In One Person

insistence, I took Mrs. Delacorte uptown in a taxi—after she’d given herself a lethal dose of her beloved Carlton’s blood. She had a tenth-floor apartment in one of those innocuously perfect buildings with an awning and a doorman on Park Avenue and East Seventy-or Eighty-something.
    “I don’t know about you, but
I’m
going to have a drink,” she told me. “Please come in.” I did.
    It was hard to fathom why Delacorte had died at St. Vincent’s, when Mrs. Delacorte could clearly have provided more comfortable hospice care for him in her own Park Avenue apartment. “Carlton always objected to feeling privileged,” Mrs. Delacorte explained. “He wanted to die like Everyman—that’s what he said. He wouldn’t let me provide him with hospice care here, even though they could probably have used the extra room at St. Vincent’s—as I told him, many times,” she said.
    They no doubt
did
need the extra room at St. Vincent’s, or they soon would. (Some people waited to die in the corridors there.)
    “Would you like to see Carlton’s room?” Mrs. Delacorte asked me, when we both had a drink in hand, and I don’t drink—nothing but beer. I had a whiskey with Mrs. Delacorte; maybe it was bourbon. I would have done anything that little woman wanted. I even went with her to Delacorte’s childhood room.
    I found myself in a museum of what had been Carlton Delacorte’s privileged life in New York, before he’d been sent “away” to Favorite River Academy; it was a fairly common story that Delacorte’s leaving home had coincided with his parents getting a divorce, about which Mrs. Delacorte was candid with me.
    More surprising, Mrs. Delacorte was no less candid about the prevailing cause of her separation and divorce from young Carlton’s father; her husband had been a raving homo-hater. The man had called Carlton a fairy and a little fag; he’d berated Mrs. Delacorte for allowing the effeminate boy to dress up in his mother’s clothes and paint his lips with her lipstick.
    “Of course I
knew
—probably long before Carlton did,” Mrs. Delacorte told me. She seemed to be favoring her right buttock; such a deep intramuscular injection had to hurt. “Mothers
know
,” she said, unconsciously limping a little. “You can’t
force
children to become something they’re not. You can’t simply tell a boy not to play with dolls.”
    “No, you can’t,” I said; I was looking at all the photographs in the room—pictures of the unguarded Delacorte, before I knew him. He’d been just a little boy once—one who’d like nothing better than to dress and make himself up as a little girl.
    “Oh, look at this—just look,” the little woman suddenly said; the ice cubes were clicking together in her near-empty glass as she reached and untacked a photo from a bulletin board of photographs in her departed son’s bedroom. “Look at how
happy
he was!” Mrs. Delacorte cried, handing me the photo.
    I’m guessing that Delacorte was eleven or twelve in the picture; I had no difficulty recognizing his impish little face. Certainly, the lipstick had accentuated his grin. The cheap mauve wig—with a pink streak—was ridiculous; it was one of those wigs you can find in a Halloween-type costume shop. And of course Mrs. Delacorte’s dress was too big for the boy, but the overall effect was hilarious and endearing—well, not if you were Mr. Delacorte, I guess. There was a taller, slightly older-looking girl in the photograph with Delacorte—a very pretty girl, but with short hair (as closely cut as a boy’s) and an arrestingly confident but tight-lipped smile.
    “This day didn’t end well. Carlton’s father came home and was furious to see Carlton like this,” Mrs. Delacorte was saying as I looked more closely at the photo. “The boys had been having such a wonderful time, and that tyrant of a man ruined it!”
    “The boys,” I repeated. The very pretty girl in the photograph was Jacques Kittredge.
    “Oh, you know him—I know you do!” Mrs. Delacorte said, pointing at the oh-so-perfectly cross-dressed Kittredge. He’d applied his lipstick far more expertly than Delacorte had applied his, and one of Mrs. Delacorte’s beautiful but old-fashioned dresses was an exquisite fit. “The
Kittredge
boy,” the little woman said. “He went to Favorite River—he was a wrestler, too. Carlton was always in awe of him, I think, but he was a devil—that boy. He could be charming, but he was a