And Henry’s favorite: “Moi, je t’aime, Henri.” Henry never wanted the summer to end.
Then, on a terrible, still day in August, Gaspard died. Before Louis could stop him, the sweet hound tore after an alley cat and was struck by the ice man’s truck as it rounded the corner of Rampart. There was a screech of wheels and one awful yelp. Louis and Henry pushed their way through the crowd. With a howl of his own, Louis sank to his knees and cradled his dead dog. The driver, a kindly man with a jowly face, removed his hat and patted Louis’s shoulder like a father, sorry as could be. “He just come outta nowhere, son. Wadn’t time to stop. I’m real sorry. Got three dogs, myself.”
Louis was inconsolable. Henry bought a bottle from the Italian widow and they took refuge in the attic garret, Gaspard’s body wrapped in a blanket on the bed. Henry held Louis while he cried, feeding him sips of strong drink till Louis was glassy-eyed. Later, Henry borrowed a car from one of the patrons at Celeste’s, and they buried Gaspard out in bayou country under a lacy willow tree and marked the grave with a roast bone stolen from Flossie’s kitchen.
“She’d kill me if she knew I took her best soup bone,” Henry said, taking off his sweat-drenched shirt.
“He was a good dog,” Louis said. His eyes were red and puffy.
“The best.”
“Why do all the things I love gotta leave me?” Louis whispered.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” Henry said.
“How you gonna get your father to let you stay?”
Henry chewed his lip and stared at the freshly tilled earth. “I’ll think of something.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” Henry said, but he had no idea how.
Late August settled in, bringing a bank of hazy clouds that promised but did not deliver rain. After a day of stifling heat, Henry and Louis sat on a blanket beside a cascading vine of morning glories, their mood tense. There’d been a cable: Henry’s father was returning from Atlanta the next day. School would start the week after Labor Day. Henry would be miles away from Louis.
“Why don’t you just tell your father you don’t want to go?”
Henry laughed bitterly. “No one says no to my father.” He yanked a morning glory from the vine and crushed it between his fingers.
“What that plant ever do to you?”
But Henry wouldn’t be joked out of his misery. At boarding school, Henry would be stuck in a regimented, colorless life of morning chapel, Latin, bullying upperclassmen, and innuendo about the way Henry walked and talked. There’d be no jazz or crawfish boils or fishing from the pier. There’d be none of the eccentric characters they knew from their haunts in the Quarter, men and women who looked after the two boys as if they were delightful nephews. There would be no Louis. Henry felt it as a physical ache.
In the dirt, Louis scratched a heart. Inside, he wrote L + H. Henry went to erase it before someone saw. Louis stayed his hand. “Don’t.”
“But—”
“Don’t,” he said again.
That night, they’d lain together in the narrow bed, listening to the swooshing tide of Lake Pontchartrain eddying about the pilings beneath the cabin. Louis’s stubble rubbed Henry’s cheeks raw, but he wouldn’t have stopped kissing him for anything. There were hands and mouths and tongues. They were sweaty with exploration and pleasure. Afterward, they lay entwined, Henry falling asleep to the soft warmth of Louis’s breath on his shoulder, while out on the streets of the West End, the party raged on.
Henry’s father returned on a Friday in August as the summer was dwindling to a close. From his chair in the library, he appraised his bronzed and freckled son. “You seem to have recovered your health, Hal.”
“Yes, Father,” Henry said.
“The school will be pleased to hear it.”
Henry’s heart beat so quickly he wondered if his father could hear it from across the broad expanse of Persian carpet. “I was thinking that perhaps I could finish school here. In New Orleans.”
His father peered around the edge of his open newspaper. “Why?”
“I could help with Mother,” he lied.
“We have servants and a doctor for that.” The newspaper barrier went back up.
“I’d like to stay,” Henry tried. He willed himself not to cry. “Please.”
“I’ve posted the check for your tuition already.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I will! I’ll take on whatever work I can. I’ll—”
“The subject is closed, the matter settled.” His father gave him one last, curious look. “Where do you go evenings?”
“I go for a long walk. Dr. Blake advised it. For my health,” Henry lied, feeling, for once, power in the secrecy of his other life.
His father had continued squinting at him for only a moment more. “Well,” he said, returning to his paper, “I suppose Dr. Blake knows best.”
It had been a stupid mistake that trapped them.
Louis had written Henry a letter. A beautiful letter. Henry could almost recite it; he’d read it that many times. He could barely stand to be parted from it, and so he transferred it from pocket to pocket, always keeping it on his person so that he could read it whenever he wanted. But one night, he’d been too tired and had forgotten it in a jacket pocket. The laundress found the note and took it to Henry’s father.
Henry got a sick feeling in his stomach as he remembered being summoned to the parlor, their butler, Joseph, closing the doors behind Henry. It was the only time his father’s calm had ever threatened to become something else, something violent.
“Do you recognize this?” his father asked, holding up the offending love letter. “What is this filth?”
Henry’s fear robbed him of any answer.
“Has this”—his father’s mouth struggled to form the word—“boy… compromised you in some way?”
Louis had made him laugh. Louis had kissed him. Loved him. There had been no compromise in any of that.
“Have you thought that he might blackmail our family, tarnish our good name, in pursuit of money?” his father continued. “Do you assume it is only homely heiresses who may fall prey to fortune hunters?”
Henry wanted to tell his father that Louis was kind and good, romantic and gentle. What they shared was real. But telling his father such a thing was impossible. His disapproval was so powerful it paralyzed Henry, strangled him in shame.
He’d never felt like more of a coward.
“You will not be returning to Exeter,” his father announced.
“I won’t?” Even in his fear, new hope surged in Henry. He could stay here. With Louis.
“If you are unconcerned with protecting your family’s reputation, I shall be forced to do it for you. I’ve made some calls. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, there is a train bound for Charleston and the Citadel. You will be on that train. Perhaps they can make a man of you where I have failed. You will never speak to this boy again.”
As Henry watched, his father tore up the beautiful letter and set the pieces ablaze with a match, tossing them into the fireplace, where they flared and curled into ash.