The Secret History - Donna Tartt [235]
“It would be easier, I think, if we bought him a new one. Less chance of it leaking all over everything. And if we get him one of those flat ones he can keep it under his pillow without much trouble.”
It was a drizzly morning, overcast and gray. Henry didn’t go with us to the hospital. He had us drop him off at his apartment—he had some excuse, plausible enough, I can’t remember what it was—and when he got out of the car he gave me a hundred-dollar bill.
“Here,” he said. “Give Charles my love. Will you buy some flowers for him or something?”
I looked at the bill, momentarily stunned. Francis snatched it from me and pushed it back at him. “Come on, Henry,” he said, with an anger that surprised me. “Stop it.”
“I want you to have it.”
“Right. We’re supposed to get him a hundred dollars’ worth of flowers.”
“Don’t forget to stop at the package store,” said Henry coldly. “Do what you like with the rest of the money. Just give him the change, if you want. I don’t care.”
He pushed the money at me again and shut the car door, with a click that was more contemptuous than if he’d slammed it. I watched his stiff square back receding up the walk.
We bought Charles’s whiskey—Cutty Sark, in a flat bottle—and a basket of fruit, and a box of petit-fours, and a game of Chinese checkers, and, instead of cleaning out the day’s stock of carnations at the florist’s downtown, an Oncidium orchid, yellow with russet tiger-stripes, in a red clay pot.
On the way to the hospital, I asked Francis what had happened over the weekend.
“Too upsetting. I don’t want to talk about it now,” he said. “I did see her. Over at Henry’s.”
“How is she?”
“Fine. A little preoccupied but fine, basically. She said she didn’t want Charles to know where she was and that was all there was to it. I wish I could’ve talked to her alone, and of course Henry didn’t leave the room for a second.” Restlessly, he felt in his pocket for a cigarette. “This may sound crazy,” he said, “but before I saw her I’d been a little worried, you know? That something maybe had happened to her.”
I didn’t say anything. The same thought had crossed my mind, more than once.
“I mean—not that I thought Henry would kill her or anything, but you know—it was strange. Her disappearing like that, without a word to anybody. I—” He shook his head. “I hate to say this, but sometimes I wonder about Henry,” he said. “Especially with things like—well, you know what I mean?”
I didn’t answer. Actually I did know what he meant, quite well. But it was too horrible for either of us to come out and say.
Charles had a semi-private room. He was in the bed nearer the door, separated by a curtain from his roommate: the Hampden County postmaster, as we later discovered, who was in for a prostate operation. On his side there were a lot of FTD flower arrangements, and corny get-well cards taped to the wall, and he was propped up in bed talking with some noisy family members: food smells, laughter, everything cheery and snug. More of his visitors trailed in after Francis and me, stopping, for an instant, to peer curiously over the curtain at Charles: silent, alone, flat on his back with an IV in his arm. His face was puffy and his skin rough and coarse-looking, broken out in some kind of a rash. His hair was so dirty it looked brown. He was watching cartoons on television, violent ones, little animals that looked like weasels cracking up cars and bashing each other on the head.
He struggled to sit up when we stepped into his partition. Francis drew the curtain behind us, practically in the faces of the postmaster’s inquisitive visitors, a pair of middle-aged ladies, who were dying to get a good look at Charles and one of whom had craned around and cawed “Good Morning!” through the gap in the curtain, in the hopes of initiating conversation.
“Dorothy! Louise!” someone called from the other side. “Over here!”
There were rapid footsteps on the linoleum and henlike clucks and cries of greeting.
“Damn them,” said Charles. He was very hoarse and his voice was little more