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With half a brain, I might have anticipated that the boy, Peter, would be the one to answer the door. I should have expected to be greeted by a shocking physical resemblance to Tom Atkins--as I first knew him--but I was speechless.
"It's the son, Billy--say something!" Elaine whispered in my ear. (Of course I was already struggling to make an effort not to cry.) "Hi--I'm Elaine, this is Billy," Elaine said to the boy with the carrot-colored hair. "You must be Peter. We're old friends of your dad."
"Yes, we've been expecting you--please come in," Peter said politely. (The boy had just turned fifteen; he'd applied to the Lawrenceville School, for what would be his sophomore year, and he was waiting to hear if he got in.)
"We weren't sure what time you were coming, but now is a good time," Peter Atkins was saying, as he led Elaine and me inside. I wanted to hug the boy--he'd used the time word twice; he had no trace of a pronunciation problem!--but, under the circumstances, I knew enough not to touch him.
Off to one side of the lavish vestibule was a rather formal-looking dining room--where absolutely no one ate (or had ever eaten), I was thinking--when the boy told us that Charles had just left. "Charles is my dad's nurse," Peter was explaining. "Charles comes to take care of the catheter--you have to keep flushing out the catheter, or it will clot off," Peter told Elaine and me.
"Clot off," I repeated--my first words in the Atkins house. Elaine elbowed me in my ribs.
"My mom is resting, but she'll be right down," the boy was saying. "I don't know where my sister is."
We had stopped alongside a closed door in a downstairs hall. "This used to be my father's study," Peter Atkins said; the boy was hesitating before he opened the door. "But our bedrooms are upstairs--Dad can't climb stairs," Peter continued, not opening the door. "If my sister is in here, with him, she may scream--she's only thirteen, about to be fourteen," the boy told Elaine and me; he had his hand on the doorknob, but he wasn't ready to let us in. "I weigh about a hundred and forty pounds," Peter Atkins said, as matter-of-factly as he could manage. "My dad's lost some weight, since you've seen him," the boy said. "He weighs almost a hundred--maybe ninety-something pounds." Then he opened the door.
"It broke my heart," Elaine told me, later. "How that boy was trying to prepare us." But as I was only beginning to learn about that goddamn disease, there was no way to be prepared for it.
"Oh, there she is--my sister, Emily," Peter Atkins said, when he finally let us enter the room where his dad lay dying.
The dog, Jacques, was a chocolate Labrador with a gray-white muzzle--an old dog, I could tell, not only by his grizzled nose and jaws, but by how slowly and unsteadily the dog came out from under the hospital bed to greet us. One of his hind legs slipped a little on the floor; his tail wagged only slightly, as if it hurt his hips to wag his tail at all.
"Jacques is almost thirteen," Peter told Elaine and me, "but that's pretty old for a dog--and he has arthritis." The dog's cold, wet nose touched my hand and then Elaine's; that was all the old Lab had wanted. There was a subsequent thump when the dog lay down under the bed again.
The girl, Emily, was curled up like a second dog at the foot of her father's hospital bed. It was probably of some small comfort to Tom that his daughter was keeping his feet warm. It was an indescribable exertion for Atkins to breathe; I knew that his hands and feet would be cold--the circulation to Tom's extremities was closing down, trying to shunt blood to his brain.
Emily's reaction to Elaine and me was delayed. She sat up and screamed, but belatedly; she'd been reading a book, which flew from her hands. The sound of its fluttering pages was lost to the girl's scream. I saw an oxygen tank in the cluttered room--what had been Atkins's "study," as his son had explained, now converted for a deathwatch.
I also observed that his daughter's scream had little effect on Tom Atkins--he'd barely moved in the hospital bed. It probably hurt him to turn his head; yet his bare chest, while the rest of his shrunken body lay still, was vigorously heaving. The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Tom's chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above the nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone.
"These are Dad's old friends, from school, Emily," Peter said irritably to his little sister. "You knew they were coming."
The girl stalked across the room to her far-flung book; when she'd retrieved it, she turned and glared. Emily definitely glared at me; she may have been glaring at her brother and Elaine, too. When the thirteen-year-old spoke, I felt certain she was speaking only to me, though Elaine would try in vain to assure me later, on the train, that Tom's daughter had been addressing both of us. (I don't think so.)
"Are you sick, too?" Emily asked.
"No, I'm not--I'm sorry," I answered her. The girl then marched out of the room.
"Tell Mom they're here, Emily. Tell Mom!" Peter called after his angry sister.
"I will!" we heard the girl shout.
"Is that you, Bill?" Tom Atkins asked; I saw him try to move his head, and I stepped closer to the bed. "Bill Abbott--are you here?" Atkins asked; his voice was weak and terribly labored. His lungs made a thick gurgling. The oxygen tank must have been for only occasional (and superficial) relief; there probably was a mask, but I didn't see it--the oxygen was in lieu of a ventilator. Morphine would come next, at the end stage.
"Yes, it's me--Bill--and Elaine is with me, Tom," I told Atkins. I touched his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. I could see poor Tom's face now. That greasy-looking seborrheic dermatitis was in his scalp, on his eyebrows, and flaking off the sides of his nose.
"Elaine, too!" Atkins gasped. "Elaine and Bill! Are you all right, Bill?" he asked me.
"Yes, I'm all right," I told him; I'd never felt so ashamed to be "all right."
There was a tray of medications, and other intimidating-looking stuff, on the bedside table. (I would remember the heparin solution, for some reason--it was for flushing out the Hickman catheter.) I saw the white, cheesy curds of the Candida crusting the corners of poor Tom's mouth.
"I did not recognize him, Billy," Elaine would say later, when we were returning to New York. Yet how do you recognize a grown man who weighs only ninety-something pounds?
Tom Atkins and I were thirty-nine, but he resembled a man in his sixties; his hair was not only translucent and thin--what there was of it was completely gray. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, his temples deeply dented, his cheeks ca
ved in; poor Tom's nostrils were pinched tightly together, as if he could already detect the stench of his own cadaver, and his taut skin, which had once been so ruddy, was an ashen color.
Hippocratic facies was the term for that near-death face--that tightly fitted mask of death, which so many of my friends and lovers who died of AIDS would one day wear. It was skin stretched over a skull; the skin was so improbably hard and tense, you were sure it was going to split.
