In One Person

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My feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t have crawled as far as West Twelfth Street, or to West Eleventh; if a speeding taxi had collided with another taxi at the nearby intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, I couldn’t have saved myself from the flying debris.

The falling snow made me miss Vermont, but I was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of moving “home”— so to speak—and Elaine had suggested we try living together, but not in New York. I was further paralyzed by the idea of trying to live anywhere with Elaine; I both wanted to try it and was afraid to do it. (I unfortunately suspected that Elaine was motivated to live with me because she mistakenly believed this would “save” me from having sex with men—and I would therefore be “safe” from ever getting AIDS—but I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men and women.)

And if the abovementioned thoughts weren’t paralyzing enough, I was also rooted like a tree to that Seventh Avenue sidewalk because I was utterly ashamed of myself. I was—once again—poised to cruise those mournful corridors of St. Vincent’s, not because I’d come to visit and comfort a dying friend or a former lover, but because I was, absurdly, looking for Kittredge.

It was almost Christmas, 1984, and Elaine and I were still searching that sacred hospital—and various hospices—for a cruel boy who had abused us when we were all oh-so-young.

Elaine and I had been looking for Kittredge for three years. “Let him go,” Larry had told us both. “If you find him, he’ll only disappoint you—or hurt you again. You’re both in your forties. Aren’t you a little old to be exorcising a demon from your unhappy lives as teenagers?” (There was no way Lawrence Upton could say the teenagers word nicely.)

These factors must have contributed to my paralysis on Seventh Avenue in the West Village this snowy December night, but the fact that Elaine and I were behaving as if we were teenagers—that is, as far as Kittredge was concerned—doubtless contributed to my tears. (As a teenager, I had cried a lot.) Thus I was standing outside St. Vincent’s crying, when the older woman in the fur coat came up to me. She was an expensive-looking little woman in her sixties, but she was notably pretty; I might have recognized her if she’d still been attired in the sleeveless dress and straw hat she was wearing on the occasion of my first meeting her, when she’d declined to shake my hand. When Delacorte had introduced me to his mom at our graduation from Favorite River, he’d told her: “This is the guy who was going to be Lear’s Fool.”

No doubt Delacorte had also told his mother the story of my having had sex with the transsexual town librarian, which had prompted Mrs. Delacorte to say—as she said again to me that wintry night on Seventh Avenue—“I’m so sorry for your troubles.”

I couldn’t speak. I knew that I knew her, but it had been twenty-three years; I didn’t remember how I knew her, or when and where. But now she was not opposed to touching me; she grasped both my hands and said, “I know it’s hard to go in there, but it means so much to the one you’re visiting. I’ll go with you, I’ll help you do this—if you help me. It’s even hard for me, you know. It’s my son who’s dying,” Mrs. Delacorte told me, “and I wish I could be him. I want him to be the one who’s going to go on living. I don’t want to go on living without him!” she cried.

“Mrs. Delacorte?” I guessed—only because I saw something in her tormented face that reminded me of Delacorte’s near-death expressions as a wrestler.

“Oh, it’s you!” she cried. “You’re that writer now— Carlton talks about you. You’re Carlton’s friend from school. You’ve come to see Carlton, haven’t you? Oh, he’ll be so glad to see you—you must come inside!”

Thus I was dragged to Delacorte’s deathbed in that hospital where so many ill and wasting-away young men were lying in their beds, dying.

“Oh, Carlton—look who’s here, look who’s come to see you!” Mrs. Delacorte announced in that doorway, which was like so many hopeless doorways in St. Vincent’s. I hadn’t even known Delacorte’s first name; at Favorite River, no one had ever called him Carlton. He was just plain Delacorte there. (Once Kittredge had called him Two Cups, because of the paper cups that so often accompanied him—due to the insane weight-cutting, and the constant rinsing and spitting, which Delacorte had been briefly famous for.)

Of course, I’d seen Delacorte when he was cutting weight for wrestling—when he looked like he was starving—but he was really starving now. (It suffices to say that I knew what the Hickman catheter in Delacorte’s skeletal birdcage of a chest was for.) They’d had him on a breathing machine, Mrs. Delacorte had told me when we were en route to his room, but he was off it for now. They’d been experimenting with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Mrs. Delacorte had also explained; Delacorte was on morphine, either way.

“At this point, the suction is very important—to help clear secretions,” Mrs. Delacorte had said.

“At this point, yes,” I’d lamely repeated. I was numb; I felt frozen on my feet, as if I were still standing paralyzed on Seventh Avenue in the falling snow.

“This is the guy who was going to be Lear’s Fool,” Delacorte was struggling to say to his mother.

“Yes, yes—I know, dear, I know,” the little woman was telling him.

“Did you bring more cups?” he asked her. I saw he was holding two paper cups; they were absolutely empty cups, his mother would later tell me. She was always bringing more cups, but there was no need for rinsing and spitting now; in fact, when they were trying the morphine under his tongue, Delacorte wasn’t supposed to rinse or spit—or so Mrs. Delacorte thought. He just wanted to hold the paper cups for some foolish reason, she said.

Delacorte also had cryptococcal meningitis; his brain was affected—he had headaches, his mom told me, and he was often delirious. “This guy was Ariel in The Tempest,” Delacorte said to his mother, upon my first visit to his room—and on the occasion of every later visit. “He was Sebastian in Twelfth Night,” Delacorte told his mom repeatedly. “It was the shadow word that prevented him from being Lear’s Fool, which was why I got the part,” Delacorte raved.

Later, when I visited him with Elaine, Delacorte even reiterated my onstage history to her. “He didn’t come to see me die, when I was Lear’s Fool—of course I understand,” Delacorte said in a most heartfelt way to Elaine. “I do appreciate that he’s come to see me die now—you’ve both come now, and I truly appreciate it!” he told us.

Delacorte not once called me by name, and I truly can’t remember if he ever did; I don’t recall him once addressing me as either Bill or Billy when we were Favorite River students. But what does that matter? I didn’t even know what his first name was! Since I’d not seen him onstage as Lear’s Fool, I have a more permanent picture of Delacorte from Twelfth Night; he played Sir Andrew Aguecheek—declaring to Sir Toby Belch (Uncle Bob), “O, had I but followed the arts!”

Delacorte died after several days of near-total silence, with the two clean paper cups held shakily in his hands. Elaine was there that day, with Mrs. Delacorte and me, and—coincidentally—so was Larry. He’d spotted Elaine and me from the doorway of Delacorte’s room, and had poked his head inside. “Not the one you were looking for, or is it?” Larry had asked.

Elaine and I both shook our heads. A very tired Mrs. Delacorte was dozing while her son slipped away. There was no point in introducing Delacorte to Larry; Delacorte, by his silence, seemed to have already slipped away, or else he was headed in that direction—nor did Elaine and I disturb Mrs. Delacorte to introduce her to Larry. (The little woman hadn’t slept a wink for God knows how long.)

Naturally, Larry was the AIDS authority in the room. “Your friend hasn’t got long,” he whispered to Elaine and me; then he left us there. Elaine took Mrs. Delacorte to the women’s room, because the exhausted mother was so worn out she looked as if she might fall or become lost if she went by herself.

I was alone with Delacorte only a moment. I’d grown so accustomed to his silence, I first thought that someone else had spoken. “Have you seen him?” came the faintest whisper. “Leave it to him—he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!” Delacorte breathlessly cried.

“Who?” I whispered in the dying man’s ear, but I knew who. Who else would Delacorte have had on his demented mind at that instant, or almost the instant, of his death? Delacorte died minutes later, with his mother’s small hands on his wasted face. Mrs. Delacorte asked Elaine and me if she could