The Secret History - Donna Tartt [267]
She looked older. Cheeks a bit hollower. Different hair, cut very short. Without realizing it, I had come to think of her, too, as a ghost: but to see her, wan but still beautiful, in the flesh, my heart gave such a glad and violent leap that I thought it would burst, I thought I would die, right there.
Francis sat up in bed and held out his arms. “Darling,” he said. “Come here.”
The three of us were in Boston together for four days. It rained the whole time. Francis got out of the hospital on the second day—which, as it happened, was Ash Wednesday.
I had never been to Boston before; I thought it looked like the London I had never seen. Gray skies, sooty brick townhouses, Chinese magnolias in the fog. Camilla and Francis wanted to go to mass, and I went along with them. The church was crowded and drafty. I went to the altar with them to get ashes, shuffling along in the swaying line. The priest was bent, in black, very old. He made a cross on my forehead with the flat of his thumb. Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return. I stood up again when it was time for communion, but Camilla caught my arm and hastily pulled me back. The three of us stayed in our seats as the pews emptied and the long, shuffling line started toward the altar again.
“You know,” said Francis, on the way out, “I once made the mistake of asking Bunny if he ever thought about Sin.”
“What did he say?” asked Camilla.
Francis snorted. “He said ‘No, of course not. I’m not a Catholic.’ ”
We loitered all afternoon in a dark little bar on Boylston Street, smoking cigarettes and drinking Irish whiskey. The talk turned to Charles. He, it seemed, had been an intermittent guest at Francis’s over the course of the past few years.
“Francis lent him quite a bit of money about two years ago,” Camilla said. “It was good of him, but he shouldn’t have done it.”
Francis shrugged and drank off the rest of his glass. It was clear the subject made him uncomfortable. “I wanted to,” he said.
“You’ll never see it again.”
“That’s all right.”
I was consumed with curiosity. “Where is Charles?”
“Oh, he’s getting by,” said Camilla. It was clear the topic made her uncomfortable, too. “He worked for my uncle for a little while. Then he had a job playing piano in a bar—which, as you can imagine, didn’t work out so well. Our Nana was distraught. Finally she had to have my uncle tell him that if he didn’t shape up, he was going to have to move out of the house. So he did. He got himself a room in town and went on working at the bar. But they finally fired him and he had to come home again. That was when he started coming up here. It was good of you,” she said to Francis, “to put up with him the way you did.”
He was staring down into his drink. “Oh,” he said, “it’s all right.”
“You were very kind to him.”
“He was my friend.”
“Francis,” said Camilla, “lent Charles the money to put himself into a treatment place. A hospital. But he only stayed about a week. He ran off with some thirty-year-old woman he met in the detox ward. Nobody heard from them for about two months. Finally the woman’s husband—”
“She was married?”
“Yes. Had a baby, too. A little boy. Anyway, the woman’s husband finally hired a private detective, and he tracked them down in San Antonio. They were living in this horrible place, a dump. Charles was washing dishes in a diner, and she—well, I don’t know what she was doing. They were both in kind of bad shape. But neither of them wanted to come home. They were very happy, they said.”
She paused to take a sip of her drink.
“And?” I said.
“And they’re still down there,” she said. “In Texas. Though they’re not in San Antonio anymore. They were in Corpus Christi for a while. The last we heard they’d moved to Galveston.”
“Doesn’t he ever call?”
There