In One Person

dress and straw hat she was wearing on the occasion of my first meeting her, when she’d declined to shake my hand. When Delacorte had introduced me to his mom at our graduation from Favorite River, he’d told her: “This is the guy who was
going to be
Lear’s Fool.”
    No doubt Delacorte had also told his mother the story of my having had sex with the transsexual town librarian, which had prompted Mrs. Delacorte to say—as she said again to me that wintry night on Seventh Avenue—“I’m so sorry for your
troubles
.”
    I couldn’t speak. I knew that I knew her, but it had been twenty-three years; I didn’t remember
how
I knew her, or when and where. But now she was not opposed to touching me; she grasped both my hands and said, “I know it’s hard to go in there, but it means so much to the one you’re visiting. I’ll go with you, I’ll help you do this—if you help me. It’s even hard for me, you know. It’s my
son
who’s dying,” Mrs. Delacorte told me, “and I wish I could
be
him. I want
him
to be the one who’s going to go on living. I don’t want to go on living
without
him!” she cried.
    “Mrs.
Delacorte
?” I guessed—only because I saw something in her tormented face that reminded me of Delacorte’s near-death expressions as a wrestler.
    “Oh, it’s
you
!” she cried. “You’re that
writer
now—Carlton talks about you. You’re Carlton’s friend from school. You’ve come to see
Carlton
, haven’t you? Oh, he’ll be so glad to see you—you
must
come inside!”
    Thus I was dragged to Delacorte’s deathbed in that hospital where so many ill and wasting-away young men were lying in their beds, dying.
    “Oh,
Carlton
—look who’s here, look who’s come to see you!” Mrs. Delacorte announced in that doorway, which was like so many hopeless doorways in St. Vincent’s. I hadn’t even known Delacorte’s first name; at Favorite River, no one had ever called him
Carlton
. He was just plain Delacorte there. (Once Kittredge had called him Two Cups, because of the paper cups that so often accompanied him—due to the insane weight-cutting, and the constant rinsing and spitting, which Delacorte had been briefly famous for.)
    Of course, I’d seen Delacorte when he was cutting weight for wrestling—when he looked like he was starving—but he was
really
starving now. (It suffices to say that I knew what the Hickman catheter in Delacorte’s skeletal birdcage of a chest was for.) They’d had him on a breathing machine, Mrs. Delacorte had told me when we were en route to his room, but he was off it for now. They’d been experimenting with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Mrs. Delacorte had also explained; Delacorte was on morphine, either way.
    “At this point, the suction is very important—to help clear secretions,” Mrs. Delacorte had said.
    “At this point, yes,” I’d lamely repeated. I was numb; I felt frozen on my feet, as if I were still standing paralyzed on Seventh Avenue in the falling snow.
    “This is the guy who was
going to be
Lear’s Fool,” Delacorte was struggling to say to his mother.
    “Yes, yes—I know, dear, I know,” the little woman was telling him.
    “Did you bring more cups?” he asked her. I saw he was holding two paper cups; they were absolutely empty cups, his mother would later tell me. She was always bringing more cups, but there was no need for rinsing and spitting now; in fact, when they were trying the morphine under his tongue, Delacorte wasn’t supposed to rinse or spit—or so Mrs. Delacorte thought. He just wanted to
hold
the paper cups for some foolish reason, she said.
    Delacorte also had cryptococcal meningitis; his brain was affected—he had headaches, his mom told me, and he was often delirious. “This guy was Ariel in
The Tempest
,” Delacorte said to his mother, upon my first visit to his room—and on the occasion of every later visit. “He was Sebastian in
Twelfth Night
,” Delacorte told his mom repeatedly. “It was the
shadow
word that prevented him from being Lear’s Fool, which was why I got the part,” Delacorte raved.
    Later, when I visited him with Elaine, Delacorte even reiterated my onstage history to her. “He didn’t come to see me die, when I was Lear’s Fool—of course I understand,” Delacorte said in a most heartfelt way to Elaine. “I do appreciate that he’s come to see me die now—you’ve both come now, and I truly appreciate it!” he told us.
    Delacorte not once