Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.
My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters.
I grew up in Piano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose.
Piano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.
The dazzle of this fictive childhood – full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers 1 wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn't have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know.1 did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read – Tom Swift, the Tolkien books – but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school.
I honestly can't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day – early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong – but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn't pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
I suppose it's not odd, then, that I have trouble reconciling my life to those of my friends, or at least to their lives as I perceive them to be. Charles and Camilla are orphans (how I longed to be an orphan when I was a child!) reared by grandmothers and great-aunts in a house in Virginia: a childhood I like to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees. And Francis.
His mother, when she had him, was only seventeen – a thinblooded, capricious girl with red hair and a rich daddy, who ran off with the drummer for Vance Vane and his Musical Swains.
She was home in three weeks, and the marriage was annulled in six; and, as Francis is fond of saying, the grandparents brought them up like brother and sister, him and his mother, brought them up in such a magnanimous style that even the gossips were impressed – English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France. Consider even bluff old Bunny, if you would. Not a childhood of reefer coats and dancing lessons, any more than mine was. But an American childhood. Son of a Clemson football star turned banker. Four brothers, no sisters, in a big noisy house in the suburbs, with sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers; summers on Cape Cod, boarding schools near Boston and tailgate picnics during football season; an upbringing vitally present in Bunny in every respect, from the way he shook your hand to the way he told a joke.
I do not now nor did 1 ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company. And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too, though I realize that might sound odd in light of the story I am about to tell.
How to begin.
After high school I went to a small college in my home town (my parents were opposed, as it had been made very plain that I was expected to help my father run his business, one of the many reasons I was in such an agony to escape) and, during my two years there, I studied ancient Greek. This was due to no love for the language but because I was majoring in pre-med (money, you see, was the only way to improve my fortunes, doctors make a lot of money, quod erat demonstrandum) and my counselor had suggested I take a language to fulfill the humanities requirement; and, since the Greek classes happened to meet in the afternoon, I took Greek so I could sleep late on Mondays. It was an entirely random decision which, as you will see, turned out to be quite fateful.
I did well at Greek, excelled in it, and I even won an award from the Classics department my last year. It was my favorite class because it was the only one held in a regular classroom no jars of cow hearts, no smell of formaldehyde, no cages full of screaming monkeys. Initially I had thought with hard work I could overcome a fundamental squeamishness and distaste for my subject, that perhaps with even harder work I could simulate something like a talent for it. But this was not the case. As the months went by I remained uninterested, if not downright sickened, by my study of biology; my grades were poor; I was held in contempt by teacher and classmate alike. In what seemed even to me a doomed and Pyrrhic gesture, I switched to English literature without telling my parents. I felt that I was cutting my own throat by this, that I would certainly be very sorry, being still convinced that it was better to fail in a lucrative field than to thrive in one that my father (who knew nothing of either finance or academia) had assured me was most unprofitable; one which would inevitably result in my hanging around the house for the rest of my life asking him for money; money which, he assured me forcefully, he had no intention of giving me.
So I studied literature and liked it better. But I didn't like home any better. I don't think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I would've been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place. Perhaps a part of it was. While to a certain extent Milton is right – the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth – it is nonetheless clear that Piano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city. In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. Then I would walk like a zombie to the parking lot and drive to the baseball field, where I wouldn't even get out of the car, just sit with my hands on the steering wheel and stare at the Cyclone fence and the yellowed winter grass until the sun went down and it was too dark for me to see.
Though I had a confused idea that my dissatisfaction was bohemian, vaguely Marxist in origin (when I was a teenager I made a fatuous show of socialism, mainly to irritate my father), I couldn't really begin to understand it; and I would have been angry if someone had suggested that it was due to a strong Puritan streak in my nature, which was in fact the case. Not long ago I found this passage in an old notebook, written when I was eighteen or so: 'There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death – those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement – been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.'
This, I think, is pretty rough stuff. From the sound of it, had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction. I remember reading about Pythagoras around this time, and finding some of his ideas curiously appealing – wearing white garments, for instance, or abstaining from foods which have a soul.
But instead I wound up on the East Coast.
I lit on Hampden by a trick of fate. One night, during a long Thanksgiving holiday of rainy weather, canned cranberries, ball games droning from the television, I went to my room after a fight with my parents (I cannot remember this particular fight, only that we always fought, about money and school) and was tearing through my closet trying to find my coat when out it flew: a brochure from Hampden College, Hampden, Vermont.
It was two years old, this brochure. In high school a lot of colleges had sent me things because I did well on my SATs, though unfortunately not well enough to warrant much in the way of scholarships, and this one 1 had kept in my Geometry book throughout my senior year.
I don't know why it was in my closet. I suppose I'd saved it because it was so pretty. Senior year, I had spent dozens of hours studying the photographs as though if I stared at them long enough and longingly enough I would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into their clear, pure silence. Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark windowpanes, snow.
Hampden College, Hampden, Vermont. Established 1895.
(This alone was a fact to cause wonder; nothing 1 knew of in Piano had been established much before 1962.) Student body, five hundred. Coed. Progressive. Specializing in the liberal arts.
Highly selective. 'Hampden, in providing a well-rounded course of study in the Humanities, seeks not only to give students a rigorous background in the chosen field but insight into all the disciplines of Western art, civilization, and thought. In doing so, we hope to provide the individual not only with facts, but with the raw materials of wisdom.'
Hampden College, Hampden, Vermont. Even the name had an austere Anglican cadence, to my ear at least, which yearned hopelessly for England and was dead to the sweet dark rhythms of the little mission towns. For a long time I looked at a picture of the building they called Commons. It was suffused with a weak, academic light – different from Piano, different from anything I had ever known – a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.
My mother knocked on the door, said my name. I didn't answer. I tore out the information form in the back of the brochure and started to fill it in. Name: John Richard Papen.
Address: 4487 Mimosa Court; Piano, California. Would you like to receive information on Financial Aid? Yes. And I mailed it the following morning.
The months subsequent were an endless dreary battle of paperwork, full of stalemates, fought in trenches. My father refused to complete the financial aid papers; finally, in desperation, I stole the tax returns from the glove compartment of his Toyota and did them myself. More waiting. Then a note from the Dean of Admissions. An interview was required, and when could I fly to Vermont? I could not afford to fly to Vermont, and I wrote and told him so. Another wait, another letter. The college would reimburse me for my travel expenses if their scholarship offer was accepted. Meanwhile the financial aid packet had come in. My family's contribution was more than my father said he could afford and he would not pay it. This sort of guerrilla warfare dragged on for eight months. Even today I do not fully understand the chain of events that brought me to Hampden.
Sympathetic professors wrote letters; exceptions of various sorts were made in my case. And less than a year after I'd sat down on the gold shag carpet of my little room in Piano and impulsively filled out the questionnaire, I was getting off the bus in Hampden with two suitcases and fifty dollars in my pocket.
I had never been east of Santa Fe, never north of Portland, and – when I stepped off the bus after a long anxious night that had begun somewhere in Illinois – it was six o'clock in the morning, and the sun was rising over mountains, and birches, and impossibly green meadows; and to me, dazed with night and no sleep and three days on the highway, it was like a country from a dream.
The dormitories weren't even dorms – or at any rate not like the dorms I knew, with cinderblock walls and depressing, yellowish light – but white clapboard houses with green shutters, set back from the Commons in groves of maple and ash. All the same it never occurred to me that my particular room, wherever ii "t might be, would be anything but ugly and disappointing and it was with something of a shock that I saw it for the first time – a white room with big north-facing windows, monkish and bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret's. On my first night there, I sat on the bed during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to gold to black, listening to a soprano's voice climb dizzily up and down somewhere at the other end of the hall until at last the light was completely gone, and the faraway soprano spiraled on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and I can't remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night, or ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Piano.
Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. A group of red-cheeked girls playing soccer, ponytails flying, their shouts and laughter carrying faintly over the velvety, twilit field.
Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them. Commons clock tower: ivied brick, white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance.
The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
I was planning to sign up for Greek again, as it was the only language at which I was at all proficient. But when I told this to the academic counselor to whom I had been assigned – a French teacher named Georges Laforgue, with olive skin and a pinched, long-nostriled nose like a turtle's – he only smiled, and pressed the tips of his fingers together. 'I am afraid there may be a problem,' he said, in accented English.
'Why?'
'There is only one teacher of ancient Greek here and he is very particular about his students,' 'I've studied Greek for two years.'
That probably will not make any difference. Besides, if you are going to major in English literature you will need a modern language. There is still space left in my Elementary French class and some room in German and Italian. The Spanish' – he consulted his list – 'the Spanish classes are for the most part filled but if you like I will have a word with Mr Delgado.'
'Maybe you could speak to the Greek teacher instead.'
'I don't know if it would do any good. He accepts only a limited number of students. A very limited number. Besides, in my opinion, he conducts the selection on a personal rather than academic basis.'
His voice bore a hint of sarcasm; also a suggestion that, if it was all the same to me, he would prefer not to continue this particular conversation.
'I don't know what you mean,' I said.
Actually, I thought I did know. Laforgue's answer surprised me. 'It's nothing like that,' he said. 'Of course he is a distinguished scholar. He happens to be quite charming as well. But he has what I think are some very odd ideas about teaching. He and his students have virtually no contact with the rest of the division. I don't know why they continue to list his courses in the general catalogue – it's misleading, every year there is confusion about it – because, practically speaking, the classes are closed. I am told that to study with him one must have read the right things, hold similar views. It has happened repeatedly that he has turned away students such as yourself who have done prior work in classics.
With me' – he lifted an eyebrow – 'if the student wants to learn what I teach and is qualified, I allow him in my classes. Very democratic, no? It is the best way.'
'Does that sort of thing happen often here?'
'Of course. There are difficult teachers at every school. And plenty' – to my surprise, he lowered his voice – 'and plenty here who are far more difficult than him. Though 1 must ask that you do not quote me on that.'
'I won't,' I said, a bit startled by this sudden confidential manner.
'Really, it is quite essential that you don't.' He was leaning forward, whispering, his tiny mouth scarcely moving as he spoke.
'I must insist. Perhaps you are not aware of this but I have several formidable enemies in the Literature Division. Even, though you may scarcely believe it, here in my own department. Besides,' he continued in a more normal tone, 'he is a special case. He has taught here for many years and even refuses payment for his work.'
'Why?'
'He is a wealthy man. He donates his salary to the college, though he accepts, I think, one dollar a year for tax purposes.'
'Oh,' I said. Even though I had been at Hampden only a few days, I was already accustomed to the official accounts of financial hardship, of limited endowment, of corners cut.
'Now me,' said Lafbrgue, 'I like to teach well enough, but I have a wife and a daughter in school in France – the money comes in handy, yes?'
'Maybe I'll talk to him anyway.'
Laforgue shrugged. 'You can try. But I advise you not to make an appointment, or probably he will not see you. His name is Julian Morrow.'
I had not been particularly bent on taking Greek, but what Laforgue said intrigued me. I went downstairs and walked into the first office I saw. A thin, sour-looking woman with tired blond hair was sitting at the desk in the front room, eating a sandwich.
'It's my lunch hour,' she said. 'Come back at two.'
'I'm sorry. I'm just looking for a teacher's office.'
'Well, I'm the registrar, not the switchboard. But I might know. Who is it?'
'Julian Morrow.'
'Oh. him,' she said, surprised. 'What do you want with him? He's upstairs, I think, in the Lyceum.'
'What room?'
'Only teacher up there. Likes his peace and quiet. You'll find him.'
Actually, finding the Lyceum wasn't easy at all. It was a small building on the edge of campus, old and covered with ivy in such a manner as to be almost indistinguishable from its landscape.
Downstairs were lecture halls and classrooms, all of them empty, with clean blackboards and freshly waxed floors. I wandered around helplessly until finally I noticed the staircase – small and badly lit – in the far corner of the building.
Once at the top I found myself in a long, deserted hallway.
Enjoying the noise of my shoes on the linoleum, I walked along briskly, looking at the closed doors for numbers or names until I came to one that had a brass card holder and, within it, an engraved card that read julian morrow. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked, three short raps.
A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me. It was a small, wise face, as alert and poised as a question; and though certain features of it were suggestive of youth – the elfin upsweep of the eyebrows, the deft lines of nose and jaw and mouth – it was by no means a young face, and the hair was snow white.
I stood there for a moment as he blinked at me.
'How may I help you?' The voice was reasonable and kind, in the way that pleasant adults sometimes have with children.
'I – well, my name is Richard Papen '
He put his head to the side and blinked again, bright-eyed, amiable as a sparrow.
'- and I want to take your class in ancient Greek.'
His face fell. 'Oh. I'm sorry.' His tone of voice, incredibly enough, seemed to suggest that he really was sorry, sorrier than I was. 'I can't think of anything I'd like better, but I'm afraid there isn't any room. My class is already filled.'
Something about this apparently sincere regret gave me courage.
'Surely there must be some way,' I said. 'One extra student '
Tm terribly sorry, Mr Papen,' he said, almost as if he were consoling me on the death of a beloved friend, tiring to make me understand that he was powerless to help me in any substantial way. 'But I have limited myself to five students and I cannot even think of adding another.'
'Five students is not very many.'
He shook his head quickly, eyes shut, as if entreaty were more than he could bear.
'Really, I'd love to have you, but I mustn't even consider it,' he said. 'I'm terribly sorry. Will you excuse me now? I have a student with me.'
More than a week went by. I started my classes and got a job with a professor of psychology named Dr Roland. (I was to assist him in some vague 'research,' the nature of which I never discovered; he was an old, dazed, disordered-lookiiig fellow, a behavioralist, who spent most of his time loitering in the teachers' lounge.) And I made some friends, most of them freshmen who lived in my house. Friends is perhaps an inaccurate word to use.
We ate our meals together, saw each other coming and going, but mainly were thrown together by the fact that none of us knew anybody – a situation which, at the time, did not seem necessarily unpleasant. Among the few people I had, net who'd been at Hampden awhile, I asked what the story was with Julian Morrow.
Nearly everyone had heard of him, and I was givm all sorts of contradictory but fascinating information: that he ivas a brilliant man; that he was a fraud; that he had no college degree; that he had been a great intellectual in the forties, and i friend to Ezra Pound and The. S. Eliot; that his family money iiad come from a partnership in a white-shoe banking firm or, conversely, from the purchase of foreclosed property during the Depression; that he had dodged the draft in some war (though chronologically this was difficult to compute); that he had ties with the Vatican; a deposed royal family in the Middle East; Franco's Spain. The degree of truth in any of this was, of course, unknowable but the more I heard about him, the more interested I became, and I began to watch for him and his little group of pupils around campus. Four boys and a girl, they were nothing so unusual at a distance. At close range, though, they were an arresting party at least to me, who had never seen anything like them, and to whom they suggested a variety of picturesque and fictive qualities.
Two of the boys wore glasses, curiously enough the same kind: tiny, old-fashioned, with round steel rims. The larger of the two – and he was quite large, well over six feet – was dark-haired, with a square jaw and coarse, pale skin. He might have been handsome had his features been less set, or his eyes, behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank. He wore dark English suits and carried an umbrella (a bizarre sight in Hampden) and he walked stiffly through the throngs of hippies and beatniks and preppies and punks with the self-conscious formality of an old ballerina, surprising in one so large as he. 'Henry Winter,' said my friends when I pointed him out, at a distance, making a wide circle to avoid a group of bongo players on the lawn.
The smaller of the two – but not by much – was a sloppy blond boy, rosy-cheeked and gum-chewing, with a relentlessly cheery demeanor and his fists thrust deep in the pockets of his knee-sprung trousers. He wore the same jacket every day, a shapeless brown tweed that was frayed at the elbows and short in the sleeves, and his sandy hair was parted on the left, so a long forelock fell over one bespectacled eye. Bunny Corcoran was his name, Bunny being somehow short for Edmund. His voice was loud and honking, and carried in the dining halls.
The third boy was the most exotic of the set. Angular and elegant, he was precariously thin, with nervous hands and a shrewd albino face and a short, fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen. I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince andjack the Ripper. Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez. (Later, I discovered that they weren't real pince-nez, but only had glass in them, and that his eyes were a good deal sharper than my own.) Francis Abernathy was his name. Further inquiries elicited suspicion from male acquaintances, who wondered at my interest in such a person.
And then there were a pair, boy and girl. I saw them together a great deal, and at first I thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend, until one day I saw them up close and realized they had to be siblings. Later I learned they were twins. They looked very much alike, with heavy dark-blond hair and epicene faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of Flemish angels.
And perhaps most unusual in the context of Hampden – where pseudo-intellects and teenage decadents abounded, and where black clothing was de rigueur – they liked to wear pale clothes, particularly white. In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory, or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party. It was easy to find out who they were, as they shared the distinction of being the only twins on campus. Their names were Charles and Camilla Macaulay.
All of them, to me, seemed highly unapproachable. But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing past at the wheel of a little white car, with Julian in the passenger's seat; Bunny leaning out of an upstairs window to yell something at the twins on the lawn below. Slowly, more information came niy way. Francis Abernathy was from Boston and, from most accounts, quite wealthy. Henry, too, was said to be wealthy; what's more, he was a linguistic genius. He spoke a number of languages, ancient and modern, and had published a translation of Anacreon, with commentary, when he was only eighteen. (I found this out from Georges Laforgue, who was otherwise sour and reticent on the topic; later I discovered that Henry, during his freshman year, had embarrassed Laforgue badly in front of the entire literature faculty during the question-and-answer period of his annual lecture on Racine.) The twins had an apartment off campus, and were from somewhere down south. And Bunny Corcoran had a habit of playing John Philip Sousa march tunes in his room, at full volume, late at night.
Not to imply that 1 was overly preoccupied with any of this. I was settling in at school by this time; classes had begun and I was busy with my work. My interest in Julian Morrow and his Greek pupils, though still keen, was starting to wane when a curious coincidence happened.
It happened the Wednesday morning of my second week, when I was in the library making some Xeroxes for Dr Roland before my eleven o'clock class. After about thirty minutes, spots of light swimming in front of my eyes, I went back to the front desk to give the Xerox key to the librarian and as I turned to leave I saw them, Bunny and the twins, sitting at a table that was spread with papers and pens and bottles of ink. The bottles of ink I remember particularly, because I was very charmed by them, and by the long black straight pens, which looked incredibly archaic and troublesome. Charles was wearing a white tennis sweater, and Camilla a sun dress with a sailor collar, and a straw hat. Bunny's tweed jacket was slung across the back of his chair, exposing several large rips and stains in the lining. He was leaning his elbows on the table, hair in eyes, his rumpled shirtsleeves held up with striped garters. Their heads were close together and they were talking quietly.
I suddenly wanted to know what they were saying. I went to the bookshelf behind their table – the long way, as if I wasn't sure what 1 was looking for – all the way down until I was so close I could've reached out and touched Bunny's arm. My back to them, I picked a book at random – a ridiculous sociological text, as it happened – and pretended to study the index. Secondary Analysis. Secondary Deviance. Secondary Groups. Secondary Schools.
'I don't know about that,' Camilla was saying. 'If the Greeksi are sailing to Carthage, it should be accusative. Remember? Place J whither? That's the rule.'
'Can't be.' This was Bunny. His voice was nasal, garrulous,, W. C. Fields with a bad case of Long Island lockjaw. 'It's not' place whither, it's place to. I put my money on the ablative case.'
There was a confused rattling of papers.
'Wait,' said Charles. His voice was a lot like his sister's **| hoarse, slightly southern. 'Look at this. They're not just sailing! to Carthage, they're sailing to attack it.'
'You're crazy.'
'No, they are. Look at the next sentence. We need a dative.'
'Are you sure?'
More rustling of papers.
'Absolutely. Epi to karchidona.'
'I don't see how,' said Bunny. He sounded like Thurstc Ho well on 'Gilligan's Island.'
'Ablative's the ticket. The hard on are always ablative.'
A slight pause. 'Bunny,' said Charles, 'you're mixed up. Tb S ablative is in Latin.'
'Well, of course, I know that,' said Bunny irritably, after confused pause which seemed to indicate the contrary, 'but ye know what I mean. Aorist, ablative, all the same thing, really…1 'Look, Charles,' said Camilla. 'This dative won't work.'
'Yes it will. They're sailing to attack, aren't they?'
'Yes, but the Greeks sailed over the sea to Carthage.'
'But 1 put that epi in front of it.'
'Well, we can attack and still use epi, but we have to use an accusative because of the first rules.'
Segregation. Self. Self-concept. I looked down at the index and racked my brains for the case they were looking for. The Greeks sailed over the sea to Carthage. To Carthage. Place whither, place whence. Carthage.
Suddenly something occurred to me. I closed the book and put it on the shelf and turned around. 'Excuse me?' I said.
Immediately they stopped talking, startled, and turned to stare at me.
Tm sorry, but would the locative case do?'
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
'Locative?' said Charles.
'Just add zde to karchido,' I said. 'I think it's zde. If you use that, you won't need a preposition, except the epi if they're going to war. It implies "Carthage-ward," so you won't have to worry about a case, either.'
Charles looked at his paper, then at me. 'Locative?' he said.
'That's pretty obscure.'
'Are you sure it exists for Carthage?' said Camilla.
I hadn't thought of this. 'Maybe not,' I said. 'I know it does for Athens.'
Charles reached over and hauled the lexicon towards him over the table and began to leaf through it.
'Oh, hell, don't bother,' said Bunny stridently. 'If you don't have to decline it and it doesn't need a preposition it sounds good to me.' He reared back in his chair and looked up at me. 'I'd like to shake your hand, stranger.' I offered it to him; he clasped and shook it firmly, almost knocking an ink bottle over with his elbow as he did so. 'Glad to meet you, yes, yes,' he said, reaching up with the other hand to brush the hair from his eyes.
I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.
Only the day before Francis, in a swish of black cashmere and cigarette smoke, had brushed past me in a corridor. For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me as ghosts, in their shadowy rounds, are said to be heedless of the living.
Charles, still fumbling with the lexicon, rose and offered his hand. 'My name is Charles Macaulay.'
'Richard Papen.'
'Oh, you're the one,' said Camilla suddenly.
'What?'
'You. You came by to ask about the Greek class.'
'This is my sister,' said Charles, 'and this is – Bun, did you tell him your name already?'
'No, no, don't think so. You've made me a happy man, sir.
We had ten more like this to do and five minutes to do them in.
Edmund Corcoran's the name,' said Bunny, grasping my hand again.
'How long have you studied Greek?' said Camilla.
'Two years,' 'You're rather good at it,' 'Pity you aren't in our class,' said Bunny.
A strained silence.
'Well,' said Charles uncomfortably, 'Julian is funny about things like that,' 'Go see him again, why don't you,' Bunny said. 'Take him some flowers and tell him you love Plato and he'll be eating out of your hand,' Another silence, this one more disagreeable than the first.
Camilla smiled, not exactly at me – a sweet, unfocused smile, quite impersonal, as if I were a waiter or a clerk in a store. Beside her Charles, who was still standing, smiled too and raised a polite eyebrow – a gesture which might have been nervous, might have meant anything, really, but which I took to mean Is that all?
I mumbled something and was about to turn away when Bunny – who was staring in the opposite direction – shot out an arm and grabbed me by the wrist. 'Wait,' he said.
Startled, I looked up. Henry had just come in the door – dark suit, umbrella, and all.
When he got to the table he pretended not to see me. 'Hello,' he said to them. 'Are you finished?'
Bunny tossed his head at me. 'Look here, Henry, we've got someone to meet you,' he said.
Henry glanced up. His expression did not change. He shut his eyes and then reopened them, as if he found it extraordinary that someone such as myself should stand in his path of vision.
'Yes, yes,' said Bunny. 'This man's name is Richard – Richard what?'
'Papen.'
'Yes, yes. Richard Papen. Studies Greek.'
Henry brought his head up to look at me. 'Not here, surely,' he said.
'No,' I said, meeting his gaze, but his stare was so rude I was forced to cut my eyes away.
'Oh, Henry, look at this, would you,' said Charles hastily, rustling through the papers again. 'We were going to use a dative or an accusative here but he suggested locative?'
Henry leaned over his shoulder and inspected the page. 'Hmm, archaic locative,' he said. 'Very Homeric. Of course, it would be grammatically correct but perhaps a bit off contextually.' He brought his head back up to scrutinize me. The light was at an angle that glinted off his tiny spectacles, and I couldn't see his eyes behind them. 'Very interesting. You're a Homeric scholar?'
I might have said yes, but I had the feeling he would be glad to catch me in a mistake, and that he would be able to do it easily. 'I like Homer,' I said weakly.
He regarded me with chill distaste. 'I love Homer,' he said.
'Of course we're studying things rather more modern, Plato and the tragedians and so forth.'
I was trying to think of some response when he looked away in disinterest.
'We should go,' he said.
Charles shuffled his papers together, stood up again; Camilla stood beside him and this time she offered me her hand, too.
Side by side, they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gesture which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid. Their eyes were the same color of gray, intelligent and calm. She, I thought, was very beautiful, in an unsettling, almost medieval way which would not be apparent to the casual observer.
Bunny pushed his chair back and slapped me between the shoulder blades. 'Well, sir,' he said, 'we must get together sometime and talk about Greek, yes?'
'Goodbye,' Henry said, with a nod.
'Goodbye,' I said. They strolled off and I stood where I was and watched them go, walking out of the library in a wide phalanx, side by side.
When I went by Dr Roland's office a few minutes later to drop off the Xeroxes, I asked him if he could give me an advance on my work-study check.
He leaned back in his chair and trained his watery, red-rimmed eyes on me. 'Well, you know,' he said, 'for the past ten years, I've made it my practice not to do that. Let me tell you why that is.'
'I know, sir,' I said hastily. Dr Roland's discourses on his 'practices' could sometimes take half an hour or more. 'I understand.
Only it's kind of an emergency.'
He leaned forward again and cleared his throat. 'And what,' he said, 'might that be?'
His hands, folded on the desk before him, were gnarled with veins and had a bluish, pearly sheen around the knuckles. I stared at them. I needed ten or twenty dollars, needed it badly, but I had come in without first deciding what to say. 'I don't know,' I said. 'Something has come up.'
He furrowed his eyebrows impressively. Dr Roland's senile manner was said to be a facade; to me it seemed quite genuine but sometimes, when you were off your guard, he would display an unexpected flash of lucidity, which – though it frequently did not relate to the topic at hand – was evidence that rational processes rumbled somewhere in the muddied depths of his consciousness.
'It's my car,' I said, suddenly inspired. I didn't have a car. 'I need to get it fixed.'
I had not expected him to inquire further but instead he perked up noticeably. 'What's the trouble?'
'Something with the transmission.'
'Is it dual-pathed? Air-cooled?'
'Air-cooled,' I said, shifting to the other foot. I did not care for this conversational turn. I don't know a thing about cars and am hard-pressed to change a tire.
'What've you got, one of those little V-6 numbers?'
'Yes.'
'I'm not surprised. All the kids seem to crave them.'
I had no idea how to respond to this.
He pulled out his desk drawer and began to pick things up and bring them close to his eyes and put them back in again.
'Once a transmission goes,' he said, 'in my experience the car is gone. Especially on a V-6. You might as well take that vehicle to the junk heap. Now, myself, I've got a '98 Regency Brougham, ten years old. With me, it's regular checkups, new filter every fifteen hundred miles, and new oil every three thousand. Runs a dream. Watch out for these garages in town,' he said sharply.
'Pardon?'
He'd found his checkbook at last. 'Well, you ought to go to the Bursar but I guess this'll be all right,' he said, opening it and beginning to write laboriously. 'Some of these places in Hampden, they find out you're from the college, they'll charge you double. Redeemed Repair is generally the best – they're a bunch of born-agains down there but they'll still shake you down pretty good if you don't keep an eye on them.'
He tore out the check and handed it to me. I glanced at it and my heart skipped a beat. Two hundred dollars. He'd signed it and everything.
'Don't you let them charge you a penny more,' he said.
'No sir,' I said, barely able to conceal my joy. What would I do with all this money? Maybe he would even forget he had given it to me.
He pulled down his glasses and looked at me over the tops of them. 'That's Redeemed Repair,' he said. They're out on Highway 6. The sign is shaped like a cross.'
'Thank you,' I said.
I walked down the hall with spirits soaring, and two hundred dollars in my pocket, and the first thing I did was to go downstairs to the pay phone and call a cab to take me into Hampden town.
If there's one thing I'm good at, it's lying on my feet. It's sort of a gift I have.
And what did I do in Hampden town? Frankly, I was too staggered by my good fortune to do much of anything. It was a glorious day; I was sick of being poor, so, before I thought better of it, I went into an expensive men's shop on the square and bought a couple of shirts. Then I went down to the Salvation Army and poked around in bins for a while and found a Harris tweed overcoat and a pair of brown wingtips that fit me, also some cufflinks and a funny old tie that had pictures of men hunting Jeer on it. When I came out of the store I was happy to find that I still had nearly a hundred dollars. Should I go to the bookstore?
To the movies? Buy a bottle of Scotch? In the end, I was so swarmed by the flock of possibilities that drifted up murmuring and smiling to crowd about me on the bright autumn sidewalk that – like a farm boy flustered by a bevy of prostitutes -1 brushed right through them, to the pay phone on the corner, to call a cab to take me to school.
Once in my room, I spread the clothes on my bed. The cufflinks were beaten up and had someone else's initials on them, but they looked like real gold, glinting in the drowsy autumn sun which poured through the window and soaked in yellow pools on the oak floor – voluptuous, rich, intoxicating.
I had a feeling of deja vu when, the next afternoon, Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding, something that he was careful not everyone should see. It was a feeling I would come to know well in the next months. Even now, years later and far away, sometimes in dreams I find myself standing before that white door, waiting for him to appear like the gatekeeper in a fairy story: ageless, watchful, sly as a child.
When he saw it was me, he opened the door slightly wider than he had the first time. 'Mr Pepin again, isn't it?' he said.
I didn't bother to correct him. 'I'm afraid so.'
He looked at me for a moment. 'You have a wonderful name, you know,' he said. 'There were kings of France named Pepin.'
'Are you busy now?'
'I am never too busy for an heir to the French throne if that is in fact what you are,' he said pleasantly.
'I'm afraid not.'
He laughed and quoted a little Greek epigram about honesty being a dangerous virtue, and, to my surprise, opened the door and ushered me in.
It was a beautiful room, not an office at all, and much bigger than it looked from outside – airy and white, with a high ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the starched curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant; their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky scent of camphor. Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated. Everywhere I looked was something beautiful – Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels a dazzle of fractured color that struck me as if I had stepped into one of those little Byzantine churches that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt and tesserae.
He sat in an armchair by the window and motioned for me to sit, too. 'I suppose you've come about the Greek class,' he said.
'Yes.'
His eyes were kind, frank, more gray than blue. 'It's rather late in the term,' he said.
'I'd like to study it again. It seems a shame to drop it after two years.'
He arched his eyebrows – deep, mischievous – and looked at his folded hands for a moment. 'I'm told you're from California.'
'Yes, I am,' I said, rather startled. Who had told him that?
'I don't know many people from the West,' he said. 'I don't know if I would like it there.' He paused, looking pensive and vaguely troubled. 'And what do you do in California?'
I gave him the spiel. Orange groves, failed movie stars, lamplit cocktail hours by the swimming pool, cigarettes, ennui. He listened, his eyes fixed on mine, apparently entranced by these fraudulent recollections. Never had my efforts met with such attentiveness, such keen solicitude. He seemed so utterly enthralled that I was tempted to embroider a little more than perhaps was prudent.
'How thrilling,' he said warmly when I, half-euphoric, was finally played out. 'How very romantic.'
'Well, we're all quite used to it out there, you see,' I said, trying not to fidget, flushed with the brilliance of my success.
'And what does a person with such a romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?' He asked this as if, having had the good fortune to catch such a rare bird as myself, he was anxious to extract my opinion while I was still captive in his office.
'If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective,' I said, 'I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.'
He laughed. 'The great romantics are often failed classicists.
But that's beside the point, isn't it? What do you think of Hamp den? Are you happy here?'
I provided an exegesis, not as brief as it might have been, of why at the moment I found the college satisfactory for my purposes.
'Young people often find the country a bore,' said Julian.
'Which is not to say that it isn't good for them. Have you traveled much? Tell me what it was that attracted you to this place. I should think a young man such as yourself would be at a loss outside the city, but perhaps you feel tired of city life, is that so?'
So skillfully and engagingly that I was quite disarmed, he led me deftly from topic to topic, and I am sure that in this talk, which seemed only a few minutes but was really much longer, he managed to extract everything about me he wanted to know.
I did not suspect that his rapt interest might spring from anything less than the very richest enjoyment of my own company, and though I found myself talking with relish on a bewildering variety of topics – some of them quite personal, and with more frankness than was customary – I was convinced that I was acting of my own volition. I wish I could remember more of what was said that day – actually, I do remember much of what,' said, most of it too fatuous for me to recall with pleasure. The only point at which he differed (aside from an incredulous eyebrow raised at my mention of Picasso; when I came to know him better I realized that he must have thought this an almost personal affront) was on the topic of psychology, which was, after all, heavy on my mind, working for Dr Roland and everything.
'But do you really think,' he said, concerned, 'that one can call psychology a science?'
'Certainly. What else is it?'
'But even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.'
'Psychology is a terrible word.'
He agreed vigorously. 'Yes, it is terrible, isn't it?' he said, but with an expression that indicated that he thought it rather tasteless of me even to use it. 'Perhaps in certain ways it is a helpful construct in talking about a certain kind of mind. The country people who live around me are fascinating because their lives are so closely bound to fate that they really are predestined. But' he laughed – 'I'm afraid my students are never very interesting to me because I always know exactly what they're going to do.'
I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.
It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
We talked a while longer, and presently fell silent. After a moment Julian said courteously, 'If you'd like, I'd be happy to take you as a pupil, Mr Papen.'
I, looking out the window and having half-forgotten why I was there, turned to gape at him and couldn't think of a thing to say.
'However, before you accept, there are a few conditions to which you must agree.'
'What?' I said, suddenly alert.
'Will you go to the Registrar's office tomorrow and put in a request to change counselors?' He reached for a pen in a cup on his desk; amazingly, it was full of Montblanc fountain pens, Meisterstiicks, at least a dozen of them. Quickly he wrote out a note and handed it to me. 'Don't lose it,' he said, 'because the Registrar never assigns me counselees unless I request them.'
The note was written in a masculine, rather nineteenth century hand, with Greek e's. The ink was still wet. 'But I have a counselor,' I said.
'It is my policy never to accept a pupil unless I am his counselor as well. Other members of the literature faculty disagree with my teaching methods and you will run into problems if someone else gains the power to veto my decisions. You should pick up some drop-add forms as well. I think you are going to have to drop all the classes you are currently taking, except the French, which would be as well for you to keep. You appear to be deficient in the area of modern languages.'
I was astonished. 'I can't drop all my classes.'
'Why not?'
'Registration is over.'
'That doesn't matter at all,' said Julian serenely. 'The classes that I want you to pick up will be with me. You will probably be taking three or four classes with me per term for the rest of your time here.'
I looked at him. No wonder he had only five students. 'But how can I do that?' I said.
He laughed. Tm afraid you haven't been at Hampden very long. The administration doesn't like it much, but there's nothing they can do. Occasionally they try to raise problems with distribution requirements but that's never caused any real trouble.
We study art, history, philosophy, all sorts of things. If I find you are deficient in a given area, 1 may decide to give you a tutorial, perhaps refer you to another teacher. As French is not my first language, I think it wise if you continue to study that with Mr Laforgue. Next year I'll start you on Latin. It's a difficult language, but knowing Greek will make it easier for you. The most satisfying of languages, Latin. You will find it a delight to learn.'
I listened, a bit affronted by his tone. To do what he asked was tantamount to my transferring entirely out of Hampden College into his own little academy of ancient Greek, student body five, six including me. 'All my classes with you?' I said.
'Not quite all of them,' he said seriously, and then laughed when he saw the look on my face. 'I believe that having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially,' he said. 'I know the modern world tends not to agree with me, but after all, Plato had only one teacher, and Alexander.'
Slowly I nodded, trying as I did so to think of a tactful way to withdraw, when my eyes met his and suddenly I thought: Why not? I was slightly giddy with the force of his personality but the extremism of the offer was appealing as well. His students – if they were any mark of his tutelage – were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks – sic oculos, sic ilk manus, sic oraferebat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated. (It was the same, I would come to find, with Julian: though he gave quite the opposite impression, of freshness and candor, it was not spontaneity but superior art which made it seem unstudied.) Studied or not, I wanted to be like them. It was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and that, perhaps, this was the way I might learn them.
This was all a long way from Piano, and my father's gas station. 'And if I do take classes with you, will they all be in Greek?' I asked him.
He laughed. 'Of course not. We'll be studying Dante, Virgil, all sorts of things. But I wouldn't advise you to go out and buy a copy of Goodbye, Columbus' (required, notoriously, in one of the freshman English classes) 'if you will forgive me for being vulgar.'
Georges Laforgue was disturbed when I told him what I planned to do. 'This is a serious business,' he said. 'You understand, don't you, how limited will be your contact with the rest of the faculty and with the school?'
'He's a good teacher,' I said.
'No teacher is that good. And if you should by chance have a disagreement with him, or be treated unjustly in any way, there will be nothing anyone on the faculty can do for you. Pardon me, but I do not see the point of paying a thirty-thousand-dollar tuition simply to study with one instructor.'
I thought of referring that question to the Hampden College Endowment Fund, but I said nothing.
He leaned back in his chair. 'Forgive me, but I should think the elitist values of such a man would be repugnant to you,' he said. 'Frankly, this is the first time I have ever heard of his accepting a pupil who is on such considerable financial aid. Being a democratic institution, Hampden College is not founded on such principles.'
'Well, he can't be all that elitist if he accepted me,' I said.
He didn't catch my sarcasm. 'I am willing to speculate that he isn't aware you are on assistance,' he said seriously. £j 'Well, if he doesn't know,' I said, 'I'm not going to tell him.'
Julian's classes met in his office. They were very small classes, and besides, no classroom could have approached it in terms of comfort, or privacy. He had a theory that pupils learned better in a pleasant, non-scholastic atmosphere; and that luxurious hothouse of a room, flowers everywhere in the dead of winter, was some sort of Platonic microcosm of what he thought a schoolroom should be. ('Work?' he said to me once, astonished, when I referred to our classroom activities as such. 'Do you really think that what we do is work?'
'What else should I call it?'
'I should call it the most glorious kind of play.'
As I was on my way there for my first class, I saw Francis Abernathy stalking across the meadow like a black bird, his coat flapping dark and crowlike in the wind. He was preoccupied, smoking a cigarette, but the thought that he might see me filled me with an inexplicable anxiety. I ducked into a doorway and waited until he had passed.
When I turned on the landing of the Lyceum stairs, I was shocked to see him sitting in the windowsill. I glanced at him quickly, and then quickly away, and was about to walk into the hall when he said, 'Wait.' His voice was cool and Bostonian, almost British.
I turned around.
'Are you the new neanias T he said mockingly.
The new young man. I said that I was.
'Cubitum eamus?'
'What?'
'Nothing.'
He transferred the cigarette to his left hand and offered the right one to me. It was bony and soft-skinned as a teenage girl's.
He did not bother to introduce himself. After a brief, awkward silence, I told him my name.
He took a last drag of the cigarette and tossed it out the open window. 'I know who you are,' he said.
Henry and Bunny were already in the office; Henry was reading a book and Bunny, leaning across the table, was talking to him loudly and earnestly.
'… tasteless, that's what it is, old man. Disappointed in you.
I gave you credit for a little more savoir faire than that, if you don't mind my saying so…"
'Good morning,' said Francis, coming in behind me and closing the door.
Henry glanced up and nodded, then went back to his book.
'Hi,' said Bunny, and then 'Oh, hello there' to me. 'Guess what,' he continued to Francis. 'Henry bought himself a Mont blanc pen.'
'Really?' said Francis.
Bunny nodded at the cup of sleek black pens that sat on Julian's desk. 'I told him he better be careful or Julian will think he stole it.'
'He was with me when I bought it,' said Henry without looking up from his book.
'How much are those things worth, anyway?' said Bunny.
No answer.
'Come on. How much? Three hundred bucks a pop?' He leaned all of his considerable weight against the table. 'I remember when you used to say how ugly they were. You used to say you'd never write with a thing in your life but a straight pen. Right?'
Silence.
'Let me see that again, will you?' Bunny said.
Putting his book down, Henry reached in his breast pocket and pulled out the pen and put it on the table. 'There,' he said.
Bunny picked it up and turned it back and forth in his fingers.
'It's like the fat pencils I used to use in first grade,' he said. 'Did Julian talk you into getting this?'
'I wanted a fountain pen.'
That's not why you got this one.'
'I am sick of talking about this.'
'I think it's tasteless.'
'You,' said Henry sharply, 'are not one to speak of taste.'
There was a long silence, during which Bunny leaned back in his chair. 'Now, what kind of pens do we all use here?' he said conversationally. 'Francois, you're a nib-and-bottle man like myself, no?'
'More or less.'
He pointed to me as if he were the host of a panel discussion on a talk show. 'And you, what's-your-name, Robert? What sort of pens did they teach you to use in California?'
'Ball points,' I said.
Bunny nodded deeply. 'An honest man, gentlemen. Simple tastes. Lays his cards on the table. I like that.'
The door opened and the twins came in.
'What are you yelling about, Bun?' said Charles, laughing, kicking the door shut behind him. 'We heard you all the way down the hall.'
Bunny launched into the story about the Montblanc pen.
Uneasily, I edged into the corner and began to examine the books in the bookcase.
'How long have you studied the classics?' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry, who had turned in his chair to look at me.
'Two years,' I said.
'What have you read in Greek?'
'The New Testament.'
'Well, of course you've read Koine,' he said crossly. 'What else?
Homer, surely. And the lyric poets.'
This, I knew, was Henry's special bailiwick. I was afraid to lie.
'A little.'
'And Plato?'
'Yes.'
'All of Plato?'
'Some of Plato.'
'But all of it in translation.'
I hesitated, a moment too long. He looked at me, incredulous. 'No?'
I dug my hands into the pockets of my new overcoat. 'Most of it,' I said, which was far from true.
'Most of what? The dialogues, you mean? What about later things? Plotinus?'
'Yes,' I lied. I have never, to this day, read a word by Plotinus.
'What?'
Unfortunately my mind went blank, and I could not think of a single thing I knew for sure Plotinus had written. The Eclogues'! No, dammit, that was Virgil. 'Actually, I don't much care for Plotinus,' I said.
'No? Why is that?'
He was like a policeman with the questions. Wistfully, I thought of my old class, the one I'd dropped for this one: Intro to Drama, with jolly Mr Lanin, who made us lie on the floor and do relaxation exercises while he walked around and said things like: 'Now imagine that your body is filling with a cool orange fluid.'
I had not answered the Plotinus question soon enough for Henry's taste. He said something rapidly in Latin.
'I beg your pardon?'
He looked at me coldly. 'Never mind,' he said, and bent back over his book.
To hide my consternation, I turned to the bookshelf.
'Happy now?' I heard Bunny say. 'I guess you raked him over the coals pretty good, eh?'
To my intense relief, Charles came over to say hello. He was friendly and quite calm, but we had scarcely more than exchanged greetings when the door opened and a hush fell as Julian slipped in and closed the door quietly behind him.
'Good morning,' he said. 'You've met our new student?'
'Yes,' said Francis in what I thought a bored tone, as he held out Camilla's chair and then slid into his own.
'Wonderful. Charles, would you put on water for tea?'
Charles went into a little anteroom, no bigger than a closet, and I heard the sound of running water. (I never did know exactly what was in that anteroom or how Julian, upon occasion, was miraculously able to convey four-course meals out of it.) Then he came out, closing the door behind him, and sat down.
'All right,' said Julian, looking around the table. 'I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?'
He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one – especially after so many years – without losing a good deal in the translation. The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato's four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.
'Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember the Erinyes?'
The Furies,' said Bunny, his eyes dazzled and lost beneath the bang of hair.
'Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.
'And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely?
Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods. War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not a great many glorious causes for which to fight these days.' He laughed. 'Though after all your Xenophon and Thucydides I dare say there are not many young people better versed in military tactics. I'm sure, if you wanted to, you'd be quite capable of marching on Hampden town and taking it over by yourselves.'
Henry laughed. 'We could do it this afternoon, with six men,' he said.
'How?' said everyone at once.
'One person to cut the phone and power lines, one at the bridge over the Battenkill, one at the main road out, to the north. The rest of us could advance from the south and west. There aren't many of us, but if we scattered we'd be able to close off all other points of entry' – here he held out his hand, fingers spread wide 'and advance to the center from all points.' The fingers closed into a fist. 'Of course, we'd have the advantage of surprise,' he said, and I felt an unexpected thrill at the coldness of his voice.
Julian laughed. 'And how many years has it been since the gods have intervened in human wars? I expect Apollo and Athena Nike would come down to fight at your side, "invited or uninvited," as the oracle at Delphi said to the Spartans. Imagine what heroes you'd be.'
'Demigods,' said Francis, laughing. 'We could sit on thrones in the town square,' 'While the local merchants paid you tribute.'
'Gold. Peacocks and ivory.'
'Cheddar cheese and common crackers more like it,' Bunny said.
'Bloodshed is a terrible thing,' said Julian hastily – the remark about the common crackers had displeased him – 'but the bloodiest parts of Homer and Aeschylus are often the most magnificent – for example, that glorious speech of Klytemnestra's in the Agamemnon that I love so much – Camilla, you were our Klytem nestra when we did the Oresteia; do you remember any of it?'
The light from the window was streaming directly into her face; in such strong light most people look somewhat washed out, but her clear, fine features were only illuminated until it was a shock to look at her, at her pale and radiant eyes with their sooty lashes, at the gold glimmer at her temple that blended gradually into her glossy hair, warm as honey. 'I remember a little,' she said.
Looking at a spot on the wall above my head, she began to recite the lines. I stared at her. Did she have a boyfriend, Francis maybe? He and she were fairly chummy, but Francis didn't look like the sort who would be too interested in girls. Not that I stood much of a chance, surrounded as she was by all these clever rich boys in dark suits; me, with my clumsy hands and suburban ways.
Her voice in Greek was harsh and low and lovely.
Thus he died, and all the life struggled out of him; and as he died he spattered me with the dark red and violent-driven rain of bitter-savored blood to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.
There was a brief silence after she had finished; rather to my surprise, Henry winked solemnly at her from across the table.
Julian smiled. 'What a beautiful passage,' he said. 'I never tire of it. But how is it that such a ghastly thing, a queen stabbing her husband in his bath, is so lovely to us?'
'It's the meter,' said Francis. 'Iambic trimeter. Those really hideous parts of Inferno, for instance, Pier de Medicina with his nose hacked off and talking through a bloody slit in his windpipe '
'I can think of worse than that,' Charles said.
'So can I. But that passage is lovely and it's because of the terza rima. The music of it. The trimeter tolls through that speech of Klytemnestra's like a bell.'
'But iambic trimeter is fairly common in Greek lyric, isn't it?' said Julian. 'Why is that particular section so breathtaking? Why do we not find ourselves attracted to some calmer or more pleasing one?'
'Aristotle says in the Poetics,' said Henry, 'that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.'
'And I believe Aristotle is correct. After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the ones that we love the most? Precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on the funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar's blood – remember how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?'
'Death is the mother of beauty,' said Henry.
'And what is beauty?'
'Terror,' 'Well said,' said Julian. 'Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory.
Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.'
I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.
'And if beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?'
'To live,' said Camilla.
'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.
The teakettle began to whistle.
Once the cups were set out, and Henry had poured the tea, somber as a mandarin, we began to talk about the madnesses induced by the gods: poetic, prophetic, and, finally, Dionysian.
'Which is by far the most mysterious,' said Julian. 'We have been accustomed to thinking of religious ecstasy as a thing found only in primitive societies, though it frequently occurs in the most cultivated peoples. The Greeks, you know, really weren't very different from us. They were a very formal people, extraordinarily civilized, rather repressed. And yet they were frequently swept away en masse by the wildest enthusiasms – dancing, frenzies, slaughter, visions – which for us, I suppose, would seem clinical madness, irreversible. Yet the Greeks – some of them, anyway – could go in and out of it as they pleased. We cannot dismiss these accounts entirely as myth. They are quite well documented, though ancient commentators were as mystified by them as we are. Some say they were the results of prayer and fasting, others that they were brought about by drink. Certainly the group nature of the hysteria had something to do with it as well. Even so, it is hard to account for the extremism of the phenomenon. The revelers were apparently hurled back into a non-rational, pre-intellectual state, where the personality was replaced by something completely different – and by "different" I mean something to all appearances not mortal.Inhuman,'
I thought of the Bacchae, a play whose violence and savagery made me uneasy, as did the sadism of its bloodthirsty god.
Compared to the other tragedies, which were dominated by I recognizable principles of justice no matter how harsh, it was a triumph of barbarism over reason: dark, chaotic, inexplicable.
'We don't like to admit it,' said Julian, 'but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks or the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?'
I looked around the table at the six faces. To modern tastes they were somewhat chilling. I imagine any other teacher would've been on the phone to Psychological Counseling in about five minutes had he heard what Henry said about arming the Greek class and marching into Hampden town.
'And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.'
'Why?' said Francis, leaning slightly forward.
Julian arched an eyebrow; his long, wise nose gave his profile a forward tilt, like an Etruscan in a bas-relief. 'Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely. For a warning of what happens in the absence of such a pressure valve, we have the example of the Romans. The emperors. Think, for example, of Tiberius, the ugly stepson, trying to live up to the command of his stepfather Augustus. Think of the tremendous, impossible strain he must have undergone, following in the footsteps of a savior, a god. The people hated him. No matter how hard he tried he was never good enough, could never be rid of the hateful self, and finally the floodgates broke. He was swept away on his perversions and he died, old and mad, lost in the pleasure gardens of Capri: not even happy there, as one might hope, but miserable.
Before he died he wrote a letter home to the Senate. "May all the Gods and Goddesses visit me with more utter destruction than I feel I am daily suffering." Think of those who came after him. Caligula. Nero.'
He paused. 'The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws – this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.' He laughed. 'Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly – how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragma tists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?
'The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.' He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. 'Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?' he said. 'It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.'
We were all leaning forward, motionless. My mouth had fallen open; I was aware of every breath I took.
'And that, to me, is the terrible seduction of Dionysiac ritual.
Hard for us to imagine. That fire of pure being.'
After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
That night I wrote in my journal: 'Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone – was it van Gogh? – said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.'
I went into the post office (blase students, business as usual) and, still preposterously lightheaded, scribbled a picture postcard to my mother – fiery maples, a mountain stream. A sentence on the back advised: Plan to see Vermont 's fall foliage between Sept.25 and Oct. ijth when it is at its vivid best.
As I was putting it in the out-of-town mail slot, I saw Bunny across the room, his back to me, scanning the row of numbered boxes. He stopped at what was apparently my own box and bent to stick something in it. Then he straightened surreptitiously and walked out quickly, his hands in his pockets and his hair flopping everywhere.
I waited until he was gone, then went to my mailbox. Inside, I found a cream-colored envelope – thick paper, crisp and very formal – but the handwriting was crabbed and childish as a fifth-grader's, in pencil. The note within was in pencil, too, tiny and uneven and hard to read:
Richard old Man What do you Say we have Lunch on Saturday, maybe about i? 1 know this Great little place. Cocktails, the business. My treat. Please come.
Yours,
Bun
p.s. wear a Tie. I am Sure you would have anyway but they will drag some godawful one out of the back and meke (s. p.) you Wear it if you Dont.
I examined the note, put it in my pocket, and was walking out when I almost bumped into Dr Roland coming in the door. At first he didn't seem to know who I was. But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium.
'Hello, Doctor Roland,' I said, abandoning hope.
'How's she running, boy?'
He meant my imaginary car. Christine. Chitty Chitty-Bang Bang. 'Fine,' I said.
'Take it to Redeemed Repair?'
'Yes.'
'Manifold trouble.'
'Yes,' I said, and then realized I'd told him earlier it was the transmission. But Dr Roland had now begun an informative lecture concerning the care and function of the manifold gasket.
'And that,' he concluded, 'is one of your major problems with a foreign automobile. You can waste a lot of oil that way. Those cans of Penn State will add up. And Penn State doesn't grow on trees.'
He gave me a significant look.
'Who was it sold you the gasket?' he asked.
'I can't remember,' I said, swaying in a trance of boredom but edging imperceptibly towards the door.
'Was it Bud?'
'I think so.'
'Or Bill. Bill Hundy is good.'
'I believe it was Bud,' I said.
'What did you think about that old blue jay?'
I was uncertain if this referred to Bud or to a literal blue jay, or if, perhaps, we were heading into the territory of senile dementia. It was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet.
He was reviewing some of the information he had previously given me on the manifold gaskets and I was waiting for a good moment to remember, suddenly, that I was late for an appointment, when Dr Roland's friend Dr Blind struggled up, beaming, leaning on his walker. Dr Blind (pronounced 'Blend') was about ninety years old and had taught, for the past fifty years, a course called 'Invariant Subspaces' which was noted for its monotony and virtually absolute unintelligibility, as well as for the fact that the final exam, as long as anyone could remember, had consisted of the same single yes-or-no question. The question was three pages long but the answer was always 'Yes.' That was all you needed to know to pass Invariant Subspaces.
He was, if possible, even a bigger windbag than Dr Roland.
Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion. I murmured an excuse and slipped away, leaving them to their own formidable devices.
I had hoped the weather would be cool for my lunch with Bunny, because my best jacket was a scratchy dark tweed, but when I woke on Saturday it was hot and getting hotter.
'Gonna be a scorcher today,' said the janitor as I passed him in the hall. 'Indian summer.'
The jacket was beautiful – Irish wool, gray with flecks of mossy green; I had bought it in San Francisco with nearly every cent I'd saved from my summer job – but it was much too heavy for a warm sunny day. I put it on and went to the bathroom to straighten my tie.
I was in no mood for talk and I was unpleasantly surprised to find Judy Poovey brushing her teeth at the sink. Judy Poovey lived a couple of doors down from me and seemed to think that because she was from Los Angeles we had a lot in common. She cornered me in hallways; tried to make me dance at parties; had told several girls that she was going to sleep with me, only in less delicate terms. She had wild clothes, frosted hair, a red Corvette with California plates bearing the legend judy p. Her voice was loud and rose frequently to a screech, which rang through the house like the cries of some terrifying tropical bird.
'Hi, Richard,' she said, and spit out a mouthful of toothpaste.
She was wearing cut-off jeans that had bizarre, frantic designs drawn on them in Magic Marker and a spandex top which revealed her intensely aerobicized midriff.
'Hello,' I said, setting to work on my tie.
'You look cute today.'
'Thanks.'
'Got a date?'
I looked away from the mirror, at her. 'What?'
'Where you going?'
By now, I was used to her interrogations, 'Out to lunch.'
'Who with?'
'Bunny Corcoran.'
'You know Bunny?'
Again, I turned to look at her. 'Sort of. Do you?'
'Sure. He was in my art history class. He's hilarious. I hate that geeky friend of his, though, the other one with the glasses, what's his name?'
'Henry?'
'Yeah, him.' She leaned towards the mirror and began to fluff out her hair, swiveling her head this way and that. Her nails were Chanel red but so long they had to be the kind you bought at the drugstore. 'I think he's an asshole.'
'I kind of like him,' I said, offended.
'I don't.' She parted her hair in the center, using the curved talon of her forefinger as a comb. 'He's always been a bastard to me. I hate those twins, too.'
'Why? The twins are nice.'
'Oh yeah?' she said, rolling a mascaraed eye at me in the mirror. 'Listen to this. I was at this party last term, really drunk, and sort of slam-dancing, right? Everybody was crashing into everybody else, and for some reason this girl twin was walking through the dance floor and pow, I slammed right into her, really hard. So then she says something rude, like totally uncalled for, and first thing I knew I'd thrown my beer in her face. It was that kind of a night. I'd already had about six beers thrown on me, and it just seemed like the thing to do, you know?
'So anyway, she starts yelling at me and in about half a second there's the other twin and that Henry guy standing over me like they're about to beat me up.' She pulled her hair back from her face in a ponytail and inspected her profile in the mirror. 'So anyway. I'm drunk, and these two guys are leaning over me in this menacing way, and you know that I Iciiry, he's really big. It was kind of scary but I was too drunk to care so I just told them to fuck off,' She turned from the mirror and smiled brilliantly. 'I was drinking Kamikazes that night. Something terrible always happens to me when I drink Kamikazes. I wreck my car, I get into fights…"
'What happened?'
She shrugged and turned back to the mirror. 'Like I said, I just told them to fuck off. And the boy twin, he starts screaming at me. Like he really wants to kill me, you know? And that Henry just standing there, right, but to me he was scarier than the other one. So anyway. A friend of mine who used to go here and who's really tough, he was in this motorcycle gang, into chains and shit – ever heard of Spike Romney?'
I had; in fact I'd seen him at my first Friday-night party. He was tremendous, well over two hundred pounds, with scars on his hands and steel toe-clips on his motorcycle boots.
'Well, anyway, so Spike comes up and sees these people abusing me, and he shoves the twin on the shoulder and tells him to beat it, and before I knew it, the two of them had jumped on him. People were trying to pull that Henry off, too – lots of them, and they couldn't do it. Six guys couldn't pull him off.
Broke Spike's collarbone and two of his ribs, and fucked up his face pretty bad. I told Spike he should've called the cops, but he was in some kind of trouble himself and wasn't supposed to be on campus. It was a bad scene, though.' She let her hair fall back around her face. 'I mean, Spike is tough. And mean. You'd think he'd be able to beat the shit out of both those sissy guys in suits and ties and stuff.'
'Hmm,' I said, trying not to laugh. It was funny to think of Henry, with his little round glasses and his books in Pali, breaking Spike Romney's collarbone.
'It's weird,' said Judy. 'I guess when uptight people like that get mad, they get really mad. Like my father.'
'Yeah, I guess so,' I said, looking back into the mirror and adjusting the knot on my tie.
'Have a good time,' she said listlessly, and started out the door. Then she stopped. 'Say, aren't you going to get hot in that jacket?'
'Only good one I have.'
'You want to try on this one I've got?'
I turned and looked at her. She was a major in Costume, Design and as such had all kinds of peculiar clothing in her room. ›j 'Is it yours?' I said.
'I stole it from the wardrobe at the Costume shop. I was going to cut it up and make, like, a bustier out of it.' *j Great, I thought, but I went along with her anyway. H The jacket, unexpectedly, was wonderful – old Brooks Brothers, unlined silk, ivory with stripes of peacock green – a little loose, but it fit all right. 'Judy,' I said, looking at my cuffs.
'This is wonderful. You sure you don't mind?'
'You can have it,' said Judy. 'I don't have time to do anything with it. I'm too busy sewing those damned costumes for fucking As You Like It. It goes up in three weeks and I don't know what I'm going to do. I've got all these freshmen working for me this term that don't know a sewing machine from a hole in the ground.'
'By the way, love that jacket, old man,' Bunny said to me as we were getting out of the taxi. 'Silk, isn't it?'
'Yes. It was my grandfather's.'
Bunny pinched a piece of the rich, yellowy cloth near the cuff and rubbed it back and forth between his fingers. 'Lovely piece,' he said importantly. 'Not quite the thing for this time of year, though.'
'No?' I said.
'Naw. This is the East Coast, boy. I know they're pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here 52. they don't let you run around in your bathing suit all year long.
Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues… Here, let me get that door for you. You know, I think you'll like this place.
Not exactly the Polo Lounge, but for Vermont it's not too bad, do you think?'
It was a tiny, beautiful restaurant with white tablecloths and bay windows opening onto a cottage garden – hedges and trellised roses, nasturtiums bordering the flagstone path. The customers were mostly middle-aged and prosperous: ruddy country-lawyer types who, according to the Vermont fashion, wore gumshoes with their Hickey-Freeman suits; ladies with frosted lipstick and challis skirts, nice looking in a kind of well-tanned, low-key way.
A couple glanced up at us as we came in, and I was well aware of the impression we were making- two handsome college boys, rich fathers and not a worry in the world. Though the ladies were mostly old enough to be my mother, one or two were actually quite attractive. Nice work if you could get it, I thought, imagining some youngish matron with a big house and nothing to do and a husband out of town on business all the time. Good dinners, some pocket money, maybe even something really big, like a car…
A waiter sidled up. 'You have a reservation?'
'Corcoran party,' said Bunny, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. 'Where's Caspar keeping himself today?'
'On vacation. He'll be back in two weeks.'
'Well, good for him,' said Bunny heartily.
Till tell him you asked for him.'
'Do that, wouldja?'
'Caspar's a super guy,' Bunny said as we followed the waiter to the table. 'Maitre d'. Big old fellow with moustaches, Austrian or something. And not' – he lowered his voice to a loud whisper 'not a fag, either, if you can believe that. Queers love to work in restaurants, have you ever noticed that? I mean, every single fag '
I saw the back of our waiter's neck stiffen slightly.
'- I have ever known has been obsessed with food. I wonder, why is that? Something psychological? It seems to me that '
I put a finger to my lips and nodded at the waiter's back, just as he turned and gave us an unspeakably evil look.
'Is this table all right, gentlemen?' he said.
'Sure,' said Bunny, beaming.
The waiter presented our menus with affected, sarcastic delicacy and stalked off. I sat down and opened the wine list, my face burning. Bunny, settling in his chair, took a sip of water and looked around happily. 'This is a great place,' he said.
'It's nice.'
'But not the Polo,' He rested an elbow on the table and raked the hair back from his eyes. 'Do you go there often? The Polo, I mean.'
'Not much.' I'd never even heard of it, which was perhaps understandable as it was about four hundred miles from where I lived.
'Seems like the kinda place you'd go with your father,' said Bunny pensively. 'For man-to-man talks and stuff. My dad's like that about the Oak Bar at the Plaza. He took me and my brothers there to buy us our first drink when we turned eighteen.'
I am an only child; people's siblings interest me. 'Brothers?' I said. 'How many?'
'Four. Teddy, Hugh, Patrick and Brady.' He laughed. 'It was terrible when Dad took me because I'm the baby, and it was such a big thing, and he was all "Here, son, have your first drink" and "Won't be long before you're sitting in my place" and "Probably I'll be dead soon" and all that kind of junk. And the whole time there I was scared stiff. About a month before, my buddy Cloke and I had come up from Saint Jerome's for the day to work on a history project at the library, and we'd run up a huge bill at the Oak Bar and slipped off without paying. You know, boyish spirits, but there I was again, with my dad.'
'Did they recognize you?'
'Yep,' he said grimly. 'Knew they would. But they were pretty decent about it. Didn't say anything, just tacked the old bill onto my dad's.'
I tried to picture the scene: the drunken old father, in a three-piece suit, swishing his Scotch or whatever it was he drank around in the glass. And Bunny. He looked a little soft but it was the softness of muscle gone to flesh. A big boy, the sort who played football in high school. And the sort of son every father secretly wants: big and good-natured and not awfully bright, fond of sports, gifted at backslapping and corny jokes. 'Did he notice?'
I said. 'Your dad?'
'Naw. He was three sheets to the wind. If I'd of been the bartender at the Oak Room he wouldn't have noticed.'
The waiter was heading towards us again.
'Look, here comes Twinkletoes,' said Bunny, busying himself with the menu. 'Know what you want to eat?'
'What's in that, anyway?' I asked Bunny, leaning to look at the drink the waiter had brought him. It was the size of a small fishbowl, bright coral, with colored straws and paper parasols and bits of fruit sticking out of it at frenetic angles.
Bunny pulled out one of the parasols and licked the end of it.
'Lots of stuff. Rum, cranberry juice, coconut milk, triple sec, peach brandy, creme de menthe, I don't know what all. Taste it, it's good.'
'No thanks.'
'C'mon.'
'That's okay.'
'C'mon.'
'No thank you, I don't want any,' I said.
'First time I ever had one of these was when I was in Jamaica, two summers ago,' said Bunny reminiscently. 'Bartender named Sam cooked it up for me. "Drink three of these, son," he said, "and you won't be able to find the door" and bless me, I couldn't.
Ever been to Jamaica?'
'Not recently, no.'
'Probably you're used to palm trees and coconuts and all that sort of thing, in California and all.,' thought it was wonderful.
Bought a pink bathing suit with flowers on it and everything.
Tried to get Henry to come down there with me but he said there was no culture, which I don't think is true, they did have | some kind of a little museum or something.' 3 'You get along with Henry?'
'Oh, sure thing,' said Bunny, reared back in his chair. 'We were roommates. Freshman year.'
'And you like him?'
'Certainly, certainly. He's a hard fellow to live with, though.
Hates noise, hates company, hates a mess. None of this bringing your date back to the room to listen to a couple Art Pepper records, if you know what I'm trying to get at.'
'I think he's sort of rude.'
Bunny shrugged. 'That's his way. See, his mind doesn't work the same way yours and mine do. He's always up in the clouds with Plato or something. Works too hard, takes himself too seriously, studying Sanskrit and Coptic and those other nutty languages. Henry, I tell him, if you're going to waste your time learning something besides Greek – that and the King's English are all I think a man needs, personally – why don't you buy yourself some Berlitz records and brush up on your French. Find a little cancan girl or something. Voolay-voo coushay avec moi and all that.'
'How many languages does he know?'
'I lost count. Seven or eight. He can read hieroglyphics.'
'Wow.'
Bunny shook his head fondly. 'He's a genius, that boy. He could be a translator for the UN if he wanted to be.'
'Where's he from?'
'Missouri.'
He said this in such a deadpan way I thought he was joking, and I laughed.
Bunny raised an amused eyebrow. 'What? You thought he was from Buckingham Palace or something?'
I shrugged, still laughing. Henry was so peculiar, it was hard to imagine him being from anyplace.
'Yep,' said Bunny. 'The Show-Me State. St Louis boy like old Tom Eliot. Father's some kind of a construction tycoon – and not quite aboveboard, either, so my cousins in St Lou tell me.
Not that Henry will give you the slightest clue what his dad does.
Acts like he doesn't know and certainly doesn't care.'
'Have you been to his house?'
'Are you kidding? He's so secretive, you'd think it was the Manhattan Project or something. But I met his mother one time.
Kind of by accident. She stopped in Hampden to see him on her way to New York and I bumped into her wandering around downstairs in Monmouth asking people if they knew where his room was.'
'What was she like?'
'Pretty lady. Dark hair and blue eyes like Henry, mink coat, too much lipstick and stuff if you ask me. Awfully young. Henry's her only chick and she adores him.' He leaned forward and lowered his voice. 'Family's got money like you wouldn't believe. Millions and millions. Course it's about as new as it comes, but a buck's a buck, know what I mean?' He winked. 'By the way.
Meant to ask. How does your pop earn his filthy lucre?'
'Oil,' I said. It was partly true.
Bunny's mouth fell open in a little round o. 'You have oil wells?'
'Well, we have one,' I said modestly.
'But it's a good one?'
'So they tell me.'
'Boy,' said Bunny, shaking his head. 'The Golden West.'
'It's been good to us,' I said.
'Geez.' Bunny said. 'My dad's just a lousy old bank president.'
I felt it necessary to change the subject, however awkwardly, as we were heading here towards treacherous waters. 'If Henry's from St Louis,' I said, 'how did he get to be so smart?'
This was an innocuous question but, unexpectedly, Bunny winced. 'Henry had a bad accident when he was a little boy,' he said. 'Got hit by a car or something and nearly died. He was out of school for a couple years, had tutors and stuff, but for a long time he couldn't do much but lie in bed and read. I guess he was one of those kids who can read at college level when they're about two years old.'
'Hit by a car?'
'I think that's what it was. Can't think what else it could've been. He doesn't like to talk about it.' He lowered his voice.
'Know the way he parts his hair, so it falls over the right eye?
That's because there's a scar there. Almost lost the eye, can't see out of it too good. And the stiff way he walks, sort of a limp. Not that it matters, he's strong as an ox. I don't know what he did, lift weights or what, but he certainly built himself back up again. A regular Teddy Roosevelt, overcoming obstacles and all. You got to admire him for it.' He brushed his hair back again and motioned to the waiter for another drink. 'I mean, you take somebody like Francis. You ask me, he's as smart as Henry. Society boy, tons of money. He's had it too easy, though. He's lazy. Likes to play.
Won't do a thing after school but drink like a fish and go to parties.
Now Henry.' He raised an eyebrow. 'Couldn't beat him away from Greek with a stick – Ah, thank you, there, sir,' he said to the waiter, who was holding out another of the coral-colored drinks at arm's length. 'You want another?'
'I'm fine.'
'Go ahead, old man. On me.'
'Another martini, I guess,' I said to the waiter, who had already turned away. He turned to glare at me.
Thanks,' I said weakly, looking away from his lingering, hateful smile until I was sure he had gone.
'You know, there's nothing I hate like I hate an officious fag,' said Bunny pleasantly. 'You ask me, I think they ought to round them all up and burn them at the stake.'
I've known men who run down homosexuality because they are uncomfortable with it, perhaps harbor inclinations in that area; and I've known men who run down homosexuality and mean it. At first I had placed Bunny in the first category. His glad-handing, varsity chumminess was totally alien and therefore suspect; then, too, he studied the classics, which are certainly harmless enough but which still provoke the raised eyebrow in some circles. ('You wrant to know what Classics are?' said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. Till tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos.' A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.)
The more I listened to Bunny, however, the more apparent it became that there was no affected laughter, no anxiety to please.
Instead, there was the blithe unselfconciousness of some crotchety old Veteran of Foreign Wars – married for years, father of multitudes – who finds the topic infinitely repugnant and amusing.
'But your friend Francis?' I said.
I was being snide, I suppose, or maybe I just wanted to see how he would wriggle out of that one. Though Francis might or might not have been homosexual – and could just as easily have been a really dangerous type of ladies' man – he was certainly of that vulpine, well-dressed, unflappable sort who, to someone with Bunny's alleged nose for such things, would rouse a certain suspicion.
Bunny raised an eyebrow. 'That's nonsense,' he said curtly.
'Who told you that?'
'Nobody. Just Judy Poovey,' I said, when I saw he wasn't going to take nobody for an answer.
'Well, I can see why she'd say it but nowadays everybody's gay this and gay that. There's still such a thing as an old-fashioned mama's boy. All Francis needs is a girlfriend.' He squinted at me through the tiny, crazed glasses. 'And what about you?' he said, a trifle belligerently.
'What?'
'You a single man? Got some little cheerleader waiting back home for you at Hollywood High?'
'Well, no,' I said. I didn't feel like explaining my own girlfriend problems, not to him. It was only quite recently that I had managed to extricate myself from a long, claustrophobic relationship with a girl in California whom we will call Kathy. I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she'd firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie – all the clinging, all the complaints, all the parking-lot confessions of 'inadequacy' and 'poor self-image,' all those banal sorrows. She was one of the main reasons I was in such an agony to leave home; she was also one of the reasons I was so wary of the bright, apparently innocuous flock of new girls I had met my first weeks of school.
The thought of her had turned me somber. Bunny leaned across the table.
'Is it true,' he said, 'that the gals are prettier in California?'
I started laughing, so hard I thought my drink was going to blow out my nose.
'Bathing beauties?' He winked. 'Beach Blanket Bingo?'
'You bet.'
He was pleased. Like some jolly old dog of an uncle, he leaned across the table even further and began to tell me about his own girlfriend, whose name was Marion. 'I know you've seen her,' he said. 'Just a little thing. Blond, blue-eyed, about so high?'
Actually, this rang a bell. I had seen Bunny in the post office, in the first week of school, talking rather officiously to a girl of this description.
'Yep,' said Bunny proudly, running his finger along the edge of his glass. 'She's my gal. Keeps me in line, I can tell you,' This time, caught in mid-swallow, I laughed so hard I was close to choking.
'And she's an elementaryeducation major, too, don't you love it?' he said. 'I mean, she's a real girl.' He drew his hands apart, as if to indicate a sizable space between them. 'Long hair, got a little meat on her bones, isn't afraid to wear a dress. I like that. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't care much for the brainy ones.
Take Camilla. She's fun, and a good guy and all '
'Come on,' I said, still laughing. 'She's really pretty.'
'That she is, that she is,' he agreed, holding up a conciliatory palm. 'Lovely girl. I've always said so. Looks just like a statue of Diana in my father's club. All she lacks is a mother's firm hand, but still, for my money, she's what you call a bramble rose, as opposed to your hybrid tea. Doesn't take the pains she ought, you know. And runs around half the time in her brother's sloppy old clothes, which maybe some girls could get away with – well, frankly I don't think any girls can really get away with it, but she certainly can't. Looks too much like her brother. I mean to say, Charles is a handsome fellow and a sterling character all around, but I wouldn't want to marry him, would I?'
He was on a roll and was about to say something else; but then, quite suddenly, he stopped, his face souring as if something unpleasant had occurred to him. I was puzzled, yet a little amused; was he afraid he'd said too much, afraid of seeming foolish? I was trying to think of a quick change of subject, to let him off the hook, but then he shifted in his chair and squinted across the room.
'Look there,' he said. 'Think that's us? It's about time.'
Despite the vast amount we ate that afternoon – soups, lobsters, pates, mousses, an array appalling in variety and amount – we drank even more, three bottles of Taittinger on top of the cocktails, and brandy on top of that, so that, gradually, our table became the sole hub of convergence in the room, around which objects spun and blurred at a dizzying velocity. I kept drinking from glasses which kept appearing as if by magic, Bunny proposing toasts to everything from Hampden College to Benjamin Jowett to Periclean Athens, and the toasts becoming purpler and purpler as time wore on until, by the time the coffee arrived, it was getting dark. Bunny was so drunk by then he asked the waiter to bring us two cigars, which he did, along with the check, face down, on a little tray.
The dim room was whirling at what was now an incredible rate of speed, and the cigar, so far from helping that, made me see as well a series of luminous spots that were dark around the edges, and reminded me unpleasantly of those horrible one-celled creatures that I used to have to blink at through a microscope till my head swam. I put it out in the ashtray, or what I thought was the ashtray but was in fact my dessert plate. Bunny took off his gold-rimmed spectacles, unhooking them carefully from behind each ear, and began to polish them with a napkin. Without them, his eyes were small and weak and amiable, watery with smoke, crinkled at the edges with laughter.
'Ah. That was some lunch, wasn't it, old man?' he said around the cigar clamped in his teeth, holding the glasses to the light to inspect them for dust. He looked like a very young Teddy Roosevelt, sans moustache, about to lead the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill or go out and track a wildebeest or something.
'It was wonderful. Thanks.'
He blew out a ponderous cloud of blue, foul-smelling smoke.
'Great food, good company, lotsa drinks, couldn't ask for much more, could we? What's that song?'
'What song?'
*,' want my dinner,' sang Bunny, 'and conversation, and… something, dum-te-dum.'
'Don't know.'
'I don't know, either. Ethel Merman sings it.'
The light was growing dimmer and, as I struggled to focus on objects outside our immediate area, I saw the place was empty except for us. In a distant corner hovered a pale shape which I believed to be our waiter, a being obscure, faintly supernatural in aspect, yet without that preoccupied air which shadows are said to possess: we were the sole focus of its attention; I felt it concentrating towards us its rays of spectral hate.
'Uh,' I said, shifting in my chair with a movement that almost made me lose my balance, 'maybe we should go.'
Bunny waved his hand magnanimously and turned over the check, rummaging in a pocket as he studied it. In a moment he looked up and smiled. 'I say, old horse.'
'Yes?'
'Hate to do this to you, but why don't you stand me lunch this time.'
I raised a drunken eyebrow and laughed. 'I don't have a cent on me.'
'Neither do I,' he said. 'Funny thing. Seem to have left my wallet at home.'
'Oh, come on. You're joking.'
'Not at all,' he said lightly. 'Haven't a dime. I'd turn out my pockets for you, but Twinkletoes'd see.'
I became aware of our malevolent waiter, lurking in the shadows, no doubt listening to this exchange with interest. 'How much is it?' I said.
He ran an unsteady finger down the column of figures. 'Comes to two hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-nine cents,' he said. 'That's without tip.'
I was stunned at this amount, and baffled at his lack of concern.
'That's a lot.'
'All that booze, you know.'
'What are we going to do?'
'Can't you write a check or something?' he said casually.
'I don't have any checks.'
Then put it on your card.'
'I don't have a card.'
'Oh, come on.'
'I don't,' I said, growing more irritated by the second.
Bunny pushed back his chair and stood up and looked around the restaurant with a studied carelessness, like a detective cruising a hotel lobby, and for one wild moment I thought he was going to make a dash for it. Then he clapped me on the shoulder. 'Sit tight, old man,' he whispered. 'I'm going to make a phone call.'
And then he was off, his fists in his pockets, the white of his socks flashing in the dim.
He was gone a long time. I was wondering if he was going to come back at all, if he hadn't just crawled out a window and left me to foot the bill, when finally a door shut somewhere and he sauntered back across the room.
'Worry not, worry not,' he said as he slid into his chair. 'All's well.'
'What'd you do?'
'Called Henry.'
'He's coming?'
'In two shakes.'
'Is he mad?'
'Naw,' said Bunny, brushing off this thought with a slight flick of the hand. 'Happy to do it. Between you and me, I think he's damned glad to get out of the house.'
After maybe ten extremely uncomfortable minutes, during which we pretended to sip at the dregs of our ice-cold coffee, Henry walked in, a book beneath his arm.
'See?' whispered Bunny. 'Knew he'd come. Oh, hello,' he said, as Henry approached the table. 'Boy am I glad to see '
'Where's the check,' said Henry, in a toneless and deadly voice.
'Here you are, old pal,' said Bunny, fumbling among the cups and glasses. 'Thanks a million. I really owe you '
'Hello,' said Henry coldly, turning to me.
'Hello.'
'How are you?' He was like a robot.
'Fine.'
That's good.'
'Here you go, old top,' said Bunny, producing the check.
Henry looked hard at the total, his face motionless.
'Well,' said Bunny chummily, his voice booming in the tense silence, 'I'd apologize for dragging you away from your book if you hadn't brought it with you. What you got there? Any good?'
Without a word, Henry handed it to him. The lettering on the front was in some Oriental language. Bunny stared at it for a moment, then gave it back. 'That's nice,' he said faintly.
'Are you ready to go?' Henry said abruptly.
'Sure, sure,' said Bunny hastily, leaping up and nearly knocking over the table. 'Say the word. Undele, undele. Any time you want.'
Henry paid the check while Bunny hung behind him like a bad child. The ride home was excruciating. Bunny, in the back seat, kept up a sally of brilliant but doomed attempts at conversation, which one by one flared and sank, while Henry kept his eyes on the road and I sat in the front beside him, fidgeting with the built-in ashtray, snapping it in and out till finally I realized how irritating this was and forced myself, with difficulty, to stop.
He stopped at Bunny's first. Bellowing a chain of incoherent pleasantries, Bunny slapped me on the shoulder and leapt out of the car. 'Yes, well, Henry, Richard, here we are. Lovely. Fine.
Thank you so much – beautiful lunch – well, toodle-oo, yes, yes, goodbye -' The door slammed and he shot up the walk at a rapid clip.
Once he was inside, Henry turned to me. 'I'm very sorry,' he said.
'Oh, no, please,' I said, embarrassed. 'Just a mix-up. I'll pay you back.'
He ran a hand through his hair and I was surprised to see it was trembling. 'I wouldn't dream of such a thing,' he said curtly.
'It's his fault.'
'But '
'He told you he was taking you out. Didn't he?'
His voice had a slightly accusatory note. 'Well, yes,' I said.
'And just happened to leave his wallet at home.'
'It's all right.'
'It's not all right,' Henry snapped. 'It's a terrible trick. How were you to know? He takes it on faith that whoever he's with can produce tremendous sums at a moment's notice. He never thinks about these things, you know, how awkward it is for everyone. Besides, what if I hadn't been at home?'
'I'm sure he really just forgot.'
'You took a taxi there,' said Henry shortly. 'Who paid for that?'
Automatically I started to protest, and then stopped cold. Bunny had paid for the taxi. He'd even made sort of a big deal of it.
'You see,' said Henry. 'He's not even very clever about it, is he? It's bad enough he does it to anyone but I must say I never thought he'd have the nerve to try it on a perfect stranger.'
I didn't know what to say. We drove to the front of Monmouth in silence.
'Here you are,' he said. 'I'm sorry.'
'It's fine, really. Thank you, Henry.'
'Good night, then.'
I stood under the porch light and watched him drive away.
Then I went inside and up to my room, where I collapsed on my bed in a drunken stupor.
'We heard all about your lunch with Bunny,' said Charles.
I laughed. It was late the next afternoon, a Sunday, and I'd been at my desk nearly all day reading the Parmenides. The Greek was rough going but I had a hangover, too, and I'd been at it so long that the letters didn't even look like letters but something else, indecipherable, bird footprints on sand. I was staring out the window in a sort of trance, at the meadow cropped close like bright green velvet and billowing into carpeted hills at the horizon, when I saw the twins, far below, gliding like a pair of ghosts on the lawn.
I leaned out the window and called to them. They stopped and turned, hands shading brows, eyes screwed up against the evening glare. 'Hello,' they called, and their voices, faint and ragged, were almost one voice floating up to me. 'Come down.'
So now we were walking in the grove behind the college, down by the scrubby little pine forest at the base of the mountains, with one of them on either side of me.
They looked particularly angelic, their blond hair windblown, both in white tennis sweaters and tennis shoes. I wasn't sure why they'd asked me down. Though polite enough, they seemed wary and slightly puzzled, as if I were from some country with unfamiliar, eccentric customs, which made it necessary for them to take great caution in order not to startle or offend.
'How'd you hear about it?' I said. 'The lunch?'
'Bun called this morning. And Henry told us about it last night.'
'I think he was pretty mad.'
Charles shrugged. 'Mad at Bunny, maybe. Not at you.'
'They don't care for each other, do they?'
They seemed astonished to hear this.
'They're old friends,' said Camilla.
'Best friends, I would say,' said Charles. 'At one time you never saw them apart.'
'They seem to argue quite a bit.'
'Well, of course,' said Camilla, 'but that doesn't mean they're not fond of each other all the same. Henry's so serious and Bun's so sort of – well, not serious – that they really get along quite well.'
'Yes,' said Charles. 'L'Allegro and II Penseroso. A well-matched pair. I think Bunny's about the only person in the world who can make Henry laugh.' He stopped suddenly and pointed into the distance. 'Have you ever been down there?' he said. 'There's a graveyard on that hill.' j I could see it, just barely, through the pines – a flat, straggled line of tombstones, rickety and carious, skewed at such angles that they gave a hectic, uncanny effect of motion, as if some j hysterical force, a poltergeist perhaps, had scattered them only moments before.
'It's old,' said Camilla. 'From the i,'oos. There was a town there too, a church and a mill. Nothing left but foundations, but you can still see the gardens they planted. Pippin apples and wintersweet, moss roses growing where the houses were. God knows what happened up there. An epidemic, maybe. Or a fire.'
'Or the Mohawks,' said Charles. 'You'll have to go see it sometime. The cemetery especially.'
'It's pretty. Especially in the snow.'
The sun was low, burning gold through the trees, casting our shadows before us on the ground, long and distorted. We walked for a long time without saying anything. The air was musty with far-off bonfires, sharp with the edge of a twilight chill. There was no noise but the crunch of our shoes on the gravel path, the whistle of wind in the pines; I was sleepy and my head hurt and there was something not quite real about any of it, something like a dream. I felt that at any moment I might start, my head on a pile of books at my desk, and find myself in a darkening room, alone.
Suddenly Camilla stopped and put a finger to her lips. In a dead tree, split in two by lightning, were perched three huge, black birds, too big for crows. I had never seen anything like them before.
'Ravens,' said Charles.
We stood stock-still, watching them. One of them hopped clumsily to the end of a branch, which squeaked and bobbed under its weight and sent it squawking into the air. The other two followed, with a battery of flaps. They sailed over the meadow in a triangle formation, three dark shadows on the grass.
Charles laughed. 'Three of them for three of us. That's an augury, I bet.'
'An omen.'
'Of what?' I said.
'Don't know,' said Charles. 'Henry's the ornithomantist. The bird-diviner.'
'He's such an old Roman. He'd know.'
We had turned towards home and, at the top of a rise, I saw the gables of Monmouth House, bleak in the distance. The sky was cold and empty. A sliver of moon, like the white crescent of a thumbnail, floated in the dim. I was unused to those dreary autumn twilights, to chill and early dark; the nights fell too quickly and the hush that settled on the meadow in the evening filled me with a strange, tremulous sadness. Gloomily, I thought of Monmouth House: empty corridors, old gas-jets, the key turning in the lock of my room.
'Well, see you later,' Charles said, at the front door of Monmouth, his face pale in the glow of the porch lamp.
Off in the distance, I saw the lights in the dining hall, across Commons; could see dark silhouettes moving past the windows.
'It was fun,' I said, digging my hands in my pockets. 'Want to come have dinner with me?'
'Afraid not. We ought to be getting home.'
'Oh, well,' I said, disappointed but relieved. 'Some other time.'
'Well, you know…?' said Camilla, turning to Charles.
He furrowed his eyebrows. 'Hmnn,' he said. 'You're right.'
'Come have dinner at our house,' said Camilla, turning impulsively back to me.
'Oh, no,' I said quickly.
'Please.'
'No, but thanks. It's all right, really.'
'Oh, come on,' said Charles graciously. 'We're not having anything very good but we'd like you to come,' I felt a rush of gratitude towards him. I did want to go, rather a lot. 'If you're sure it's no trouble,' I said.
'No trouble at all,' said Camilla. 'Let's go.'
Charles and Camilla rented a furnished apartment on the third floor of a house in North Hampden. Stepping inside, one found oneself in a small living room with slanted walls and dormer windows. The armchairs and the lumpy sofa were upholstered in dusty brocades, threadbare at the arms: rose patterns on tan, acorns and oak leaves on mossy green. Everywhere were tattered doilies, dark with age. On the mantel of the fireplace (which I later discovered was inoperable) glittered a pair of lead-glass candelabra and a few pieces of tarnished silver plate.
Though not untidy, exactly, it verged on being so. Books were stacked on every available surface; the tables were cluttered with papers, ashtrays, bottles of whiskey, boxes of chocolates; umbrellas and galoshes made passage difficult in the narrow hall.
In Charles's room clothes were scattered on the rug and a rich confusion of ties hung from the door of the wardrobe; Camilla's night table was littered with empty teacups, leaky pens, dead marigolds in a water glass, and on the foot of her bed was laid a half-played game of solitaire. The layout of the place was peculiar, with unexpected windows and halls that led nowhere and low doors I had to duck to get through, and everywhere I looked was some fresh oddity: an old stereopticon (the palmy avenues of a ghostly Nice, receding in the sepia distance); arrowheads in a dusty glass case; a staghorn fern; a bird's skeleton.
Charles went into the kitchen and began to open and shut cabinets Camilla made me a drink from a bottle of Irish whiskey which stood on top of a pile of National Geographies.
'Have you been to the La Brea tar pits?' she said, matter-offactly.
'No,' Helplessly perplexed, I gazed at my drink.
'Imagine that. Charles,' she said, into the kitchen, 'he lives in California and he's never been to the La Brea tar pits.'
Charles emerged in the doorway, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. 'Really?' he said, with childlike astonishment. 'Why not?'
'I don't know.'
'But they're so interesting. Really, just think of it.'
'Do you know many people here from California?' said Camilla.
'No.'
'You know Judy Poovey.'
I was startled: how did she know that? 'She's not my friend,' I said.
'Nor mine,' she said. 'Last year she threw a drink in my face.'
'I heard about that,' I said, laughing, but she didn't smile.
'Don't believe everything you hear,' she said, and took another sip of her drink. 'Do you know who Cloke Rayburn is?'
I knew of him. There was a tight, fashionable clique of Californians at Hampden, mostly from San Francisco and L. A.; Cloke Rayburn was at its center, all bored smiles and sleepy eyes and cigarettes. The girls from Los Angeles, Judy Poovey included, were fanatically devoted to him. He was the sort you saw in the men's room at parties, doing coke on the edge of the sink.
'He's a friend of Bunny's.'
'How's that?' I said, surprised.
'They were at prep school together. At Saint Jerome's in Pennsylvania.'
'You know Hampden,' said Charles, taking a large gulp of his 7i drink. 'These progressive schools, they love the problem student, the underdog. Cloke came in from some college in Colorado after his first year. He went skiing every day and failed every class. Hampden's the last place on earth '
'For the worst people in the world,' said Camilla, laughing.
'Oh, come on now,' I said.
'Well, in a way, I think it's true,' said Charles. 'Half the people here are here because nowhere else would let them in. Not that Hampden's not a wonderful school. Maybe that's why it's wonderful. Take Henry, for instance. If Hampden hadn't let him in, he probably wouldn't have been able to go to college at all.'
'I can't believe that,' I said.
'Well, it does sound absurd, but he never went past tenth grade in high school and, 1 mean, how many decent colleges are likely to take a tenth-grade dropout? Then there's the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs – he'd probably score off the charts if he did, but he's got some kind of aesthetic objection to them. You can imagine how that looks to an admissions board.' He took another sip of his drink. 'So, how did you end up here?'
The expression in his eyes was hard to read. 'I liked the catalogue,' I said.
'And to the admissions board I'm sure that seemed a perfectly sensible reason for letting you in.'
I wished I had a glass of water. The room was hot and my throat was dry and the whiskey had left a terrible taste in my mouth, not that it was bad whiskey; it was actually quite good, but I had a hangover and I hadn't eaten all day, and I felt, all at once, very nauseous.
There was a knock at the door and then a flurry of knocks.
Without a word, Charles drained his drink and ducked back into the kitchen while Camilla went to answer it.
Before it was even open all the way I could see the glint of little round glasses. There was a chorus of hellos, and there they 72. all were: Henry; Bunny, with a brown paper bag from the supermarket; Francis, majestic in his long black coat, clutching, with a black-gloved hand, the neck of a bottle of champagne.
The last inside, he leaned to kiss Camilla – not on the cheek, but on the mouth, with a loud and satisfied smack. 'Hello, dear,' he said. 'What a happy mistake we have made. I've got champagne, and Bunny brought stout, so we can make black and tans. What have we got to eat tonight?'
I stood up.
For a fraction of a second they were struck silent. Then Bunny shoved his paper bag at Henry and stepped forward to shake my hand. 'Well, well. If it isn't my partner in crime,' he said. 'Haven't had enough of going out to dinner, eh?'
He slapped me on the back and started to babble. I felt hot, and rather sick. My eyes wandered around the room. Francis was talking to Camilla. Henry, by the door, gave me a small nod and a smile, nearly imperceptible.
'Excuse me,' I said to Bunny. Till be back in just a minute.'
I found my way to the kitchen. It was like a kitchen in an old person's house, with shabby red linoleum and – in keeping with this odd apartment – a door that led onto the roof. I filled a glass from the tap and bolted it, a case of too much, too quickly.
Charles had the oven open and was poking at some lamb chops with a fork.
I – due largely to a rather harrowing tour my sixth-grade class took through a meat-packing plant – have never been much of a meat eater; the smell of lamb I would not have found appealing in the best of circumstances, but it was particularly repulsive in my current state. The door to the roof was propped open with a kitchen chair, a draft blowing through the rusty screen. I filled my glass again and went to stand by the door: deep breaths, I thought, fresh air, that's the ticket… Charles burned his finger, cursed, and slammed the oven shut. When he turned around he seemed surprised to find me.
'Oh, hi,' he said. 'What is it? Can I get you another drink?'
'No, thanks.'
He peered at my glass. 'What've you got? Is that gin? Where did you dig that up?'
Henry appeared in the door. 'Do you have an aspirin?' he said to Charles.
'Over there. Have a drink, why don't you.'
Henry shook a few aspirins into his hand, along with a couple of mystery pills from his pocket, and washed them down with the glass of whiskey Charles gave him.
He had left the aspirin bottle on the counter and surreptitiously I went over and got a couple for myself, but Henry saw me do it. 'Are you ill?' he said, not unkindly.
'No, just a headache,' 1 said.
'You don't have them often, I hope?'
'What?' said Charles. 'Is everybody sick?'
'Why is everybody in here?' Bunny's pained voice came booming from the hallway. 'When do we eat?'
'Hold on, Bun, it'll only be a minute.'
He sauntered in, peering over Charles's shoulder at the tray of chops he'd just removed from the broiler. 'Looks done to me,' he said, and he reached over and picked up a tiny chop by the bone end and began to gnaw on it.
'Bunny, don't, really,' said Charles. 'There won't be enough to go around.'
'I'm starving,' said Bunny with his mouth full. 'Weak from hunger.'
'Maybe we can save the bones for you to chew on,' Henry said rudely.
'Oh, shut up.'
'Really, Bun, I wish you would wait just a minute,' said Charles.
'Okay,' Bunny said, but he reached over and stole another chop when Charles's back was turned. A thin trickle of pinkish juice trickled down his hand and disappeared into the cuff of his sleeve.
To say that the dinner went badly would be an exaggeration, but it didn't go all that well, either. Though I didn't do anything stupid, exactly, or say anything that I shouldn't, I felt dejected and bilious, and I talked little and ate even less. Much of the talk centered around events to which I was not privy, and even Charles's kind parenthetical remarks of explanation did not help much to clarify it. Henry and Francis argued interminably about how far apart the soldiers in a Roman legion had stood: shoulder to shoulder (as Francis said) or (as Henry maintained) three or four feet apart. This led into an even longer argument – hard to follow and, to me, intensely boring – about whether Hesiod's primordial Chaos was simply empty space or chaos in the modern sense of the word.
Camilla put on ajosephine Baker record; Bunny ate my lamb chop.
I left early. Both Francis and Henry offered to drive me home, which for some reason made me feel even worse. I told them I'd rather walk, thanks, and backed out of the apartment, smiling, practically delirious, my face burning under the collective gaze of cool, curious solicitude.
It wasn't far to school, only fifteen minutes, but it was getting cold and my head hurt and the whole evening had left me with a keen sense of inadequacy and failure which grew keener with every step. I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might've missed, and my mind – quite willingly – supplied various distortions.
When I got to my room it was silver and alien with moonlight, the window still open and the Parmenides open on the desk where I had left it; a half-drunk coffee from the snack bar stood beside it, cold in its styrofoam cup. The room was chilly but I didn't shut the window. Instead, I lay down on my bed, without taking off my shoes, without turning on the light.
As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the pages of the Pannenides rippled back and forth.
I had meant to sleep only a few hours, but I woke with a start the next morning to find sunlight pouring in and the clock reading five of nine. Without stopping to shave or comb my hair or even change my clothes from the night before, I grabbed my Greek Prose composition book and my Liddell and Scott and ran to Julian's office.
Except for Julian, who always made a point of arriving a few minutes late, everyone was there. From the hall I heard them talking, but when I opened the door they all fell quiet and looked at me.
No one said anything for a moment. Then Henry said: 'Good morning.'
'Good morning,' I said. In the clear northern light they all looked fresh, well rested, startled at my appearance; they stared at me as I ran a self-conscious hand through my disheveled hair.
'Looks like you didn't meet up with a razor this morning, chap,' said Bunny to me. 'Looks like '
Then the door opened and Julian walked in.
There was a great deal to do in class that day, especially for me, being so far behind; on Tuesdays and Thursdays it might be pleasant to sit around and talk about literature, or philosophy, but the rest of the week was taken up in Greek grammar and prose composition and that, for the most part, was brutal, bludgeoning labor, labor that I – being older now, and a little less hardy would scarcely be able to force myself to do today. I had certainly plenty to worry about besides the coldness which apparently had infected my classmates once again, their crisp air of solidarity, the cool way their eyes seemed to look right through me. There had been an opening in their ranks, but now it was closed; I was bark, it seemed, exactly where I'd begun.
That afternoon, I went to see Julian on the pretext of talking about credit transfers, but with something very different on my mind.
For it seemed, quite suddenly, that my decision to drop everything for Greek had been a rash and foolish one, and made for all the wrong reasons. What had I been thinking of? I liked Greek, and I liked Julian, but I wasn't sure if I liked his pupils or not and anyway, did I really want to spend my college career and subsequently my life looking at pictures of broken kouroi and poring over the Greek particles? Two years before, I had made a similar heedless decision which had plummeted me into a nightmarish, year-long round of chloroformed rabbits and day trips to the morgue, from which I had barely escaped at all. This was by no means as bad (with a shudder I remembered my old zoology lab, eight in the morning, the bobbing vats of fetal pigs), by no means -1 told myself- as bad as that. But still it seemed like a big mistake, and it was too late in the term to pickup my old classes or change counselors again.
I suppose I'd gone to see Julian in order to revive my flagging assurance, in hopes he would make me feel as certain as I had that first day. And I am fairly sure he would have done just that if only I had made it in to see him. But as it happened, I didn't get to talk to him at all. Stepping onto the landing outside his office, I heard voices in the hall and stopped.
It was Julian and Henry. Neither of them had heard me come up the stairs. Henry was leaving; Julian was standing in the open door. His brow was furrowed and he looked very somber, as if he were saying something of the gravest importance. Making the vain, or rather paranoid, assumption that they might be talking about me, I took a step closer and peered as far as I could risk around the corner.
Julian finished speaking. He looked away for a moment, then bit his lower lip and looked up at Henry.
Then Henry spoke. His words were low but deliberate and distinct. 'Should I do what is necessary?'
To my surprise, Julian took both Henry's hands in his own.
'You should only, ever, do what is necessary,' he said.
What, I thought, the hell is going on? I stood at the top of the stairs, trying not to make a sound, wanting to leave before they saw me but afraid to move.
To my utter, utter surprise Henry leaned over and gave Julian a quick little businesslike kiss on the cheek. Then he turned to leave, but fortunately for me he looked over his shoulder to say one last thing; I crept down the stairs as quietly as I could, breaking into a run when I was at the second landing and out of earshot.
The week that followed was a solitary and surreal one. The leaves were changing; it rained a good deal and got dark early; in Monmouth House people gathered around the downstairs fireplace, burning logs stolen by stealth of night from the faculty house, and drank warm cider in their stocking feet. But I went straight to my classes and straight back to Monmouth and up the stairs to my room, bypassing all these homey firelit scenes and hardly speaking to a soul, even to the chummier sorts who invited me down to join in all this communal dorm fun.
I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers. I thought I was sick, though I don't believe I really was; I was just cold all the time and unable to sleep, sometimes no more than an hour or two a night.
Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia. I spent the nights reading Greek until four in the morning, until my eyes burned and my head swam, until the only light burning in Monmouth House was my own. When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.
Tm a survivor,' the girl at the party was saying to me. She was blond and tan and too tall – almost my height – and without even asking I knew she was from California. I suppose it was something in her voice, something about the expanse of reddened, freckled skin, stretched taut over a bony clavicle and a bonier sternum and ribcage and entirely unrelieved by breasts of any sort – which presented itself to me through the lacuna of a Gaultier corselet. It was Gaultier, I knew, because she'd sort of casually let that slip. To my eyes it looked only like a wet suit, laced crudely up the front.
She was shouting at me over the music. 'I guess I've had a pretty hard life, with my injury and all' (I had heard about this previously: loose tendons; dance world's loss; performance-art's gain) 'but I guess I just have a very strong sense of myself, of my own needs. Other people are important to me, sure, but I always get what I want from them, you know.' Her voice was brusque with the staccato Californians sometimes affect when they're trying too hard to be from New York, but there was a bright hard edge of that Golden State cheeriness, too. A Cheerleader of the Damned. She was the kind of pretty, burnt-out, vacuous girl who at home wouldn't have given me the time of day. But now I realized she was trying to pick me up. I hadn't slept with anybody in Vermont except a little red-haired girl I met at a party on the first weekend. Somebody told me later she was a paper-mill heiress from the Midwest. Now I cut my eyes away whenever we met. (The gentleman's way out, as my classmates used to joke.)
'Do you want a cigarette?' I shouted at this one.
'I don't smoke.'
'I don't, either, except at parties.'
She laughed. 'Well, sure, give me one,' she yelled in my ear.
'You don't know where we can find any pot, do you?'
While I was lighting the cigarette for her, someone elbowed me in the back and I lurched forward. The music was insanely loud and people were dancing and there was beer puddled on the floor and a rowdy mob at the bar. I couldn't see much but a Dantesque mass of bodies on the dance floor and a cloud of smoke hovering near the ceiling, but I could see, where light from the corridor spilled into the darkness, an upturned glass here, a wide lipsticked laughing mouth there. As parties go, this was a nasty one and getting worse – already certain of the freshmen had begun to throw up as they waited in dismal lines for the bathroom – but it was Friday and I'd spent all week reading and I didn't care. I knew none of my fellow Greek students would be there. Having been to every Friday night party since school began, I knew they avoided them like the Black Death.
'Thanks,' said the girl. She had edged into a stairwell, where things were a little quieter. Now it was possible to talk without shouting but I'd had about six vodka tonics and I couldn't think of a thing to say to her, I couldn't even remember her name.
'Uh, what's your major,' I said drunkenly at last.
She smiled. 'Performance art. You asked me that already.'
'Sorry. I forgot.'
She looked at me critically. 'You ought to loosen up. Look at your hands. You're very tense.'
'This is about as loose as I get,' I said, quite truthfully.
She looked at me, and a light of recognition began to dawn in her eyes. 'I know who you are,' she said, looking at my jacket and my tie that had the pictures of the men hunting deer on it.
'Judy told me all about you. You're the new guy who's studying Greek with those creepos.'
'Judy? Whar do you mean, Judy told you about me?'
She ignored this. 'You had better watch out,' she said. 'I have heard some weird shit about those people.'
'Like what?'
'Like they worship the flicking Devil.'
'The Greeks have no Devil,' I said pedantically.
'Well, that's not what I heard.'
'Well, so what. You're wrong.'
'That's not all. I've heard some other stuff, too.'
'What else?'
She wouldn't say.
'Who told you this? Judy?'
'No.'
'Who, then?'
'Seth Gartrell,' she said, as if that settled the matter.
As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word 'postmodernist.'
'That swine,' I said. 'You know him?'
She looked at me with a glitter of antagonism. 'Seth Gartrell is my good friend.'
I really had had a bit much to drink. 'Is he?' I said. 'Tell me, then. How does his girlfriend get all those black eyes? And does he really piss on his paintings like Jackson Pollock?'
'Seth,' she said coldly, 'is a genius.'
'Is that so? Then he's certainly a master of deception, isn't he?'
'He is a wonderful painter. Conceptually, that is. Everybody in the art department says so.'
'Well then. If everybody says it, it must be true,' 'A lot of people don't like Seth.' She was angry now. 'I think a lot of people are just jealous of him.'
A hand tugged at the back of my sleeve, near the elbow. I shrugged it off. With my luck it could only be Judy Poovey, trying to hit up on me as she inevitably did about this time every Friday night. But the tug came again, this time sharper and more impatient; irritably I turned, and almost stumbled backwards into the blonde.
It was Camilla. Her iron-colored eyes were all I saw at first luminous, bemused, bright in the dim light from the bar. 'Hi,' she said.
I stared at her. 'Helio,' I said, trying to be nonchalant but delighted and beaming down at her all the same. 'How are you?
What are you doing here? Can I get you a drink?'
'Are you busy?' she said.
It was hard to think. The little gold hairs were curled in a very engaging way at her temples. 'No, no, I'm not busy at all,' I said, looking not at her eyes but at this fascinating area around her forehead.
'If you are, just say so,' she said in an undertone, looking over my shoulder. 'I don't want to drag you away from anything.'
Of course: Miss Gaul tier. I turned around, half-expecting some snide comment, but she'd lost interest and was talking pointedly to someone else. 'No,' I said. 'I'm not doing a thing.'
'Do you want to go to the country this weekend?'
'What?'
'We're leaving now. Francis and me. He has a house about an hour from here.'
I was really drunk; otherwise I wouldn't have just nodded and followed her without a single question. To get to the door, we had to make our way through the dance floor: sweat and heat, blinking Christmas lights, a dreadful crush of bodies. When finally we stepped outside, it was like falling into a pool of cool, still water. Shrieks and depraved music throbbed, muffled, through the closed windows.
'My God,' said Camilla. 'Those things are hellish. People being sick all over the place.'
The pebbled drive was silver in the moonlight. Francis was standing in the shadows under some trees. When he saw us coming he stepped suddenly onto the lighted path. 'Boo,' he said.
We both jumped back. Francis smiled thinly, light glinting off his fraudulent pince-nez. Cigarette smoke curled from his nostrils.
'Hello,' he said to me, then glanced at Camilla. 'I thought you'd run off,' he said.
'You should have come in with me.'
'I'm glad I didn't,' said Francis, 'because I saw some interesting things out here,' 'Like what?'
'Like some security guards handing out a girl on a stretcher and a black dog attacking some hippies.' He laughed, then tossed his car keys in the air and caught them with a jingle. 'Are you ready?'
He had a convertible, an old Mustang, and we drove all the way to the country with the top down and the three of us in the front seat. Amazingly, I had never been in a convertible before, and it is even more amazing that I managed to fall asleep when both momentum and nerves should've kept me awake but I did, fell asleep with my cheek resting on the padded leather of the door, my sleepless week and the six vodka tonics hitting me as hard as an injection.
I remember little of the ride. Francis drove at a reasonable clip – he was a careful driver, unlike Henry, who drove fast and often recklessly and whose eyes were none too good besides. The night wind in my hair, their indistinct talk, the songs on the radio all mingled and blurred in my dreams. It seemed we'd been driving for only a few minutes when suddenly I was conscious of silence, and of Camilla's hand on my shoulder. 'Wake up,' she said.
'We're here.'
Dazed, half dreaming, not quite sure where I was, I shook my head and inched up in my seat. There was drool on my cheek and I wiped it off with the flat of my hand.
'Arc you awake?'
'Yes,' I said, though I wasn't. It was dark and I couldn't see a thing. My fingers finally closed on the door handle and only then, as I was climbing out of the car, the moon came out from behind a cloud and I saw the house. It was tremendous. I saw, in sharp, ink-black silhouette against the sky, turrets and pikes, a widow's walk.
'Geez,' I said.
Francis was standing beside me, but I was scarcely aware of it till he spoke, and I was startled by the closeness of his voice. 'You can't get a very good idea of it at night,' he said.
'This belongs to you?' I said.
He laughed. 'No. It's my aunt's. Way too big for her, but she won't sell it. She and my cousins come in the summer, and only a caretaker the rest of the year.'
The entrance hall had a sweet, musty smell and was so dim it seemed almost gaslit; the walls were spidery with the shadows of potted palms and on the ceilings, so high they made my head reel, loomed distorted traces of our own shadows. Someone in the back of the house was playing the piano. Photographs and gloomy, gilt-framed portraits lined the hall in long perspectives.
'It smells terrible in here,' said Francis. 'Tomorrow, if it's warm, we'll air it out, Bunny gets asthma from all this dust…
That's my great-grandmother,' he said, pointing at a photograph which he saw had caught my attention. 'And that's her brother next to her – he went down on the Titanic, poor thing. They found his tennis racket floating around in the North Atlantic about three weeks afterward.'
'Come see the library,' said Camilla.
Francis close behind us, we went down the hall and through several rooms – a lemon-yellow sitting room with gilt mirrors and chandeliers, a dining room dark with mahogany, rooms I wanted to linger in but got only a glimpse of. The piano music got closer; it was Chopin, one of the preludes, maybe.
Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass-fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier – dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading – sparkled in the dim.
There was a piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another.
A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair.
'Golly,' I said.
The playing stopped abruptly and Charles looked up. 'Well there you are,' he said. 'You're awfully late. Bunny's gone to sleep.'
'Where's Henry?' said Francis.
'Working. He might come down before bed.'
Camilla went to the piano and took a sip from Charles's glass.
'You should have a look at these books,' she said to me. 'There's a first edition oflvanhoe here.'
'Actually, I think they sold that one,' said Francis, sitting in a leather armchair and lighting a cigarette. 'There are one or two interesting things but mostly it's Marie Corelli and old Rover Boys.'
I walked over to the shelves. Something called London by somebody called Pennant, six volumes bound in red leather massive books, two feet tall. Next to it The Club History of London, an equally massive set, bound in pale calfhide. The libretto of The Pirates of Penzance. Numberless Bobbsey Twins. Byron's Marino Faliero, bound in black leather, with the date 1821 stamped in gold on the spine.
'Here, go make your own drink if you want one,' Charles was saying to Camilla.
'I don't want my own. I want some of yours.'
He gave her the glass with one hand and, with the other, wobbled up a difficult backwards-and-forwards scale.
'Play something,' I said.
He rolled his eyes.
'Oh, come on,' said Camilla.
'No.'
'Of course, he can't really play anything,' Francis said in a sympathetic undertone.
Charles took a swallow of his drink and ran up another octave, trilling nonsensically on the keys with his right hand. Then he handed the glass to Camilla and, left hand free, reached down and turned the fibrillation into the opening notes of a Scott Joplin rag.
He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase. Camilla, on the seat beside him, smiled at me. I smiled back, a little dazed.
The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.
Charlestons on the wings of airborne biplanes. Parties on sinking ships, the icy water bubbling around the waists of the orchestra as they sawed out a last brave chorus of 'Auld Lang Syne.' Actually, it wasn't 'Auld Lang Syne' they'd sung, the night the Titanic went down, but hymns. Lots of hymns, and the Catholic priest saying Hail Marys, and the first-class salon which had really looked a lot like this: dark wood, potted palms, rose silk lampshades with their swaying fringe. I really had had a bit much to drink. I was sitting sideways in my chair, holding tight to the arms (Holy Mary, Mother of God), and even the floors were listing, like the decks of a foundering ship; like we might all slide to the other end with a hysterical wheeee! piano and all.
There were footsteps on the stair and Bunny, his eyes screwed up and his hair standing on end, tottered in wearing his pajamas.
'What the hell,' he said. 'You woke me up.' But nobody paid any attention to him. and finally he poured himself a drink and tottered back up the stairs with it, in his bare feet, to bed.
The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business.
Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off – though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be – but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories: watchful and grudging, oddly silent. All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another. 'Stop looking so superior!' my father sometimes used to shout at me when I was eating, watching television, or otherwise minding my own business. But this facial cast of mine (that's what I think it is, really, a way my mouth has of turning down at the corners, it has little to do with my actual moods) has worked as often to my favor as to my disadvantage.
Months after I got to know the five of them, I found to my surprise that at the start they'd been nearly as bewildered by me as I by them. It never occurred to me that my behavior could seem to them anything but awkward and provincial, certainly not that it would appear as enigmatic as it in fact did; why, they eventually asked me, hadn't I told anyone anything about myself?
Why had I gone to such lengths to avoid them? (Startled, I realized my trick of ducking into doorways wasn't as clandestine as I'd thought.) And why hadn't I returned any of their invitations?
Though I had believed they were snubbing me, now I realize they were only waiting, politely as maiden aunts, for me to make the next move.
At any rate, this was the weekend that things started to change, that the dark gaps between the street lamps begin to grow smaller and smaller, and farther apart, the first sign that one's train is approaching familiar territory, and will soon be passing through the well-known, well-lighted streets of town. The house was their trump card, their fondest treasure, and that weekend they revealed it to me slyly, by degrees – the dizzy little turret rooms, the high-beamed attic, the old sleigh in the cellar, big enough to be pulled by four horses, astring with bells. The carriage barn was a caretaker's house. ('That's Mrs Hatch in the yard. She's very sweet but her husband is a Seventh-Day Adventist or something, quite strict. We have to hide all the bottles when he comes inside.'
'Or what?'
'Or he'll get depressed and start leaving little tracts all over the place.')
In the afternoon we wandered down to the lake, which was shared, discreetly, by several adjoining properties. On the way they pointed out the tennis court and the old summerhouse, a mock tholos, Doric by way of Pompeii, and Stanford White, and (said Francis, who was scornful of this Victorian effort at classicism) D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille. It was made of plaster, he said, and had come in pieces from Sears, Roebuck.
The grounds, in places, bore signs of the geometric Victorian trimness which had been their original form: drained fish-pools; the long white colonnades of skeleton pergolas; rock-bordered parterres where flowers no longer grew. But for the most part, these traces were obliterated, with the hedges running wild and native trees – slippery elm and tamarack – outnumbering the quince and Japanese maple.
The lake, surrounded by birches, was bright and very still.
Muddled in the rushes was a small wooden rowboat, painted white on the outside and blue within.
'Can we take it out?' I said, intrigued.
'Of course. But we can't all go, we'll sink.'
I had never been in a boat in my life. Henry and Camilla went out with me – Henry at the oars, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his dark jacket on the seat beside him. He had a habit, as I was later to discover, of trailing off into absorbed, didactic, entirely self-contained monologues, about whatever he happened to be interested in at the time – the Catuvellauni, or late Byzantine painting, or headhunting in the Solomon Islands. That day he was talking about Elizabeth and Leicester, I remember: the murdered wife, the royal barge, the queen on a white horse talking to the troops at Tilbury Fort, and Leicester and the Earl of Essex holding the bridle rein… The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone. Camilla, flushed and sleepy, trailed her hand in the water. Yellow birch leaves blew from the trees and drifted down to rest on the surface. It was many years later, and far away, when I came across this passage in The Waste Land: Elizabeth and Leicester Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell Red and gold The brisk swell Rippled both shores Southwest wind Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers Weialala leia Wallala leilala We went to the other side of the lake and returned, half-blinded by the light on the water, to find Bunny and Charles on the front porch, eating ham sandwiches and playing cards.
'Have some champagne, quick,' Bunny said. 'It's going flat.'
'Where is it?'
'In the teapot.'
'Mr Hatch would be beside himself if he saw a bottle on the porch,' said Charles.
They were playing Go Fish: it was the only card game that Bunny knew.
On Sunday I woke early to a quiet house. Francis had given my clothes to Mrs Hatch to be laundered; putting on a bathrobe he'd lent me, I went downstairs to sit on the porch for a few minutes before the others woke up.
Outside, it was cool and still, the sky that hazy shade of white peculiar to autumn mornings, and the wicker chairs were drenched with dew. The hedges and the acres and acres of lawn were covered in a network of spider web that caught the dew in beads so that it glistened white as frost. Preparing for their journey south, the martins flapped and fretted in the eaves, and, from the blanket of mist hovering over the lake, I heard the harsh, lonely cry of the mallards.
'Good morning,' a cool voice behind me said.
Startled, I turned to see Henry sitting at the other end of the porch. He was without a jacket but otherwise immaculate for such an ungodly hour: trousers knife-pressed, his white shirt crisp with starch. On the table in front of him were books and papers, a steaming espresso pot and a tiny cup, and – I was surprised to see – an unfiltered cigarette burning in an ashtray.
'You're up early,' I said.
'I always rise early. The morning is the best time for me to work.'
I glanced at the books. 'What are you doing, Greek?'
Henry set the cup back into its saucer. 'A translation of Paradise Lost.'
'Into what language?'
'Latin,' he said solemnly.
'Hmm,' 1 said. 'Why?'
'I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English – of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I'm referring to is the later work. In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose.' He laid his cigarette back in the ashtray. I stared at it burning. 'Will you have some coffee?'
'No, thank you.'
'I hope you slept well.'
'Yes, thanks.'
'I sleep better out here than I usually do,' said Henry, adjusting his glasses and bending back over the lexicon. There was a subtle evidence of fatigue, and strain, in the slope of his shoulders which I, a veteran of many sleepless nights, recognized immediately.
Suddenly I realized that this unprofitable task of his was probably nothing more than a method of whiling away the early morning hours, much as other insomniacs do crossword puzzles.
'Are you always up this early?' I asked him.
'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.'
'I know what you mean,' I said, and I did. About the only time of day I had been able to stand in Piano was the very early morning, almost dawn, when the streets were empty and the light was golden and kind on the dry grass, the chain-link fences, the solitary scrub-oaks.
Henry looked up from his books at me. 'You're not very happy where you come from, are you?' he said.
I was startled at this Holmes-like deduction. He smiled at my evident discomfiture.
'Don't worry. You hide it very cleverly,' he said, going back to his book. Then he looked up again. 'The others really don't understand that sort of thing, you know.'
He said this without malice, without empathy, without even much in the way of interest. I was not even sure what he meant, but, for the first time, I had a glimmer of something I had not previously understood: why the others were all so fond of him.
Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes; the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.
I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food – acquired then, and largely, I must admit, in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class – have stayed with me through the years. It is easy, even now, for me to remember what their daily routines, which subsequently became my own, were like. Regardless of circumstance they lived like clockwork, with surprisingly little of that chaos which to me had always seemed so inherent a part of college life – irregular diet and work habits, trips to the Laundromat at one a. m. There were certain times of the day or night, even when the world was falling in, when you could always find Henry in the all-night study room of the library, or when you knew it would be useless to even look for Bunny, because he was on his Wednesday date with Marion or his Sunday walk. (Rather in the way that the Roman I Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained intact even during the terrible days after Bunny's death. Up until the very end there was always, always, Sunday-night dinner at Charles and Camilla's, except on the evening of the murder itself, when no one felt much like eating and it was postponed until Monday.)
I was surprised by how easily they managed to incorporate me into their cyclical, Byzantine existence. They were all so used to one another that I think they found me refreshing, and they were intrigued by even the most mundane of my habits: by my fondness for mystery novels and my chronic movie-going; by the fact that I used disposable razors from the supermarket and cut my own hair instead of going to the barber; even by the fact that I read papers and watched news on television from time to time (a habit which seemed to them an outrageous eccentricity, peculiar to me alone; none of them were the least bit interested in anything that went on in the world, and their ignorance of current events and even recent history was rather astounding.
Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me that men had walked on the moon. 'No,' he said, putting down his fork.
'It's true,' chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up along the way.
'I don't believe it.'
'I saw it,' said Bunny. 'It was on television.'
'How did they get there? When did this happen?').
They were still overwhelming as a group, and it was on an individual basis that I really got to know them. Because he knew I kept late hours, too, Henry would sometimes stop by late at night, on his way home from the library. Francis, who was a terrible hypochondriac and refused to go to the doctor alone, frequently dragged me along and it was, oddly enough, during those drives to the allergist in Manchester or the ear-nose-and throat man in Keene that we became friends. That fall, he had to have a root canal, over about four or five weeks; each Wednesday afternoon he would show up, white-faced and silent, at my room, and we would go together to a bar in town and drink until his appointment, at three. The ostensible purpose of my coming was so I could drive him home when he got out, woozy with laughing gas, but as I waited for him at the bar while he went across the street to the dentist's office, I was generally in no better condition to drive than he was.
I liked the twins most. They treated me in a happy, offhand manner which implied I'd known them much longer than I had.
Camilla I was fondest of, but as much as I enjoyed her company I was slightly uneasy in her presence; not because of any lack of charm or kindness on her part, but because of a too-strong wish to impress her on mine. Though I looked forward to seeing her, and thought of her anxiously and often, I was more comfortable with Charles. He was a lot like his sister, impulsive and generous, but more moody; and though he sometimes had long gloomy spells, he was very talkative when not suffering from these. In either mood, I got along with him well. We borrowed Henry's car, drove to Maine so he could have a club sandwich in a bar he liked there; went to Bennington, Manchester, the greyhound track in Pownal, where he ended up bringing home a dog too old to race, in order to save it from being put to sleep. The dog's name was Frost. It loved Camilla, and followed her everywhere: Henry quoted long passages about Emma Bovary and her greyhound: 'Sa pensee, sans but d'abord, vagabonda. it au hasard, comme sa levrette, quifaisait des cercles clans la campagne…' But the dog was weak, and highly strung, and suffered a heart attack one bright December morning in the country, leaping from the porch in happy pursuit of a squirrel. This was by no means unexpected; the man at the track had warned Charles that she might not live the week; still, the twins were upset, and we spent a sad afternoon burying her in the back garden of Francis's house, where one of I Francis's aunts had an elaborate cat cemetery, complete with headstones.
The dog was fond of Bunny, too. It used to go with Bunny and me on long, grueling rambles through the countryside every Sunday, over fences and streams, through bogs and pastures.
Bunny was himself as fond of walks as an old dog – his hikes were so exhausting, he had a hard time finding anyone to accompany him except me and the dog – but it was because of those walks that I became familiar with the land around Hampden, the logging roads and hunter's trails, all his hidden waterfalls and secret swimming holes.
Bunny's girlfriend, Marion, was around surprisingly little; partially, I think, because he didn't want her there but also, I think, because she was even less interested in us than we were in her.
('She likes to be with her girlfriends a lot,' Bunny would say boastfully to Charles and me. 'They talk about clothes and boys and all that kind of malarkey. You know.') She was a small, petulant blonde from Connecticut, pretty in the same standard, round-faced way in which Bunny was handsome, and her manner of dress was at once girlish and shockingly matronly – flowered skirts, monogrammed sweaters with bags and shoes to match.
From time to time I would see her at a distance in the playground of the Early Childhood Center as I walked to class. It was some branch of the Elementary Education department at Hampden; kids from the town went to nursery school and kindergarten there, and there she would be with them, in her monogrammed sweaters, blowing a whistle and trying to make them all shut up and get in line.
No one would talk about it much, but I gathered that earlier, abortive attempts to include Marion in the activities of the group had ended in disaster. She liked Charles, who was generally polite to everyone and had the unflagging capacity to carry on conversations with anyone from little kids to the ladies who worked in the cafeteria; and she regarded Henry, as did most I everyone who knew him. with a kind of fearful respect; but she hated Camilla, and between her and Francis there had been some m catastrophic incident which was so frightful that no one would even talk about it. She and Bunny had a relationship the likes of which I had seldom seen except in couples married for twenty years or more, a relationship which vacillated between the touching and the annoying. In her dealings with him she was very bossy and businesslike, treating him in much the same way she handled her kindergarten pupils; he responded in kind, alternately wheedling, affectionate, or sulky. Most of the time he bore her nagging patiently, but when he did not, terrible fights ensued.
Sometimes he would knock on my door late at night, looking haggard and wild-eyed and more rumpled than usual, mumbling, 'Lemme in, old man, you gotta help me, Marion's on the warpath…' Minutes later, there would be a neat report of sharp knocks at the door: rat-a-tat-tat. It would be Marion, her little mouth tight, looking like a small, angry doll.
'Is Bunny there?' she would say, stretching up on tiptoe and craning to look past me into the room.
'He's not here.'
'Are you sure?'
'He's not here, Marion.'
'Bunny!' she would call out ominously.
No answer.
'Bunny!'
And then, to my acute embarrassment, Bunny would emerge sheepishly in the doorway. 'Hello, sweetie,' 'Where have you been?'
Bunny would hem and haw.
'Well, I think we need to talk.'
'I'm busy now, honey.'
'Well' – she would look at her tasteful little Cartier watch 'I'm going home now. I'll be up for about thirty minutes and then I'm going to sleep.'
Tine.'
'I'll see you in about twenty minutes, then.'
'Hey, wait just a second there. I never said I was going to '
'See you in a little while,' she would say, and leave.
'I'm not going,' Bunny would say.
'No, I wouldn't.'
'I mean, who does she think she is.'
'Don't go.'
'I mean, gotta teach her a lesson sometime. I'm a busy man.
On the move. My time's my own.'
'Exactly.'
An uneasy silence would fall. Finally Bunny would get up.
'Guess I better go.'
'All right, Bun.'
'I mean, I'm not gonna go over to Marion's, if that's what you think,' he'd say defensively.
'Of course not.'
'Yes, yes,' Bunny would say distractedly, and bluster away.
The next day, he and Marion would be having lunch together or walking down by the playground. 'So you and Marion got everything straightened out, huh?' one of us would ask when next we saw him alone.
'Oh, yeah,' Bunny would say, embarrassed.
The weekends at Francis's house were the happiest times. The trees turned early that fall but the days stayed warm well into October, and in the country we spent most of our time outside.
Apart from the occasional, half-hearted game of tennis (overhead volley going out of court; poking dispiritedly in the tall grass with the ends of our rackets for the lost ball) we never did anything very athletic; something about the place inspired a magnificent laziness I hadn't known since childhood.
Now that I think about it, it seems while we were out there we drank almost constantly – never very much at once, but the I thin liicklc of spirits which began with the Bloody Marys at ^ breakfast would last until bedtime, and that, more than anything ™ else, was probably responsible for our torpor. Bringing a book outside to read, I would fall asleep almost immediately in my chair; when I took the boat out I soon tired of rowing and allowed myself to drift all afternoon. (That boat! Sometimes, even now, when I have trouble sleeping, I try to imagine that I am lying in that rowboat, my head pillowed on the cross-slats of the stern, water lapping hollow through the wood and yellow birch leaves floating down to brush my face.) Occasionally, we would attempt something a little more ambitious. Once, when Francis found a Beretta and ammunition in his aunt's night table, we went through a brief spate of target practice (the greyhound, jumpy from years of the starting gun, had to be secluded in the cellar), shooting at mason jars that were lined on a wicker tea-table we'd dragged into the yard. But that came to a quick end when Henry, who was very nearsighted, shot and killed a duck by mistake. He was quite shaken by it and we put the pistol away.
The others liked croquet, but Bunny and I didn't; neither of us ever quite got the hang of it, and we always hacked and sliced at the ball as if we were playing golf. Every now and then, we roused ourselves sufficiently to go on a picnic. We were always too ambitious at the outset – the menu elaborate, the chosen spot distant and obscure – and they invariably ended with all of us hot and sleepy and slightly drunk, reluctant to start the long trudge home with the picnic things. Usually we lay around on the grass all afternoon, drinking martinis from a thermos bottle and watching the ants crawl in a glittering black thread on the messy cake plate, until finally the martinis ran out, and the sun went down, and we had to straggle home for dinner in the dark.
It was always a tremendous occasion if Julian accepted an invitation to dinner in the country. Francis would order all kinds of food from the grocery store and leaf through cookbooks and worry for days about what to serve, what wine to serve with it, which dishes to use, what to have in the wings as a backup course should the souffle fall. Tuxedos went to the cleaners; flowers came from the florists; Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.
I don't know why we insisted on making such a production of these dinners, because by the time Julian arrived we were invariably nervous and exhausted. They were a dreadful strain for everyone, the guest included, I am sure – though he always behaved with the greatest good cheer, and was graceful, and charming, and unflaggingly delighted with everyone and everything – this despite the fact that he only accepted on the average about one of every three such invitations. I found myself less able to conceal the evidences of stress, in my uncomfortable borrowed tuxedo, and with my less-than-extensive knowledge of dining etiquette. The others were more practiced at this particular dissimulation. Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room – curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in the kitchen, everyone tugging at collars and dull-eyed with fatigue – but the instant the doorbell rang their spines would straighten, conversation would snap to life, the very wrinkles would fall from their clothes.
Though, at the time, I found those dinners wearing and troublesome, now I find something very wonderful in my memory of them: that dark cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our faces luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.
There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass.
'Live forever,' he says.
And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. 'Live forever,' we chorus, throwing our glasses back in unison.
And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.
I wonder now that I was around them so much and yet knew so little of what was happening at the end of that term. Physically, there was very little indication that anything was happening at all – they were too clever for that – but even the tiny discrepancies that squeaked through their guard I met with a kind of willful blindness. That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn't let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same. I knew, for instance, that the five of them sometimes did things – what, exactly, I didn't know – without inviting me, and that if put on the spot they would all stick together and lie about it, in a casual and quite convincing fashion. They were so convincing, in fact, so faultlessly orchestrated in the variations and counterpoint of falsehood (the twins' unblinking carelessness striking a bright true note against Bunny's tomfoolery, or Henry's bored irritation at rehashing a trivial sequence of events) that I usually found myself believing them, often against evidence to the contrary.
Of course, I can see traces of what went on – to their credit, quite small traces – in retrospect; in the way they would sometimes disappear, very mysteriously, and hours later be vague about their whereabouts; in private jokes, asides in Greek or even I Latin which I was well aware were meant to go over my head.
Naturally, I disliked this, but there seemed nothing alarming or unusual about it; though some of those casual remarks and private jokes assumed a horrific significance much later. Towards the end of that term, for instance, Bunny had a maddening habit of breaking out into choruses of'The Farmer in the Dell'; I found it merely annoying and could not understand the violent agitation to which it provoked the rest of them: not knowing then, as I do now, that it must have chilled them all to the bone.
Of course I noticed things. I suppose, being around them as much as I was, it would have been impossible not to. But they were mostly quirks, discrepancies, most of them so minor that it will perhaps show you how little reason I had to imagine that anything was wrong. For instance: All five of them seemed unusually accident-prone. They were always getting scratched by cats, or cutting themselves shaving, or stumbling over footstools in the dark – reasonable explanations, certainly, but for sedentary people they had an odd excess of bruises and small wounds. There was also a strange preoccupation with the weather; strange, to me, because none of them seemed to be involved in activity which might be aided or impeded by weather of any sort. And yet they were obsessed with it, Henry in particular. He was concerned, primarily, with rapid drops in temperature; sometimes, in the car, he would punch around as frantically on the radio as a sea captain before a storm, searching for barometric readings, long-range forecasts, data of any sort.
The news that the mercury was sinking would plunge him into a sudden, inexplicable gloom. I wondered what he would do when winter came; but by the first snowfall, the preoccupation had vanished, never to return.
Little things. I remember waking up once in the country at six o'clock, while everyone was still in bed, and going downstairs to find the kitchen floors freshly washed, still wet, immaculate except for the bare, mysterious footprint of a Man Friday in the I clean sandbank between water heater and porch Sometimes 1 woke nights out there, half-dreaming, but vaguely conscious of Hi something; muffled voices, movement, the greyhound whining softly and pawing at my bedroom door… Once I heard a muttered exchange between the twins about some bed sheets.
'Silly,' Camilla was whispering – and I caught a glimpse of ragged, fluttering cloth, streaked with mud – 'you took the wrong ones.
We can't bring them back like this.'
'We'll substitute the others.'
'But they'll know. The Linen Service ones have a stamp. We'll have to say we lost them.'
Though this exchange did not remain in my mind for long, I was puzzled, and even more so by the twins' unsatisfactory manner when I asked about it. Another oddity was my discovery, one afternoon, of a large copper pot bubbling on the back burner of the stove, a peculiar smell emanating from it. I lifted the lid and a cloud of pungent, bitter steam hit me in the face. The pot was filled with limp, almond-shaped leaves, boiling away in about half a gallon of blackish water. What in God's name, I thought, perplexed but also amused, and when I asked Francis he said, curtly, 'For my bath.'
It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don't know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together – my future, my past, the whole of my life – and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!
We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing sbowers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers. While the twins played cards at one end of the table, and Henry worked at the other, Francis sat curled in the window seat with a plate of little sandwiches in his lap, reading, in French, the Memoires of the Due de Saint-Simon, which for some reason he was determined to get through. He had gone to several schools in Europe and spoke excellent French, though he pronounced it with the same lazy, snob accent as his English; sometimes I got him to help me with my own lessons in first-year French, tedious little stories about Marie and Jean-Claude going to the tabac, which he read aloud in a languishing, hilarious drawl ('Marie a apporte des legumes a son frere') that sent everyone into hysterics. Bunny lay on his stomach on the hearth rug, doing his homework; occasionally he would steal one of Francis's sandwiches or ask a pained question. Though Greek gave him so much trouble, he'd actually studied it far longer than any of the rest of us, since he was twelve, a circumstance about which he perpetually boasted. He suggested slyly that this had simply been a childish whim of his, a manifestation of early genius a la Alexander Pope; but the truth of the matter (as I learned from Henry) was that he suffered from fairly severe dyslexia and the Greek had been a mandatory course of therapy, his prep school having theorized it was good to force dyslexic students to study languages like Greek, Hebrew, and Russian, which did not utilize the Roman alphabet. At any rate, his talent as a linguist was considerably less than he led one to believe, and he was unable to wade through even the simplest assignments without continual questions, complaints, and infusions of food. Towards the end of term he had a flare-up of asthma and wandered wheezing around the house in pajamas and bathrobe, hair standing on end, gasping theatrically at his I inhaler. The pills he took for it (1 was informed, behind his back) made him irritable, kept him up at night, made him gain weight.
And I accepted this explanation for much of Bunny's crabbiness at the end of the term, which subsequently I was to find was due to entirely different reasons.
What should I tell you? About the Saturday in December that Bunny ran around the house at five in the morning, yelling 'First snow!' and pouncing on our beds? Or the time Camilla tried to teach me the box step; or the time Bunny turned the boat over – with Henry and Francis in it – because he thought he saw a water snake? About Henry's birthday party, or about the two instances when Francis's mother- all red hair and alligator pumps and emeralds – turned up on her way to New York, trailing the Yorkshire terrier and the second husband? (She was a wild card, that mother of his; and Chris, her new husband, was a bit player * in a soap opera, barely older than Francis. Olivia was her name.
At the time I first met her, she had just been released from the Betty Ford Center after having been cured of alcoholism and an unspecified drug habit, and was launching merrily down the path of sin again. Charles once told me that she had knocked on his door in the middle of the night and asked if he would care to join her and Chris in bed. I still get cards from her at Christmas.)
One day, however, remains particularly vivid, a brilliant Saturday in October, one of the last summery days we had that year.
The night before – which had been rather cold – we'd stayed up drinking and talking till almost dawn, and I woke late, hot and vaguely nauseated, to find my blankets kicked to the foot of the bed and sun pouring through the window. I lay very still for a long time. The sun filtered through my eyelids a bright, painful red, and my damp legs prickled with the heat. Beneath me, the house was silent, shimmering and oppressive.
I made my way downstairs, my feet creaking on the steps.
The house was motionless, empty. Finally I found Francis and Bunny on the shady side of the porch. Bunny had on a T-shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts; Francis, his face flushed a blotchy albino pink, and his eyelids closed and almost fluttering with pain, was wearing a ratty terry-cloth bathrobe that was stolen from a hotel.
They were drinking prairie oysters. Francis pushed his over to me without looking at it. 'Here, drink this,' he said, Till be sick if I look at it another second.'
The yolk quivered, gently, in its bloody bath of ketchup and Worcestershire.7 don't want it,' I said, and pushed it back.
He crossed his legs and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. 'I don't know why I make these things,' he said. 'They never work. I have to go get some Alka-Seltzer.'
Charles closed the screen door behind him and wandered listlessly onto the porch in his red-striped bathrobe. 'What you need,' he said, 'is an ice-cream float.'
'You and your ice-cream floats.'
'They work, I tell you. It's very scientific. Cold things are good for nausea and -'
'You're always saying that, Charles, but I just don't think it's true.'
'Would you just listen to me for a second? The ice cream slows down your digestion. The Coke settles your stomach and the caffeine cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy. And besides, it makes you metabolize the alcohol faster. It's the perfect food.'
'Go make me one, would you?' said Bunny.
'Go make it yourself,' said Charles, suddenly irritable.
'Really,' Francis said, 'I think I just need an Alka-Seltzer.'
Henry – who had been up, and dressed, since the first wink of dawn – came down shortly, followed by a sleepy Camilla, damp and flushed from her bath, and her gold chrysanthemum of a head curled and chaotic. It was almost two in the afternoon. The greyhound lay on its side, drowsing, one chestnut-colored eye only partly closed and rolling grotesquely in the socket.
There was no Alka-Seltzer, so Francis went in and got a bottle of ginger ale and some glasses and ice and we sat for a while as the afternoon got brighter and hotter. Camilla – who was rarely content to sit still but was always itching to do something, anything, play cards, go for a picnic or a drive – was bored and restless, and made no secret of it. She had a book, but she wasn't reading; her legs were thrown over the arm of her chair, one bare heel kicking, with obstinate, lethargic rhythm, at the wicker side. Finally, as much to humor her as anything, Francis suggested a walk to the lake. This cheered her instantly. There was nothing else to do, so Henry and I decided to go along. Charles and Bunny were asleep, and snoring in their chairs.
The sky was a fierce, burning blue, the trees ferocious shades of red and yellow. Francis, barefoot and still in his bathrobe, stepped precariously over rocks and branches, balancing his glass of ginger ale. Once we got to the lake he waded in, up to his knees, and beckoned dramatically like Saint John the Baptist.
We took off our shoes and socks. The water near the bank was a clear, pale green, cool over my ankles, and the pebbles at the bottom were dappled with sunlight. Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, an old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting. A wind rustled through the birches, blowing up the pale undersides of the leaves, and it caught in Camilla's dress and billowed it out like a white balloon. She laughed, and smoothed it down quickly, only to have it blow out again.
The two of us walked near the shore, in the shallows barely covering our feet. The sun shimmered off the lake in bright waves – it didn't look like a real lake but a mirage in the Sahara.
Henry and Francis were further out: Francis talking, gesticulating wildly in his white robe and Henry with his hands clasped behind his back, Satan listening patiently to the rantings of some desert prophet.
We walked a good distance around the lake's edge, she and I, ^ then started back. Camilla, one hand shading her light-dazzled V eyes, was telling me a long story about something the dog had done – chewing up a sheepskin rug that belonged to the landlord, their efforts to disguise and finally to destroy the evidence – but I wasn't following her very closely: she looked so much like her brother, yet his straightforward, uncompromising good looks were almost magical when repeated, with only slight variations, in her. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.
I was looking at the side of her face, listening to the sweet, throaty cadences of her voice, when I was jolted from my musing by a sharp exclamation. She stopped.
'What is it?' M She was staring down at the water. 'Look,' In the water, a dark plume of blood blossomed by her foot; as I blinked, a thin red tendril spiraled up and curled over her pale toes, undulating in the water like a thread of crimson smoke.
'Jesus, what did you do?'
'I don't know. I stepped on something sharp.' She put a hand on my shoulder and I held her by the waist. There was a shard of green glass, about three inches long, stuck in her foot just above the arch. The blood pulsed thickly with her heartbeat; the glass, stained with red, glittered wickedly in the sun.
'What is it?' she said, trying to lean over to see. 'Is it bad?'
She had cut an artery. The blood was spurting out strong and fast.
'Francis?' I yelled. 'Henry?'
'Mother of God,' said Francis when he got close enough to see, and started splashing towards us, holding the skirt of his robe out of the water with one hand. 'What have you done to yourself?
Can you walk? Let me see,' he said, out of breath.
Camilla tightened her grip on my arm. The bottom of her foot was glazed with red. Fat droplets ticked off the edge, spreading and dispersing like drops of ink in the clear water.
'Oh, God,' said Francis, closing his eyes. 'Does it hurt?'
'No,' she said briskly, but I knew it did; I could feel her trembling and her face had gone white.
Suddenly Henry was there, too, leaning over her. 'Put your arm around my neck,' he said; deftly he whisked her up, as lightly as if she were made of straw, one arm under her head and the other beneath her knees. 'Francis, run get the first-aid kit out of your car. We'll meet you halfway.'
'All right,' said Francis, glad to be told what to do, and started splashing for the bank.
'Henry, put me down. I'm bleeding all over you.'
He didn't pay any attention to her. 'Here, Richard,' he said, 'get that sock and tie it around her ankle.'
It was the first time I had even thought of a tourniquet; some kind of doctor I would have made. 'Too tight?' I asked her.
'That's fine. Henry, I wish you'd put me down. I'm too heavy for you.'
He smiled at her. There was a slight chip in one of his front teeth I'd never noticed before; it gave his smile a very engaging quality. 'You're light as a feather,' he said.
Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over.
Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things – a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf- are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And that was what happened then, walking over the meadow to the house.
It was like a painting too vivid to be real – every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at it. Camilla was limp in Henry's arms, her head thrown back like a dead girl's, and the curve of her throat beautiful and lifeless.
The hem of her dress fluttered abstractly in the breeze. Henry's trousers were spattered with drops the size of quarters, too red to be blood, as if he'd had a paintbrush slung at him. In the overwhelming stillness, between our echoless footsteps, the pulse sang thin and fast in my ears.
Charles skidded down the hill, barefoot, still in his bathrobe, Francis at his heels. Henry knelt and set her on the grass, and she raised herself on her elbows.
'Camilla, are you dead?' said Charles, breathless, as he dropped to the ground to look at the wound.
'Somebody,' said Francis, unrolling a length of bandage, 'is going to have to take that glass out of her foot.'
'Want me to try?' said Charles, looking up at her.
'Be careful.'
Charles, her heel in his hand, caught the glass between thumb and forefinger and pulled gently. Camilla caught her breath in a quick, wincing gasp.
Charles drew back like he'd been scalded. He made as if to touch her foot again, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. His fingertips were wet with blood.
'Well, go on,' said Camilla, her voice fairly steady.
'I can't do it. I'm afraid I'll hurt you.'
'It hurts anyway.'
'I can't,' Charles said miserably, looking up at her.
'Get out of the way,' said Henry impatiently, and he knelt quickly and took her foot in his hand.
Charles turned away; he was almost as white as she was, and I wondered if that old story was true, that one twin felt pain when the other was injured.
Camilla flinched, her eyes wide; Henry held up the curved piece of glass in one bloody hand. 'Consummatum est,' he said.
Francis set to work with the iodine and the bandages.
'My God,' I said, picking up the red-stained shard and holding it to the light.
'Good girl,' said Francis, winding the bandages around the arch of her foot. Like most hypochondriacs, he had an oddly soothing bedside manner. 'Look at you. You didn't even cry.'
'It didn't hurt that much.'
'The hell it didn't,' Francis said. 'You were really brave.'
Henry stood up. 'She was brave,' he said.
Late that afternoon, Charles and I were sitting on the porch. It had turned suddenly cold; the sky was brilliantly sunny but the wind was up. Mr Hatch had come inside to start a fire, and I smelled a faint tang of wood smoke. Francis was inside, too, starting dinner; he was singing, and his high, clear voice, slightly out of key, floated out the kitchen window.
Camilla's cut hadn't been a serious one. Francis drove her to the emergency room – Bunny went, too, because he was annoyed at having slept through the excitement – and in an hour she was back, with six stitches in her foot, a bandage, and a bottle of Tylenol with codeine. Now Bunny and Henry were out playing croquet and she was with them, hopping around on her good foot and the toe of the other with a skipping gait that, from the porch, looked oddly jaunty.
Charles and I were drinking whiskey and soda. He had been trying to teach me to play piquet ('because it's what Rawdon Crawley plays in Vanity Fair') but I was a slow learner and the cards lay abandoned.
Charles took a sip of his drink. He hadn't bothered to dress all day. 'I wish we didn't have to go back to Hampden tomorrow,' he said.
'I wish we never had to go back,' I said. 'I wish we lived here.'
'Well, maybe we can.'
'What?'
'I don't mean now. But maybe we could. After school.'
'How's that?'
He shrugged. 'Well, Francis's aunt won't sell the house because she wants to keep it in the family. Francis could get it no from her for next to nothing when he turns twenty-one. And even if he couldn't, Henry has more money than he knows what to do with. They could go in together and buy it. Easy,' I was startled by this pragmatic answer.
'I mean, all Henry wants to do when he finishes school, if he finishes, is to find some place where he can write his books and study the Twelve Great Cultures.'
'What do you mean, if he finishes?'
'I mean, he may not want to. He may get bored. He's talked about leaving before. There's no reason he's got to be here, and he's surely never going to have a job.'
'You think not?' I said, curious; I had always pictured Henry teaching Greek, in some forlorn but excellent college out in the Midwest.
Charles snorted. 'Certainly not. Why should he? He doesn't need the money, and he'd make a terrible teacher. And Francis has never worked in his life. I guess he could live with his mother, except he can't stand that husband of hers. He'd like it better here. Julian wouldn't be far away, either.'
I took a sip of my drink and looked out at the faraway figures on the lawn. Bunny, hair falling into his eyes, was preparing to make a shot, flexing the mallet and shifting back and forth on his feet like a professional golfer.
'Does Julian have any family?' I said.
'No,' said Charles, his mouth full of ice. 'He has some nephews but he hates them. Look at this, would you,' he said suddenly, half rising from his chair.
I looked. Across the lawn, Bunny had finally made his shot; the ball went wide of the sixth and seventh arches but, incredibly, hit the turning stake.
'Watch,' I said. 'I bet he'll try for another shot.'
'He won't get it, though,' said Charles, sitting down again, his eyes still on the lawn. 'Look at Henry. He's putting his foot down,' in Henry was pointing at the neglected arches and, even at that distance, I could tell he was quoting from the rule book; faintly, we could hear Bunny's startled cries of protest.
'My hangover's about gone,' Charles said presently.
'Mine, too,' I said. The light on the lawn was golden, casting long velvety shadows, and the cloudy, radiant sky was straight out of Constable; though I didn't want to admit it, I was about half-drunk.
We were quiet for a while, watching. From the lawn I could hear the faint pock of mallet against croquet ball; from the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world:' "We are little black sheep who have gone astray… Baa baa baa…
'And if Francis buys the house?' I said finally. 'Think he'd let us live here?'
'Sure. He'd be bored stiff if it was just him and Henry. I guess Bunny might have to work in the bank but he could always come up on weekends, if he leaves Marion and the kids at home.'
I laughed. Bunny had been talking the night before about how he wanted eight children, four boys and four girls; which had prompted a long, humorless speech from Henry about how the fulfillment of the reproductive cycle was, in nature, an invariable harbinger of swift decline and death.
'It's terrible,' said Charles. 'Really, I can just see him. Standing out in a yard wearing some kind of stupid apron.'
'Cooking hamburgers on the grill.'
'And about twenty kids running around him and screaming.'
'Kiwanis picnics.'
'La-Z-Boy recliners.'
'Jesus.'
A sudden wind rustled through the birches; a gust of yellow leaves came storming down. I took a sip of my drink. If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible -just barely – in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.
It was getting dark; soon it would be time for dinner. I finished my drink in a swallow. The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant – the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.
Francis was working up to a big finish on his song. ' "Gentlemen songsters off on a spree… Doomed from here to eternity Charles looked at me sideways. 'So, what about you?' he said.
'What do you mean?'
'I mean, do you have any plans?' He laughed. 'What are you doing for the next forty or fifty years of your life?'
Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air.
That laughter haunts me still.
From the first moment I set foot in Hampden, I had begun to dread the end of term, when I would have to go back to Piano, and flat land, and filling stations, and dust. As the term wore on, and the snow got deeper and the mornings blacker and every day brought me closer to the date on the smeared mimeograph ('December 17 – All Final Papers Due') taped inside my closet door, my melancholy began to turn into something like alarm. I did not think I could stand a Christmas at my parents' house, with a plastic tree and no snow and the TV going constantly. It was not as if my parents were so anxious to have me, either. In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the Mac Natts. Mr Mac Natt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs Mac Natt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. They had got my parents doing things like taking bus trips to factory outlets and playing a dice game called 'bunko' and hanging around the piano bar at the Ramada Inn. These activities picked up considerably around holidays and my presence, brief and irregular as it was, was regarded as a hindrance and something of a reproach.
But the holidays were only half the trouble. Because Hampden was so far north, and because the buildings were old and expensive to heat, the school was closed during January and February.
Already I could hear my father complaining beerily about me to Mr Mac Natt, Mr Mac Natt slyly goading him on with remarks insinuating that I was spoiled and that he wouldn't allow any son of his to walk all over him, if he had one. This would drive my father into a fury; eventually he would come busting dramatically into my room and order me out, his forefinger trembling, rolling his eyes like Othello. He had done this several times when I was in high school and in college in California, for no reason really except to display his authority in front of my mother and his co-workers. I was always welcomed back as soon as he tired of the attention and allowed my mother to 'talk some sense' into him, but what about now? I didn't even have a bedroom in California anymore; in October, my mother had written to say that she had sold the furniture and turned it into a sewing room.
Henry and Bunny were going to Italy over the winter vacation, to Rome. I was surprised at this announcement, which Bunny had made at the beginning of December, especially since the two of them had been out of sorts for over a month, Henry in particular. Bunny, I knew, had been hitting him hard for money in the past weeks, but though Henry complained about this he seemed oddly incapable of refusing him. I was fairly sure that it wasn't the money per se, but the principle of it; I was also fairly sure that whatever tension existed, Bunny was oblivious of it.
The trip was all Bunny talked about. He bought clothes, guidebooks, a record called Parliamo Italiano which promised to teach the listener Italian in two weeks or less ('Even to those who've never had luck with other language courses!' boasted the jacket) and a copy of Dorothy Sayers's translation of Inferno. He knew I had nowhere to go for the winter vacation and enjoyed rubbing salt in my wounds. 'I'll be thinking of you while I'm drinking Campari and riding the gondolas,' he said, winking.
Henry had little to say about the trip. As Bunny rattled on he would sit smoking with deep, resolute drags, pretending not to understand Bun's fallacious Italian.
Francis said he'd be happy to have me to Christmas in Boston and then travel on with him to New York; the twins phoned their grandmother in Virginia and she said she'd be glad to have me there, too, for the entire winter break. But there was the question of money. For the months until school began I would have to have a job. I needed money if I wanted to come back in the spring, and I couldn't very well work if I was gallivanting around with Francis. The twins would he clerking, as they always did during holidays, with their uncle the lawyer, but they had quite a time stretching the job to fat the two of them, Charles driving Uncle Orman to the occasional estate sale and to the package store, Camilla sitting around the office waiting to answer a phone that never rang. I am sure it never occurred to them that I might want a job, too – all my tales of Californian richesse had hit the mark harder than I'd thought. 'What'll I do while you're at work?' I asked them, hoping they would get my drift, but of course they didn't. 'I'm afraid there's not much to do,' said Charles apologetically. 'Read, talk to Nana, play with the dogs.'
My only choice, it seemed, was to stay in Hampden town. Dr Roland was willing to keep me on, though at a salary that wouldn't cover a decent rent. Charles and Camilla were subletting their apartment and Francis had a teenaged cousin staying in his; Henry's, for all I knew, was standing empty, but he didn't offer its use and I was too proud to ask. The house in the country was empty, too, but it was an hour from Hampden and I didn't have a car. Then I heard about an old hippie, an ex-Hampden student, who ran a musical-instrument workshop in an abandoned warehouse. He would let you live in the warehouse for free if you carved pegs or sanded a few mandolins now and again.
Partly because 1 did not wish to be burdened with anyone's pity or contempt, I concealed the true circumstances of my stay.
Unwanted during the holidays by my glamorous, good-for nothing parents, I had decided to stay alone in Hampden (at an unspecified location) and work on my Greek, spurning, in my pride, their craven offers of financial help.
This stoicism, this Henrylike dedication to my studies and general contempt for the things of this world, won me admiration from all sides, particularly from Henry himself. 'I wouldn't mind being here myself this winter,' he said to me one bleak night late in November as we were walking home from Charles and Camilla's, our shoes sunk to the ankles in the sodden leaves that covered the path. 'The school is boarded up and the stoics in town close by three in the afternoon. Everything's white and empty and there's no noise but the wind. In the old days the snow would drift up to the eaves of the roofs, and people would be trapped in their houses and starve to death. They wouldn't be found until spring.' His voice was dreamy, quiet, but I was filled with uncertainty; in the winters where I lived it did not even snow.
The last week of school was a flurry of packing, typing, plane reservations and phone calls home, for everybody but me. I had no need to finish my papers early because I had nowhere to go; I could pack at my leisure, after the dorms were empty. Bunny was the first to leave. For three weeks he had been in a panic over a paper he had to write for his fourth course, something called Masterworks of English Literature. The assignment was twenty-five pages on John Donne. We'd all wondered how he was going to do it, because he was not much of a writer; though his dyslexia was the convenient culprit the real problem was not that but his attention span, which was as short as a child's. He seldom read the required texts or supplemental books for any course. Instead, his knowledge of any given subject tended to be a hodgepodge of confused facts, often strikingly irrelevant or out of context, that he happened to remember from classroom discussions or believed himself to have read somewhere. When it was time to write a paper he would supplement these dubious fragments by cross-examination of Henry (whom he was in the habit of consulting, like an atlas) or with information from either The World Book Encyclopedia or a reference work entitled Men of Thought and Deed, a six-volume work by E. Tipton Chatsford, Rev., dating from the 18905, consisting of thumbnail sketches of great men through the ages, written for children, full of dramatic engravings.
Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny, but the John Donne paper must have been the worst of all the bad papers he ever wrote (ironic, given that it was the only thing he ever wrote that saw print. After he disappeared, a journalist asked for an excerpt from the missing young scholar's work and Marion gave him a copy of it, a laboriously edited paragraph of which eventually found its way into People magazine).
Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. 'Hello, hello,' he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. 'Hope I didn't wake you, don't mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…' He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: 'Metahemeralism.
Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.'
'I'm sorry. I don't know what that is.'
'I don't either,' Bunny would say brokenly. 'Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.' He would resume pacing.
'Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it.'
'Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word.'
'Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.'
'Is it in the dictionary?'
'Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean' – he made a picture frame with his hands – 'the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?'
And so it would go, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended.
He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in.
'This is a nice paper, Bun -,' Charles said cautiously.
'Thanks, thanks.'
'But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?'
'Oh, Donne,' Bunny had said scoffingly. 'I don't want to drag him into this.'
Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?'
'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly.
'These lines are about an inch apart.'
'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?'
Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose.
'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said.
All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence 'And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.' We wondered if he would fail. But Bunny wasn't worried: the approaching trip to Italy, now close enough to cast the dark shadow of the Tower of Pisa over his bed at night, had thrown him into a state of high agitation and he was anxious to leave Hampden as soon as possible and dispense with his familial obligations so that he could embark.
Brusquely he asked me, since I didn't have anything to do, would I come over and help him pack? I said I would, and arrived to find him dumping the contents of entire drawers into suitcases, clothes everywhere. I reached up and carefully took a framed Japanese print from the wall and laid it down on his desk: 'Don't touch that,' he shouted, dropping his nightstand drawer on the floor with a bang and darting over to snatch up the print. 'That thing's two hundred years old.' As a matter of fact, I knew that it was no such thing, since I happened a few weeks before to have seen him carefully razoring it from a book in the library; I said nothing, but I was so irritated that I left immediately, amidst what gruff excuses his pride permitted him. Later, after he had gone, I found an awkward note of apology in my mailbox, wrapped around a paperback copy of the poems of Rupert Brooke and a box of Junior Mints.
Henry departed quickly and quietly. One night he told us he was leaving and the next day he was gone. (To St Louis? ahead to Italy? none of us knew.) Francis left the day after that and there were many elaborate and prolonged goodbyes – Charles, Camilla, and I standing by the side of the road, noses raw and ears half-frozen, while Francis shouted at us with the window rolled down and the motor idling and great clouds of white smoke billowing all around the Mustang for what must have been a good forty-five minutes.
Perhaps because they were the last to leave, I hated to see the twins go most of all. After Francis's horn honks had faded into the snowy, echoless distance, we walked back to their house, not saying much, taking the path through the woods. When Charles turned on the light, I saw that the place was heartbreakingly neat – sink empty, floors waxed, and a row of suitcases by the door.
The dining halls had closed at noon that day; it was snowing hard and getting dark and we didn't have a car; the refrigerator, freshly cleaned and smelling of Lysol, was empty. Sitting around the kitchen table we had a sad, makeshift dinner of canned mushroom soup, soda crackers, and tea without sugar or milk.
The main topic of conversation was Charles and Camilla's itinerary – how they would manage the baggage, what time they should call the taxi in order to make a six-thirty train. I joined in this travel-talk but a deep melancholy that would not lift for many weeks had already begun to settle around me; the sound of Francis's car, receding and then disappearing in the snowy, muffled distance, was still in my ears, and for the first time I realized how lonely the next two months would really be, with the school closed, the snow deep, everyone gone.
They'd told me not to bother seeing them off the next morning, they were leaving so early, but all the same I was there again at five to tell them goodbye. It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars; the thermometer on the porch of Commons had sunk to zero. The taxi, idling in a cloud of fume, was already waiting in front. The driver had just slammed the lid on a trunkful of luggage and Charles and Camilla were locking the door behind them. They were too worried and preoccupied to take much pleasure at my presence. Both of them were nervous travelers: their parents had been killed in a car accident, on a weekend drive up to Washington, and they were edgy for days before they had to go anywhere themselves.
They were running late, as well. Charles put down his suitcase to shake my hand. 'Merry Christmas, Richard. You will write, won't you?' he said, then ran down the walk to the cab. Camilla – struggling with two enormous carpetbags – dropped them both in the snow and said: 'Dammit, we'll never get all this luggage on the train.'
She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment. I stood blinking stupidly at her, the blood pounding in my veins, and my carefully I rehearsed plans for a goodbye kiss forgotten, when unexpectedly she flew up and threw her arms around me. Her hoarse breath ™ was loud in my ear and her cheek was like ice when she put it against mine a moment later; when I took her gloved hand, I felt the quick pulse of her slender wrist beneath my thumbs.
The taxi honked and Charles put his head out the window.
'Come on,' he shouted.
I carried her bags down to the sidewalk and stood under the street lamp as they pulled away. They were turned around in the back seat and waving to me through the rear window and I stood watching them, and the ghost of my own distorted reflection receding in the curve of the dark glass, until the cab turned a corner and disappeared.
I stood in the deserted street until 1 could no longer hear the sound of the motor, only the hiss of the powdery snow that the wind kicked up in little eddies on the ground. Then I started back to campus, hands deep in pockets and the crunch of my feet unbearably loud. The dorms were black and silent, and the big parking lot behind the tennis court was empty except for a few faculty cars and a lone green truck from Maintenance. In my dorm the hallways were littered with shoe boxes and coat hangers, doors ajar, everything dark and quiet as the grave. I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life. I pulled down the shades and lay down on my unmade bed and went back to sleep.
I had so few belongings it was possible to take them in one trip.
When I woke again, around noon, I packed my two suitcases and, dropping my key off at the security booth, hauled them down the deserted, snowy road into town and to the address the hippie had given me over the telephone.
It was a longer walk than I'd expected, and it soon took me off the main road and through some particularly desolate country near Mount Cataract. My way ran parallel to a rapid, shallow river – the Battenkill – spanned by covered bridges here and there It would have been a pleasant, if demanding walk even in the summertime but in December, in two feet of snow and with two heavy suitcases to carry, I found myself wondering if I would make it at all. My toes and fingers were cramped with cold, and more than once I had to stop to rest, but gradually the countryside began to look less and less deserted and finally the road came out where I had been told it would: Prospect Street in East Hampden.
It was a part of town I had never seen, and worlds away from the part 1 knew – maple trees and clapboard storefronts, village green and courthouse clock. This Hampden was a bombed-out expanse of water towers, rusted railroad tracks, sagging warehouses and factories with the doors boarded up and the windows broken out. All of it looked as though it had stood abandoned since the Depression, except for a seedy little bar at the end of the street, which, judging from the scrum of trucks out front, was doing a good brisk business, even this early in the afternoon.
Strings of Christmas lights and plastic holly hung above the neon beer lights; glancing inside, I saw a line of men in flannel shirts at the bar, all with shot glasses or beers before them, and – towards the back – a younger set running more to baseball caps and fat clustered around a pool table. I stood outside the red, padded-vinyl door and looked in through the porthole at the top for an instant longer. Should I go in and ask directions, have a drink, get warm? I decided I should, and my hand was on the greasy brass door handle when I saw the name of the place in the window: Boulder Tap. I had heard of the Boulder Tap from the local news. It was the epicenter of what little crime there was in Hampden – knifings, rapes, never a single witness. It was not a 1long its course. There were few houses, and even those grim, terrifying house trailers one frequently sees in the harkwoods of Vermont, with tremendous piles of wood to the side and black smoke pouring out the stovepipes, were few and far between.
There were no cars at all, except for the occasional derelict vehicle propped on cinderblocks in someone's front yard. the type of place where you'd want to stop in alone for a drink if you were a lost college bov from up on the hill. j O J L But it wasn't so hard to find where the hippie lived, after all.
One of the warehouses, right on the river, was painted bright purple.
The hippie looked angry, as though I'd woken him up, when he finally came to the door. 'Just let yourself in next time, man,' he said sullenly. He was a short fat man with a sweat-stained T-shirt and a red beard, who looked as if he'd spent many fine evenings with his friends around the pool table at the Boulder Tap. He pointed out the room where I was to live, at the top of a flight of iron stairs (no railing, naturally), and disappeared without a word.
I found myself in a cavernous, dusty room with a plank floor and high, exposed rafters. Besides a broken dresser, and a high chair standing in the corner, it was completely unfurnished except for a lawn mower, a rusted oil drum, and a trestle table which was scattered with sandpaper and carpentry tools and a few curved pieces of wood which were perhaps the exoskeletons of mandolins. Sawdust, nails, food wrappers and cigarette butts, Playboy magazines from the 19705 littered the floor; the many paned windows were furry with frost and grime.
I let one suitcase and then the other fall from my numb hands; for a moment my mind was numb, too, agreeably registering these impressions without comment. Then, all at once, I became aware of an overwhelming roaring, rushing noise. I went over and looked out the back windows behind the trestle table and was startled to see an expanse of water, hardly three feet below.
Farther down, I could see it pounding over a dam, and the spray flying. As I tried to clear a circle on the window with my hand so I could see better, I noticed that my breath was still white, even then, indoors.
Suddenly, something that I can only describe as an icy blast swept over me, and I looked up. There was a large hole in the roof; I saw blue sky, a swift cloud moving from left to right, through the jagged black edge. Below it was a thin powdery dusting of snow, stenciled perfectly on the wooden floor in the shape of the hole above it, and undisturbed except for the sharp line of a solitary footprint, my own.
A good many people asked me later if I had realized what a dangerous thing this was, attempting to live in an unheated building in upstate Vermont during the coldest months of the year; and to be frank, I hadn't. In the back of my mind were the stories I'd heard, of drunks, of old people, of careless skiers freezing to death, but for some reason none of this seemed to apply to me. My quarters were uncomfortable, certainly, they were foully dirty and bitterly cold; but it never occurred to me that they were actually unsafe. Other students had lived there; the hippie lived there himself; a receptionist at the Student Referral Office had told me about it. What I didn't know was that the hippie's own quarters were properly heated, and that the students who had lived there in the past had come there well armed with space heaters and electric blankets. The hole in the roof, moreover, was a recent development, unknown to the Student Referral Office. I suppose anyone who knew the whole story would have warned me off, but the fact was, nobody did know. I was so embarrassed at having such living quarters that I had told no one where I was staying, not even Dr Roland; the only person who knew all was the hippie, and he was supremely unconcerned with anyone's welfare but his own.
Early in the morning, while it was still dark, I would wake up in my blankets on the floor (I slept in two or three sweaters, long underwear, wool trousers and overcoat) and walk just as I was to Dr Roland's office. It was a long walk and, if it was snowing or the wind was up, sometimes a harrowing one. I would arrive at Commons, chilled and exhausted, just as the janitor was unlocking the building for the day. I would then go downstairs and shave and shower in the cellar, in a disused and rather sinister-looking room – white tiles, exposed piping, a drain in the middle of the floor – that had been part of a makeshift infirmary during World War II. The janitors used the taps to fill the wash buckets, so the water was still on and there was even a gas heater; I kept a razor, soap, an inconspicuously folded towel towards the back of one of the empty, glass-fronted cabinets. Then I would go make myself a can of soup and some instant coffee on the hot plate in the Social Science office, and by the time Dr Roland and the secretaries arrived, I already had quite a start on the day's work.
Dr Roland, accustomed as he was by this time to my truancy and my frequent excuses and my failure to complete tasks by the deadline, was startled and rather suspicious of this abrupt spurt of industry. He praised my work, questioned me closely; on several occasions I heard him in the hall discussing my metamorphosis with Dr Cabrini, the head of the psychology department, the only other teacher in the building who hadn't left for the winter. At the first, no doubt, he thought it was all some new trick of mine. But as the weeks rolled by and each new day of enthusiastic labor added another gold star to my shining record he began to believe: timidly at first but at last triumphantly.
Around the first of February he even gave me a raise. Perhaps he was hoping in his Behavioralist way that this would spur me to even greater heights of motivation. He came to regret this mistake, however, when the winter term ended and I went back to my comfortable little room in Monmouth House and all my old incompetent ways.
I worked as late at Dr Roland's as I decently could and then went to the snack bar in Commons for dinner. On certain fortunate nights there were even places to go afterwards, and I scanned the bulletin boards eagerly for these meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, these performances of Brigadoon by the local high school. But usually there was nothing at all, and Commons closed at seven, and I was left my long walk home in the snow and dark.
The cold in the warehouse was like nothing I've known before or since. I suppose if I'd had any sense I'd have gone out and bought an electric heater, but only four months before I had come from one of the warmest climates in America and I had only the dimmest awareness that such appliances existed. It never occurred to me that half the population of Vermont wasn't experiencing pretty much what I put myself through every night – bone-cracking cold that made my joints ache, cold so relentless I felt it in my dreams: ice floes, lost expeditions, the lights of search planes swinging over whitecaps as I floundered alone in black Arctic seas. In the morning, when I woke, I was as stiff and sore as if I'd been beaten. I thought it was because I was sleeping on the floor. Only later did I realize that the true cause of this malady was hard, merciless shivering, my muscles contracting as mechanically as if by electric impulse, all night long, every night.
Amazingly, the hippie, whose name was Leo, was quite angry that I didn't spend more time carving mandolin struts or warping boards or whatever it was I was supposed to be doing up there.
'You're taking advantage, man,' he would say threateningly whenever he happened to see me. He had some idea that I had studied instrument building and was in fact able to do all sorts of complex, technical work, though I had never told him any such thing. 'Yes, you did,' he said, when I pled my ignorance. 'You did. You said you lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains one summer and made dulcimers. In Kentucky.'
I had nothing to say to this. I am not unused to being confronted with my own lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop. I could only deny it and say, quite honestly, that I didn't even know. what a dulcimer was. 'Carve pegs,' he said insolently. 'Sweep up.' To which I replied, in so many words, that I could hardly carve pegs in rooms too cold for me to take my gloves off. 'Cut the fingertips off them, man,' said Leo, unperturbed. These occasional collarings in the front hall were as far as my contact with him went. It eventually became evident to me that Leo, for all his professed love for mandolins, never actually set foot in the workshop and had apparently not done so for months before I came to live there. I began to wonder if perhaps he was even unaware of the hole in the roof; one day I made so bold as to mention it to him. 'I thought that was one of the things you could fix around the place,' he said. It stands as a testimony to my misery that one Sunday I actually attempted to do this, with a few odd scraps of mandolin wood that I found around, and nearly lost my life in the attempt; the grade of the roof was wickedly sharp and I lost my balance and nearly fell into the dam, catching myself only at the last moment on a length of tin drainpipe which, mercifully, held. I managed with effort to save myself – my hands were cut on the rusted tin, and I had to get a tetanus shot – but Leo's hammer and saw and the pieces of mandolin wood tumbled into the dam. The tools all sank and Leo probably does not know to this day that they are missing, but unfortunately the mandolin pieces floated and managed to lodge themselves in a cluster at the top of the spillway, right outside Leo's bedroom window. Of course he had plenty to say about this, and about college kids who didn't care about other people's things, and everybody trying to rip him off all the time.
Christmas came and went without notice, except that with no work and everything closed there was no place to go to get warm except, for a few hours, to church. I came home afterwards and wrapped myself in my blanket and rocked back and forth, ice in my very bones, and thought of all the sunny Christmases of my childhood – oranges, bikes and Hula Hoops, green tinsel sparkling in the heat.
Mail arrived occasionally, in care of Hampden College. Francis sent me a six-page letter about how bored he felt, and how sick he was, and virtually everything he'd had to eat since I'd seen him last. The twins, bless them, sent boxes of cookies their erandmother had made and letters written in alternating inks black for Charles, red for Camilla. Around the second week of January I got a postcard from Rome, no return address. It was a photograph of the Primaporta Augustus; beside it, Bunny had drawn a surprisingly deft cartoon of himself and Henry in Roman dress (togas, little round eyeglasses) squinting off curiously in the direction indicated by the statue's outstretched arm. (Caesar Augustus was Bunny's hero; he had embarrassed us all by cheering loudly at the mention of his name during the reading of the Bethlehem story from Luke 2 at the literature division's Christmas party. 'Well, what of it,' he said, when we tried to shush him.
'All the world shoulda been taxed.')
I still have this postcard. Characteristically, the writing is in pencil; over the years it's become a bit smudged but it's still quite legible. There is no signature, but there is no mistaking the authorship: Richard old Man are you Frozen? it is quite warm here. We live in a Penscione (sp.) I ordered Conche by mistake yesterday in a restaurant it was awfiil but Henry ate it. Everybody here is a damn Catholic. Arrivaderci see you soon.
Francis and the twins had asked me, rather insistently, my address in Hampden. 'Where are you living?' said Charles in black ink. 'Yes, where?' echoed Camilla in red. (She used a particular morocco shade of ink that to me, missing her terribly, brought back in a rush of color all the thin, cheerful hoarseness of her voice.) As I had no address to give them, I ignored their questions and padded my replies with broad references to snow, and beauty, and solitude. I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away. The existence they described was detached and impersonal, all embracing yet indefinite, with large blanks that rose to halt the reader at every turn; with a few changes of date and circumstance they could have been as easily from the Gautama as myself.
I wrote these letters in the mornings before work, in the library, during my sessions of prolonged loitering in Commons, where I remained every evening until asked to leave by the janitor. It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overheard, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in my life, ever.
I became expert at making myself invisible. I could linger two hours over a coffee, four over a meal, and hardly be noticed by the waitress. Though the janitors in Commons rousted me every night at closing time, I doubt they ever realized they spoke to the same boy twice. Sunday afternoons, my cloak of invisibility around my shoulders, I would sit in the infirmary for sometimes six hours at a time, placidly reading copies of Yankee magazine ('Clamming on Cuttyhunk') or Reader's Digest ('Ten Ways to Help That Aching Back!'), my presence unremarked by receptionist, physician, and fellow sufferer alike.
But, like the Invisible Man in H. G. Wells, I discovered that my gift had its price, which took the form of, in my case as in his, a sort of mental darkness. It seemed that people failed to meet my eye, made as if to walk through me; my superstitions began to transform themselves into something like mania. I became convinced that it was only a matter of time before one of the rickety iron steps that led to my room gave and I would fall and break my neck or, worse, a leg; I'd freeze or starve before Leo would assist me. Because one day, when I'd climbed the stairs successfully and without fear, I'd had an old Brian Eno song running through my head ('In New Delhi,'And Hong Kong,' They all know that it won't be long…'), I now had to sing it to myself each trip up or down the stairs.
And each time I crossed the footbridge over the river, twice a day, I had to stop and scoop around in the coffee-colored snow at the road's edge until I found a decent-sized rock. I would then lean over the icy railing and drop it into the rapid current that bubbled over the speckled dinosaur eggs of granite which made up its bed – a gift to the river-god, maybe, for safe crossing, or perhaps some attempt to prove to it that I, though invisible, did exist. The water ran so shallow and clear in places that sometimes I heard the dropped stone click as it hit the bed. Both hands on the icy rail, staring down at the water as it dashed white against the boulders, boiled thinly over the polished stones, I wondered what it would be like to fall and break my head open on one of those bright rocks: a wicked crack, a sudden limpness, then veins of red marbling the glassy water.
If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence? Might the river beat me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out in the quiet waters, down behind the dye factory, where some lady would catch me in the beam of her headlights when she pulled out of the parking lot at five in the afternoon? Or would I, like the pieces of Leo's mandolin, lodge stubbornly in some quiet place behind a boulder and wait, my clothes washing about me, for spring?
This was, I should say, about the third week in January. The thermometer was dropping; my life, which before had been only solitary and miserable, became unbearable. Every day, in a daze, I walked to and from work, sometimes during weather that was ten or twenty below, sometimes during storms so heavy that all I could see was white, and the only way I made it home at all was by keeping close to the guard rail on the side of the road.
Once home, I wrapped myself in my dirty blankets and fell on the floor like a dead man. All my moments which were not consumed with efforts to escape the cold were absorbed with morbid Poe-like fancies. One night, in a dream, I saw my own corpse, hair stiff with ice and eyes wide open.
I was at Dr Roland's office every morning like clockwork. He, an alleged psychologist, noticed not one of the Ten Warning Signs of Nervous Collapse or whatever it was that he was educated to see, and qualified to teach. Instead, he took advantage of my silence to talk to himself about football, and dogs he had had as a boy. The rare remarks he addressed to me were cryptic and incomprehensible. He asked, for example, since I was in the Drama department, why hadn't I been in any plays? 'What's wrong? Are you shy, boy? Show them what you're made of Another time he told me, in an offhand manner, that when he was at Brown he had roomed with the boy who lived down the hall from him. One day, he said he didn't know my friend was in Hampden for the winter.
'I don't have any friends here for the winter,' I said, and I didn't.
'You shouldn't push your friends away like that. The best friends you'll ever have are the ones you're making right now. I know you don't believe me, but they start to fall away when you get to be my age.'
When I walked home at night, things got white around the edges and it seemed I had no past, no memories, that I had been on this exact stretch of luminous, hissing road forever.
I don't know what exactly was wrong with me. The doctors said it was chronic hypothermia, with bad diet and a mild case of pneumonia on top of it; but I don't know if that accounts for all the hallucinations and mental confusion. At the time I wasn't even aware I was sick: any symptom, any fever or pain, was drowned by the clamor of my more immediate miseries.
For I was in a bad fix. It was the coldest January on record for twenty-five years. I was terrified of freezing to death but there was absolutely nowhere I could go. I suppose I might've asked Dr Roland if I could stay in the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, but the embarrassment of that was such that death, to me, seemed preferable. I knew no one else, even slightly, and short of knocking on the doors of strangers there was little I could do. One bitter night I tried to call my parents from the pay phone outside the Boulder Tap; sleet was falling and I was shivering so violently I could hardly get the coins in the slot.
Although I had some desperate, half-baked hope that they might send money or a plane ticket, I didn't know what I wanted them to say to me; I think I had some idea that I, standing in the sleet and winds of Prospect Street, would feel better simply by hearing the voices of people far away, in a warm place. But when my father picked up the telephone on the sixth or seventh ring, his voice, beery and irritated, gave me a hard, dry feeling in my throat and I hung up.
Dr Roland mentioned my imaginary friend again. He'd seen him uptown this time, walking on the square late at night as he was driving home.
'I told you I don't have any friends here,' I said.
'You know who I'm talking about. Great big boy. Wears glasses.'
Someone who looked like Henry? Bunny? 'You must be mistaken,'
I said.
The temperature plummeted so low that I was forced to spend a few nights at the Catamount Motel. I was the only person in the place, besides the snaggle-toothed old man who ran it; he was in the room next to mine and kept me awake with his loud hacking and spitting. There was no lock on my door, only the antique sort that can be picked with a hairpin; on the third night I woke from a bad dream (nightmare stairwell, steps all different heights and widths; a man going down ahead of me, really fast) to hear a faint, clicking noise. I sat up in bed and, to my horror, saw my doorknob turning stealthily in the moonlight: 'Who's there?' I said loudly, and it stopped. I lay awake in the dark for a long time. The next morning, I left, preferring a quieter death at Leo's to being murdered in my bed.
A terrible storm came around the first of February, bringing with it downed power lines, stranded motorists, and, for me, a bout of hallucinations. Voices spoke to me in the roar of the water, in the hissing snow: 'Lie down,' they whispered, and 'Turn left. You'll be sorry if you don't.' My typewriter was by the window of Dr Roland's office. Late one afternoon, as it was getting dark, I looked down into the empty courtyard and was startled to see that a dark, motionless figure had materialized under the lamp, standing with its hands in the pockets of its dark overcoat and looking up at my window. It was shadowy and heavy snow was falling: 'Henry?' I said, and squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars. When I opened them again, I saw nothing but snow whirling in the bright cone of emptiness beneath the light.
At night I lay shivering on the floor, watching the illuminated snowflakes sift in a column through the hole in the ceiling. On the margin of stupefaction, as I was sliding off the steep roof of unconsciousness, something would tell me at the last instant that if I went to sleep I might never wake: with a struggle I would force my eyes open and all of a sudden the column of snow, standing bright and tall in its dark corner, would appear to me in its true whispering, smiling menace, an airy angel of death. But I was too tired to care; even as I looked at it I would feel my grasp slackening, and before I knew it I had tumbled down the slanted edge, and into the dark abyss of sleep.
Time was beginning to blur. I still dragged myself to the office, but only because it was warm there, and I somehow performed the simple tasks that I had to do, but I honestly do not know J how much longer I would have been able to keep this up had not a very surprising thing happened.
I'll never forget this night as long as I live. It was Friday, and Dr Roland was going to be out of town until the following Wednesday. For me, that meant four days in the warehouse, and even in my clouded state it was clear I might freeze to death for real.
When Commons closed I started for home. The snow was deep, and before long my legs to the knees were prickling and numb. By the time the road came around into East Hampden I was wondering seriously if I could make it to the warehouse, and what I would do when I got there. Everything in East Hampden was dark and deserted, even the Boulder Tap; the only light for miles around seemed to be the light shimmering around the pay phone in front. I made my way towards it as though it were a mirage in the desert. I had about thirty dollars in my pocket, more than enough to call a taxi to take me to the Catamount Motel, to a nasty little room with an unlocked door and whatever else might await me there.
My voice was slurred and the operator wouldn't give me the number of a taxi company. 'You have to give me the name of a specific taxi service,' she said. 'We're not allowed to '
'I don't know the name of a specific taxi service,' I said thickly.
'There's not a phone book here.'
'I'm sorry, sir, but we're not allowed to '
'Red Top?' I said desperately, trying to guess at names, make them up, anything. 'Yellow Top? Town Taxi? Checker?'
Finally I guess I got one right, or maybe she just felt sorry for me. There was a click, and a mechanical voice came on and gave me a number. I dialed it quickly so I wouldn't forget, so quickly that I got it wrong and lost my quarter.
I had one more quarter in my pocket; it was my last one. I took off my glove and groped in my pocket with my numbed fingers. Finally I found it, and I had it in my hand and was about to bring it up to the slot, when suddenly it slipped from my fingers and I pitched forward after it, hitting my forehead on the sharp corner of the metal tray beneath the phone.
I lay face down in the snow for a few minutes. There was a rushing noise in my ears; in falling, I had grabbed for the phone and knocked it off the hook, and the busy signal the receiver made as it swung back and forth sounded as if it were coming from a long way off.
I managed to get up on all fours. Staring at the place where my head had been, I saw a dark spot on the snow. When I touched my forehead with my ungloved hand the fingers came away red. The quarter was gone; besides, I had forgotten the number. I would have to come back later, when the Boulder Tap was open and I could get change. Somehow I struggled to my feet, leaving the black receiver dangling from its cord.
I made it up the stairs half walking, half on my hands and knees. Blood was trickling down my forehead. At the landing I stopped to rest and felt my surroundings slide out of focus: static, between stations, everything snowy for a moment or two before the black lines wavered and the picture snapped back; not quite clear, but recognizable. Jerky camera, nightmare commercial.
Leo's Mandolin Warehouse. Last stop, down by the river. Low rates. Remember us, too, for all your meat-locker needs.
I pushed the workshop door open with my shoulder and began to fumble for the light switch when suddenly I saw something by the window that made me reel with shock. A figure in a long black overcoat was standing motionless across the room by the windows, hands clasped behind the back; near one of the hands I saw the tiny glow of a cigarette coal.
The lights came on with a crackle and a hum. The shadowy figure, now solid and visible, turned around. It was Henry. He seemed on the verge of making some joking remark, but when he saw me his eyes got wide and his mouth fell open into a small round o.
We stood staring at each other across the room for a moment or two.
'Henry?' I said at last, my voice scarcely more than a whisper.
He let the cigarette fall from his fingers and took a step towards me. It really was him – damp, ruddy cheeks, snow on the shoulders of his overcoat. 'Good God, Richard,' he said, 'what's happened to you?'
It was as much surprise as I ever saw him show. I stood where I was, staring, unbalanced. Things had got too bright. I reached for the door frame, and the next thing I knew I was falling, and Henry had jumped forward to catch me.
He eased me onto the floor and took off his coat and spread it over me like a blanket. I squinted up at him and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. 'Where did you come from?'
I said.
'I left Italy early.' He was brushing the hair back from my forehead, trying to get a look at my cut. I saw blood on his fingertips.
'Some little place I've got here, huh?' I said, and laughed.
He glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. 'Yes,' he said brusquely. 'Like the Pantheon.' Then he bent to look at my head again.
I remember being in Henry's car, and lights and people bending over me, and having to sit up when I didn't want to, and I also remember someone trying to take my blood, and me complaining sort of feebly about it; but the first thing I remember with any clarity was sitting up and finding myself in a dim, white room, lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm.
Henry was sitting in a chair by my bed, reading by the table lamp. He put down his book when he saw me stir. 'Your cut wasn't serious,' he said. 'It was very clean and shallow. They gave you a few stitches.'
'Am I in the infirmary?'
'You're in Montpelier. I brought you to the hospital.'
'What's this IV for?'
'They say you have pneumonia. Would you like something to read?' he said courteously.
'No thank you. What time is it?'
'One in the morning.'
'But I thought you were in Rome.'
'I came back about two weeks ago. If you want to go back to sleep I'll call the nurse to give you a shot.'
'No thanks. Why haven't I seen you before now?'
'Because I didn't know where you lived. The only address I had for you was in care of the college. This afternoon I asked around at the offices. By the way,' he said, 'what's the name of the town where your parents live?'
'Piano. Why?'
'I thought you might want me to call them.'
'Don't bother,' I said, sinking back into my bed. The IV was like ice in my veins. 'Tell me about Rome.'
'All right,' he said, and he began to talk very quietly about the lovely Etruscan terracottas in the Villa Giulia, and the lily pools and the fountains in the nymphaeum outside it; about the Villa Borghese and the Colosseum, the view from the Palatine Hill early in the morning, and how beautiful the Baths of Caracalla must have been in Roman times, with the marbles and the libraries and the big circular calidarium, and the frigidarium, with its great empty pool, that was there even now, and probably a lot of other things besides but I don't remember because I fell asleep.
I was in the hospital for four nights. Henry stayed with me almost the whole time, bringing me sodas when I asked for them, and a razor and a toothbrush, and a pair of his own pajamas – silky Egyptian cotton, cream-colored and heavenly soft, with HMW (M for Marchbanks) embroidered in tiny scarlet letters on the pocket. He also brought me pencils and paper, for which I had little use but which The suppose he would have been lost without, and a great many books, half of which were in languages I couldn't read and the other half of which might as well have been. One night – head aching from Hegel -1 asked him to bring me a magazine; he looked rather startled, and when he came back it was with a trade journal (Pharmacology Update) he had found in the lounge. We talked hardly at all. Most of the time he read, with a concentration that astonished me; six hours at a stretch, scarcely glancing up. He paid me almost no attention.
But he stayed up with me on the bad nights, when I had a hard time breathing and my lungs hurt so I couldn't sleep; and once, when the nurse on duty was three hours late with my medicine, he followed her expressionless into the hall and there delivered, in his subdued monotone, such a tense and eloquent reprimand that the nurse (a contemptuous, hard-bitten woman, with dyed hair like an aging waitress, and a sour word for everyone) was somewhat mollified; and afterwards she – who ripped off the bandages around my IV with such callousness, and poked me black and blue in her desultory search for veins – was much gentler in her handling of me, and once, while taking my temperature, even called me 'hon.'
The emergency room doctor told me that Henry had saved my life. This was a dramatic and gratifying thing to hear – and one which I repeated to a number of people – but secretly I thought it was an exaggeration. In subsequent years, however, I've come to feel that he might well have been right. When I was younger I thought that I was immortal. And though I bounced back quickly, in a short-term sense, in another I never really quite got over that winter. I've had problems with my lungs ever since, and my bones ache at the slightest chill, and I catch cold easily now, whereas I never used to.
I told Henry what the doctor had said. He was displeased.
Frowning, he made some curt remark – actually, I'm surprised I've forgotten it, I was so embarrassed – and I never mentioned it again. I think he did save me, though. And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name.
But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.
On Monday morning I was able to leave at last, with a bottle of antibiotics and an arm full of pinpricks. They insisted on pushing me to Henry's car in a wheelchair, though I was perfectly able to walk and humiliated at being rolled out like a parcel.
'Take me to the Catamount Motel,' 1 told him as we pulled into Hampden.
'No,' he said. 'You're coming to stay with me.'
Henry lived on the first floor of an old house on Water Street, in North Hampden, just around the block from Charles and Camilla's and closer to the river. He didn't like to have people over and I had been there only once, and then only for a minute or two. It was much larger than Charles and Camilla's apartment, and a good deal emptier. The rooms were big and anonymous, with wide-plank floors and no curtains on the windows and plaster walls painted white. The furniture, while obviously good, was scarred and plain and there wasn't much of it. The whole place had a ghostly, unoccupied look; and some of the rooms had nothing in them at all. I had been told by the twins that Henry disliked electric lights, and here and there I saw kerosene lamps in the windowsills.
His bedroom, where I was to stay, had been closed off rather pointedly during my previous visit. In it were Henry's books – not as many as you might think – and a single bed, and very little else, except a closet with a large, conspicuous padlock. Tacked on the closet door was a black and white picture from an old magazine – Life, it said, 1945. It was of Vivien Leigh and, surprisingly, a much younger Julian. They were at a cocktail party, I glasses in hand; he was whispering something in her ear, and she was laughing.
'Where was that taken?' I said.
'I don't know. Julian says he can't remember. Every now and then one runs across a photograph of him in an old magazine.'
'Why?'
'He used to know a lot of people.'
'Who?'
'Most of them are dead now.'
'Who?'
'I really don't know, Richard.' Then, relenting: 'I've seen pictures of him with the Sitwells. And The. S. Eliot. Also – there's rather a funny one of him with that actress – I can't remember her name. She's dead now.' He thought for a minute. 'She was blond,' he said. 'I think she was married to a baseball player.'
'Marilyn Monroe?'
'Maybe. It wasn't a very good picture. Only newsprint.'
Some time during the past three days, Henry had gone over and moved my things from Leo's. My suitcases stood at the foot of the bed.
'I don't want to take your bed, Henry,' I said. 'Where are you going to sleep?'
'One of the back rooms has a bed that folds out from the wall,' said Henry. 'I can't think what they're called. I've never slept in it before.'
'Then why don't you let me sleep there?'
'No. I am rather curious to see what it is like. Besides, I think it's good to change the place where one sleeps from time to time.
I believe it gives one more interesting dreams.'
I was only planning on spending a few days with Henry – I was back at work for Dr Roland the following Monday – but I ended up staying until school started again. I couldn't understand why Bunny had said he was hard to live with. He was the best roommate I've ever had, quiet and neat, and usually off in his own part of the house. Much of the time he was gone when I got home from work; he never told me where he went, and I never asked. But sometimes when I got home he would have made dinner – he wasn't a fancy cook like Francis and only made plain things, broiled chickens and baked potatoes, bachelor food – and we would sit at the card table in the kitchen and eat it and talk.
I had learned better by then than to pry into his affairs, but one night, when my curiosity had got the better of me, I asked him: 'Is Bunny still in Rome?'
It was several moments before he answered. 'I suppose so,' he said, putting down his fork. 'He was there when I left.'
'Why didn't he come back with you?'
'I don't think he wanted to leave. I'd paid the rent through February.'
'He stuck you with the rent?'
Henry took another bite of his food. 'Frankly,' he said, after he had chewed and swallowed, 'no matter what Bunny tells you to the contrary, he hasn't a cent and neither does his father.'
'I thought his parents were well off,' I said, jarred.
'I wouldn't say that,' said Henry calmly. 'They may have had money once, but if so they spent it long ago. That terrible house of theirs must have cost a fortune, and they make a big show of yacht clubs and country clubs and sending their sons to expensive schools, but that's got them in debt to the eyebrows. They may look wealthy, but they haven't a dime. I expect Mr Corcoran is about bankrupt.'
'Bunny seems to live pretty well.'
'Bunny's never had a cent of pocket money the entire time I've known him,' said Henry tartly. 'And he has expensive tastes.
That is unfortunate.'
We resumed eating in silence.
'If I were Mr Corcoran,' said Henry after a long while, 'I would have set Bunny up in business or had him learn a trade after high school. Bunny has no business being in college. He couldn't even read until he was about ten years old.'
'He draws well,' I said.
'I think so, too. He certainly has no gift for scholarship. They should've apprenticed him to a painter when he was young instead of sending him to all those expensive schools for learning disabilities.'
'He sent me a very good cartoon of you and he standing by a statue of Caesar Augustus.'
Henry made a sharp, exasperated sound. 'That was in the Vatican,' he said. 'All day long he made loud remarks about Dagos and Catholics.'
'At least he doesn't speak Italian.'
'He spoke it well enough to order the most expensive thing on the menu every time we went to a restaurant,' said Henry curtly, and I thought it wise to change the subject and did.
On the Saturday before school was to begin, I was lying on Henry's bed reading a book. Henry had been gone since before I woke up. Suddenly I heard a loud banging at the front door.
Thinking Henry had forgotten his key, I went to let him in.
It was Bunny. He was wearing sunglasses and – in contrast to the shapeless, tweedy rags he generally wore – a sharp and very new Italian suit. He had also gained about ten or twenty pounds.
He seemed surprised to see me.
'Well, hello there, Richard,' he said, shaking my hand heartily. 'Buenos dias. Good to see ya. Didn't see the car out front but just got into town and thought I'd stop by anyway. Where's the man of the house?'
'He's not home.'
'Then what are you doing? Breaking and entering?'
'I've been staying here for a while. I got your postcard.'
'Staying here?' he said, looking at me in a peculiar way. 'Why?'
I was surprised he didn't know. 'I was sick,' I said, and I explained a little of what had happened.
'Hmnpf,' said Bunny.
'Do you want some coffee?'
We walked through the bedroom to get to the kitchen. 'Looks like you've made quite a little home for yourself,' he said brusquely, looking at my belongings on the night table and my suitcases on the floor. 'American coffee all you have?'
'What do you mean? Folger's?'
'No espresso, I mean?'
'Oh. No. Sorry.'
Tm an espresso man myself,' he said expansively. 'Drank it all the time over in Italy. They have all kind of little places where you sit around and do that, you know.'
'I've heard.'
He took off his sunglasses and sat down at the table. 'You don't have anything decent in there to eat, do you?' he said, peering into the refrigerator as I opened the door to take out the cream. 'Haven't had my lunch yet.'
I opened the door wider so he could see.
'That cheese'll be all right,' he said.
I cut some bread and made him a cheese sandwich, as he showed no inclination of getting up and making anything himself.
Then I poured the coffee and sat down. 'Tell me about Rome,' I said.
'Gorgeous,' he said through his sandwich. 'Eternal City. Lots of art. Churches every which way.'
'What'd you see?'
'Tons of things. Hard to remember all the names now, you know. Was speaking the lingo like a native by the time I left.'
'Say something.'
He obliged, pinching his thumb and forefinger together and shaking them in the air for emphasis, like a French chef on a TV commercial.
'Sounds good,' I said. 'What does it mean?'
'Tt means "Waiter, bring me your local specialties,'" he said, going back to his sandwich.
I heard the slight sound of a key being turned in the lock and then I heard the door shut. Footsteps went quietly toward the other end of the apartment.
'Henry?' bellowed Bun. 'That you?'
The footsteps stopped. Then they came very rapidly towards the kitchen. When he got to the door he stood in it and stared down at Bunny, with no expression on his face. 'I thought that was you,' he said.
'Well, hello to you, too.' Bunny, his mouth full, reared back in his chair. 'How's the boy?'
'Fine,' said Henry. 'And you?'
'I hear you've been taking in the sick,' said Bunny, winking at me. 'Conscience been hurting you? Thought you'd better rack up a couple good deeds?'
Henry didn't say anything, and I'm sure that at that moment he would have looked perfectly impassive to anyone who didn't know him, but I could tell he was quite agitated. He pulled out a chair and sat down. Then he got up again and went to pour himself a cup of coffee.
Till have some more, thanks, if you don't mind,' Bunny said.
'Good to be back in the good old U. S. of A. Hamburgers sizzling on an open grill and all that. Land of Opportunity. Long may she wave.'
'How long have you been here?'
'Flew into New York late last night.'
'I'm sorry I wasn't here when you arrived.'
'Where were you?' said Bunny suspiciously.
'At the market.' This was a lie. I didn't know where he'd been but certainly he hadn't been grocery shopping for four hours.
'Where are the groceries?' said Bunny. Till help you bring them in.'
'I'm having them delivered.'
'The Food King has delivery?' said Bunny, startled.
'I didn't go to the Food King,' said Henry.
Uneasily, I got up and headed back to the bedroom.
'No, no, don't go,' said Henry, taking a long gulp of his coffee and putting the cup in the sink. 'Bunny, I wish I'd known you were coming. But Richard and I have got to leave in a few minutes.'
'Why?'
'I have an appointment in town.'
'With a lawyer?' Bunny laughed loudly at his own joke.
'No. With the optometrist. That's why I came by,' he said to me. 'I hope you don't mind. They're going to put drops in my eyes and I can't see to drive.'
'No, sure,' I said.
'I won't be long. You don't have to wait, just drop me off and come back to get me.'
Bunny walked us out to the car, our footsteps crunching in the snow. 'Ah, Vermont,' he said, breathing deep and slapping his chest, like Oliver Douglas in the opening sequence of 'Green Acres.'
'Air does me good. So when d'ya think you'll be back, Henry?'
'I don't know,' said Henry, handing me the keys and walking over to the passenger's side.
'Well, I'd like to have a little chat with you.'
'Well, that's fine, but really, I'm a little late now, Bun.'
'Tonight, then?'
'If you like,' said Henry, getting in the car and slamming the door.
Once in the car, Henry lit a cigarette and didn't say a word. He'd been smoking a lot since he got back from Italy, almost a pack a day, which was rare for him. We started into town, and it wasn't until I pulled in at the eye doctor's office that he shook himself and looked at me blankly. 'What is it?'
'What time should I come hack to get you'
' o J Henry looked out, at the low gray building, at the sign in front that said optometry group of hampden.
'Good God,' he said, with a snort and a surprised, bitter little laugh. 'Keep driving.'
I went to bed early that night, around eleven; at twelve I was awakened by a loud persistent banging at the front door. I lay in bed and listened for a minute, then got up to see who it was.
In the dark hallway I met Henry, in his bathrobe, fumbling with his glasses; he was holding one of his kerosene lanterns and it cast long, weird shadows on the narrow walls. When he saw me, he put a finger to his lips. We stood in the hall, listening.
The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.
We stood there for a long time, it seemed, long after the banging stopped and we heard footsteps crunching away. Henry looked over at me, and we were quiet for a bit longer. 'It's all right now,' he said at last, and he turned away abruptly, the lamplight bobbing crazily about him as he went back to his room.
I waited a moment or two longer in the dark, and then went back to my own room and to bed.
The next day, around three in the afternoon, I was ironing a shirt in the kitchen when there was another knock at the door. I went into the hall and found Henry standing there.
'Does that sound like Bunny to you?' he said quietly.
'No,' I said. This knock was fairly light; Bunny always beat on the door as if to bash it in.
'Go around to the side window and see if you can see who it is.'
I went to the front room and advanced cautiously to the side; there were no curtains and it was hard to get to the far windows ^ without exposing oneself to view. They were at an odd angle ™ and all I could see was the shoulder of a black coat, with a silk scarf blown out in the wind behind it. I crept back through the kitchen to Henry. 'I can't really see, but it might be Francis,' I said.
'Oh, you can let him in, I suppose,' said Henry, and he turned and went back towards his part of the house.
I went to the front room and opened the door. Francis was looking back over his shoulder, wondering, I suppose, if he should leave. 'Hi,' I said.
He turned around and saw me. 'Hello!' he said. His face seemed to have got much thinner and sharper since I'd seen him last. 'I thought nobody was home. How are you feeling?'
'Fine.'
'You look pretty bad to me.'
'You don't look so good yourself I said, laughing.
'I drank too much last night and gave myself a stomachache.
I want to see this tremendous head wound of yours. Are you going to have a scar?'
I led him into the kitchen and shoved aside the ironing board so he could sit down. 'Where's Henry?' he said, pulling off his gloves.
'In the back.'
He began to unwind his scarf. Till just run say hello to him and I'll be right back,' he said briskly, and slid away.
He was gone a long time. I had got bored and had almost finished ironing my shirt when suddenly I heard Francis's voice rise, with a hysterical edge. I got up and went into the bedroom so I could hear better what he was saying.
'- thinking about? My God, but he's in a state. You can't tell me you know what he might '
There was a low murmur now, Henry's voice, then Francis's voice came back to me again.
'I don't care,' he said hotly. 'Jesus, but you've done it now.
I've been in town two hours and already – I don't care.' he said in reply to another murmur from Henry. 'Besides, it's a bit late for that, isn't it?'
Silence. Then Henry began to talk, too indistinctly for me to hear.
'You don't like it? You?' said Francis. 'What about me?'
His voice dropped suddenly and then resumed, too quietly for me to hear.
I walked quietly back to the kitchen and put on water for tea.
I was still thinking about what I'd heard when, several minutes later, there were footsteps and Francis emerged in the kitchen, edging his way around the ironing board to gather his gloves and scarf.
'Sorry to run,' he said. 'I've got to unpack the car and start cleaning my apartment. That cousin of mine tore it all to pieces.
I don't believe he took out the garbage once the whole time he was there. Let me see your head wound.'
I pulled back the hair on my forehead and showed him the place. I'd had the stitches out long ago and it was nearly gone.
He leaned forward to peer at it through his pince-nez. 'Goodness, I must be blind, I can't see a thing. When do classes start?
Wednesday?'
'Thursday, I think.'
'See you then,' he said, and he was gone.
I put my shirt on a hanger and then went into the bedroom and started to pack my things. Monmouth House opened that afternoon; maybe Henry would drive me to school with my suitcases later on.
I was just about finished when Henry called me from the back of the apartment. 'Richard?'
'Yes?'
'Would you come here for a moment, please?'
I went back to his room. He was sitting on the side of the I (old-out bed, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a game of jh solitaire spread out on the blanket at the foot. His hair had fallen to the wrong side and I could see the long scar at his hairline, all dented and puckered, with ridges of white flesh cutting across it to the browbone.
He looked up at me. 'Will you do a favor for me?' he said.
'Sure.'
He took a deep breath through the nostrils and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. 'Will you call Bunny and ask him if he'd like to come over for a few minutes?' he said.
I was so surprised that I didn't say anything for half a second.
Then I said: 'Sure. Fine. I'll be glad to.'
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temple with his fingertips.
Then he blinked at me. 'Thank you,' he said.
'No, really.'
'If you want to take some of your things back to school this afternoon, you're more than welcome to borrow the car,' he said evenly.
I got his drift. 'Sure,' I said, and it was only after I'd loaded my suitcases in the car and driven them to Monmouth and got Security to unlock my room that I called Bunny from the pay phone downstairs, a safe half hour later.
Somehow I thought that when the twins returned, when we were settled in again, when we were back at our Liddell and Scotts and had suffered through two or three Greek Prose Composition assignments together, we would all fall back into the comfortable routine of the previous term and everything would be the same as it had been before. But about this I was wrong.
Charles and Camilla had written to say they would arrive in Hampden on the late train, around midnight on Sunday, and on Monday afternoon, as students began to straggle back to Monmouth House with their skis and their stereos and their cardboard boxes, I had some idea that they might come to see me, but they didn't. On Tuesday I didn't hear from them either, or from Henry or anybody but Julian, who had left a cordial little note in my post-office box welcoming me back to school and asking me to translate an ode of Pindar's for our first class.
On Wednesday I went to Julian's office to ask him to sign my registration cards. He seemed happy to see me. 'You look well,' he said, 'but not as well as you ought. Henry's been keeping me up to date on your recovery.'
'Oh?'
'It was a good thing, I suppose, that he came back early,' said Julian, glancing through my cards, 'but I was surprised to see him, too. He showed up at my house straight from the airport, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of the night.'
This was interesting. 'Did he stay with you?' I said.
'Yes, but only a few days. He'd been ill himself, you know. In Italy.'
'What was the matter?'
'Henry's not as strong as he looks. His eyes bother him, he _, has terrible headaches, sometimes he has a difficult time… I " didn't think he was in a proper condition to travel, but it was lucky he didn't stay on or he wouldn't have found you. Tell me.
How did you end up in such a dreadful place? Wouldn't your parents give you money, or didn't you want to ask?'
'I didn't want to ask.'
'Then you are more of a stoic than I am,' he said, laughing.
'But your parents do not seem very fond of you, am I correct?'
'They're not that crazy about me, no.'
'Why is that, do you suppose? Or is it rude of me to ask? I should think that they would be quite proud, yet you seem more an orphan than our real orphans do. Tell me,' he said, looking up, 'why is it that the twins haven't been in to see me?'
'I haven't seen them, either.'
'Where can they be? I haven't even seen Henry. Only you and Edmund. Francis telephoned but I only spoke to him for a moment. He was in a hurry, he said he would stop by later, but he hasn't… I don't think Edmund's learned a word of Italian, do you?'
'I don't speak Italian.'
'Nor do I, not anymore. I used to speak it rather well. I lived in Florence for a while but that was nearly thirty years ago. Will you be seeing any of the others this afternoon?'
'Maybe.'
'Of course, it's a matter of small importance, but the registration slips should be at the Dean's office this afternoon and he will be irritated that I haven't sent them. Not that I care, but he is certainly in a position to make things unpleasant for any of you, if he chooses.'
I was somewhat annoyed. The twins had been in Hampden three days and hadn't called once. So when I left Julian's I stopped by their apartment, but they weren't home.
They weren't at dinner that night, either. Nobody was.
Though I had expected at least to see Bunny, I stopped by his room on the way to the dining hall and found Marion locking his door. She told me, rather officiously, that the two of them had plans and would not be in until late.
I ate alone and walked back to my room in the snowy twilight, with a sour, humorless feeling as if I were the victim of a practical joke. At seven I called Francis, but there was no answer. There was no answer at Henry's, either.
I read Greek till midnight. After I'd brushed my teeth and washed my face and was almost ready for bed, I went downstairs and called again. Still no answer anywhere. I got my quarter back after the third call and tossed it up in the air. Then, on a whim, I called Francis's number in the country.
There was no answer there, either, but something made me hold the line longer than I should have and finally, after about thirty rings, there was a click and Francis said gruffly into the receiver, 'Hullo?' He was making his voice deep in an attempt to disguise it but he didn't fool me; he couldn't bear to leave a phone unanswered, and I had heard him use that silly voice more than once before.
'Hullo?' he said again, and the forced deepness of his voice broke into a quaver at the end. I pressed the receiver hook and heard the line go dead.
I was tired but I couldn't sleep; my irritation and perplexity were growing stronger, kept in motion by a ridiculous sense of unease.
I turned on the lights and looked through my books until I found a Raymond Chandler novel I had brought from home. I had read it before, and thought that a page or two would put me to sleep, but I had forgotten most of the plot and before I knew it I'd read fifty pages, then a hundred.
Several hours passed and I was wide awake. The radiators were on full blast and the air in my room was hot and dry. I began to feel -^ -as sputlgs'g and deserted. Everything smelled of fresh paint. I walked through the laundry room – pristine, brightly lit, its creamy walls alien without the tangle of graffiti which had accumulated during the term before – and bought a can of Coke from the phosphorescent bank of machines which hummed at the end of the hall.
Walking around the other way, I was startled to hear a hollow, tinny music coming from the common rooms. The television was on; Laurel and Hardy, obscured by a blizzard of electronic snow, were trying to move a grand piano up a great many flights of stairs. At first I thought they were playing to an empty room, but then I noticed the top of a shaggy blond head, lolling against the back of the lone couch that faced the set.
I walked over and sat down. 'Bunny,' I said. 'How are you?'
He looked over at me, eyes glazed, and it took him a second or two to recognize me. He stank of liquor. 'Dickie boy,' he said thickly. 'Yes.'
'What are you doing?'
He burped. 'Feeling pretty sick, to tell you the God's honest truth.'
'Drink too much?'
'Naah,' he said crossly. 'Stomach flu.'
Poor Bunny. He never would own up to being drunk; he'd always say he had a headache or needed to get the prescription for his glasses readjusted. He was like that about a lot of things, actually. One morning after he'd had a date with Marion, he showed up at breakfast with his tray full of milk and sugar doughnuts and when he sat down I saw that there was a big purple hickey on his neck above the collar. 'How'd you get that, Bun?' I asked him. I was only joking, but he was very offended.
'Fell down some stairs,' he said brusquely, and ate his doughnuts in silence.
I a…-.-~. =«e stuniac R-ITu ruse. 'Maybe il thing you picked up overseas,' I said.
'Maybe.'
'Been to the infirmary?'
'Nope. Nothing they can do. Got to let it run its course Better not sit so close to me, old man.'
Though I was all the way at the opposite end of the couch, I shifted down even further. We sat looking at the television for a while without saying anything. The reception was terrible. Ollie had just pushed Stan's hat down over his eyes; Stan was wandering in circles, bumping into things, tugging desperately at the brim with both hands. He ran into Ollie and Ollie smacked him on the head with the heel of his palm. Glancing over at Bunny, I saw that he was gripped by this. His gaze was fixed and his mouth slightly open.
'Bunny,' I said.
'Yeah?' he said without looking away.
'Where is everybody?'
'Asleep, probably,' he said irritably.
'Do you know if the twins are around?'
'I guess.'
'Have you seen them?'
'No,' 'What's wrong with everybody? Are you mad at Henry or something?'
He didn't answer. Looking at the side of his face, I saw that it was absolutely blank. For a moment I was unnerved and I glanced back at the television. 'Did you have a fight in Rome, or what?'
All of a sudden, he cleared his throat noisily, and I thought he was going to tell me to mind my own business, but instead he pointed at something and cleared his throat again. 'Are you going to drink that Coke?' he said.
I had forgotten all about it. It lay sweating and unopened on Ithe sofa.1 handed it to him and he cracked it open and took a large greedy drink and burped.
'Pause that refreshes,' he said, and then: 'Let me give you a little tip about Henry, old man.'
'What?'
He took another swig and turned back to the TV. 'He's not what you think he is.'
'What does that mean?' I said after a long pause.
'I mean, he's not what you think,' he said, louder this time.
'Or what Julian thinks or anybody else.' He took another slug of the Coke. 'For a while there he had me fooled but good.'
'Yeah,' I said uncertainly, after another long moment. The uncomfortable assumption had begun to dawn on me that maybe this was all some sex-related thing I was better off not knowing.
I looked at the side of his face: petulant, irritable, glasses low on * the tip of his sharp little nose and the beginnings of jowls at his jawline. Might Henry have made a pass at him in Rome? Incredible, but a possible hypothesis. If he had, certainly, all hell would have broken loose. I could not think of much else that would involve this much whispering and secrecy, or that would have so strong an effect on Bunny. He was the only one of us who had a girlfriend and I was pretty sure he slept with her, but at the same time he was incredibly prudish – touchy, easily offended, at root hypocritical. Besides, there was something unquestionably odd about the way Henry was constantly shelling out money to him: paying his tabs, footing his bills, doling out cash like a husband to a spendthrift wife. Perhaps Bunny had allowed his greed to get the better of him, and was angry to discover that Henry's largesse had strings attached.
But did it? There were certainly strings somewhere, though easy as it seemed on the face of it – I wasn't sure that this was where those particular strings led. There was of course that thing with Julian in the hallway; still, that had been very different. I had lived with Henry for a month, and there hadn't been the faintest hint of that sort of tension, which I, being rather more disinclined that way than not, am quick to pick up on. I had caught a strong breath of it from Francis, a whiff of it at times from Julian; and even Charles, who I knew was interested in women, had a sort of naive, prepubescent shyness of them that a man like my father would have interpreted alarmingly – but with Henry, zero. Geiger counters dead. If anything, it was Camilla he seemed fondest of, Camilla he bent over attentively when she spoke, Camilla who was most often the recipient of his infrequent smiles.
And even if there was a side of him of which I was unaware (which was possible) was it possible that he was attracted to Bunny? The answer to this seemed, almost unquestionably, No.
Not only did he behave as if he wasn't attracted to Bunny, he acted as if he were hardly able to stand him. And it seemed that he, disgusted by Bunny in what appeared to be virtually all respects, would be far more disgusted in that particular one than even I would be. It was possible for me to recognize, in a general sort of way, that Bunny was handsome, but if I brought the lens any closer and tried to focus on him in a sexual light, all I got was a repugnant miasma of sour-smelling shirts and muscles gone to fat and dirty socks. Girls didn't seem to mind that sort of thing, but to me he was about as erotic as an old football coach.
All at once I felt very tired. I stood up. Bunny stared at me, his mouth open.
Tm getting sleepy, Bun,' I said. 'See you tomorrow, maybe.'
He blinked at me. 'Hope you're not coming down with this damn bug, old man,' he said curtly.
The, too,' I said, feeling sorry for him, unaccountably so.
'Good night.'
I awoke at six on Thursday morning, intending to do some Greek, but my Liddell and Scott was nowhere to be found. I looked and looked and, with a sinking feeling, remembered: it was at Henry's house. I had noticed its absence while I was packing; for some reason it wasn't with my other books. I had made a hurried but diligent search which I finally abandoned, telling myself I'd be back for it later. This put me in a fairly serious fix. My first Greek class wasn't till Monday, but Julian had given me a good deal of work and the library was still closed, as they were changing the catalogues from Dewey decimal to Library of Congress.
I went downstairs and dialed Henry's number, and got, as I expected, no answer. Radiators clanged and hissed in the drafty hall. As I listened to the phone ring for about the thirtieth time, suddenly it occurred to me: why not just run up to North Hampden and get it? He wasn't there – at least I didn't think he was – and I had the key. It would be a long drive for him from Francis's. If I hurried I could be there in fifteen minutes. I hung up and ran out the front door.
In the chilly morning light, Henry's apartment looked deserted, and his car was neither in the drive nor in any of the places up and down the street where he liked to park when he didn't want anyone to know he was home. But just to make sure I knocked. Pas de reponse. Hoping I wouldn't find him standing in the front hall in his bathrobe, peering around a door at me, I turned the key gingerly and stepped inside.
No one was there, but the apartment was a mess – books, papers, empty coffee cups and wineglasses; there was a slight film of dust on everything, and the wine in the glasses had dried to a sticky purplish stain at the bottom. The kitchen was full of dirty dishes and the milk had been left out of the refrigerator and turned bad. Henry, generally, was clean as a cat, and I'd never even seen him take off his coat without hanging it up immediately.
A dead fly floated in the bottom of one of the coffee cups.
Nervous, feeling as if I'd stumbled on the scene of a crime, I searched the rooms quickly, my footsteps ringing loud in the silence. Before long The saw my book, lying on the hall table, one of the most obvious places I could have left it. How could I have missed it? I wondered; I'd looked all over the day I'd left; had Henry found it, left it out for me? I grabbed it up quickly and had started out – jittery, anxious to leave – when my eye was caught by a scrap of paper also on the table.
The handwriting was Henry's: TWA 219 795 X 4
A telephone number with a 617 area code had been added in Francis's hand, at the bottom. I picked the sheet up and studied it. It was written on the back of an overdue notice from the library dated only three days before.
Without quite knowing why, I set down my Liddell and Scott and took the paper with me to the telephone in the front room.
The area code was Massachusetts, probably Boston; I checked my watch and then dialed the number, reversing the charges to Dr Roland's office.
A wait, two rings, a click. 'You have reached the law offices of Robeson Tail on Federal Street,' a recording informed me.
'Our switchboard is now closed. Please call within the hours of nine to '
I hung up, and stood staring at the paper. I was remembering, with some unease, the crack Bunny had made about Henry needing a lawyer. Then I picked up the phone again and dialed directory assistance for the information number of TWA.
'This is Mr Henry Winter,' I told the operator. 'I'm calling, um, to confirm my reservation.'
'Just a moment, Mr Winter. Your reservation number?'
'Uh,' I said, trying to think fast, pacing back and forth, 'I don't seem to have my information handy right now, maybe you could just -' Then I noticed the number in the upper right-hand corner.
'Wait. Maybe this is it.219?'
There was the sound of keys being punched in on a computer.
I tapped my foot impatiently and glanced out the window for Henry's car. Then I remembered, with a shock, that Henry didn't have his car. I hadn't taken it back to him after I borrowed it on Sunday and it was still parked behind the tennis courts where I'd left it.
In a panicky reflex, I nearly hung up – if Henry didn't have his car I couldn't hear him, he might be halfway up the walk that instant – but just then the operator came back on. 'All set, Mr Winter,' she said briskly. 'Didn't the agent who sold you the tickets tell you it wasn't necessary to confirm on tickets purchased less than three days in advance?'
'No,' I said impatiently, and was about to hang up when I was struck by what she'd said. 'Three days?' I repeated.
'Well, generally your reservations are confirmed at date of purchase, especially on non-refundable fares such as these. The agent should have informed you of this when you purchased the tickets on Tuesday,' Date of purchase? Non-refundable? I stopped pacing. 'Let me make sure I have the correct information,' I said.
'Certainly, Mr Winter,' she said crisply. 'TWA flight 401, departing Boston tomorrow from Logan Airport, gate 12., at 8:45 p.m., arriving Buenos Aires, Argentina, at 6:01 a.m. That's with a stopover in Dallas. Four fares at seven hundred and ninety-five dollars one way, let's see' – she punched in some more numbers on the computer – 'that comes to a total of three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars plus tax, and you chose to pay for that with your American Express card, am I correct?'
My head began to swim. Buenos Aires'? Four tickets? One way?
Tomorrow?
'I hope you and your family have a pleasant flight on TWA, Mr Winter,' said the operator cheerily, and hung up. I stood there, holding the receiver, until a dial tone came droning on the other end.
Suddenly something occurred to me. I put down the telephone and went back to the bedroom and threw open the door. The books on the book shelf were gone; the padlocked closet stood open, empty; the unfastened lock swung open from the hasp.
For a moment I stood staring at it, at the raised Roman capitals that said yale across the bottom, and then went back to the spare bedroom. The closets there were empty, too, nothing but coat hangers jingling on the metal rod. I turned quickly and almost stumbled over two tremendous pigskin suitcases, strapped in black leather, just inside the doorway. I picked one of them up, and the weight nearly toppled me.
My God, I thought, what are they doing? I went back to the hall, replaced the paper, and hurried out the front door with my book.
Once out of North Hampden I walked slowly, extremely puzzled, an undertow of anxiety tugging at my thoughts. I felt as if I needed to do something, but I didn't know what. Did Bunny know anything about this? Somehow, I thought not, and somehow I thought it better not to ask him. Argentina. What was in Argentina? Grasslands, horses, cowboys of some sort who wore flat-crowned hats with pom-poms hanging from the brim. Borges, the writer. Butch Cassidy, they said, had gone into hiding there, along with Dr Mengele and Martin Bormann and a score of less pleasant characters.
It seemed that I remembered Henry telling a story, one night at Francis's house, about some South American country – maybe Argentina, I wasn't sure. I tried to think. Something about a trip with his father, a business interest, an island off the coast… But Henry's father traveled a good deal; besides, if there was a connection, what could it possibly be? Four tickets? One way?
And if Julian knew about it – and he seemed to know everything about Henry, even more so than the rest – why had he been inquiring about everyone's whereabouts only the day before?
My head ached. Emerging from the woods near Hampden, into an expanse of snow-covered meadow that sparkled in the light, I saw twin threads of smoke coming from the age-blacked chimneys at either end of Commons. Everything was cold and quiet except for a milk truck that idled at the rear entrance as two silent, sleepy-looking men unloaded the wire crates and let them fall with a clatter on the asphalt.
The dining halls were open, though at that hour of the morning there were no students, only cafeteria workers and maintenance men eating breakfast before their shifts began. I went upstairs and got myself a cup of coffee and a couple of soft-boiled eggs, which I ate alone at a table near a window in the empty main dining room.
Classes started today, Thursday, but my first class with Julian wasn't until the next Monday. After breakfast I went back to my room and began to work on the irregular second aorists. Not until almost four in the afternoon did I finally close my books, and when I looked out my window over the meadow, the light fading in the west and the ashes and yews casting long shadows on the snow, it was as if I'd just woken up, sleepy and disoriented, to find it was getting dark and I had slept through the day.
It was the big back-to-school dinner that night – roast beef, green beans almondine, cheese souffle and some elaborate lentil dish for the vegetarians. I ate dinner alone at the same table where I'd had my breakfast. The halls were packed, everyone smoking, laughing, extra chairs wedged in at full tables, people with plates of food roaming from group to group to say hello.
Next to me was a table of art students, branded as such by their ink-grimed fingernails and the self-conscious paint spatters on their clothes; one of them was drawing on a cloth napkin with a black felt marker; another was eating a bowl of rice using inverted paintbrushes for chopsticks. I had never seen them before. As I drank my coffee and gazed around the dining room, it struck me that Georges Laforgue had been right, after all: I really was cut off from the rest of the college – not that I cared to be on intimate terms, by and large, with people who used paintbrushes for cutlery.
There was a life-or-death attempt being made near my table by a couple of Neanderthals looking to collect money for a beer blast in the sculpture studio. Actually, I did know these two; it was impossible to attend Hampden and not to. One was the son of a famous West Coast racket boss and the other was the son of a movie producer. They were, respectively, president and vice-president of the Student Council, offices they utilized principally in order to organize drinking contests, wet-T-shirt competitions, and female mud-wrestling tournaments. They were both well over six feet – slack-jawed, unshaven, dumb dumb dumb, the sort who I knew would never go indoors at all after daylight savings in the spring but instead would lounge bare-chested on the lawn with the Styrofoam cooler and the tape deck from dawn till dusk. They were widely held to be good guys, and maybe they were decent enough if you lent them your car for beer runs or sold them pot or something; but both of them – the movie producer's kid in particular – had a piggish, schizophrenic glitter about the eye that I did not care for at all. Party Pig, people called him, and not entirely with affection, either; but he liked this name and took a kind of a stupid pride in living up to it. He was always getting drunk and doing things like setting fires, or stuffing freshmen down chimneys, or throwing beer kegs through plate glass windows.
Party Pig (a. k. a. Jud) and Frank were making their way to my table. Frank held out a paint can full of change and crumpled bills. 'Hi, guy,' he said. 'Keg party in the sculpture studio tonight.
Want to give something?'
I put down my coffee and fished in my jacket pocket and found a quarter and some pennies.
'Oh, come on, man,' Jud said, rather menacingly I thought.
'You can do better than that.'
Hoi polloi. Barbaroi. 'Sorry,' I said, and pushed back from the.» table and got my coat and left. "
I went back to my room and sat at my desk and opened my lexicon, but I didn't look at it. 'Argentina?' I said to the wall.
On Friday morning I went to my French class. Several students dozed in the back, overcome no doubt by the previous evening's festivities. The odor of disinfectant and chalkboard cleaner, combined with vibrating fluorescents and the monotonous chant of conditional verbs, put me into kind of a trance, too, and I sat at my desk swaying slightly with boredom and fatigue, hardly aware of the passage of time.
When I got out I went downstairs to a pay phone and called Francis's number in the country and let the phone ring maybe fifty times. No answer.
I walked back to Monmouth House through the snow and went to my room and thought, or, rather, didn't think, but sat on my bed and stared out the window at the ice-rimed yews below.
After a while I got up and went to my desk, but I couldn't work, either. One-way tickets, the operator had said. Nonrefundable.
It was eleven a. m. in California. Both my parents would be at work. I went downstairs to my old friend the pay phone and called the number of Francis's mother's apartment in Boston, reversing the charges to my father.
'Well, Richard,' she said when she finally figured out who I was. 'Darling. How nice of you to call us. I thought you were going to come spend Christmas with us in New York. Where are you, dear? Can I send somebody to pick you up?'
'No, thank you. I'm in Hampden,' I said. 'Is Francis there?'
'Dear, he's at school, isn't he?'
'Excuse me,' I said, suddenly flustered; it had been a mistake to call like this, without planning what to say. 'I'm sorry. I think I've made a mistake.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'I thought he'd said something about going to Boston today.'
'Well, if he's here, sweetheart, I haven't seen him. Where did you say you were? Are you sure you don't want me to send Chris around to get you?'
'No thank you. I'm not in Boston. I'm -'
'You're calling all the way from school? she said, alarmed. 'Is anything wrong, dear?'
'No, ma'am, of course not,' I said; for a moment I had my customary impulse to hang up but it was too late for that now.
'He came by last night while I was really sleepy, and I could've sworn he said he was going down to Boston – oh! Here he is now!' I said stupidly, hoping she wouldn't call my bluff.
'Where, dear? There?'
'I see him coming across the lawn. Thank you so much, Mrs er, Abernathy,' I said, badly flustered and unable to remember the name of her present husband.
'Call me Olivia, dear. You give that bad boy a kiss for me and tell him to call me on Sunday.'
I made my goodbyes quickly – by now I'd broken out in a sweat – and was just turning to go back up the stairs when Bunny, dressed in one of his smart new suits and chewing briskly on a large wad of gum, came striding down the rear hall towards me.
He was the last person I was ready to talk to, but I couldn't get away. 'Hello, old man,' he said. 'Where's Henry got off to?'
'I don't know,' I said, after an uncertain pause.
'I don't either,' he said belligerently. 'Haven't seen him since Monday. Nor Francois or the twins, either. Say, who was that on the phone?'
I didn't know what to say. 'Francis,' I said. 'I was talking to Francis.'
'Hmn,' he said, leaning back with his hands in his pockets.
'Where was he calling from?'
'Hampden, I guess.'
'Not long distance?'
My neck prickled. What did he know about this? 'No,' I said. ™ 'Not that I know of.' 1 'Henry didn't say anything to you about going out of town, did he?'
'No. Why?'
Bunny was silent. Then he said: There hasn't been a single light on at his house the last few nights. And his car is gone. It's not parked anywhere on Water Street.'
For some strange reason, I laughed. I walked over to the back door, which had a window at the top that faced the parking lot behind the tennis courts. Henry's car was there, right where I'd parked it, plain as day. I pointed it out to him. 'There it is, right there,' I said. 'See?'
Bunny's jaw slowed at its work, and his face clouded with the effort of thinking. 'Well, that's funny.'
'Why?'
A thoughtful pink bubble emerged from his lips, grew slowly, and burst with a pop. 'No reason,' he said briskly, resuming his chewing.
'Why would they have gone out of town?'
He reached up and flipped the hair out of his eyes. 'You'd be surprised,' he said cheerily. 'What are you up to now, old man?'
We went upstairs to my room. On the way he stopped at the house refrigerator and peered inside, stooping down myopically to inspect the contents. 'Any of this yours, old soak?' he said.
'No.'
He reached in and pulled out a frozen cheesecake. Taped to the box was a plaintive note: 'Please do not steal this. I am on financial aid. Jenny Drexler.'
This'd hit the spot about now,' he said, glancing quickly up and down the hall. 'Anybody coming?'
'No.'
He stuck the box underneath his coat and, whistling, walked ahead to my room. Once inside, he spat out his gum and stuck it on the inside rim of my garbage can with a quick, feinting motion, as if he hoped I wouldn't see him do it, then sat down and began to eat the cheesecake straight from the box with a spoon he'd found on my dresser. 'Phew,' he said. 'This is terrible.
Want some?'
'No thanks.'
He licked thoughtfully at the spoon. 'Too lemony, is what the problem is. And not enough cream cheese.' He paused – thinking, I believed, about this handicap – and then said abruptly: 'Tell me.
You and Henry spent a lot of time together last month, huh?'
I was suddenly watchful. 'I guess.'
'Do much talking?'
'Some.'
'He tell you much about when we were in Rome?' he said, looking at me keenly.
'Not a whole lot.'
'He say anything about leaving early?'
At last, I thought, relieved. At last we were going to get to the bottom of this business. 'No. No, he didn't tell me much at all,'
I said, which was the truth. 'I knew he'd left early when he showed up here. But I didn't know you were still there. Finally I asked him about it one night, and he said you were. That's all.'
Bunny took a jaded bite of the cheesecake. 'He say why he left?'
'No.' Then, when Bunny didn't respond, I added: 'It had something to do with money, didn't it?'
'Is that what he told you?'
'No.' And then, since he had gone mute again: 'But he did say you were short on cash, that he had to pay the rent and stuff. Is that right?'
Bunny, his mouth full, made a brushing, dismissive motion with one hand.
'That Henry,' he said. 'I love him, and you love him, but just between the two of us I think he's got a little bit of Jew blood.'
'What?' I said, startled.
He had just taken another big bite of cheesecake, and it took W! him a moment to answer me.
'I never heard anybody complain so much about helping out a pal,' he finally said. 'I tell you what it is. He's afraid of people taking advantage of him.'
'How do you mean?'
He swallowed. 'I mean, somebody probably told him when he was little, "Son, you have a load of money, and someday people are going to try to weasel it out of you."' His hair had fallen over one eye; like an old sea captain, he squinted at me shrewdly through the other. 'It's not a question of the money, y'see,' he said. 'He don't need it himself, it's the principle of the thing. He wants to know that people like him not for his money, you know, but for himself I was surprised by this exegesis, which was at odds with what I knew to be Henry's frequent and – by my standards of reckoning – extravagant generosity.
'So it's not about money?' I said at last.
'Nope.'
'Then what is it about, if you don't mind my asking?'
Bunny leaned forward, his face thoughtful, and for a moment almost transparently frank; and when he opened his mouth again I thought he was going to come right out and say what he meant; but instead, he cleared his throat and said, if I didn't mind, would I go make him a pot of coffee?
That night, as I was lying on my bed reading Greek, I was startled by a flash of remembrance, almost as if a hidden spotlight had been trained without warning on my face. Argentina. The word itself had lost little of its power to startle and had, due to my ignorance of the physical place it occupied on the globe, assumed a peculiar life of its own. There was the harsh Ar at the beginning, which called up gold, idols, lost cities in the jungle, which in turn led to the hushed and sinister chamber of Gen, with the bright interrogative Tina at the end – all nonsense, of course, but then it seemed in some muddled way that the name itself, one of the few concrete facts available to me, might itself be a cryptogram or clue. But that wasn't what made me bolt upright, but the sudden realization of what time it must be – nine-twenty, I saw, when I looked at my watch. So they were all on the plane now (or were they?) hurtling towards the bizarre Argentina of my imagination through the dark skies.
I put down my book and went over and sat in a chair by the window, and didn't work for the rest of the night.
The weekend passed, as they will do, and for me it went by in Greek, solitary meals in the dining hall, and more of the same old puzzlement back in my room. My feelings were hurt, and I missed them more than I would have admitted. Bunny was behaving oddly besides. I saw him around a couple of times that weekend, with Marion and her friends, talking importantly as they stared in goony admiration (they were Elementary Education majors, for the most part, who I suppose thought him terribly erudite because he studied Greek and wore some little wire-rimmed glasses). Once I saw him with his old friend Cloke Rayburn. But I didn't know Cloke well, and I was hesitant to stop and say hello.
I awaited Greek class, on Monday, with acute curiosity. I woke that morning at six. Not wanting to arrive insanely early, I sat around my room fully dressed for quite some time, and it was with something of a thrill that I looked at my watch and realized that if I didn't hurry, I'd be late. I grabbed my books and dashed out; halfway to the Lyceum, I realized I was running, and forced myself to slow to a walk.
I had caught my breath by the time I opened the back door.
Slowly, I climbed the stairs, feet moving, mind oddly blank – the way I'd felt as a kid on Christmas morning when, after a night of almost insane excitement, I would walk down the hall to the closed door behind which my presents lay as if the day were nothing special, suddenly drained of all desire.
They were all there, all of them: the twins, poised and alert in the windowsill; Francis, with his back to me; Henry beside him; and Bunny across the table, reared back in his chair. Telling a story of some sort. 'So get this,' he said to Henry and Francis, turning his face sideways to glimpse the twins. Everyone's eyes were riveted on him; no one had seen me come in. 'The warden says, "Son, your pardon hasn't come through from the governor and it's already five after. Any last words?" So the guy thinks for a minute, and as they're leading him into the chamber' – he brought his pencil up close to his eyes and studied it for a moment – 'he looks over his shoulder and says, "Well, Governor So-and-So has certainly lost my vote in the next election!"' Laughing, he tipped back even further in his chair; then he looked up and saw me standing like an idiot in the doorway. 'Oh, come in, come in,' he said, bringing the front legs of the wooden chair down with a thump.
The twins glanced up, startled as a pair of deer. Except for a certain tightness around the jaw, Henry was as serene as the Buddha, but Francis was so white he was almost green.
'We're just chucking around a couple jokes before class,' said Bunny genially, leaning back in his chair. He tossed the hair out of his eyes. 'Okay. Smith and Jones commit an armed robbery and they both get death row. Of course, they go through all the usual channels of appeal but Smith's runs out first and he's slotted for the chair.' He made a resigned, philosophical gesture and then, unexpectedly, winked at me. 'So,' he continued, 'they let Jones out to see the execution and he's watching them strap his buddy in' – I saw Charles, his eyes blank, biting down hard into his lower lip – 'when the warden comes up. "Heard anything on your appeal, Jones?" he says. "Not much, Warden," says Jones.
"Well, then," says the warden, looking at his watch, "hardly worth going back to your cell then, is it?"' I Ic threw back his head and laughed, pleased as all get-out, but no one else even smiled.
When Bunny started in again ('And then there's the one about the Old West – this is when they still hung folks…') Camilla edged over on the windowsill and smiled nervously at me.
I went over and sat between her and Charles. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. 'How are you?' she said. 'Did you wonder where we were?'
'I can't believe we haven't seen you,' said Charles quietly, turning towards me and crossing his ankle over his knee. His foot was trembling violently, as if it had a life of its own, and he put a hand on it to still it. 'We had a terrible mishap with the apartment.'
I didn't know what I'd expected to hear from them, but this was not it. 'What?' I said.
'We left the key back in Virginia.'
'Aunt Mary-Gray had to drive all the way to Roanoke to Federal Express it.'
'I thought you had someone subletting,' I said suspiciously.
'He left a week ago. Like idiots we told him to mail us the key. The landlady is in Florida. We've been in the country at Francis's the whole time.'
'Trapped like rats.'
'Francis drove us out there and about two miles from the house something terrible happened to the car,' said Charles.
'Black smoke and grinding noises.'
'The steering went out. We ran into a ditch.'
They were both talking very rapidly. For a moment, Bunny's voice rose stridently above them. '… Now this judge had a particular system he liked to follow. He'd hang a cattle thief on a Monday, a card cheat on a Tuesday, murderers on Wednesday '
'… so after that,' Charles was saying, 'we had to walk to Francis's and for days we called Henry to come get us. But he wasn't answering the phone – you know what it's like to try to get in touch with him '
There was no food at Francis's house except some cans of black olives and a box of Bisquick.'
'Yes. We ate olives and Bisquick.'
Could this be true? I wondered suddenly. Briefly I was cheered – my God, how silly I had been – but then I remembered the way Henry's apartment had looked, the suitcases by the door.
Bunny was working up to a big finish. 'So the judge says, "Son, it's a Friday, and I'd like to go on and hang you today, but I'm going to have to wait until next Tuesday because 'There wasn't any milk, even,' said Camilla. 'We had to mix the Bisquick with water.'
There was the slight sound of a throat being cleared and I looked up and saw Julian closing the door behind him.
'Goodness, you magpies,' he said into the abrupt silence that fell. 'Where have you all been?'
Charles coughed, his eyes fixed on a point across the room, and began rather mechanically to tell the story of the apartment key and the car in the ditch and the olives and the Bisquick. The wintry sun, coming in at a slant through the window, gave everything a frozen, precisely detailed look; nothing seemed real, and I felt as though this were some complicated film I'd started watching in the middle and couldn't quite get the drift of. Bunny's jailhouse jokes had for some reason unsettled me, though I remembered him telling an awful lot of jokes like that, back in the fall. They had been met, then as now, with a strained silence, but then they were silly, bad jokes. I had always assumed the reason he told them was because he had some corny old Lawyer's Joke Book up in his room or something, right up there on the shelf with Bob Hope's autobiography, the Fu Manchu novels, and Men of Thought and Deed. (Which, as it eventually turned out, he did.)
'Why didn't you call me?' said Julian, perplexed and perhaps a little slighted, when Charles finished his story.
The twins looked at him blankly.
'We never thought of it.' Camilla said.
Julian laughed and recited an aphorism from Xenophon, which was literally about tents and soldiers and the enemy nigh, but which carried the implication that in troubled times it was best to go to one's own people for help.
I walked home from class alone, in a state of bewilderment and turmoil. By now my thoughts were so contradictory and disturbing that I could no longer even speculate, only wonder dumbly at what was taking place around me; I had no classes for the rest of the day and the thought of going back to my room was intolerable. I went to Commons and sat in an armchair by the window for maybe forty-five minutes. Should I go to the library? Take Henry's car, which I still had, and go for a drive, maybe see if there was a matinee at the movie house in town?
Should I go ask Judy Poovey for a Valium?
I decided, finally, that the last of these would be a prerequisite for any other plan. I walked back to Monmouth House and up to Judy's room, only to find a note in gold paint-marker on the door: 'Beth – Come to Manchester for lunch with Tracy and me?
I'm in the costume shop till eleven. J.'
I stood staring at Judy's door, which was adorned with photographs of automobile crashes, lurid headlines cut from the Weekly World News, and a nude Barbie doll hanging from the doorknob by a noose. By now it was one o'clock. I walked back to my pristine white door at the end of the hall, the only one in the suite unobscured by taped-up religious propaganda and posters of the Fleshtones and suicidal epithets from Artaud, and wondered how all these people were able to put up all this crap on their doors so fast and why they did it in the first place.
I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling, trying to guess when Judy would return, trying to think of what to do in the meantime, when there was a knock at the door.
It was Henry. I opened the door a little wider and stared at him and said nothing.
He gazed back at me with a fixed and patient unconcern. He was level-eyed and calm and had a book tucked under his arm.
'Hello,' he said.
There was another pause, longer than the first. 'Hi,' I said, after a while.
'How are you?'
'Fine.'
'That's good.'
There was another long silence.
'Are you doing anything this afternoon?' he said politely.
'No,' I said, taken aback.
'Would you like to go on a drive with me?'
I got my coat.
Once well out of Hampden, we turned off the main highway and onto a stretch of gravel road that I had never seen. 'Where are we going?' I said, rather uneasy.
'I thought we might go out and take a look at an estate sale on the Old Quarry Road,' said Henry, unperturbed.
I was as surprised as I've ever been at anything in my life when the road finally did bring us out, about an hour later, to a large house with a sign in front that said estate sale.
Though the house itself was magnificent, the sale turned out not to be much: a grand piano covered with a display of silver and cracked glassware; a grandfather clock; several boxes full of records, kitchen implements, and toys; and some upholstered furniture badly scratched by cats, all out in the garage.
I leafed through a stack of old sheet music, keeping Henry in the corner of my eye. He poked around unconcernedly in the silver; played a disinterested bar of 'Traumerei' on the piano with one hand; opened the door of the grandfather clock and had a look at the works; had a long chat with the owner's niece, who had just come down from the big house, about when was the best time to put out tulip bulbs. After I had gone through the sheet music twice, I moved to the glassware and then the records; Henry bought a garden hoe for twenty-five cents.
Tm sorry to have dragged you all the way out here,' he said on the way home.
That's all right,' I said, slouched down in my seat very close to the door.
Tm a bit hungry. Are you hungry at all? Would you like to have something to eat?'
We stopped at a diner on the outskirts of Hampden. It was virtually deserted this early in the evening. Henry ordered an enormous dinner – pea soup, roast beef, a salad, mashed potatoes with gravy, coffee, pie – and ate it silently and with a great deal of methodical relish. I picked erratically at my omelet and had a hard time keeping my eyes off him as we ate. I felt as though I were in the dining car of a train and had been seated by the steward with another solitary male traveler, some kindly stranger, someone who didn't even speak my language, perhaps, but who was still content to eat his dinner with me, exuding an air of calm acceptance as if he'd known me all his life.
When he'd finished he took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket (he smoked Lucky Strikes; whenever I think of him I think of that little red bull's-eye right over his heart) and offered me one, shaking a couple out of the pack and raising an eyebrow. I shook my head.
He smoked one and then another, and over our second cup of coffee he looked up. 'Why have you been so quiet this afternoon?'
I shrugged.
'Don't you want to know about our trip to Argentina?'
I set my cup in its saucer and stared at him. Then I began to laugh.
'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, I do. Tell me.'
'Don't you wonder how I know? That you know, I mean?'
That hadn't occurred to me, and I guess he saw it in my face because now he laughed. 'It's no mystery,' he said. 'When I called to cancel the reservations – they didn't want to do it, of course, nonrefundable tickets and all that, but I think we've got it worked out now – anyway, when I called the airline they were rather surprised, as they said I'd called to confirm only the day before.'
'How did you know it was me?'
'Who else could it have been? You had the key. I know, I know,' he said when I tried to interrupt him. 'I left you that key on purpose. It would have made things easier later on, for various reasons, but by sheer chance you happened in at just the wrong time. I had only left the apartment for a few hours, you see, and I never dreamed that you'd happen in between midnight and seven a. m. I must have missed you by only a few minutes. If you'd happened in an hour or so later everything would have been gone.'
He took a sip of his coffee. I had so many questions it was useless to try to sort them into any coherent order. 'Why did you leave me the key?' I said at last.
Henry shrugged. 'Because I was pretty sure you wouldn't use it unless you had to,' he said. 'If we'd actually gone, someone would eventually have had to open the apartment for the landlady, and I would have sent you instructions on who to contact and how to dispose of the things I'd left, but I forgot all about that damned Liddell and Scott. Well, I won't say that. I knew you'd left it there, but I was in a hurry and somehow I never thought you'd come back for it bei Nacht und Nebel, as it were.
But that was silly of me. You have as much trouble sleeping as I do.'
'Let me get this straight. You didn't go to Argentina at all?'
Henry snorted, and motioned for the check. 'Of course not,' he said. 'Would I be here if we had?'
Once he'd paid the check he asked me if I wanted to go to Francis's. 'I don't think he's there,' he said.
'So why go there?'
'Because my apartment is a mess and I'm staying with him until I can get somebody in to clean it up. Do you happen to know of a good maid service? Francis said, the last time he had someone from the employment office in town, they stole two bottles of wine and fifty dollars from his dresser drawer.'
On the way into North Hampden, it was all I could do to keep from deluging Henry with questions, but I kept my mouth shut until we got there.
'He isn't here, I'm sure,' he said as he unlocked the front door.
'Where is he?'
'With Bunny. He took him to Manchester for dinner and then I think to some movie that Bunny wanted to see. Would you like some coffee?'
Francis's apartment was in an ugly 19705 building owned by the college. It was roomier and more private than the old oak-floored houses we lived in on campus, and as a consequence was much in demand; as a trade-off there were linoleum floors, ill-lit halls, and cheap, modern fixtures like at a Holiday Inn.
Francis didn't seem to mind it much. He had his own furniture there, brought out from the country house, but he'd chosen it carelessly and it was an atrocious mix of styles, upholstery, light and dark woods.
A search revealed that Francis had neither coffee nor tea ('He needs to go to the grocery store,' said Henry, looking over my shoulder into yet another barren cabinet), only a few bottles of Scotch and some Vichy water. I got some ice and a couple of glasses and we took a fifth of Famous Grouse with us into i?7 the shadowy living room, our shoes clicking across the ghastly wilderness of white linoleum.
'So you didn't go,' I said, after we'd sat down and Henry had poured us each a glass.
'No.'
'Why not?'
Henry sighed, and reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette.
'Money,' he said, as the match flared brightly in the dim. 'I don't have a trust like Francis, you see, only a monthly allowance.
It's much more than I generally need to live on, and for years I've put most of it into a savings account. But Bunny's just about cleaned that out. There was no way I could put my hands on more than thirty thousand dollars, even if I sold my car.'
Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money.'
'Yes.'
'Why would you need that much?'
Henry blew a smoke ring half into the yellowy circle of light beneath the lamp, half into the surrounding dark. 'Because we weren't coming back,' he said. 'None of us have work visas.
Whatever we took would've had to last the four of us for a long time. Incidentally,' he said, raising his voice as if I'd tried to interrupt him – actually, I hadn't, I was only making a sort of inarticulate noise of stupefaction – 'incidentally, Buenos Aires wasn't our destination at all. It was only a stop along the way.'
'What?'
'If we'd had the money, I suppose we would have flown to Paris or London, some gateway city with plenty of traffic, and once there to Amsterdam and eventually on to South America.
That way we'd have been more difficult to trace, you see. But we didn't have that kind of money, so the alternative was to go to Argentina and from there take a roundabout course to Uruguay – a dangerous and unstable place in its own right, to my way of thinking, but suitable for our purposes. My father has an interest in some developing property down there. We'd have had no problem finding a place to live,' 'Did he know about this,' I said, 'your father?'
'He would have eventually. As a matter of fact I was hoping to ask you to get in touch with him once we were there. Had something unforeseen happened he would've been able to help us, even get us out of the country if need be. He knows people down there, people in the government. Otherwise, no one would know.'
'He would do that for you?'
'My father and I are not close,' said Henry, 'but I am his only child.' He drank the rest of his Scotch and rattled the ice around in his glass. 'But anyway. Even though I didn't have much ready cash, my credit cards were more than adequate, leaving only the problem of raising a sum large enough to live on for a while.
Which is where Francis came in. He and his mother live off the income of a trust, as I expect you know, but they also have the right to withdraw as much as three percent of the principal per year, which would amount to a sum of about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Generally this isn't touched when it turns up, but in theory either of them can take it out whenever they like. A law firm in Boston serves as the trustees, and on Thursday morning we left the country house, came into Hampden for a few minutes so the twins and I could get our things, and then we all went to Boston and checked into the Parker House. That's a lovely hotel, do you know it? No? Dickens used to stay there when he came to America.
'At any rate, Francis had an appointment with his lawyers, and the twins had some things to straighten out with the passport office. It takes more planning than you might think to pick up and leave the country, but everything was pretty much taken care of; we were leaving the next night and there seemed no way things could go wrong. We were a bit worried about the twins, but of course it wouldn't have posed a problem even if they'd i?9 had to wait ten days or so and follow us down later. I had some things to do myself, but not many, and Francis had assured me that getting the money was a simple matter of going downtown and signing some papers. His mother would find out he'd taken it, but what could she do once he was gone?
'But he wasn't back when he said he would be, and three hours passed, then four. The twins came back, and the three of us had just ordered up some lunch from room service when Francis burst in, half-hysterical. The money for that year was all gone, you see. His mother had checked out every cent of the principal at the first of the year and hadn't told him about it. It was a nasty surprise, but even nastier given the circumstances.
He'd tried everything he could think of – to borrow money on the trust itself, even to assign his interests, which is, if you know anything about trusts, about the most desperate thing one can do. The twins were all for going ahead and taking our chances.
But… It was a difficult situation. Once we left we couldn't come back and anyway, what were we supposed to do when we got there? Live in a treehouse like Wendy and the Lost Boys?' He sighed. 'So there we were, with our suitcases packed and passports ready, but no money. I mean, literally none. Between the four of us we had hardly five thousand dollars. There was quite a bit of discussion, but in the end we decided our only choice was to come back to Hampden. For the time being, at least.'
He said this all quite calmly but I, listening to him, felt a lump growing in the pit of my stomach. The picture was still wholly obscure, but what I saw of it I didn't like at all. I said nothing for a long time, only looked at the shadows the lamp cast on the ceiling.
'Henry, my God,' I said at last. My voice was flat and strange even to my own ears.
He raised an eyebrow and said nothing, empty glass in hand, face half in shadow.
I looked at him. 'My God,' I said. 'What have you done?'
He smiled wryly, and leaned forward out of the light to pour himself some more Scotch. 'I think you already have a pretty good idea,' he said. 'Now let me ask you something. Why have you been covering up for us?'
'What?'
'You knew we were leaving the country. You knew it all the time and you didn't tell a soul. Why is that?'
The walls had fallen away and the room was black. Henry's face, lit starkly by the lamp, was pale against the darkness and stray points of light winked from the rim of his spectacles, glowed in the amber depths of his whiskey glass, shone blue in his eyes.
'I don't know,' I said.
He smiled. 'No?' he said.
I stared at him and didn't say anything.
'After all, we hadn't confided in you,' he said. His gaze on mine was steady, intense. 'You could have stopped us any time you wanted and yet you didn't. Why?'
'Henry, what in God's name have you done?'
He smiled. 'You tell me,' he said.
And the horrible thing was, somehow, that I did know. 'You killed somebody,' I said, 'didn't you?'
He looked at me for a moment, and then, to my utter, utter surprise, he leaned back in his chair and laughed.
'Good for you,' he said. 'You're just as smart as I thought you were. I knew you'd figure it out, sooner or later, that's what I've told the others all along.'
The darkness hung about our tiny circle of lamplight as heavy and palpable as a curtain. With a rush of what was almost motion sickness, I experienced for a moment both the claustrophobic feeling that the walls had rushed in towards us and the vertiginous one that they receded infinitely, leaving both of us suspended in some boundless expanse of dark. I swallowed, and looked back at Henry. 'Who was it?' I said.
He shrugged. 'A minor thing, really. An accident.'
'Not on purpose?'
'Heavens, no,' he said, surprised. W 'What happened?'
'I don't know where to begin.' He paused, and took a drink.
'Do you remember last fall, in Julian's class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?'
'Yes,' I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now.
'Well, we decided to try to have one.'
For a moment I thought I hadn't understood him. 'What?' I said.
'I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.'
'Come on.'
'We did.'
I looked at him. 'You must be joking.'
'No.'
That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.'
He shrugged.
'Why would you want to do something like that?'
'I was obsessed with the idea.'
'Why?'
'Well, as far as I knew, it hadn't been done for two thousand years.' He paused, when he saw he hadn't convinced me. 'After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.'
'Like what?'
'Well, it's not called a mystery for nothing,' said Henry sourly.
'Take my word for it. But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal – to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time. That was attractive to me from the first, even when I knew nothing ahont the topic and approached it less as potential mystes than anthropologist. Ancient commentators are very circumspect about the whole thing. It was possible, with a great deal of work, to figure out some of the sacred rituals – the hymns, the sacred objects, what to wear and do and say. More difficult was the mystery itself: how did one propel oneself into such a state, what was the catalyst?' His voice was dreamy, amused.
'We tried everything. Drink, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison. On the night of our first attempt, we simply overdrank and passed out in our chitons in the woods near Francis's house.'
'You wore chitons'?'
'Yes,' said Henry, irritated. 'It was all in the interests of science.
We made them from bed sheets in Francis's attic. At any rate.
The first night nothing happened at all, except we were hung over and stiff from having slept on the ground. So the next time we didn't drink as much, but there we all were, in the middle of the night on the hill behind Francis's house, drunk and in chitons and singing Greek hymns like something from a fraternity initiation, and all at once Bunny began to laugh so hard that he fell over like a ninepin and rolled down the hill.
'It was rather obvious that drink alone wasn't going to do the trick. Goodness. I couldn't tell you all the things we tried. Vigils.
Fasting. Libations. It depresses me even to think about it. We burned hemlock branches and breathed the fumes. I knew the Pythia had chewed laurel leaves, but that didn't work either. You found those laurel leaves, if you recall, on the stove in Francis's kitchen.'
I stared at him. 'Why didn't I know about any of this?' I said.
Henry reached into his pocket for a cigarette. 'Well, really,' he said, 'I think that's kind of obvious.'
'What do you mean?'
'Of course we weren't going to tell you. We hardly knew you.
You would have thought we were crazy.' He was quiet for a I moment. 'You see, we had almost nothing to go on,' he said. 'I ^ suppose in a certain way I was misled by accounts of the Pythia, ™ the pneuma enthusiastikon, poisonous vapors and so forth. Those processes, though sketchy, are more well documented than Bacchic methods, and I thought for a while that the two must be related. Only after a long period of trial and error did it become evident that they were not, and that what we were missing was something, in all likelihood, quite simple. Which it was.'
'And what might that have been?'
'Only this. To receive the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of euphemia, cultic purity. That is at the very center of Bacchic mystery. Even Plato speaks of it. Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self- the dust of us, the part that decays – must be made clean as possible.'
'How is that?'
'Through symbolic acts, most of them fairly universal in the Greek world. Water poured over the head, baths, fasting – Bunny wasn't so good about the fasting nor about the baths, either, if you ask me but the rest of us went through the motions. The more we did it, though, the more meaningless it all began to seem, until, one day, I was struck by something rather obvious – namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.' He paused. 'Do you know,' he said, 'what Julian says about the Divine Comedy'?'
'No, Henry, I don't.'
'That it's incomprehensible to someone who isn't a Christian?
That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one. At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didii I believe. And belie! was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.'
I waited for him to continue.
'At this point, you must understand, we were on the verge of giving up,' he said calmly. 'The enterprise had been interesting, but not that interesting; and besides, it was a good deal of trouble.
You don't know how many times you almost stumbled on us.'
'No?'
'No.' He took a drink of his whiskey. 'I don't suppose you remember coming downstairs one night in the country, about three in the morning,' he said. 'Down to the library to get a book.
We heard you on the stairs. I was hidden behind the draperies; I could have reached out and touched you if I'd wanted. Another time you woke up before we even got home. We had to slip around to the back door, sneak up the stairs like cat burglars – it was very tiresome, all that creeping around barefoot in the dark.
Besides, it was getting cold. They say that the oreibasia took place in midwinter, but I daresay the Peloponnesus is considerably milder that time of year than Vermont.
'We'd worked on it so long, though, and it seemed senseless, in light of our revelation, not to try once more before the weather turned. Everything got serious all of a sudden. We fasted for three days, longer than we ever had before. A messenger came to me in a dream. Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I'd never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn't understand, towards an end I did not know.' He reached for his drink again. 'The only problem was Bunny. He didn't grasp, in some fundamental way, that things had changed significantly.
We were closer than we'd ever been, and every day counted; already it was terribly cold, and if it snowed, which it might have any day, we'd have had to wait till spring. I couldn't bear the thought that, after everything we'd done, he'd ruin it at the last minute. And I knew he would. At the crucial moment he'd start to tell some asinine joke and ruin everything. By the second day I was having my doubts, and then, on the afternoon of the night itself, Charles saw him in Commons having a grilled cheese sandwich and a milk shake. That did it. We decided to slip away without him. To go out on the weekends was too risky, since you'd almost caught us several times already, so we'd been driving out late on Thursday and getting back about three or four the next morning. Except this time we left early, before dinner, and didn't say a word to him about it.'
He lit a cigarette. There was a long pause.
'So?' I said. 'What happened?'
He laughed. 'I don't know what to say.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean that it worked.'
'It worked"!'
'Absolutely.'
'But how could-?'
'It worked.'
'I don't think I understand what you mean when you say "it worked."'
'I mean it in the most literal sense.'
'But how?'
'It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing.
Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know… I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no "I," and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy. It was like being a baby. I couldn't remember my name. The soles of my feet were cut to pieces and I couldn't even feel it.'
'But these are fundamentally sex rituals, aren't they?'
It came out not as a question but as a statement. He didn't blink, but sat waiting for me to continue.
'Well? Aren't they?'
He leaned over to rest his cigarette in the ashtray. 'Of course,' he said agreeably, cool as a priest in his dark suit and ascetic spectacles. 'You know that as well as I do.'
We sat looking at each other for a moment.
'What exactly did you do?' I said.
'Well, really, I think we needn't go into that now,' he said smoothly. 'There was a certain carnal element to the proceedings but the phenomenon was basically spiritual in nature.'
'You saw Dionysus, I suppose?'
I had not meant this at all seriously, and I was startled when he nodded as casually as if I'd asked him if he'd done his homework.
'You saw him corporeally! Goatskin? Thyrsus?'
'How do you know what Dionysus is?' said Henry, a bit sharply. 'What do you think it was we saw? A cartoon? A drawing from the side of a vase?'
'I just can't believe you're telling me you actually saw '
'What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you'd ever seen was a child's picture – blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don't know what Dionysus looks like. We're talking about God here. God is serious business.' He leaned back in his chair and scrutinized me. 'You don't have to take my word for any of this, you know,' he said. 'There were four of us.
Charles had a bloody bite-mark on his arm that he had no idea how he'd got, but it wasn't a human bite. Too big. And strange puncture marks instead of teeth. Camilla said that during part of it, she'd believed she was a deer; and that was odd, too, because the rest of us remember chasing a deer through the woods, for miles it seemed. Actually, it was miles. I know that for a fact.
Apparently we ran and ran and ran, because when we came to ourselves we had no idea where we were. Later we figured out that we had got over at least four barbed-wire fences, though how I don't know, and were well off Francis's property, seven or eight miles into the country. This is where I come to the rather unfortunate part of my story.
'I have only the vaguest memory of this. I heard something behind me, or someone, and I wheeled around, almost losing my balance, and swung at whatever it was – a large, indistinct, yellow thing – with my closed fist, my left, which is not my good one. I felt a terrible pain in my knuckles and then, almost instantly, something knocked the breath right out of me. It was dark, you understand; I couldn't really see. I swung out again with my right, hard as I could and with all my weight behind it, and this time I heard a loud crack and a scream.
'We're not too clear on what happened after that. Camilla was a good deal ahead, but Charles and Francis were fairly close behind and had soon caught up with me.,' have a distinct recollection of being on my feet and seeing the two of them crash through the bushes – God. I can see them now. Their hair was tangled with leaves and mud and their clothes virtually in shreds.
They stood there, panting, glassy-eyed and hostile – I didn't recognize either of them, and I think we might have started to fight had not the moon come from behind a cloud. We stared at each other. Things started to come back. I looked down at my hand and saw it was covered with blood, and worse than blood.
Then Charles stepped forward and knelt at something at my feet, and I bent down, too, and saw that it was a man. He was dead. He was about forty years old and he had on a yellow plaid shirt – you know those woolen shirts they wear up here – and his neck was broken, and, unpleasant to say, his brains were all over his face. Really, I do not know how that happened. There was a dreadful mess. I was drenched in blood and there was even blood on my glasses.
'Charles tells a different story. He remembers seeing me by the body. But he says he also has a memory of struggling with something, pulling as hard as he could, and all of a sudden becoming aware that what he was pulling at was a man's arm, with his foot braced in the armpit. Francis – well, I can't say.
Every time you talk to him, he remembers something different.'
'And Camilla?'
Henry sighed. 'I suppose we'll never know what really happened,' he said. 'We didn't find her until a good bit later. She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except for her hair. It was dark and clotted, completely soaked. As if she'd tried to dye it red.'
'How could that have happened?'
'We don't know.' He lit another cigarette. 'Anyway, the man was dead. And there we were in the middle of the woods, half-naked and covered with mud with this body on the ground in front of us. We were all in a daze. I was fading in and out, nearly went to sleep; but then Francis went over for a closer look and had a pretty violent attack of the dry heaves. Something about that brought me to my senses. I told Charles to find Camilla and then I knelt down and went through the man's pockets.
There wasn't much – I found something or other that had his name on it – but of course that wasn't any help.
'I had no idea what to do. You must remember that it was getting cold, and I hadn't slept or eaten for a long time, and my mind wasn't at its clearest. For a few minutes – goodness, how confusing this was – I thought of digging a grave but then I realized that would be madness. We couldn't linger around all night. We didn't know where we were, or who might happen along, or even what time it was. Besides, we had nothing to dig a grave with. For a moment I nearly panicked – we couldn't just leave the body in the open, could we? – but then I realized it was the only thing we could do. My God. We didn't even know where the car was. I couldn't picture dragging this corpse over hill and dale for goodness knows how long; and even if we got it to the car, where would we take it?
'So when Charles came back with Camilla, we just left. Which, in retrospect, was the smartest thing we could have done. It's not as if teams of expert coroners are crawling all over upstate Vermont. It's a primitive place. People die violent natural deaths all the time. We didn't even know who the man was; there was nothing to tie us to him. All we had to worry about was finding the car and then making our way home without anyone seeing us.' He leaned over and poured himself some more Scotch.
'Which is exactly what we did.'
I poured myself another glass, too, and we sat without speaking for a minute or more.
'Henry,' I said at last. 'Good God.'
He raised an eyebrow. 'Really, it was more upsetting than you can imagine,' he said. 'Once I hit a deer with my car. It was a beautiful creature and to see it struggling, blood everywhere, legs broken… And this was even more distressing but at least I thought it was over. I never dreamed we'd hear anything else about it.' He took a drink of his Scotch. 'Unfortunately, that is not the case,' he said. 'Bunny has seen to that.'
'What do you mean?'
'You saw him this morning. He's driven us half mad over this.
I am very nearly at the end of my rope.'
There was the sound of a key being turned in the lock. I lenry brought up his glass and drank the rest of his whiskey in a long swallow. That'll be Francis,' he said, and turned on the overhead light.
When the lights came on, and the circle of darkness leapt back into the mundane and familiar boundaries of the living room cluttered desk; low, lumpy sofa; the dusty and modishly cut draperies that had fallen to Francis after one of his mother's decorating purges – it was as if I'd switched on the lamp after a long bad dream; blinking, I was relieved to discover that the doors and windows were still where they were supposed to be and that the furniture hadn't rearranged itself, by diabolical magic, in the dark.
The bolt turned. Francis stepped in from the dark hall. He was breathing hard, pulling with dispirited jerks at the fingertips of a glove.
'Jesus, Henry,' he said. 'What a night.'
I was out of his line of vision. Henry glanced at me and cleared his throat discreetly. Francis wheeled around.
I thought I looked back at him casually enough, but evidently I didn't. It must have been all over my face.
He stared at me for a long time, the glove half on, half off, dangling limply from his hand.
'Oh, no,' he said at last, without moving his eyes away from mine. 'Henry. You didn't.'
Tm afraid I did,' Henry said.
Francis squeezed his eyes tight shut, then reopened them.
He had got very white, his pallor dry and talcumy as a chalk drawing on rough paper. For a moment I wondered if he might faint.
'It's all right,' said Henry.
Francis didn't move.
'Really, Francis,' Henry said, a trifle peevishly, 'it's all right.
Sit down.'
Breathing hard, he made his way across the room and fell heavily into an armchair, where he rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette.
'He knew,' said Henry. 'I told you so.'
Francis looked up at me, the unlit cigarette trembling in his fingertips. 'Did you?'
I didn't answer. For a moment I found myself wondering if this was all some monstrous practical joke. Francis dragged a hand down the side of his face.
'I suppose everybody knows now,' he said. 'I don't even know why I feel bad about it.'
Henry had stepped into the kitchen for a glass. Now he poured some Scotch in it and handed it to Francis. 'Deprendi miserum est,' he said.
To my surprise Francis laughed, a humorless little snort.
'Good Lord,' he said, and took a long drink. 'What a nightmare.
I can't imagine what you must think of us, Richard.'
'It doesn't matter.' I said this without thinking, but as soon as I had, I realized, with something of a jolt, that it was true; it really didn't matter that much, at least not in the preconceived way that one would expect.
'Well, I guess you could say we're in quite a fix,' said Francis, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. 'I don't know what we're going to do with Bunny. I wanted to slap him when we were standing in line for that damned movie.'
'You took him to Manchester?' Henry said.
'Yes. But people are so nosy and you never do really know who might be sitting behind you, do you? It wasn't even a good movie.'
'What was it?'
'Some nonsense about a bachelor party. I just want to take a sleeping pill and go to bed.' He drank off the rest of his Scotch and poured himself another inch. 'Jesus,' he said to me. 'You're being so nice about this. The feel awfully embarrassed by this whole thing.'
There was a long silence.
Finally I said: 'What are you going to do?'
Francis sighed. 'We didn't mean to do anything,' he said. 'I know it sounds kind of bad, but what can we do about it now?'
The resigned note in his voice simultaneously angered and distressed me.7 don't know,' I said. 'Why for God's sake didn't you go to the police?'
'Surely you're joking,' said Henry dryly.
'Tell them you don't know what happened? That you found him lying out in the woods? Or, God, I don't know, that you hit him with the car, that he ran out in front of you or something?'
'That would have been a very foolish thing to do,' Henry said.
'It was an unfortunate incident and I am sorry that it happened, but frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers' interests or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in a Vermont jail.'
'But it was an accident. You said so yourself.'
Henry shrugged.
'If you'd gone right in, you could've got off on some minor charge. Maybe nothing would have happened at all.'
'Maybe not,' Henry said agreeably. 'But remember, this is Vermont.'
'What the hell difference does that make?'
'It makes a great deal of difference, unfortunately. If the thing went to trial, we'd be tried here. And not, I might add, by a jury of our peers.'
'So?'
'Say what you like, but you can't convince me that a jury box of poverty-level Vermonters would have the remotest bit of pity for four college students on trial for murdering one of their neighbors.'
'People in I lampden have been hoping tor years that something like this would happen,' said Francis, lighting a new cigar ette off the end of the old one. 'We wouldn't be getting off on any manslaughter charges. We'd be lucky if we didn't go to the chair.'
'Imagine how it would look,' Henry said. 'We're all young, well educated, reasonably well off; perhaps most importantly, not Vermonters. And I suppose that any equitable judge might make allowances for our youth, and the fact that it was an accident and so forth '
'Four rich college kids?' said Francis. 'Drunk? On drugs? On this guy's land in the middle of the night?'
'You were on his land?'
'Well, apparently,' said Henry. 'That's where the papers said his body was found.'
I hadn't been in Vermont very long, but I'd been there long enough to know what any Vermonter worth his salt would think of that. Trespassing on someone's land was tantamount to breaking into his house. 'Oh, God,' I said.
'That's not the half of it, either,' said Francis. 'For Christ's sake, we were wearing bed sheets. Barefoot. Soaked in blood.
Stinking drunk. Can you imagine if we'd trailed down to the sheriff's office and tried to explain all that'?'
'Not that we were in any condition to explain,' Henry said dreamily. 'Really. I wonder if you understand what sort of state we were in. Scarcely an hour before, we'd all been really, truly out of our minds. And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.'
'It certainly wasn't as if something snapped and there we were, our jolly old selves,' said Francis. 'Believe me. We might as well have had shock treatments.'
'I really don't know how we got home without being seen,'
Henry said.
'No way could we have patched together a plausible story from this. Good Lord. Tt was weeks before I got over it. Camilla couldn't even talk for three days.'
With a small chill, I remembered: Camilla, her throat wrapped in a red muffler, unable to speak. Laryngitis, they'd said.
'Yes, that was very strange,' said Henry. 'She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn't come out right. As if she'd had a stroke. When she started to speak again, her high school French came back before her English or her Greek.
Nursery words. I remember sitting by her bed, listening to her count to ten, watching her point to lafenetre, la chaise Francis laughed. 'She was so funny,' he said. 'When I asked her how she felt she said, "Je me sens eomme Helene Keller, man vieux,"'
'Did she go to the doctor?'
'Are you kidding?'
'What if she hadn't got any better?'
'Well, the same thing happened to all of us,' said Henry. 'Only it more or less wore off in a couple of hours.'
'You couldn't talk?'
'Bitten and scratched to pieces?' Francis said. 'Tongue-tied?
Half mad? If we'd gone to the police they would have charged us with every unsolved death in New England for the last five years.' He held up an imaginary newspaper. ' "Crazed Hippies Indicted for Rural Thrill-Killing."
"Cult Slaying of Old Abe So and-So."'
'Teen Satanists Murder Longtime Vermont Resident,' said Henry, lighting a cigarette.
Francis started to laugh.
'It would be one thing if we had even a chance at a decent hearing,' said Henry. 'But we don't.'
'And I personally can't imagine much worse than being tried for my life by a Vermont circuit-court judge and a jury box full of telephone operators.'
'Things aren't marvelous,' said Henry, 'but they could certainly be worse. The big problem now is Bunny.'
'What's wrong with him?'
'Nothing's wrong with him.'
Then what's the problem?'
'He just can't keep his mouth shut, that's all.'
'Haven't you talked to him?'
'About ten million times,' Francis said.
'Has he tried to go to the police?'
'If he goes on like this,' said Henry, 'he won't have to. They'll come right to us. Reasoning with him does no good. He just doesn't grasp what a serious business this is.'
'Surely he doesn't want to see you go to jail.'
'If he thought about it, I'm sure he'd realize he didn't,' said Henry evenly. 'And I'm sure he'd realize that he doesn't particularly want to go to jail himself, either.'
'Bunny? But why?'
'Because he's known about this since November and he hasn't gone to the police,' Francis said.
'But that's beside the point,' said Henry. 'Even he has sense enough not to turn us in. He doesn't have much of an alibi for the night of the murder, and if it ever came to prison for the rest of us I think he must know that I, at least, would do everything in my power to see he came along with us.' He stubbed out his cigarette. 'The problem is he's just a fool, and sooner or later he's going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person,' he said.
'Perhaps not intentionally, but I can't pretend to be too concerned with motive at this point. You heard him this morning. He'd be in quite a spot himself if this got back to the police but of course he thinks those ghastly jokes are all terribly subtle and clever and over everyone's head,' 'He's only just smart enough to realize what a mistake turning us in would be,' said Francis, pausing to pour himself another drink. 'But we can't seem to pound it into him that it's even more in his own self-interest not to go around talking like he does. And, really, I'm not at nil sure he won't just come out and tell someone, when he's in one of these confessional moods.'
'Tell someone? Like who?'
'Marion. His father. The Dean of Studies.' He shuddered.
'Gives me the creeps just to think about it. He's just the sort who always stands up in the back of the courtroom during the last five minutes of "Perry Mason.'"
'Bunny Corcoran, Boy Detective,' said Henry dryly.
'How did he find out? He wasn't with you, was he?'
'As a matter of fact,' said Francis, 'he was with you.' He glanced at Henry, and to my surprise the two of them began to laugh.
'What? What's so funny?' I said, alarmed.
This sent them into fresh peals of laughter. 'Nothing,' said Francis at last.
'Really, it is nothing,' said Henry, with a bemused little sigh.
'The oddest things make me laugh these days.' He lit another cigarette. 'He was with you that night, early in the evening, anyway. Remember? You went to the movies.'
'The Thirty-Nine Steps,' Francis said.
With something of a start, I did remember: a windy autumn night, full moon obscured by dusty rags of cloud. I'd worked late in the library and hadn't gone to dinner. Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, and the dry leaves skittering and dancing on the path before me, I'd run into Bunny on his way to the Hitchcock series, which the Film Society was showing in the auditorium.
We were late and there were no seats left so we sat on the carpeted stairs, Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker. The high wind rattled the flimsy walls; a door banged open and shut until somebody propped it open with a brick. On the screen, locomotives screaming across a black-and-white nightmare of iron-bridged chasms.
'We had a drink afterwards,' I said. 'Then he went to his room.'
Henry sighed. 'I wish he had,' he said.
'He kept asking if I knew where you were.'
'He knew himself, very well. We'd threatened half a dozen times to leave him at home if he didn't behave.'
'So he got the bright idea of coming around to Henry's to scare him,' said Francis, pouring himself another drink.
'I was so angry about that,' said Henry abruptly. 'Even if nothing had happened, it was a sneaky thing to do. He knew where the spare key was, and he just got it and let himself in.'
'Even so, nothing might have happened. It was just a horrible string of coincidences. If we'd stopped in the country to get rid of our clothes, if we'd come here or to the twins', if Bunny only hadn't fallen asleep 'He was asleep?'
'Yes, or otherwise he would have got discouraged and left,'
Henry said. 'We didn't get back to Hampden until six in the morning. It was a miracle we found our way to the car, over all those fields and things in the dark… Well, it was foolish to drive to North Hampden in those bloody clothes. The police could have pulled us over, we could have had a wreck, anything. But I felt ill, and I wasn't thinking clearly, and I suppose I drove to my own apartment by instinct.'
'He left my room around midnight.'
'Well, then, he was alone in my apartment from about twelve thirty to six a. m. And the coroner reckoned the time of death between one and four. That's one of the few decent cards fate dealt us in the whole hand. Though Bunny wasn't with us, he'd have a hard time proving he wasn't. Unfortunately, that's not a card we can play except in the direst circumstances.' He shrugged.
'If only he'd left the lamp on, anything to tip us off.'
'But that was going to be the big surprise, you see. Jumping out at us from the dark.'
'We walked in and turned on the light, and then it was too late. He woke up instantly. And there we were '
'- all white robes and bloody like something from Edgar Allan Poe,' Francis said gloomily.
'Jesus, what did he do?'
'What do you think? We scared him half to death.'
'It served him right,' said Henry.
'Tell him about the ice cream.'
'Really, this was the last straw,' Henry said crossly. 'He took a quart of ice cream out of my freezer to eat while he waited he couldn't bother to get a bowl of it, you understand, he had to have the whole quart – and when he fell asleep it melted all over him and on my chair and on that nice little Oriental rug I used to have. Well. It was quite a good antique, that rug, but the dry cleaners said there was nothing they could do. It came back in shreds. And my chair.' He reached for a cigarette. 'He screamed like a banshee when he saw us '
'- and he would not shut up,' said Francis. 'Remember, it was six o'clock in the morning, the neighbors sleeping…' He shook his head. 'I remember Charles taking a step towards him, trying to talk to him, and Bunny yelling bloody murder. After a minute or two '
'It was only a few seconds,' Henry said.
'- after a minute, Camilla picked up a glass ashtray and threw it at him and hit him square in the chest.'
'It wasn't a hard blow,' said Henry thoughtfully, 'but it was quite judiciously timed. Instantly he shut up and stared at her and I said to him, "Bunny, shut up. You'll wake the neighbors.
We've hit a deer in the road on the way home."'
'So then,' said Francis, 'he wiped his brow and rolled his eyes and went through the whole Bunny routine – boy you guys scared me and must've been half-asleep and just on and on and on-'
'And meanwhile,' Henry said, 'the four of us were standing there in the bloody sheets, the lights on, no curtains, in full view of anyone who might happen to drive by. He was talking so loudly, and the lights were so bright, and I felt so faint with exhaustion and shock that I couldn't do much more than stare at him. My God – we were covered with this man's blood, we'd tracked it into the house, the sun was coming up, and here, to top it all off, was Bunny. I couldn't force myself to think what to do. Then Camilla, quite sensibly, flicked off the light and all of a sudden I realized no matter how it looked, no matter who was there, we had to get out of our clothes and wash up without losing another second.'
'I practically had to rip the sheet off,' said Francis. The blood had dried and it was stuck to me. By the time I'd managed that, Henry and the others were in the bathroom. Spray was flying; the water in the bathtub was backed up red; rusty splashes on the tile. It was a nightmare.'
'I can't tell you how unfortunate it was that Bunny happened to be there,' said Henry, shaking his head. 'But for heaven's sake, we couldn't just stand around and wait for him to leave. There was blood everywhere, the neighbors would soon be up, for all I knew the police would be pounding at the door any second 'Well, it was too bad we alarmed him, but then, it wasn't like we thought we were doing this in front of J. Edgar Hoover, either,' said Francis.
'Exactly,' said Henry. 'I don't want to convey the impression that Bunny's presence seemed like a tremendous menace at that point. It was just a nuisance, because I knew he wondered what was going on, but at the moment he was the least of our troubles.
If there'd been time, I would have sat him down and explained things to him the instant we got in. But there wasn't time.'
'Good God,' Francis said, and shuddered. 'I still can't go in Henry's bathroom. Blood smeared on the porcelain. Henry's straight razor swinging from a peg. We were bruised and scratched to pieces.'
'Charles was the worst by far.'
'Oh, my God. Thorns stuck all over him.'
'And that bite.'
'You've never seen anything like it,' said Francis. 'Four inches around and the teeth marks just gouged in. Remember what Bunny said?'
Henry laughed. 'Yes,' he said. 'Tell him.'
'Well, there we all were, and Charles was turning to get the soap – I didn't even know Bunny was there, I suppose he was looking in the door – when all of a sudden I heard him say, in this weird businesslike way, "Looks like that deer took a plug out of your arm, Charles."'
'He was standing there for part of the time, making comments of various sorts,' said Henry, 'but the next thing I knew he wasn't.
I was disturbed by how suddenly he'd left but glad he was out of the way. We had a great deal to do and not too much time.'
'Weren't you afraid he'd tell somebody?'
Henry looked at me blankly. 'Who?'
The. Marion. Anybody.'
'No. At that point I had no reason to think he'd do anything of the sort. He'd been with us on previous tries, you understand, so our appearance didn't seem as extraordinary to him as it might have to you. The whole thing was deadly secret. He'd been involved in it with us for months. How could he have told anyone without explaining the whole thing and making himself look foolish? Julian knew what we were trying to do, but I was still pretty certain Bunny wouldn't talk to him without checking it with us first. And, as it happened, I was right.'
He paused and lit a cigarette. 'It was almost daybreak, and things were still a dreadful mess – bloody footprints on the porch, the chitons lying where we'd dropped them. The twins put on some old clothes of mine and went out to take care of the porch and the inside of the car. The chitons, I knew, should be burnt, but I didn't want to start a big fire in the back yard; nor did I want to burn them inside and risk setting off the fire alarm. My landlady is constantly warning me not to use the fireplace, but I'd always suspected it worked. I took a chance and as luck would have it, it did.'
'I was no help at all,' said Francis.
'No, you certainly weren't,' said Henry crossly.
'I couldn't help it. I thought I was going to throw up. I went back to Henry's room and went to sleep.'
'I think we all would have liked to go to sleep but somebody had to clean up,' Henry said. 'The twins came in around seven.
I was still having a terrible time with the bathroom. Charles's back was stuck full of thorns like a pincushion. For a while Camilla and I worked on him with a pair of tweezers; then I went back in the bathroom to finish up. The worst of it was over, but I was so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open. The towels weren't so bad – we'd pretty much avoided using them – but there were stains on some of them so I put them in the washing machine and dumped in some soap. The twins were asleep, on that fold-out bed in the back room, and I shoved Charles over and was out like a light.'
'Fourteen hours,' said Francis. 'I've never slept that long in my life.'
'Nor have I. Like a dead man. No dreams.'
'I can't tell you how disorienting this was,' Francis said. 'The sun was coming up when I went to sleep, and it seemed like I'd just closed my eyes when I opened them again, and it was dark, and a phone was ringing, and I had no idea where I was. It kept ringing and ringing, and finally I got up and found my way into the hall. Somebody said don't answer it but -'
'I've never seen anybody like you for answering a phone,' said Henry. 'Even in somebody else's house.'
'Well, what am I supposed to do? Just let it ring? Anyway, I picked it up, and it was Bunny, cheery as a lark. Boy, the four of us had really been messed up, and were we turning into a bunch of nudists or what, and how about if we all went to the Brasserie.» and had some dinner?' ™ I sat up in my chair. 'Wait,' I said. 'Was that the night?'
Henry nodded. 'You came too,' he said. 'Remember?'
'Of course,' I said, unaccountably excited that the story was at last beginning to dovetail with my own experience. 'Of course. I met Bunny on his way to your place.'
'If you don't mind my saying so, we were all a little surprised when he showed up with you,' said Francis.
'Well, I suppose eventually he wanted to get us alone and find out what happened, but it was nothing that couldn't wait,' said Henry. 'You'll recall that our appearance wouldn't have seemed so odd to him as it might. He'd been with us before, you know, on nights very nearly as – what is the word I'm looking for?'
'- when we'd been sick all over the place,' said Francis, 'and fallen in mud, and didn't get home till dawn. There was the blood – he might have wondered exactly how we'd killed that deer-but still.'
Uncomfortably, I thought of the Bacchae: hooves and bloody ribs, scraps dangling from the fir trees. There was a word for it in Greek: omophagia. Suddenly it came back to me: walking into Henry's apartment, all those tired faces, Bunny's snide greeting of'Khairei, deerslayers!'
They'd been quiet that evening, quiet and pale, though not more than seemed remarkable for people suffering particularly bad hangovers. Only Camilla's laryngitis seemed unusual. They'd been drunk the night before, they told me, drunk as bandicoots; Camilla had left her sweater at home and caught cold on the walk back to North Hampden. Outside, it was dark and raining hard. Henry gave me the car keys and asked me to drive.
It was a Friday night, but the weather was so bad the Brasserie was nearly deserted. We ate Welsh rarebits and listened to the rain beating down in gusts on the roof. Bunny and I drank whiskey and hot water; the others had tea.
'Feeling queasy, bakchoi T said Bunny slyly after the waiter took our drink orders.
Camilla made a face at him.
When we went out to the car after dinner Bunny walked around it, inspected the headlights, kicked at the tires. This the one you were in last night?' he said, blinking in the rain.
'Yes.'
He brushed the damp hair from his eyes and bent to examine the fender. 'German cars,' he said. 'Hate to say it but I think the Krauts have got Detroit metal beat. I don't see a scratch.'
I asked him what he meant.
'Aw, they were driving around drunk. Making a nuisance of themselves on the public road. Hit a deer. Did you kill it?' he asked Henry.
Walking around to the passenger's side, Henry looked up.
'What's that?'
'The deer. Didja kill it?'
Henry opened the door. 'It looked pretty dead to me,' he had said.
There was a long silence. My eyes were smarting from all the smoke. A thick gray haze of it hung near the ceiling.
'So what's the problem?' I said.
'What do you mean?'
'What happened? Did you tell him about it or not?'
Henry took a deep breath. 'No,' he said. 'We might have, but obviously the fewer people who knew the better. When I first saw him alone, I broached it carefully, but he seemed satisfied with the deer story and I let it go at that. If he hadn't figured it out on his own there was certainly no reason to tell him.
The fellow's body was found, an article ran in the Hampden Examiner, no problem at all. But then – by some rotten stroke of luck – I suppose in Hampden they don't get many stories like this – they published a follow-up story two weeks later.
"Mysterious Death in Battenkill County." And that was the one Bunny saw.'
'It was the stupidest thing,' Francis said. 'He never reads the newspaper. None of this would have happened if it wasn't for that blasted Marion.'
'She has a subscription, something to do with the Early Childhood Center,' said Henry, rubbing his eyes. 'Bunny was with her in Commons before lunch. She was talking to one of her friends – Marion, that is – and Bunny I suppose had got bored and started to read her paper. The twins and I went up to say hello and the first thing he said, practically across the room, was "Look here, you guys, some chicken farmer got killed out by Francis's house."
Then he read a bit of the article out loud. Fractured skull, no murder weapon, no motive, no leads. I was trying to think of some way to change the subject when he said: "Hey. November tenth? That's the night you guys were out at Francis's. The night you ran over that deer."
' "I don't see," I said, "how that could be right."
' "It was the tenth. I remember because it was the day before my mom's birthday. That's really something, isn't it?"
' "Why yes," we said, "it certainly is."
' "If I had a suspicious mind," he said, "I'd guess you'd done it, Henry, coming back from Battenkill County that night with blood from head to toe."'
He lit another cigarette. 'You have to remember that it was lunch time, Commons was packed, Marion and her friend were listening to every word, and besides, you know how his voice carries… We laughed, naturally, and Charles said something funny, and we'd just managed to get him off the topic when he looked at the paper again. "I can't believe this, guys," he said.
"An honest-to-God murder, out in the woods too, not three miles from where you were. You know, if the cops had pulled you over that night, you'd probably be in jail right now. There's a phone number to call if anybody's got any information. If I I wanted to, 1 bet I could get you guys in a heck of a lot of trouble…" et cetera, et cetera.
'Of course, I didn't know what to think. Was he joking, did he really suspect? Eventually I got him to drop it but still I had an awful feeling that he'd felt how uneasy he'd made me. He knows me so well – he has a sixth sense about that kind of thing.
And I was uneasy. Goodness. It was right before lunch, all these security guards were standing around, half of them are connected with the police force in Hampden… I mean, there was no way our story could stand up to even peremptory examination and I knew it. Obviously we hadn't hit a deer. There wasn't a scratch on either of the cars. And if anyone made even a casual connection between us and the dead man… So, as I say, I was glad when he dropped it. But even then I had a feeling we hadn't heard the last of it. He teased us about it – quite innocently, I believe, but in public as well as private – for the rest of the term. You know how he is. Once he gets something like that on the brain he won't give it up.'
I did know. Bunny had an uncanny ability to ferret out topics of conversation that made his listener uneasy and to dwell upon them with ferocity once he had. In all the months I'd known him he'd never ceased to tease me, for instance, about that jacket I'd worn to lunch with him that first day, and about what he saw as my flimsy and tastelessly Californian style of dress. To an impartial eye, my clothes were in fact not at all dissimilar from his own but his snide remarks upon the subject were so inexhaustible and tireless, I think, because in spite of my good-natured laughter he must have been dimly aware that he was touching a nerve, that I was in fact incredibly self-conscious about these virtually imperceptible differences of dress and of the rather less imperceptible differences of manner and bearing between myself and the rest of them. I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu – you've never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student – but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade. Whenever Bunny, rudely and in public, accused me of wearing a shirt which contained a polyester blend, or remarked critically that my perfectly ordinary trousers, indistinguishable from his own, bore the taint of something he called a 'Western cut,' a large portion of the pleasure this sport afforded him was derived from his unerring and bloodhoundish sense that this, of all topics, was the one which made me most truly uncomfortable. He could not have failed to notice what a sore spot his mention of the murder had touched in Henry; nor, once he sensed its existence, could he have restrained himself from continuing to jab at it.
'Of course, he didn't know a thing,' Francis said. 'Really, he didn't. It was all a big joke to him. He liked to throw out references to that farmer we'd gone and murdered, just to see me jump. One day he told me he'd seen a policeman out in front of my house, asking my landlady questions.'
'He did that to me, too,' said Henry. 'He was always joking about calling the tips number in the newspaper, and the five of us splitting the reward money. Picking up the telephone.
Pretending to dial.'
'You can understand how thin that wore after a time. My God.
Some of the things he said in front of you – The terrible thing was, you could never tell when it was coming. Right before school let out he stuck a copy of that newspaper article under the windshield wiper of my car. "Mysterious Death in Battenkill County." It was horrible to know that he'd saved it in the first place, and kept it all that time.'
'Worst of all,' said Henry, 'there was absolutely nothing we could do. For a while we even thought of telling him outright, throwing ourselves on his mercy so to speak, but then we I realized, at that late date, it was impossible to predict how he'd react. He was grouchy, and sick, and worried about his grades.
And the term was nearly over too. It seemed that the best thing to do was to stay on his good side until the Christmas break take him places, buy him things, pay a lot of attention to him and hope it would blow over during the winter.' He sighed. 'At the end of virtually every school term I've been through with Bunny, he's suggested that the two of us go on a trip, meaning by this that we go to some place of his choosing and that I pay for it. He hasn't the money to get to Manchester on his own.
And when the subject came up, as I knew it would, about a week or two before school was out, I thought: why not? In this way, at least, one of us could keep an eye on him over the winter; and perhaps a change of scenery might prove beneficial. I should also note that it didn't seem to be such a bad thing if he were to feel a bit under obligation to me. He wanted to go to either Italy or Jamaica. I knew I couldn't bear Jamaica, so I bought two tickets for Rome and arranged for some rooms not far from the Piazza di Spagna.'
'And you gave him money for clothes and all those useless Italian books.'
'Yes. All in all it was a considerable outlay of money but it seemed like a good investment. I even thought it might be a bit of fun. But never, in my wildest dreams… Really, I don't know where to begin. I remember when he saw our rooms – actually, they were quite charming, with a frescoed ceiling, beautiful old balcony, glorious view, I was rather proud of myself for having found them – he was incensed, and began to complain that it was shabby, that it was too cold and the plumbing was bad; and, in short, that the place was completely unsuitable and he wondered how I had been duped into taking it. He'd thought I knew better than to stumble into a lousy tourist trap, but he guessed that he was wrong. He insinuated that our throats would be cut in the night. At that point, I was more amenable to his whims. I asked him, if he didn't like the rooms, where would he prefer to stay? and he suggested why didn't we just go down and get a suite – not a room, you understand, but a suite – in the Grand Hotel?
'He kept on, and finally I told him we would do nothing of the sort. For one thing, the exchange rate was bad and the rooms – besides being paid in advance, and with my money – were already rather more than I could afford. He sulked for days, feigning asthma attacks, moping around and honking at his inhaler and nagging me constantly – accusing me of being cheap, and so forth, and when he traveled he liked to do it right – and finally I lost my temper. I told him that if the rooms were satisfactory to me, they were certainly better than what he was used to – I mean, my God, it was a palazzo, it belonged to a countess, I'd paid a fortune for it – and, in short, there was no possibility of my paying 500,000 lire a night for the company of American tourists and a couple of sheets of hotel stationery.
'So we stayed on at the Piazza di Spagna, which he proceeded to transform into a living Hell. He needled me ceaselessly – about the carpet, about the pipes, about what he felt was his insufficient supply of pocket money. We were living just a few steps from the Via Condotti, the most expensive shopping street in Rome.,' was lucky, he said. No wonder I was having such a good time, since I could buy whatever I wanted, while all he could do was lie wheezing in the garret like a poor stepchild. I did what I could to placate him, but the more I bought him, the more he wanted.
Besides which, he would hardly let me out of his sight. He complained if I left him alone for even a few minutes; but if I asked him to come along with me, to a museum or a church my God, we were in Rome – he was dreadfully bored and kept at me constantly to leave. It got so I couldn't even read a book without his sailing in. Goodness. He'd stand outside the door and jabber at me while I was having my bath. I caught him going through my suitcase. I mean' – he paused delicately – 'it's slightly annoying to have even an unobtrusive person sharing such close quarters with one. Perhaps I'd only forgotten what it was like when we lived together freshman year, or perhaps I've simply become more accustomed to living alone, but after a week or two of this I was a nervous wreck. I could hardly bear the sight of him. And I was worried about other things as well. You know, don't you,' he said abruptly to me, 'that sometimes I get headaches, rather bad ones?'
I did know. Bunny – fond of recounting his own illnesses and those of others – had described them in an awed whisper: Henry, flat on his back in a dark room, ice packs on his head and a handkerchief tied over his eyes.
'I don't get them so often as I once did. When I was thirteen or fourteen I had them all the time. But now it seems that when they do come – sometimes only once a year – they're much worse. And after I'd been a few weeks in Italy, I felt one coming on. Unmistakable. Noises get louder; objects shimmer; my peripheral vision darkens and I see all sorts of unpleasant things hovering at its edges. There's a terrible pressure in the air. I'll look at a street sign and not be able to read it, not understand the simplest spoken sentence. There's not much that can be done when it comes to that but I did what I could – stayed in my room with the shades pulled, took medicine, tried to keep quiet. At last I realized I would have to cable my doctor in the States. The drugs they give me are too powerful to dispense in prescription form; generally I go to the emergency room for a shot. I wasn't sure what an Italian doctor would do if I showed up gasping at his office, an American tourist, asking for an injection of phenobarbital.
'But by then it was too late. The headache was on me in a matter of hours and after that, I was quite incapable either of finding my way to a doctor or making myself understood if I had. I don't know if Bunny tried to get me one or not. His Italian is so bad that when he tried to speak to anyone he would generally just end up insulting them. The American Express office was not far from where we lived, and I'm sure they could have given him the name of an English-speaking doctor, but of course that's not the sort of thing that would occur to Bunny.
'I hardly know what happened for the next few days. I lay in my room with the shades down and sheets of newspaper taped over the shades. It was impossible even to have any ice sent up – all one could get were lukewarm pitchers of acqua semplice but then I had a hard time talking in English, much less Italian.
God knows where Bunny was. I have no memory of seeing him, nor much of anything else.
'Anyway. For a few days I lay flat on my back, hardly able to blink without feeling like my forehead was splitting open, and everything sick and black. I swung in and out of consciousness until finally I became aware of a thin seam of light burning at the edge of the shade. How long I'd been looking at it I don't know, but gradually I became aware that it was morning, that the pain had receded somewhat, and that I could move around without awful difficulty. I also realized that I was extraordinarily thirsty.
There was no water in my pitcher, so I got up and put on my dressing gown and went to get a drink.
'My room and Bunny's opened from opposite ends to a rather grand central room – fifteen-foot ceilings, with a fresco in the manner of Carracci; glorious sculptured-stuccoed framework; French doors leading to the balcony. I was almost blinded by the morning light, but I made out a shape which I took to be Bunny, bent over some books and papers at my desk. I waited until my eyes cleared, one hand on the doorknob to steady myself, and then I said, "Good morning, Bun."
'Well, he leapt up as if he'd been scalded, and scrabbled in the papers as if to hide something, and all of a sudden I realized what he had. I went over and snatched it from him. It was my diary.
He was always nosing around trying to get a look at it; I'd hidden it behind a radiator but I suppose he'd come digging in my room while I was ill. He'd found it once before, but since 1 write in Latin I dnn't suppose he was able to make much sense of it. I didn't even use his real name. Cuniculus molestus, I thought, denoted him quite well. And he'd never figure that out without a lexicon.
'Unfortunately, while I was ill, he'd had ample chance to avail himself of one. A lexicon, that is. And I know we make fun of Bunny for being such a dreadful Latinist, but he'd managed to eke out a pretty competent little English translation of the more recent entries. I must say, I never dreamed he was capable of such a thing. It must have taken him days.
'I wasn't even angry. I was too stunned. I stared at the translation – it was sitting right there – and then at him, and then, all of a sudden, he pushed back his chair and began to bellow at me.
We had killed that fellow, he said, killed him in cold blood and didn't even bother to tell him about it, but he knew there was something fishy all along, and where did I get off calling him Rabbit, and he had half a mind to go right down to the American consulate and have them send over some police… Then – this was foolish of me – I slapped him in the face, hard as I could.'
He sighed. 'I shouldn't have done that. I didn't even do it from anger, but frustration. I was sick and exhausted; I was afraid someone would hear him; I just didn't think I could stand it another second.
'And I'd hit him harder than I meant to. His mouth fell open.
My hand had left a big white mark across his cheek. All of a sudden the blood rushed back into it, bright red. He began to shout at me, cursing, quite hysterical, throwing wild punches at me. There were rapid footsteps on the stairs, followed by a loud banging at the door and a delirious burst of Italian. I grabbed the diary and the translation and threw them in the stove – Bunny went for them, but I held him back until they started to go up and then I yelled for whoever it was to come in. It was the chambermaid. She flew into the room, screaming in Italian so fast I couldn't understand a word she said. At first I thought she was angry about the noise. Then I understood it wasn't it at all.
She'd known I was ill; there'd been hardly a sound from the room for days and then, she said excitedly, she'd heard all the screaming; she had thought I'd died in the night, perhaps, and the other young signer had found me, but as I was standing now in front of her, that was obviously not the case; did I need a doctor? An ambulance? Bicarbonate di soda?
'I thanked her and said no, I was perfectly all right, and then I sort of dunque-dunqued around, trying to think of some explanation for the disturbance, but she seemed perfectly satisfied and went away to fetch our breakfast. Bunny looked rather stunned.
He had no idea what it had been about, of course. I suppose it seemed rather sinister and inexplicable. He asked me where she was going, and what she'd said, but I was too sick and angry to answer. I went back to my bedroom and shut the door, and stayed there until she came back with our breakfast. She laid it out on the terrace, and we went outside to eat.
'Curiously, Bunny had little to say. After a bit of a tense silence, he inquired about my health, told me what he'd done while I was ill, and said nothing about what had just happened. I ate my breakfast, and realized all I could do was try to keep my head. I had hurt his feelings, I knew – really, there were several very unkind things in the diary – so I resolved to be as pleasant to him from then on out as I could, and to hope no more problems would arise.'
He paused to take a drink of his whiskey. I looked at him.
'You mean, you thought problems might not arise?' I said.
'I know Bunny better than you do,' Henry said crossly.
'But what about what he said – about the police?'
'I knew he wasn't prepared to go to the police, Richard.'
'If it were simply a question of the dead man, things would be different, don't you see?' said Francis, leaning forward in his chair. 'It's not that his conscience bothers him. Or that he feels any compelling kind of moral outrage. He thinks he's been somehow wronged by the whole business.'
'Well, frankly, I thought I was doing him a favor by not telling him,' Henry said. 'But he was angry – is angry, I should say because things were kept from him. He feels injured. Excluded.
And my best chance was to try to make amends for that. We're old friends, he and I.'
'Tell him about those things Bunny bought with your credit cards while you were sick.'
'I didn't find out about that until later,' said Henry gloomily.
'It doesn't make much difference now.' He lit another cigarette.
'I suppose, right after he found out, he was in a kind of shock,' he said. 'And, too, he was in a strange country, unable to speak the language, without a cent of his own. He was all right for a little while. Nonetheless, once he caught on to the fact – and it didn't take him long – that, circumstances to the contrary, I was actually pretty much at his mercy, you can't imagine what torture he put me through. He talked about it all the time. In restaurants, in shops, in taxicabs. Of course, it was the off season, and not many English around, but for all I know there are entire families of Americans back home in Ohio wondering if… Oh, God.
Exhaustive monologues in the Hosteria dell'Orso. An argument in the Via dei Cestari. An abortive re-enactment of it in the lobby of the Grand Hotel.
'One afternoon at a cafe, he was going on and on and I noticed that a man at the next table was hanging on every word. We got up to leave. He got up too. I wasn't sure what to think. I knew he was German, because I'd heard him talking to the waiter, but I had no idea if he had any English or if he'd been able to hear Bunny distinctly enough to understand. Perhaps he was only a homosexual, but I didn't want to take any chances. I led the way home through the alleys, turning this way and that, and I felt quite certain we'd lost him but apparently not, because when I woke up the next morning and looked out the window he was standing by the fountain. Bunny was elated. He thought it was just like a spy picture. He wanted to go out and see if this fellow would try to follow us, and I had practically to restrain him by force. All morning I watched from the window. The German stood around, had a few cigarettes, and drifted away after a couple of hours; but it wasn't until about four o'clock when Bunny, who'd been complaining steadily since noon, began to raise such a ruckus that we finally went to get something to eat. But we were only a few blocks from the piazza when I thought I saw the German again, walking behind us at quite a distance. I turned and started back, in hopes of confronting him; he disappeared, but in a few minutes I turned around and he was there again.
'I'd been worried before, but then I began to feel really afraid.
Immediately we went off into a side street, and made our way home by a roundabout route – Bunny never did get his lunch that day, he almost drove me crazy – and I sat by the window until it got dark, telling Bunny to shut up and trying to think what to do. I didn't think he knew exactly where we lived otherwise, why roam around the piazza, why not come directly to our apartment if he had something to say? At any rate. We. left our rooms pretty much in the middle of the night and checked into the Excelsior, which was fine with Bunny. Room service, you know. I watched quite anxiously for the German the rest of my time in Rome – goodness, I dream about him still – but I never saw him again.'
'What do you suppose he wanted? Money?'
Henry shrugged. 'Who knows. Unfortunately at that point I had very little money to give him. Bunny's jaunts to the tailors and so forth had just about cleaned me out, and then having to move to this hotel -1 didn't care about the money, really I didn't, but he was nearly driving me crazy. Never once was I alone. It was impossible to write a letter or even to make a telephone call without Bunny lurking somewhere in the background, arrectis auribus, trying to listen in. While I was having a bath, he'd go in my room and root through my things; I'd come out to find my clothes all wadded up in the bureau and crumbs in the pages of my notebooks. Everything I did made him suspicious.
'I stood it as long as I could but I was beginning to feel desperate and, frankly, rather unwell too. I knew that leaving him in Rome might be dangerous but it seemed every day that things got worse and eventually it became obvious that staying on was no solution. Already I knew that the four of us could under no circumstances go back to school as usual in the spring – though look at us now – and that we'd have to devise a plan, probably a rather Pyrrhic and unsatisfactory one. But I needed time, and quiet, and a few weeks' grace period in the States if I was to do anything of the sort. So one night at the Excelsior when Bunny was drunk and sleeping soundly I packed my clothes – leaving him his ticket home and two thousand American dollars and no note – and took a taxi to the airport and got on the first plane home.'
'You left him two thousand dollars?' I said, aghast.
Henry shrugged. Francis shook his head and snorted. 'That's nothing,' he said.
I stared at them.
'Really, it is nothing,' said Henry mildly. 'I can't tell you how much that trip to Italy cost me. And my parents are generous, but they're not that generous. I've never had to ask for money in my life until the last few months. As it is, my savings are virtually gone and I don't know how much longer I can keep feeding them these stories about elaborate car repairs and so forth. I mean, I was prepared to be reasonable with Bunny, but he doesn't seem to understand that after all I'm just a student on an allowance and not some bottomless well of money… And the horrible thing is, I don't see an end to it. I don't know what would happen if my parents got disgusted and cut me off, which is extremely likely to happen at some point in the near future if things go on as they are.'
'He's blackmailing you?'
Henry and Francis looked at earh other.
'Well, not exactly,' said Francis.
Henry shook his head. 'Bunny doesn't think of it in those terms,' he said wearily. 'You'd have to know his parents to understand. What the Corcorans did with their sons was to send them all to the most expensive schools they could possibly get into, and let them fend for themselves once they were there. His parents don't give him a cent. Apparently they never have. He told me when they sent him off to Saint Jerome's they didn't even give him money for his schoolbooks. Rather an odd child-rearing method, in my opinion – like certain reptiles who hatch their young and abandon them to the elements. Not surprisingly, this has inculcated in Bunny the notion that it is more honorable to live by sponging off other people than it is to work.'
'But I thought his folks were supposed to be such bluebloods,'
I said.
'The Corcorans have delusions of grandeur. The problem is, they lack the money to back them up. No doubt they think it very aristocratic and grand, farming their sons off on other people.'
'He's shameless about it,' said Francis. 'Even with the twins, and they're nearly as poor as he is.'
'The bigger the sums, the better, and never a thought of paying it back. Of course, he'd rather die than get a job.'
'The Corcorans would rather see him dead,' said Francis sourly, lighting his cigarette and coughing as he exhaled. 'But this squeamishness about work wears a bit thin when one is forced to assume his upkeep oneself.'
'It's unthinkable,' said Henry. Td rather have any job, six jobs, than beg from people. Look at you,' he said to me. 'Your parents aren't particularly generous with you, are they? But you're so scrupulous about not borrowing money that it's rather silly.'
I said nothing, embarrassed.
'I leavens. I think you might have died in that warehouse rather than wire one of us for a couple of hundred dollars.' He lit a cigarette and blew out an emphatic plume of smoke. 'That's an infinitesimal sum. I'm sure we shall have spent two or three rimes that on Bunny by the end of next week,' I stared. 'You're kidding,' I said.
'I wish I were.'
'I don't mind lending money either,' Francis said, 'if I've got it. But Bunny borrows beyond all reason. Even in the old days he thought nothing of asking for a hundred dollars at the drop of a hat, for no reason at all.'
'And never a word of thanks,' said Henry irritably. 'What can he spend it on? If he had even a shred of self-respect he'd go down to the employment office and get himself a job.'
'You and I may be down there in a couple of weeks if he doesn't let up,' said Francis glumly, pouring himself another glass of Scotch and sloshing a good deal of it on the table. 'I've spent thousands on him. Thousands,' he said to me, taking a careful sip from the trembling brim of his glass. 'And most of it on restaurant bills, the pig. It's all very friendly, why don't we go out to dinner and that sort of thing, but the way things are, how can I say no?
My mother thinks I'm on drugs. I don't suppose there's much else she can think. She's told my grandparents not to give me any money and since January I haven't gotten a damn thing except my dividend check. Which is fine as far as it goes, but I can't be taking people out for hundred-dollar dinners every night.'
Henry shrugged. 'He's always been like this,' he said. 'Always.
He's amusing; I liked him; I felt a little sorry for him. What was it to me, to lend him money for his schoolbooks and know he wouldn't pay it back?'
'Except now,' Francis said, 'it's not just money for schoolbooks.
And now we can't say no.'
'How long can you keep this up?'
'Not forever.'
'And when the money's gone?'
'I don't know,' said Henry, reaching up behind his spectacles to rub his eyes again.
'Maybe I could talk to him.'
'No,' said Henry and Francis, one on top of the other, with an alacrity that surprised me.
'Why-?'
There was an awkward pause, finally broken by Francis.
'Well, you may or may not know this,' he said, 'but Bunny is a little jealous of you. Already he thinks we've all ganged up on him. If he gets the impression you're siding with the rest of us…"
'You mustn't let on you know,' said Henry. 'Ever. Unless you want to make things worse.'
For a moment no one spoke. The apartment was blue with smoke, through which the broad expanse of white linoleum was arctic, surreal. Music from a neighbor's stereo was filtering through the walls. The Grateful Dead. Good Lord.
'It's a terrible thing, what we did,' said Francis abruptly. 'I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame.
I feel bad about it.'
'Well, of course, I do too,' said Henry matter-of-factly. 'But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it.'
Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. 'No,' he said. 'Not that bad.'
No one said anything for a moment. I felt sleepy, ill, as if this were some lingering and dyspeptic dream. I had said it before, but I said it again, mildly surprised at the sound of my own voice in the quiet room. 'What are you going to do?'
'I don't know what we're going to do,' said Henry, as calmly as if I'd asked him his plans for the afternoon.
'Well, I know what I'm going to do,' said Francis. He stood up unsteadily and pulled with his forefinger at his collar. Startled, I looked at him, and he laughed at my surprise.
'I want to sleep,' he said, with a melodramatic roll of his eye, ' "dormir plutot que vivre"!'
' "Clans un sommeil aussi doux que la man…'" said Henry with a smile.
'Jesus, Henry, you know everything,' said Francis, 'you make me sick.' He turned unsteadily, loosening his tie as he did it, and swayed out of the room.
'I believe he is rather drunk,' said Henry, as a door slammed somewhere and we heard taps running furiously in the bathroom.
'It's early still. Do you want to play a hand or two of cards?'
I blinked at him.
He reached over and got a deck of cards from a box on the end table – Tiffany cards, with sky-blue backs and Francis's monogram on them in gold – and began to shuffle through them expertly. 'We could play bezique, or euchre if you'd rather,' he said, the blue and gold dissolving from his hands in a blur. 'I like poker myself- of course, it's rather a vulgar game, and no fun at all with two – but still, there's a certain random element in it which appeals to me.'
I looked at him, at his steady hands, the whirring cards, and suddenly an odd memory leapt to mind: Tojo, at the height of the war, forcing his top aides to sit up and play cards with him all night long.
He pushed the deck over to me. 'Do you want to cut?' he said, and lit a cigarette.
I looked at the cards, and then at the flame of the match burning with an unwavering clarity between his fingers.
'You're not too worried about this, are you?' I said.
Henry drew deeply on the cigarette, exhaled, shook out the match. 'No,' he said, looking thoughtfully at the thread of smoke that curled from the burnt end. 'I can get us out of it, I think.
But that depends on the exact opportunity presenting itself and for that we'll have to wait. I suppose it also depends to a certain extent on how much, in the end, we are willing to do. Shall I deal'
' he said, and he reached for the cards again.
I awoke from a heavy, dreamless sleep to find myself lying on Francis's couch in an uncomfortable position, and the morning sun streaming through the bank of windows at the rear. For a while I lay motionless, trying to remember where I was and how I had come to be there; it was a pleasant sensation which was abruptly soured when I recalled what had happened the night before. I sat up and rubbed the waffled pattern the sofa cushion had left on my cheek. The movement made my head ache. I stared at the overflowing ashtray, the three-quarters-empty bottle of Famous Grouse, the game of poker solitaire laid out upon the table. So it had all been real; it wasn't a dream.
I was thirsty. I went to the kitchen, my footsteps echoing in the silence, and drank a glass of water standing at the sink. It was seven a. m. by the kitchen clock.
I filled my glass again and took it to the living room with me and sat on the couch. As I drank, more slowly this time – bolting the first glass had made me slightly sick – I looked at Henry's solitaire poker game. He must have laid it out while I was asleep.
Instead of going all out for flushes in the columns, and full houses and fours on the rows, which was the prudent thing to do in this game, he'd tried for a couple of straight flushes on the rows and missed. Why had he done that? To see if he could beat the odds?
Or had he only been tired?
I picked up the cards and shuffled them and laid them out again one by one, in accordance with the strategic rules that he himself had taught me, and beat his score by fifty points. The cold, jaunty faces stared back at me: jacks in black and red, the Queen of Spades with her fishy eye. Suddenly a wave of fatigue and nausea shuddered over me, and I went to the closet, got my coat, and left, closing the door quietly behind me.
The hall, in the morning light, had the feel of a hospital corridor. Pausing unsteadily on the stairs, I looked back at Francis's door, indistinguishable from the others in the long faceless row.
I suppose if I had a moment of doubt at all it was then, as I stood in that cold, eerie stairwell looking back at the apartment from which I had come. Who were these people? How well did I know them? Could I trust any of them, really, when it came right down to it? Why, of all people, had they chosen to tell me?
It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.
Back in my room, dizzy and exhausted, I wanted more than anything to pull the shades and lie down on my bed – which seemed suddenly the most enticing bed in the world, musty pillow, dirty sheets, and all. But that was impossible. Greek Prose Composition was in two hours, and I hadn't done my homework.
The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, I finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is _j difficult for me to explain in English exactly what 1 mean. I can ™ only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.
Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.
In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular.
Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms – the world, in fact, was not their home, at least not the world as I knew it – and far from being occasional visitors to this land which I myself knew only as an admiring tourist, they were pretty much its permanent residents, as permanent as I suppose it was possible for them to be. Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, and it is eminently possible to study it all one's life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry's calculated, formal English, the English of a welleducated foreigner, as compared with the marvelous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek – quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times, I've seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious 'Hello,' and may I never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his 'Khairei!' when Julian happened to be at the other end.
1 was a bit uncomfortable – after the story I'd just heard – with the Callimachean epigrams having to do with flushed cheeks, and wine, and the kisses of fair-limbed youths by torchlight. I'd chosen instead a rather sad one, which in English runs as follows: 'At morn we buried Melanippus; as the sun set the maiden Basilo died by her own hand, as she could not endure to lay her brother on the pyre and live; and the house beheld a twofold woe, and all Gyrene bowed her head, to see the home of happy children made desolate.'
I finished my composition in less than an hour. After I'd gone through it and checked the endings, I washed my face and changed my shirt and went, with my books, over to Bunny's room.
Of the six of us, Bunny and I were the only two who lived on campus, and his house was across the lawn on the opposite end of Commons. He had a room on the ground floor, which I am sure was inconvenient for him since he spent most of his time upstairs in the house kitchen: ironing his pants, rummaging through the refrigerator, leaning out the window in his shirtsleeves to yell at passers-by. When he didn't answer his door I I went to look for him there, and I found him sitting in the ^ windowsill in his undershirt, drinking a cup of coffee and leafing through a magazine. I was a little surprised to see the twins there, too: Charles, standing with his left ankle crossed over his right, stirring moodily at his coffee and looking out the window; Camilla – and this surprised me, because Camilla wasn't much of one for domestic tasks – ironing one of Bunny's shirts.
'Oh, hello, old man,' said Bunny. 'Come on in. Having a little kaffeeklatsch. Yes, women are good for one or two things,' he added, when he saw me looking at Camilla and the ironing board, 'though, being a gentleman' – he winked broadly – 'I don't like to say what the other thing is, mixed company and all.
Charles, get him a cup of coffee, would you? No need to wash it, it's clean enough,' he said stridently, as Charles got a dirty cup from the drain board and turned on the tap. 'Do your prose composition?'
'Yeah.'
'Which epigram?'
'Twenty-two.'
'Hmn. Sounds like everybody went for the tearjerkers. Charles did that one about the girl who died, and all her friends missed her, and you, Camilla, you picked '
'Fourteen,' said Camilla, without looking up, pressing rather savagely on the collar band with the tip of the iron.
'Hah. I picked one of the racy ones myself. Ever been to France, Richard?'
'No,' I said.
'Then you better come with us this summer.'
'Us? Who?'
'Henry and me.'
I was so taken aback that all I could do was blink at him.
'France?' I said.
'May wee. Two-month tour. A real doozy. Have a look.' He tossed me the magazine, which I now saw was a glossy brochure.
I glanced through it. It was a lollapalooza of a tour, all right a 'luxury hotel harge cruise' which began in the Champagne country and then went, via hot air balloon, to Burgundy for more barging, through Beaujolais, to the Riviera and Cannes and Monte Carlo – it was lavishly illustrated, full of brightly colored pictures of gourmet meals, flower-decked barges, happy tourists popping champagne corks and waving from the basket of their balloon at the disgruntled old peasants in the fields below.
'Looks great, doesn't it?' said Bunny.
'Fabulous.'
'Rome was all right but actually it was kind of a sinkhole when you get right down to it. Besides, I like to gad about a little more myself. Stay on the move, see a few of the native customs. Just between you and me, I bet Henry's going to have a ball with this.'
I bet he will, too, I thought, staring at a picture of a woman holding up a stick of French bread at the camera and grinning like a maniac.
The twins were studiously avoiding my eye, Camilla bent over Bunny's shirt, Charles with his back to me and his elbows on the sideboard, looking out the kitchen window.
'Of course, this balloon thing's great,' Bunny said conversationally, 'but you know, I've been wondering, where do you go to the bathroom? Off the side or something?'
'Look here, I think this is going to take several minutes,' said Camilla abruptly. 'It's almost nine. Why don't you go ahead with Richard, Charles. Tell Julian not to wait.'
'Well, it's not going to take you that much longer, is it?' said Bunny crossly, craning over to see. 'What's the big problem?
Where'd you learn how to iron, anyway?'
'I never did. We send our shirts to the laundry.'
Charles followed me out the door, a few paces behind. We walked through the hall and down the stairs without a word, but once downstairs he stepped close behind me and, catching my arm, pulled me into an empty card room. In the twenties and thirties, rhere had been a hridge fad at Hampden; when the enthusiasm faded, the rooms were never subsequently put to any function and no one used them now except for drug deals, or typing, or illicit romantic trysts.
He shut the door. I found myself looking at the ancient card table – inlaid at its four corners with a diamond, a heart, a club and a spade.
'Henry called us,' said Charles. He was scratching at the raised edge of the diamond with his thumb, his head studiously down.
'When?'
'Early this morning.'
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
'I'm sorry,' said Charles, glancing up.
'Sorry for what?'
'Sorry he told you. Sorry for everything. Camilla's all upset.'
He seemed calm enough, tired but calm, and his intelligent eyes met mine with a sad, quiet candor. All of a sudden I felt terribly upset. I was fond of Francis and Henry but it was unthinkable that anything should happen to the twins. I thought, with a pang, of how kind they had always been; of how sweet Camilla was in those first awkward weeks and how Charles had always had a way of showing up in my room, or turning to me in a crowd with a tranquil assumption – heartwarming to me that he and I were particular friends; of walks and car trips and dinners at their house; of their letters – frequently unacknowledged on my part – which had come so faithfully over the long winter months.
From somewhere overhead I heard the shriek and groan of water pipes. We looked at each other.
'What are you going to do?' I said. It seemed the only question I had asked of anyone for the last twenty-four hours, and yet no one had given me a satisfactory answer.
He shrugged, a funny little one-shouldered shrug, a mannerism he and his sister had in common. 'Search me,' he said wearily. 'I guess we should go.'
When we got to Julian's office, Henry and Francis were already there. Francis hadn't finished his essay. He was scratching rapidly at the second page, his fingers blue with ink, while Henry proofread the first one, dashing in subscripts and aspirants with his fountain pen.
He didn't look up. 'Hello,' he said. 'Close the door, would you?'
Charles kicked at the door with his foot. 'Bad news,' he said.
'Very bad?'
'Financially, yes.'
Francis swore, in a quick hissing underbreath, without pausing in his work. Henry dashed in a few final marks, then fanned the paper in the air to dry it.
'Well for goodness' sakes,' he said mildly. 'I hope it can wait.
I don't want to have to think about it during class. How's that last page coming, Francis?'
'Just a minute,' said Francis, laboriously, his words lagging behind the hurried scrawl of his pen.
Henry stood behind Francis's chair and leaned over his shoulder and began to proofread the top of the last page, one elbow resting on the table. 'Camilla's with him?' he said.
'Yes. Ironing his nasty old shirt.'
'Hmnn.' He pointed at something with the end of his pen.
'Francis, you need the optative here instead of the subjunctive.'
Francis reached up quickly from his work – he was nearly at the end of the page – to change it.
'And this labial becomes pi, not kappa.'
Bunny arrived late, and in a foul temper. 'Charles,' he snapped, 'if you want this sister of yours to ever get a husband, you better teach her how to use an iron.' I was exhausted and ill prepared and it was all I could do to keep my mind on the class. I had._, French at two. but after Greek I went straight hack to my room and took a sleeping pill and went to bed. The sleeping pill was an extraneous gesture; I didn't need it, but the mere possibility of restlessness, of an afternoon full of bad dreams and distant plumbing noises, was too unpleasant to even contemplate.
So I slept soundly, more soundly than I should have, and the day slipped easily away. It was almost dark when somewhere, through great depths, I became aware that someone was knocking at my door.
It was Camilla. I must have looked terrible, because she raised an eyebrow and laughed at me. 'All you ever do is sleep,' she said. 'Why is it you're always sleeping when I come to see you?'
I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.
'Come in,' I said. s She did, and closed the door behind her. I sat on the side of * the unmade bed, feet bare and collar loose, and thought how wonderful it would be if this really were a dream, if I could walk over to where she sat and put my hands on either side of her face and kiss her, on the eyelids, on the mouth, on the place at her temple where the honey-colored hair graded into silky gold.
We looked at each other for a long time.
'Are you sick?' she said.
The gleam of her gold bracelet in the dark. I swallowed. It was hard to think what to say.
She stood up again. 'I'd better go,' she said. 'I'm sorry to have bothered you. I came to ask if you wanted to go on a drive.'
'What?'
'A drive. It's all right, though. Some other time.'
'Where?'
'Somewhere. Nowhere. I'm meeting Francis at Commons in ten minutes.'
'No, wait,' I said. I felt sort of marvelous. A narcotic heaviness still clung deliriously to my limbs and I imagined what fun it would be to wander with her – drowsy, hypnotized – up to Commons in the fading light, the snow.
I stood up – it took forever to do it, the floor receding gradually before my eyes as if I were simply growing taller and taller by some organic process – and walked to my closet. The floor swayed as gently beneath me as the deck of an airship. I found my overcoat, then a scarf. Gloves were too complicated to bother with.
'Okay,' I said. 'Ready.'
She raised an eyebrow. 'It's sort of cold out,' she said. 'Don't you think you should wear some shoes?'
We walked to Commons through slush and cold rain, and when we got there Charles, Francis, and Henry were waiting for us.
The configuration struck me as significant, in some way that was not entirely clear, everyone except for Bunny – 'What's going on?' I said, blinking at them.
'Nothing,' said Henry, tracing a pattern on the floor with the sharp, glinting ferrule of his umbrella. 'We're just going for a drive. I thought it might be fun' – he paused delicately – 'if we got away from school for a while, maybe had some dinner Without Bunny, that is the subtext here, I thought. Where was he? The tip of Henry's umbrella glittered. I glanced up and noticed that Francis was looking at me with lifted eyebrows.
'What is it?' I said irritably, swaying slightly in the doorway.
He exhaled with a sharp, amused sound. 'Are you drunk?' he said.
They were all looking at me in kind of a funny way. 'Yes,' I said. It wasn't the truth, but I didn't feel much like explaining.
The chill sky, misty with fine rain near the treetops, made even the familiar landscape around Hampden seem indifferent and remote. The valleys were white with fog and the top of Mount Cataract was entirely obscured, invisible in the cold haze. Not being able to see it, that omniscient mountain which grounded Hampden and its environs in my senses, I found it difficult to get my bearings, and it seemed as if we were heading into strange and unmarked territory, though I had been down this road a hundred times in all weathers. Henry drove, rather fast as he always did, the tires whining on the wet black road and water spraying high on either side.
'I looked at this place about a month ago,' he said, slowing as we approached a white farmhouse on a hill, forlorn bales of hay dotting the snowy pasture. 'It's still for sale, but I think they want too much.'
'How many acres?' said Camilla.
'A hundred and fifty.'
'What on earth would you do with that much land?' She raised her hand to clear the hair from her eyes and again I caught the gleam of her bracelet: blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown… 'You wouldn't want to farm it, would you?'
'To my way of thinking,' Henry said, 'the more land the better.
I'd love to have so much land that from where I lived I couldn't see a highway or a telephone pole or anything I didn't want to see. I suppose that's impossible, this day and age, and that place is practically on the road. There was another farm I saw, over the line in New York State…'
A truck shot past in a whine of spray.
Everyone seemed unusually calm and at ease and I thought I knew why. It was because. Bunny wasn't with us. They were avoiding the topic with a deliberate unconcern; he must be somewhere now, I thought, doing something, what I didn't want to ask. I leaned back and looked at the silvery, staggering paths the raindrops made as they blew across my window.
'If I bought a house anywhere I'd buy one here,' said Camilla.
'I've always liked the mountains better than the seashore.'
'So have I,' said Henry. 'I suppose in that regard my tastes are rather Hellenistic. Landlocked places interest me, remote prospects, wild country. I've never had the slightest bit of interest in the sea. Rather like what Homer says about the Arcadians, you remember? With ships they had nothing to do…'
'It's because you grew up in the Midwest,' Charles said.
'But if one follows that line of reasoning, then it follows that I would love flat lands, and plains. Which I don't. The descriptions of Troy in the Iliad are horrible to me – all flat land and burning sun. No. I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions Pan himself was born in the mountains, you know. And Zeus. In Parrhasia it was that Rheia bore thee,' he said dreamily, lapsing into Greek, 'where was a hill sheltered with the thickest brush It was dark now. Around us, the countryside lay veiled and mysterious, silent in the night and fog. This was remote, untraveled land, rocky and thickly wooded, with none of the quaint appeal of Hampden and its rolling hills, its ski chalets and antique shops, but high and perilous and primitive, everything black and desolate even of billboards.
Francis, who knew this territory better than we did, had said there was an inn nearby but it was hard to believe there was anything habitable for fifty miles around. Then we rounded a bend and our headlights swept across a rusted metal sign pockmarked with shotgun pellets, that informed us that the Hoosatonic Inn, straight ahead, was the original birthplace of Pie a la Mode.
The building was ringed by a rickety porch – sagging rockers, peeling paint. Inside, the lobby was an intriguing jumble of mahogany and moth-eaten velvet, interspersed with deer heads, calendars from filling stations, and a large collection of I Bicentennial commemorative trivets, mounted and hung upon the wall. *
The dining room was empty except for a few country people A eating their dinners, all of whom looked up at us with innocent, || frank curiosity as we came in, at our dark suits and spectacles, at | Francis's monogrammed cufflinks and his Charvet tie, at Camilla f" with her boyish haircut and sleek little Astrakhan coat. I was a bit surprised at this collective openness of demeanor – neither stares nor disapproving looks – until it occurred to me that these ^ people probably didn't realize we were from the college. Closer» in, we would have been pegged instantly as rich kids from up on *, the hill, kids likely to make a lot of noise and leave a bad tip. But J6 here we were only strangers, in a place where strangers were rare.
No one even came by to take an order. Dinner appeared with „ instantaneous magic: pork roast, biscuits, turnips and corn and butternut squash, in thick china bowls that had pictures of the presidents (up to Nixon) around their rims.
The waiter, a red-faced boy with bitten nails, lingered for a moment. Finally he said, shyly: 'You folks from New York City?'
'No,' said Charles, taking the plate of biscuits from Henry.
'From here.'
'From Hoosatonic?'
'No. Vermont, I mean.'
'Not New York?'
'No,' said Francis cheerily, carving at the roast. 'I'm from Boston.'
'I went there,' said the boy, impressed.
Francis smiled absently and reached for a dish.
'You folks must like the Red Sox.'
'Actually I do,' said Francis. 'Quite a bit. But they never seem to win, do they?'
'Some of the time they do. I guess we'll never see 'em win the Series, though,' He was still loitering, trying to think of something else to say, when Henry glanced up at him.
'Sit down,' he said unexpectedly. 'Have some dinner, won't you?'
After a bit of awkward demurral, he pulled up a chair, though he refused to eat anything; the dining room closed at eight, he told us, and it wasn't likely that anyone else would come in.
'We're off the highway,' he said. 'Most folks go to bed pretty early around here.' His name, we discovered, was John Deacon; he was my age – twenty – and had graduated from Equinox High School, over in Hoosatonic proper, only two years before. Since graduation, he said, he'd been working on his uncle's farm; the waiter's job was a new thing, something to fill the winter hours.
'This is only my third week,' he said. 'I like it here, I reckon.
Food's good. And I get my meals free.'
Henry, who generally disliked and was disliked by hoi polloi a category which in his view expanded to include persons ranging from teenagers with boom boxes to the Dean of Studies of Hamp den, who was independently wealthy and had a degree in American Studies from Yale – nonetheless had a genuine knack with poor people, simple people, country folk; he was despised by the functionaries of Hampden but admiredby its janitors, its gardeners and cooks. Though he did not treat them as equals – he didn't treat anyone as an equal, exactly – neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy. 'I think we're much more hypocritical about illness, and poverty, than were people in former ages,' I remember Julian saying once. 'In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true. Does anyone remember Plato's definition of Justice in the Republic? Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it. A poor man who wishes to rise above his station is only making himself needlessly miserable. And the wise poor have always known this, the same as do the wise rich.'
I'm not entirely sure now that this is true – because if it is, where does that leave me? still wiping down windshields in Piano? – but there is no doubt that Henry was so confident of his own abilities and position in the world, and so comfortable with them, that he had the strange effect of making others (including myself) feel comfortable in their respective, lesser positions, whatever they might happen to be. Poor people for the most part were unimpressed by his manner, except in the most hazy and admiring fashion; and as a consequence they were able to see past it to the real Henry, the Henry I knew, taciturn, polite, in many respects as simple and straightforward as they themselves were. It was a knack he shared with Julian, who was greatly admired by the country people who lived around him, much as one likes to imagine that kindly Pliny was held in affection by the poor folk of Comum and Tifernum.
Through most of the meal, Henry and the boy talked in the most intimate and, to me, baffling terms, about the land around Hampden and Hoosatonic – zoning, developments, price per acre, uncleared land and titles and who owned what – as the rest of us ate our dinners and listened. It was a conversation one might overhear at any rural filling station or feed store; but hearing it made me feel curiously happy, and at ease with the world.
In retrospect, it is odd how little power the dead farmer exercised over an imagination as morbid and hysterical as my own. I can well imagine the extravagance of nightmares such a thing might provoke (opening the door to a dream-classroom, the flannel shirted figure without a face propped ghoulishly at a desk, or turning from its work at the blackboard to grin at me), but I suppose it is rather telling that I seldom thought of it at all and then only when I was reminded in some way. I believe the others were troubled by it as little as or less than I was, as evidenced by the fact that they all had carried on so normally and in such good humor for so long. Monstrous as it was, the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry's feet, to be discovered when the lights came up; the picture of it, staring and dumb in all its gore, never failed to provoke an anxious little frisson but still it seemed relatively harmless compared to the very real and persistent menace which I now saw that Bunny presented.
Bunny, for all his appearance of amiable, callous stability, was actually a wildly erratic character. There were any number of reasons for this, but primary among them was his complete inability to think about anything before he did it. He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum. But his instincts had failed him in the new set of circumstances presented by the murder. Now that the old trusted channel-markers had, so to speak, been rearranged in the dark, the automatic-pilot mechanism by which his psyche navigated was useless; decks awash, he floundered aimlessly, running on sandbars, veering off in all sorts of bizarre directions.
To the casual observer, I suppose, he seemed pretty much his jolly old self- slapping people on the back, eating Twinkies and Ho Hos in the reading room of the library and dropping crumbs all down in the bindings of his Greek books. But behind that bluff facade some distinct and rather ominous changes were taking place, changes of which I was already dimly aware but which made themselves more evident as time went on.
In some respects, it was as if nothing had happened at all. We went to our classes, did our Greek, and generally managed to pretend among one another and everybody else that things were all right. At the time it heartened me that Bunny, in spite of his obviously disturbed state of mind, nonetheless continued to follow the old routine so easily. Now, of course, I see that the routine was all that held him together. It was his one remaining point of reference and he clung to it with a fierce Pavlovian tenacity, partly through habit and partly because he had nothing with which to replace it. I suppose the others sensed that the continuation of the old rituals was in some respects a charade for Bunny's benefit, kept up in order to soothe him, but I did not, nor did I have any idea how disturbed he really was until the following event took place.
We were spending the weekend at Francis's house. Aside from the barely perceptible strain which manifested itself in all dealings with Bunny at that time, things seemed to be going smoothly and he'd been in a good mood at dinner that night. When I went to bed he was still downstairs, drinking wine left from dinner and playing backgammon with Charles, to all appearances his usual self; but some time in the middle of the night I was awakened by a loud, incoherent bellowing, from down the corridor in Henry's room.
I sat up in bed and switched on the light.
'You don't care about a goddamn thing, do you?' I heard Bunny scream; this was followed by a crash, as if of books being swept from desk to floor. 'Not a thing but your own fucking self, you and all the rest of them – I'd like to know just what Julian would think, you bastard, if I told him a couple of- Don't touch me,' he shrieked, 'get away -I'
More crashing, as of furniture overturned, and Henry's voice, quick and angry. Bunny's rose above it. 'Go ahead!' he shouted, so loudly I'm sure he woke the house. 'Try and stop me. I'm not scared of you. You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew-'
Yet another crash, this time of splintering wood. A door slammed. There were rapid footsteps down the hall. Then the muffled noise of sobs – gasping, terrible sobs which went on for a long while.
About three o'clock, when everything was quiet and I was just about to go back to sleep, I heard soft footsteps in the hall and, after a pause, a knock at my door. It was Henry.
'Goodness,' he said distractedly, looking around my room, at the unmade four-poster hed and my clothes scattered on the rug beside it. Tm glad you're awake. I saw your light.'
'Jesus, what was all that about?'
He ran a hand through his rumpled hair. 'What do you suppose?' he said, looking up at me blankly. 'I don't know, really.
I must have done something to set him off, though for the life of me I don't know what. I was reading in my room, and he came in and wanted a dictionary. In fact, he asked me to look something up, and – You wouldn't happen to have an aspirin, would you?'
I sat on the side of my bed and rustled through the drawer of the night table, through the tissues and reading glasses and Christian Science leaflets belonging to one of Francis's aged female relatives. 'I don't see any,' I said. 'What happened?'
He sighed and sat down heavily in an armchair. There's aspirin in my room,' he said. 'In a tin in my overcoat pocket.
Also a blue enamel pillbox. And my cigarettes. Will you go get them for me?'
He was so pale and shaken I wondered if he was ill. 'What's the matter?' I said.
'I don't want to go in there.'
'Why not?'
'Because Bunny's asleep on my bed.'
I looked at him. 'Well, Jesus,' I said. 'I'm not going to '
He waved away my words with a tired hand. 'It's all right.
Really. I'm just too upset to go myself. He's fast asleep.'
I went quietly out of my room and down the hall. Henry's door was at the end. Pausing outside with one hand on the knob, I heard distinctly from within the peculiar huffing noise of Bunny's snores.
In spite of what I'd heard earlier, I was unprepared for what I saw: books were scattered in a frenzy across the floor; the night table was knocked over; against the wall lay the splay-legged remains of a black Malacca chair. The shade of the pole lamp was askew and cast a crazy irregular light over the room. In the middle of it was Bunny, his face resting on the tweed elbow of his jacket and one foot, still in its wing-tipped shoe, dangling off It the edge of the bed. Mouth open, his eyes swollen and unfamiliar f without their spectacles, he puffed and grumbled in his sleep. I | grabbed up Henry's things and left as fast as I could. I Bunny came down late the next morning, puff-eyed and sullen, while Francis and the twins and I were eating our breakfasts. He ignored our awkward greetings and went straight to the cabinet ^ and made himself a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and sat down I wordlessly at the table. In the abrupt silence which had fallen, I i heard Mr Hatch come in the front door. Francis excused himself i.1 and hurried away, and I heard the two of them murmuring in the hall as Bunny crunched morosely at his cereal. A few minutes passed. I was looking, obliquely, at Bunny slumped over his bowl «when all of a sudden, in the window behind his head, I saw the distant figure of Mr Hatch, walking across the open field beyond the garden, carrying the dark, curlicued ruins of the Malacca chair to the rubbish heap.
As troubling as they were, these eruptions of hysteria were infrequent. But they made it plain how upset Bunny was, and how disagreeable he might make himself if provoked. It was Henry he was angriest at, Henry who had betrayed him, and Henry who was always the subject of these outbursts. Yet in a funny way, it was Henry he was best able to tolerate on a daily basis. He was more or less constantly irritated with everyone else. He might explode at Francis, say, for making some remark he found pretentious, or become inexplicably enraged if Charles offered to buy him an ice cream; but he did not pick these petty fights with Henry in quite the same trivial, arbitrary way. This was in spite of the fact that Henry did not take nearly the pains to placate him that everyone else did. When the subject of the barge tour came up – and it came up fairly often – Henry played along in only the most perfunctory way, and his replies were mechanical and forced. To me, Bunny's confident anticipation was more chilling than any outburst; how could he possibly delude himself into thinking that the trip would come about, that it would be anything but a nightmare if it did? But Bunny, happy as a mental patient, would rattle for hours about his delusions of the Riviera, oblivious to a certain tightness about Henry's jaw, or to the empty, ominous silences which fell when he was talked out and sat, chin in hand, staring dreamily into space.
It seemed, for the most part, that he sublimated his anger towards Henry into his dealings with the rest of the world. He was insulting, rude, quick to start a quarrel with virtually everyone he came in contact with. Reports of his behavior drifted back to us through various channels. He threw a shoe at some hippies playing Hackysack outside his window; he threatened to beat up his neighbor for playing the radio too loudly; he called one of the ladies in the Bursar's office a troglodyte. It was fortunate for us, I suppose, that his wide circle of acquaintance included few people whom he saw on a regular basis. Julian saw as much of Bunny as anyone, but their relation did not extend much beyond the classroom. More troublesome was his friendship with his old schoolmate Cloke Rayburn; and most troublesome of all, Marion.
Marion, we knew, recognized the difference in Bunny's behavior as clearly as we did, and was puzzled and angered by it. If she'd seen the way he was around us, she doubtless would have realized that she was not the cause; but as it was she saw only the broken dates, the mood swings, the sullenness and the quick irrational angers which apparently were directed solely at her – Was he seeing another girl? Did he want to break up? An acquaintance at the Early Childhood Center told Camilla that one day at work Marion had called Bunny six times, and the last time he had hung up on her.
'God, please God, let her give him the old heave-ho,' said Francis, turning his eyes to heaven, when he heard this bit of intelligence. Nothing more was said of it, but we watched them carefully and prayed that it would be so. If he had his wits about him Bunny surely would keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
Cloke he saw rather less frequently. He and Bunny had little in common besides their prep school, and Cloke – who ran with a fast crowd, and took a lot of drugs besides – was fairly self-preoccupied, not likely to concern himself with Bunny's behavior or even to take much notice of it. Cloke lived in the house next door to mine, Durbinstall (nicknamed, by campus wags, 'Dalmane Hall,' it was the bustling center of what the administration chose to refer to as 'narcotics-related activity' and one's visits there were occasionally punctuated with explosions and small fires, incurred by lone free-basers or the student chemists who worked in the basement) and, fortunately for us, he lived in the front, on the ground floor. Since his shades were always up and there were no trees in the immediate area, it was possible to sit safely on the porch of the library, some fifty feet away, and enjoy a luxurious and unobscured view of Bunny, framed in a bright window as he gazed open-mouthed at comic books or talked, arms waving, with an invisible Cloke.
'I just like to have an idea,' Henry explained, 'where he goes.'
But actually it was quite simple to keep tabs on Bunny: I think because he, too, was unwilling to let the others, and Henry in particular, out of his sight for very long.
If he treated Henry with deference, it was the rest of us who were forced to bear the wearing, day-to-day brunt of his anger.
Most of the time he was simply irritating: for example, in his ill-informed and frequent tirades against the Catholic Church.
Bunny's family was Episcopalian, and my parents, as far as I knew, had no religious affiliation at all; but Henry and Francis and the twins had been reared as Catholics; and though none of I them went to church much, Bunny's ignorant, tireless stream of blasphemies enraged them. With leers and winks he told stories about lapsed nuns, sluttish Catholic girls, pederastic priests ('So then, this Father What's-His-Name, he said to the altar boy – this kid is nine years old, mind you, he's in my Cub Scout troop – he says to Tim Mulrooney, "Son, would you like to see where me and all the other fathers sleep at night?"'). He invented outrageous stories of the perversions of various Popes; informed them of little-known points of Catholic doctrine; raved about Vatican conspiracies, ignoring Henry's bald refutations and Francis's muttered asides about social-climbing Protestants.
What was worse was when he chose to zero in on one person in particular. With some preternatural craftiness he always knew the right nerve to touch, at exactly the right moment, to wound and outrage most. Charles was good-natured, and slow to anger, but he was sometimes so disturbed by these anti-Catholic diatribes that his very teacup would clatter upon its saucer. He was also sensitive to remarks about his drinking. As a matter of fact, Charles did drinka lot. We all did: but still, though he didn't indulge in any very conspicuous excess, I'd frequently had the experience of smelling liquor on his breath at odd hours or dropping by unexpectedly in the early afternoon to find him with a glass in his hand – which was perhaps understandable, things being what they were. Bunny made a show of fraudulent, infuriating concern, peppered with snide comments about drunkards and sots. He kept exaggerated tallies of Charles's cocktail consumption. He left questionnaires ('Do you sometimes feel you need a drink to get through the day?') and pamphlets (freckle-faced child gazing plaintively at parent, asking, 'Mommy, what's "drunk"?') anonymously in Charles's box, and once went so far as to give his name to the campus chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon Charles was deluged with tracts and phone calls and even a personal visit from a well-meaning Twelfth-Stepper.
With Francis, on the other hand, things were more pointed and unpleasant. Nobody said anything about it, ever, but we all knew he was gay. Though he was not promiscuous, every so often he would disappear quite mysteriously at a party and once, very early in our acquaintance, he'd made a subtle but unmistakable pass at me one afternoon when we were drunk and by ourselves in the rowboat. I'd dropped an oar, and in the confusion of retrieving it I felt his fingertips brush in a casual yet deliberate fashion along my cheek near the jawbone. I glanced up, startled, and our eyes met in that way that eyes will, and we looked at each other for a moment, the boat wobbling around us and the lost oar forgotten. I was dreadfully flustered; embarrassed, I looked away; when suddenly, and to my great surprise, he burst out laughing at my distress.
'No?' he said.
'No,' I said, relieved.
It might seem that this episode would have imposed a certain coolness upon our friendship. While I don't suppose that anyone who has devoted much energy to the study of Classics can be very much disturbed by homosexuality, neither am I particularly comfortable with it as it concerns me directly. Though I liked Francis well enough, I had always been nervous around him; oddly, it was this pass of his that cleared the air between us. I suppose I knew it was inevitable, and dreaded it. Once it was out of the way I was perfectly comfortable being alone with him even in the most questionable situations – drunk, or in his apartment, or even wedged in the back seat of a car.
With Francis and Bunny it was a different story. They were happy enough to be together in company, but if one was around either of them for too long it became obvious that they seldom did things with each other and almost never spent time alone. I knew why this was; we all did. Still, it never occurred to me that they weren't genuinely fond of each other on some level, nor that Bunny's gruff jokes concealed, however beguilingly, a keen and very pointed streak of malice toward Francis in particular.
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. I'd never considered, though I should have, that these crackpot prejudices of Bunny's which I found so amusing were not remotely ironic but deadly serious.
Not that Francis, in normal circumstances, wasn't perfectly able to take care of himself. He had a quick temper, and a sharp tongue, and though he could've put Bunny in his place pretty much any time he chose, he was understandably apprehensive about doing so. We were all of us painfully aware of that metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine which Bunny carried around with him day and night, and which, from time to time, he allowed us a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always with him, and he had the power to dash it to the floor whenever he pleased.
I don't really have the heart to recount all the vile things he said and did to Francis, the practical jokes, the remarks about faggots and queers, the public, humiliating stream of questions about his preference and practices: clinical and incredibly detailed ones, having to do with such things as enemas, and gerbils, and incandescent light bulbs.
'Just once,' I remember Francis hissing, through clenched teeth.
'Just once I'd like to…'
But there was absolutely nothing that anyone could say or do.
One might expect that I, being at that time perfectly innocent of any crime against either Bunny or humanity, would not myself be a target of this ongoing sniper fire. Unfortunately I was, perhaps more unfortunately for him than for me. How could he have been so blind as not to see how dangerous it might be for him to alienate the one impartial party, his one potential ally?
Because, as fond as I was of the others, I was fond of Bunny, too, and I would not have been nearly so quick to cast in my lot with the rest of them had he not turned on me so ferociously. Perhaps, in his mind, there was the justification of jealousy; his position in the group had started to slip at roughly the same time I'd arrived; his resentment was of the most petty and childish sort, and doubtless would never have surfaced had he not been in such a paranoid state, unable to distinguish his enemies from his friends.
By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: 'Gorgeous necktie,' he'd say, 'that's a Hermes, isn't it?' – and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie's humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: 'Richard, old man, why don't you keep any pictures of your folks around?'
It was just the sort of detail he would seize upon. His own room was filled with an array of flawless family memorabilia, all of them perfect as a series of advertisements: Bunny and his brothers, waving lacrosse sticks on a luminous black-and-white playing field; family Christmases, a pair of cool, tasteful parents in expensive bathrobes, five little yellow-haired boys in identical pajamas rolling on the floor with a laughing spaniel, and a ridiculously lavish train set, and the tree rising sumptuous in the background; Bunny's mother at her debutante ball, young and disdainful in white mink.
'What?' he'd ask with mock innocence. 'No cameras in California?
Or can't you have your friends seeing Mom in polyester pants suits? Where'd your parents go to school anyway?' he'd say, interrupting before I could interject. 'Are they Ivy League material? Or did they go to some kind of a State U?'
It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty. My lies about my family were adequate, I suppose, but they could not stand up under these glaring attacks. Neither of my parents had finished high school; my mother did wear pants suits, which she purchased at a factory outlet. In the only photograph I had of her, a snapshot, she squinted blurrily at the camera, one hand on the Cyclone fence and the other on my father's new riding lawn mower. This, ostensibly, was the reason that the photo had been sent me, my mother having some notion that I would be interested in the new acquisition; I'd kept it because it was the only picture I had of her, kept it tucked inside a Webster's dictionary (under M for Mother) on my desk. But one night I rose from my bed, suddenly consumed with fear that Bunny would find it while snooping around my room. No hiding place seemed safe enough. Finally I burned it in an ashtray.
They were unpleasant enough, these private inquisitions, but I cannot find words to adequately express the torments I suffered when he chose to ply this art of his in public. Bunny's dead now, requiescat in pace, but so long as I live I will never forget a particular interlude of sadism to which he subjected me at the twins' apartment.
A few days earlier, Bunny had been grilling me about where I'd gone to prep school. I don't know why I couldn't just have admitted the truth, that I'd gone to the public school in Piano.
Francis had gone to any number of wildly exclusive schools in England and Switzerland, and Henry had been at correspondingly exclusive American ones before he dropped out entirely in the eleventh grade; but the twins had only gone to a little country day school in Roanoke, and even Bunny's own hallowed Saint Jerome's was really only an expensive remedial school, the sort of place you see advertised in the back of Town and Country as offering specialized attention for the academic underachiever.
My own school was not particularly shameful in this context, yet I evaded the question long as I could till finally, cornered and desperate, I had told him I'd gone to Renfrew Hall, which is a tennis-y, indifferent sort of boys' school near San Francisco. That had seemed to satisfy him, but then, to my immense discomfort, and in front of everybody, he brought it up again.
'So you were at Renfrew,' he said chummily, turning to me and popping a handful of pistachios in his mouth.
'Yes.'
'When'd ya graduate?'
I offered the date of my real high school graduation.
'Ah,' he said, chomping busily on his nuts. 'So you were there with Von Raumer.'
'What?'
'Alec. Alec Von Raumer. From San Fran. Friend of Cloke's.
He was in the room the other day and we got talking. Lots of old Renfrew boys at Hampden, he says,' I said nothing, hoping he'd leave it at that.
'So you know Alec and all.'
'Uh, slightly,' I said.
'Funny, he said he didn't remember you,' said Bunny, reaching over for another handful of pistachios without taking his eyes off me. 'Not at all.'
'It's a big school.'
He cleared his throat. Think so?'
'Yes.'
'Von Raumer said it was tiny. Only about two hundred people.'
He paused and threw another handful of pistachios into his mouth, and chewed as he talked. 'What dormitory did you say you were in?'
'You wouldn't know it.'
'Von Raumer told me to make a point of asking you.'
'What difference does it make?'
'Oh, it's nothing, nothing at all, old horse,' said Bunny pleasantly.
'Just that it's pretty damn peculiar, n'est-ce pas'? You and Alec being there together for four years, in a tiny place like Renfrew, and he never laid eyes on you even once?'
'I was only there for two years.'
'How come you're not in the yearbook?'
'I am in the yearbook.'
'No you're not.'
The twins looked stricken. Henry had his back turned, pre248 tending not to listen. Now he said, quite suddenly and without turning around: 'I low do you know if lie was in the yearbook or not?'
'I don't think I've ever been in a yearbook in my life,' said Francis nervously. 'I can't stand to have my picture taken. Whenever I try to '
Bunny paid no attention. He leaned back in his chair.
'Come on,' he said to me. Till give you five dollars if you can tell me the name of the dorm you lived in.'
His eyes were riveted on mine; they were bright with a horrible relish. I said something incoherent and then in consternation got up and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Leaning on the sink, I held the glass to my temple; from the living room, Francis whispered something indistinct but angry, and then Bunny laughed harshly. I poured the water down the sink and turned on the tap so I wouldn't have to listen.
How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny's eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter? I still think about this sometimes. If what Bunny really wanted was revenge, he could have had it easily enough and without putting himself at risk.
What did he imagine was to be gained from this slow and potentially explosive kind of torture, had it, in his mind, some purpose, some goal? Or were his own actions as inexplicable to him as they were to us?
Or perhaps they weren't so inexplicable as that. Because the worst thing about all of this, as Camilla once remarked, was not that Bunny had suffered some total change of personality, some schizophrenic break, but rather that various unpleasant elements of his personality which heretofore we had only glimpsed had orchestrated and magnified themselves to a startling level of potency. Distasteful as his behavior was, we had seen it all before, only in less concentrated and vitriolic form. Even in the happiest times he'd made ran of my California accent, my secondhand overcoat and my room barren of tasteful bibelots, but in such an ingenuous way I couldn't possibly do anything but laugh. ('Good Lord, Richard,' he would say, picking up one of my old wingtips and poking his finger through the hole in the bottom. 'What is it with you California kids? Richer you are, the more shoddy you look. Won't even go to the barber. Before I know it, you'll have hair down to your shoulders and be skulking around in rags like Howard Hughes.') It never occurred to me to be offended; this was Bunny, my friend, who had even less pocket money than I did and a big rip in the seat of his trousers besides. A good deal of my horror at his new behavior sprang from the fact that it was so similar to the old and frankly endearing way he used to tease me, and I was as baffled and enraged at his sudden departure from the rules as though – if we had been in the habit of doing a little friendly sparring – he had boxed me into the corner and beaten me half to death.
To compound this – all these unpleasant recollections to the contrary – so much remained of the old Bunny, the one I knew and loved. Sometimes when I saw him at a distance – fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk – I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. It seemed impossible then that one could ever be angry at him, no matter what he did. Unfortunately, these were often the moments when he chose to attack. He would be amiable, charming, chatting in his old distracted manner when, in the same manner and without missing a beat, he would lean back in his chair and come out with something so horrendous, so backhanded, so unanswerable, that I would vow not to forget it, and never to forgive him again. I broke that promise many times. I was about to say that it was a promise I finally had to keep, but that's not I really true. Even today I cannot muster anything resembling anger for Bunny. In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?'
One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Camilla he tormented simply because she was a girl. In some ways she was his most vulnerable target – through no fault of her own, but simply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures, better seen than heard. This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.
Bunny, through no impulse toward Hellenic purity but simply out of mean-spiritedness, championed this view. He didn't like women, didn't enjoy their company, and even Marion, his self proclaimed raison d'etre, was tolerated as grudgingly as a concubine.
With Camilla he was forced to assume a slightly more paternalistic stance, beaming down at her with the condescension of an old papa toward a dimwit child. To the rest of us he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship. We all found this pretty funny. To be honest, none of us, not even the brightest of us, were destined for academic achievement in subsequent years, Francis being too lazy, Charles too diffuse, and Henry too erratic and generally strange, a sort of Mycroft Holmes of classical philology. Camilla was no different, secretly preferring, as I did, the easy delights of I English literature to the coolie labor of Greek. What was laugh «able was that poor Bunny should display concern about anyone else's intellectual capacities.
Being the only female in what was basically a boys' club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn't compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof. Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees.
Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.
If I found the twins so fascinating, I think it was because there was something a tiny bit inexplicable about them, something I was often on the verge of grasping but never quite did. Charles, kind and slightly ethereal soul that he was, was something of an enigma but Camilla was the real mystery, the safe I could never crack. I was never sure what she thought about anything, and I knew that Bunny found her even harder to read than I did. In good times he'd often offended her clumsily, without meaning to; as soon as things turned bad, he tried to insult and belittle her in a variety of ways, most of which struck wide of the mark. She was impervious to slights about her appearance; met his eye, unblinking, as he told the most vulgar and humiliating jokes; laughed if he attempted to insult her taste or her intelligence; ignored his frequent discourses, peppered with erudite quotations he must have gone to great trouble to dig up, all to the effect that all women were categorically inferior to himself: not designed as he was – for Philosophy, and Art, and Higher Reasoning, but to attract a husband and to Tend the Home.
Only once did I ever see him get to her. It was over at the twins' apartment, very late. Charles, fortunately, was out with Henry getting ice; he'd had a lot to drink and if he'd been around things would almost certainly have gotten out of hand.
Bunny was so drunk he could hardly sit up. For most of the evening, he'd been in a passable mood, but then, without warning, he turned to Camilla and said: 'How come you kids live together?'
She shrugged, in that odd, one-shouldered way the twins had.
'Huh?'
'It's convenient,' said Camilla. 'Cheap.'
'Well, I think it's pretty damned peculiar.'
'I've lived with Charles all my life.'
'Not much privacy, is there? Little place like this? On top of each other all the time?'
'It's a two-bedroom apartment.'
'And when you get lonesome in the middle of the night?'
There was a brief silence.
'I don't know what you're trying to say,' she said icily.
'Sure you do,' said Bunny. 'Convenient as hell. Kinda classical, too. Those Greeks carried on with their brothers and sisters like nobody's – whoops,' he said, retrieving the whiskey glass which was about to fall off the arm of his chair. 'Sure, it's against the law and stuff,' he said. 'But what's that to you. Break one, you might as well break 'em all, eh?'
I was stunned. Francis and I gaped at him as he unconcernedly drained his glass and reached for the bottle again.
To my utter, utter surprise, Camilla said tartly: 'You mustn't think I'm sleeping with my brother just because I won't sleep with you.'
Bunny laughed a low, nasty laugh. 'You couldn't pay me to sleep with you, girlie,' he said. 'Not for all the tea in China.'
She looked at him with absolutely no expression in her pale eyes. Then she got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Francis and me to one of the more torturous silences I have ever experienced.
Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants – too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive. To ascribe it to such a motive would be easy enough. There was one, certainly. But the instinct for self-preservation is not so compelling an instinct as one might think. The danger which he presented was, after all, not immediate but slow and simmering, a sort which can, at least in the abstract, be postponed or diverted in any number of ways. I can easily imagine us there, at the appointed time and place, anxious suddenly to reconsider, perhaps even to grant a disastrous last minute reprieve. Fear for our own lives might have induced us to lead him to the gallows and slip the noose around his neck, but a more urgent impetus was necessary to make us actually go ahead and kick out the chair.
Bunny, unawares, had himself supplied us with such an impetus. I would like to say I was driven to what I did by some overwhelming, tragic motive. But I think I would be lying if I told you that; if I led you to believe that on that Sunday afternoon in April, I was actually being driven by anything of the sort.
An interesting question: what was I thinking, as I watched his eyes widen with startled incredulity ('come on, fellas, you're joking, right?') for what would be the very last time? Not of the fact that I was helping to save my friends, certainly not; nor of fear; nor guilt. But little things. Insults, innuendos, petty cruelties. The hundreds of small, unavenged humiliations which had been rising in me for months. It was of them The thought, and nothing more.
It was because of them that I was able to watch him at all, without the slightest tinge of pity or regret, as he teetered on the cliff's edge for one long moment – arms flailing, eyes rolling, a silent-movie comedian slipping on a banana peel – before he toppled backwards, and fell to his death.
Henry, I believed, had a plan. What it was I didn't know. He was always disappearing on mysterious errands, and perhaps these were only more of the same; but now, anxious to believe that someone, at least, had the situation in hand, I imbued them with a certain hopeful significance. Not infrequently he refused to answer his door, even late at night when a light was burning and I knew he was at home; more than once he appeared late for dinner with wet shoes, and windblown hair, and mud on the cuffs of his neat dark trousers. A stack of mysterious books, in a Near Eastern language which looked like Arabic and bearing the stamp of the Williams College Library, materialized in the back seat of his car. This was doubly puzzling, as I did not think he read Arabic; nor, to my knowledge, did he have borrowing privileges at the Williams College Library. Glancing surreptitiously at the back pocket of one of them, I found the card was still in it, and that the last person to check it out was an F.
Lockett, back in 1929.
Perhaps the oddest thing of all, though, I saw one afternoon when I'd hitched a ride into Hampden with Judy Poovey. I wanted to take some clothes to the cleaners and Judy, who was going into town, offered to drive me; we'd done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King, and we were stopped in the Corvette at a red light, listening to terrible music ('Free Bird') on the Manchester radio station, and Judy rattling on, like the senseless cokehead she was, about these two guys she knew who'd had sex in the Food King ('Right 2.55 I in the store! In the frozen food aisle!'), when she glanced out her «window and laughed. 'Look,' she said. 'Isn't that your friend '
Four Eyes over there?'
Startled, I leaned forward. There was a tiny head shop directly across the street – bongs, tapestries, canisters of Rush, and all sorts of herbs and incense behind the counter. I'd never seen anyone in it before except the sad old hippie in granny glasses, a Hampden graduate, who owned it. But now to my astonishment I saw Henry – black suit, umbrella and all – among the celestial maps and unicorns. He was standing at the counter looking at a sheet of paper. The hippie started to say something but Henry, cutting him short, pointed to something behind the counter. The hippie shrugged and took a little bottle off the shelf. I watched them, half-breathless.
'What do you think he's doing in there, trying to harass that poor old Deadhead? That's a shitty store, by the way. I went in there once for a pair of scales and they didn't even have any, just a bunch of crystal balls and shit. You know that set of green plastic scales I – Hey, you're not listening,' she said when she saw I was still staring out the window. The hippie had leaned down and was rummaging under the counter. 'You want me to honk or something?'
'No,' I shouted, edgy from the cocaine, and pushed her hand away from the horn.
'Oh, God. Don't scare me like that.' She pressed her hand to her chest. 'Shit. I'm speeding my brains out. That coke was cut with meth or something. Okay, okay,' she said irritably, as the light turned green and the gas truck behind us began to honk.
Stolen Arabic books? A head shop in Hampden town? I couldn't imagine what Henry was doing, but as disconnected as his actions seemed, I had a childlike faith in him and, as confidently as Dr Watson observing the actions of his more illustrious friend, I waited for the design to manifest itself.
Which it did, in a certain fashion, in a couple of days.
On a Thursday night, around twelve-thirty, I was in my pajamas and attempting to cut my own hair with the aid of a mirror and some nail scissors (I never did a very good job; the finished product was always very thistly and childish, a la Arthur Rimbaud) when there was a knock at the door. I answered it with scissors and mirror in hand. It was Henry. 'Oh, hello,' I said.
'Come in.'
Stepping carefully over the tufts of dusty brown hair, he sat down at my desk. Inspecting my profile in the mirror, I went back to work with the scissors. 'What's up?' I said, reaching over to snip off a long clump by my ear.
'You studied medicine for a while, didn't you?' he said.
I knew this to be a prelude to some health-related inquiry. My one year of pre-med had provided scanty knowledge at best, but the others, who knew nothing at all of medicine and regarded the discipline per se as less a science than a kind of sympathetic magic, constantly solicited my opinion on their aches and pains as respectfully as savages consulting a witch doctor. Their ignorance ranged from the touching to the downright shocking; Henry, I suppose because he'd been ill so often, knew more than the rest of them but occasionally even he would startle one with a perfectly serious question about humors or spleen.
'Are you sick?' I said, one eye on his reflection in the mirror.
'I need a formula for dosage.'
'What do you mean, a formula for dosage? Dosage of what?'
'There is one, isn't there? Some mathematical formula which tells the proper dose to administer according to height and weight, that sort of thing?'
'It depends on the drug,' I said. 'I can't tell you something like that. You'd have to look it up in a Physicians' Desk Reference.'
'I can't do that.'
'They're very simple to use.'
'That's not what I mean. It's not in the Physicians' Desk Reference.'
'You'd be surprised.'
For a moment there was no sound except the grinding of my scissors. At last he said: 'You don't understand. This isn't something doctors generally use.'
I brought down my scissors and looked at his reflection in the mirror.
'Jesus, Henry,' I said. 'What have you got? Some LSD or something?'
'Let's say I do,' he said calmly.
I put down the mirror and turned to stare at him. 'Henry, I don't think that's a good idea,' I said. 'I don't know if I ever told you this but I took LSD a couple of times. When I was a sophomore in high school. It was the worst mistake I ever made in my '
'I realize that it's hard to gauge the concentration of such a drug,' he said evenly. 'But say we have a certain amount of empirical evidence. Let's say we know, for instance, that x amount of the drug in question is enough to affect a seventy pound animal and another, slightly larger amount is sufficient to kill it. I've figured out a rough formula, but still we are talking about a very fine distinction. So, knowing this much, how do I go about calculating the rest?'
I leaned against my dresser and stared at him, my haircut forgotten. 'Let's see what you have,' I said.
He looked at me intently for a moment or two, then reached into his pocket. When his hand opened, I couldn't believe my eyes, but then I stepped closer. A pale, slender-stemmed mushroom lay across his open palm.
'Amanita caesaria,' he said. 'Not what you think,' he added when he saw the look on my face.
'I know what an amanita is.'
'Not all amanitae are poisonous. This one is harmless.'
'What is it?' I said, taking it from his hand and holding it to the light. 'A hallucinogen?'
'No. Actually they are good to eat – the Romans liked them a great deal – but people avoid them as a rale because they are so easily confused with their evil twin.'
'Evil twin?'
'Amanita phalloides,' said Henry mildly. 'Death cap.'
I didn't say anything for a moment.
'What are you going to do?' I finally asked.
'What do you think?'
I got up, agitated, and walked to my desk. Henry put the mushroom back in his pocket and lit a cigarette. 'Do you have an ashtray?' he said courteously.
I gave him an empty soda can. His cigarette was nearly finished before I spoke. 'Henry, I don't think this is a good idea.'
He raised an eyebrow. 'Why not?'
Why not, he asks me. 'Because,' I said, a little wildly, 'they can trace poison. Any kind of poison. Do you think if Bunny keels over dead, people won't find it peculiar? Any idiot of a coroner can '
'I know that,' said Henry patiently. 'Which is why I'm asking you about the dosage.'
'That has nothing to do with it. Even a tiny amount can be '
'- enough to make one extremely ill,' Henry said, lighting another cigarette. 'But not necessarily lethal.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean,' he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, 'that strictly in terms of virulence there are any number of excellent poisons, most of them far superior to this. The woods will be soon full of foxglove and monkshood. I could get all the arsenic I needed from flypaper. And even herbs that aren't common here – good God, the Borgias would have wept to see the health-food store I found in Brattleboro last week. Hellebore, mandrake, pure oil of wormwood… I suppose people will buy anything if they think it's natural. The wormwood they were selling as organic insect repellent, as if that made it safer than the stuff at the supermarket. One bottle could have killed an army.'
He toyed with his glasses again. 'The problem with these things – excellent though they are – is one, as you said, of administration.
Amatoxins are messy, as poisons go. Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions.
Not like some of the little Italian comfortives, which are relatively quick and kind. But, on the other hand, what could be easier to give? I'm not a botanist, you know. Even mycologists have a hard time telling amanitae apart. Some handpicked mushrooms… a few bad ones get mixed in the lot… one friend gets dreadfully ill and the other…?' He shrugged.
We looked at each other.
'How can you be sure you won't get too much yourself?' I asked him.
'I suppose I can't be, really,' he said. 'My own life must be plausibly in danger, so you can see I have a delicate margin to work with. But still, chances are excellent that I can bring it off.
All I have to worry about is myself, you know. The rest will take care of itself.'
I knew what he meant. The plan had several grave flaws, but this was its genius: if anything could be relied upon with almost mathematical certainty, it was that Bunny, at any given meal, would somehow manage to eat almost twice as much as anyone else.
Henry's face was pale and serene through the haze of his cigarette. He put his hand in his pocket and produced the mushroom again.
'Now,' he said. 'A single cap, roughly this size, of A. phalloides is enough to make a healthy seventy-pound dog quite ill. Vomiting, diarrhea, no convulsions that I saw. I don't think there was anything as severe as liver dysfunction but I suppose we will have to leave that to the veterinarians. Evidently '
'Henry, how do you know this?'
He was silent for a moment. Then he said: 'Do you know those two horrible boxer dogs who belong to the couple who live upstairs?'
It was dreadful but 1 had to laugh, 1 couldn't help it. 'No,' i said. 'You didn't.'
'I'm afraid I did,' he said dryly, mashing out his cigarette. 'One of them is fine, unfortunately. The other one won't be dragging garbage up on my front porch anymore. It was dead in twenty hours, and only of a slightly larger dose – the difference perhaps of a gram. Knowing this, it seems to me that I should be able to prescribe how much poison each of us should get. What worries me is the variation in concentration of poison from one mushroom to the next. It's not as if it's measured out by a pharmacist. Perhaps I'm wrong – I'm sure you know more about it than I do – but a mushroom that weighs two grams might well have just as much as one that weighs three, no? Hence my dilemma.'
He reached into his breast pocket and took out a sheet of paper covered with numbers. 'I hate to involve you in this, but no one else knows a thing about math and I'm far from reliable myself. Will you have a look?'
Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions. Mechanically, I took the sheet of paper from him. It was covered with algebraic equations, but at the moment algebra was frankly the last thing on my mind. I shook my head and was on the point of handing it back when I looked up at him and something stopped me. I was in the position, I realized, to put an end to this, now, right here. He really did need my help, or else he wouldn't have come to me; emotional appeals, I knew, were useless but if I pretended that I knew what I was doing I might be able to talk him out of it.
I took the paper to my desk and sat down with a pencil and forced myself through the tangle of numbers step by step.
Equations about chemical concentration were never my strong point in chemistry, and they are difficult enough when you are trying to figure a fixed concentration in a suspension of distilled water; but this, dealing as it did with varying concentrations in irregularly shaped objects, was virtually impossible. He had probably used all the elementary algebra he knew in figuring this, and as far as I could follow him he hadn't done a bad job; but this wasn't a problem that could be worked with algebra, if it could be worked at all. Someone with three or four years of college calculus might have been able to come up with something that at least looked more convincing; by tinkering, I was able to narrow his ratio slightly but I had forgotten most of the little calculus I knew and the answer I wound up with, though probably closer than his own, was far from correct.
I put down my pencil and looked up. The business had taken me about half an hour. Henry had got a copy of Dante's Purgatorio from my bookshelf and was reading it, absorbed.
'Henry.'
He glanced up absently.
'Henry, I don't think this is going to work.'
He closed the book on his finger. 'I made a mistake in the second part,' he said. 'Where the factoring begins.'
'It's a good try, but just by looking at it I can tell that it's insolvable without chemical tables and a good working knowledge of calculus and chemistry proper. There's no way to figure it otherwise. I mean, chemical concentrations aren't even measured in terms of grams and milligrams but in something called moles.'
'Can you work it for me?'
Tm afraid not, though I've done as much as I can. Practically speaking, I can't give you an answer. Even a math professor would have a tough time with this one.'
'Hmn,' said Henry, looking over my shoulder at the paper on the desk. 'I'm heavier than Bun, you know. By twenty-five pounds. That should count for something, shouldn't it?'
'Yes, but the difference of size isn't large enough to bank on, not with a margin of error potentially this wide. Now, if you were fifty pounds heavier, maybe 'The poison doesn't take effect for at least twelve hours,' he said. 'So even if I overdose I'll have a certain advantage, a grace period. With an antidote on hand for myself, just in case…'
'An antidote?' I said, jarred, leaning back in my chair. 'Is there such a thing?'
'Atropine. It's in deadly nightshade.'
'Well, Jesus, Henry. If you don't finish yourself off with one you will with the other.'
'Atropine's quite safe in small amounts.'
'They say the same about arsenic but I wouldn't like to try it.'
'They are exactly opposite in effect. Atropine speeds the nervous system, rapid heartbeat and so forth. Amatoxins slow it down.'
'That still sounds fishy, a poison counteracting a poison.'
'Not at all. The Persians were master poisoners, and they say-'
I remembered the books in Henry's car. 'The Persians?' I said.
'Yes. According to the great '
'I didn't know you read Arabic.'
'I don't, at least not well, but they're the great authorities on the subject and most of the books I need haven't been translated.
I've been going through them as best I can with a dictionary.'
I thought about the books I had seen, dusty, bindings crumbled with age. 'When were these things written?'
'Around the middle of the fifteenth century, I should say.'
I put down my pencil. 'Henry.'
'What?'
'You should know better than that. You can't rely on something that old.'
'The Persians were master poisoners. These are practical handbooks, how-tos if you will. I don't know of anything quite like them.'
'Poisoning people is quite a different matter from curing them.'
'People have used these books for centuries. Their accuracy is beyond dispute.'
'Well, I have as much respect for ancient learning as you do, – but I don't know that I'd want to stake my life on some home remedy from the Middle Ages.'
'Well, I suppose I can check it somewhere else,' he said, without much conviction.
'Really. This is too serious a matter to '
'Thank you,' he said smoothly. 'You've been a great help.' He picked up my copy of Purgatorio again. 'This isn't a very good translation, you know,' he said, leafing through it idly. 'Singleton is the best if you don't read Italian, quite literal, but you lose all the terza rima, of course. For that you should read the original.
In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know the language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.'
'Henry,' I said, in a low, urgent voice.
He glanced over at me, annoyed. 'Anything I do will be dangerous, you know,' he said.
'But nothing is any good if you die.'
'The more I hear about luxury barges, the less terrible death begins to seem,' he said. 'You've been quite a help. Good night.'
Early the next afternoon, Charles dropped by for a visit. 'Gosh, it's hot in here,' he said, shouldering off his wet coat and throwing it over the back of a chair. His hair was damp, his face flushed and radiant. A drop of water trembled at the end of his long, fine nose. He sniffed and wiped it away. 'Don't go outside, whatever you do,' he said. 'It's terrible out. By the way, you haven't seen Francis, have you?'
I ran a hand through my hair. It was a Friday afternoon, no class, and I hadn't been out of my room all day, nor had I slept much the night before. 'Henry stopped by last night,' I said.
'Really? What did he have to say? Oh, I almost forgot.' He reached in the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a bundle wrapped in napkins. 'I brought you a sandwich since you weren't at lunch. Camilla said the lady in the dining hall saw me stealing it and she made a black mark by my name on a list.'
It was cream cheese and marmalade, I knew without looking.
The twins were fanatical about them but I didn't like them much.
I unwrapped a corner of it and took a bite, then set it down on my desk. 'Have you talked to Henry recently?' I said.
'Just this morning. He drove me to the bank.'
I picked up the sandwich and took another bite. I hadn't swept, and my hair still lay in clumps on the floor. 'Did he,' I said, 'say anything about '
'About what?'
'About asking Bunny to dinner in a couple of weeks?'
'Oh, that,' said Charles, lying back on my bed and propping his head up with pillows. 'I thought you knew about that already.
He's been thinking about that for a while.'
'What do you think?'
'I think he's going to have a hell of a hard time finding enough mushrooms to even make him sick. It's just too early. Last week he made Francis and me go out and help him, but we hardly found a thing. Francis came back really excited, saying, "Oh, my God, look, I found all these mushrooms," but then we looked in his bag and it was just a bunch of puffballs.'
'So you think he'll be able to find enough?'
'Sure, if he waits awhile. I know you don't have a cigarette, do you?'
'No.'
'I wish you smoked. I don't know why you don't. You weren't an athlete in high school or anything, were you?'
'No.'
'That's why Bun doesn't smoke. Some clean-living type of football coach got to him at an impressionable age.'
'Have you seen Bun lately?'
'Not too much. He was at the apartment last night, though, and stayed forever.'
'This isn't just hot air?' I said, looking at him closely. 'You're really going to go through with it?'
'I'd rather go to jail than know that Bunny was going to be hanging around my neck for the rest of my life. And I'm not too keen on going to jail, either, now that I think about it. You know,' he said, sitting up on my bed and bending over double, as if from a pain in his stomach, 'I really wish you had some cigarettes.
Who's that awful girl who lives down the hall from you -Judy?'
'Poovey,' I said.
'Go knock on her door, why don't you, and ask her if she'll give you a pack. She looks like the sort who keeps cartons in her room.'
It was getting warmer. The dirty snow was pockmarked from the warm rain, and melting in patches to expose the slimy, yellowed grass beneath it; icicles cracked and plunged like daggers from the sharp peaks of the roofs.
'We might be in South America now,' Camilla said one night while we were drinking bourbon from teacups in my room and listening to rain dripping from the eaves. 'That's funny, isn't it?'
'Yes,' I said, though I hadn't been invited.
'I didn't like the idea then. Now I think we might've got by all right down there.'
'I don't see how.'
She leaned her cheek on her closed fist. 'Oh, it wouldn't have been so bad. We could have slept in hammocks. Learned Spanish.
Lived in a little house with chickens in the yard.'
'Got sick,' I said. 'Been shot.'
'I can think of worse things,' she said, with a brief sideways glance that pierced me to the heart.
The windowpanes rattled in a sudden gust.
'Well,' I said, 'I'm glad you didn't go.'
She ignored this remark and, looking out the dark window, took another sip from the teacup.
It was by now the first week of April, not a pleasant time for me or anyone. Bunny, who had been relatively calm, was now on a rampage because Henry refused to drive him down to Washington, D. C., to see an exhibit of World War I biplanes at the Smithsonian. The twins were getting calls twice daily from an ominous B. Perry at their bank, and Henry from a D. Wade at his; Francis's mother had discovered his attempt to withdraw money from the trust fund, and each day brought a fresh volley of communication from her. 'Good God,' he muttered, having torn open the latest arrival and scanned it with disgust.
'What does she say?'
' "Baby. Chris and 1 are so concerned about you,"' Francis read in a deadpan voice. ' "Now I do not pretend to be an authority on Young People and maybe you are going through something I am too old to understand but I have always hoped you would be able to go to Chris with your problems."'
'Chris has a lot more problems than you do, it seems to me,'
I said. The character that Chris played on The Young Doctors' was sleeping with his brother's wife and involved in a baby smuggling ring.
'I'll say Chris has problems. He's twenty-six years old and married to my mother, isn't he? "Now I even hate to bring this up,"' he read, ' "and I wouldn't have suggested it had not Chris insisted but you know, dear, how he loves you and he says he has seen this type of thing so often before in show business you know. So I phoned the Betty Ford Center and precious, what do you think? They have a nice little room waiting just for you, dear" – no, let me finish,' he said, when I started to laugh.' "Now I know you'll hate the idea but really you needn't be ashamed, it's a Disease, baby, that's what they told me when I went and it made me feel so much better you cannot imagine. Of course I don't know what it is you're taking but really, darling, let's be practical, whatever it is it must be frightfully expensive mustn't it and I have to be quite honest with you and tell you that we simply cannot afford it, not with your grandpa the way he is and the taxes on the house and everything…'"
'You ought to go,' I said.
'Are you kidding? It's in Palm Springs or someplace like that and besides I think they lock you up and make you do aerobics.
She watches too much television, my mother,' he said, glancing at the letter again.
The telephone began to ring.
'Goddammit,' he said in a tired voice.
'Don't answer it.'
'If I don't she'll call the police,' he said, and picked up the receiver.
I let myself out (Francis pacing back and forth: 'Funny? What do you mean, I sound funny'?') and walked to the post office, where in my box I found, to my surprise, an elegant little note from Julian asking me to lunch the next day.
Julian, on special occasions, sometimes had lunches for the class; he was an excellent cook and, when he was a young man living off his trust fund in Europe, had the reputation of being an excellent host as well. This was, in fact, the basis of his acquaintance with most of the famous people in his life. Osbert Sitwell, in his diary, mentions Julian Morrow's 'sublime little fetes,' and there are similar references in the letters of people ranging from Charles Laughton to the Duchess of Windsor to Gertrude Stein; Cyril Connolly, who was notorious for being a hard guest to please, told Harold Acton that Julian was the most gracious American that he had ever met – a doubleedged compliment, admittedly – and Sara Murphy, no mean hostess herself, once wrote him pleading for his recipe for sole veronique. But though I knew that Julian frequently invited Henry for lunches a deux, I had never before received an invitation to dine alone with him, and I was both flattered and vaguely worried. At that time, anything even slightly out of the ordinary seemed ominous to me, and, pleased as I was, I could not but feel that he might have an objective other than the pleasure of my company. I took the invitation home and studied it. The airy, oblique style in which it was written did little to dispel my feeling that there was more in it than met the eye. I phoned the switchboard and left a message for him to expect me at one the next day.
'Julian doesn't know anything about what happened, does he?' I asked Henry when next I saw him alone.
'What? Oh, yes,' said Henry, glancing up from his book. 'Of course.'
'He knows you killed that guy?'
'Really, you needn't be so loud,' said Henry sharply, turning in his chair. Then, in a quieter voice: 'He knew what we were trying to do. And approved. The day after it happened, we drove out to his house in the country. Told him what happened. He was delighted.'
'You told him everything?'
'Well, I saw no point in worrying him, if that's what you mean,' said Henry, adjusting his glasses and going back to his book.
Julian, of course, had made the lunch himself, and we ate at the big round table in his office. After weeks of bad nerves, bad conversation, and bad food in the dining hall, the prospect of a meal with him was immensely cheering; he was a charming companion and his dinners, though deceptively simple, had a sort of Augustan wholesomeness and luxuriance which never failed to soothe.
There was roasted lamb, new potatoes, peas with leeks and fennel; a rich and almost maddeningly delicious bottle of Chateau Latour. I was eating with better appetite than I had had in ages when I noticed that a fourth course had appeared, with unobtrusive magic, at my elbow: mushrooms. They were pale and slender-stemmed, of a type I had seen before, steaming in a red wine sauce that smelled of coriander and rue.
'Where did you get these?'I said. Hfj 'Ah. You're quite observant,' he said, pleased. 'Aren t they marvelous? Quite rare. Henry brought them to me.'
I took a quick swallow of my wine to hide my consternation.
'He tells me – may I?' he said, nodding at the bowl.
I passed it to him, and he spooned some of them onto his plate. 'Thank you,' he said. 'What was I saying? Oh, yes. Henry tells me that this particular sort of mushroom was a great favorite of the emperor Claudius. Interesting, because you remember how Claudius died.'
I did remember. Agrippina had slipped a poisoned one into his dish one night.
'They're quite good,' said Julian, taking a bite. 'Have you gone with Henry on any of his collecting expeditions?'
'Not yet. He hasn't asked me to.'
'I must say, I never thought I cared very much for mushrooms, but everything he's brought me has been heavenly.'
Suddenly I understood. This was a clever piece of groundwork on Henry's part. 'He's brought them to you before?' I said.
'Yes. Of course I wouldn't trust just anyone with this sort of thing, but Henry seems to know an amazing lot about it.'
'I believe he probably does,' I said, thinking of the boxer dogs.
'It's remarkable how good he is at anything he tries. He can grow flowers, repair clocks like a jeweler, add tremendous sums in his head. Even if it's something as simple as bandaging a cut finger he manages to do a better job of it.' He poured himself another glass of wine. 'I gather that his parents are disappointed that he's decided to concentrate so exclusively on the classics. I disagree, of course, but in a certain sense it is rather a pity. He would have made a great doctor, or soldier, or scientist.'
I laughed. 'Or a great spy,' I said.
Julian laughed too. 'All you boys would be excellent spies,' he said. 'Slipping about in casinos, eavesdropping on heads of state.
Really, won't you try some of these mushrooms? They're glorious.'
I drank the rest of my wine. 'Why not,' I said, and reached for the bowl.
After lunch, when the dishes had been cleared away and we were talking about nothing in particular, Julian asked, out of the blue, if I'd noticed anything peculiar about Bunny recently.
'Well, no, not really,' I said, and took a careful sip of tea.
He raised an eyebrow. 'No? I think he's behaving very strangely. Henry and I were talking only yesterday about how brusque and contrary he's become.'
"I think he's been in kind of a bad mood.'
He shook his head. 'I don't know. Edmund is such a simple soul.1 never thought I'd be surprised at anything he did or said, but he and I had a very odd conversation the other day.'
'Odd?' I said cautiously.
'Perhaps he'd only read something that disturbed him. I don't know. I am worried about him.'
'Why?'
'Frankly, I'm afraid he might be on the verge of some disastrous religious conversion.'
I was jarred. 'Really?' I said.
'I've seen it happen before. And I can think of no other reason for this sudden interest in ethics. Not that Edmund is profligate, but really, he's one of the least morally concerned boys I've ever known. I was very startled when he began to question me – in all earnestness – about such hazy concerns as Sin and Forgiveness.
He's thinking of going into the Church, I just know it. Perhaps that girl has something to do with it, do you suppose?'
He meant Marion. He had a habit of attributing all of Bunny's faults indirectly to her – his laziness, his bad humors, his lapses of taste. 'Maybe,' I said.
'Is she a Catholic?'
'I think she's Presbyterian,' I said. Julian had a polite but implacable contempt for Judeo-Christian tradition in virtually all its forms. He would deny this if confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.
'A Presbyterian? Really?' he said, dismayed.
'I believe so.'
'Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.'
In the first week of April the weather turned suddenly, unseasonably, insistently lovely. The sky was blue, the air warm and windless, and the sun beamed on the muddy ground with all the sweet impatience of June. Toward the fringe of the wood, the young trees were yellow with the first tinge of new leaves; woodpeckers laughed and drummed in the copses and, lying in bed with my window open, I could hear the rush and gurgle of the melted snow running in the gutters all night long.
In the second week of April everyone waited anxiously to see if the weather would hold. It did, with serene assurance. Hyacinth and daffodil bloomed in the flower beds, violet and periwinkle in the meadows; damp, bedraggled white butterflies fluttered drunkenly in the hedgerows. I put away my winter coat and overshoes and walked around, nearly light-headed with joy, in my shirtsleeves.
'This won't last,' said Henry.
In the third week of April, when the lawns were green as Heaven and the apple blossoms had recklessly blown, I was reading in my room on a Friday night, with the windows open and a cool, damp wind stirring the papers on my desk. There was a party across the lawn, and laughter and music floated through the night air. It was long after midnight. I was nodding, half-asleep over my book, when someone bellowed my name outside my window.
I shook myself and sat up, just in time to see one of Bunny's shoes flying through my open window. It hit the floor with a thud. I jumped up and leaned over the sill. Far below, I saw his staggering, shaggy-headed figure, attempting to steady itself by clutching at the trunk of a small tree.
'What the hell's wrong with you?'
He didn't reply, only raised his free hand in a gesture half wave, half salute, and reeled out of the light. The back door slammed, and a few moments later he was banging on the door of my room.
When I opened it he came limping in, one shoe off and one shoe on, leaving a muddy trail of macabre, unmatched footprints behind him. His spectacles were askew and he stank of whiskey.
'Dickie boy,' he mumbled.
The outburst beneath my window seemed to have exhausted him and left him strangely uncommunicative. He tugged off his muddy sock and tossed it clumsily away from him. It landed on my bed.
By degrees, I managed to extricate from him the evening's events. The twins had taken him to dinner, afterwards to a bar in town for more drinks; he'd then gone alone to the party across the lawn, where a Dutchman had tried to make him smoke pot and a freshman girl had given him tequila from a thermos.
('Pretty little gal. Sort of a Deadhead, though. She was wearing clogs, you know those things? And a tie-dyed T-shirt. I can't stand them. "Honey," I said, "you're such a cutie, how come you want to get yourself up in that nasty stuff?"') Then, abruptly, he broke off this narrative and lurched away – leaving the door of my room open behind him – and I heard the sound of noisy, athletic vomiting.
He was gone a long time. When he returned he smelled sour, and his face was damp and very pale; but he seemed composed. _, 'Whew.' he said, collapsing in my chair and mopping his forehead with a red bandanna. 'Musta been something I ate,' j| 'Did you make it to the bathroom?' I asked uncertainly. The I vomiting had sounded ominously near my own door. | 'Naw,' he said, breathing heavily. 'Ran in the broom closet. I Get me a glass of water, wouldja.'
In the hall, the door to the service closet hung partly open, J providing a coy glimpse of the reeking horror within. I hurried past it to the kitchen.
Bunny looked at me glassily when I came back in. His expression had changed entirely, and something about it made me. J. uneasy. I gave him the water and he took a large, greedy gulp. '- 'Not too quick,' I said, alarmed.
He paid no attention and drank the rest in a swallow, then set the glass on the desk with a trembling hand. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.
'Oh, my God,' he said. 'Sweet Jesus.'
Uneasily, 1 crossed to my bed and sat down, trying to think of some neutral subject, but before I could say anything he spoke again.
'Can't stomach it any longer,' he mumbled. 'Just can't. Sweet Italian Jesus.'
I didn't say anything.
Shakily, he passed a hand over his forehead. 'You don't even know what the devil I'm talking about, do you?' he said, with an oddly nasty tone in his voice.
Agitated, I recrossed my legs. I'd seen this coming, seen it coming for months and dreaded it. I had an impulse to rush from the room, just leave him sitting there, but then he buried his face in his hands.
'All true,' he mumbled. 'All true. Swear to God. Nobody knows but me.'
Absurdly, I found myself hoping it was a false alarm. Maybe he and Marion had broken up. Maybe his father had died of a heart attack. I sat there, paralyzed.
He dragged his palms down over his face, as if he were wiping water from it, and looked up at me. 'You don't have a clue,' he said. His eyes were bloodshot, uncomfortably bright. 'Boy. You don't have a fucking clue.'
I stood up, unable to bear it any longer, and looked around my room distractedly. 'Uh,' I said, 'do you want an aspirin? I meant to ask you earlier. If you take a couple now you won't feel so bad in the '
'You think I'm crazy, don't you?' Bunny said abruptly.
Somehow I'd always known it was going to happen this way, the two of us alone, Bunny drunk, late at night… 'Why no,' I said. 'All you need is a little '
'You think I'm a lunatic. Bats in the belfry. Nobody listens to me,' he said, his voice rising.
I was alarmed. 'Calm down,' I said. 'I'm listening to you.'
'Well, listen to this,' he said.
It was three in the morning when he stopped talking. The story he told was drunken and garbled, out of sequence and full of vituperative, self-righteous digressions; but I had no problem understanding it. It was a story I'd already heard. For a while we sat there, mute. My desk light was shining in my eyes. The party across the way was still going strong and a faint but boisterous rap song throbbed obtrusively in the distance.
Bunny's breathing had become loud and asthmatic. His head fell on his chest, and he woke with a start. 'What?' he said, confused, as if someone had come up behind him and shouted in his ear. 'Oh. Yes.'
I didn't say anything.
'What do you think about that, eh?'
I was unable to answer. I'd hoped, faintly, that he might have blacked it all out.
'Damndest thing. Fact truer than fiction, boy. Wait, that's not right. How's it go?'
'Fact stranger than fiction,' I said mechanically. It was fortunate, I suppose, that I didn't have to make an effort to look shaken up or stunned. I was so upset I was nearly sick.
'Just goes to show,' said Bunny drunkenly. 'Could be the guy next door. Could be anybody. Never can tell.'
I put my face in my hands.
'Tell anybody you want,' Bunny said. 'Tell the goddamn mayor. I don't care. Lock 'em right up in that combination post office and jail they got down by the courthouse. Thinks he's so smart,' he muttered. 'Well, if this wasn't Vermont he wouldn't be sleeping so well at night, let me tell you. Why, my dad's best friends with the police commissioner in Hartford. He ever finds out about this – geez. He and Dad were at school together. Used to date his daughter in the tenth grade…" His head was drooping and he shook himself again. 'Jesus,' he said, nearly falling out of his chair.
I stared at him.
'Give me that shoe, would you?'
I handed it to him, and his sock too. He looked at them for a moment, then stuffed them in the outside pocket of his blazer.
'Don't let the bedbugs bite,' he said, and then he was gone, leaving the door of my room open behind him. I could hear his peculiar limping progress all the way down the stairs.
The objects in the room seemed to swell and recede with each thump of my heart. In a horrible daze, I sat on my bed, one elbow on the windowsill, and tried to pull myself together.
Diabolical rap music floated from the opposite building, where a couple of shadowy figures were crouched on the roof, throwing empty beer cans at a disconsolate band of hippies huddled around a bonfire in a trash can, trying to smoke a joint. A beer can sailed from the roof, then another, which hit one of them on the head with a tinny sound. Laughter, aggrieved cries.
I was gazing at the sparks flying from the garbage can when suddenly I was struck by a harrowing thought. Why had Bunny decided to come to my room instead of Cloke's, or Marion's? As I looked out the window the answer was so obvious it gave me a chill. It was because my room was by far the closest. Marion lived in Roxburgh, on the other end of campus, and Cloke's was on the far side of Durbinstall. Neither place was readily apparent to a drunk stumbling out into the night. But Monmouth was scarcely thirty feet away, and my own room, with its conspicuously lighted window, must have loomed in his path like a beacon.
I suppose it would be interesting to say that at this point I felt torn in some way, grappled with the moral implications of each of the courses available to me. But 1 don't recall experiencing anything of the sort. I put on a pair of loafers and went downstairs to call Henry.
The pay phone in Monmouth was on a wall by the back door, too exposed for my taste, so I walked over to the Science Building, my shoes squelching on the dewy grass, and found a particularly isolated booth on the third floor near the chemistry labs.
The phone must've rung a hundred times. No answer. Finally, in exasperation, I pressed down the receiver and dialed the twins.
Eight rings, nine; then, to my relief, Charles's sleepy hello.
'Hi, it's me,' I said quickly. 'Something happened.'
'What?' he said, suddenly alert. I could hear him sitting up in bed.
'He told me. Just now.'
There was a long silence.
'Hello?' I said.
'Call Henry,' said Charles abruptly. 'Hang up the phone and call him right now.'
'I already did. He's not answering the phone.'
Charles swore under his breath. 'Let me think,' he said. 'Oh, hell. Can you come over?'
'Sure. Now?'
'I'll run down to Henry's and see if I can get him to the door.
We should be back by the time you get here. Okay?'
'Okay,' I said, but he'd already hung up.
When I got there, about twenty minutes later, I met Charles coming from the direction of Henry's, alone.
'No luck?'
'No,' he said, breathing hard. His hair was rumpled and he had a raincoat on over his pajamas.
'What'll we do?'
'I don't know. Come upstairs. We'll think of something.'
We had just got our coats off when the light in Camilla's room came on and she appeared in the doorway, blinking, cheeks aflame. 'Charles? What are you doing here?' she said when she saw me.
Rather incoherently, Charles explained what had happened.
With a drowsy forearm she shielded her eyes from the light and listened. She was wearing a man's nightshirt, much too big for her, and I found myself staring at her bare legs – tawny calves, slender ankles, lovely, dusty-soled boy-feet.
'Is he there?' she said.
'I know he is.'
'You sure?'
'Where else would he be at three in the morning?'
'Wait a second,' she said, and went to the telephone. 'I just want to try something.' She dialed, listened for a moment, hung up, dialed again.
'What are you doing?'
'It's a code,' she said, the receiver cradled between shoulder and ear. 'Ring twice, hang up, ring again.'
'Code?'
'Yes. He told me once – Oh, hello, Henry,' she said suddenly, and sat down.
Charles looked at me.
'Well, I'll be damned,' he said quietly. 'He must have been awake the whole time.'
'Yes,' Camilla was saying; she stared at the floor, bobbing the foot of her crossed leg idly up and down. 'That's fine. I'll tell him.'
She hung up. 'He says to come over, Richard,' she said. 'You should leave now. He's waiting for you. Why are you looking at me like that?' she said crossly to Charles.
'Code, eh?'
'What about it?'
'You never told me about it.'
'It's stupid. I never thought to.'
'What do you and Henry need a secret code for?'
'It's not a secret.'
'Then why didn't you tell me?'
'Charles, don't be such a baby.'
Henry – wide awake, no explanations – met me at the door in his bathrobe. I followed him into the kitchen, and he poured me a cup of coffee and sat me down. 'Now,' he said, 'tell me what happened.'
I did. He sat across the table, smoking cigarette after cigarette with his dark blue eyes fastened on mine. He interrupted with questions only once or twice. Certain parts he asked me to repeat.
I was so tired that I rambled a bit, but he was patient with my digressions.
By the time I finished, the sun was up and the birds were singing. Spots were swimming in front of my eyes. A damp, cool breeze shifted in the curtains. Henry switched off the lamp and went to the stove and began, rather mechanically, to make some bacon and eggs. I watched him move around the dim, dawn-lit kitchen in his bare feet.
While we ate, I looked at him curiously. He was pale, and his eyes were tired and preoccupied, but there was nothing in his expression that gave me any indication what he might be thinking.
'Henry,' I said.
He started. It was the first time either of us had said a word for half an hour or more.
'What are you thinking about?'
'Nothing.'
'If you've still got the idea of poisoning him '
He glanced up with a quick flash of anger that surprised me.
'Don't be absurd,' he snapped. 'I wish you'd shut up a minute and let me think.'
I stared at him. Abruptly he stood up and went to pour himself some more coffee. For a moment he stood with his back to me, hands braced on the counter. Then he turned around.
'I'm sorry,' he said wearily. 'It's just not very pleasant to look back on something that one has put so much effort and thought into, only to realize it's completely ridiculous. Poisoned mushrooms.
The whole idea is like something from Sir Walter Scott.'
I was taken aback. 'But I thought it was kind of a good idea,'
I said.
He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. 'Too good,' he said. 'I suppose that when anyone accustomed to working with the mind is faced with a straightforward action, there's a tendency to embellish, to make it overly clever. On paper there's a certain symmetry. Now that I'm faced with the prospect of executing it I realize how hideously complicated it is.'
'What's wrong?'
He adjusted his glasses. 'The poison is too slow.'
'I thought that's what you wanted.'
'There are half a dozen problems with it. Some of them you pointed out. Control of the dose is risky, but time, I think, is the real concern. From my standpoint the longer the better, but still… A person can do an awful lot of talking in twelve hours.' He was quiet for a moment. 'It's not as if I haven't seen this all along.
The idea of killing him is so repellent that I haven't been able to think of it as anything but a chess-problem. A game. You have no idea how much thought I've put into this. Even to the strain of poison. It's said to make the throat swell, do you know that? Victims are said to be struck dumb, unable to name their poisoner.' He sighed. 'Too easy to beguile myself with the Medicis, the Borgias, all those poisoned rings and roses… It's possible to do that, did you know? To poison a rose, then present it as a gift? The lady pricks her ringer, then falls dead. I know how to make a candle that will kill if burned in a closed room.
Or how to poison a pillow, or a prayer book I said: 'What about sleeping pills?'
He glanced at me, annoyed.
Tm serious. People die from them all the time.'
'Where are we going to get sleeping pills?'
'This is Hampden College. If we want sleeping pills, we can get them.'
We looked at each other.
'How would we give them?' he said.
'Tell him they're Tylenol.'
'And how do we get him to swallow nine or ten Tylenol?'
'We could break them open in a glass of whiskey.'
'You think Bunny is likely to drink a glass of whiskey with a lot of white powder at the bottom?'
'I think he's just as apt to do that as eat a dish of toadstools.'
There was a long silence, during which a bird trilled noisily outside the window. Henry closed his eyes for a long moment and rubbed his temple with his fingertips.
'What are you going to do?' I said.
'I think I'm going to go out and run a few errands,' he said. 'I want you to go home and go to sleep.'
'Do you have any ideas?'
'No. But there's something I want to look into. I'd drive you back to school, but I don't think it's a good idea for us to be seen together just now.' He began to fish in the pocket of his bathrobe, pulling out matches, pen nibs, his blue enamel pillbox. Finally he found a couple of quarters and laid them on the table. 'Here,' he said. 'Stop at the newsstand and buy a paper on your way home.'
'Why?'
'In case anyone should wonder why you're wandering around at this hour. I may have to talk to you tonight. If I don't find you in, I'll leave a message that a Doctor Springfield called. Don't try to get in touch with me before then, unless of course you have to.'
'Sure.'
'I'll see you later, then,' he said, starting out of the kitchen.
Then he turned in the door and looked at me. Till never forget this, you know,' he said matter-offactly.
'It's nothing.'
'It's everything and you know it.'
'You've done me a favor or two yourself,' I said, but he had already started out and didn't hear me. At any rate, he didn't answer.
I bought a newspaper at the little store down the street and walked back to school through the dank, verdant woods, off the main path, stepping over the boulders and rotting logs that occasionally blocked my way.
It was still early when I got to campus. I went in the back door of Monmouth and, pausing at the top of the stairs, I was startled to see the house chairperson and a flock of girls in housecoats, huddled around the broom closet and conversing in varying tones of shrill outrage. When I tried to brush past them, Judy Poovey, clad in a black kimono, grabbed my arm. 'Hey,' she said.
'Somebody puked in this broom closet.'
'It was one of those goddamned freshmen,' said a girl at my elbow. 'They get stinking drunk and come to the upper-class suites to barf.'
'Well, 1 don't know who did it,' the house chairperson said, 'but whoever it was, they had spaghetti for dinner.'
'Hmnn.'
'That means they're not on the meal ticket, then.'
I pushed through them to my room, locking the door behind me, and went, almost immediately, to sleep.
I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality talk, footsteps, slamming doors – which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream. Day ran into night, and still I slept, until finally the rush and rumble of a flushing toilet rolled me on my back and up from sleep.
The Saturday night party had already started, in Putnam House next door. That meant dinner was over, the snack bar was closed, and I'd slept at least fourteen hours. My house was deserted. I got up and shaved and took a hot bath. Then I put on my robe and, eating an apple I'd found in the house kitchen, walked downstairs in my bare feet to see if any messages had been left for me by the phone.
There were three. Bunny Corcoran, at a quarter to six. My mother, from California, at eight-forty-five. And a Dr H. Springfield, D. D. S., who suggested I visit at my earliest convenience.
I was famished. When I got to Henry's, I was glad to see that Charles and Francis were still picking at a cold chicken and some salad.
Henry looked as if he hadn't slept since I'd seen him last. He was wearing an old tweed jacket with sprung elbows, and there were grass stains on the knees of his trousers; khaki gaiters were laced over his mud-caked shoes. 'The plates are in the sideboard, if you're hungry,' he said, pulling out his chair and sitting down heavily, like some old farmer just home from the field.
'Where have you been?'
'We'll talk about it after dinner.'
'Where's Camilla?'
Charles began to laugh.
Francis put down his chicken leg. 'She's got a date,' he said.
'You're kidding. With who?'
'Cloke Rayburn.'
They're at the party,' Charles said. 'He took her out for drinks before and everything.'
'Marion and Bunny are with them,' Francis said. 'It was Henry's idea. Tonight she's keeping an eye on you-know-who.'
'You-know-who left a message for me on the telephone this afternoon,' I said.
'You-know-who has been on the warpath all day long,' said Charles, cutting himself a slice of bread.
'Not now, please,' said Henry in a tired voice.
After the dishes were cleared Henry put his elbows on the table and lit a cigarette. He needed a shave and there were dark circles under his eyes.
'So what's the plan?' said Francis.
Henry tossed the match into the ashtray. 'This weekend,' he said. Tomorrow,'
I paused with my coffee cup halfway to my lips.
'Oh my God,' said Charles, disconcerted. 'So soon?'
'It can't wait any longer.'
'How? What can we do on such short notice?'
'I don't like it either, but if we wait we won't have another chance until next weekend. If it comes to that, we may not have another chance at all.'
There was a brief silence.
This is for real?' said Charles uncertainly. This is, like, a definite thing?'
'Nothing is definite,' said Henry. The circumstances won't be entirely under our control. But I want us to be ready should the opportunity present itself.'
'This sounds sort of indeterminate,' said Francis.
It is. It can't be any other way, unfortunately, as Bunny will be doing most of the work.'
'How's that?' said Charles, leaning back in his chair.
'An accident. A hiking accident, to be precise.' Henry paused.
'Tomorrow's Sunday.'
'Yes.'
'So tomorrow, if the weather's nice, Bunny will more likely than not go for a walk.'
'He doesn't always go,' said Charles.
'Say he does. And we have a fairly good idea of his route.'
'It varies,' I said. I had accompanied Bunny on a good many of those walks the term before. He was apt to cross streams, climb fences, make any number of unexpected detours.
'Yes, of course, but by and large we know it,' said Henry. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and spread it on the table.
Leaning over, I saw it was a map. 'He goes out the back door of his house, circles behind the tennis courts, and when he reaches the woods, heads not towards North Hampden but east, towards Mount Cataract. Heavily wooded, not much hiking out that way.
He keeps on till he hits that deer path – you know the one I mean, Richard, the trail marked with the white boulder – and bears hard southeast. That runs for three-quarters of a mile and then forks '
'But you'll miss him if you wait there,' I said. 'I've been with him on that road. He's as apt to turn west here as to keep heading south.'
'Well, we may lose him before then if it comes to that,' said Henry. 'I've known him to ignore the path altogether and keep heading east till he hits the highway. But I'm counting on the likelihood he won't do that. The weather's nice – he won't want such an easy walk.'
'But the second fork? You can't say where he'll go from there.'
'We don't have to. You remember where it comes out, don't you? The ravine.'
'Oh,' said Francis.
There was a long silence.
'Now, listen,' said Henry, taking a pencil from his pocket.
'He'll be coming in from school, from the south. We can avoid his route entirely and come in on Highway 6, from the west.'
'We'll take the car?'
'Partway, yes. Just past that junkyard, before the turnoff to Battenkill, there's a gravel road. I'd thought it might be a private way, in which case we'd have to avoid it, but I went down to the courthouse this afternoon and found that it's just an old logging road. Comes to a dead end in the middle of the woods. But it should take us directly to the ravine, within a quarter mile. We can walk the rest of the way.'
'And when we get there?'
'Well, we wait. I made Bunny's walk to the ravine from school twice this afternoon, there and back, and timed it both ways. It'll take him at least half an hour from the time he leaves his room.
Which gives us plenty of time to go around the back way and surprise him.'
'What if he doesn't come?'
'Well, if he doesn't, we've lost nothing but time.'
'What if one of us goes with him?'
He shook his head. 'I've thought of that,' he said. 'It's not a good idea. If he walks into the trap himself – alone, of his own volition – there's not much way it can be traced to us.'
'If this, if that,' said Francis sourly. 'This sounds pretty haphazard to me.'
'We want something haphazard.'
'I don't see what's wrong with the first plan.'
The first plan is too stylized. Design is inherent in it through and through.'
'But design is preferable to chance.'
Henry smoothed the crumpled map against the table with the flat of his palm. 'There, you're wrong,' he said. 'If we attempt to order events too meticulously, to arrive at point X via a logical trail, it follows that the logical trail can be picked up at point X and followed back to us. Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It's invisible, erratic, angelic. What could possibly be better, from our point of view, than allowing Bunny to choose the circumstances of his own death?'
Everything was still. Outside, the crickets shrieked with rhythmic, piercing monotony.
Francis – his face moist and very pale – bit his lower lip. 'Let me get this straight. We wait at the ravine and just hope he happens to stroll by. And if he does, we push him off – right there in broad daylight – and go back home. Am I correct?'
'More or less,' said Henry.
'What if he doesn't come by himself? What if somebody else wanders by?'
'It's no crime to be in the woods on a spring afternoon,' Henry said. 'We can abort at any time, up to the moment he goes over the edge. And that will only take an instant. If we happen across anybody on the way to the car -1 think it improbable, but if we should – we can always say there's been an accident, and we're going for help.'
'But what if someone sees us?'
'I think that extremely unlikely,' said Henry, dropping a lump of sugar into his coffee with a splash.
'But possible.'
'Anything is possible, but probability will work for us here if only we let it,' said Henry. 'What are the odds that some previously undetected someone will stumble into that very isolated spot, during the precise fraction of a second it will take to push him over?'
'It might happen.'
'Anything might happen, Francis. He might be hit by a car tonight, and save us all a lot of trouble.'
A soft, damp breeze, smelling of rain and apple blossoms, blew through the window. I had broken out in a sweat without realizing it and the wind on my cheek made me feel clammy and lightheaded.
Charles cleared his throat and we turned to look at him.
'Do you know…" he said. 'I mean, are you sure it's high enough? What if he '
'I went out there today with a tape measure,' Henry said. 'The highest point is forty-eight feet, which should be ample. The trickiest part will be to get him there. If he falls from one of the lower points, he'll end up with nothing worse than a broken leg.
Of course, a lot will rest on the fall itself. Backwards seems better than forward for our purposes.'
'But I've heard of people falling from airplanes and not dying,' said Francis. 'What if the fall doesn't kill him?'
Henry reached behind his spectacles and rubbed an eye. 'Well, you know, there's a little stream at the bottom,' he said. 'There's not much water, but enough. He'll be stunned, no matter what.
We'd have to drag him there, hold him face-down for a bit – shouldn't think that'd take more than a couple of minutes. If he was conscious, maybe a couple of us could even go down and walk him over…'
Charles passed a hand over his damp, flushed forehead. 'Oh, Jesus,' he said. 'Oh my God. Just listen to us.'
'What's the matter?'
'Are we insane?'
'What are you talking about?'
'We're insane. We've lost our minds. How can we possibly do this?'
'I don't like the idea any more than you do.'
'This is crazy. I don't even know how we can talk about this.
We've got to think of something else.'
Henry took a sip of his coffee. 'If you can think of anything,' he said, Td be delighted to hear it.'
'Well -1 mean, why can't we just leave'? Get in the car tonight and drive away?'
'And go where?' Henry said flatly. 'With what money?'
Charles was silent.
'Now,' said Henry, drawing a line on the map with a pencil.
'I think it will be fairly easy to get away without being seen, though we should be especially careful about turning into the logging road and coming out of it onto the highway.'
'Will we use my car or yours?' said Francis.
'Mine, I think. People tend to look twice at a car like yours.'
'Maybe we should rent one.'
'No. Something like that might ruin everything. If we keep it as casual as possible, no one will give us a second glance. People don't pay attention to ninety percent of what they see.'
There was a pause.
Charles coughed slightly. 'And after?' he said. 'We just go home?'
'We just go home,' said Henry. He lit a cigarette. 'Really, there's nothing to worry about,' he said, shaking out the match.
'It seems risky, but if you look at it logically it couldn't be safer.
It won't look like a murder at all. And who knows we have reason to kill him? I know, I know,' he said impatiently when I tried to interrupt. 'But I should be extremely surprised if he's told anyone else.'
'How can you say what he's done? He could have told half the people at the party.'
'But I'm willing to bank on the odds he hasn't. Bunny's unpredictable, of course, but at this point his actions still make a kind of rudimentary horse sense. I had very good reason to think he'd tell you first.'
'And why's that?'
'Surely you don't think it an accident that, of all the people he might have told, he chose to come to you?'
'I don't know, except that I was handier than anyone else.'
'Who else could he tell?' said Henry impatiently. 'He'd never go to the police outright. He stands to lose as much as we do if he did. And for the same reason he doesn't dare tell a stranger.
Which leaves an extremely limited range of potential confidants.
Marion, for one. His parents for another. Cloke for a third. Julian as an outside possibility. And you.'
'And what makes you think he hasn't told Marion, for instance?'
'Bunny might be stupid, but not that stupid. It would be all over school by lunch the next day. Cloke's a poor choice for different reasons. He isn't quite so apt to lose his head but he's untrustworthy all the same. Skittish and irresponsible. And very much out for his own interests. Bunny likes him – admires him too, I think – but he'd never go to him with something like this.
And he wouldn't tell his parents, not in a million years. They'd stand behind him, certainly, but without a doubt they'd go right to the police.'
'And Julian?'
Henry shrugged. 'Well, he might tell Julian. I'm perfectly willing to concede that. But he hasn't told him yet, and I think the chances are he won't, at least not for a while.'
'Why not?'
Henry raised an eyebrow at me. 'Because who do you think Julian would be more apt to believe?'
No one said a thing. Henry drew deeply on his cigarette. 'So,' he said, and exhaled. 'Process of elimination. He hasn't told Marion or Cloke, for fear of their telling other people. He hasn't told his parents, for the same reason, and probably won't except as a last resort. So what possibilities does that leave him? Only two. He could tell Julian – who wouldn't believe him – or you, who might believe him and wouldn't repeat it.'
I stared at him. 'Surmise,' I said at last.
'Not at all. Do you think, if he'd told anyone else, we'd be sitting here now? Do you think now, once he's told you, that he'd be foolhardy enough to tell a third party before he even knows what your response will be? Why do you suppose he called you this afternoon? Why do you suppose he's pestered the rest of us all day?'
I didn't answer him.
'Because,' said Henry, 'he was testing the waters. Last night he was drunk, full of himself. Today he's not quite sure what you think. He wants another opinion. And he'll look to your response for the cue.'
'I don't understand,' I said.
Henry took a sip of his coffee. 'What don't you understand?'
'Why you're in such a goddamned rush to kill him if you think he won't tell anyone but me.'
He shrugged. 'He hasn't told anyone yet. Which is not to say he won't, very soon.'
'Maybe I could dissuade him.'
'That's frankly not a chance I'm willing to take.'
'In my opinion, you're talking about taking a much greater one.'
'Look,' said Henry evenly, raising his head and fixing me with a bleary gaze. 'Forgive me for being blunt, but if you think you have any influence over Bunny you're sadly mistaken. He's not particularly fond of you, and, if I may speak plainly, as far as I know he never has been. It would be disastrous if you of all people tried to intercede.'
'I was the one he came to.'
'For obvious reasons, none of them very sentimental,' He shrugged. 'As long as I was sure he hadn't told anyone, we might have waited indefinitely. But you were the alarm bell, Richard.
Having told you – nothing happened, he'll think, it wasn't so bad – he'll find it twice as easy to tell a second person. And a third. He's taken the first step on a downward slope. Now that he has, I feel that we're in for an extremely rapid progression of events.'
My palms were sweating. In spite of the open window, the room seemed close and stuffy. I could hear everybody breathing; quiet, measured breaths that came and went with awful regularity, four sets of lungs, eating at the thin oxygen.
Henry folded his fingers and flexed them, at arm's length, until they cracked. 'You can go now, if you like,' he said to me.
'Do you want me to?' I said rather sharply.
'You can stay or not,' he said. 'But there's no reason why you must. I wanted to give you a rough idea, but in a certain sense the fewer details you know, the better.' He yawned. 'There were some things you had to know, 1 suppose, but I feel I've done you a disservice by involving you this far.'
I stood up and looked around the table.
'Well,' I said. 'Well well well.'
Francis raised an eyebrow at me.
'Wish us luck,' said Henry.
I clapped him awkwardly on the shoulder. 'Good luck,' I said.
Charles – out of Henry's line of vision – caught my eye. He smiled and mouthed the words: I'll call you tomorrow, okay?
Suddenly, and without warning, I was overcome by a rush of emotion. Afraid I would say or do something childish, something I'd regret, I got into my coat and drank the rest of my coffee in a long gulp and left, without even the most perfunctory of goodbyes.
On my way home through the dark woods, my head down and my hands in my pockets, I ran virtually headlong into Camilla.
She was very drunk and in an exhilarated mood.
'Hello,' she said, linking her arm through mine and leading me back in the direction from which I'd just come. 'Guess what.
I had a date.'
'So I heard.'
She laughed, a low, sweet chortle that warmed me to my heart. 'Isn't that funny?' she said. 'I feel like such a spy. Bunny just went home. Now the problem is, I think Cloke kind of likes me.'
It was so dark I could hardly see her. The weight of her arm was wonderfully comfortable, and her gin-sweet breath was warm on my cheek.
'Did Cloke behave himself?' I said.
'Yes, he was very nice. He bought me dinner and some red drinks that tasted like Popsicles.'
We emerged from the woods into the deserted, blue-lit streets of North Hampden. Everything was silent and strange in the moonlight. A faint breeze tinkled in the wind chimes on someone's porch.
When I stopped walking, she tugged at my arm. 'Aren't you coming?' she said.
'No.'
'Why not?'
Her hair was tousled, and her lovely mouth was stained dark by the Popsicle drink, and just by looking at her I could tell she didn't have the faintest idea what was going on at Henry's.
She would go with them tomorrow. Somebody would probably tell her that she didn't have to go, but she would end up going with them anyway.
I coughed. 'Look,' I said.
'What?'
'Come home with me.'
She lowered her eyebrows. 'Now?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
The wind chimes tinkled again; silvery, insidious.
'Because I want you to.'
She gazed at me with vacant, drunken composure, standing coltlike on the outer edge of her black-stockinged foot so the ankle was twisted inward in a startling, effortless L.
Her hand was in mine. I squeezed it hard. Clouds were racing across the moon.
'Come on,' I said.
She raised up on tiptoe and gave me a cool, soft kiss that tasted of Popsicles. Oh, you, I thought, my heart beating fast and shallow.
Suddenly, she broke away. 'I've got to go,' she said.
'No. Please don't.'
'I've got to. They'll wonder where I am.'
She gave me a quick kiss, then turned and started down the street. I watched her until she reached the corner, then dug my hands in my pockets and started back home.
I woke the next day with a start, to chill sunlight and the thump of a stereo down the hall. It was late, noon, afternoon maybe; I reached for my watch on the night table and started again, more violently this time. It was a quarter of three. I jumped out of bed and began to dress, in great haste, without bothering to shave or even comb my hair.
Pulling on my jacket in the hall, I saw Judy Poovey walking briskly towards me. She was all dressed up, for Judy, and she had her head to the side attempting to fasten an earring.
'You coming?' she said when she saw me.
'Coming where?' I said, puzzled, my hand still on the doorknob.
'What is it with you? Do you live on Mars or what?'
I stared at her.
'The party,' she said impatiently. 'Swing into Spring. Up behind Jennings. It started an hour ago.'
The edges of her nostrils were inflamed and rabbity, and she reached up to wipe her nose with a red-taloned hand.
'Let me guess what you've been doing,' I said.
She laughed. 'I have lots more. Jack Teitelbaum drove to New York last weekend and came back with a ton. And Laura Stora has Ecstasy, and that creepy guy in Durbinstall basement – you know, the chemistry major -just cooked up a big batch of meth.
You're trying to tell me you didn't know about this?'
'No.'
'Swing into Spring is a big deal. Everybody's been getting ready for months. Too bad they didn't have it yesterday, though, the weather was so great. Did you go to lunch?'
She meant had I been outside yet that day. 'No,' I said.
'Well, I mean, the weather's okay, but it's a little cold. I walked outside and went, like, oh shit. Anyway. You coming?'
I looked at her blankly. I'd run out of my room without the slightest idea where I was going. 'I need to get something to eat,'
I said at last.
'That's a good idea. Last year I went and I didn't eat anything before and I smoked pot and drank, like, thirty martinis. I was all right and everything but then I went to Fun O'Rama. Remember?
That carnival they had – well, I guess you weren't here then.
Anyway. Big mistake. I'd been drinking all day and I had a sunburn and I was with Jack Teitelbaum and all those guys.
I wasn't going to go, you know, on a ride and then I thought, okay. The Ferris wheel. I can go on the Ferris wheel no problem I listened politely to the rest of her story which ended, as I knew it would, with Judy being pyrotechnically ill behind a hot-dog stand.
'So this year, I was like, no way. Stick with coke. Pause that refreshes. By the way, you ought to get that friend of yours you know, what's his name – Bunny, and make him come with you. He's in the library.'
'What?' I said, suddenly all ears.
'Yeah. Drag him out. Make him do some bong hits or something.'
'He's in the library?'
'Yeah. I saw him through the window of the reading room a little while ago. Doesn't he have a car?'
Well, I was thinking, maybe he could drive us. Long walk to Jennings. Or I don't know, maybe it's just me. I swear, I'm so out of shape, I have to start doing Jane Fonda again.'
By now it was three. I locked the door and walked to the library, nervously jangling my key in my pocket.
It was a strange, still, oppressive day. The campus seemed deserted – everyone was at the party, I supposed – and the green lawn, the gaudy tulips, were hushed and expectant beneath the overcast sky. Somewhere a shutter creaked. Above my head, in the wicked black claws of an elm, a marooned kite rattled convulsively, then was still. This is Kansas, I thought. This is Kansas before the cyclone hits.
The library was like a tomb, illumined from within by a chill fluorescent light that, by contrast, made the afternoon seem colder and grayer than it was. The windows of the reading room were bright and blank; bookshelves, empty carrels, not a soul.
The librarian – a despicable woman named Peggy – was behind the desk reading a copy of Woman's Day, and didn't look up. The Xerox machine hummed quietly in the corner. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and went around behind the foreign language section to the reading room. It was empty, just as I'd thought, but at one of the tables near the front there was an eloquent little nest of books, wadded paper, and greasy potato chip bags.
I went over for a closer look. It had the air of fairly recent abandonment; there was a can of grape soda, three-quarters drunk, still sweating and cool to the touch. For a moment I wondered what to do – perhaps he'd only gone to the bathroom, perhaps he'd be back any second – and I was about to leave when I saw the note.
Lying on top of a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, a grubby piece of lined paper was folded in half, with 'Marion' written on the outer edge in Bunny's tiny, crabbed hand. I opened it and read it quickly: old Gal Bored stiff. Walked down to the party to get a brewski. See ya later.
I refolded the note and sat down hard on the arm of Bunny's chair. Bunny went on his walks, when he went, around one in the afternoon. It was now three. He was at the Jennings party.
They'd missed him.
I went down the back steps and out the basement door, then over to Commons – its red brick facade flat as a stage backdrop against the empty sky – and called Henry from the pay phone.
No answer. No answer at the twins', either.
Commons was deserted except for a couple of haggard old janitors and the red-wigged lady who sat at the switchboard and knitted all weekend, paying no attention to the incoming calls.
As usual, the lights were blinking frantically and she had her back to them, as oblivious as that ill-omened wireless operator on the Califomian the night the Titanic went down. I walked past her down the hall to the vending machines, where I got a cup of watery instant coffee before going down to try the phone again.
Still no answer.
I hung up and wandered back to the deserted common room, with a copy of an alumni magazine I'd found in the post office tucked under my arm, and sat in a chair by the window to drink my coffee.
Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty. The alumni magazine was depressing. Hampden graduates never seemed to do anything after they got out of school but start little ceramics shops in Nantucket or join ashrams in Nepal. I tossed it aside and stared blankly out the window. The light outside was very strange.
Something about it intensified the green of the lawn so all that 2.97 vast expanse seemed unnatural, luminous somehow, and not quite of this world. An American flag, stark and lonely against the violet sky, whipped back and forth on the brass flagpole.
I sat and stared at it for a minute and then, suddenly, unable to bear it a moment longer, I put on my coat and started out towards the ravine.
The woods were deathly still, more forbidding than I had ever seen them – green and black and stagnant, dark with the smells of mud and rot. There was no wind; not a bird sang, not a leaf stirred. The dogwood blossoms were poised, white and surreal and still against the darkening sky, the heavy air.
I began to hurry, twigs cracking beneath my feet and my own hoarse breath loud in my ears, and before long the path emerged into the clearing. I stood there, half-panting, and it was a moment or so before I realized that nobody was there.
The ravine lay to the left – raw, treacherous, a deep plunge to the rocks below. Careful not to get too near the edge, I walked to the side for a closer look. Everything was absolutely still. I turned again, towards the woods from which I had just come.
Then, to my immense surprise, there was a soft rustle and Charles's head rose up out of nowhere. 'Hi!' he called, in a glad whisper. 'What in the world?'
'Shut up,' said an abrupt voice, and a moment later Henry materialized as if by magic, stepping towards me from the underbrush.
I was speechless, agog. He blinked at me, irritated, and was about to speak when there was a sudden crackle of branches and I turned in amazement just in time to see Camilla, clad in khaki trousers, clambering down the trunk of a tree.
'What's going on?' I heard Francis say, somewhere very close.
'Can I have a cigarette now?'
Henry didn't answer. 'What are you doing here?' he said in a very annoyed tone of voice.
'There's a party today.'
'What?'
'A party. He's there now.' I paused. 'He's not going to come.'
'See, I told you,' said Francis, aggrieved, stepping gingerly from the brush and wiping his hands. Characteristically, he was not dressed for the occasion and had on sort of a nice suit.
'Nobody listens to me. I said we should have left an hour ago.'
'How do you know he's at the party?' said Henry.
'He left a note. In the library.'
'Let's go home,' said Charles, wiping a muddy smudge off his cheek with the heel of his hand.
Henry wasn't paying any attention to him. 'Damn,' he said, and shook his head quickly, like a dog shaking off water. 'I'd so hoped we'd be able to get it over with.'
There was a long pause.
'I'm hungry,' said Charles.
'Starving,' Camilla said absently, and then her eyes widened.
'Oh, no.'
'What is it?' said everyone at once.
'Dinner. Tonight's Sunday. He's coming to our house for dinner tonight.'
There was a gloomy silence.
'I never thought about it,' Charles said. 'Not once.'
'I didn't either,' said Camilla. 'And we don't have a thing to eat at home.'
'We'll have to stop at the grocery store on the way back.'
'What can we get?'
'I don't know. Something quick.'
'I can't believe you two,' Henry said crossly. 'I reminded you of this last night.'
'But we forgot,' said the twins, in simultaneous despair.
'How could you?'
'Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner.'
'Asparagus is in season,' said Francis helpfully.
'Yes, but do they have it at the Food King?'
Henry sighed and started off towards the woods.
'Where are you going?' Charles said in alarm.
'I'm going to dig up a couple of ferns. Then we can leave.'
'Oh, let's just forget about it,' said Francis, lighting a cigarette and tossing away the match. 'Nobody's going to see us.'
Henry turned around. 'Somebody might. If they do, I certainly want to have an excuse for having been here. And pick up that match,' he said sourly to Francis, who blew out a cloud of smoke and glared at him.
It was getting darker by the minute and cold, too. I buttoned my jacket and sat on a damp rock that overlooked the ravine, staring at the muddy, leaf-clogged rill that trickled below and half-listening to the twins argue about what they were going to make for dinner. Francis leaned against a tree, smoking. After a while he put out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe and came over to sit beside me.
Minutes passed. The sky was so overcast it was almost purple.
A wind swayed through a luminous clump of birches on the opposite bank, and I shivered. The twins were arguing monotonously.
Whenever they were in moods like this – disturbed, upset – they tended to sound like Heckle and Jeckle.
All of a sudden Henry emerged from the woods in a flurry of underbrush, wiping his dirt-caked hands on his trousers. 'Somebody's coming,' he said quietly.
The twins stopped talking and blinked at him.
'What?' said Charles.
'Around the back way. Listen.'
We were quiet, looking at each other. A chilly breeze rustled through the woods and a gust of white dogwood petals blew into the clearing.
'I don't hear anything,' Francis said.
Henry put a finger to his lips. The five of us stood poised, waiting, for a moment longer. I took a breath, and was about to speak when all of a sudden I did hear something.
Footsteps, the crackle of branches. We looked at one another.
Henry bit his lip and glanced quickly around. The ravine was bare, no place to hide, no way for the rest of us to run across the clearing and into the woods without making a lot of noise. He was about to say something when all of a sudden there was a crash of bushes, very near, and he stepped out of the clearing between two trees, like someone ducking into a doorway on a city street.
The rest of us, stranded in the open, looked at each other and then at Henry – thirty feet away, safe at the shady margin of the wood. He waved at us impatiently. I heard the sudden crunch of footsteps on gravel and, hardly aware of what I was doing, turned away spasmodically and pretended to inspect the trunk of a nearby tree.
The footsteps approached. Prickles rising on the nape of my neck, I bent to scrutinize the tree trunk more closely: silvery bark, cool to the touch, ants marching out of a fissure in a glittering black thread.
Then – almost before I noticed it – the footsteps stopped, very near my back.
I glanced up and saw Charles. He was staring straight ahead with a ghastly expression on his face and I was on the verge of asking him what was the matter when, with a sick, incredulous rush of disbelief, I heard Bunny's voice directly behind me.
'Well, I'll be damned,' he said briskly. 'What's this? Meeting of the Nature Club?'
I turned. It was Bunny, all right, all six-foot-three of him, looming up behind me in a tremendous yellow rain slicker that came almost to his ankles.
There was an awful silence.
'Hi, Bun,' said Camilla faintly.
'Hi yourself.' He had a bottle of beer – a Rolling Rock, funny I remember that – and he turned it up and took a long, gurgling pull. 'Phew,' he said. 'You people sure do a lot of sneaking around in the woods these days. You know,' he said, poking me in the ribs, 'I've been trying to get ahold of you.'
The abrupt, booming immediacy of his presence was too much for me to take. I stared at him, dazed, as he drank again, as he lowered the bottle, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; he was standing so close I could feel the heaviness of his rich, beery breaths.
'Aaah,' he said, raking the hair back from his eyes, and belched.
'So what's the story, deerslayers? You all just felt like coming out here to study the vegetation?'
There was a rustle and a slight, deprecating cough from the direction of the woods.
'Well, not exactly,' said a cool voice.
Bunny turned, startled -1 did, too – just in time to see Henry step out of the shadows.
He came forward and regarded Bunny pleasantly. He was holding a garden trowel and his hands were black with mud.
'Hello,' he said. 'This is quite a surprise.'
Bunny gave him a long, hard look. 'Jesus,' he said. 'What you doing, burying the dead?'
Henry smiled. 'Actually, it's very lucky you happened by.'
'This some kind of convention?'
'Why, yes,' said Henry agreeably, after a pause. 'I suppose one might call it that.'
'One might,' said Bunny mockingly.
Henry bit his lower lip. 'Yes,' he said, in all seriousness. 'One might. Though it's not the term I would use myself Everything was very still. From somewhere far away, in the woods, I heard the faint, inane laughter of a woodpecker.
'Tell me,' Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note, of suspicion. 'Just what the Sam Hill arc you guys doing out here anyway?'
The woods were silent, not a sound.
Henry smiled. 'Why, looking for new ferns,' he said, and took a step towards him.