He heard one of the men swear, and shout from the bathroom, “Get an ambulance right now,” and he wrestled free from the man who was holding him and ducked under another man’s arm and made three fast leaps to the bathroom, where he had seen Brother Luke with an extension cord around his neck, hanging from the hook in the center of the bathroom ceiling, his mouth open, his eyes shut, his face as gray as his beard. He had screamed, then, screamed and screamed, and then he was being dragged from the room, screaming Brother Luke’s name again and again.

He remembers little of what followed. He was questioned again and again; he was taken to a doctor at a hospital who examined him and asked him how many times he had been raped, but he hadn’t been able to answer him: Had he been raped? He had agreed to this, to all of this; it had been his decision, and he had made it. “How many times have you had sex?” the doctor asked instead, and he said, “With Brother Luke, or with the others?” and the doctor had said, “What others?” And after he had finished telling him, the doctor had turned away from him and put his face in his hands and then looked back at him and had opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. And then he knew for certain that what he had been doing was wrong, and he felt so ashamed, so dirty that he had wanted to die.

They took him to the home. They brought him his things: his books, the Navajo doll, the stones and twigs and acorns and the Bible with its pressed flowers he had carried with him from the monastery, his clothes that the other boys made fun of. At the home, they knew what he was, they knew what he had done, they knew he was ruined already, and so he wasn’t surprised when some of the counselors began doing to him what people had been doing to him for years. Somehow, the other boys also knew what he was. They called him names, the same names the clients had called him; they left him alone. When he approached a group of them, they would get up and run away.

They hadn’t brought him his bag with razors, and so he had learned to improvise: he stole an aluminum can lid from the trash and sterilized it over the gas flame one afternoon when he was on kitchen duty and used that, stuffing it under his mattress. He stole a new lid every week.

He thought of Brother Luke every day. At the school, he skipped four grades; they allowed him to attend classes in math, in piano, in English literature, in French and German at the community college. His teachers asked him who had taught him what he knew, and he said his father had. “He did a good job,” his English teacher told him. “He must have been an excellent teacher,” and he had been unable to respond, and she had eventually moved on to the next student. At night, when he was with the counselors, he pretended that Brother Luke was standing right behind the wall, waiting to spring out in case things got too awful, which meant that everything that was happening to him were things Brother Luke knew he could bear.

After he had come to trust Ana, he told her a few things about Brother Luke. But he was unwilling to tell her everything. He told no one. He had been a fool to follow Luke, he knew that. Luke had lied to him, he had done terrible things to him. But he wanted to believe that, through everything, in spite of everything, Luke really had loved him, that that part had been real: not a perversion, not a rationalization, but real. He didn’t think he could take Ana saying, as she said of the others, “He was a monster, Jude. They say they love you, but they say that so they can manipulate you, don’t you see? This is what pedophiles do; this is how they prey on children.” As an adult, he was still unable to decide what he thought about Luke. Yes, he was bad. But was he worse than the other brothers? Had he really made the wrong decision? Would it really have been better if he had stayed at the monastery? Would he have been more or less damaged by his time there? Luke’s legacies were in everything he did, in everything he was: his love of reading, of music, of math, of gardening, of languages—those were Luke. His cutting, his hatred, his shame, his fears, his diseases, his inability to have a normal sex life, to be a normal person—those were Luke, too. Luke had taught him how to find pleasure in life, and he had removed pleasure absolutely.

He was careful never to say his name aloud, but sometimes he thought it, and no matter how old he got, no matter how many years had passed, there would appear Luke’s face, smiling, conjured in an instant. He thought of Luke when the two of them were falling in love, when he was being seduced and had been too much of a child, too naïve, too lonely and desperate for affection to know it. He was running to the greenhouse, he was opening the door, the heat and smell of flowers were surrounding him like a cape. It was the last time he had been so simply happy, the last time he had known such uncomplicated joy. “And here’s my beautiful boy!” Luke would cry. “Oh, Jude—I’m so happy to see you.”

[ V ] The Happy Years

1

THERE HAD BEEN a day, about a month after he turned thirty-eight, when Willem realized he was famous. Initially, this had fazed him less than he would have imagined, in part because he had always considered himself sort of famous—he and JB, that is. He’d be out downtown with someone, Jude or someone else, and somebody would come over to say hello to Jude, and Jude would introduce him: “Aaron, do you know Willem?” And Aaron would say, “Of course. Willem Ragnarsson. Everyone knows Willem,” but it wouldn’t be because of his work—it would be because Aaron’s former roommate’s sister had dated him at Yale, or he had two years ago done a reading for Aaron’s friend’s brother’s friend who was a playwright, or because Aaron, who was an artist, had once been in a group show with JB and Asian Henry Young, and he’d met Willem at the after-party. New York City, for much of his adulthood, had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn. The four of them talked to the same—well, if not the same people, the same types of people at least, that they had in college, and in that realm of artists and actors and musicians, of course he was known, because he always had been. It wasn’t such a vast world; everyone knew everyone else.

Of the four of them, only Jude, and to some degree Malcolm, had experience living in another world, the real world, the one populated with people who did the necessary stuff of life: making laws, and teaching, and healing people, and solving problems, and handling money, and selling and buying things (the bigger surprise, he always thought, was not that he knew Aaron but that Jude did). Just before he turned thirty-seven, he had taken a role in a quiet film titled The Sycamore Court in which he played a small-town Southern lawyer who was finally coming out of the closet. He’d taken the part to work with the actor playing his father, who was someone he admired and who in the film was taciturn and casually vituperative, a man disapproving of his own son and made unkind by his own disappointments. As part of his research, he had Jude explain to him what, exactly, he did all day, and as he listened, he found himself feeling slightly sad that Jude, whom he considered brilliant, brilliant in ways he would never understand, was spending his life doing work that sounded so crushingly dull, the intellectual equivalent of housework: cleaning and sorting and washing and tidying, only to move on to the next house and have to begin all over. He didn’t say this, of course, and on one Saturday he met Jude at Rosen Pritchard and looked through his folders and papers and wandered around the office as Jude wrote.