Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [94]
He sat on the bed, and I went to the bench under the skylight. I knew if I sat close to him, I would not hear what he was going to say—the nearness of scent and skin would make words and understanding impossible and I wanted to hear him. I placed my hands on the lacquered wood on either side of me, and he reached for the lamp on the table beside his bed. As he turned the knob, I saw that his face had changed.
In the half-light, his head down, he spoke of trials and tests, of soldiers, Green Berets, Greek legends, and failure. Sometimes he wept. There were things he had to tell me, things that only now had become clear to him. He confessed that he was not a man yet; maybe in a different time, one of warriors and rituals, he would have been. The words pained him. “I haven’t gone through the fire,” he kept saying. “It’s like I haven’t gone through the fire.”
On another night, I would have bolstered him, held him, convinced him otherwise, believed that anything was possible, but that night, I stayed on the wooden bench and I listened.
“How can I reach out my hand to you? How can I ask you to join my life when I don’t know what it is yet?” he cried. “You’re lucky, you have a calling. You know what your life is.”
“You don’t want to be a lawyer?” He had started working for the Manhattan district attorney’s office that fall, but as soon as I said it, I knew how foolish the words sounded. Of course, he didn’t. Torts and voir dire were antithetical to his natural gifts. But he’d worked hard, and because he had, I’d assumed it was what he wanted, for a time at least.
He began to speak about the theater with such tender loss—grief even—as if it were a paramour he would always carry a torch for, one he could not part with but would never fully possess. I’d known his passion and his talent for acting. I had stood on a stage with him and looked into his eyes. But until that night, I hadn’t fully known his regret.
“If that’s what you want, you can do it. Just decide. You’re a wonderful actor—you can do anything you want.” I still believed that.
“No, I can’t,” he said, wincing slightly.
I didn’t ask, but I knew by the way he spoke that it was not his mother, as the papers so often opined, that stood between him and an actor’s life. It was the knowledge that deep within, no matter how much he loved it, it was not his path to follow, something Professor Barnhill had intuited long ago.
We talked about politics and, as he had at other times, he called it the family business. Was that what he wanted? I reminded him of the associates and friends, true or otherwise, who waited in the wings for him to say the word. He knew this but lowered his head. “I haven’t done anything yet to earn it. I need to know what I believe.”
The room had darkened, and the city was almost quiet, only the odd car rumbling up Hudson Street like a wave rolling. I moved to the bed and sat close to him.
“I’ve only told three people in my life that I loved them,” he confessed. “You, Sally, my sister.”
“And your mother.”
“Yes, my mother.”
He stroked my face. “You’re my compass,” he whispered, the lamplight hitting him golden from behind.
Compass? But he was the fearless one, the one who knew the seas and trails.
“You’ve always been my compass,” he said, as if I should have known. “I’ll be lost without you. I think of the time ahead and it’s like a desert.”
I said nothing. I closed my eyes and held him. He had imagined it, this desert, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t.
I stayed with him that night, and in the morning when I asked, he agreed not to call me for a while. We