Page 641 - A Little Life: A Novel

As they were leaving for the night, Mr. Irvine put his hand on his
shoulder. “Jude, will you stay behind for a bit?” he asked. “I’ll have
Monroe drive you home.”

He had to agree and so he did, telling Richard he could take the car back
to Greene Street. For a while they sat in the living room, just he and Mr.
Irvine—Malcolm’s mother remained in the dining room with Flora and her
husband and children—talking about his health, and Mr. Irvine’s health, and
Harold, and his work, when Mr. Irvine began to cry. He had stood then, and
had sat down again next to Mr. Irvine, and placed his hand hesitantly on his
back, feeling awkward and shy, feeling the decades slip away from beneath

him.
Mr. Irvine had always been such an intimidating figure to all of them
throughout their adulthoods. His height, his self-possession, his large, hard
features—he looked like something from an Edward Curtis photograph, and
that was what they all called him: “The Chief.” “What’s the Chief gonna
say about this, Mal?” JB had asked when Malcolm told them he was going

to quit Ratstar, and they were all trying to urge temperance. Or (JB again):
“Mal, can you ask the Chief if I can use the apartment when I’m passing
through Paris next month?”
But Mr. Irvine was no longer the Chief: although he was still logical and
upright, he was eighty-nine, and his dark eyes had turned that same
unnamable gray that only the very young or the very old possess: the color
of the sea from which one comes, the color of the sea to which one returns.

“I loved him,” Mr. Irvine told him. “You know that, Jude, right? You
know I did.”
“I do,” he said. It was what he had always told Malcolm: “Of course your
dad loves you, Mal. Of course he does. Parents love their kids.” And once,
when Malcolm was very upset (he could no longer remember why), he had
snapped at him, “Like you’d know anything about that, Jude,” and there had

been a silence, and then Malcolm, horrified, had begun apologizing to him.
“I’m sorry, Jude,” he’d said, “I’m so sorry.” And he’d had nothing to say,
because Malcolm was right: he didn’t know anything about that. What he
knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier. It had
been the worst thing Malcolm had ever said to him, and although he had
never mentioned it to Malcolm again, Malcolm had mentioned it to him,
once, shortly after the adoption.

“I will never forget that thing I said to you,” he’d said.