My Oxford Year(83)

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s not true?”

“You’re not dying.”

Jamie scoffs. “We’re all dying.”

Silence.

“I can’t lose both of you, Jamie. I won’t allow it.” William’s voice breaks.

“You won’t allow it.”

“Sons do not die before fathers. It’s not the order of things. I’ve done what I’ve done, I do what I do, because I refuse to accept that this is my lot. Simply can’t fathom that I can’t fix it. I can’t buy the cancer out of you. I can’t pay it to go away, I can’t bully it away. What have I done in this life that I’m forced to watch both my sons die before me?”

When Jamie finally replies, his voice is strangled. “I’m sorry. I truly am. But there is no order to things. I can’t let you do to me what you did to Oliver, just so you feel like you’ve done everything you can. I won’t have ‘stop’ be my last word.”

“Live and let live, is that it?”

“Live and let die, more like.”

Antonia leans her head against the wall, turns into it.

William swallows, his tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth, betraying its dryness. Betraying his fear. “It all seems rather pointless. We fix and repair, fix and repair, only to have it break again. I don’t know what to do, Jamie. Tell me what to do.”

“Open the bottle. Open every damn bottle you can, while you can. Then let me go. In love. That’s what you can do.”

Unbidden, I think of “Dover Beach” and Jamie asking me what Matthew Arnold is saying, and me replying, In death, love is all there is. He asked me how that made me feel and I, stupidly, naively said, Lonely. But not Jamie. No, Jamie answered, Hopeful.

Because Jamie knew all of this already.

After a time, I hear them pulling away from each other and I realize that they were embracing. The sound of a hand pounding on a back as William says hoarsely, “Damn stiff upper lip. Everything comes out eventually, I suppose.”

“Try being with an American,” Jamie quips. They chuckle.

William clears his throat. “How’s your hand?”

“I’ll live.” They both snort at that. “I feel rather better, I must say.”

“If only feeling better made it easier.”

“Well,” Jamie argues, “at least it doesn’t make it harder.”

William groans slightly. “Ever the optimist.”

“Quoth the pessimist.”

They share a chuckle. William sighs. “We better get back up there. Your mother’s probably called the coroner. Here, we’ll take this one up for supper.”

“We’re not drinking this.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s more expedient to ask what’s right with it.”

“You know,” William growls, “where I come from, we drink ale. All this fuss about wine, with the year and the vintage—”

“They’re the same thing, old man.”

Antonia and I look at each other, unable to contain our smiles as they bicker. I point up the stairs with a nod, indicating that we should leave them to it. But Antonia tugs my hand. I look at her. She tugs harder and pulls me into her, our hands unclasping and her arms enveloping me. She kisses the hair above my ear and croaks, “Thank you.”

I swallow. To be hugged by a mother and have nothing but gratitude and joy there; it’s heady stuff. I squeeze her and then, for some reason I don’t understand, nudge her back. We look at each other and she smiles again. She whispers, “Shall we join them?”

I’m about to go with her, but something inside me—for a reason I now understand—whispers back, “You go.”

She looks disappointed, but wipes her eyes, takes a breath, and turns away, stepping through the archway and to her left, into the wine cellar. “Ah, splendid!” she cries, sounding chipper. “You haven’t killed each other.”

They laugh. They speak easily. They tease, they prod, they poke.

I find I can’t take a step. I find I have to lean against the wall for a moment. Just a moment and then I’ll leave. I promise. I just want to appreciate this.

The three of them, on the other side of the wall, are a single unit now. Unseeable, unknowable, by me. I got what I wanted. I’m free to leave now.

So why don’t I want to?

I take a breath. I force my foot onto the next stair, and then the next, and the next. Leaving them behind.

“SO, PROFESSOR DAVENPORT,” Charlie says, holding his champagne flute up by his face and leaning across the table toward Jamie. “I should like to know your intentions.”

“Charlie, please,” Jamie replies. “My parents don’t know about us yet.”

Everyone chuckles, including Charlie, who huffs, “They’d have to be blind not to see the way you look at me.” We’re sitting in the grand dining room, the seven of us spread out around a table meant for twenty, Antonia and William at each head, Jamie and me on one side, Charlie, Maggie, and Tom on the other. We’ve gone through two bottles of bubbly and three bottles of wine. And that’s just since the start of dinner. Smithy’s delicious quintessential English roast dinner, of which she took only one considering bite from Jamie’s plate before declaring it edible, wished me happy birthday, slipped into her coat, and excused herself for the night.