“Hubert naturally didn’t know what to make of this. He had pretty much succeeded in following his text to the end, but his ‘success’ left him dumbfounded.
“It was after this event that I was called in by a team of local psychologists, contacted by Bellamy, who was worried by Hubert’s growing confusion and discouragement. I met Rachel, who briefed me on what had happened. I then attended the third and final session. It drew a still larger attendance than the week before, and among the newcomers an element appeared that was no less exuberant than its forerunners but less kind. I felt they had come to jeer as well as laugh; and jeer they did. The low point was reached when Hubert told of the weird packets falling from his bones, and a thinly bearded young man shouted, ‘Hey, Hube! Did you get your rocks off, too?’ This garnered a small laugh from the crowd, not from Hubert, who turned white, rose to his feet, and started shrieking obscenities at his heckler. For a while he stood there, stamping one foot compulsively on the platform, until Rachel summarily ended the meeting, leading Hubert past cheering spectators into the cooler air outside. I followed them.
“Rachel led us to a restaurant nearby. We ordered a stiff whisky for Hubert, and for us, too. We tried to make him eat; we pampered him with whatever words we thought might soothe him. I made a remark that I’ve regretted ever since. ‘Hubert, you said what you wanted to say, and some day your words may get through to them. That does happen. In the meantime you made them laugh. That’s not dishonorable. It’s a commonplace joy, but a real one.’ Hubert said, ‘I came to speak to them as a modest evangelist, not to be their clown.’
“That was pretty much the end for Hubert. Rachel was dismayed that not only had he been stripped of his zeal in spreading his ‘good word,’ but there remained not a trace of the excitement of his original experience, not even a consoling memory. He sank into carnivorous melancholy, with its attendant petty monsters — insomnia by night, constipation, back ache, and migraine by day. He became skeletally thin and brutally rude. Melancholy is inaccessible to psychotherapy, so he was treated with chemicals that only damped down his agitation into resigned sullenness.
“The Boeyens at last decided they could no longer keep him under their roof. They found and paid for a rest home in the outskirts of the city in which he could take early retirement. It was a reasonably good solution: Hubert found himself in new surroundings where nothing reminded him of his disappointments, aside from Rachel’s visits.
“She visited him almost every day. She could not quite cheer him up, but she brought him rudimentary peace of mind. They still loved one another, and each somehow knew that reestablishing their former intimacy meant risking havoc.
“On clement days they took walks together in the nearby countryside. Once, in early autumn, they went by bus as far as the mountain range that lay east of the city. The mountains were low, with gentle grades; the pair ascended one not much higher than a big hill. They nevertheless reached a height above the last grassy slopes where no vegetation grew. Around them stretched an expanse of dark gray limestone streaked with thin fissures that rain had incised in its downward flow. It was a quiet afternoon, in fact an absolutely silent one. Hubert remembered a remark of Webern’s to the effect that no matter how complete the surrounding silence, one could always distinguish some sound, however faint. Leaning against the high limestone that flanked the path, putting a hand on Rachel’s arm to keep her still, he listened hard — could that be a far-off crow? As soon as he heard it, it faded. There was not even a whisper of wind. The rain of centuries had been sucked into the limestone’s clefts. Rachel was smiling a peculiar smile that reminded him of something. Holding out his hands to her, he asked, “Is it happening? To you?” Rachel took his hands in hers and kissed them, raising glazed eyes in the fading light. No tears for Rachel; she knew that she was about to spin straight up into the twilit sky. He had to take her word for it — he himself felt nothing much but faint, overdue relief.
“Next day he said to her, ‘Now we have our holy order. A society of two. That’s enough room to stand up in.’
“Rachel and I had become friends. Her letters keep me up to date. The most recent one arrived last Saturday to inform me that, a week before his sixtieth birthday, Hubert had died. He was clear-headed, calm, slightly disgusted.”
Margot asked, “Didn’t this fellow have any family?” “He had a twin brother. He’d emigrated years before all this. Now I must go to bed. Good night.”
5
Berenice had been sincere in saying she “had to go to bed,” but it was not, as one might expect, because of fatigue. When Andreas eventually followed her upstairs, he found her wide awake and eager to chat.
“You aren’t Bellamy’s son, by some prank of fate? His given name was Lewis, I believe.” “So was mine. I decided to change half my identity — my half. I had nothing against my family, after all. Does it matter?” “Only that we came so close.” “You mean all that time wasted? Years of love foregone? My darling, but who knows what disasters such ‘convenient’ intimacy might have brought down on us? What could be better than this? I’ll take contingency any day over a family connection.” Berenice agreed. She also wondered if, by her rough calculation,
