The Madness Of Love | The Secret History

Epilogue I

I managed to get out of taking my French exams the next week, due to the very excellent excuse of having a gunshot wound to the stomach.

Henry died, of course. With two bullets to the head I don't suppose he could have done much else. Still, he lived more than twelve hours, a feat which amazed the doctors. Such grave wounds, they said, would have killed most people instantly.

Lilith spent all twelve hours next to him, not moving away for a moment. She didn't sleep, drink or eat, didn't go anywhere, even when the doctors asked her to. At first they tried to make her go away with force, but she didn't move one bit, and they stopped trying. Even after they declared that he was dead, she sat next to him for a couple of hours more, till Francis came and took he away.

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Francis didn't come back to school that autumn. Neither did Lilith or the twins. Camilla took Charles down to Virginia the day of Henry's funeral. The funeral took place in St. Louis. None of us were there but Francis and, of course, Lilith. I was still in the hospital.

A few days before, Henry's mother had stopped in to see me with Lilith, after they'd been down the hall to see Henry in the morgue. All I remembered is a pretty lady with dark hair and Henry's eyes.

She held my hand. I had tried to save her son's life. Lilith was standing behind her like a ghost, looking at me but not seeing anything. I saw Henry himself, over his mum's shoulder next to Lilith, standing in his old gardening clothes. I wanted to yell to Lilith that she would look to her side, that she'd see Henry, but I couldn't make a sound.

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You'd think, after all we'd been through, that Francis, the twins, Lilith, and I would have kept in better touch over the years. But after Henry died, it was as if some thread which bound us had been abruptly severed, and we began to drift apart.

Francis was in Manhattan the whole summer that I was in Brooklyn. During that time we talked on the phone maybe five times and saw each other twice. Both times were in a bar on the Upper East Side. He didn't like to venture far away from home.

The twins were in Virginia, sequestered at their grandmother's, incommunicado. Camilla sent me three postcards and called me twice - conspicuously lacking in news of Charles.

Francis tried to bring Lilith with him to Manhattan, but she refused and spent all summer in Henry's house. She didn't pay rent and changed the locks, so the owner couldn't get in. Later Francis told me that it was him who paid for the house all that time. Lilith wrote to me every two weeks and I saw her one time. When I saw her, a French phrase came to my mind: Les yeux sans visage. Eyes without a face. Her face was blank and her voice flat.

Around the time I graduated, there was a sporadic renewal of communications. "Who would've thought," wrote Francis, "that you'd be the only one of us to make it out with a diploma." Camilla sent her congratulations, and called a couple of times.

There was no message from Lilith, but there was some talk from both of them about coming up to Hampden, to watch me walk down the aisle, but this did not materialise and I was not surprised about it. What I was surprised about, was the fact that Lilith, after a couple of months without any news, actually came to my graduation. She clapped when I walked down the aisle and after the ceremony hugged me, even though she looked worse than before and was getting paler and paler.

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When I was writing my dissertation, on Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy, I received the following letter from Francis:
Dear Richard:
I wish I could say that this is a difficult letter for me to write but in fact it is not. So this is the last chance I will have to speak to you, in this world at least. Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not.
I wonder if I'll see Henry on the other side. If I do, I'm looking forward to asking him why the hell he didn't just us all and get it over with.
Cheerily,
Francis

I had not seen him in three years. The letter was postmarked Boston, four days earlier. I dropped everything and drove to the airport and got on the first plane and found Francis in Brigham and Women's Hospital recuperating from two razor-blade cuts to the wrist.

He looked terrible. The maid, he said, had found him in the bathtub. He had a private room and Lilith was already there. She was pale as a corpse and almost looked worse than Francis.

I was terribly glad to see them both and they, I think, to see me. We talked for hours, about nothing, really. Apparently, Francis was getting married. To some blue-eyed blonde, built along the Marion line.

The door opened, and the blonde from the photograph Francis showed me waltzed in. She walked over to the bed, kissed Francis briskly on the forehead. "Now sweetie," she said to him. "I thought we'd decided not to smoke."

And, to my surprise, she plucked the cigarette from between his fingers and put it out in the ashtray. Francis ran a bandaged hand through his hair. "Priscilla," he said tonelessly, "this is my friend Richard." (She had met Lilith before).

Her blue eyes widened. "Hi!" she said. Behind her back Lilith gave a cigarette to Francis and lit one herself. Priscilla pulled up a chair to Francis's bed, and, as if by magic, the conversation stopped.

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A couple of days later, I was still in Boston, in a hotel, when I got a letter from Lilith. The letter consisted of two words: Goodbye, Richard.
I didn't understand what she meant by this, till Francis called me, all hysterical. "Did Lilith call you?" he didn't even wait for my answer. "She called me. 'I love you, Francis. I hope you know that. Goodbye.' It was all she said." he was almost shouting now.

"She sent me a letter." I said. On the other end it sounded like Francis was running around the room. "Where are you, Francis?"
"In the hospital." he said rapidly. "They didn't let me out. Do something, Richard."
But there was nothing I could do anymore.

We got the news about Lilith after two days. The police broke down her door and found her laying on the bed, hands on her chest, like she was already laying in a coffin.

Suicide, they declared. She poisoned herself. Apparently, there was a small compartment in one of her rings with poison. How very much like her, I thought. Her funeral took place in Hampden. I was the only one there. Francis couldn't go out of the hospital and I don't think Camilla even knew. I brought Lilith some roses, from the bush that Henry planted seemingly an eternity ago.

I cried while writing this.
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