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
It said,
PART TWO
i
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 allees 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
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,
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
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.
“Oh man,” I said beneath my breath. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly open it. “Please, god, please…”
The inside of the envelope was lined with marbled paper, blue and violet and green. The edges of the heavy rag stationery were gilt, as was a tiny monogram stamped at the top of the page.
LdR
I drew it to my face, breathing in Pelican ink and the sharp medicinal tang of eucalyptus, and began to read.
Wrapped in a second sheet of the same heavy smooth paper were two airplane tickets.
I went; of course I went. I was afraid not to, but even more afraid of what I might do or what I might become if I stayed at the Divine, drinking and hiding in the Shrine and slowly going insane. It felt strange, to be flying into Westchester without my parents’ knowledge. At the airport I was seized by the absurd terror that they would be there, that somehow they had found out about everything and had come to collect me and bring me in disgrace back home. But there was hardly anyone at the airport at all, besides a few weary wives come to collect their weary husbands, and a young man in a cable-knit sweater and salmon-colored golf pants, holding a sign that said SWEENEY CASSIDY.
