out at the city, as I had. Then she pulled the blinds.

“The next day I looked for her in the piazza, hoping to buy her a glass of red wine. I never found her and at noon our bus left for the airport. Perhaps I wouldn’t have recognized her. But I always wondered.”

Henry listened, thoughtful. “It’s different,” he said when I was through.

“Perhaps.”

“I have to know,” he repeated. “Maybe none of this has ever meant anything. Maybe life doesn’t. But a man has to live as though it does. I have to. Especially now.”

“Why me? Why not Roland?”

“Because I trust you.” He looked at me directly. “And because you need answers, too.”

I shrugged. “I guess we’ll see.”

The depression in his face seemed to ease. “You believe me then, Adam.”

“We’ll see.” I stubbed my cigarette. “We’ll see what I do.”

I got up without waiting for an answer. My legs were rubbery, my head light. I felt foolish, surprised. Henry rose, reaching for me. “You’re pale, Adam. Let me drive you to the hospital.”

I waved him back. “I need to get home to Kris Ann. Just stay there. Please.”

He slumped, arms falling to his sides. I got to the library door, hesitated, then turned, propping one hand in the doorway. He watched me in the dimness. “Men,” I said. “Jesus, Henry, how did you get stuck with that one?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Adam. It just was.”

I nodded slowly. When I turned to leave he was reaching for War and Peace.

I awoke panicky with the sense of lost time. It was dark. Seconds passed as I recognized my garage, replayed the surreal drift of the drive home, a collage of strobe-light beams, curves that shifted and distances that shrank abruptly, leaping shadows. The luminous blue of my wristwatch became numbers again. I relaxed; I had lost perhaps fifteen minutes.

I got out, moving from muscle memory through the garage and into the backyard. The night moved. Fluorescent moonlight yellowed the grass and oaks and the pathway of mossy stones leading to the sunroom. Its windows were dark. Inside the house was total darkness.

Stumbling from stone to stone I ran toward the house, slipping, falling palms forward on the slippery moss of the stone in front of me, smelling its dankness. Crablike, I pushed at the slimy rocks and then the whine came and bits of rock flew into my face.

The second bullet struck the tree behind me. Kris Ann, I thought frenziedly. I came up running off balance with the third shot, headed for the sunroom window. Ten feet, five feet. A fourth shot. Arms across my face, I hurtled through the window amidst a hail of shattering glass and hit the floor, blacking out for the last time.