"You know, you're not just bisexual, Bill. You're bi-everything!" Larry told me.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked him.
"You're a solo pilot, aren't you, Bill?" Larry asked me. "You're cruising solo--no copilot has any clout with you." (I still have no idea what Larry meant.)
"Don't pull rank on us, Mr. Florence Fucking Nightingale," Elaine said to Larry.
Elaine and I had been standing in the corridor outside Delacorte's room, when one of the nurses passed by and paused to speak to us. "Is Carlton--" the nurse started to say.
"Yes, he's gone--his mother is with him," Elaine said.
"Oh, dear," the nurse said, stepping quickly into Delacorte's room, but she got there too late. Mrs. Delacorte had done what she wanted to do--what she'd probably planned to do, once she knew her son was going to die. She must have had the needle and a syringe in her purse. She'd stuck the needle into the end of the Hickman catheter; she'd drawn some blood out of the Hickman, but she emptied that first syringe into the wastebasket. The first syringe was mostly full of heparin. Mrs. Delacorte had done her homework; she knew that the second syringe would be almost entirely Carlton's blood, teeming with the virus. Then she'd injected herself, deep into her gluteus, with about five milliliters of her son's blood. (Mrs. Delacorte would die of AIDS in 1989; she died in hospice care in her apartment, in New York.)
At Elaine's insistence, I took Mrs. Delacorte uptown in a taxi--after she'd given herself a lethal dose of her beloved Carlton's blood. She had a tenth-floor apartment in one of those innocuously perfect buildings with an awning and a doorman on Park Avenue and East Seventy-or Eighty-something.
"I don't know about you, but I'm going to have a drink," she told me. "Please come in." I did.
It was hard to fathom why Delacorte had died at St. Vincent's, when Mrs. Delacorte could clearly have provided more comfortable hospice care for him in her own Park Avenue apartment. "Carlton always objected to feeling privileged," Mrs. Delacorte explained. "He wanted to die like Everyman--that's what he said. He wouldn't let me provide him with hospice care here, even though they could probably have used the extra room at St. Vincent's--as I told him, many times," she said.
They no doubt did need the extra room at St. Vincent's, or they soon would. (Some people waited to die in the corridors there.)
"Would you like to see Carlton's r
oom?" Mrs. Delacorte asked me, when we both had a drink in hand, and I don't drink--nothing but beer. I had a whiskey with Mrs. Delacorte; maybe it was bourbon. I would have done anything that little woman wanted. I even went with her to Delacorte's childhood room.
I found myself in a museum of what had been Carlton Delacorte's privileged life in New York, before he'd been sent "away" to Favorite River Academy; it was a fairly common story that Delacorte's leaving home had coincided with his parents getting a divorce, about which Mrs. Delacorte was candid with me.
More surprising, Mrs. Delacorte was no less candid about the prevailing cause of her separation and divorce from young Carlton's father; her husband had been a raving homo-hater. The man had called Carlton a fairy and a little fag; he'd berated Mrs. Delacorte for allowing the effeminate boy to dress up in his mother's clothes and paint his lips with her lipstick.
"Of course I knew--probably long before Carlton did," Mrs. Delacorte told me. She seemed to be favoring her right buttock; such a deep intramuscular injection had to hurt. "Mothers know," she said, unconsciously limping a little. "You can't force children to become something they're not. You can't simply tell a boy not to play with dolls."
"No, you can't," I said; I was looking at all the photographs in the room--pictures of the unguarded Delacorte, before I knew him. He'd been just a little boy once--one who'd like nothing better than to dress and make himself up as a little girl.
"Oh, look at this--just look," the little woman suddenly said; the ice cubes were clicking together in her near-empty glass as she reached and untacked a photo from a bulletin board of photographs in her departed son's bedroom. "Look at how happy he was!" Mrs. Delacorte cried, handing me the photo.
I'm guessing that Delacorte was eleven or twelve in the picture; I had no difficulty recognizing his impish little face. Certainly, the lipstick had accentuated his grin. The cheap mauve wig--with a pink streak--was ridiculous; it was one of those wigs you can find in a Halloween-type costume shop. And of course Mrs. Delacorte's dress was too big for the boy, but the overall effect was hilarious and endearing--well, not if you were Mr. Delacorte, I guess. There was a taller, slightly older-looking girl in the photograph with Delacorte--a very pretty girl, but with short hair (as closely cut as a boy's) and an arrestingly confident but tight-lipped smile.
"This day didn't end well. Carlton's father came home and was furious to see Carlton like this," Mrs. Delacorte was saying as I looked more closely at the photo. "The boys had been having such a wonderful time, and that tyrant of a man ruined it!"
"The boys," I repeated. The very pretty girl in the photograph was Jacques Kittredge.
"Oh, you know him--I know you do!" Mrs. Delacorte said, pointing at the oh-so-perfectly cross-dressed Kittredge. He'd applied his lipstick far more expertly than Delacorte had applied his, and one of Mrs. Delacorte's beautiful but old-fashioned dresses was an exquisite fit. "The Kittredge boy," the little woman said. "He went to Favorite River--he was a wrestler, too. Carlton was always in awe of him, I think, but he was a devil--that boy. He could be charming, but he was a devil."
"How was Kittredge a devil?" I asked Mrs. Delacorte.
"I know he stole my clothes," she said. "Oh, I gave him some old things I didn't want--he was always asking me if he could have my clothes! 'Oh, please, Mrs. Delacorte,' he would say, 'my mother's clothes are huge, and she doesn't let me try them on--she says I always mess them up!' He just went on, and on, like that. And then my clothes started disappearing--I mean things I know perfectly well I would never have given him."
"Oh."
"I don't know about you," Mrs. Delacorte said, "but I'm going to have another drink." She left me to fix herself a second whiskey; I looked at all the other photos on the bulletin board in Delacorte's childhood bedroom. There were three or four photographs with Kittredge in the picture--always as a girl. When Mrs. Delacorte came back to her dead son's room, I was still holding the photo she'd handed me.
"Please take it," she told me. "I don't like remembering how that day ended."
"Okay," I said. I still have that photograph, though I don't like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.
DID I TELL ELAINE about Kittredge and Mrs. Delacorte's clothes? Did I show Elaine that photo of Kittredge as a girl? No, of course not--Elaine was holding out on me, wasn't she?
Some guy Elaine knew got a Guggenheim; he was a fellow writer, and he told Elaine that his seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street was the perfect place for two writers.