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By all accounts, there was no water snake. Henry was confident enough of the fact that he dove to the bottom of the lake and searched the silt for Francis's pince-nez. But he, Francis and Bunny were all sodden. Although I myself wasn’t, well… had I been of a more rational than tremulous disposition, I would have kept to the anatomy laboratories in Plano and never met any of them.
Rather than join the twins on their own boat ride, I chose to keep the others company while they (in boxers and bathrobes) waited for the sun and the breeze to dry them out. Bunny and Henry were passionately discussing haberdashers. In Bunny’s East Coast mind, there was not a finer choice than Brooks Brothers’ oxford weave and button down collars; Henry found their products foppish, and contended that no adequate shirtmakers existed outside of Jermyn Street anyway.
That was, at least, my fragmentary understanding of their discussion: Francis had insisted on going some distance away, to lie down where the shade of some birches would keep the worst of the sun off his delicate skin. Because my shirt was from JCPenney and I didn’t want to risk it coming up, I went with him.
'Francis?'
I was beside him on the grass, absently running my hand through his curls like a rake through dead leaves, in an act I somehow considered unequivocally platonic. It was one of those displays of affection he enjoyed and I liked to indulge. I enjoyed knowing I was doing something for him.
He emitted a lazy moan - a sort of 'mm?' - without stirring.
'Do you ever feel like… like a rug’s about to be yanked from under our feet?'
A light frown creased his forehead as he looked up at me.
'What do you mean?'
'What happens when this is all over? That’s what I mean.'
He seemed to think about it seriously for a moment. Then, to my surprise, he broke into a bright smile. Between the mosaic shadows of the leaves, his face was speckled with sunlight.
'You’re so gloomy, Richard.’
He gestured broadly at the scene in front of us.
‘None of this is going anywhere.'
I was irritated that he would answer me like a child who had just asked his father what happens after death. My fingers went on raking through his wet hair - I didn’t want him thinking I was mad, even though I was a little. But the idea that he was wrong repulsed me.
I stood - alone, now, and it felt like I had been there for five years - where we had lain in the fall of that fateful, faithless year. I felt no different from then - a malapropism I use in the interest of simplicity. Of course I felt different: heavy from the weight of unspeakable acts, irreparably damaged by loss, guilt, I felt worn - scuffed, like old furniture. But I was fundamentally the same person, even more aware, in fact, of who that person was and had always been.
The shoreline stretched before me, the water as smooth and clear as a pane of glass. When I finished my cigarette, I flicked the butt into the lake and immediately regretted it. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, the way it broke the water and wrinkled its surface, the concentric ripples it produced, upset me somewhat.
I turned heel and headed for the mansion, irritated.
The caretaker was there, pruning a maple tree. With some difficulty, he climbed down his ladder as soon as he saw me. His look was one of such profound disapproval as to set off a vestigial reflex, that of hiding the two bottles I had brought behind my back.
He didn’t mellow when I announced my wish to see Francis. Mister Abernathy was apparently not disposed to receive any visitors. When I insisted, he asked who was calling for the master of the house - which, until that very moment, I had no notion that he had become.
I hesitated briefly.
'A pilgrim.'
‘A what, now?’' he said irritably.
Glancing over his shoulder, I eyed the unlocked front door not ten yards behind him.
'You don’t remember me, Mr Hatch, do you?'
The shears twitched menacingly in his hand.
'That’s alright,' I smiled. 'I wish I didn’t remember you.'
With that, I sidestepped him, strolling right in faster than his rheumatic condition would allow him to follow.
“Hey!”
I shut the door and bolted it.
Nothing I laid eyes on seemed to be new, to have moved, to have even gathered dust since the days when this house had been the omphalos of my infant world. As I had the very first time, I went past the great-grandmother, her unfortunate brother (the one with the globetrotting tennis racket), the dizzyingly yellow sitting room.
I went on from one memory to another until the door of the library. Where else would he be, if I knew anything about him. I pushed the door open and peered inside.
I heard distant sounds of outraged knocking at the front door, which I ignored.
The library smelled dark, of old books, leather and tobacco - the same as always. Daylight came through in beams full of floating dust particles that slashed through the gloom and made everything seem even more stale by contrast. An armchair was set by the tall window, facing out like a makeshift stargazing station. Above it, a faint plume of smoke creeped upwards.
‘Francis?'
I heard a creak of leather, and he appeared from behind the armchair.
My heart swelled large enough to shove my lungs against my ribs, squeezing the wind out of them. I heard my own pulse in my ear, the artery at my temple thudding like a bass string. I reached behind me discreetly to clutch at the door frame, to keep myself upright.
'Richard,' he whispered. 'Is that you?'
'Francis…'
I let his name hang in the air like a warning to myself. I was unprepared; for his voice, his face, for the reality and proximity of him. I had come, I realized just then, expecting to enter a museum, look fondly upon a framed portrait and leave.
Only the left half of him was candlelit, and it was more than enough. A curl of red hair reached down to his wide, fixed eye, nearly covering it. His lips were ajar at the corner and - I fancied - trembling slightly, slackening the delicate jawline. His neck, that indecent expanse of alabaster skin, was left uncovered by the shirt he wore with three buttons undone. A dressing gown, dark red, hung looser over his frame than it once had.
'I… I’m sorry,' I offered rather pathetically. 'I shouldn’t ha-'
Dazed as I was, I only saw a blur of red velvet, only heard the clatter of furniture overturned, then Francis had me trapped in the tightest embrace I’ve ever felt. I was flat out of breath again.
'Richard…' he whimpered. 'Oh, Richard, you- you… my God!'
Only after a moment of dumbstruck paralysis did I think to reciprocate. I slipped my hands around his back.
'I-'
'For the love of God, shut up!' he let out in a single breath.
I did.
The rib-cracking clutch loosened a little, as he rode out the initial rush of emotion. It became a bearable compression, then a rather very gentle hold. For some minutes we stayed that way, each of us - I imagined - making quite sure the other was as real as all those years ago in Hampden.
When he finally let go of me, his cheeks and my collar were wet; he made no effort to hide this. Sliding down my arm, his hand ended up in mine. I let him lead me to the coffee table on either side of which we each sat.
'My God, Richard, my God! How are you even here?'
I explained. My first year as a graduate teaching assistant at UCLA and a part-time librarian job - the beginnings of a decent living given the circumstances. A bad cold like I had become prone to. It had passed, thankfully, but I had a week’s worth of sick leave left to go. This, I knew, only told him how I had been able to come, not why I had; but that, I didn’t know myself.
While he listened, Francis flicked the lid of a marquetry box open and reached in for two cigarettes, offering me one. He lit them both - mine first, as his usual fussiness demanded - before reclining into the cushions.
I watched him take a greedy drag of his cigarette, hold it for one, two, three seconds, then breathe the smoke out of his mouth and nostrils with a blissful, beautiful sigh. Briefly, I was looking at an androgynous Pythia inhaling nicotinic pneuma as fuel for their apollonian ecstasy.
In the ashtray, the long matches were melding together as they burned out.
I shifted in my seat, pretending to look around, and only then did a jarring absence come to the forefront of my mind. In retrospect, it was a forgivable oversight: the house, the deposed wonderland of my freshman year, occupied a part of my memory entirely unrelated to the wife, the intruder, a late add-on whose irruption had almost cost the world Francis. Not that anything was her fault per se. It could have been any other pretty young woman of good breeding and too mild a nature to realize she was being set up for a sham marriage.
I cleared my throat.
'Um… - I had to rack my mind for her name, even - Isn’t Priscilla home?'
Francis - he was only Francis again - opened his eyes.
'I let her go when my grandfather died' he said simply, like he was talking about a maid.
'Oh.'
Ever since Hampden I had kept a close eye on a select few papers for any information about my former friends. It was tedious work, often a waste of time, but my way of keeping them alive in my mind. I had read about the death in the obituaries of the Boston Globe three years prior - embarrassingly, I even kept a clipping under my desk pad ever since.
Though I began to mumble an apology, all I could feel was an overwhelming wave of relief washing over me.
I must have hidden it poorly, because he grinned for a few moments, looking amused by my pitiable attempts at propriety.
'Richard. You didn’t come here to ask about that bore - though he may have meant ‘boar’ - I was saddled with, did you?'
'No,' I said slowly. 'To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I came here to do.'
He smiled broadly.
'How I missed you!'
‘You could have come by anytime you wanted.’
I had tried to infuse some softness into my reproach but his reply came detached.
‘I would have visited, really. I just don’t leave the house very often these days.’
‘Do you leave at all?’
He shrugged and pulled on his cigarette.
‘Solitaire?’ I asked, eyeing the scattered cards on the table which I imagined had once been arranged in neat columns.
‘ Oui, mais pas par choix ,’ he sighed
I took his hand and he looked at me curiously.
‘Francis, I came because I needed to see you.’
I rubbed my thumb across the back of his hand slowly - clumsily, I thought. Francis had always been much better than me at these displays of affection. It seemed I could hardly ever do such things without averting my eyes and clenching my jaw.
He looked down at my hand.
‘You needed to?’
‘I needed to,’ I repeated, ‘I haven’t seen you in five years.’
‘That long… it doesn’t feel like five years,’ he mused.
‘It might not have been for you. Doesn’t look like much has changed since then.’
‘Do you think so? I’ve just been watching you all not be here…’
I would have asked why he had never moved on, why he had never thought to simply not come back to the manor, go wherever with whomever, to do whatever was not this.
But I refrained, because I knew the answer, of course. Some things felt better to miss than anything else to have. Francis’s way of missing what I did too, was to smoke ceaselessly over a selection of tomes he knew by heart and look out the window for hours at a time as though another one of the six - one of us - could walk past any minute.
But, I thought with a start, that was exactly what had just happened.
I looked up to find him smiling.
‘But you’re here now, Richard.’
‘I’m here.’
It sounded like an admission of defeat. Like I had just lost a long-standing bet.
He stubbed his cigarette out into the ashtray.
'We should go outside!' he exclaimed, his voice newly enthusiastic. 'I’ve been in this room longer than I can bear.'
Springing up, he fished inside the box for a handful of cigarettes, which he stuffed into a pocket along with his lighter.
I left my cigarette half-smoked and started after him. The reading room seemed a bit brighter as we headed out than it had on my way in. The entrance hall had somehow regained some of its old majesty, but I didn’t have the time to pause and wonder.
‘We should take a couple of glasses,’ I said as we walked past the kitchen.
‘What for?’
I held up the bottles I had taken with me.
‘A libation. Napa Valley.’
‘We’ll drink out of the bottle.’
‘One each?’
‘No,’ he said and continued on his way.
Francis, though he had always been a loafing boy, had a great potential for liveliness; for frantic, uncontrollable animation. Any number of small things could fling him from simply being to doing , as if a switch were suddenly thrown inside him. These sudden moments of fawn-like excitement, I considered a corollary to his propensity to anxiety ( hysteria , Henry always called it, imbuing the disparagingly female word with a stoic’s disgust for panic) whenever anything problematic happened. To me, both were equally touching.
Presently, he opened the front door onto the luminous porch.
As he stretched and wallowed in the light like a spoiled house cat, the robe slid off his shoulders a little. He threw his head back, flipping his locks up into a perfect Hellenistic anastole. A swirl of burnished copper glinting in the sun.
How great is the power of this bronze, I thought, reminded of one of Asclepiades’ epigrams,
The brazen king seems to be gazing up at Zeus and about to say:
I set Earth under my feet; for yourself, Zeus, possess Olympus.
I marveled at him just as the poet had at the deftness of Lysippos’ hand, the liveliness of his sculptured tribute to the great Macedonian conqueror. My hands were trembling slightly, my throat dry. I couldn’t wait for a draft of the wine. That innocent, natural movements of his body produced such a dramatic effect on me should have been self-explanatory. But in those days, I wasn’t ready or willing to deal with the implications of that fact, and I suppose I hid in deluded candor: he was my friend. I had missed him very much. That was all.
But the tremor in my hands persisted. In the distance I saw Mr. Hatch marching towards us with a shovel in hand.
‘Um… I’ll go back inside while you sort this out,’ I said cautiously.
Francis looked from me to the housekeeper and back, puzzled. Then he burst out laughing so hard I had to pat him on the back to keep him from choking.