Dionysus [is] the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship's plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world's not.
– E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
Just for the record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!). Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency. 'Basically I am a very good person.' This from the latest serial killer – destined for the chair, they say – who, with incarnadine axe, recently dispatched half a dozen registered nurses in Texas. I have followed his case with interest in the papers.
But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am a spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way, our Texan friend being a case in point. What we did was terrible, but still I don't think any of us were bad, exactly; chalk it up to weakness on my part, hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition – whatever you like.
I don't know. I suppose I should have had a better idea of what I was letting myself in for. Still, the first murder – the farmer – seemed to have been so simple, a dropped stone falling to the lakebed with scarcely a ripple. The second one was also easy, at least at first, but I had no inkling how different it would be. What we took for a docile, ordinary weight (gentle plunk, swift rush to the bottom, dark waters closing over it without a trace) was in fact a depth charge, one that exploded quite without warning beneath the glassy surface, and the repercussions of which may not be entirely over, even now.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei did a variety of experiments on the nature of falling bodies, dropping objects (so they say) from the Tower of Pisa in order to measure the rate of acceleration as they fell. His findings were as follows: That falling bodies acquire speed as they fall. That the farther a body falls, the faster it moves. That the velocity of a falling body equals the acceleration due to gravity multiplied by the time of the fall in seconds. In short, that given the variables in our case, our particular falling body was traveling at a speed greater than thirty-two feet per second when it hit the rocks below.
You see, then, how quick it was. And it is impossible to slow down this film, to examine individual frames. I see now what I saw then, flashing by with the swift, deceptive ease of an accident: shower of gravel, windmilling arms, a hand that claws at a branch and misses. A barrage of frightened crows explodes from the underbrush, cawing and dark against the sky. Cut to Henry, stepping back from the edge. Then the film flaps up in the projector and the screen goes black. Consummation est.
If, lying in my bed at night, I find myself unwilling audience to this objectionable little documentary (it goes away when I open my eyes but always, when I close them, it resumes tirelessly at the very beginning), I marvel at how detached it is in viewpoint, eccentric in detail, largely devoid of emotional power. In that way it mirrors the remembered experience more closely than one might imagine. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. I watched it all happen quite calmly – without fear, without pity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity – so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart.
It was many hours before I was cognizant of what we'd done; days (months? years?) before I began to comprehend the magnitude of it. I suppose we'd simply thought about it too much, talked of it too often, until the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination and took on a horrible life of its own…
Never, never once in any immediate sense, did it occur to me that any of this was anything but a game. An air of unreality suffused even the most workaday details, as if we were plotting not the death of a friend but the itinerary of a fabulous trip that I, for one, never quite believed we'd ever really take.
What is unthinkable is undoable. That is something that Julian used to say in our Greek class, and while I believe he said it in order to encourage us to be more rigorous in our mental habits, it has a certain perverse bearing on the matter at hand. The idea of murdering Bunny was horrific, impossible; nonetheless we dwelt on it incessantly, convinced ourselves there was no alternative, devised plans which seemed slightly improbable and ridiculous but which actually worked quite well when put to the test… I don't know. A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.
This part, for some reason, is difficult for me to write, largely because the topic is inextricably associated with too many nights like this one (sour stomach, wretched nerves, clock inching tediously from four to five). It is also discouraging, because I recognize attempts at analysis are largely useless. I don't know why we did it. I'm not entirely sure that, circumstances demanding, we wouldn't do it again. And if I'm sorry, in a way, that probably doesn't make much difference.
I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story. I have noticed that even the most garrulous and shameless of murderers are shy about recounting their crimes. A few months ago, in an airport bookstore, I picked up the autobiography of a notorious 3ii thrill killer and was disheartened to find it entirely bereft of lurid detail. At the points of greatest suspense (rainy night; deserted street; fingers closing around the lovely neck of Victim Number Four) it would suddenly, and not without some coyness, switch to some entirely unrelated matter. (Was the reader aware that an IQ test had been given him in prison? That his score had been gauged as being close to that of Jonas Salk?) By far the major portion of the book was devoted to spinsterish discourses on prison life – bad food, hijinks in the exercise yard, tedious little jailbird hobbies. It was a waste of five dollars.
In a certain way, though, I know how my colleague feels. Not that everything 'went black,' nothing of the sort; only that the event itself is cloudy because of some primitive, numbing effect that obscured it at the time; the same effect, I suppose, that enables panicked mothers to swim icy rivers, or rush into burning houses, for a child; the effect that occasionally allows a deeply bereaved person to make it through a funeral without a single tear. Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things – naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror – are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself- quite to one's surprise – in an entirely different world.
When we got back to the car it had not yet begun to snow, but already the woods shrank beneath the sky, hushed and waiting, as if they could sense the weight of the ice that would be on them by nightfall.
'Christ, look at this mud,' said Francis as we bounced through yet another pothole, brown spray striking the window with a thick rataplan.
Henry shifted down into first.
Another pothole, one that rattled the teeth in my head. As we tried to come out of it the tires whined, kicking up fresh splatters 312. of mud, and we fell back into it with a jolt. Henry swore, and put the car in reverse.
Francis rolled down his window and craned his head outside to see. 'Oh, Jesus,' I heard him say. 'Stop the car. There's no way we're going to '
'We're not stuck.'
'Yes we are. You're making it worse. Christ, Henry. Stop the '
'Shut up,' Henry said.
The tires whined in the back. The twins, sitting on either side of me, turned to look out the rear window at the muddy spray.
Abruptly, Henry shifted into first, and with a sudden leap that made my heart glad we were clear of the hole.
Francis slumped back in his seat. He was a cautious driver, and riding in the car with Henry, even in the most propitious of circumstances, made him nervous.
Once in town, we drove to Francis's apartment. The twins and I were to split up and walk home – me to campus, the twins to their apartment – while Henry and Francis took care of the car.
Henry turned off the engine. The silence was eerie, jolting.
He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. 'We need to talk a minute,' he said.
'What is it?'
'When did you leave your room?'
'About a quarter of three.'
'Did anyone see you?'
'Not really. Not that I know of.'
Cooling down after its long drive, the car ticked and hissed and settled contentedly on its frame. Henry was silent for a moment, and he was about to speak when Francis suddenly pointed out the window. 'Look,' he said. 'Is that snow?'
The twins leaned low to see. Henry, biting his lower lip, paid no attention. 'The four of us,' he said, at last, 'were at a matinee at the Orpheum in town – a double feature that ran from one o'clock to four-fifty-five. Afterwards we went on a short drive, returning' – he checked his watch – 'at five-fifteen. That accounts for us, all right. I'm not sure what to do about you.'
'Why can't I say I was with you?'
'Because you weren't.'
'Who'll know the difference?'
'The ticket girl at the Orpheum, that's who. We went down and bought tickets for the afternoon show, paid for them with a hundred-dollar bill. She remembers us, I can assure you of that.
We sat in the balcony and slipped out the emergency exit about fifteen minutes into the first movie.'
'Why couldn't I have met you there?'
'You could have, except you don't have a car. And you can't say you took a cab because that can be easily checked. Besides, you were out walking around. You say you were in Commons before you met us?'
'Yes.'
'Then I suppose there's nothing you can say except that you went straight home. It's not an ideal story, but at this point you don't have any alternative to speak of. We'll have to imagine you met up with us at some point after the movie, in the quite likely event that someone has seen you. Say we called you at five o'clock and met you in the parking lot. You rode with us to Francis's – really, this doesn't follow very smoothly, but it'll have to do – and walked home again.'
'All right.'
'When you get home, check downstairs in case any phone messages were left for you between three-thirty and five. If there were, we'll have to think of some reason why you didn't take the calls.'
'Look, you guys,' Charles said. 'It's really snowing.'
Tiny flakes, just visible at the tops of the pines.
'One more thing,' said Henry. 'We don't want to behave as if we're waiting around to hear some momentous piece of news.
Go home. Read a book. I don't think we ought to try to contact 3i4 one another tonight – unless, of course, it's absolutely necessary.'
'I've never seen it snow this late in the year.' Francis was looking out the window. 'Yesterday it was nearly seventy degrees.'
'Were they predicting it?' Charles said.
'Not that I heard.'
'Christ. Look at this. It's almost Easter.'
'I don't see why you're so excited,' Henry said crossly. He had a pragmatic, farmer-like knowledge of how weather conditions affected growth, germination, blooming times, et cetera. 'It's just going to kill all the flowers.'
I walked home fast, because I was cold. A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape. Snow was falling in earnest now – big silent petals drifting through the springtime woods, white bouquets segueing into snowy dark: a nightmarish topsy-turvy land, something from a story book. My path took me beneath a row of apple trees, full-blown and luminous, shivering in the twilight like an avenue of pale umbrellas. The big white flakes wafted through them, dreamy and soft. I did not stop to look, however, only hurried beneath them even faster. My winter in Hampden had given me a horror of snow.
There were no messages for me downstairs. I went up to my room, changed my clothes, couldn't decide what to do with the ones I'd taken off, thought of washing them, wondered if it might look suspicious, finally stuffed them all at the very bottom of my laundry bag. Then I sat down on my bed and looked at the clock.
It was time for dinner and I hadn't eaten all day but I wasn't hungry. I went to the window and watched the snowflakes whirl in the high arcs of light above the tennis courts, then crossed over and sat upon my bed again.
Minutes ticked by. Whatever anesthesia had carried me through the event was starting to wear off and with each passing second the thought of sitting around all night, alone, was seeming more and more unbearable. I turned on the radio, switched it off, tried to read. When I found I couldn't hold my attention on one book I tried another. Scarcely ten minutes had passed. I picked up the first book and put it down again. Then, against my better judgment, I went downstairs to the pay phone and dialed Francis's number.
He answered on the first ring. 'Hi,' he said, when I told him it was me. 'What is it?'
'Nothing.'
'Are you sure?'
I heard Henry murmuring in the background. Francis, his mouth away from the receiver, said something that I couldn't catch.
'What are you guys doing?' I said.
'Not much. Having a drink. Hold on a second, would you?' he said, in response to another murmur.
There was a pause, an indistinct exchange, and then Henry's brisk voice came on the line. 'What's the matter? Where are you?' he said.
'At home.'
'What's wrong?'
'I just wondered if maybe I could come over for a drink or something.'
'That's not a good idea. I was just leaving when you called.'
'What are you going to do?'
'Well, if you want to know the truth, I'm going to take a bath and go to bed.'
The line was silent for a moment.
'Are you still there?' Henry said.
'Henry, I'm going crazy. I don't know what I'm going to do.'
'Well, do anything you like,' Henry said amiably. 'As long as you stick pretty close to home.'
'I don't see what difference it would make if I '
'When you're worried about something,' said Henry abruptly, 'have you ever tried thinking in a different language?'
'What?'
It slows you down. Keeps your thoughts from running wild.
A good discipline in any circumstance. Or you might try doing what the Buddhists do.'
'What?'
'In the practice of Zen there is an exercise called zazen similar, I think, to the Theravadic practice of vipassana. One sits facing a blank wall. No matter the emotion one feels, no matter how strong or violent, one remains motionless. Facing the wall.
The discipline, of course, is in continuing to sit.'
There was a silence, during which I struggled for language to adequately express what I thought of this goofball advice.
'Now, listen,' he continued, before I could say anything. 'I'm exhausted. I'll see you in class tomorrow, all right?'
'Henry,' I said, but he'd hung up.
In a sort of trance, I walked upstairs. I wanted a drink badly but I had nothing to drink. I sat down on my bed and looked out the window.
My sleeping pills were all gone. I knew they were gone but I went to my bureau and checked the bottle just in case. It was empty except for some vitamin C tablets I'd got from the infirmary.
Little white pills. I poured them on my desk, arranged them in patterns and then I took one, hoping that the reflex of swallowing would make me feel better, but it didn't.
I sat very still, trying not to think. It seemed as if I was waiting for something, I wasn't sure what, something that would lift the tension and make me feel better, though I could imagine no possible event, in past, present, or future, that would have either effect. It seemed as if an eternity had passed. Suddenly, I was struck by a horrible thought: is this what it's like? Is this the way it's going to be from now on?
I looked at the clock. Scarcely a minute had gone by. I got up, not bothering to lock the door behind me, and went down the hall to Judy's room.
By some miracle, she was in – drunk, putting on lipstick. 'Hi,' she said, without glancing away from the mirror. 'Want to go to «a party?'
I don't know what I said to her, something about not feeling well.
'Have a bagel,' she said, turning her head from side to side and examining her profile.
'I'd rather a sleeping pill, if you've got one.'
She screwed the lipstick down, snapped on the top, then opened the drawer of her dressing table. It was not actually a dressing table but a desk, college-issue, just like the one in my room; but like some savage unable to understand its true purpose – transforming it into a weapon rack, say, or a flower-decked fetish – she had painstakingly turned it into a cosmetics area, with a glass top and a ruffled satin skirt and a three-way mirror on the top that lit up. Scrabbling through a nightmare of compacts and pencils, she pulled out a prescription bottle, held it to the light, tossed it into the trash can and selected a new one. 'This'll do,' she said, handing it to me.
I examined the bottle. There were two drab tablets at the bottom. All the label said was for pain.
I said, annoyed, 'What is this? Anacin or something?'
'Try one. They're okay. This weather's pretty wild, huh?'
'Yeah,' I said, swallowing a pill and handing the bottle back.
'Don't worry, keep it,' she said, already returned to her toilette.
'Man. All it does here is fucking snow. I don't know why the hell I ever came here. You want a beer?'
She had a refrigerator in her room, in the closet. I fought my way through a jungle of belts and hats and lacy shirts to get to it.
'No, I don't want one,' she said when I held one out to her.
'Too fucked up. You didn't go to the party, did you?'
'No,' I said, and then stopped, the beer bottle at my lips.
There was something about the taste of it, the smell, and then I remembered: Bunny, the beer on his breath; spilled beer foaming on the ground. The bottle clattering after him down the slope.
'Smart move, said Judy. 'It was cold and the band stunk. I saw your friend, what's-his-name. The Colonel.'
'What?'
She laughed. 'You know. Laura Stora calls him that. She used to live next door to him and he irritated the shit out of her playing these John Philip Sousa marching records all the time.'
She meant Bunny. I set the bottle down.
But Judy, thank God, was busy with the eyebrow pencil. 'You know,' she said, 'I think Laura has an eating disorder, not anorexia, but that Karen Carpenter thing where you make yourself puke.
Last night I went with her and Trace to the Brasserie, and, I'm totally serious, she stuffed herself until she could not breathe. Then she went in the men's room to barf and Tracy and I were looking at each other, like, is this normal? Then Trace told me, well, you remember that time Laura was supposedly in the hospital for mono? Well. The story is that actually…'
She rattled on. I stared at her, lost in my own awful thoughts.
Suddenly I realized she'd stopped talking. She was looking at me expectantly, waiting for a reply.
'What?' I said.
'I said, isn't that the most retarded thing you ever heard?'
'Ummmm.'
'Her parents just must not give a shit.' She closed the makeup drawer and turned to face me. 'Anyway. You want to come to this party?'
'Whose is it?'
'Jack Teitelbaum's, you airhead. Durbinstall basement. Sid's band is supposed to play, and Moffat's back on the drums. And somebody said something about a go-go dancer in a cage. Come on.'
For some reason I was unable to answer her. Unconditional refusal to Judy's invitations was a reflex so deeply ingrained that it was hard to force myself to say yes. Then I thought of my room. Bed, bureau, desk. Books lying open where I'd left them.
'Come on, she said coquettishly. 'You never go out with me.'
'All right,' I said at last. 'Let me get my coat.'
Only much later did I find out what Judy had given me: Demerol.
By the time we got to the party it had started to kick in. Angles, colors, the riot of snowflakes, the din of Sid's band – everything was soft and kind and infinitely forgiving. I noted a strange beauty in the faces of people previously repulsive to me. I smiled at everyone and everyone smiled back.
Judy (Judy! God bless her!) left me with her friend Jack Teitelbaum and a fellow named Lars and went off to get us a drink.
Everything was bathed in a celestial light. I listened to Jack and Lars talk about pinball, motorcycles, female kick-boxing, and was heartwarmed at their attempts to include me in the conversation.
Lars offered me a bong hit. The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realized I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.
I was trying to think of some way to vocalize this epiphany when Judy came back with the drinks. I drank mine, wandered off to get another, found myself roaming in a fluid, pleasant daze.
Someone gave me a cigarette. Jud and Frank were there, Jud with a cardboard crown from Burger King on his head. This crown was oddly flattering to him. Head thrown back and howling with laughter, brandishing a tremendous mug of beer, he looked like Cuchulain, Brian Boru, some mythic Irish king.
Cloke Rayburn was shooting pool in the back room. Just outside his line of vision, I watched him chalk the cue, unsmiling, and bend over the table so his hair fell in his face. Click. The colored balls spun out in all directions. Flecks of light swam in my eyes.
I thought of atoms, molecules, things so small you couldn't even see them.
Then I remember feeling dizzy, pushing through the crowd 32,0 to try to get some air. I could see the door propped invitingly with a cinder block, could feel a cold draft on my face. Then – I don't know, I must've blacked out, because the next thing I knew my back was against a wall, in an entirely different place, and a strange girl was talking to me.
Gradually I understood that I must have been standing there with her for some time. I blinked, and struggled gamely to bring her into focus. Very pretty, in a snub-nosed, good-natured way; dark hair, freckles, light blue eyes. I had seen her earlier, somewhere, in line at the bar maybe, had seen her without paying her much attention. And now here she was again, like an apparition, drinking red wine from a plastic cup and calling me by name.
I couldn't make out what she was saying, though the timbre of her voice was clear even over the noise: cheerful, raucous, oddly pleasant. I leaned forward – she was a small girl, barely five feet – and cupped a hand to my ear. 'What?' I said.
She laughed, stretched up on tiptoe, brought her face close to mine. Perfume. Hot thunder of whisper against my cheek.
I grabbed her by the wrist. 'It's too noisy,' I said in her ear; my lips brushed against her hair. 'Let's go outside.'
She laughed again. 'But we just came in,' she said. 'You said you were freezing.'
Hmmn, I thought. Her eyes were pale, bored, regarding me with a kind of intimate amusement in the jaded light.
'Somewhere quiet, I mean,' I said.
She turned up her glass and looked at me through the bottom of it. 'Your room or mine?'
'Yours,' I said, without a moment's hesitation.
She was a good girl, a good sport. Sweet chuckles in the dark and her hair falling across my face, funny little catches in her breath like the girls back in high school. The warm feel of a body in my arms was something I'd almost forgotten. How long since I'd kissed anyone that way? Months, and more months.
Strange to think how simple things could be. A party, some «drinks, a pretty stranger. That was the way most of my classmates ' lived – talking rather self-consciously at breakfast about their liaisons of the previous night, as if this harmless, homey little vice, which fell somewhere below drink and above gluttony in the catalogue of sins, was somehow the abyss of depravity and dissipation.
Posters; dried flowers in a beer mug; the luminous glow of her stereo in the dark. It was all too familiar from my suburban youth, yet now seemed unbelievably remote and innocent, a memory from some lost Junior Prom. Her lip gloss tasted like bubble gum. I buried my face in the soft, slightly acrid-smelling flesh of her neck and rocked her back and forth – babbling, mumbling, feeling myself fall down and down, into a dark, half-forgotten life. J| I woke at two-thirty – according to the flashing, demonic red of a digital clockface – in an absolute panic. I'd had a dream, nothing scary really, in which Charles and I were on a train, trying to evade a mysterious third passenger. The cars were packed with people from the parry – Judy, Jack Teitelbaum, Jud in his cardboard crown – as we lurched through the aisles. Throughout the dream, however, I'd had a feeling that it was all unimportant, that I actually had a far more pressing worry if only I could remember it. Then I did remember, and the shock of it woke me up.
It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare. I sat up, heart pounding, slapping at the blank wall for the light switch until the terrible realization dawned on me that I was not in my own room. Strange shapes, unfamiliar shadows, crowded horribly around me; nothing offered any clue to my whereabouts, and for a few delirious moments I wondered if I was dead. Then I felt the sleeping body next to mine. Instinctively I recoiled, and then I prodded it gently with my elbow. It didn't move. I lay in bed for a minute or two, trying to collect my thoughts; then I got up, found my clothes, dressed as best as I could in the dark, and left.
Stepping outside, I slipped on an icy step and pitched, face forward, into more than a foot of snow. I lay still for a moment, then raised myself to my knees and looked about in disbelief. A few snowflakes were one thing, but I had not thought it possible for weather to change as suddenly and violently as this. The flowers were buried, and the lawn; everything had disappeared.
An expanse of clean, unbroken snow stretched blue and twinkling as far as I could see.
My hands were raw and my elbow felt bruised. With some effort, I got to my feet. When I turned to see where I'd come from, I was horrified to realize I'd just walked out of Bunny's own dorm. His window, on the ground floor, stared back at me black and silent. I thought of his spare glasses lying on the desk; the empty bed; the family photographs smiling in the dark.
When I got back to my room – by a confused, circular route -1 fell on my bed without taking off my coat or shoes. The lights were on, and I felt weirdly exposed and vulnerable but I didn't want to turn them off. The bed was rocking a little, like a raft, and I kept a foot on the floor to steady it.
Then I fell asleep, and slept very soundly for a couple of hours until I was awakened by a knock at the door. Seized by fresh panic, I fought to sit up in the tangle of my coat, which had somehow got twisted around my knees and seemed to be attacking me with the force of a living creature.
The door creaked open. Then no sound at all. 'What the hell is wrong with you?' said a sharp voice.
Francis was in the doorway. He stood with one black-gloved hand on the knob, looking at me like I was a lunatic.
I stopped struggling and fell back on my pillow. I was so glad to see him I felt like laughing, and I was so doped up I probably did. 'Francois,' I said idiotically.
He shut the door and came over to my bed, where he stood looking down at me. It was really him – snow in his hair, snow on the shoulders of his long black overcoat. 'Are you okay?' he said, after a long, derisive pause.
I rubbed my eyes and tried again. 'Hi,' I said. 'I'm sorry. I'm fine. Really.'
He stood looking at me with no expression and did not answer.
Then he took off his coat and laid it over the back of a chair. 'Do you want some tea?' he said.
'No.'
'Well, I'm going to go make some, if you don't mind.'
By the time he was back I was more or less myself. He put the kettle on the radiator and helped himself to some tea bags from my bureau drawer. 'Here,' he said. 'You can have the good teacup. There wasn't any milk in the kitchen.'
It was a relief to have him there. I sat up and drank my tea and watched him take offhis shoes and socks. Then he put them by the radiator to dry. His feet were long and thin, too long for his slim, bony ankles; he flexed his toes, looked up at me. 'It's an awful night,' he said. 'Have you been outside?'
I told him a little about my night, omitting the part about the girl.
'Gosh,' he said, reaching up to loosen his collar. 'I've just been sitting in my apartment. Giving myself the creeps.'
'Heard from anyone?'
'No. My mother called around nine; I couldn't talk to her.
Told her I was writing a paper.'
For some reason my eyes strayed to his hands, fidgeting unconsciously on the top of my desk. He saw that I saw, forced them down, palms flat. 'Nerves,' he said.
We sat for a while without saying anything. I put my teacup on the windowsill and leaned back. The Demerol had set off some kind of weird Doppler effect in my head, like the whine of car tires speeding past and receding in the distance. I was staring I across the room in a daze – how long, I don't know – when gradually I became aware that Francis was looking at me with an intent, fixed expression on his face. I mumbled something and got up and went to the bureau to get an Alka-Seltzer.
The sudden movement made me feel light-headed. I was standing there dully, wondering where I'd put the box, when all of a sudden I became aware that Francis was immediately behind me, and I turned around.
His face was very close to mine. To my surprise he put his hands on my shoulders and leaned forward and kissed me, right on the mouth.
It was a real kiss – long, slow, deliberate. He'd caught me off balance and I grabbed his arm to keep from falling; sharply, he drew in his breath and his hands went down to my back and before I knew it, more from reflex than anything else, I was kissing him, too. His tongue was sharp. His mouth had a bitter, mannish taste, like tea and cigarettes.
He pulled away, breathing hard, and leaned to kiss my throat.
I looked rather wildly around the room. God, I thought, what a night.
'Look, Francis,' I said, 'cut it out.'
He was undoing the top button of my collar. 'You idiot,' he said, chuckling. 'Did you know your shirt's on inside-out?'
I was so tired and drunk I started to laugh. 'Come on, Francis,'
I said. 'Give me a break.'
'It's fun,' he said. 'I promise you.'
Matters progressed. My jaded nerves began to stir. His eyes were magnified and wicked behind his pince-nez. Presently he took them off and dropped them on my bureau with an absent clatter.
Then, quite unexpectedly, there was another knock at the door. We sprang apart. His eyes were wide. We stared at each other, and then the knock came again.
Francis swore under his breath, bit his lip. I, panic-stricken, gi) ^=«rc«t _.-.^ziitiiji, uut fig made a quick, shushing gesture at me I with his hand.
'But what if it's -?' I whispered. -*
I had been about to say 'What if it's Henry?' But what I was actually thinking was 'What if it's the cops?' Francis, I knew, was thinking the same thing.
More knocking, more insistent this time.
My heart was pounding. Bewildered with fear, I crossed to my bed and sat down.
Francis ran a hand through his hair. 'Come in,' he called.
I was so upset that it took me a moment to realize it was only Charles. He was leaning with one elbow against the door frame, his red scarf slung into great careless loops around his neck. When he stepped in my room I saw immediately that he was drunk. 'Hi,' he said to Francis. 'What the hell are you doing here?'
'You scared us to death.'
'I wish I'd known you were coming. Henry called and got me out of bed.'
The two of us looked at him, waiting for him to explain. He jostled off his coat and turned to me with a watery, intense gaze.
'You were in my dream,' he said.
'What?'
He blinked at me. 'I just remembered,' he said. 'I had a dream tonight. You were in it.'
I stared at him. Before I had a chance to tell him he was in my dream, too, Francis said impatiently: 'Come on, Charles. What's the matter?'
Charles ran a hand through his windblown hair. 'Nothing,' he said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers folded lengthwise. 'Did you do your Greek for today?' he asked me.
I rolled my eyes. Greek had been about the last thing on my mind.
: Hemy thought you might have forgot. He called and asked me to bring mine for you to copy, just in case.'
He was very drunk. He wasn't slurring his words, but he smelled of whiskey and he was extremely unsteady on his feet.
His face was flushed and radiant as an angel's.
'You talked to Henry? Has he heard anything?'
'He's very annoyed about this weather. Nothing's turned up that he knows of. Gosh, it's hot in here,' he said, shouldering off his jacket.
Francis, sitting in his chair by the window with an ankle balanced upon the opposite kneecap and his teacup balanced on his bare ankle, was looking at Charles rather narrowly.
Charles turned, reeling slightly. 'What are you looking at?' he said.
'Do you have a bottle in your pocket?'
'No.'
'Nonsense, Charles, I can hear it sloshing.'
'What difference does it make?'
'I want a drink.'
'Oh, all right,' said Charles, irritated. He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket and brought out a flat pint bottle.
'Here,' he said. 'Don't be a pig.'
Francis drank the rest of his tea and reached for the bottle.
Thanks,' he said, pouring the remaining inch or so into his teacup. I looked at him – dark suit, sitting very straight with his legs now crossed at the knee. He was the picture of respectability except that his feet were bare. All of a sudden I found myself able to see him as the world saw him, as I myself had seen him when I first met him – cool, well-mannered, rich, absolutely beyond reproach. It was such a convincing illusion that even I, who knew the essential falseness of it, felt oddly comforted.
He drank the whiskey down in a swallow. 'We need to sober you up, Charles,' he said. 'We've got class in a couple of hours.'
Charles sighed and sat on the foot of my bed. He looked very 32.7 3I – -astii HOE in dark circles, or pauui, BMl a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness. 'I know,' he said. 'I hoped the walk might do the trick.' _
'You need some coffee.' ™ He wiped his damp forehead with the heel of his hand. 'I need | more than coffee,' he said.
I smoothed out the papers and went over to my desk and began to copy out my Greek.
Francis sat down on the bed next to Charles. 'Where's Camilla?'
'Asleep.'
'What'd you two do tonight? Get drunk?'
'No,' said Charles tersely. 'Cleaned house.'
'No. Really.'
'I'm not kidding.'
I was still so dopey that I couldn't make any sense of the passage I was copying, only a sentence here and there. Being weary from the march, the soldiers stopped to offer sacrifices at the temple. I came back from that country and said that I had seen the Gorgon, but it did not make me a stone.
'Our house is full of tulips, if you want any,' said Charles inexplicably.
'What do you mean?'
'I mean, before the snow got too deep, we went outside and brought them in. Everything's full of them. The water glasses, even.'
Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me.
Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they'd had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.
My vision swam. I closed my eyes. I sat there for a long time, half-dozing, until I became aware that Charles was saying my name.
I turned in my chair. They were leaving. Francis was sirring on the side of my bed, lacing his shoes.
'Where are you going?' I said.
'Home to dress. It's getting late.'
I didn't want to be alone – quite the contrary – but I felt, unaccountably, a strong desire to be rid of them both. The sun was up. Francis reached over and turned off the lamp. The morning light was sober and pale and made my room seem horribly quiet.
'We'll see you in a little while,' he said, and then I heard their footsteps dying on the stair. Everything was faded and silent in the dawn – dirty teacups, unmade bed, snowflakes floating past the window with an airy, dangerous calm. My ears rang. When I turned back to my work, with trembling, ink-stained hands, the scratch of my pen on the paper rasped loud in the stillness. I thought of Bunny's dark room and of the ravine, miles away; of all those layers of silence on silence.
'And where is Edmund this morning?' said Julian as we opened our grammars.
'At home, I suppose,' said Henry. He'd come in late and we hadn't had a chance to talk. He seemed calm, well rested, more than he had any right to be.
The others were surprisingly calm as well. Even Francis and Charles were well dressed, freshly shaven, very much their unconcerned old selves. Camilla sat between them, with her elbow propped negligently on the table and her chin in her hand, tranquil as an orchid.
Julian arched an eyebrow at Henry. 'Is he ill?'
'I don't know.'
'This weather may have slowed him a bit. Perhaps we should wait a few minutes.'
'I think that's a good idea,' said Henry, going back to his book.
After class, once we were away from the Lyceum and near the birch grove, Henry glanced around to make sure that no one was within earshot; we all leaned close to hear what he was going to say but at just that moment, as we were standing in a huddle and our breath was coming out in clouds, I heard someone call my name and there, at a great distance, was Dr Roland, tottering through the snow like a lurching corpse.
I disengaged myself and went to meet him. He was breathing hard and, with a good deal of coughing and hawing, he began to tell me about something he wanted me to have a look at in his office.
There was nothing I could do but go with him, adjusting my pace to his leaden shuffle. Once inside, he paused several times on the stair to remark upon scraps of debris that the janitor had missed, feebly kicking at them with his foot. He kept me for half an hour. When I finally escaped, with my ears ringing and an armful of loose papers struggling to fly away in the wind, the birch grove was empty.
I don't know what I'd expected, but the world certainly hadn't been kicked out of its orbit overnight. People were hurrying to and fro, on their way to class, everything business as usual. The sky was gray and an icy wind was blowing off Mount Cataract.
I bought a milk shake at the snack bar and then went home. I was walking down the hall to my suite when I ran headlong into Judy Poovey.
She glared at me. She looked like she had an evil hangover and there were black circles under her eyes.
'Oh, hello,' I said, edging past. 'Sorry.'
'Hey,' she said.
I turned around.
'So you went home with Mona Beale last night?'
For a second I didn't know what she meant. 'What?'
'How was it?' she said bitchily. 'Was she good?'
Taken aback, I shrugged and started down the hall.
To my annoyance she followed and caught me by the arm.
'She's got a boyfriend, do you know that? You better hope nobody tells him.'
'I don't care.'
'Last term he beat up Bram Guernsey because he thought Bram was hitting on her.'
'She was the one who was hitting on me.'
She gave me a catty, sideways look. 'Well, I mean, she's kind of a slut.'
Just before I woke up, I had a terrible dream.
I was in a large, old-fashioned bathroom, like something from a Zsa Zsa Gabor movie, with gold fixtures and mirrors and pink tiles on the walls and floor. A bowl of goldfish stood on a spindly pedestal in the corner. I went over to look at them, my footsteps echoing on the tile, and then I became aware of a measured plink plink plink, coming from the faucet of the tub.
The tub was pink, too, and it was full of water, and Bunny, fully clad, was lying motionless at the bottom of it. His eyes were open and his glasses were askew and his pupils were different sizes – one large and black, the other scarcely a pinpoint. The water was clear, and very still. The tip of his necktie undulated near the surface.
Plink, plink, plink. I couldn't move. Then, suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching, and voices. With a rush of terror I realized I had to hide the body somehow, where I didn't know; I plunged my hands into the icy water and grasped him beneath the arms and tried to pull him out, but it was no good, no good; his head lolled back uselessly and his open mouth was filling with water…
Struggling against his weight, reeling backward, I knocked the fishbowl from its pedestal and it crashed to the floor. Goldfish flopping all around my feet, amidst the shards of broken glass.
Someone banged on the door. In my terror I let go of the body 33i I and it fell back into the tub with a hideous slap and a spray of water and I woke up.
It was almost dark. There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird were trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death. Gasping, I lay back on my bed.
When the worst of it was over I sat up. I was trembling all over and drenched in sweat. Long shadows, nightmare light. I could see some kids playing outside in the snow, silhouetted in black against the dreadful, salmon-colored sky. Their shouts and laughter had, at that distance, an insane quality. I dug the heels of my hands hard into my eyes. Milky spots, pinpoints of light. Oh, God, I thought.
Bare cheek on cold tile. The roar and rush of the toilet was so $ loud I thought it would swallow me. It was like all the times I'd ever been sick, all the drunken throw-ups I'd ever had in the bathrooms of gas stations and bars. Same old bird's-eye view: those odd little knobs at the base of the toilet that you never notice at any other time; sweating porcelain, the hum of pipes, that long burble of water as it spirals down.
While I was washing my face, I began to cry. The tears mingled easily with the cold water, in the luminous, dripping crimson of my cupped fingers, and at first I wasn't aware that I was crying at all. The sobs were regular and emotionless, as mechanical as the dry heaves which had stopped only a moment earlier; there was no reason for them, they had nothing to do with me. I brought my head up and looked at my weeping reflection in the mirror with a kind of detached interest. What does this mean? I thought. I looked terrible. Nobody else was falling apart; yet here I was, shaking all over and seeing bats like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend.
A cold draft was blowing in the window. I felt shaky but oddly refreshed. I ran myself a hot bath, throwing in a good handful of Judy's bath salts, and when I got out and put on my clothes I felt quite myself again.
Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hail to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
They were all there when I arrived at the twins' for dinner that night, gathered around the radio and listening to the weather forecast as if to some wartime bulletin from the front. 'For the long-range outlook,' said an announcer's spry voice, 'expect cool weather on Thursday, with cloudy skies and a possibility of showers, leading into warmer weather for the '
Henry snapped off the radio. 'If we're lucky,' he said, 'the snow will be gone tomorrow night. Where were you this afternoon, Richard?'
'At home.'
'I'm glad you're here. I want you to do a little favor for me, if you don't mind.'
'What is it?'
'I want to drive you downtown after dinner so you can see those movies at the Orpheum and tell us what they're about. Do you mind?'
'No.'
'I know this is an imposition on a school night, but I really don't think it's wise for any of the rest of us to go back again.
Charles has offered to copy out your Greek for you if you like.'
'If I do it on that yellow paper you use,' said Charles, 'with your fountain pen, he'll never know the difference.'
'Thanks,' I said. Charles had a rather startling talent for forgery which, according to Camilla, dated from early childhood – expert report-card signatures by the fourth grade, entire excuse notes by the sixth. I was always getting him to sign Dr Roland's name to my time sheets.
'Really,' said Henry, 'I hate to ask you to do this. I think they're dreadful movies.'
They were pretty bad. The first was a road movie from the early seventies, about a man who leaves his wife to drive cross-country. On the way he gets sidetracked into Canada and becomes involved with a bunch of draft dodgers; at the end he goes back to his wife and they renew their vows in a hippie ceremony. The worst thing was the soundtrack. All these acoustic guitar songs with the word 'freedom' in them.
The second film was more recent. It was about the Vietnam War and was called Fields of Shame – a big-budget movie with a lot of stars. The special effects were a bit realistic for my taste, though. People getting their legs blown off and so forth.
When I got out, Henry's car was parked down the street with the lights off. Upstairs at Charles and Camilla's, everyone was sitting around the kitchen table with their sleeves rolled up, deep in Greek.
When we came in they began to stir, and Charles got up and made a pot of coffee while I read my notes. Both movies were rather plotless and I had a hard time communicating the gist of them.
'But these are terrible,' said Francis. 'I'm embarrassed that people will think we went to see such bad movies.'
'But wait,' said Camilla.
'I don't get it, either,' Charles said. 'Why did the sergeant bomb the village where the good people lived?'
'Yes,' Camilla said. 'Why? And who was that kid with the puppy who just wandered up in the middle of it? How did he know Charlie Sheen?'
Charles had done a beautiful job on my Greek, and I was looking it over before class the next day when Julian came in. He paused in the doorway, looked at the empty chair and laughed. 'Goodness,' he said. 'Not again.'
'Looks like it,' said Francis.
'I must say, I hope our classes haven't become as tedious as all that. Please tell Edmund that, should he choose to attend tomorrow, I shall make an effort to be especially engaging.'
By noon it was apparent that the weather forecast was in error.
The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and more snow fell in the afternoon.
The five of us were to go out to dinner that night, and when the twins and I showed up at Henry's apartment, we found him looking especially glum. 'Guess who just phoned me,' he said.
'Who?'
'Marion.'
Charles sat down. 'What did she want?'
'She wanted to know if I'd seen Bunny.'
'What'd you say?'
'Well, of course I said I hadn't,' Henry said irritably. 'They were supposed to meet on Sunday night and she hasn't seen him since Saturday.'
'Is she worried?'
'Not particularly.'
Then what's the problem?'
'Nothing.' He sighed. 'I just hope the weather breaks tomorrow.'
But it didn't. Wednesday dawned bright and cold and two more inches of snow had accumulated in the night.
'Of course,' said Julian, 'I don't mind if Edmund misses a class now and then. But three in a row. And you know what a hard time he has catching up.'
'We can't go on like this much longer,' said Henry at the twins' apartment that night, as we were smoking cigarettes over uneaten plates of bacon and eggs.
'What can we do?'
'I don't know. Except he's been missing now for seventy-two hours, and it'll start to look funny if we don't act worried pretty soon.'
'No one else is worried,' said Charles. 5 'No one else sees as much of him as we do. I wonder if Marion's home,' he said, glancing at the clock.
'Why?'
'Because maybe I should give her a call.'
'For God's sake,' said Francis. 'Don't drag her into it.'
'I have no intention of dragging her into anything. I just want to make it plain to her that none of us have seen Bunny for three days.'
'And what do you expect her to do about it?'
'I hope she'll call the police.'
'Have you lost your mind?'
'Well, if she doesn't, we're going to have to,' said Henry impatiently. The longer he's gone, the worse it will look. I don't want a big ruckus, people asking questions.'
Then why call the police?'
'Because if we go to them soon enough, I doubt there'll be any ruckus at all. Perhaps they'll send one or two people out here to poke around, thinking it's probably a false alarm '
'If no one's found him yet,' I said, 'I don't see what makes you think that a couple of traffic cops from Hampden will do any better.'
'No one's found him because no one's looking. He's not half a mile away.'
It took whoever answered a long time to bring Marion to the telephone. Henry stood patiently, gazing down at the floor; gradually his eyes began to wander, and after about five minutes he made an exasperated noise and looked up. 'My goodness,' he said. 'What's taking them so long? Let me have a cigarette, would you, Francis?'
He had it in his mouth and Francis was lighting it for him when Marion came on the line. 'Oh, hello, Marion,' he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke and turning his back to us. 'I'm glad I caught you. Is Bunny there?'
A slight pause. 'Well,' said Henry, reaching for the ashtray, 'do you know where he is, then?'
'Well, frankly,' he said at last, 'I was going to ask you the same thing. He hasn't been in class for two or three days.'
Another long silence. Henry listened, his face pleasantly blank.
Then, all of a sudden, his eyes widened. 'What?' he said, a little too sharply.
All of us were jarred awake. Henry wasn't looking at any of us but at the wall above our heads, his blue eyes round and glassy.
'I see,' he said finally.
More talk on the other end.
'Well, if he happens to stop by, I'd appreciate it if you would ask him to call me. Let me give you my number.'
When he hung up he had a strange look on his face. We all stared at him.
'Henry?' said Camilla. 'What is it?'
'She's angry. Not worried a bit. Expecting him to walk in the door any moment. I don't know,' he said, staring at the floor.
'This is very peculiar, but she said that a friend of hers – a girl named Rika Thalheim – saw Bunny standing around outside the First Vermont Bank this afternoon.'
We were too stunned to say anything. Francis laughed, a short, incredulous laugh.
'My God,' said Charles. 'That's impossible.'
'It certainly is,' Henry said dryly.
'Why would somebody just make that up?'
'I can't imagine. People think they see all kinds of things, I suppose. Well, of course, she didn't see him,' he added testily to Charles, who looked rather troubled. 'But I don't know what we should do now.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, we can't very well call and report him missing when somebody saw him six hours ago.'
'So what are we going to do? Wait?'
'No, said Henry, biting his lower lip.111 have to think of something else.'
'Where on earth is Edmund?' said Julian on Thursday morning.
'I don't know how long he plans on being absent, but it is very thoughtless of him not to have got in touch with me.'
No one answered him. He looked up from his book, amused at our silence.
'What's wrong?' he said teasingly. 'All these shameful faces.
Perhaps,' he said more coolly, 'some of you are ashamed at how insufficiently you were prepared for yesterday's lesson.'
I saw Charles and Camilla exchange a look. For some reason, this week of all weeks, Julian had loaded us down with work.
We'd all managed, somehow or other, to bring in the written assignments; but no one had kept up with the reading, and in class the day before there had been several excruciating silences which not even Henry had been able to break.
Julian glanced down at his book. 'Perhaps, before we begin,' he said, 'one of you should go call Edmund on the telephone and ask him to join us if he's at all able. I don't mind if he hasn't read his lesson, but this is an important class and he ought not to miss it.'
Henry stood up. But then Camilla said, quite unexpectedly, 'I don't think he's at home.'
Then where is he? Out of town?'
I'm not sure.'
Julian lowered his reading glasses and looked at her over the tops of them. 'What do you mean?'
'We haven't seen him for a couple of days.'
Julian's eyes widened with childish, theatrical surprise; not for the first time, I thought how much he was like Henry, that same strange mixture of chill and warmth. 'Indeed,' he said. 'Most peculiar. And you have no idea where he might be?'
The mischievous, open-ended note in his voice made me nervous.1 stared at the aqueous, rippling circles of light that the crystal vase cast over the tabletop.
'No,' said Henry. 'We're a bit puzzled.'
'I should think so.' His eyes met Henry's, for a long, strange moment.
He knows, 1 thought, with a rush of panic. He knows we're lying.
He just doesn't know what we're lying about.
After lunch, after my French class, I sat on the top floor of the library with my books spread across the table in front of me. It was a strange, bright, dreamlike day. The snowy lawn – peppered with the toylike figures of distant people – was as smooth as sugar frosting on a birthday cake; a tiny dog ran, barking, after a ball; real smoke threaded from the dollhouse chimneys.
This time, I thought, a year ago. What had I been doing? Driving a friend's car up to San Francisco, standing around in the poetry sections of bookstores worrying about my application to Hamp den. And now here I was, sitting in a cold room in strange clothes and wondering if I might go to prison.
Nihil sub sole novum. A pencil sharpener complained loudly somewhere. I put my head down on my books – whispers, quiet footsteps, the smell of old paper in my nostrils. Several weeks earlier, Henry had become angry when the twins were voicing moral objections at the idea of killing Bunny. 'Don't be ridiculous,' he snapped.
'But how,' said Charles, who was close to tears, 'how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?'
Henry lit a cigarette. 'I prefer to think of it,' he had said, 'as redistribution of matter.'
I woke, with a start, to find Henry and Francis standing over me.
'What is it?' I said, rubbing my eyes and looking up at them.
'Nothing,' said Henry. 'Will you come with us to the car?'
Sleepily 1 followed them downstairs, where the car was parked in front of the bookstore.
'What's the matter?' I said after we had got in.
'Do you know where Camilla is?'
'Isn't she at home?'
'No. Julian hasn't seen her, either.'
'What do you want with her?'
Henry sighed. It was cold inside the car, and his breath came out white. 'Something's up,' he said. 'Francis and I saw Marion at the guard booth with Cloke Rayburn. They were talking to some people from Security.'
'When?'
'About an hour ago.'
'You don't think they've done anything, do you?'
'We shouldn't jump to conclusions,' said Henry. He was looking out at the roof of the bookstore, which was sheeted in ice and glittered in the sun. 'What we want is for Camilla to drop in on Cloke and see if she can find out what's going on. I'd go myself, except I hardly know him.'
'And he hates me,' said Francis.
'I know him a little.'
'Not well enough. He and Charles are on fairly good terms, but we can't find him, either.'
I unwrapped a Rolaids tablet from a roll in my pocket and began to chew on it.
'What's that you're eating?' said Francis.
'Rolaids.'
Till have one of those, if you don't mind,' Henry said. 'I guess we should drive by the house again.'
This time Camilla came to the door, opening it only a crack and looking out warily. Henry started to say something, but she gave him a sharp warning glance. 'Hello,' she said. 'Come in.'
We followed her inside without a word, down the dark hail into the living room. There, with Charles, was Cloke Rayburn.
Charles stood up nervously; Cloke stayed where he was and looked at us with sleepy, inscrutable eyes. He had a sunburn and he needed a shave. Charles raised his eyebrows at us and mouthed the word 'stoned.'
'Hello,' said Henry after a pause. 'How are you?'
Cloke coughed – a deep, nasty-sounding rasp – and shook a Marlboro from a pack on the table before him. 'Not bad,' he said.
'You?'
'Fine.'
He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, lit it, coughed again. 'Hey,' he said to me. 'How's it going?'
'Pretty good.'
'You were at that party at Durbinstall on Sunday.'
'Yes.'
'Seen Mona?' he said without any inflection whatever.
'No,' I said brusquely, and was suddenly aware that everyone was looking at me.
'Mona?' said Charles, after a puzzled silence.
'This girl,' Cloke said. 'Sophomore. Lives in Bunny's house.'
'Speaking of whom,' said Henry.
Cloke leaned back in his chair and fixed Henry with a bloodshot, heavy-lidded gaze. 'Yeah,' he said. 'We were just talking about Bun. You haven't seen him the last couple days, have you?'
'No. Have you?'
Cloke didn't say anything for a moment. Then he shook his head. 'No,' he said hoarsely, reaching for an ashtray. 'I can't figure out where the hell he is. Last time I saw him was Saturday night, not that I thought about it or anything until today.'
'I talked to Marion last night,' Henry said.
'I know,' said Cloke. 'She's kind of worried. I saw her in Commons this morning and she told me he hasn't been in his room for like five days. She thought maybe he was at home or something, but she called his brother Patrick. Who says he ain't in Connecticut. And she talked to Hugh, too, and he says he's not in New York, either.'
'Did she speak to his parents?'
'Well, shit, she wasn't trying to get him in trouble.'
Henry was silent for a moment. Then he said: 'Where do you think he is?'
Cloke looked away, shrugged uneasily.
'You've known him longer than I have. He's got a brother at Yale, doesn't he?'
'Yeah. Brady. Business school. But Patrick said he'd just talked to Brady, you know?'
'Patrick lives at home, right?'
'Yeah. He's got some kind of business thing he's working on, a sporting goods store or something, trying to get it off the ground.'
'And Hugh's the lawyer.'
'Yes. He's the oldest. He's at Milbank Tweed in New York.'
'What about the other brother – the married one?'
'Hugh's the married one.'
'But isn't there another one who's married, too?'
'Oh. Teddy. I know he's not there.'
'Why?'
'The T-man lives with his in-laws. I don't think they get along too well.'
There was a long silence.
'Can you think of anyplace he might be?' said Henry.
Cloke leaned forward, his long, dark hair falling in his face, and knocked the ash offhis cigarette. He had a troubled, secretive expression, and after a few moments he looked up. 'Have you noticed,' he said, 'that Bunny's had an awful lot of cash around the last two or three weeks?'
'What do you mean?' said Henry, a trifle sharply.
'You know Bunny. He's broke all the time. Lately, though, he's had all this money. Like, a lot. Maybe his grandmother sent it to him or something, but you can be damn sure he didn't get it from his parents.'
There was another long silence. Henry bit his lip. 'What are you trying to get at?' he said.
'You have noticed it, then.'
'Now that you mention it, I have.'
Cloke shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 'This is off the record, now,' he said.
With a sinking feeling in my chest, I sat down.
'What is it?' Henry said.
'I don't know if I should even mention it.'
'If you think it important, by all means do,' Henry said curtly.
Cloke took a last draw on his cigarette and ground it out with a deliberate, corkscrewing movement. 'You know,' he said, 'that I deal a little coke now and then, don't you? Not much,' he said hastily, just a few grams here and there. Just for me and my friends. But it's easy work and I can make a little money at it, too.'
We all looked at each other. This was no news at all. Cloke was one of the biggest drug dealers on campus.
'So?' said Henry.
Cloke looked surprised. Then he shrugged. 'So,' he said, 'I know this Chinaman down on Mott Street in New York, kind of a scary guy, but he likes me and he'll pretty much give me however much I can scrape up the cash for. Blow, mostly, sometimes a little pot as well but that's kind of a headache. I've known him for years. We even did a little business when Bunny and I were at Saint Jerome's.' He paused. 'Well. You know how broke Bunny always is.'
'Yes.'
'Well, he's always been real interested in the whole thing.
Quick money, you know. If he'd ever had the cash I might've cut him in on it – on the financial end, I mean – but he never did and besides, Bunny has no business being mixed up in a deal like this.' He lit another cigarette. 'Anyway,' he said. That's why I'm worried.'
Henry frowned. 'I'm afraid I don't follow.'
'This was a bad mistake I guess but I let him ride down with me a couple weeks ago.'
We had already heard about this excursion to New York.
Bunny had bragged about it incessantly. 'And?' said Henry.
'I don't know. I'm just kind of worried, is all. He knows where the guy lives – right? – and he's got all this money, so when I was talking to Marion, I just '
'You don't think he went down there by himself?' said Charles.
'I don't know. I sure hope not. He never actually met the guy or anything.'
'Would Bunny do something like that?' said Camilla.
'Frankly,' said Henry, unhooking his glasses and giving them a quick swipe with his handkerchief, 'it strikes me as just the type of stupid thing that Bunny would do.'
Nobody said anything for a moment. Henry glanced up. His eyes without the glasses were blind, unwavering, strange. 'Does Marion know about this?' he said.
'No,' said Cloke. 'And I'd just as soon you didn't tell her, okay?'
'Do you have any other reason for thinking this?'
'No. Except where else could he be? And Marion told you about Rika Thalheim seeing him at the bank on Wednesday?'
'Yes.'
'That's kind of weird but not really, not if you think about it.
Say he went down to New York with a couple hundred dollars, right? And talking like he had a lot more where that came from.
These guys'll chop you up and put you in a garbage bag for twenty bucks. I mean, I don't know. Maybe they told him to go back home and close out his account and come back with all he had.'
'Bunny Joesn t even have a bank account.'
'That you know of,' Cloke pointed out.
'You're perfectly right,' said Henry.
'Can't you just call down there?' Charles said.
'Who'm I gonna call? The guy's unlisted and he doesn't hand out business cards, all right?'
Then how do you get in touch with him?'
'I have to call a third guy.'
'Then call him,' said Henry calmly, putting the handkerchief back in his pocket and hooking the glasses back over his ears.
'They're not going to tell me anything.'
'I thought they were such good chums of yours.'
'What do you think?' said Cloke. 'You think these people are running some kind of a scout troop down there? Are you kidding?
These are real guys. Doing real shit.'
For one horrible instant I thought that Francis was going to laugh aloud but somehow he managed to turn it into a theatrical battery of coughs, hiding his face behind his hand. With barely a glance Henry slapped him, hard, on the back.
Then what do you suggest we do?' Camilla said.
'I don't know. I'd like to get into his room, see if he took a suitcase or anything.'
'Isn't it locked?' Henry said.
'Yes. Marion tried to get Security to open it for her and they wouldn't do it.'
Henry bit his lower lip. 'Well,' he said slowly, 'it wouldn't be so very hard to get in in spite of that, would it?'
Cloke put out his cigarette and looked at Henry with new interest. 'No,' he said. 'It wouldn't.'
There's the ground floor window. The storm windows have been taken off.'
'I know I could handle the screens.'
The two of them stared at each other.
'Maybe,' Cloke said, 'I should go down and try it now.'
'We'll go with you.'
'Man,' said Cloke, 'we can't all go.'
I saw Henry cut his eyes at Charles; Charles, behind Cloke's back, acknowledged the glance. 'I'll go,' he said suddenly, in a voice that was too loud, and tossed off the rest of his drink.
'Cloke, how on earth did you get mixed up in something like this?' Camilla said.
He laughed condescendingly. 'It's nothing,' he said. 'You have to meet these guys on their own ground. I don't let them give me shit or anything.'
Inconspicuously, Henry slipped behind Cloke's chair to where Charles stood, and leaned over and whispered something in his ear. I saw Charles nod tersely.
'Not that they don't try to fuck with you,' said Cloke. 'But I know how they think. Now Bunny, he doesn't have a clue, he thinks it's some kind of a game with hundred-dollar bills just lying on the ground, waiting for some stupid kid to come along and pick them up…'
By the time he stopped talking, Charles and Henry had completed whatever business they'd been discussing and Charles had gone to the closet for his overcoat. Cloke reached for his sunglasses and stood up. He had a faint, dry smell of herbs, an echo of the pothead smell that always lingered in the dusty corridors of Durbinstall: patchouli oil, clove cigarettes, incense.
Charles wound the scarf around his neck. His expression was at once casual and turbulent; his eyes were distant and his mouth was steady, but his nostrils flared slightly with his breathing.
'Be careful,' Camilla said.
She was talking to Charles, but Cloke turned and smiled.
'Piece of cake,'he said.
She walked with them to the door. As soon as she shut it behind them she turned around.
Henry put a finger to his lips.
We listened to their footsteps going down the stairs, and were quiet until we heard Cloke's car start. Henry went to the window and pulled aside a shabby lace curtain. 'They're gone,' he said.
'Henry, are you sure this is a good idea?' said Camilla.
He shrugged, still looking at the street below. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I had to play that one by ear.'
'I wish you'd gone. Why didn't you go with him?'
'I would have, but this is better.'
'What did you say to him?'
'Well, it should be pretty obvious even to Cloke that Bunny isn't out of town. Everything he owns is in that room. Money, extra glasses, winter coat. Odds are that Cloke will want to leave, and not say anything, but I told Charles to insist that they at least call Marion over for a look. If she sees – well. She doesn't know a thing about Cloke's problems and wouldn't care if she did.
Unless I'm mistaken she'll call the police, or Bunny's parents at the very least, and I doubt Cloke will be able to stop her.'
'They won't find him today,' said Francis. 'It'll be dark in a couple of hours.'
'Yes, but if we're lucky they'll start looking first thing tomorrow.'
'Do you think anyone will want to talk to us about it?'
'I don't know,' said Henry abstractedly. 'I don't know how they go about such things.'
A thin ray of sun struck the prisms of a candelabrum on the mantelpiece, throwing brilliant, trembling shards of light that were distorted by the slant of the dormer walls. All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind – the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived. Don't think, don't think, I told myself, looking fixedly at a bright, cold pool of sunlight soaking into the rug near my feet.
Camilla tried to light a cigarette, but one match and then another went out. Henry took the hox from her and struck one himself; it flared up high and strong and she leaned close to it, one hand cupped around the flame and the other resting upon his wrist.
The minutes crept by with a torturous slowness. Camilla brought a bottle of whiskey into the kitchen and we sat around the table playing euchre, Francis and Henry against Camilla and me.
Camilla played well – this was her game, her favorite – but I wasn't a good partner and we lost trick after trick to the others.
The apartment was very still: clink of glasses, ruffle of cards.
Henry's sleeves were rolled above his elbows and the sun glinted metallic off Francis's pince-nez.1 did my best to concentrate on the game but again and again I found myself staring, through the open door, at the clock on the mantel in the next room. It was one of those bizarre pieces of Victorian bric-a-brac that the twins were so fond of- a white china elephant with the clock balanced in a howdah, and a little black mahout in gilt turban and breeches to strike the hours. There was something diabolical about the mahout, and every time I looked up I found him grinning at me in an attitude of cheerful malice.
I lost count of the score, lost count of the games. The room grew dim.
Henry laid down his cards. 'March,' he said.
Tm sick of this,' said Francis. 'Where is he?'
The clock ticked loudly, a jangling, arrhythmic tick. We sat in the fading light, the cards forgotten. Camilla took an apple from a bowl on the counter and sat in the windowsill, eating it morosely and looking down at the street below. A fiery outline of twilight shone around her silhouette, burned red-gold in her hair, grew diffuse in the fuzzy texture of the woolen skirt pulled carelessly about her knees.
'Maybe something went wrong,' Francis said.
'Don't be ridiculous. What could go wrong?'
'A million things. Maybe Charles lost his head or something.'
Henry gave him a fishy look. 'Calm down,' he said. 'I don't know where you get all these Dostoyevsky sorts of ideas.'
Francis was about to reply when Camilla jumped up. 'He's coming,' she said.
Henry stood up. 'Where? Is he alone?'
'Yes,' said Camilla, running to the door.
She ran down to meet him on the landing and in a few moments the two of them were back.
Charles's eyes were wild and his hair was disordered. He took off his coat, threw it on a chair, flung himself on the couch.
'Somebody make me a drink,' he said.
'Is everything all right?'
'Yes.'
'What happened?'
'Where's that drink?'
Impatiently, Henry splashed some whiskey in a dirty glass and shoved it at him. 'Did it go well? Did the police come?'
Charles took a long swallow, winced and nodded.
'Where's Cloke? At home?'
'I guess.'
Tell us everything from the first.'
Charles finished the glass and set it down. His face was a damp, feverish red. 'You were right about that room,' he said.
'What do you mean?'
'It was eerie. Terrible. Bed unmade, dust everywhere, half an old Twinkie lying on his desk and ants crawling all over it. Cloke got scared and wanted to leave, but I called Marion before he could. She was there in a few minutes. Looked around, seemed kind of stunned, didn't say much. Cloke was very agitated.'
'Did he tell her about the drug business?'
'No. He hinted at it, more than once, but she wasn't paying much attention to him.' He looked up. 'You know, Henry,' he said abruptly, 'I think we made a bad mistake by not going down there first. We should've gone through that room ourselves before either of them even saw it.'
'Why do you say that?'
'Look what I found.' He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket.
Henry took it from him quickly and looked it over. 'How did you get this?'
He shrugged. 'Luck. It was on top of his desk. I slipped it off the first chance I had.'
I looked over Henry's shoulder. It was a Xerox of a page of the Hampden Examiner. Wedged between a column by the Home Extension Service and a chopped-off ad for garden hoes, there was a small but conspicuous headline.
MYSTERIOUS DEATH IN BATTENKILL COUNTY
Battenkill County Sheriff Department, along with Hampden police, are still investigating the brutal November 12 homicide of Harry Ray Mc Ree. The mutilated corpse of Mr Mc Ree, a poultry farmer and former member of the Egg Producers Association of Vermont, was found upon his Mechanicsville farm. Robbery did not appear to be a motive, and though Mr Mc Ree was known to have several enemies, both in the chicken-and-egg business and in Battenkill county at large, none of these are suspects in the slaying.
Horrified, I leaned closer – the word mutilated had electrified me, it was the only thing I could see on the page – but Henry had turned the paper over and begun to study the other side. 'Well,' he said, 'at least this isn't a photocopy of a clipping. Odds are he did this at the library, from the school's copy.'
'I hope you're right but that doesn't mean it's the only copy.'
I Icnry put the paper in the ashtray and struck the match.
When he touched it to the edge a bright red seam crawled up the side, then licked suddenly over the whole thing; the words were illumined for a moment before they curled and darkened.
'Well,' he said, 'it's too late now. At least you got this one. What happened next?'
'Well, Marion left. She went next door to Putnam House and came back with a friend.'
'Who?'
'I don't know her. Uta or Ursula or something. One of those Swedish-looking girls who wears fishermen's sweaters all the time. Anyway, she had a look around, too, and Cloke was just sitting there on the bed smoking a cigarette and looking like his stomach hurt him, and finally she – this Uta or whatever suggested we go upstairs and tell Bunny's house chairperson.'
Francis started laughing. At Hampden, the house chairpeople were who you complained to if your storm windows didn't work or someone was playing their stereo too loud.
'Well, it's a good thing she did or we might still be standing there,' said Charles. 'It was that loud, red-haired girl who wears hiking boots all the time – what's her name? Briony Dillard?'
'Yes,' I said. Besides being a house chairperson and a vigorous member of the student council, she was also the president of a leftist group off campus, and was always trying to mobilize the youth of Hampden in the face of crushing indifference.
'Well, she barged right in and got the show on the road,' said Charles. Took our names. Asked a bunch of questions. Herded Bunny's neighbors into the hall and asked them questions. Called Student Services, then Security. Security said they would send somebody over' – he lit a cigarette – 'but it really wasn't their jurisdiction, a student disappearance, and that she should call the police. Will you get me another drink?' he said, turning abruptly to Camilla.
'And they came?'
Charles, cigarette balanced between his first and middle fingers, wiped the sweat from his forehead with the heel of his hand. 'Yes,' he said. 'Two of them. And a couple of security guards as well.'
'What did they do?'
The security guards didn't do anything. But the policemen were actually kind of efficient. One of them looked around the room while the other herded everybody in the hall and started asking questions.'
'What kind of questions?'
'Who'd seen him last and where, how long he'd been gone, where he might be. It all sounds pretty obvious but that was the first time anyone had even asked.'
'Did Cloke say anything?'
'Not much. It was very confused, a lot of people around, most of them dying to tell what they knew, which was nothing. No one paid any attention to me at all. This lady who'd come down from Student Services kept trying to butt in, acting very officious and saying it wasn't a police matter, that the school would handle it. Finally one of the policemen got mad. "Look," he said, "what's the matter with you people? This boy's been missing for a solid week and nobody's even mentioned it till now. This is serious business and if you want my two cents, I think the school may be at fault." Well, that really got the lady from Student Services going and then, all of a sudden, the policeman in the room came out with Bunny's wallet.
'Everything got very quiet. There was two hundred dollars in it, and all of Bunny's ID. The policeman who'd found it said, "I think we'd better contact this boy's family." Everyone started whispering. The lady from Student Services got very white and said she'd go up to her office and get Bunny's file immediately.
The policeman went with her.
'By this time the hall was absolutely mobbed. They'd trickled in from outdoors and were hanging around to see what was going on. The first policeman told them to go home and mind their own business, and Cloke slid away in the confusion. Before he left, he pulled me aside and told me again not to mention that drug business.'
'I hope you waited until you were told you could leave.'
'I did. It wasn't much longer. The policeman wanted to talk to Marion, and he told me and this Uta we could go home once he'd taken our names and stuff. That was about an hour ago.'
'Then why are you just getting back?'
'I'm coming to that. I didn't want to run into anybody on the way home, so I cut across the back of campus, down behind the faculty offices. That was a big mistake. I hadn't even got to the birch grove when that troublemaker from Student Services – the lady who started the fight – saw me from out the window of the Dean's office and called for me to come in.'
'What was she doing in the Dean's office?'
'Using the WATS line. They had Bunny's father on the telephone – he was yelling at everybody, threatening to sue. The Dean of Studies was trying to calm him down, but Mr Corcoran kept asking to talk to someone he knew. They'd tried to get you on another line, Henry, but you weren't home.'
'Had he asked to talk to me?'
'Apparently. They were about to send someone up to the Lyceum for Julian, but then this lady saw me out the window.
There were about a million people there – the policeman, the Dean's secretary, four or five people from down the hall, that nutty lady who works in Records. Next door, in the admissions office, somebody was trying to get hold of the President. There were some teachers hanging around, too. I guess the Dean of Studies was in the middle of a conference when the lady from Student Services came bursting in with the policeman. Your friend was there, Richard. Doctor Roland.
'Anyway. The crowd parted when I came in and the Dean of Studies handed me the telephone. Mr Corcoran calmed down when he realized who I was. Got all confidential and asked me if this wasn't some type of frat stunt.'
'Oh, God,' said Francis.
Charles looked at him out of the corner of his eye. 'He asked about you. "Where's the old Carrot-Top," he said.'
'What else did he say?'
'He was very nice. Asked about you all, really. Said to tell everybody that he said hi.'
There was a long, uncomfortable pause.
Henry bit his lower lip and went to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a drink. 'Did anything,' he said, 'come up about that bank business?'
'Yes. Marion gave them the girl's name. By the way' – when he looked up, his eyes were distracted, blank – 'I forgot to tell you earlier, but Marion gave your name to the police. Yours too, Francis.'
'Why?' said Francis, alarmed. 'What for?'
'Who were his friends? They wanted to know.'
'But why me?'
'Calm down, Francis.'
The light in the room was gone. The skies were lilac-colored and the snowy streets had a surreal, lunar glow. Henry turned on the lamp. 'Do you think they'll start looking tonight?'
They'll look for him, certainly. Whether they'll look in the right place is something else.'
No one said anything for a moment. Charles, thoughtfully, rattled the ice in his glass. 'You know,' he said, 'we've done a terrible thing.'
'We had to, Charles, as we have all discussed.'
'I know, but I can't stop thinking about Mr Corcoran. The holidays we've spent at his house. And he was so sweet on the telephone.'
'We're all a lot better off.'
'Some of us are, you mean.'
Henry smiled acidly. 'Oh, I don't know,' he said. Tle XXuiou port; jif'Yfrc hv ',\ff›r^'
This was something to the effect that, in the Underworld, a great ox costs only a penny, but I knew what he meant and in spite of myself I laughed. There was a tradition among the ancients that things were very cheap in Hell.
When Henry left, he offered to drive me back to school. It was late, and when we pulled up behind the dormitory I asked him if he wanted to come to Commons and have some dinner.
We stopped in the post office so Henry could check his mail.
He went to his mailbox only about every three weeks so there was quite a stack waiting for him; he stood by the trash can, going through it indifferently, throwing half the envelopes away unopened. Then he stopped.
'What is it?'
He laughed. 'Look in your mailbox. It's a faculty questionnaire.
Julian's up for review.'
They were closing the dining hall by the time we arrived, and the janitors had already started to mop the floor. The kitchen was closed, too, so I went to ask for some peanut butter and bread while Henry made himself a cup of tea. The main dining room was deserted. We sat at a table in the corner, our reflections mirrored in the black of the plate-glass windows. Henry took out a pen and began to fill out Julian's evaluation.
I looked at my own copy while I ate my sandwich. The questions were ranked from one – poor to five – excellent: Is this faculty member prompt? Well-prepared? Ready to offer help outside the classroom? Henry, without the slightest pause, had gone down the list and circled all fives. Now I saw him writing the number 19 in a blank.
'What's that for?'
'The number of classes I've taken with Julian,' he said, without looking up.
'You've taken nineteen classes with Julian?'
'Well, that's tutorials and everything,' he said, irritated.
For a moment there was no sound except the scratching of Henry's pen and the distant crash of dish racks in the kitchen.
'Does everybody get these, or just us?' I said.
'Just us,' 'I wonder why they even bother.'
'For their records, I suppose.' He had turned to the last page, which was mostly blank. Please elaborate here on any additional compliments or criticisms you may have of this teacher. Extra sheets of paper may be attached if necessary.
His pen hovered over the paper. Then he folded the sheet and pushed it aside.
'What,' I said, 'aren't you going to write anything?'
Henry took a sip of his tea. 'How,' he said, 'can I possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?'
After dinner, I went back to my room. I dreaded the thought of the night ahead, but not for the reasons one might expect – that I was worried about the police, or that my conscience bothered me, or anything of the sort. Quite the contrary. By that time, by some purely subconscious means, I had developed a successful mental block about the murder and everything pertaining to it. I talked about it in select company but seldom thought of it when alone.
What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten. Every cruel or fatuous thing I'd ever said came back to me with an amplified clarity, no matter how I talked to myself or jerked my head to shake the thoughts away: old insults and guilts and embarrassments stretching clear back to childhood – the crippled boy I'd made fun of, the Easter chick I'd squeezed to death – paraded before me one by one, in vivid and mordant splendor.
I tried to work on Greek but it wasn't much good. I would look up a word in the lexicon only to forget it when I turned to write it down; my noun cases, my verb forms, had left me utterly.
Around midnight I went downstairs and called the twins. Camilla answered the phone. She was sleepy, a little drunk and getting ready for bed.
'Tell me a funny story,' I said.
'I can't think of any funny stories.'
'Any story.'
'Cinderella? The Three Bears?'
'Tell me something that happened to you when you were little.'
So she told me about the only time she remembered seeing her father, before he and her mother were killed. It was snowing, she said, and Charles was asleep, and she was standing in her crib looking out the window. Her father was out in the yard in an old gray sweater, throwing snowballs against the side of the fence.
'It must have been about the middle of the afternoon. I don't know what he was doing there. All I know is that I saw him, and I wanted to go out so bad, and I was trying to climb out of my crib and go to him. Then my grandmother came in and put the bars up so I couldn't get out, and I started to cry. My uncle Hilary – he was my grandmother's brother, he lived with us when we were little – came in the room and saw me crying. "Poor little girl," he said. He rummaged around in his pockets, and finally he found a tape measure and gave it to me to play with.'
'A tape measure?'
'Yes. You know, the ones that snap in when you push a button.
Charles and I used to fight over it all the time. It's still at home somewhere.'
Late the next morning I woke with an unpleasant start to a knock at my door.
I opened it to find Camilla, who looked as if she'd dressed in a hurry. She came in and locked the door behind her while 1 stood blinking sleepily in my bathrobe. 'Have you been outside today?' she said.
A spider of anxiety crawled up the back of my neck. I sat down on the side of my bed. 'No,' I said. 'Why?'
'I don't know what's going on. The police are talking to Charles and Henry, and I don't even know where Francis is.'
'What?'
'A policeman came by and asked for Charles around seven this morning. He didn't say what he wanted. Charles got dressed and they went off together and then, at eight, I got a call from Henry. He asked if I'd mind if he was a little late this morning?
And I asked what he was talking about, because we hadn't planned to meet. "Oh, thanks," he said, "I knew you'd understand, the police are here about Bunny, you see, and they want to ask some questions."'
'I'm sure it'll be all right.'
She ran a hand through her hair, in an exasperated gesture reminiscent of her brother. 'But it's not just that,' she said.
'There are people all over the place. Reporters. Police. It's like a madhouse.'
'Are they looking for him?'
'I don't know what they're doing. They seem to be headed up towards Mount Cataract.'
'Maybe we should leave campus for a while.'
Her pale, silvery glance skittered anxiously around my room.
'Maybe,' she said. 'Get dressed and we'll decide what to do.'
I was in the bathroom scraping a quick razor over my face when Judy Poovey came in and rushed over so fast I cut my cheek.
'Richard,' she said, her hand on my arm. 'Have you heard?'
I touched my face and looked at the blood on my fingertips, then glanced at her, annoyed. 'Heard what?'
'About Bunny,' she said, her voice hushed and her eyes wide.
I stared at her, not knowing what she was going to say.
'Jack Teitelbaum told me. Cloke was talking to him about it last night. I never heard of anybody just, like, vanishing. It's too weird. And Jack was saying, well, if they haven't found him by now… I mean, I'm sure he's all right and everything,' she said when she saw the way I was looking at her.
I couldn't think of anything to say.
'If you want to stop by or anything, I'll be at home.'
'Sure.'
'I mean, if you want to talk or something. I'm always there.
Just stop by.'
'Thanks,' I said, a little too abruptly.
She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief. 'It'll be okay,' she said, giving my arm a squeeze, and then she left, pausing in the door for a sorrowful backwards glance.
Despite what Camilla had said, I was unprepared for the riot of activity outside. The parking lot was full and people from Hampden town were everywhere – factory workers mostly, from the looks of them, some with lunch boxes, others with children – beating the ground with sticks and making their way towards Mount Cataract in broad, straggling lines as students milled about and looked at them curiously. There were policemen, deputies, a state trooper or two; on the lawn, parked beside a couple of official-looking vehicles, was a remote radio station hookup, a concessions truck, and a van from Action News Twelve.
'What are all these people doing here?' I said.
'Look,' she said. 'Is that Francis?'
Far away, in the busy multitude, I saw a flash of red hair, the conspicuous line of muffled throat and black greatcoat. Camilla stuck up her hand and yelled to him.
He shouldered his way through a bunch of cafeteria workers who had come outside to see what was going on. He was smoking a cigarette; there was a newspaper tucked under his arm. 'Hello,' he said. 'Can you believe this?'
'What's going on?'
'A treasure hunt.'
'What?'
'The Corcorans put up a big reward in the night. All the factories in Hampden are closed. Anybody want some coffee? I have a dollar.'
We picked our way to the concessions truck, through a sparse, gloomy gathering of janitors and maintenance men.
'Three coffees, two with milk, please,' said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter.
'No milk, just Cremora.'
'Well, then, just black, I guess.' He turned to us. 'Have you seen the paper this morning?'
It was a late edition of the Hampden Examiner. In a column on the first page was a blurry, recent photograph of Bunny and under it this caption: police, kin, seek youth, 24, missing in HAMPDEN.
'Twenty-four?' I said, startled. The twins and I were twenty years old, and Henry and Francis were twenty-one.
'He failed a grade or two in elementary school,' said Camilla.
'Ahh.'
Sunday afternoon Edmund Corcoran, a Hampden College student known to his family and friends as 'Bunny,' attended a campus party which he apparently left some time in the middle of the afternoon in order to meet his girlfriend Marion Barnbridge of Rye, New York, also a student at Hampden. That was the last that anyone has seen of Bunny Corcoran.
The concerned Barnbridge, along with friends of Cor coran's, yesterday alerted state and local police, who put out a Missing Persons Bulletin. Today the search begins in the Hampden area. The missing youth is described as (See p.5)
'Are you finished?' I asked Camilla.
'Yes. Turn the page.' being six feet, three inches tall, weighing 190 pounds, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes. He wears glasses, and when last seen was wearing a gray tweed sports coat, khaki pants, and a yellow rain slicker.
'Here's your coffee, Richard,' said Francis, turning gingerly with a cup in either hand.
At St Jerome's preparatory school in College Falls, Massachusetts, Corcoran was active in varsity sports, lettering in hockey, lacrosse and crew and leading his football team, the Wolverines, to a state championship when he captained during senior year. At Hampden Corcoran served as a volunteer fire marshal!. He studied literature and languages, with a concentration in Classics, and was described by fellow students as 'a scholar.'
'Ha,' said Camilla.
Cloke Rayburn, a school friend of Corcoran's and one of those who first notified police, said that Corcoran 'is a real straight guy – definitely not mixed up in drugs or anything like that.'
Yesterday afternoon, after growing suspicious, he broke into Corcoran's dormitory room, and subsequently notified police.
'That's not right,' Camilla said. 'He didn't call them.'
'There's not a word about Charles.'
'Thank God,' she said, in Greek.
Corcoran's parents, Macdonald and Katherine Corcoran of Shady Brook, Connecticut, arrive in Hampden today to assist in the search for the youngest of their five children.
(See 'A Family Prays,' p.10.) In a telephone interview Mr Corcoran, who is president of the Bingham Bank and Trust Company and a member of the Board of Directors of the First National Bank of Connecticut, said, 'There's not much we can do down here. We want to assist if we can.' He said that he had spoken to his son by telephone a week before the disappearance and had noticed nothing unusual.
Of her son, Katherine Corcoran said: 'Edmund is a very family-oriented type person. If anything was wrong I know he would have told Mack or myself A reward of fifty thousand dollars is being offered for information leading to the whereabouts of Edmund Corcoran, provided through contributions from the Corcoran family, the Bingham Bank and Trust Company, and the Highland Heights Lodge of the Loyal Order of the Moose.
The wind was blowing. With Camilla's help, I folded the newspaper and handed it back to Francis. 'Fifty thousand dollars,'
I said. 'That's a lot of money.'
'And you wonder why you see all these people from Hampden town up here this morning?' said Francis, taking a sip of his coffee. 'Gosh, it's cold out here.'
We turned and started back towards Commons. Camilla said to Francis: 'You know about Charles and Henry, don't you?'
'Well, they told Charles they might want to talk to him, didn't they?'
'But Henry?'
'I wouldn't waste my time worrying about him.'
Commons was overheated and surprisingly empty. The three of us sat on a clammy, black vinyl couch and drank our coffee.
People drifted in and out, bringing blasts of cold air from outdoors; some of them came over to ask if there was any news. Jud 'Party Pig' Mac Kenna, as Vice-president of the Student Council, came over with his empty paint can to ask if we would like to donate to an emergency search fund. Between us, we contributed a dollar in change.
We were talking to Georges Laforgue, who was telling us enthusiastically and at great length about a similar disappearance at Brandeis when suddenly, from nowhere, Henry appeared behind him.
Laforgue turned. 'Oh,' he said coldly when he saw who it was.
Henry inclined his head slightly. 'Bonjour, Monsieur Laforgue,' he said. 'Quel plaisir de vous revoir.'
Laforgue, with a flourish, took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose for what seemed about five minutes; then, refolding the handkerchief into fussy little squares, he turned his back on Henry and resumed his story. It happened, in this case, that the student had simply gone off to New York City on the bus without telling anybody.
'And this boy – Birdie, is it?'
'Bunny.'
'Yes. This boy has been away for far less long. He will appear again, of his own accord, and everyone will feel very foolish,' He lowered his voice. 'I believe that the school is afraid of a lawsuit, and that perhaps is why they lost their sense of proportion, no?
Please do not repeat me.'
'Of course not.'
'My position is delicate with the Dean, you understand.'
'I'm a bit tired,' Henry said later, in the car, 'but there's nothing to worry about.'
' What'd they want to know?'
'Nothing much. How long had I known him, was he acting strangely, did I know any reason why he might have decided to leave school. Of course, he has been acting strangely the last few months, and I said so. But I also said I hadn't seen very much of him lately, which is true.' He shook his head. 'Honestly. Two hours. I don't know if I could've made myself go through with this if I'd known what nonsense we were letting ourselves in for.'
We stopped by the twins' apartment and found Charles asleep on the couch, sprawled on his stomach in his shoes and overcoat, one arm dangling over the edge so that three or four inches of wrist and an equal amount of cuff were exposed.
He woke with a start. His face was puffy and the ridged pattern from the sofa cushions was printed deeply on his cheek.
'How did it go?' said Henry.
Charles sat up a bit and rubbed his eyes. 'All right, I guess,' he said. 'They wanted me to sign some thing that said what happened yesterday.'
'They visited me as well.'
'Really? What'd they want?'
'The same questions.'
'Were they nice to you?'
'Not particularly.'
'God, they were so nice to me down at the police station. They even gave me breakfast. Coffee and jelly doughnuts.'
This was a Friday, which meant no classes, and that Julian was not in Hampden but at home. His house was not far from where we were – halfway to Albany, where we'd driven to have pancakes at a truck stop – and after lunch Henry suggested, quite out of the blue, that we drive by and see if he was there.
I had never been in Julian's house, had never even seen it, though I assumed the rest of them had been there a hundred limes. Actually – Henry being of course the notable exception – Julian did not allow many visitors. This was not so surprising as it sounds; he kept a gentle but firm distance between himself and his students; and though he was much more fond of us than teachers generally are of their pupils, it was not, even with Henry, a relationship of equals, and our classes with him ran more along the lines of benevolent dictatorship than democracy. 'I am your teacher,' he once said, 'because I know more than you do.'
Though on a psychological level his manner was almost painfully intimate, superficially it was businesslike and cold. He refused to see anything about any of us except our most engaging qualities, which he cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all our tedious and less desirable ones. While I felt a delicious pleasure in adjusting myself to fit this attractive if inaccurate image – and, eventually, in finding that I had more or less become the character which for a long time I had so skillfully played – there was never any doubt that he did not wish to see us in our entirety, or see us, in fact, in anything other than the magnificent roles he had invented for us: genis grains, corpore glabelliis, arte multiscius, et fortuna opulentus – smooth-cheeked, soft-skinned, welleducated, and rich. It was his odd blindness, I think, to all problems of a personal nature which made him able at the end to transmute even Bunny's highly substantive troubles into spiritual ones.
I knew then, and know now, virtually nothing about Julian's life outside of the classroom, which is perhaps what lent such a tantalizing breath of mystery to everything he said or did. No doubt his personal life was as flawed as anyone's, but the only side of himself he ever allowed us to see was polished to such a high gloss of perfection that it seemed when he was away from us he must lead an existence too rarefied for me to even imagine.
So, naturally, I was curious to see where he lived. It was a large stone house, set on a hill, miles off the main road and nothing but trees and snow as far as one could see – imposing enough, but not half so Gothic and monstrous as Francis's. I had heard marvelous tales of his garden, also of the inside of the house – Attic vases, Meissen porcelain, paintings by Alma-Tadema and Frith. But the garden was covered with snow, and Julian, apparently, was not at home; at least he didn't answer the door.
Henry looked back down the hill to where we waited in the car. He reached into his pocket for a piece of paper and scribbled a note that he folded and wedged in the crack of the door.
'Are there students out with the search parties?' Henry asked on the way back to Hampden. 'I don't want to go down there if we'll be making ourselves conspicuous. But on the other hand, it does seem rather callous, don't you think, to just go home?'
He was quiet a moment, thinking. 'Maybe we should have a look,' he said. 'Charles, you've done quite enough for one day.
Maybe you should just go home.'
After we dropped the twins off, the three of us went on to campus. I had expected that by now the search party would have grown tired and gone home but I was surprised to find the enterprise busier than ever. There were policemen, college administrators, Boy Scouts, maintenance workers and security guards, about thirty Hampden students (some in an official, student-councily-looking group, the rest just along for the ride), and mobs of townspeople. It was a large assembly, but as the three of us looked down at it from the top of the rise, it seemed oddly muffled and small in the great expanse of snow.
We went down the hill – Francis, sulky because he hadn't wanted to come, followed two or three paces behind – and wandered through the crowd. No one paid us the least bit of attention.
Behind me I heard the indistinct, aborted garble of a walkie-talkie; and, startled, I walked backwards into the Chief of Security.
'Watch it,' he shouted. He was a squat, bulldoggish man with liver spots on his nose and jowls.
'Sorry,' I said hastily. 'Can you tell me what '
'College kids,' he muttered, turning his head away as if to spit.
'Stumbling around, getting in the way, don't know what the hell you're supposed to do.'
'Well, that's what we're trying to find out,' snapped Henry.
The guard turned quickly, and somehow his gaze landed not on Henry but on Francis, who was standing staring into space.
'So it's you, is it?' he said with venom. 'Mr Off-Campus who thinks he can park in the faculty parking lot.'
Francis started, a wild look in his eye.
'Yes, you. You know how many unpaid violations you're carrying? Nine. I turned your registration in to the Dean just last week. They can put you on probation, hold your transcripts, what have you. Suspend your library privileges. If it was up to me they'd put you in jail.'
Francis gaped at him. Henry caught him by the sleeve and pulled him away.
A long, straggly line of townspeople was crunching through the snow, some of them swiping listlessly at the ground with sticks. We walked to the end of the queue, then fell into step with them.
The knowledge that Bunny's body actually lay about two miles to the southwest did not lend much interest or urgency to the search, and I plodded along in a daze, my eyes on the ground.
At the front of the rank an authoritative cluster of state troopers and policemen marched ahead, heads bent, talking in low voices as a barking German shepherd dog circled around them at a trot.
The air had a heavy quality and the sky over the mountains was overcast and stormy. Francis's coat whipped out behind him in theatrical billows; he kept glancing furtively around to see if his inquisitor was anywhere nearby and from time to time he emitted a faint, self-pitying cough.
'Why the hell haven't you paid those parking tickets?' Henry whispered to him.
'Leave me alone.'
We crept through the snow for what seemed like hours, until the energetic needle pricks in my feet subsided to an uncomfortable numbness; heavy boots of policemen, crunching black in the snow, night sticks swinging ponderously from heavy belts. A helicopter overhead swooped in with a roar over the trees, hovered above us for a moment, then darted back the way it had come. The light was thinning and people were trailing up the trampled hillside towards home.
'Let's go,' said Francis, for the fourth or fifth time.
We were starting away at last when a strolling policeman stopped in front of our path. 'Had enough?' he said, smiling, a big red-faced guy with a red moustache.
'I believe so,' said Henry.
'You kids know that boy?'
'As a matter of fact, we do.'
'No ideas where he might of went off to?'
If this was a movie, I thought, looking pleasantly into the pleasant beefy face of the policeman – if this was a movie, we'd all be fidgeting and acting really suspicious.
'How much does a television cost?' said Henry on the way home.
'Why?'
'Because I'd like to see the news tonight.'
'I think they're kind of expensive,' said Francis.
'There's a television in the attic of Monmouth,' I said.
'Does it belong to anyone?'
'I'm sure it does.'
'Well,' said Henry, 'we'll take it back when we're finished with it.'
Francis kept watch while Henry and I went up to the attic and searched through broken lamps, cardboard boxes, ugly Art I oil paintings. Finally we found the television behind an old rabbit hutch and carried it down the stairs to Henry's car. On the way over to Francis's, we stopped by for the twins.
'The Corcorans have been trying to get in touch with you this afternoon,' said Camilla to Henry.
'Mr Corcoran's called half a dozen times.'
'Julian called, too. He's very upset.'
'And Cloke,' said Charles.
Henry stopped. 'What did he want?'
'He wanted to make sure that you and I hadn't said anything about drugs when we talked to the police this morning.'
'What did you tell him?'
'I said I hadn't, but I didn't know about you.'
'Come on,' said Francis, glancing at his watch. 'We're going to miss it if you don't hurry.'
We put the television on Francis's dining room table and fooled around with it until we got a decent picture. The final credits of 'Petticoat Junction' were rolling past, over shots of the Hooter ville water tower, the Cannonball express.
The news was next. As the theme song died away, a small circle appeared in the left-hand corner of the newscaster's desk; within it was a stylized picture of a policeman shining a flashlight and holding a straining dog back by a leash and, underneath, the word MANHUNT.
The newscaster looked at the camera. 'Hundreds search and thousands pray,' she said, 'as the hunt for Hampden College student Edmund Corcoran begins in the Hampden area.'
The picture shifted to a pan of a thickly wooded area; a line of searchers, filmed from behind, beat in the underbrush with sticks, while the German shepherd dog we had seen earlier laughed and barked at us from the screen.
'Where are you guys?' said Camilla. 'Are you in there somewhere?'
'Look,' said Francis. 'There's that horrible man.'
'One hundred volunteers,' said the voice-over, 'arrived this morning to help Hampden College students in the search for their classmate, who has been missing since Sunday afternoon.
Until now there have been no leads in the search for the twenty four-year-old Edmund Corcoran, of Shady Brook, Connecticut, but Action News Twelve has just received an important phone tip which authorities think may provide a new angle in the case.'
'What?' said Charles, to the television set.
'We go now to Rick Dobson, live on the scene.'
The picture switched to a man in a trench coat, holding a microphone and standing in front of what appeared to be a gas station.
'I know that place,' said Francis, leaning forward. 'That's Redeemed Repair on Highway 6.'
'Ssh,' somebody said.
The wind was blowing hard. The microphone shrieked, then died down with a sputtering noise. 'This afternoon,' the reporter said, chin low, 'at one-fifty-six p. m., Action News Twelve received an important piece of information which may provide a break for police in the recent Hampden missing-persons case.'
The camera pulled back to reveal an old man in coveralls, a woolen cap, and a greasy dark windbreaker. He was staring to the side in a fixed manner; his head was round and his face as bland and untroubled as a baby's.
'I am now with William Hundy,' the reporter said, 'co-owner of Redeemed Repair in Hampden, a member of the Hampden County Rescue Squad who has just come forward with this information.'
'Henry,' said Francis. I was startled to see that his face had all of a sudden got very white.
Henry reached in his pocket for a cigarette. 'Yes,' he said tersely. 'I see.'
'What's the matter?' I said.
Henry tamped the cigarette down on the side of the pack. He didn't take his eyes from the screen. 'That man,' he said, 'fixes my car.'
'Mr Hundy,' said the reporter, 'will you tell us what you saw on Sunday afternoon?'
'Oh, my God,' said Charles.
'Hush,' said Henry.
The mechanic glanced shyly at the camera, and then away.
'Sunday afternoon,' he said, in a nasal Vermont voice, 'there was a cream-colored Le Mans, few years old, pulled up to that pump over there.' Awkwardly, as an afterthought, he raised his arm and pointed somewhere off camera. 'It was three men, two in the front seat, one in the back. Out-of-towners. Seemed in a hurry. Wouldn't have thought a thing of it except that boy was with them. I recognized him when I saw his picture in the paper.'
My heart had nearly stopped – three men, white car – but then the details registered. We were four, with Camilla, too, and Bunny hadn't been anywhere near the car on Sunday. And Henry drove a BMW, which was far from a Pontiac.
Henry had stopped tapping the unlit cigarette on the side of the pack; it dangled loosely between his fingers.
'Although no ransom note has been received by the Corcoran family, authorities have not yet ruled out the possibility of kidnapping.
This is Rick Dobson, reporting live from Action News Twelve.'
'Thank you, Rick. If any of our viewers have further information on this or any other story, they are urged to call our Tips Line, 363-TIPS, between the hours of nine and five…
'Today the Hampden County School Board took a vote on what may be the most controversial We stared at the television in astonished silence for what seemed several minutes. Finally the twins looked at each other and started to laugh.
Henry shook his head, still looking incredulously at the screen. 'Vermonters,' he said.
'Do you know this man?' said Charles.
'I've taken my car to him for the last two years.'
'Is he crazy?'
He shook his head again. 'Crazy, lying, out for the reward. I don't know what to say. He always seemed sane enough, though he did drag me off in a corner once and start talking about Christ's kingdom on earth.'
'Well, for whatever reason,' said Francis, 'he's done us a tremendous favor.'
'I don't know,' said Henry. 'Kidnapping is a serious crime. If this turns into a criminal investigation they may stumble across something we'd rather they didn't know.'
'How could they? What does any of this have to do with us?'
'I don't mean anything big. But there are a great many little things which would be just as damning if anyone took the trouble to add them up. I was a fool to put those plane tickets on my credit card, for instance. We'd have a difficult time explaining that. And your trust fund, Francis? And our bank accounts?
Massive withdrawals over the last six months, and nothing to show for it. Bunny's got an awful lot of new clothes hanging in his closet that he couldn't possibly have paid for himself 'Somebody would have to dig pretty deep to find that.'
'Someone would only have to make two or three well-placed phone calls.'
Just then the telephone rang.
'Oh, God,' Francis wailed.
'Don't answer it,' said Henry.
But Francis picked it up anyway, as I knew he would. 'Yes,' he said carefully. Pause. 'Well, hello to you too, Mr Corcoran,' he said, sitting down and giving us the OK signal with thumb and forefinger. 'Have you heard anything?'
A very long pause. Francis listened attentively for some minutes, looking at the floor and nodding; after a while he began to bob his foot up and down impatiently.
'What's going on?' Charles whispered.
Francis held the phone away from his ear and made a gabby mouth sign with his hand.
'I know what he wants,' Charles said bleakly. 'He wants us to come over to his hotel and have dinner.'
'Actually, sir, we've already had our dinner,' Francis was saying. '… No, of course not… Yes. Oh, yes sir, I've been trying to get in touch with you, but you know how confused things are… Certainly…'
Finally he hung up. We stared at him.
He shrugged. 'Well,' he said, 'I tried. He's expecting us at the hotel in twenty minutes.'
'Us?'
'I'm not going by myself 'Is he alone?'
'No.' Francis had drifted into the kitchen; we could hear him opening and shutting cabinets. 'It's the whole crew except for Teddy, and they're expecting him any minute.'
There was a slight pause.
'What are you doing in there?' said Henry.
'Making myself a drink.'
'Make me one, too,' said Charles.
'Scotch all right?'
'I'd rather bourbon if you've got it.'
'Make that two,' said Camilla.
'Just bring the whole bottle in, why don't you,' Henry said.
After they left, I lay on Francis's couch, smoking his cigarettes and drinking his Scotch, and watched 'Jeopardy.' One of the contestants was from San Gilberto, which is really close to where I grew up, only five or six miles away. All those suburbs tend to run into one another out there, so you can't always tell where one ends and the next begins.
After that came a made-for-television movie. It was about the threat of the earth colliding with another planet and how all the scientists in the world united to avert the catastrophe. A hack astronomer, who is constantly on talk shows and whose name you would probably recognize, played himself in a cameo role.
For some reason, I felt uneasy about watching the news alone when it came on at eleven, so I turned to PBS and watched something called 'History of Metallurgy.' It was actually quite interesting, but I was tired and a bit drunk, and I fell asleep before it ended.
When I awoke, a blanket had been thrown over me, and the room was blue with a cold dawn light. Francis sat in the windowsill with his back to me; he was wearing his clothes from the night before and he was eating maraschino cherries from ajar balanced on his knee.
I sat up. 'What time is it?'
'Six,' he said without turning around, his mouth full.
'Why didn't you wake me up?'
'I didn't get in until four-thirty. Too drunk to drive you home.
Want a cherry?'
He was still drunk. His collar was open and his clothes disordered; his voice was flat and toneless.
'Where were you all night?'
'With the Corcorans.'
'Not drinking.'
'Of course.'
Till four?'
'They were still going at it when we left. There were five or six cases of beer in the bathtub.'
'I didn't know it was going to be a frivolous occasion.'
'It was donated by the Food King,' said Francis. 'The beer, I mean. Mr Corcoran and Brady got hold of some of it and brought it to the hotel.'
'Where are they staying?'
'I don't know,' he said dully. 'Terrible place. One of those big flat motels with a neon sign and no room service. All the rooms were connected. Hugh's children screaming and throwing potato rhips, the television going in every room. It was hell… Really,' he said humorlessly as I started to laugh, 'I think I could get through anything after last night. Survive a nuclear war. Fly a plane. Somebody – one of those damned toddlers, I guess – got my favorite scarf off the bed and wrapped up part of a chicken leg in it. That nice silk one with the pattern of clocks on it. It's just ruined.'
'Were they upset?'
'Who, the Corcorans? Of course not. I don't think they even noticed.'
'I don't mean about the scarf 'Oh.' He got another cherry from the jar. 'They were all upset I suppose, in a way. Nobody talked about much else but they didn't seem out of their minds or anything. Mr Corcoran would act all sad and worried for a while, then the next thing you knew he'd be playing with the baby, giving everybody beer.'
'Was Marion there?'
'Yes. Cloke, too. He went for a drive with Brady and Patrick and came back reeking of pot. Henry and I sat on the radiator all night and talked to Mr Corcoran. I guess Camilla went over to say hello to Hugh and his wife and got trapped. I don't even know what happened to Charles.'
After a moment or so, Francis shook his head. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Does it ever strike you, in a horrible sort of way, how funny this is?'
'Well, it's not all that funny really.'
'I guess not,' he said, lighting a cigarette with shaky hands.
'And Mr Corcoran said the National Guard is coming up today, too. What a mess.'
For some time I had been staring at the jar of cherries without realizing fully what they were. 'Why are you eating those?' I said.
'I don't know,' he said, staring down at the jar. 'They taste really bad.'
'Throw them away.'
He struggled with the window sash. It sailed up with a grinding noise.
A blast of icy air hit me in the face. 'Hey,' I said.
He threw the jar out the window and then leaned on the sash with all his weight. I went over to help him. Finally, it crashed down, and the draperies floated down to rest placidly by the windows. The cherry juice had left a spattered red trajectory on the snow.
'Kind of a Jean Cocteau touch, isn't it?' Francis said. 'I'm exhausted. If you don't mind, I'm going to have a bath now.'
He was running the water and I was on my way out when the phone rang.
It was Henry. 'Oh,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I thought I dialed Francis.'
'You did. Hold on a second.' I put down the phone and called for him.
He came in in his trousers and undershirt, his face half-lathered, a razor in his hand. 'Who is it?'
'Henry.'
'Tell him I'm in the bath.'
'He's in the bath,' I said.
'He is not in the bath,' said Henry. 'He is standing in the room with you. I can hear him.'
I gave Francis the telephone. He held it away from his face so he wouldn't get any soap on the receiver.
I could hear Henry talking indistinctly. After a moment, Francis's sleepy eyes widened.
'Oh, no,' he said. 'Not me.'
Henry's voice again, curt and businesslike.
'No. I mean it, Henry. I'm tired and I'm going to sleep and there's no way-'
Suddenly, his face changed. To my great surprise he cursed loudly and slammed down the receiver so hard that it jangled.
'What is it?'
He was staring at the phone. 'God damn him,' he said. 'He hung up on me,' 'What's the matter?'
'He wants us to go out with that damn search party again. Now.
I'm not like he is. I can't just stay up for five or six days at a '
'Now? But it's so early.'
'It started an hour ago, so he says. Damn him. Doesn't he ever sleep?'
We had not spoken about the incident in my room several nights before and, in the drowsy silence of the car, I felt the need to make things plain.
'You know, Francis,' I said.
'What?'
It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it.
'You know,' I said, 'I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that-'
'Isn't that interesting,' he said coolly. 'I'm really not attracted to you, either.'
'But-'
'You were there.'
We drove the rest of the way to school in a not very comfortable silence.
Unbelievably, things had escalated even more during the night.
There now were hundreds of people: people in uniforms, people with dogs and bullhorns and cameras, people buying sweet rolls from the concessions truck and trying to peek into the dark windows of the news vans – three of them, one from a station in Boston – parked on Commons lawn, along with the overflow of vehicles from the parking lot.
We found Henry on the front porch of Commons. He was reading, with absorbed interest, a tiny, vellum-bound book I written in some Near Eastern language. The twins – sleepy, ^-, red nosed, rumpled – were sprawled on a bench like a couple of ™ teenagers, passing a cup of coffee back and forth.
Francis half nudged, half kicked the toe of Henry's shoe.
Henry started. 'Oh,' he said. 'Good morning.'
'How can you even say that? I haven't had a wink of sleep. I haven't eaten anything in about three days.'
Henry marked his place with a ribbon and slipped the book in his breast pocket. 'Well,'he said amiably, 'go get a doughnut, then.'
'I don't have any money.'
'I'll give you the money, then.'
'I don't want a goddamn doughnut.'
I went over and sat down with the twins.
'You missed quite a time last night,' said Charles to me. J['So I hear.' *jt\ 'Hugh's wife showed us baby pictures for an hour and a half.'
'Yes, at least,' said Camilla. 'And Henry drank a beer from a can.'
Silence.
'So what did you do?' Charles said.
'Nothing. Watched a movie on TV.'
They both perked up. 'Oh, really? The thing about the planets colliding?'
'Mr Corcoran had it on but somebody switched channels before it was over,' said Camilla.
'How'd it end?'
'What's the last part you saw?'
'They were in the mountain laboratory. The young enthusiastic scientists had all ganged up on that cynical old scientist who didn't want to help.'
I was explaining the denouement when Cloke Raybum abruptly shouldered through the crowd. I stopped talking, thinking he was headed for the twins and me, but instead he only nodded to us and walked up to Henry, who now was standing on the edge of the porch.
'Listen,' I heard him say. 'I didn't get a chance to talk to you last night. I got hold of those guys in New York and Bunny hasn't been there.'
Henry didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said: 'I thought you said you couldn't get in touch with them.'
'Well, it's possible, it's just like a big headache. But they hadn't seen him, anyway.'
'How do you know?'
'What?'
'I thought you said you couldn't believe a word they said.'
He looked startled. 'I did?'
'Yes.'
'Hey, listen to me,' said Cloke, taking off his sunglasses. His eyes were bloodshot and pouchy. 'These guys are telling the truth. I didn't think of this before – well, I guess it hasn't been that long – but anyway, the story's all over the New York papers.
If they really did something to him, they wouldn't be sticking around their apartment taking phone calls from me… What is it, man?' he said nervously when Henry didn't respond. 'You didn't say anything to anybody, did you?'
Henry made an indistinct noise in the back of his throat, which might have meant anything.
'What?'
'No one has asked,' said Henry.
There was no expression on his face. Cloke, his discomfiture evident, waited for him to continue. Finally, he put on his sunglasses again in a slightly defensive manner.
'Well,' he said. 'Um. Okay, then. See you later.'
After he'd gone Francis turned to Henry, a bemused look on his face. 'What on earth are you up to?' he said.
But Henry didn't answer.
The day passed like a dream. Voices, dogs barking, the whap of a helicopter overhead. The wind was strong and the roar of it in I the trees was like an ocean. The helicopter had been sent from „- the New York State Police headquarters in Albany; it had, we ™ were told, a special infrared heat sensor. Someone had also volunteered something called an 'ultra-light' aircraft which swooped overhead, barely clearing the tops of the trees. There were real ranks now, squadron leaders with bullhorns; we marched over the snowy hills wave upon wave.
Cornfields, pastures, knolls heavy with undergrowth. As we approached the base of the mountain the land took a downward slope. A thick fog lay in the valley below, a smoldering cauldron of white from which only the treetops protruded, stark and Dantesque. By degrees, we descended, and the world sank from view. Charles, beside me, stood out sharp and almost hyper realistic with his ruddy cheeks and labored breaths but further down, Henry had become a wraith, his large form light and strangely insubstantial in the mist.
When the ground rose several hours later, we came up on the rear of another, smaller party. In it were some people I was surprised and somehow touched to see. There was Martin Hoffer, an old and distinguished composer on the music faculty; the middle-aged lady who checked IDs in the lunch line, looking inexplicably tragic in her plain cloth coat; Dr Roland, the blares of his nose-blowing audible even at a distance.
'Look,' said Charles. 'That's not Julian, is it?'
'Where?'
'Surely not,' said Henry.
But it was. Rather characteristically, he pretended not to see us until we were so close it was impossible for him to ignore us any longer. He was listening to a tiny, fox-faced lady whom I knew to be a housekeeper in the dorms.
'Goodness,' he said, when she had finished talking, drawing back in mock surprise. 'Where did you come from? Do you know Mrs O'Rourke?'
Mrs O'Rourke smiled shyly. 'I seen all of you before,' she said.
The kids think the maids don't notice them, but I know you all by sight.'
'Well, I should hope so,' said Charles. 'You haven't forgotten me, have you? Bishop House, number ten?'
He said this so warmly that she flushed with pleasure.
'Sure,' she said. 'I remember you. You was the one was always running off with my broom.'
During this exchange Henry and Julian were talking softly.
'You should have told me before now,' I heard Julian say.
'We did tell you.'
'Well, you did, but still. Edmund's missed class before,' said Julian, looking distressed. 'I thought he was playing sick. People are saying that he's been kidnapped but I think that's rather silly, don't you?'
'I'd rather one of mine be kidnapped than out in this snow for six days,' said Mrs O'Rourke.
'Well, I certainly hope that nothing has happened to him. You know, don't you, that his family is here? Have you seen them?'
'Not today,' said Henry.
'Of course, of course,' said Julian hastily. He disliked the Corcorans. 'I haven't been to see them either, it's really not the time to intrude… This morning I did run into the father quite by accident, and one of the brothers as well. He had a baby with him. Riding it on his shoulders as if they were on their way to a picnic.'
'Little one like him had no business being out in this weather,' said Mrs O'Rourke. 'Hardly three years old.'
'Yes, I'm afraid I agree. I can't imagine why anyone would have a baby along on something like this.'
'I certainly wouldn't have let one of mine yell and carry on like that.'
'Perhaps it was cold,' murmured Julian. The tone he used was a delicate cue that he had tired of the subject and wished to stop talking about it.
Henry cleared his throat. 'Did you talk to Bunny's father?' he said.
'Only for a moment. He – well, I suppose we all have different ways of handling these things… Edmund looks a great deal like him, doesn't he?'
'All the brothers do,' said Camilla.
Julian smiled. 'Yes! And so many of them! Like something from a fairy story…' He glanced at his watch. 'Goodness,' he said, 'it's late.'
Francis started from his morose silence. 'Are you leaving now?' he asked Julian anxiously. 'Do you want me to drive you?'
This was a blatant attempt at escape. Henry's nostrils flared, not so much in anger as in a kind of exasperated amusement: he gave Francis a dirty look, but then Julian, who was gazing into the distance and quite unaware of the drama which hinged on his reply, shook his head.
'No, thank you,' he said. 'Poor Edmund. I'm really quite worried, you know.'
'Just think how his parents must feel,' said Mrs O'Rourke.
'Yes,' said Julian, in a tone of voice which managed to convey at once both sympathy with and distaste for the Corcorans.
'I'd be wild if it was me.'
Unexpectedly, Julian shuddered and turned up the collar of his coat. 'Last night I was so upset I could hardly sleep,' he said.
'He's such a sweet boy, so silly; I'm really very fond of him. If anything should have happened to him I don't know if I could bear it.'
He was looking over the hills, at all that grand cinematic expanse of men and wilderness and snow that lay beneath us; and though his voice was anxious there was a strange dreamy look on his face. The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing. r ™ Henry saw it, too. 'Like something from Tolstoy, isn't it?' he remarked.
Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face. 'Yes,' he said. 'Isn't it, though?'
At about two in the afternoon, two men in dark overcoats walked up to us from nowhere.
'Charles Macaulay?' said the shorter of the two. He was a barrel-chested fellow with hard, genial eyes.
Charles, beside me, stopped and looked at him blankly.
The man reached in his breast pocket and flipped out a badge.
'Agent Harvey Davenport, Northeast Regional Division, FBI.'
For a moment I thought Charles might lose his composure.
'What do you want?' he said, blinking.
'We'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind,' 'It won't take long,' said the taller man. He was an Italian with stooped shoulders and a sad, doughy nose. His voice was soft and pleasant.
Henry, Francis, Camilla had all stopped and were staring at the strangers with varying degrees of interest and alarm.
'Besides,' said Davenport snappily. 'Good to get out of the cold for a minute or two. Bet you're freezing your balls off, huh?'
After they left, the rest of us were bristling with anxiety, but of course we couldn't talk and so we continued to shuffle along, eyes on the ground and half afraid to look up. Soon it was three o'clock, then four. Things were far from over, but at the first premature signs that the day's search was breaking up we headed rapidly and silently for the car.
'What do you suppose they want with him?' said Camilla for about the tenth time.
'I don't know,' said Henry.
'He gave them a statement already.' *jjjl 'He gave the police one. Not these people.'
'What difference does it make? Why would they want to talk to him?'
'I don't know, Camilla.'
When we got to the twins' apartment we were relieved to find Charles there, alone. He was lying on the couch, a drink on the table beside him, talking to his grandmother on the telephone.
He was a little drunk. 'Nana says hi,' he said to Camilla when he got off the phone. 'She's all worried. Some bug or something has got up into her azaleas.'
'What's that all over your hands?' said Camilla sharply.
He held them out, palms up, none too steadily. The tips of the fingers were black. 'They took my fingerprints,' he said. 'It was kind of interesting. I'd never had it done before.'
For a moment we were all too shocked to say anything. Henry stepped forward, took one of his hands and examined it beneath the light. 'Do you know why they did it?' he said.
Charles wiped his brow with the back of his free wrist. 'They've sealed off Bunny's room,' he said. 'Some people are in there dusting for prints and putting things in plastic bags.'
Henry dropped his hand. 'But why?'
'I don't know why. They wanted the fingerprints of everybody who'd been in the room on Thursday and touched things.'
'What good will that do? They don't have Bunny's fingerprints.'
'Apparently they do have them. Bunny was in the Boy Scouts and his troop went in and was fingerprinted for some kind of Law Enforcement badge, years ago. They're still on file somewhere.'
Henry sat down. 'Why did they want to talk to you?'
'That was the first thing they asked me.'
'What?'
' "Why do you think we want to talk to you."' He dragged the heel of his hand down the side of his face. These people are smart, Henry,' he said. 'A lot smarter than the police.'
'How did they treat you?'
Charles shrugged. The one called Davenport was pretty brusque. The other one – the Italian – was nicer, but he scared me. Didn't say much, just listened. He's much more clever than the other one 'Well?' said Henry impatiently. 'What is it?'
'Nothing. We… I don't know. We've got to be really careful, that's all. They tried to trip me up more than once.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, when I told them Cloke and I had gone down to Bunny's room around four on Thursday, for instance.'
That's when you did go,' said Francis.
'I know that. But the Italian – really, he's a very pleasant man – began to look all concerned. "Can that be right, son?" he said.
"Think." I was really confused, because I knew we went at four, and then Davenport said, "You'd better think about it, because your buddy Cloke told us you two were down at that room for a solid hour before you called anybody."'
They wanted to see if you and Cloke had anything to hide,'
Henry said.
'Maybe. Maybe they just wanted to see if I would lie about it.'
'Did you?'
'No. But if they'd asked me something a little touchier, and I was kind of scared… You don't realize what it's like. There are two of them, and only one of you, and you don't have much time to think… I know, I know,' he said despairingly. 'But it's not like the police. These small-town cops don't actually expect to find anything. They'd be shocked to know the truth, probably wouldn't believe it if you told them. But these guys…" He shuddered. 'I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances,' he said. 'It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won't be taken in by that.' He picked up his glass and took a drink. 'By the way,' he said, 'they asked a million questions about your trip to Italy,' Henry glanced up, startled. 'Did they ask at all about the finances? Who paid for it?'
'No.' Charles finished off the glass and rattled the ice around for a moment. 'I was terrified they would. But I think they were kind of overly impressed by the Corcorans. I think if I told them that Bunny never wore the same pair of underpants twice they would probably believe me.'
'What about that Vermonter?' Francis said. 'The one on television last night?'
'I don't know. They were a lot more interested in Cloke than anything else, it seemed to me. Maybe they just wanted to make sure his story matched up with mine, but there were a couple of really strange questions that – I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if he's going around telling people this theory of his, that Bunny was kidnapped by drug dealers.'
'Certainly not,' said Francis.
'Well, he told us, and we're not even his friends. Though the FBI men seem to think he and I are on intimate terms.'
'I hope you took pains to correct them,' said Henry, lighting a cigarette.
'I'm sure Cloke would have set them straight on that account.'
'Not necessarily,' said Henry. He shook out his match and threw it in an ashtray; then he inhaled deeply on his cigarette.
'You know,' he said, 'I thought at first that this association with Cloke was a great misfortune. Now I see it's one of the best things that could have happened to us.'
Before anyone could ask him what he meant, he glanced at his watch. 'Goodness,' he said. 'We'd better go. It's almost six.'
On the way to Francis's, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front oi us.
'That,' said Henry, 'is a very bad omen.'
But of what he wouldn't say.
The news was just beginning. The anchorman glanced up from his papers, looking grave but at the same time very pleased. 'The frantic search – thus far a fruitless one – continues, for missing Hampden College student Edward Corcoran.'
'Gosh,' said Camilla, reaching into her brother's coat pocket for a cigarette. 'You'd think they'd get his name right, don't you?'
The picture cut to an aerial shot of snowy hills, dotted like a war map with pinprick figures, Mount Cataract looming lopsided and huge in the foreground.
'An estimated three hundred searchers,' said the voiceover, 'including National Guard, police, Hampden firefighters and Central Vermont Public Service employees, combed the hard-to reach area on this, Day Two of the search. In addition, the FBI has launched an investigation of its own in Hampden today.'
The picture wobbled, then switched abruptly to a lean, white haired man in a cowboy hat who the caption informed us was Dick Postonkill, Hampden County sheriff. He was talking, but no sound came from his mouth; searchers milled curiously in the snowy background, raising on tiptoe to jeer silently at the camera.
After a few moments, the audio lurched on with a jerky, garbled sound. The sheriff was in the middle of a sentence.
'- to remind hikers,' he said, 'to go out in groups, stay on the trail, leave a projected itinerary and carry plenty of warm clothing in case of sudden drops in temperature.'
That was Hampden County sheriff Dick Postonkill,' said the anchorman brightly, 'with a few tips for our viewers on winter hiking safety.' He turned, and the camera zoomed in on him at a different angle. 'One of the only leads so far in the Corcoran disappearance case has been provided by William Hundy, a local businessman and Action News Twelve viewer, who phoned our TIPS line with information regarding the missing youth. Today Mr Hundy has been cooperating with state and local authorities in providing a description of Corcoran's alleged abductors ' "State and local,"' said Henry.
'What?'
'Not federal.'
'Of course not,' said Charles. 'Do you think the FBI is going to believe some dumb story that a Vermonter made up?'
'Well, if they don't, why are they here?' said Henry.
This was a disconcerting thought. In the brilliant, delayed-tape noontime sun, a group of men hurried down the courthouse steps. Mr Hundy, his head down, was among them. His hair was slicked back and he wore, in lieu of his service station uniform, a baby-blue leisure suit.
A reporter – Liz Ocavello, a sort of local celebrity, with her own current-issues program and a segment called 'Movie Beat' on the local news – approached, microphone in hand. 'Mr Hundy,' she said. 'Mr Hundy.'
He stopped, confused, as his companions walked ahead and left him standing alone on the steps. Then they realized what was going on and came back up to huddle around him in an official-looking cluster. They grabbed Hundy by the elbows and made as if to hustle him away but he hung back, reluctant.
'Mr Hundy,' said Liz Ocavello, nudging her way in. 'I understand you have been working today with police artists on composite drawings of the persons you saw with the missing boy on Sunday.'
Mr Hundy nodded rather briskly. His shy, evasive manner of the day before had given way to a slightly more assertive stance.
'Could you tell us what they looked like?'
The men surged around Mr Hundy once more, but he seemed entranced by the camera. 'Well,' he said, 'they wasn't from around here. They was… dark.'
'Dark?'
They now were tugging him down the steps, and he glanced back over his shoulder, as if sharing a confidence. 'Arabs,' he said.
'You know.'
Liz Ocavello, behind her glasses and her big anchorwoman hairdo, accepted this disclosure so blandly that I thought I'd heard it wrong. Thank you, Mr Hundy,' she said, turning away, as Mr Hundy and his friends disappeared down the steps. This is Liz Ocavello at the Hampden County Courthouse.'
Thanks, Liz,' the newscaster said cheerily, swiveling in his chair.
'Wait,' said Camilla. 'Did he say what I thought he said?'
'What?'
'Arabs? He said Bunny got in a car with some Arabs'?'
'In a related development,' the anchorman said, 'area churches have joined hands in a prayer effort for the missing boy. According to Reverend A. K. Poole of First Lutheran, several churches in the tri-state area, including First Baptist, First Methodist, Blessed Sacrament and Assembly of God, have offered up their '
'I wonder what this mechanic of yours is up to, Henry,' said Francis.
Henry lit a cigarette. He had smoked it halfway down before he said: 'Did they ask you anything about Arabs, Charles?'
'No.'
'But they just said on television that Hundy's not dealing with the FBI,' Camilla said.
'We don't know that.'
'You don't think it's all some kind of setup?'
'I don't know what to think.'
The picture on the set had changed. A thin, well-groomed woman in her fifties – Chanel cardigan, pearls at the neckline, hair brushed into a stiff, shoulder-length flip – was talking, in a nasal voice which was oddly familiar.
'Yes,' she said; where had I heard that voice before? The people of Hampden are ever so kind. When we arrived at our hotel, late yesterday afternoon, the concierge was waiting for -'
'Concierge,' said Francis, disgusted. 'They don't have a concierge at the Coachlight Inn.'
I studied this woman with new interest. 'That's Bunny's mother?'
'That's right,' said Henry. 'I keep forgetting. You haven't met her.'
She was a slight woman, corded and freckled around the neck the way women of that age and disposition often are; she bore little resemblance to Bunny but her hair and eyes were the same color as his and she had his nose: a tiny, sharp, inquisitive nose which harmonized perfectly with the rest of her features but had always looked slightly incongruous on Bunny, stuck as it was like an afterthought in the middle of his large, blunt face. Her manner was haughty and distracted. 'Oh,' she said, twisting a ring on her finger, 'we've had a deluge, indeed, from all over the country.
Cards, calls, the most glorious flowers -'
'Do they have her doped up or something?' I said.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, she doesn't seem very upset, does she?'
'Of course,' said Mrs Corcoran reflectively, 'of course, we're all just out of our minds, really. And I certainly hope that no mother will ever have to endure what I have for the past few nights. But the weather does seem to be breaking, and we've met so many lovely people, and the local merchants have all been generous in so many little ways…'
'Actually,' said Henry, when the station cut to a commercial, 'she photographs rather well, doesn't she?'
'She looks like a tough customer.'
'She's from Hell,' Charles said drunkenly.
'Oh, she's not that bad,' said Francis.
'You just say that because she kisses up to you all the time,'
Charles said. 'Because of your mother and stuff.'
'Kiss up? What are you talking about? Mrs Corcoran doesn't Wc. f up to me.'
'She's awful,' Charles said. 'It's a horrible thing to tell your kids that money's the only thing in the world, but it's a disgrace to work for it. Then toss 'em out without a penny. She never gave Bunny one red -'
'That's Mr Corcoran's fault, too,' said Camilla.
'Well, yeah, maybe. I don't know. I just never met such a bunch of greedy, shallow people. You look at them and think, oh, what a tasteful, attractive family but they're just a bunch of zeros, like something from an ad. They've got this room in their house,' Charles said, turning to me, 'called the Gucci Room.'
'What?'
'Well, they painted it with a dado, sort of, those awful Gucci stripes. It was in all kinds of magazines. Rouse Beautiful had it in some ridiculous article they did on Whimsy in Decorating or some absurd idea – you know, where they tell you to paint a giant lobster or something on your bedroom ceiling and it's supposed to be very witty and attractive.' He lit a cigarette. 'I mean, that's exactly the kind of people they are,' he said. 'All surface. Bunny was the best of them by a long shot but even he '
'I hate Gucci,' said Francis.
'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.'
'Come on, Henry.'
'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.'
'I don't see what you think is grand about that.'
'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry.
I was walking home that night, paying no attention to where I was going, when a large, sulky fellow approached me near the apple trees in front of Putnam House. He said: 'Are you Richard Papen?'
I stopped, looked at him, said that I was.
To my astonishment, he punched me in the face, and I fell backwards in the snow with a thump that knocked me breathless.
'Stay away from Mona!' he shouted at me. 'If you go near her again, I'll kill you. You understand me?'
Too stunned to reply, I stared up at him. He kicked me in the ribs, hard, and then trudged sullenly away – footsteps crunching through the snow, a slamming door.
I looked up at the stars. They seemed very far away. Finally, I struggled to my feet – there was a sharp pain in my ribs, but nothing seemed broken – and limped home in the dark.
I woke late the next morning. My eye hurt when I rolled on my cheek. I lay there for a while, blinking in the bright sun, as confused details of the previous night floated back to me like a dream; then I reached for my watch on the night table and saw that it was late, almost noon, and why had no one been by to get me?
I got up, and as I did my reflection rose to meet me, head-on in the opposite mirror; it stopped and stared – hair on end, mouth agog in idiotic astonishment – like a comic book character konked on the head with an anvil, chaplet of stars and birdies twittering about the brow. Most startling of all, a splendid dark cartoon of a black eye was stamped in a ring on my eye socket, in the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum.
I brushed my teeth, dressed, and hurried outside, where the first familiar person I spotted was Julian on his way up to the Lyceum.
He drew back from me in innocent, Chaplinesque surprise.
'Goodness,' he said, 'what happened to you?'
'Have you heard anything this morning?'
'Why, no,' he said, looking at me curiously. 'That eye. You look as if you were in a barroom brawl.'
Any other time I would have been too embarrassed to tell him the truth, but The was so sick of lying that I had an urge to come clean, on this small matter at least. So I told him what had happened.
I was surprised at his reaction. 'So it was a brawl,' he said, with childish delight. 'How thrilling. Are you in love with her?'
'I'm afraid I don't know her too well.'
He laughed. 'Dear me, you are being truthful today,' he said, with remarkable perspicuity. 'Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction… By the way, did I tell you that some men came round to see me yesterday afternoon?'
'Who were they?'
'There were two of them. At first I was rather anxious – I thought they were from the State Department, or worse. You've heard of my problems with the Isrami government?'
I am not sure what Julian thought the Isrami government terrorist state though it is – should want to do with him, but his fear of it came from his having taught its exiled crown princess about ten years before. After the revolution she'd been forced into hiding, had ended up somehow at Hampden College; Julian taught her for four years, in private tutorials supervised by the former Isrami minister of education, who would occasionally fly in from Switzerland, with gifts of caviar and chocolates, to make sure that the curriculum was suitable for the heir apparent to his country's throne.
The princess was fabulously rich. (Henry had caught a glimpse of her once – dark glasses, full-length marten coat – clicking rapidly down the stairs of the Lyceum with her bodyguards at her heels.) The dynasty to which she belonged traced its origins to the Tower of Babel, and had accumulated a monstrous amount of wealth since then, a good deal of which her surviving relatives and associates had managed to smuggle out of the country.
But there was a price on her head, as a result of which she'd been isolated, overprotected, and largely friendless, even while a I teenager at Hampden. Subsequent years had made her a recluse. «She moved from place to place, terrified of assassins; her whole ™ family – except for a cousin or two and a little half-wit brother who was in an institution – had been picked off one by one over the years and even the old Minister of Education, six months after the princess was graduated from college, had died of a sniper's bullet, sitting in the garden of his own little red-roofed house in Montreux.
Julian was uninvolved in Isrami politics despite his fondness for the princess and his sympathy – on principle – with royalists instead of revolutionaries. But he refused to travel by airplane or accept packages COD, lived in fear of unexpected visitors, and had not been abroad in eight or nine years. Whether these were reasonable precautions or excessive ones I do not know, but his connection with the princess did not seem a particularly strong one and I, for one, suspected that the Isramic jihad had better things to do than hunting down Classics tutors in New England.
'Of course, they weren't from the State Department at all but they were connected with the government in some way. I have a sixth sense about such things, isn't that curious? One of the men was an Italian, very charming, really… courtly, almost, in a funny sort of way. I was rather puzzled by it all. They said that Edmund was on drugs.'
'What?'
'Do you think that odd? I think it very odd.'
'What did you say?'
'I said certainly not. I may be flattering myself, but I do think I know Edmund rather well. He's really quite timid, puritanical, almost… I can't imagine him doing anything of the sort and besides, young people who take drugs are always so bovine and prosaic. But do you know what this man said to me? He said that with young people, you can never tell. I don't think that's right, do you? Do you think that's right?'
We walked through Commons – I could hear the crash of plates overhead in the dining hall – and, on the pretext of having business on that end of campus, I walked on with Julian to the Lyceum.
That part of school, on the North Hampden side, was usually peaceful and desolate, the snow trackless and undisturbed beneath the pines until spring. Now it was trampled and littered like a fairgrounds. Someone had run a Jeep into an elm tree broken glass, twisted fender, horrible splintered wound gaping yellow in the trunk; a foul-mouthed group of townie kids slid and shrieked down the hillside on a piece of cardboard.
'Goodness,' said Julian, 'those poor children,' I left him at the back door of the Lyceum and walked to Dr Roland's office. It was a Sunday, he wasn't there; I let myself in and locked the door behind me and spent the afternoon in happy seclusion: grading papers, drinking muddy drip coffee from a mug that said rhonda, and half-listening to the voices from down the hall.
I have the idea that those voices were in fact audible, and that I could have understood what they were saying if I'd paid any attention, but I didn't. It was only later, after I'd left the office and forgotten all about them, that I learned whom they belonged to, and that maybe I hadn't been quite so safe that afternoon as I'd thought.
The FBI men, said Henry, had set up a temporary headquarters in an empty classroom down the hall from Dr Roland's office, and that was where they talked to him. They hadn't been twenty feet from where I sat, were even drinking the same muddy coffee from the same pot I'd made in the teachers' lounge. 'That's odd,' said Henry. 'The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you.'
'What do you mean?'
'It tasted strange. Burnt. Like your coffee.'
The classroom (Henry said) had a blackboard covered with I quadratic equations, and two full ashtrays, and a long conference =, table at which the three of them sat. There was also a laptop ™ computer, a litigation bag with the FBI insignia in yellow, and a box of maple sugar candies – acorns, wee pilgrims, in fluted paper cups. They belonged to the Italian. 'For my kids,' he said.
Henry, of course, had done marvelously. He didn't say so, but then he didn't have to. He, in some senses, was the author of this drama and he had waited in the wings a long while for this moment, when he could step onto the stage and assume the role he'd written for himself: cool but friendly; hesitant; reticent with details; bright, but not as bright as he really was. He'd actually enjoyed talking to them, he told me. Davenport was a Philistine, not worth mentioning, but the Italian was somber and polite, quite charming. ('Like one of those old Florentines Dante meets in Purgatory.') His name was Sciola. He was very interested in the trip to Rome, asked a lot of questions about it, not so much as investigator as fellow tourist. ('Did you boys happen to go out to the, what do you call it, San Prassede, out there around the train station? With that little chapel out on the side?') He spoke Italian, too, and he and Henry had a brief and happy conversation which was cut short by the irritated Davenport, who didn't understand a word and wanted to get down to business.
Henry was none too forthcoming, with me at least, about what that business actually was. But he did say that whatever track they were on, he was pretty sure it wasn't the right one.
'What's more,' he said, 'I think I've figured out what it is.'
'What?'
'Cloke.'
They don't think Cloke killed him?'
'They think Cloke knows more than he's telling. And they think his behavior is questionable. Which, as a matter of fact, it is. They know all kinds of things that I'm sure he didn't tell them.'
'Like what?'
'The logistics of his drug business. Dates, names, places. Things that happened before he even came to Hampden. And they seemed to be trying to tie some of it up with me, which of course they weren't able to do in any kind of satisfactory way. Goodness.
They even asked about my prescriptions, painkillers I got from the infirmary my freshman year. There were file folders all over the place, data that no single person has access to – medical histories, psychological evaluations, faculty comments, work samples, grades… Of course, they made a point of letting me see they had all these things. Trying to intimidate me, I suppose.
I know pretty much exactly what my records say, but Cloke's… bad grades, drugs, suspensions – I'd be willing to bet he's left quite a little trail of paper behind him. I don't know if it's the records per se that have made them curious, or if it was something Cloke himself had said when he talked to them; but mostly what they wanted from me – and from Julian, and from Brady and Patrick Corcoran, to whom they spoke last night – were details of Bunny's association with Cloke. Julian, of course, didn't know anything about it. Brady and Patrick apparently told them plenty.
And I did, too.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Well, I mean, Brady and Patrick were out in the parking lot of the Coachlight Inn smoking pot with him night before last.'
'But what did you tell them?'
'What Cloke told us. About the drug business in New York.'
I leaned back in my chair. 'Oh, my God,' I said. 'Are you sure you know what you're doing?'
'Of course,' said Henry serenely. 'It was what they wanted to hear. They'd been circling around it all afternoon, when finally I decided to let it slip, they pounced… I expect Cloke is in for an uncomfortable day or two but really, I think this is very fortunate for us. We couldn't have asked for anything better to keep them busy until the snow melts – and have you noticed how bright it's been the last couple of days? I think the roads are already starting to clear.'
My black eye was the source of much interest, speculation, and debate -1 told Francis that the FBI men had done it just to watch his eyes get round – but not nearly so much as was an article in the Boston Herald. They'd sent a reporter up the day before, as had the New York Post and the New York Daily News, but the Herald reporter had scooped them all.
DRUGS MAY BE INVOLVED IN VERMONT DISAPPEARANCE
Federal agents investigating the April 24 disappearance of Edmund Corcoran, a twenty-four-year-old Hampden College student who has been the subject of an intensive manhunt in Vermont for the past three days, have found that the missing youth may have been involved with drugs.
Federal authorities who searched Corcoran's room discovered drug paraphernalia and heavy cocaine residue.
Though Corcoran had no known history of drug abuse, sources close to the boy say that the normally extroverted Corcoran had become moody and withdrawn in the months prior to the disappearance. (See 'What Your Child Won't Tell You,' p.6.)
We were puzzled by this account, though everyone else on campus seemed to know all about it. I got the story from Judy Poovey.
'You know what it was they found in his room? It was, like, this mirror that belonged to Laura Stora. I bet everybody in Durbinstall has done coke off that thing. Really old, with little grooves carved in the side, Jack Teitelbaum used to call it the Snow Queen because you could always scrape up a line or two if you were desperate or something. And sure, I guess it's technically her mirror, but really it's kind of public property and she said she hadn't even seen it in about a million years, somebody took it from a living room in one of the new houses in March.
Bram Guernsey said that Cloke said it wasn't in Bunny's room when he was there before, that the Feds had planted it, but then Bram said that Cloke thought this whole thing was some kind of a setup. A frame. Like in " Mission: Impossible," he meant, or one of those paranoia books by Philip K. Dick. He told Bram he thought the Feebies had a hidden camera planted somewhere in Durbinstall, all this wild stuff. Bram says it's because Cloke is afraid to go to sleep and been up on crystal meth for forty-eight hours. He sits around in his room with the door locked and does lines and listens to this song by the Buffalo Springfield, over and over… you know that one? "Something's happening here… what it is ain't exactly clear…" It's weird. People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind, when my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these Simon and Garfunkel records.
Anyway.' She lit a cigarette. 'How did I get off on this? Right, Laura's freaking out, somehow they traced the mirror to her and she's already on probation, you know, had to do all this community service last fall because Flipper Leach got in trouble and ratted on Laura and Jack Teitelbaum – oh, you remember all that stuff, don't you?'
'I never heard of Flipper Leach.'
'Oh, you know Flipper. She's a bitch. Everybody calls her Flipper because she flipped over her dad's Volvo, like, four times freshman year.'
'I don't understand what this Flipper person has to do with this.'
'Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in "Dragnet" that always wants the facts. It's just that Laura is freaking out, okay, and Student Services is threatening to call her parents unless she tells them how that mirror got in Bunny's room, which she doesn't even have a rucking clue, and, get this, those FBI men found out about the Ecstasy she had at Swing into Spring last week and they want her to give up the names. I said, "Laura, don't do it, it'll be just like that thing with Flipper and everybody'll hate you and you'll have to transfer to another school." It's like Bram was saying -'
'Where is Cloke now?'
'That's what I was going to tell you if you'd shut up a minute.
Nobody knows. He was really wigged out and asked if he could borrow Bram's car last night, to leave school, but this morning the car was back in the parking lot with the keys in it and nobody's seen him and he's not in his room and something weird is happening there, too, but for sure I don't know what it is… I just won't even do meth anymore. Heebiejeebieville. By the way, I've been meaning to ask you, what did you do to your eye?'
Back at Francis's with the twins – Henry was having lunch with the Corcorans – I told them what Judy had told me.
'But I know that mirror,' said Camilla.
'I do, too,' said Francis. 'Spotty old dark one. Bunny's had it in his room for a while.'
'I thought it was his.'
'I wonder how he got hold of it.'
'If the girl left it in a living room,' said Charles, 'he probably just found it and took it.'
This was highly probable. Bunny had had a mild tendency towards kleptomania, and was apt to pocket any small, valueless articles that caught his eye – nail clippers, buttons, spools of tape.
These he hid around his room in jumbled little nests. It was a vice he practiced in secret, but at the same time he had felt no compunction about quite openly carrying away objects of greater value which he found unattended. He did this with such assurance and authority – tucking bottles of liquor or unguarded boxes I from the florist under his arm and walking away without a backwards glance – that I wondered if he knew it was stealing. I once heard him explaining vigorously and quite unselfconsciously to Marion what he thought ought to be done to people who stole food from house refrigerators.
As bad as things were for Laura Stora, they were worse for the luckless Cloke. We were to discover later that he had not brought Bram Guernsey's car back of his own volition, but had been impelled to do so by the FBI agents, who had had him pulled over before he was ten miles out of Hampden. They took him back to the classroom where they had set up headquarters, and kept him there for most of Sunday night, and while I don't know what they said to him, I do know that by Monday morning he had requested to have an attorney present at the interview.
Mrs Corcoran (said Henry) was burned up that anyone had dared suggest Bunny was on drugs. At lunch at the Brasserie, a reporter had edged up to the Corcoran table to ask if they had any comment to make about the 'drug paraphernalia' found in Bunny's room.
Mr Corcoran, startled, had lowered his eyebrows impressively and said, 'Well, of course, haw, ahem,' but Mrs Corcoran, sawing at her steak au poivre with subdued violence, launched without even looking up into a tart diatribe. Drug paraphernalia, as they chose to call it, was not drugs, and it was a pity the press chose to level accusations at persons not present to defend themselves, and she was having a hard enough time as it was without having strangers imply that her son was a drug kingpin. All of which was more or less reasonable and true, and which the Post reported dutifully the next day word for word, alongside an unflattering picture of Mrs Corcoran with her mouth open and a headline which read: mom sez: not my kid.
On Monday night, about two in the morning, Camilla asked me to walk her home from Francis's. Henry had left around midnight; and Francis and Charles, who'd been drinking hard since four o'clock, showed no signs of slowing down. They were entrenched in Francis's kitchen with the lights turned out, preparing, with what I felt was alarming hilarity, a series of hazardous cocktails called 'Blue Blazers' which involved ignited whiskey poured back and forth in a flaming arc between two pewter mugs.
At her apartment Camilla – shivering, preoccupied, her cheeks fever-red from the cold – asked me upstairs for a cup of tea. 'I wonder if we should have left them there,' she said, switching on the lamp. 'I'm afraid they're going to set themselves on fire.'
'They'll be all right,' I said, though the same thought had occurred to me.
We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean conveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book; opportunities which I would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.
The teacup was too hot; it burned my fingertips. I set it down and looked at her – oblivious, smoking a cigarette, scarcely two feet away. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth. Come here, you. Let's shut the light out, shall we? When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself.
And yet: why should it be? She had been party to the killing of two men; had stood calm as a Madonna and watched Bunny die. I remembered Henry's cool voice, scarcely six weeks earlier. There was a certain carnal dement to the proceedings, yes.
'Camilla?' I said.
She glanced up, distracted.
'What really happened, that night in the woods?'
I think I had been expecting, if not surprise, at least a show of it. But she didn't blink. 'Well, I don't remember an awful lot,' she said slowly. 'And what I do remember is almost impossible to describe. It's all much less clear than it was even a few months ago. I suppose I should have tried to write it down or something.'
'But what do you remember?'
It was a moment before she answered. 'Well, I'm sure you've heard it all from Henry,' she said. 'It seems a bit silly to even say it aloud. I remember a pack of dogs. Snakes twining around my arms. Trees on fire, pines bursting into flames like enormous torches. There was a fifth person with us for part of the time.'
'A fifth person?'
'It wasn't always a person.'
'I don't know what you mean.'
'You know what the Greeks called Dionysus. no Xveidri^. The Many-Formed One. Sometimes it was a man, sometimes a woman. And sometimes something else. I – I'll tell you something that I do remember,' she said abruptly.
'What?' I said, hopeful at last for some passionate, back-clawing detail.
'That dead man. Lying on the ground. His stomach was torn open and steam was coming out of it.'
'His stomach"!'
'It was a cold night. I'll never forget the smell of it, either. Like when my uncle used to cut up deer. Ask Francis. He remembers, too.'
I was too horrified to say anything. She reached for the teapot and poured a bit more into her cup. 'Do you know,' she said, 'why I think we're having such bad luck this time around?'
'What?'
'Because it's terrible luck to leave a body unburied. That farmer they found straightaway, you know. But remember poor I Palinurus in the Aeneid~› He lingered around and haunted them ^^^ for the longest time. I'm afraid that none of us are going to have ^B a good night's sleep until Bunny's in the ground.'
That's nonsense.'
She laughed. 'In the fourth century b. c., the sailing of the entire Attic fleet was delayed just because a soldier sneezed.'
'You've been talking too much to Henry.'
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: 'Do you know what Henry made us do, a couple of days after that thing in the woods?'
'What?'
'He made us kill a piglet.'
I was not shocked so much by this statement as by the eerie calm with which she delivered it. 'Oh, my God,' I said.
'We cut its throat. Then we took turns holding it over each other, so it bled on our heads and hands. It was awful. I nearly got sick.'
It seemed to me that the wisdom of deliberately covering oneself with blood – even pig blood – immediately after committing a murder was questionable, but all I said was: 'Why did he want to do that?'
'Murder is pollution. The murderer defiles everyone he comes into contact with. And the only way to purify blood is through blood. We let the pig bleed on us. Then we went inside and washed it off. After that, we were okay.'
'Are you trying to tell me,' I said, 'that '
'Oh, don't worry,' she said hastily. 'I don't think he plans on doing anything like that this time.'
'Why? Didn't it work?'
She failed to catch the sarcasm of this. 'Oh, no,' she said. 'I think it worked, all right.'
'Then why not do it again?'
'Because I think Henry has got the idea that it might upset you.'
There was the fumble of a key in the lock, and a few moments later Charles plunged through the door. He shouldered his coat off and let it fall in a heap on the rug.
'Hello, hello,' he sang, lurching inside and shedding his jacket in the same fashion. He had not come into the living room, but made an abrupt turn into the hallway which led to bedrooms and bath. A door opened, then another. 'Milly, my girl,' I heard him call. 'Where are you, honey?'
'Oh, dear,' said Camilla. Out loud, she said: 'We're in here, Charles.'
Charles reappeared. His tie was now loosened and his hair was wild. 'Camilla,' he said, leaning against the doorframe, 'Camilla,' and then he saw me.
'You,' he said, not too politely. 'What are you doing here?'
'We're just having some tea,' said Camilla. 'Would you like some?'
'No.' He turned and disappeared into the hall again. 'Too late.
Going to bed.'
A door slammed. Camilla and I looked at each other. I stood up.
'Well,' I said, 'better be heading home.'
There were still search parties, but the number of participating townspeople had shrunk dramatically, and almost no students remained at all. The operation had turned tight, secretive, professional.
I heard the police had brought in a psychic, a fingerprint expert, a special team of bloodhounds trained at Dannemora.
Perhaps because I imagined that I was tainted with a secret pollution, imperceptible to most but perhaps discernible to the nose of a dog (in movies, the dog is always the first to know the suave and unsuspected vampire for what it is), the thought of the bloodhounds made me superstitious and I tried to stay as far away from dogs as I could, all dogs, even the dopey Labrador mutts who belonged to the ceramics teacher and were always r running around with their tongues hanging out, looking for a j IB game of Frisbee. Henry – imagining, perhaps, some trembling Kassandra gibbering prophecies to a chorus of policemen – was far more concerned about the psychic. 'If they're going to find us out,' he said, with glum certainty, 'that's how it's going to happen.'
'Certainly you don't believe in that stuff.'
He gave me a look of indescribable contempt.
'You amaze me,' he said. 'You think nothing exists if you can't see it.'
The psychic was a young mother from upstate New York. An electrical shock from some jumper cables had put her into a coma from which she emerged, three weeks later, able to 'know' things by handling an object or touching a stranger's hand. The police had used her successfully in a number of missing-person cases. Once she had found the body of a strangled child by merely pointing to an area on a surveyor's map. Henry, who was so superstitious that he sometimes left a saucer of milk outside his door to appease any malevolent spirits who might happen to wander by, watched her, fascinated, as she walked alone on the edge of campus – thick glasses, suburban car coat, red hair tied up in a polka-dot scarf.
'It's unfortunate,' he said. 'I don't dare risk meeting her. But I should like to talk to her very much.'
The majority of our classmates, however, were thrown into an uproar by the information – accurate or not, I still don't know – that the Drug Enforcement Agency had brought in agents and was conducting an undercover investigation. Theophile Gautier, writing about the effect of Vigny's Chatterton on the youth of Paris, said that in the nineteenth-century night one could practically hear the crack of the solitary pistols: here, now, in Hampden, the night was alive with the flushing of toilets. Pillheads, cokeheads staggered around glassy-eyed, dazed at their sudden losses. Someone flushed so much pot down one of the toilets in the sculpture studio they had to get somebody in from the Water Department to dig up the septic tank.
About four-thirty on Monday afternoon, Charles showed up at my room. 'Hello,' he said. 'Want to get something to eat?'
'Where's Camilla?'
'Somewhere, I don't know,' he said, his pale glance skittering across my room. 'Do you want to come?'
'Well… sure,' I said.
He brightened. 'Good. I've got a taxi downstairs.'
The taxi driver – a florid man named Junior who'd driven Bunny and me into town that first fall afternoon, and who in three days would be driving Bunny back to Connecticut for the last time, this time in a hearse – looked back at us in the rear-view mirror as we pulled out onto College Drive. 'You boys going to the Brassiere?' he said.
He meant the Brasserie. It was the little joke he always had with us. 'Yes,' I said.
'No,' said Charles quite suddenly. He was slouched down childishly low against the door, staring straight ahead and drumming on the armrest with his fingers. 'We want to go to 1910 Catamount Street.'
'Where's that?' I said to him.
'Oh, I hope you don't mind,' he said, almost looking at me but not quite. 'Just feel like a change. It's not far and besides, I'm sick of the food at the Brasserie, aren't you?'
The place where we wound up – a bar called the Farmer's Inn was not remarkable for its food, or its decor – folding chairs and Formica tables – or for its sparse clientele, which was mostly rural, drunken, and over sixty-five. It was, in fact, inferior to the Brasserie in every respect but one, which was that really very sizable shots of off-brand whiskey could be got at the bar for fifty cents each.
We sat at the end of the bar by the television set. A basketball game was on. The barmaid – in her fifties, with turquoise eye shadow and lots of turquoise rings to match – looked us over, our suits and ties. She seemed startled by Charles's order of two double whiskeys and a club sandwich. 'What the hey,' she said, in a voice like a macaw. 'They're letting you boys have a snort now and then, huh?'
I didn't know what she meant – was this some dig at our clothes, at Hampden College, did she want to see our IDs?
Charles, who only the moment before had been sunk in gloom, glanced up and fixed her with a smile of great warmth and sweetness. He had a way with waitresses. They always hovered over him in restaurants and went to all kinds of special trouble on his behalf.
This one looked at him – pleased, incredulous – and barked with laughter. 'Well, ain't that a kick,' she said hoarsely, reaching with a heavily ringed hand for the Silva-Thin burning in the ashtray beside her. 'And here I thought you Mormon kids that went around wasn't even suppose to drink Coca-Cola.'
As soon as she sauntered back to the kitchen to turn in our order ('Bill!' we heard her saying, behind the swinging doors.
'Hey, Bill! Listen to this!'), the smile faded from Charles's face.
He reached for his drink and offered a humorless shrug when I tried to catch his eye.
'Sorry,' he said. 'I hope you don't mind coming here. It's cheaper than the Brasserie and we won't see anybody.'
He was not in a mood to talk – ebullient sometimes, he could also be as mute and sulky as a child – and he drank steadily, with both his elbows on the bar and his hair falling down in his face.
When his sandwich came he picked it apart, ate the bacon and left the rest, while I drank my drink and watched the Lakers. It was weird to be there, in that clammy dark bar in Vermont, and watching them play. Back in California, at my old college, they'd had a pub called Falstaff's with a wide-screen television; I'd had a dopey friend named Carl who used to drag me there to drink dollar beer and watch basketball. He was probably there now. on a redwood bar stool, watching this exact game.
I was thinking these depressing thoughts and others like them, and Charles was on his fourth or fifth whiskey when somebody started switching the television with a remote control: 'Jeopardy,'
'Wheel of Fortune,'
'Mac Neil,'Lehrer,' at last a local talk show.
It was called 'Tonight in Vermont.' The set was styled after a New England farmhouse, with mock Shaker furniture and antique farm equipment, pitchforks and so forth, hanging from the clapboard backdrop. Liz Ocavello was the host. In imitation of Oprah and Phil, she had a question-and-answer period at the end of each show, generally not too lively since her guests tended to be pretty tame – the State Commissioner for Veterans' Affairs, Shriners announcing a blood drive ('What's that address again, Joe?').
Her guest that evening, though it was several moments before I realized it, was William Hundy. He had on a suit – not the blue leisure suit but an old one the likes of which a rural preacher might wear – and he was talking authoritatively, for some reason I did not immediately understand, about Arabs and OPEC. That OPEC,' he said, 'is the reason we don't have Texaco filling stations anymore. I remember when I was a boy it was Texaco stations all over the place but these Arabs, it was some kind of, what you call, leverage buyout '
'Look,' I said to Charles, but by the time I'd got him to glance up from his stupor they'd switched back to Jeopardy.'
'What?' he said.
'Nothing.'
'Jeopardy,'
'Wheel of Fortune,' back to 'Mac Neil,'Lehrer' for kind of a long time until someone yelled, 'Turn that shit off, Dotty.'
'Well, what you want to watch, then?'
' "Wheel of Fortune,"' shouted a hoarse chorus.
But 'Wheel of Fortune' was going off the air (Vanna blowing a glittery kiss) and the next thing I knew we were back in the simulated farmhouse with William Hundy. He was talking now about his appearance the previous morning on the 'Today' show.
'Look,' said someone, 'there's that guy runs Redeemed Repair.'
'He don't run it.'
'Who does, then?'
'Him and Bud Alcorn both do.'
'Aw, shut up, Bobby.'
'Naw,' said Mr Hundy, 'didn't see Willard Scott. Reckon I wouldn't have known what to say if I had. It's a big operation they got there, course it don't look so big on the TV.'
I kicked Charles's foot.
'Yeah,' he said, without interest, and brought his glass up with an unsteady hand.
1 was surprised to see how outspoken Mr Hundy had become in just four days. I was even more surprised to see how warmly the studio audience responded to him – asking concerned questions on topics ranging from the criminal justice system to the role of the small businessman in the community, roaring with laughter at his feeble jokes. It seemed to me that such popularity could only be incidental to what he had seen, or claimed to see.
His stunned and stuttering air was gone. Now, with his hands folded over his stomach, answering questions with the pacific smile of a pontiff granting dispensations, he was so perfectly at his ease that there was something palpably dishonest about it. I wondered why no one else, apparently, could see it.
A small, dark man in shirtsleeves, who had been waving his hand in the air for some time, was finally called upon by Liz and stood up. 'My name is Adnan Nassar and I am Palestinian American,' he said in a rush. 'I came to this country from Syria nine years ago and have since then earned American citizenship and am assistant manager of the Pizza Pad on Highway 6.'
Mr Hundy put his head to the side. 'Well, Adnan,' he said cordially, 'I expect that story would be pretty unusual in your own country. But here, that's the way the system works. For everybody. And that's regardless of your race or the color of your skin.' Applause.
Liz, microphone in hand, made her way down the aisle and pointed at a lady with a bouffant hairdo, but the Palestinian angrily waved his arms and the camera shifted back to him.
That is not the point,' he said. 'I am an Arab and I resent the racial slurs you make against my people.'
Liz walked back to the Palestinian and put her hand on his arm, Oprah-style, to comfort him. William Hundy, sitting in his mock-Shaker chair on the podium, shifted slightly as he leaned forward. 'You like it here?' he said shortly.
'Yes.'
'You want to go back?'
'Now,' Liz said loudly. 'Nobody is trying to say that '
'Because the boats,' said Mr Hundy, even louder, 'run both ways.'
Dotty, the barmaid, laughed admiringly and took a drag off her cigarette. 'That's telling him,' she said.
'Where your family comes from?' said the Arab sarcastically.
'You American Indian or what?'
Mr Hundy did not appear to have heard this. 'I'll pay for you to go back,' he said. 'How much is a one-way ticket to Baghdad going for these days? If you want me to, I'll '
'I think,' Liz said hastily, 'that you've misunderstood what this gentleman is trying to say. He's just trying to make the point that -' She put her arm around the Palestinian's shoulders and he threw it off in a rage.
'All night long you say offensive things about Arabs,' he screamed. 'You don't know what Arab is.' He beat on his chest with his fist. 'I know it, in my heart.'
'You and your buddy Saddam Hussein.'
'How dare you say we are all greedy, driving big cars? This is very offensive to me. I am Arabic and I conserve the natural resource '
'By setting fire to all them oil wells, eh?'
'-by driving a Toyota Corolla.'
'I wasn't talking about you in particular,' said Hundy. "I was talking about them OPEC creepos and them sick people kidnapped that boy. You think they're driving around in Toyota Corollas? You think we condone terrorism here? Is that what they do in your country?'
'You lie,' shouted the Arab.
For a moment, in confusion, the camera went to Liz Ocavello; she was staring, without seeing, right out of the screen and I knew she was thinking exactly what I was thinking, oh, boy, oh, boy, here it comes…
'It ain't a lie,' said Hundy hotly. 'I know. I been in the service station business for thirty years. You think I don't remember, when Carter was President, you had us over such a barrel, back in nineteen and seventy-five? And now all you people coming over here, acting like you own the place, with all your chick peas and your filthy little pocket breads?'
Liz was looking to the side, trying to mouth instructions.
The Arab screamed out a frightful obscenity.
'Hold it! Stop!' shouted Liz Ocavello in despair.
Mr Hundy leapt to his feet, eyes blazing, pointing a trembling forefinger into the audience. 'Sand niggers!' he shouted bitterly. 'Sand niggers.' Sand '
The camera jerked away and panned wildly to the side of the set, a tangle of black cables, hooded lights. It wavered in and out of focus and then, with a jerk, a commercial for Mc Donald's came on the screen.
'Whooo-hoo,' someone shouted appreciatively.
There was scattered clapping.
'Did you hear that?' said Charles, after a pause.
I had forgotten all about him. His voice was slurred and his hair fell sweaty across his forehead. 'Be careful,' 1 said to him in Greek, and nodded towards the barmaid. 'She can hear you.'
He mumbled something, wobbling on his bar stool, all padded glitter-vinyl and chrome.
'Let's go. It's late,' I said, fumbling in my pocket for money.
Unsteadily, his gaze locked on mine, he leaned over and caught hold of my wrist. The light from the jukebox caught and glinted in his eyes, making them strange, crazed, the luminous killer eyes that sometimes glow unexpectedly from a friend's face in a snapshot.
'Shut up, old man,' he said. 'Listen.'
I pulled my hand away and swung round on the stool but just as I did it I heard a long, dry rumble. Thunder.
We looked at each other.
'It's raining,' he whispered.
All that night it fell, warm rain, dripping from the eaves and pattering at my window, while I lay flat on my back with my eyes wide open, listening.
All that night it rained and all the next morning: warm, gray, coming down soft and steady as a dream.
When I woke up I knew they were going to find him that day, knew it in my stomach from the moment I looked out my window at the snow, rotten and pocky, patches of slimy grass and everywhere drip drip drip.
It was one of those mysterious, oppressive days we sometimes had at Hampden, where the mountains that lowered at the horizon were swallowed up in fog and the world seemed light and empty, dangerous somehow. Walking around campus, the wet grass squishing beneath your feet, you felt as if you were in Olympus, Valhalla, some old abandoned land above the clouds; the landmarks that you knew – clocktower, houses – floating up 4i3 like memories from a former life, isolated and disconnected in the mist.
Drizzle and damp. Commons smelled like wet clothes, everything dark and subdued. I found Henry and Camilla upstairs at a table by the window, a full ashtray between them, Camilla with her chin propped in her hand and a cigarette burning low between her ink-stained fingers.
The main dining room was on the second floor, in a modern addition that jutted over a loading dock in the back. Huge, rain-splashed panes of glass – tinted gray, so they made the day seem drearier than it was – walled us in on three sides and we had a prime view of the loading dock itself, where the butter and egg trucks pulled up early in the morning, and of the slick black road that wound through the trees and disappeared in the mist in the direction of North Hampden.
There was tomato soup for lunch, coffee with skim milk because they were out of plain. Rain pittered against the plate glass windows. Henry was distracted. The FBI had paid him another visit the night before – what they wanted he didn't say – and he was talking on and on in a low voice about Schliemann's Ilios, the fingertips of his big square hands poised on the table's edge as if it were a Ouija board. When I'd lived with him over the winter, he would sometimes go on for hours in these didactic monologues, reeling off a pedantic and astonishingly accurate torrent of knowledge with the slow, transfixed calm of a subject under hypnosis. He was talking about the excavation of Hissarlik: 'a terrible place, a cursed place,' he said dreamily – cities and cities buried beneath each other, cities torn down, cities burnt and their bricks melted to glass… a terrible place, he said absently, a cursed place, nests of tiny brown adders of the sort that the Greeks call antelion and thousands and thousands of little owl-headed death gods (goddesses, really, some hideous prototype of Athena) staring fanatical and rigid from the engraved illustrations.
1 didn't know where Francis was, but there was no need to ask about Charles. The night before I'd had to bring him home in a taxi, help him upstairs and into bed, where, judging from the condition in which I'd left him, he still was now. Two cream cheese and marmalade sandwiches lay wrapped in napkins by Camilla's plate. She hadn't been there when I brought Charles home, and she looked like she'd just got out of bed herself: tousle-haired, no lipstick, wearing a gray wool sweater that came down past her wrists. Smoke drifted from her cigarette in wisps that were the color of the sky outside. A tiny white speck of a car came singing down the wet road from town, far away, twisting with the black curves and growing larger by the moment.
It was late. Lunch was over, people were leaving. A misshapen old janitor trudged in with mop and pail and began, with weary grunting noises, to slop water on the floor by the beverage center.
Camilla was staring out the window. Suddenly, her eyes got wide. Slowly, incredulously, she raised her head; and then she was scrambling out of her chair, craning to see.
I saw, too, and jumped forward. An ambulance was parked directly beneath us. Two attendants, pursued by a pack of photographers, hurried past with their heads bent against the rain and a stretcher between them. The form upon it was covered with a sheet but, just before they shoved it through the double doors (long, easy motion, like bread sliding into the oven) and slammed them shut, I saw, hanging down from the edge, five or six inches of yellow rain slicker.
Shouts, far away, downstairs in Commons; doors slamming, a growing confusion, voices shouting down voices and then one hoarse voice, rising above the others: 'Is he living?'
Henry took a deep breath. Then he closed his eyes; and exhaling sharply, a hand to his chest, he fell back in his chair as if he'd been shot.
This is what happened.
At about one-thirty on Tuesday afternoon, Holly Goldsmith, an eighteen-year-old freshman from Taos, New Mexico, decided to take her golden retriever, Milo, for a walk.
Holly, who studied modern dance, knew of the search for Bunny but like most students of her year had not participated in it, taking advantage of the unexpected recess to catch up on sleep and study for midterms. Quite understandably, she did not wish to run into a search party while on her outing. Therefore she decided to take Milo out behind the tennis courts to the ravine, since it had been canvassed days before and was, besides, a spot of which the dog was especially fond.
This is what Holly said: 'When we were out of sight of campus, I unhooked Milo's leash so he could run around by himself. He likes to do that…
'So I was just standing there [at the edge of the ravine] waiting for him. He'd scrambled over the embankment and was running around and barking, usual stuff. I'd forgot his tennis ball that day.
I thought it was in my pocket but it wasn't, so I went off and found a few sticks to throw to him. When I came back to the edge of the embankment, I saw he had something in his teeth, shaking it from side to side. He wouldn't come when I called him. I thought he had a rabbit or something…
'I guess Milo had dug him up, his head and his, um, chest, I guess – I couldn't see very well. It was the glasses I noticed… slipped off one [ear] and kind of flopping back and forth like… yes, please… licking his face… I thought for a moment he was…' [unintelligible].
The three of us went rapidly downstairs (gaping janitor, cooks peeping from the kitchen, the cafeteria ladies in their nurse cardigans leaning over the balustrade) past the snack bar, past the post office where for once the red-wigged lady at the switchboard had put aside her afghan and her bag of variegated yarns and was standing in the doorway, crumpled Kleenex in hand, following us curiously with her eyes as we rushed through the hall and into the main room of Commons, where stood a cluster of grim-looking policemen, the sheriff, the game warden, security guards, a strange girl crying and someone taking pictures and everybody talking at once until someone looked up at us and shouted: 'Hey! You! Didn't you know the boy?'
Flashbulbs went off everywhere and there was a riot of microphones and camcorders in our faces.
'How long had you known him?'
'… drug-related incident?'
'… traveled across Europe, is that right?'
Henry passed a hand over his face; I'll never forget the way he looked, white as talc, beads of sweat on his upper lip and the light bouncing off his glasses… 'Leave me alone,' he muttered, seizing Camilla by the wrist and trying to push through to the door.
They crowded forward to block his path.
'… care to comment…?'
'… best friends?'
The black snout of a camcorder was thrust in his face. With a sweep of his arm Henry knocked it away and it fell on the floor with a loud crack, batteries rolling in all directions. The owner a fat man in a Mets cap – shrieked, stooped partway to the floor in consternation, then sprang up, cursing, as if to grab the retreating Henry by the collar. His ringers brushed the back of Henry's jacket and Henry turned, surprisingly quick.
The man shrank. It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that 'bookish' Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?).
Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible 4i7 in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will – and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.
The ambulance had gone. The roads stretched out slick and empty in the drizzle. Agent Davenport was hurrying up the steps to Commons, head down, black shoes slapping on the wet marble. When he saw us, he stopped. Sciola, behind him, climbed laboriously up the last two or three steps, bracing his knee with his palm. He stood behind Davenport and regarded us for a moment, breathing hard. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
An airplane went by overhead, invisible above the clouds.
'He is dead, then,' said Henry.
'Afraid so.'
The buzz of the airplane receded in the damp, windy distance.
'Where was he?' said Henry at last. He was pale, pale and sweaty at the temples but perfectly composed. There was a flat sound in his voice.
'In the woods,' said Davenport.
'Not far,' Sciola said, rubbing with a knuckle at his pouchy eye. 'Haifa mile from here.'
'Were you there?'
Sciola stopped rubbing his eye. 'What?'
'Were you there when they found him?'
'We were at the Blue Ben having some lunch,' said Davenport briskly. He was breathing heavily through the nostrils and his ginger brush cut was beaded with droplets of condensed mist.
'We went down for a look. Right now we're on the way to see the family.'
'Don't they know?' said Camilla, after a shocked pause.
'It's not that,' said Sciola. He was patting his chest, fumbling gently with long yellow fingers in the pocket of his overcoat.
'We're taking them a release form. We'd like to send him down I to the lab in Newark, have some tests run. Cases like this, though' – his hand closed upon something, very slowly he drew out a crumpled pack of Pall Malls – 'cases like this, it's hard to get the family to sign. Can't say I blame them. These folks have been waiting around a week already, the family's all together, they're going to want to go ahead and bury him and get it over with 'What happened?' said Henry. 'Do you know?'
Sciola rummaged for a light, found it, got his cigarette lit after two or three tries. 'Hard to say,' he said, letting the match fall, still burning, from his fingers. 'He was at the bottom of a drop-off with a broken neck.'
'You don't think he might have killed himself?'
Sciola's expression did not change, but a wisp of smoke curled from his nostrils in a manner subtly indicative of surprise. 'Why do you say that?'
'Because someone inside said it just now.'
He glanced over at Davenport. 'I wouldn't pay any attention to these people, son,' he said. 'I don't know what the police are going to find, and it's going to be their decision, you understand, but I don't think they'll rule it a suicide.'
'Why?'
He blinked at us placidly, his eyes balled and heavy-lidded like a tortoise's. There's no indication of it,' he said. 'That I'm aware.
The sheriff thinks maybe he was out there, he wasn't dressed warm enough, the weather got bad and maybe he was just in too big of a hurry to get home…'
'And they don't know for sure,' said Davenport, 'but it looks like he might've been drinking.'
Sciola made a weary, Italianate gesture of resignation. 'Even if he wasn't,' he said. 'The ground was muddy. It was raining. It could've been dark for all we know.'
Nobody said anything for several long moments.
'Look, son,' said Sciola, not unkindly. 'It's just my opinion, but if you ask me, your friend didn't kill himself. I saw the place he went over. The brush at the edge was all, you know -' He made a feeble, flicking gesture at the air.
Torn up,' said Davenport brusquely. 'Dirt under his nails.
When that kid went down he was grabbing at anything he could get ahold of.'
'Nobody's trying to say how it happened,' said Sciola. Tm just saying, don't believe everything you hear. That's a dangerous place up there, they ought to fence it off or something… Maybe you'd better sit down a minute, you think, honey?' he said to Camilla, who was looking a bit green.
'The college is going to get stuck either way,' said Davenport.
'From the way that lady in Student Services was talking I can already see them trying to dodge liability. If he got drunk at that -ft college party… There was a suit like this up in Nashua, where I'm * I from, about two years ago. A kid got drunk at some fraternity party, passed out in a snowbank, they didn't find him till the plows came through. I guess it all depends on how drunk they were and where they got their last drink but even if he wasn't drunk it looks pretty bad for the college, doesn't it? Kid's off at school, he has an accident like this right on the campus? All due respect to the parents, but I've met them, and they're the type's gonna sue.'
'How do you think it happened?' said Henry to Sciola.
This line of questioning did not seem to me to be a wise one, especially here, now, but Sciola grinned, a gaunt, toothy expanse, like an old dog or an opossum – too many teeth, discolored, stained. The?' he said.
'Yes.'
He didn't say anything for a moment, just took a drag of his cigarette and nodded. 'It doesn't make any difference what I think, son,' he said after a pause. 'This isn't a federal case.'
'What?'
'He means it's not a federal case,' Davenport said sharply.
'There's no federal offense committed here. It's for the local cops to decide. The reason they called us up here in the first place was because of that nut, you know, from the gas station, and he didn't have anything to Jo with it. D. C. faxed us a lot of information on him before we came. You want to know what kind of a nut he is? He used to send all this crank mail to Anwar Sadat in the 19705. Ex-Lax, dog turds, mail order catalogues with pictures of nude Oriental women in them. Nobody paid much attention to him, but when Mr Sadat was assassinated in, when was it, '82, the CIA ran a check on Hundy and it was the Agency made available the files we saw. Never been arrested or anything but what a nut. Runs up thousand-dollar phone bills making prank calls to the Middle East. I saw this letter he wrote to Golda Meir where he called her his kissing cousin… I mean, you have to be suspicious when somebody like him steps forward. Seemed harmless enough, wasn't even after the reward – we had an undercover approach him with a phony check, he wouldn't touch it. But it's the ones like him that you've really got to wonder. I remember Morris Lee Harden back in '78, seemed like the sweetest thing going, repairing all those clocks and watches and giving them to the poor kids, but I'll never forget the day they went out behind that jewelry shop of his with the backhoe 'These kids don't remember Morris, Harv,' said Sciola, letting the cigarette fall from his fingers. That was before their time.'
We stood there a moment or two longer, an awkward semicircle on the flagstones, and just as it seemed that everyone was going to open his mouth at once and say he had to be going, I heard a strange, choked noise from Camilla. I looked over at her in amazement. She was crying.
For a moment, no one seemed to know what to do. Davenport gave Henry and me a disgusted look and turned half away as if to say: this is all your fault.
Sciola, blinking in slow, somber consternation, twice reached to put his hand upon her arm, and on the third try his slow fingertips finally made contact with her elbow. 'Dear,' he said to her, 'dear, you want us to drop you off home on our way?'
Their car – a car you'd expect, a black Ford sedan – was parked -.*«at the bottom of the hill, in the gravel lot behind the Science ™ Building. Camilla walked ahead between the two of them. Sciola was talking to her, as soothingly as to a child; we could hear him above the crunching footsteps, the drip of water and the sift of wind in the trees overhead. 'Is your brother at home?' he said.
'Yes.'
He nodded slowly. 'You know,' he said, 'I like your brother.
He's a good kid. It's funny, but I didn't know a boy and a girl could be twins. Did you know that, Harv?' he said over her head.
'No.'
'I didn't know it, either. Did you look more alike when you were little kids? I mean, there's a family resemblance, but your hair's not even quite the same color. My wife, she's got some cousins, they're twins. They both look alike and they both work for the Welfare Department, too.' He paused peacefully. 'You and your brother, you get along pretty well, don't you?'
She made a muffled reply.
He nodded somberly. That's nice,' he said. 'I bet you kids have some interesting stories. About ESP and things like that.
My wife's cousins, they go to these twin conventions they have sometimes, you wouldn't believe the things they come back and tell us.'
White sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone.
My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew – the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in – an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.
An old shoe was lying on the asphalt in front of the loading dock, where the ambulance had been only minutes before. It wasn't Bunny's shoe. I don't know whose it was or how it got there. It was just an old tennis shoe lying on its side. I don't know why I remember that now, or why it made such an impression on me.
Although Bunny hadn't known many people at Hampden, it was such a small school that almost everyone had been aware of him in some way or other; people knew his name, knew him by sight, remembered the sound of his voice which was in many ways his most distinct feature of all. Odd, but even though I have a snapshot or two of Bunny it is not the face but the voice, the lost voice, which has stayed with me over the years – strident, ^Jl garrulous, abnormally resonant, once heard it was not easily forgotten, and in those first days after his death the dining halls were strangely quiet without that great braying hee-haw of his echoing in its customary place by the milk machine.
It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned – for it's a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances. No one had seemed very torn up by his disappearance, even in those grim final days when it seemed that the news when it came must certainly be bad; nor, in the public eye, had the search seemed much besides a massive inconvenience. But now, at news of his death, people were strangely frantic. Everyone, suddenly, had known him; everyone was deranged with grief; everyone was just going to have to try and get on as well as they could without him. 'He would have wanted it that way.' That was a phrase I heard many times that week on the lips of people who had absolutely no idea what Bunny wanted; college officials, anonymous weepers, strangers who clutched and sobbed outside the dining halls; from the Board of Trustees, who, in a defensive and carefully worded statement, said that 'in harmony with the unique spirit of Bunny Corcoran, as well as the humane and progressive ideals of Hampden College,' a large gift was being made in his name to the American Civil Liberties Union – an organization Bunny would certainly have abhorred, had he been aware of its existence.
I really could go on for pages about all the public histrionics in the days after Bunny's death. The flag flew at half-mast. The psychological counselors were on call twenty-four hours a day.
A few oddballs from the Political Science department wore black armbands. There was an agitated flurry of tree plantings, memorial services, fund-raisers and concerts. A freshman girl attempted suicide – for entirely unrelated reasons – by eating poison berries from a bush outside the Music Building, but somehow this was all tied in with the general hysteria. Everyone wore sunglasses for days. Frank and Jud, taking as always the view that Life Must Go On, went around with their paint can collecting money for a Beer Blast to be held in Bunny's memory.
This was thought to be in bad taste by certain of the school officials, especially as Bunny's death had brought to public attention the large number of alcohol-related functions at Hampden, but Frank and Jud were unmoved. 'He would have wanted us to party,' they said sullenly, which certainly was not the case; but then again, the Student Services office lived in mortal fear of Frank and Jud. Their fathers were on the lifetime board of directors; Frank's dad had donated money for a new library and Jud's had built the Science Building; theory had it that the two of them were unexpellable, and a reprimand from the Dean of Studies was not going to stop them from doing anything they felt like doing. So the Beer Blast went on, and was just the sort of tasteless and incoherent event you might expect – but I am getting ahead of my story.
Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People screamed, wept, gave away their possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the words to 'Sugar Magnolia.' Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward.
Though not nearly so spectacular, this manifestation of grief for Bunny was in many ways a similar phenomenon – an affirmation of community, a formulaic expression of homage and dread. Learn by Doing is the motto of Hampden. People experienced a sense of invulnerability and well-being by attending rap sessions, outdoor flute concerts; enjoyed having an official excuse to compare nightmares or break down in public. In a certain sense it was simply play-acting but at Hampden, where creative expression was valued above all else, play-acting was itself a kind of work, and people went about their grief as seriously as small children will sometimes play quite grimly and without pleasure in make-believe offices and stores.
The mourning of the hippies, in particular, had an almost anthropological significance. Bunny, in life, had been at almost perpetual war with them: the hippies contaminating the bathtub with tie-dye and playing their stereos loudly to annoy him; Bunny bombarding them with empty soda cans and calling Security whenever he thought they were smoking pot. Now that he was dead, they marked his passage to another plane in impersonal and almost tribal fashion – chanting, weaving mandalas, beating on drums, performing their own inscrutable and mysterious rites.
Henry stopped to watch them at a distance, resting the ferrule of his umbrella on the toe of his khaki-gaitered shoe.
'Is "mandala" a Pali word?' I asked him.
He shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'Sanskrit. Means "circle."'
'So this is some Hindu kind of thing?'
'Not necessarily,' he said, looking the hippies up and down as if they were animals in a zoo. 'They have come to be associated with Tantrism – mandalas, that is. Tantrism acted as a kind of corrupting influence upon the Indian Buddhist pantheon, though of course elements of it were assimilated into and restructured by the Buddhist tradition, until, by a.d.800, say, Tantrism had an academic tradition of its own – a corrupt tradition, to my way of thinking, but a tradition nonetheless.' He paused, watching a girl with a tambourine twirling dizzily on the lawn. 'But to answer your question,' he said, 'I believe that the mandala actually has quite a respectable place in the history of Theravada, Buddhism proper.
One finds their features in reliquary mounds on the Gangetic plain and elsewhere from as early as the first century a. d.'
Reading back over this, I feel that in some respects I've done Bunny an injustice. People really did like him. No one had known him all that well but it was a strange feature of his personality that the less one actually knew him, the more one felt one did.
Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.
A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be denned by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard. People who had never once spoken to him suddenly remembered, with a pang of affection, having seen him throwing sticks to a dog or stealing tulips from a teacher's garden. 'He touched people's lives,' said the college president, leaning forward to grip the podium with both his hands; and though he was to repeat the exact phrase, in the exact way, two months later at a memorial service for the freshman girl (who'd fared better with a singleedged razor blade than with the poison berries), it was, in Bunny's case at least, strangely true. He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him – or what they thought was him – with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
It was this unreality of character, this cartoonishness if you will, which was the secret of his appeal and what finally made his death so sad. Like any great comedian, he colored his environment wherever he went; in order to marvel at his constancy you wanted to see him in all sorts of alien situations: Bunny riding a camel, Bunny babysitting, Bunny in space. Now, in death, this constancy crystallized and became something else entirely: he was an old familiar jokester cast – with surprising effect – in the tragic role.
When the snow finally melted it went as quickly as it had come.
In twenty-four hours it was all gone except for some lovely shady patches in the woods – white-laced branches dripping rain holes in the crust – and the slushy gray piles at the roadside. Commons lawn stretched out wide and desolate like some Napoleonic battlefield: churned, sordid, roiled with footprints.
It was a strange, fragmented time. In the days before the funeral none of us saw each other very much. The Corcorans had spirited Henry back to Connecticut with them; Cloke, who seemed to me close on the verge of a nervous breakdown, went uninvited to stay at Charles and Camilla's, where he drank Grolsch beer by the six-pack and fell asleep on the couch with lighted cigarettes. I myself was encumbered with Judy Poovey and her friends Tracy and Beth. At mealtimes they came regularly to fetch me ('Richard,'Judy would say, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand, 'you must eat') and for the rest of the time I was captive to little activities they planned for me – drive-in movies and Mexican food, going to Tracy's apartment for Margaritas and MTV. Though I didn't mind the drive-ins, I did not care for the continual parade of nachos and tequila-based drinks. They were crazy about something called Kamikazes, and liked to dye their Margaritas a horrifying electric blue.
Actually, I was often glad of their company. Despite her faults, Judy was a kindly soul, and she was so bossy and talkative that I felt oddly safe with her. Beth I disliked. She was a dancer, from Santa Fe, with a rubbery face and an idiotic giggle and dimples all over when she smiled. At Hampden she was thought something of a beauty but I loathed her lolloping, spaniel-like walk and her little-girl voice – very affected, it seemed to me – which degenerated frequently into a whine. She had also had a nervous breakdown or two, and sometimes, in repose, she got a kind of walleyed look that made me nervous. Tracy was great. She was pretty and Jewish, with a dazzling smile and a penchant for Mary Tyler Moore mannerisms like hugging herself or twirling around with her arms outstretched. The three of them smoked a lot, told long boring stories ('So, like, our plane just sat on the runway for five hours') and talked about people I didn't know. I, the absentminded bereaved, was free to stare peacefully out the window. But sometimes I grew tired of them, and if I complained of a headache or said I wanted to go to sleep, Tracy and Beth would disappear with prearranged swiftness and there I would be, alone with Judy. She meant well, 1 suppose, but the type of comfort she wished to offer did not much appeal to me and after ten or twenty minutes alone with her I was ready again for any amount of Margaritas and MTV at Tracy's.
Francis, alone of us all, was unencumbered and occasionally he stopped by to see me. Sometimes he found me alone; when he did not he would sit stiffly in my desk chair and pretend, Henrylike, to examine my Greek books until even dimwit Tracy got the hint and left. As soon as the door closed and he heard footsteps on the stairs he would shut the book on his finger and lean forward, agitated and blinking. Our main worry at the time was the autopsy Bunny's family had requested; we were shocked when Henry, in Connecticut, got us word that one was in progress, by slipping away from the Corcorans' house one afternoon to call Francis from a pay phone, under the flapping banners and striped awnings of a used-car lot, with a highway roaring in the background. He'd overheard Mrs Corcoran tell Mr Corcoran that it was all for the best, that otherwise (and Henry swore he'd heard this very distinctly) they'd never know for sure.
Whatever else one may say about guilt, it certainly lends one diabolical powers of invention; and I spent two or three of the worst nights I had, then or ever, lying awake drunk with a horrible taste of tequila in my mouth and worrying about clothing filaments, fingerprints, strands of hair. All I knew about autopsies was what I had seen on reruns of'Quincy,' but somehow it never occurred to me that my information might be inaccurate because it came from a TV show. Didn't they research these things carefully, have a consulting physician on the set? I sat up, turned on the lights; my mouth was stained a ghastly blue. When the drinks came up in the bathroom they were brilliant-hued, perfectly clear, a rush of vibrant acid turquoise the color of Ty DBol.
But Henry, free as he was to observe the Corcorans in their own habitat, soon figured out what was going on. Francis was so impatient with his happy news that he did not even wait for Tracy and Judy to leave the room but told me immediately, in sloppily inflected Greek, while sweet dopey Tracy wondered aloud at our wanting to keep up our schoolwork at a time like this.
'Do not fear,' he said to me. 'It is the mother. She is concerned with the dishonor of the son having to do with wine.'
I did not understand what he meant. The form of 'dishonor' (mtfiia) that he used also meant 'loss of civil rights.'
'Atimiaf I repeated.
'Yes.'
'But rights are for living men, not for the dead.'
'Oifwi,' he said, shaking his head. 'Oh, dear. No. No.'
He cast about, snapping his fingers, while Judy and Tracy looked on in interest. It is harder to carry on a conversation in a dead language than you might think. 'There has been much rumor,' he said at last. "The mother grieves. Not for her son,' he added hastily, when he saw I was about to speak, 'for she is a wicked woman.
Rather she grieves for the shame which has fallen on her house.'
'What shame is this?'
'Oivov,' he said impatiently. '(Ddpfia Kov. She seeks to show that his corpse does not hold wine' (and here he employed a very elegant and untranslatable metaphor: dregs in the empty wineskin of his body).
'And why, pray tell, does she care?'
'Because there is talk among the citizens. It is shameful for a young man to die while drunk.'
This was true, about the talk at least. Mrs Corcoran, who previously had put herself at the disposal of anyone who would listen, was angry at the unflattering position in which she now found herself. Early articles, which had depicted her as 'well dressed,'
'striking,' the family 'perfect,' had given way to snide and vaguely accusatory ones of the ilk of mom sez: not my kid.
Though there was only a poor beer bottle to suggest the presence of alcohol, and no real evidence of drugs at all, psychologists on 43i the evening news spoke oi dysfunctional families, the phenom- gg cnon of denial, pointed out that addictive tendencies were often ' passed from parent to child. It was a hard blow. Mrs Corcoran, leaving Hampden, walked through the crush of her old pals the reporters with her eyes averted and her teeth clenched in a brilliant hateful smile.
Of course, it was unfair. From the news accounts one would have thought Bunny the most stereotypical of'substance abusers' or 'troubled teens.' It did not matter a whit that everyone who knew him (including us: Bunny was no juvenile delinquent) denied this; no matter that the autopsy showed only a tiny percentage of blood alcohol and no drugs at all; no matter that he was not even a teenager: the rumors – wheeling vulture-like in the skies above his corpse – had finally descended and sunk in their claws for good. A paragraph which blandly stated the results J| of the autopsy appeared in the back of the Hampden Examiner. But in college folklore he is remembered as a stumbling teen inebriate; his beery ghost is still evoked in darkened rooms, for freshmen, along with the car-crash decapitees and the bobby soxer who hanged herself in Putnam attic and all the rest of the shadowy ranks of the Hampden dead.
The funeral was set for Wednesday. On Monday morning I found two envelopes in my mailbox: one from Henry, the other from Julian. I openedjulian's first. It was postmarked New York and was written hastily, in the red pen he used for correcting our Greek.
Dear Richard – How very unhappy I am this morning, as I know I will be for many mornings to come. The news of our friend's death has saddened me greatly. I do not know if you have tried to reach me, I have been away, 1 have not been well, I doubt if I shall return to Hampden until after the funeral How sad it is to think that Wednesday will be the last time that we shall all be together. I hope this letter finds you well. It brings love.
At the bottom were his initials.
Henry's letter, from Connecticut, was as stilted as a crypto gram from the western front.
Dear Richard,
I hope you are well. For several days I have been at the Corcorans' house. Although I feel I am less comfort to them than they, in their bereavement, can recognize, they have allowed me to be of help to them in many small household matters.
Mr Corcoran has asked me to write to Bunny's friends at school and extend an invitation to spend the night before the funeral at his house. I understand you will be put up in the basement. If you do not plan to attend, please telephone Mrs Corcoran and let her know.
I look forward to seeing you at the funeral if not, as I hope, before.
There was no signature, but instead a tag from the Iliad, in Greek.
It was from the eleventh book, when Odysseus, cut off from his friends, finds himself alone and on enemy territory: Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.
I rode down to Connecticut with Francis. Though I'd expected the twins to come with us, instead they went a day earlier with Cloke – who, to everyone's surprise, had received a personal invitation from Mrs Corcoran herself. We had thought he would not be invited at all. After Sciola and Davenport caught him trying to leave town, Mrs Corcoran had refused to even speak to him. ('She's saving face,' said Francis.) At any rate, he'd got the personal invitation, and there had also been invitations – relayed through Henry – for Cloke's friends Rooney Wynne and Bram Guernsey.
Actually, the Corcorans had invited quite a few people from Hampden – dorm acquaintances, people I didn't know Bunny even knew. A girl named Sophie Dearbold, whom I knew slightly from French class, was to ride down with Francis and me.
'How did Bunny know her?' I asked Francis on the way to her dorm.
'I don't think he did, not well. He did have a crush on her, though, freshman year. I'm sure Marion won't like it a bit that they've asked her.'
Though I'd feared that the ride down might be awkward, in fact it was a wonderful relief to be around a stranger. We almost had fun, with the radio going and Sophie (brown-eyed, gravel-voiced) leaning on folded arms over the front seat talking to us, and Francis in a better mood than I'd seen him in in ages.
'You look like Audrey Hepburn,' he told her, 'you know that?'
She gave us Kools and cinnamon gumballs, told funny stories. I laughed and looked out the window and prayed we'd miss our turn. I had never been to Connecticut in my life. I had never been to a funeral, either.
Shady Brook was on a narrow road that veered off sharply from the highway and twisted along for many miles, over bridges, past farmland and horse pastures and fields. After a time the rolling meadows segued into a golf course. shady brook country club, said the wood-burned sign that swung in front of the mock-Tudor clubhouse. The houses began after that – large, handsome, widely spaced, each set on its own six or seven acres of land.
The place was like a maze. Francis looked for numbers on the mailboxes, nosing into one false trail after another and backing out again, cursing, grinding the gears. There were no signs and no apparent logic to the house numbers, and after we'd poked around blind for about half an hour, I began to hope that we would never find it at all, that we could just turn around and have a jolly ride back to Hampden.
But of course we did find it. At the end of its own cul-de-sac, it was a large modern house of the 'architectural' sort, bleached I cedar, its split levels and asymmetrical terraces selt-consciously bare. The yard was paved with black cinder, and there was no greenery at all except a few gingko trees in postmodern tubs, placed at dramatic intervals.
'Wow,' said Sophie, a true Hampden girl, ever dutiful in homage to the New.
I looked over at Francis and he shrugged.
'His mom likes modern architecture,' he said.
I had never seen the man who answered the door but with a sick, dreamlike feeling I recognized him instantly. He was big and red in the face, with a heavy jaw and a full head of white hair; for a moment he stared at us, his smallish mouth fallen open into a tight, round o. Then, surprisingly boyish and quick, he sprang forward and seized Francis's hand. 'Well,' he said.
'Well, well, well.' His voice was nasal, garrulous, Bunny's voice.
'If it's not the old Carrot Top, How are you, boy?'
'Pretty good,' said Francis, and I was a little surprised at the depth and warmth with which he said it, and the strength with which he returned the handshake.
Mr Corcoran slung a heavy arm around his neck and pulled him close. This one's my boy,' he said to Sophie and me, reaching up to tousle Francis's hair. 'All my brothers were redheads and out of my boys there's not an honest-to-god redhead in the bunch. Can't understand it. Who are you, sweetheart?' he said to Sophie, disengaging his arm and reaching for her hand.
'Hi. I'm Sophie Dearbold.'
'Well, you're mighty pretty. Isn't she pretty, boys. You look just like your aunt Jean, honey.'
'What?' said Sophie, after a confused pause.
'Why, your aunt, honey. Your daddy's sister. That pretty Jean Lickfold that won the ladies' golf tournament out at the club last year.'
'No, sir. Dearbold.'
'Dearfold. Well, isn't that strange.1 don't know of any Dear folds around here. Now, I used to know a fellow name of Breedlow, but that must have been, oh, twenty years ago. He was in business. They say he embezzled a cool five million from his partner,' Tm not from around here.'
He cocked an eyebrow at her, in a manner reminiscent of Bunny. 'No?' he said.
'No.'
'Not from Shady Brook?' He said it as if he could hardly believe it.
'No.'
'Then where you from, honey? Greenwich?'
'Detroit.'
'Bless your heart then. To come all this way.'
Sophie, smiling, shook her head and started to explain when, with absolutely no warning, Mr Corcoran flung his arms around her and burst into tears.
We were frozen with horror. Sophie's eyes, over his heaving shoulder, were round and aghast as if he'd run her through with a knife.
'Oh, darling,' he wailed, his face buried deep in her neck.
'Honey, how are we going to get along without him?'
'Come on, Mr Corcoran,' said Francis, tugging at his sleeve.
'We loved him a lot, honey,' sobbed Mr Corcoran. 'Didn't we? He loved you, too. He would have wanted you to know that. You know that, don't you, dear?'
'Mr Corcoran,' said Francis, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him hard. 'Mr Corcoran.'
He turned and fell back against Francis, bellowing.
I ran around to the other side and managed to get his arm around my neck. His knees sagged; he almost pulled me down but somehow, staggering beneath his weight, Francis and I got him to his feet and together we maneuvered him inside and I weaved down the hall with him ('Oh, shit,' I heard Sophie murmur, 'shit.') and got him into a chair.
He was still crying. His face was purple. When I reached down to loosen his collar he grabbed me by the wrist. 'Gone,' he wailed, looking me straight in the eye. 'My baby.'
His gaze – helpless, wild – hit me like a blackjack. Suddenly, and for the first time, really, I was struck by the bitter, irrevocable truth of it; the evil of what we had done. It was like running full speed into a brick wall. I let go his collar, feeling completely helpless. I wanted to die. 'Oh, God,' I mumbled, 'God help me, I'm sorry '
I felt a fierce kick in my anklebone. It was Francis. His face was as white as chalk.
A shaft of light splintered painfully in my vision. I clutched the back of the chair, closed my eyes and saw luminous red as the rhythmic noise of his sobs fell over and over again, like a bludgeon.
Then, very abruptly, they stopped. Everything was quiet. I opened my eyes. Mr Corcoran – leftover tears still rolling down his cheeks but his face otherwise composed – was looking with interest at a spaniel puppy who was gnawing furtively at the toe of his shoe.
'Jennie,' he said severely. 'Bad girl. Didn't Mama put you out?
Huh?'
With a cooing, baby noise, he reached down and scooped up the little dog – its feet paddling furiously in midair – and carried her out of the room.
'Now, go on,' I heard him say airily. 'Scat.'
A screen door creaked somewhere. In a moment he was back: calm now, beaming, a dad from an ad.
'Any of you kids care for a beer?' he said.
We were all agog. No one answered him. I stared at him, trembling, ashen-faced.
'Come on, guys,' he said, and winked. 'No takers?'
At last, Francis cleared his throat with a rasping sound. 'Ah, I believe I'd like one, yes.'
There was a silence.
The, too,' said Sophie.
Three?' said Mr Corcoran to me jovially, holding up three fingers.
I moved my mouth but no sound came out of it.
He put his head to the side, as if fixing me with his good eye.
'I don't think we've met, have we, son?'
I shook my head.
'Macdonald Corcoran,' he said, leaning forward to offer his hand. 'Call me Mack.'
I mumbled my own name.
'What's that?' he said brightly, hand to ear.
I said it again, louder this time.
'Ah! So you're the one from California! Where's your tan, son?' He laughed loudly at his joke and went to fetch the beers.
I sat down hard, exhausted and almost sick. We were in an overscaled, Architectural Digest sort of room, big and loft-like, with skylights and a fieldstone fireplace, chairs upholstered in white leather, kidney-shaped coffee table – modern, expensive, Italian stuff. Running along the back wall was a long glass trophy case filled with loving cups, ribbons, school and sports memorabilia; in ominous proximity were several large funeral wreaths which, in conjunction with the trophies, gave that corner of the room a Kentucky Derby sort of look.
'This is a beautiful space,' said Sophie. Her voice echoed amid the sharp surfaces and the polished floor.
'Why, thank you, honey,' Mr Corcoran said from the kitchen.
'We were in House Beautiful last year, and the Home section of the Times the year before that. Not quite what I'd pick myself, but Kathy's the decorator in the family, y'know.'
The doorbell rang. We looked at each other. Then it rang again, two melodious chimes, and Mrs Corcoran clicked through from the back of the house and past us without a word or a glance.
'Henry,' she called. 'Your guests are here.' Then she opened the front door. 'Hello,' she said to the delivery boy who was standing outside. 'Which one are you? Are you from Sunset Florists?'
'Yes, ma'am. Please sign.'
'Now wait just a minute. I called you people earlier. I want to know why you delivered all these wreaths here while I was out this morning.'
'I didn't deliver them. I just came on shift.'
'You're with Sunset Florists, aren't you?'
'Yes, ma'am.' I felt sorry for him. He was a teenager, with blotches of flesh-colored Clearasil scattered over his face.
'I asked specifically that only floral arrangements and house plants be sent here. These wreaths should all be down at the funeral home.'
Tm sorry, lady. If you want to call the manager or something '
Tm afraid you don't understand. I don't want these wreaths in my house. I want you to pack them right back up in your truck and take them to the funeral home. And don't try to give me that one, either,' she said as he held up a gaudy wreath of red and yellow carnations. 'Just tell me who it's from.'
The boy squinted at his clipboard. ' "With sympathy, Mr and Mrs Robert Bartle."'
'Ah!' said Mr Corcoran, who had come back with the beers; he had them all clasped together in his hands, very clumsily, without a tray. 'That from Betty and Bob?'
Mrs Corcoran ignored him. 'I guess you can go ahead and bring in those ferns,' she said to the delivery boy, eyeing the foil-wrapped pots with loathing.
After he had gone Mrs Corcoran began to inspect the ferns, lifting up the fronds to check for dead foliage, making notes on the backs of the envelopes with a tiny silver screw-point pencil..» To her husband she said: 'Did you see that wreath the Bartles ' sent?'
'Wasn't that nice of them.'
'No, in fact I don't think it appropriate for an employee to send something like that. I wonder, is Bob thinking about asking you for a raise?'
'Now, hon.'
'I can't believe these plants, either,' she said, jabbing a forefinger into the soil. 'This African violet is almost dead. Louise would be humiliated if she knew.'
'It's the thought that counts.'
'I know, but still, if I've learned one thing from this it is never to order flowers from Sunset Florists again. All the things from Tina's Flowerland are so much nicer. Francis,' she said, in the same bored tone and without looking up. 'You haven't been to see us since last Easter.'
Francis took a sip of his beer. 'Oh, I've been fine,' he said stagily. 'How are you?'
She sighed and shook her head. 'It's been terribly hard,' she said. 'We're all trying to take things one day at a time. I never realized before how very difficult it can be for a parent to just let go and… Henry, is that you?' she said sharply at the sound of some scuffling on the landing.
A pause. 'No, Mom, just me.'
'Go find him, Pat, and tell him to get down here,' she said.
Then she turned back to Francis. 'We got a lovely spray of Easter lilies from your mother this morning,' she said to him. 'How is she?'
'Oh, she's fine. She's in the city now. She was really upset,' he added uncomfortably, 'when she heard about Bunny.' (Francis had told me she was hysterical on the telephone and had to go take a pill.)
'She is such a lovely person,' said Mrs Corcoran sweetly. 'I was so sorry when I heard she'd been admitted to the Betty Ford Center.'
'She was only there for a couple of days,' said Francis.
She raised an eyebrow. 'Oh? She made that much progress, did she? I've always heard it was an excellent place.'
Francis cleared his throat. 'Well, she mainly went out there for a rest. Quite a number of people do that, you know.'
Mrs Corcoran looked surprised. 'Oh, you don't mind talking about it, do you?' she said. 'I don't think you should. I think it's very modern of your mother to realize that she needed help. Not so long ago one simply didn't admit to problems of that nature.
When I was a girl '
'Well, well, speak of the Devil,' boomed Mr Corcoran.
Henry, in a dark suit, was creaking down the stairs with a stiff, measured tread.
Francis stood up. I did, too. He ignored us.
'Come on in here, son,' said Mr Corcoran. 'Grab yourself a brewski.'
'Thank you, no,' said Henry.
Up close, I was startled to see how pale he was. His face was leaden and set and beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.
'What you boys been doing up there all afternoon?' Mr Corcoran said through a mouthful of ice.
Henry blinked at him.
'Huh?' said Mr Corcoran pleasantly. 'Looking at girlie magazines?
Building yourselves a ham radio set?'
Henry passed a hand – which, I saw, trembled slightly – over his forehead. 'I was reading,' he said.
'Reading?' said Mr Corcoran, as if he'd never heard of such a thing.
'Yes, sir.'
'What is it? Something good?'
The Upanishads.'
'Well aren't you smart. You know, I've got a whole shelf of books down in the basement if you want to take a look. Even have a couple old Perry Masons. They're pretty good. Exactly like the TV show, except Perry gets a little sexy with Delia and sometimes he'll say "damn" and stuff.'
Mrs Corcoran cleared her throat.
'Henry,' she said smoothly, reaching for her drink, 'I'm sure the young people would like to see where they'll be staying. Maybe they have some luggage in the car.'
'All right.'
'Check the downstairs bathroom to make sure there are enough washcloths and towels. If there aren't, get some from the linen closet in the hall.'
Henry nodded but before he could answer Mr Corcoran suddenly came up behind him. 'This boy,' he said, slapping him on the back – I saw Henry's neck clench and his teeth sink into his lower lip – 'is one in a million. Isn't he a prince, Kathy?'
'He has certainly been quite a help,' said Mrs Corcoran coolly.
'You bet your boots he has. I don't know what we would've done this week without him. You kids,' said Mr Corcoran, a hand clamped on Henry's shoulder, 'better hope you've got friends like this one. They don't come along like this every day. No, sir.
Why, I'll never forget, it was Bunny's first night at Hampden, he called me up on the telephone. "Dad," he said to me, "Dad, you ought to see this nut they gave me for a roommate."
"Stick it out, son," I told him, "give it a chance" and before you could spit it was Henry this, Henry that, he's changing his major from whatever the hell it was to ancient Greek. Tearing off to Italy.
Happy as a clam.' The tears were welling in his eyes. 'Just goes to show,' he said, shaking Henry's shoulder with a kind of rough affection. 'Never judge a book by its cover. Old Henry here may look like he's got a stick up his butt but there never breathed a finer fella. Why, just about the last time I spoke to the old Bunster he was all excited about taking off to France with this guy in the summer '
'Now, Mack,' said Mrs Corcoran, but it was too late. He was crying again.
It was not as bad as the first time but still it was bad. He threw his arms around Henry and sobbed in his lapel while Henry just stood there, gazing offinto the distance with a haggard, stoic calm.
Everyone was embarrassed. Mrs Corcoran began to pick at the house plants and I, ears burning, was staring at my lap when a door slammed and two young men sauntered into the wide, high-raftered hall. There was no mistaking for an instant who they were. The light was behind them, I couldn't see either of them very well but they were laughing and talking and, oh, God, what a bright sudden stab in my heart at the echo of Bunny which rang – harsh, derisive, vibrant – through their laughter.
They ignored their father's tears and marched right up to him.
'Hey, Pop,' said the eldest. He was curly haired, about thirty, and looked very much like Bunny in the face. A baby wearing a little cap that said Red Sox was perched high on his hip.
The other brother – freckled, thinner, with a too-dark tan and black circles under his blue eyes – took the baby. 'Here,' he said.
'Go see Grandpa.'
Mr Corcoran stopped crying instantly, in mid-sob; he held the baby high in the air and looked up at it adoringly. 'Champ!' he shouted. 'Did you go for a ride with Daddy and Uncle Brady?'
'We took him to Mc Donald's,' said Brady. 'Got him a Happy Meal.'
Mr Corcoran's jaw dropped in wonder. 'Did you eat it all?' he asked the baby. 'All that Happy Meal?'
'Say yes,' cooed the baby's father. ' "Yes, Drampaw."'
'That's baloney, Ted,' said Brady, laughing. 'He didn't eat a bite of it.'
'He got a prize in the box, though, didn't you? Didn't you?
Huh?'
'Let's see it,' said Mr Corcoran, busily prying the baby's fingers from around it.
'Henry,' said Mrs Corcoran, 'perhaps you'll help the young lady with her bags and show her to her room. Brady, you can take the boys downstairs.'
Mr Corcoran had got the prize – a plastic airplane – away from the baby and was making it fly back and forth.
'Look!' he said, in a tone of hushed awe.
'Since it's only for a night,' Mrs Corcoran said to us, 'I'm sure that no one will mind doubling up.'
As we were leaving with Brady, Mr Corcoran plumped the baby down on the hearth rug and was rolling around, tickling him. I could hear the baby's high screams of terror and delight all the way down the stairs.
We were to stay in the basement. Along the back wall, near the Ping-Pong and pool tables, several army cots had been set up, and in the corner was a pile of sleeping bags.
'Isn't this wretched,' said Francis as soon as we were alone.
'It's just for tonight.'
'I can't sleep in rooms with lots of people. I'll be up all night.'
I sat down on a cot. The room had a damp, unused smell and the light from the lamp over the pool table was greenish and depressing.
'It's dusty, too,' said Francis. 'I think we ought to just go check into a hotel.'
Sniffing noisily, he complained about the dust as he searched for an ashtray but deadly radon could have been seeping into the room, it didn't matter to me. All I wondered was how, in the name of Heaven and a merciful God, was I going to make it through the hours ahead. We had been there only twenty minutes and already I felt like shooting myself.
He was still complaining and I was still sunk in despair when Camilla came down. She was wearing jet earrings, patent-leather shoes, a natty, closely cut black velvet suit.
'Hello,' Francis said, handing her a cigarette. 'Let's go check into the Ramada Inn.'
As she put the cigarette between her parched lips I realized how much I'd missed her for the last few days.
'Oh, you don't have it so bad,' she said. 'Last night,' had to sleep with Marion.'
'Same room?'
'Same bed.'
Francis's eyes widened with admiration and horror. 'Oh, really? Oh, I say. That's awful,' he said in a hushed, respectful voice.
'Charles is upstairs with her now. She's hysterical because somebody asked that poor girl who rode down with you.'
'Where's Henry?'
'Haven't you seen him yet?'
'I saw him. I didn't talk to him.'
She paused to blow out a cloud of smoke. 'How does he seem to you?'
'I've seen him looking better. Why?'
'Because he's sick. Those headaches.'
'One of the bad ones?'
'That's what he says.'
Francis looked at her in disbelief. 'How is he up and walking around, then?'
'I don't know. He's all doped up. He has his pills and he's been taking them for days.'
'Well, where is he now? Why isn't he in bed?'
'I don't know. Mrs Corcoran just sent him down to the Cumberland Farms to get that damn baby a quart of milk.'
'Can he drive?'
'I have no idea,' 'Francis,' I said, 'your cigarette.'
He jumped up, grabbed for it too quickly and burned his fingers. He'd laid it on the edge of the pool table and the coal had burned down to the wood; a charred spot was spreading on the varnish.
'Boys?' Mrs Corcoran called from the head of the stairs. 'Boys?
Do you mind if I come down to check the thermostat?'
'Quick,' Camilla whispered, mashing out her cigarette. 'We're not supposed to smoke down here.'
'Who's there?' said Mrs Corcoran sharply. 'Is something burning?'
'No, ma'am,' Francis said, wiping at the burned spot and scrambling to hide the cigarette butt as she came down the steps.
It was one of the worst nights of my life. The house was filling with people and the hours passed in a dreadful streaky blur of relatives, neighbors, crying children, covered dishes, blocked driveways, ringing telephones, bright lights, strange faces, awkward conversations. Some swinish, hard-faced man trapped me in a corner for hours, boasting of bass tournaments and businesses in Chicago and Nashville and Kansas City until finally I excused myself and locked myself in an upstairs bathroom, ignoring the beating and piteous cries of an unknown toddler who pled, weeping, for admittance.
Dinner was set out at seven, an unappetizing combination of gourmet carry-out – orzo salad, duck in Campari, miniature foie gras tarts – and food the neighbors had made: tuna casseroles, gelatin molds in Tupperware, and a frightful dessert called a 'wacky cake' that I am at a loss to even describe. People roamed with paper plates. It was dark outside and raining. Hugh Corcoran, in shirtsleeves, went around with a bottle freshening drinks, nudging his way through the dark, murmuring crowd.
He brushed by me without a glance. Of all the brothers, he bore the strongest resemblance to Bunny (Bunny's death was starting to seem some horrible kind of generative act, more Bunnys popping up everywhere I looked, Bunnys coming out of the I woodwork), and it was akin to looking into the future and seeing what Bunny would have looked like at thirty-five, just as looking at his father was like seeing him at sixty. I knew him and he didn't know me. I had a strong, nearly irresistible urge to take him by the arm, say something to him, what I didn't know: just to see the brows drop abruptly in the way I knew so well, to see the startled expression in the naive, muddy eyes. ft was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.
Laughter, vertigo. Strangers kept wandering up and talking at me. I disengaged myself from one of Bunny's teenaged cousins – who, upon hearing I was from California, had begun to ask me a lot of very complicated questions about surfing – and, swimming through the hobbling crowd, found Henry. He was standing by himself in front of some glass doors, his back to the room, smoking a cigarette.
I stood beside him. He didn't look at me or speak. The doors faced out on a barren, floodlit terrace – black cinder, privet in concrete urns, a statue artfully broken in white pieces on the ground. Rain slanted in the lights, which were angled to cast long, dramatic shadows. The effect was fashionable, post-nuclear but ancient, too, like some pumice-strewn courtyard from Pompeii.
That is the ugliest garden I have ever seen,' I said.
'Yes,' said Henry. He was very pale. 'Rubble and ash.'
People laughed and talked behind us. The lights, through the rain-spattered window, cast a pattern of droplets trickling down his face.
'Maybe you'd better lie down,' I said after a while.
He bit his lip. The ash on his cigarette was about an inch long.
'I don't have any more medicine,' he said.
I looked at the side of his face. 'Can you get along?'
'I guess I'll have to, won't I?' he said without moving.
Camilla locked the door of the bathroom behind us and the two of us, on our hands and knees, began to rummage through the mess of prescription bottles under the sink.
' "For high blood pressure,"' she read.
'No.'
'"For asthma.'"
There was a knock on the door.
'Somebody's in here,' I yelled.
Camilla's head was wedged all the way in the cabinet by the water pipes, so that her rear end stuck out. I could hear the medicine bottles clinking. '"Inner ear"?' she said, her voice muffled. ' "One cap twice daily"?'
'Let's see.'
She handed me some antibiotics, at least ten years old.
'This won't do,' I said, edging closer. 'Do you see anything with a no-refill sticker? From a dentist, maybe?'
'No.'
' "May Cause Drowsiness"? "Do Not Drive or Operate Heavy Machinery"?'
Someone knocked on the door again and rattled the knob. I knocked back, then reached up and turned on both taps full-blast.
Our findings were not good. If Henry had been suffering from poison ivy, hay fever, rheumatism, pinkeye, we would have been in luck but the only painkiller they had was Excedrin. Out of sheer desperation I took a handful, also two ambiguous capsules that had a Drowsiness sticker but which I suspected of being antihistamines.
I'd thought our mystery guest had left, but venturing out I was annoyed to find Cloke lurking outside. He gave me a contemptuous look that turned to a stare when Camilla – hair tousled, tugging at her skirt – stepped out behind me.
If she was surprised to see him, she didn't show it. 'Oh, hello,' she said to him, reaching down to dust off her knees.
'Hi.' He glanced away in a studied, offhanded manner. We all knew Cloke was sort of interested in her, but even if he hadn't been, Camilla was not exactly the sort of girl one expected to find making out with someone in a locked bathroom.
She brushed past us and headed downstairs. I started down, too, but Cloke coughed in a significant manner and I turned around.
He leaned back against the wall, looking at me as if he'd had me figured out from the day I was born. 'So,' he said. His shirt was unironed and his shirttails were out; and though his eyes were red, I didn't know if he was stoned or just tired. 'How's it going?'
I paused on the landing. Camilla was at the foot of the steps, out of earshot. 'All right,' I said.
'What's the story?'
'What?'
'Better not let Kathy catch you guys screwing around in her bathroom. She'll make you walk to the bus station.'
His tone was neutral. Still, I was reminded of the business with Mona's boyfriend the week before. Cloke, however, presented little or nothing in the way of physical threat and besides, he had problems enough of his own.
'Look,' I said, 'you've got it wrong.'
'I don't care. I'm just telling you.'
'Well, I'm telling you. Believe it or not, I don't care.'
Cloke fished lazily in his pocket, came out with a pack of Marlboros so crumpled and flat that it did not seem possible that a cigarette could be inside it. He said: 'I thought she was seeing somebody.'
'For God's sake.'
He shrugged. 'It's no business of mine,' he said, extracting one crooked cigarette and crushing the empty pack in his hand. 'People were bothering me at school, so I was staying on their couch before we came down here. I've heard her talking on the phone.'
'And saying what?'
'Oh, nothing, but like two or three in the morning, whispering, you've got to wonder.' He smiled bleakly. 'I guess she thinks I'm passed out but to tell you the truth I haven't been sleeping all that well… Right,' he said, when I didn't answer. 'You don't know a thing about it.'
'I don't.'
'Sure.'
'I really don't.'
'So what were you doing in there?'
I looked at him for a moment, and then I took out a handful of pills and held them out on my open palm.
He leaned forward, brows knit, and then, quite suddenly, his foggy eyes became intelligent and alert. He selected a capsule and held it up to the light in businesslike fashion. 'What is it?' he said. 'Do you know?'
'Sudafed,' I said. 'Don't bother. There's nothing in there.'
He chuckled. 'Know why?' he said, looking at me for the first time with real friendliness. 'That's because you were looking in the wrong place.'
'What?'
He glanced over his shoulder. 'Down the hall. Off the master bedroom. I would have told you if you'd asked.'
I was startled. 'How do you know?'
He pocketed the capsule and raised an eyebrow at me. 'I practically grew up in this house,' he said. 'Old Kathy is on about sixteen different types of dope.'
I looked back at the closed door of the master bedroom.
'No,' he said. 'Not now.'
'Why not?'
'Bunny's grandma. She has to lie down after she eats. We'll come up later.'
Things downstairs had cleared out some, but not much. Camilla was nowhere in sight. Charles, bored and drunk, his back in a corner, was holding a glass to his temple as a tearful Marion babbled away – her hair pulled back in one of those tremendous preppy bows from the Talbots catalogue. I hadn't had a chance to speak to him because she had shadowed him almost constantly since we arrived; why she had latched so firmly on to him I don't know, except that she wasn't talking to Cloke, and Bunny's brothers were either married or engaged, and of the remaining males in her age group – Bunny's cousins, Henry and me, Bram Guernsey and Rooney Wynne – Charles was by far the best looking.
He glanced at me over her shoulder. I didn't have the stomach to go over and rescue him, and I looked away; but just then a toddler – fleeing his grinning, jug-eared brother – slid into my legs and almost knocked me down.
They dodged round me in circles. The smaller one, terrified and shrieking, dove to the floor and grabbed my knees. 'Butthole,' he sobbed.
The other one stopped and took a step backwards, and there was something nasty and almost lascivious about the look on his face. 'Oh, Dad,' he sang, his voice like spilled syrup. 'Oh, Daayid.'
Across the room, Hugh Corcoran turned, glass in hand. 'Don't make me come over there, Brandon,' he said.
'But Corey called you a butthole, Daayid.'
'You're a butthole,' sobbed the little one. 'You you you.'
I pried him off my leg and went looking for Henry. He and Mr Corcoran were in the kitchen, surrounded by a semicircle of people: Mr Corcoran, who had his arm around Henry, looked as if he'd had a few too many.
'Now Kathy and I,' he said, in a loud, didactic voice, 'have always opened our home to young people. Always an extra place at the table. First thing you know, they'd be coming to Kathy and me with their problems, too. Like this guy,' he said, jostling Henry. Till never forget the time he came up to me one night 45i I after supper. He said, "Mack" – all the kids call me Mack – "I'd like to ask your advice about something, man to man."
"Well, before you start, son," I said, "I want to tell you just one thing.
I think I know boys pretty well. I raised five of ' em myself. And I had four brothers when I was coming up, so I guess you might call me a pretty good authority on boys in general He rambled on with this fraudulent recollection while Henry, pale and ill, endured his prods and backslaps as a well-trained dog will tolerate the pummeling of a rough child. The story itself was ludicrous. It had a dynamic and strangely hot-headed young Henry wanting to rush out and buy a used single-engine airplane against the advice of his parents.
'But this guy was determined,' said Mr Corcoran. 'He was going to get that plane or bust. After he'd told me all about it I sat there for a minute and then I took a deep breath and I said, m "Henry, son, she sounds like a beaut, but I'm still going to have to be a square and agree with your folks. Let me tell you why that is."'
'Hey, Dad,' said Patrick Corcoran, who had just come in to fix himself another drink. He was slighter than Bun, heavily freckled, but he had Bunny's sandy hair and his sharp little nose.
'Dad, you're all mixed up. That didn't happen to Henry. That was Hugh's old friend Walter Ballantine.'
'Bosh,' said Mr Corcoran.
'Sure it was. And he ended up buying the plane anyway.
Hugh?' he shouted into the next room. 'Hugh, do you remember Walter Ballantine?'
'Sure,' said Hugh, and appeared in the doorway. He had by the wrist the kid Brandon, who was twisting and trying furiously to get away. 'What about him?'
'Didn't Walter wind up buying that little Bonanza?'
'It wasn't a Bonanza,' said Hugh, ignoring with a glacial calm the thrashing and yelps of his son. 'It was a Beechcraft. No, I know what you're thinking,' he said, as both Patrick and his father started to object. 'I drove out to Danbury with Walter to look at a little converted Bonanza, but the guy wanted way too much. Those things cost a fortune to maintain, and there was plenty wrong with it, too. He was selling it because he couldn't afford to keep it.'
'What about this Beechcraft, then?' said Mr Corcoran. His hand had slipped from Henry's shoulder. 'I've heard that's an excellent little outfit.'
'Walter had some trouble with it. Got it through an ad in the Pennysaver, off some retired congressman from New Jersey. He'd used it to fly around in while he was campaigning and '
Gasping, he lurched forward as with a sudden wrench the kid broke free of him and shot across the room like a cannonball.
Evading his father's tackle, he sidestepped Patrick's block as well and, glancing back at his pursuers, slammed right into Henry's abdomen.
It was a hard blow. The kid began to cry. Henry's jaw dropped and every ounce of blood drained from his face. For a moment I was sure he would fall, but somehow he drew himself upright, with the dignified, massive effort of a wounded elephant, while Mr Corcoran threw back his head and laughed merrily at his distress.
I had not entirely believed Cloke about the drugs to be found upstairs, but when I went up with him again I saw he had told the truth. There was a tiny dressing room off the master bedroom, and a black lacquer vanity with lots of little compartments and a tiny key, and inside one of the compartments was a ballotin of Godiva chocolates and a neat, well-tended collection of candy colored pills. The doctor who had prescribed them – E. G. Hart, M. D., and apparently a more reckless character than his prim initials would suggest – was a generous fellow, particularly with the amphetamines. Ladies of Mrs Corcoran's age usually went in pretty heavily for the Valium and so forth but she had enough speed to send a gang of Hell's Angels on a cross-country rampage.
I was nervous. The room smelled like new clothes and perfume; big disco mirrors on the wall reproduced our every move in paranoiac multiple-image; there was no way out and no possible excuse for being there should anyone happen in. I kept an eye on the door while Cloke, with admirable efficiency, went swiftly through the bottles.
Dalmane. Yellow and orange. Darvon. Red and gray. Fiorinal.
Nembutal. Miltown. I took two from each of the bottles he gave me.
'What,' he said, 'don't you want more than that?'
'I don't want her to miss anything.'
'Shit,' he said, opening another bottle and pouring half the contents into his pocket. 'Take what you want. She'll think it was one of her daughters-in-law or something. Here, have some of this speed,' he said, tapping most of the rest of the bottle on my palm. 'It's great stuff. Pharmaceutical. During exams you can get ten or fifteen dollars a hit for this, easy.'
I went downstairs, the right-hand pocket of my jacket full of ups and the left full of downs. Francis was standing at the foot of the steps. 'Listen,' I said, 'do you know where Henry is?'
'No. Have you seen Charles?'
He was half-hysterical. 'What's wrong?' I said.
'He stole my car keys,' 'What?'
'He took the keys out of my coat pocket and left. Camilla saw him pulling out of the driveway. He had the top down. That car stalls in the rain, anyway, but if – shit,' he said, running a hand through his hair. 'You don't know anything about it, do you?'
'I saw him about an hour ago. With Marion.'
'Yes, I talked to her too. He said he was going out for cigarettes, but that was an hour ago. You did see him? You haven't talked to him?'
'No.'
'Was he drunk? Marion said he was. Did he look drunk to you?'
Francis looked pretty drunk himself. 'Not very,' I said. 'Come on, help me find Henry.'
'I told you. I don't know where he is. What do you want him for?'
'I have something for him.'
'What is it?' he said in Greek. 'Drugs?'
'Yes.'
'Well, give me something, for God's sake,' he said, swaying forward, pop-eyed.
He was far too drunk for sleeping pills. I gave him an Excedrin.
'Thanks,' he said, and swallowed it with a big sloppy drink of his whiskey. 'I hope I die in the night. Where do you suppose he went, anyway? What time is it?'
'About ten.'
'You don't suppose he decided to drive home, do you? Maybe he just took the car and went back to Hampden. Camilla said certainly not, not with the funeral tomorrow, but I don't know, he's just disappeared. If he really just went for cigarettes, don't you think he'd be back by now? I can't imagine where else he would have gone. What do you think?'
'He'll turn up,' I said. 'Look, I'm sorry, I've got to go. I'll see you later.'
I looked all over the house for Henry and found him sitting by himself on an army cot, in the basement, in the dark.
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, without moving his head. 'What is that?' he said, when I offered him a couple of capsules.
'Nembutal. Here.'
He took them from me and swallowed them without water.
'Do you have any more?'
'Yes.'
'Give them to me.'
'You can't take more than two.'
'Give them to me.'
I gave them to him. 'I'm not kidding, Henry,' I said. 'You'd better be careful.'
He looked at them, then reached in his pocket for the blue enamel pillbox and put them carefully inside it. 'I don't suppose,' he said, 'you would go upstairs and get me a drink.'
'You shouldn't be drinking on top of those pills.'
'I've been drinking already.'
'I know that.'
There was a brief silence.
'Look,' he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. 'I want a Scotch and soda. In a tall glass. Heavy on the Scotch, light on the soda, lots of ice, a glass of plain water, no ice, on the side. That's what I want.'
'I'm not going to get it for you.'
'If you don't go up and get it for me,' he said, Till just have to go up and get it myself.'
I went up to the kitchen and got it for him, except I made it a good deal heavier on the soda than I knew he wanted me to.
That's for Henry,' said Camilla, coming into the kitchen just as I'd finished the first glass and was filling the second with water from the tap.
'Yes.'
'Where is he?'
'Downstairs.'
'How's he doing?'
We were alone in the kitchen. With my eyes on the empty doorway, I told her about the lacquer chest.
'That sounds like Cloke,' she said, laughing. 'He's really pretty decent, isn't he? Bun always said he reminded him of you.'
I was puzzled and a bit offended by this last. I started to say something about it, but instead I set down the glass and r WJ said, 'Who do you talk to on the telephone at three in the morning?'
'What?'
Her surprise seemed perfectly natural. The problem was that she was such an expert actress it was impossible to know if it was genuine.
I held her gaze. She met it unblinking, brows knit, and just when I thought she'd been silent a beat too long, she shook her head and laughed again. 'What's wrong with you?' she said.
'What are you talking about?'
I laughed too. It was impossible to outfox her at this game.
'I'm not trying to put you on the spot,' I said. 'But you need 1 to be careful what you say on the telephone when Cloke's in your house.'
She looked blank. 'I am careful.'
'I hope you are, because he's been listening.'
'He couldn't have heard anything.'
'Well, that's not for want of trying.'
We stood looking at each other. There was a heart-stopping, ruby-red pinprick of a beauty mark just beneath her eye. On an irresistible impulse I leaned down and gave her a kiss.
She laughed. 'What was that for?' she said.
My heart – which, thrilled at my daring, had held its breath for a moment or two – began suddenly to beat quite wildly. I turned and busied myself with the glasses. 'Nothing,' I said, 'you just looked pretty,' and I might have said something else had Charles – dripping wet – not burst through the kitchen door, Francis hard at his heels.
'Why didn't you just tell me?' said Francis in an angry whisper.
He was flushed and trembling. 'Never mind that the seats are soaked, and will probably mildew and rot, and that I've got to drive back to Hampden tomorrow. But never mind about that. I don't care. What I can't believe is that you went up, you deliberately went looking for my coat, you took the keys and '
'I've seen you leave the top down in the rain before.' said Charles curtly. He was at the counter, his back to Francis, pouring himself a drink. His hair was plastered to his head and a small puddle was forming round him on the linoleum.
'What,' said Francis, through his teeth. 'I never.'
'Yes you have,' said Charles, without turning around.
'Name one time.'
'Okay. What about that afternoon you and I were in Manchester, and it was about two weeks before school started, and we decided to go to the Equinox House for '
That was a summer afternoon. It was sprinkling.'
'It was not. It was raining hard. You just don't want to talk about that now because that was the afternoon you tried to get f me to ' it 'You're crazy,' said Francis. That doesn't have anything to do with this. It's dark as hell and pouring rain and you're drunk out of your skull. It's a miracle you didn't kill somebody. Where the hell did you go for those cigarettes, anyway? There's not a store around here for '
'I'm not drunk.'
'Ha, ha. Tell me. Where'd you get those cigarettes? I'd like to know. I bet '
'I said I'm not drunk.'
'Yeah, sure. I bet you didn't even buy any cigarettes. If you did, they must be soaking wet. Where are they, anyway?'
'Leave me alone.'
'No. Really. Show them to me. I'd like to see these famous -'
Charles slammed down his glass and spun around. 'Leave me alone,' he hissed.
It was not the tone of his voice, exactly, as much as the look on his face which was so terrible. Francis stared, his mouth fallen slightly open. For about ten long seconds there was no sound but the rhythmic tick tick tick of the water dripping from Charles's sodden clothes.
I took Henry's Scorch and soda, lots of ice, and his water, no ice, and walked past Francis, out the swinging door and down to the basement.
It rained hard all night. My nose tickled from the dust in the sleeping bag, and the basement floor – which was poured concrete beneath a thin, comfortless layer of indoor-outdoor carpeting – made my bones ache whichever way I turned. The rain drummed on the high windows, and the floodlights, shining through the glass, cast a pattern on the walls as if dark rivulets of water were streaming down them from ceiling to floor.
Charles snored on his cot, his mouth open; Francis grumbled in his sleep. Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room – the pool table, the snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.
In the morning I woke up sore and disoriented to the sound of a loose shutter banging somewhere. The rain was falling harder than ever. It lashed in rhythmic waves against the windows of the white, brightly lit kitchen as we guests sat around the table and ate a silent, cheerless breakfast of coffee and Pop Tarts.
The Corcorans were upstairs, dressing. Cloke and Bram and Rooney drank coffee with their elbows on the table and talked in low voices. They were freshly showered and shaven, cocky in their Sunday suits but uneasy, too, as if they were about to go to court. Francis – puff-eyed, his stiff red hair full of absurd cowlicks – was still in his bathrobe. He had got up late and was in a state of barely contained outrage because all the hot water in the downstairs tank was gone.
He and Charles were across the table from each other, and took great pains to avoid looking in the other's direction. Marion – red-eyed, her hair in hot curlers – was sullen and silent, too.
She was dressed very smartly, in a navy suit, but with fuzzy pink slippers over her fleshtone nylons. Every now and then she would reach up and put her hands on the rollers to see if they were cooling off.
Henry, among us, was the only pallbearer – the other five being family friends or business associates of Mr Corcoran's. I wondered if the coffin was very heavy and, if so, how Henry would manage. Though he emitted a faint, ammoniac odor of sweat and Scotch he did not look at all drunk. The pills had sunk him into a glassy, fathomless calm. Threads of smoke floated up from a filterless cigarette whose coal burned dangerously near his fingertips. It was a state which might have seemed a suspiciously narcotic one except that it differed so little from his customary manner.
It was a little after nine-thirty by the kitchen clock. The funeral was set for eleven. Francis went off to dress and Marion to take her rollers out. The rest of us were still sitting around the kitchen table, awkward and inert, pretending to enjoy our second and third cups of coffee when Teddy's wife marched in. She was a hard-faced, pretty litigation lawyer who smoked constantly and wore her blond hair in a China chop. With her was Hugh's wife: a small, mild-mannered woman who looked far too young and frail to have borne as many children as she had. By an unfortunate coincidence, both of them were named Lisa, which made for a lot of confusion around the house.
'Henry,' said the first Lisa, leaning forward and jamming out her half-smoked Vantage so it crooked at a right angle in the ashtray. She was wearing Giorgio perfume and far too much of it. 'We're driving to the church now to arrange the flowers in the chancel and collect the cards before the service starts. Ted's mother' – both Lisas disliked Mrs Corcoran, a feeling which was heartily reciprocated – 'said you should drive over with us so that you can meet with the pallbearers. Okay?'
Henry, the light winking off the steel rims of his glasses, gave no indication of having heard her. I was about to kick him under the table when, very slowly, he looked up.
'Why?' he said.
'The pallbearers are supposed to meet in the vestibule at ten-fifteen.'
'Why?' repeated Henry, with Vedic calm.
'I don't know why. I'm just telling you what she said. This stuff is planned out like synchronized swimming or some damn thing. Are you ready to go, or do you need a minute?'
'Now, Brandon,' said Hugh's wife weakly to her little son, who had run into the kitchen and was attempting to swing from his mother's arms like an ape. 'Please. You're going to hurt Mother. Brandon.'
'Lisa, you shouldn't let him hang all over you like that,' said the first Lisa, glancing at her watch.
'Please, Brandon. Mother's got to go now.'
'He's too big to act like that. You know he is. If I were you, I would just take him in the bathroom and tear him up.'
Mrs Corcoran came down about twenty minutes later, in black crepe de Chine, riffling through a quilted-leather clutch. 'Where is everybody?' she said when she saw only Camilla, Sophie Dearbold and me loafing by the trophy case.
When no one answered her, she paused on the stair, annoyed.
'Well?' she said. 'Has everybody left? Where's Francis?'
'I think he's dressing,' I said, glad she'd asked something I could answer without having to lie. From where she stood on the stairs she could not see what the rest of us saw, quite clearly, through the glass doors of the living room: Cloke and Bram and Rooney, Charles with them, all of them standing around under the sheltered part of the terrace getting stoned. It was odd to see Charles of all people smoking pot and the only reason I could think why he was doing it was because he thought it would brace him up, the way a stiff drink might. If so, I felt certain he was in for a nasty surprise. When I was twelve and thirteen I used to get high at school every day – not because I liked it, it broke me out in cold sweats and panic – but because in the lower grades it was such a fabulous prestige to be thought a pothead, also because I was so expert at hiding the paranoiac flulike symptoms it gave me.
Mrs Corcoran was looking at me as if I'd uttered some Nazi oath. 'Dressing?' she said.
'I think so.'
'Isn't he even dressed by now? What's everybody been doing all morning?'
I didn't know what to say. She was drifting down the stairs a step at a time, and now that her head was free of the balustrade, she had an unimpeded view of the patio doors – rain-splashed glass, oblivious smokers beyond – if she chose to look that way.
We were all transfixed with suspense. Sometimes mothers didn't know what pot was when they saw it, but Mrs Corcoran looked like she would know, all right.
She snapped the clutch bag shut and looked around with a sweeping, raptor-like gaze – the only thing about her, surely, that could remind me of my father, and it did.
'Well?' she said. 'Would somebody tell him to hurry up?'
Camilla jumped up. 'I'll get him, Mrs Corcoran,' she said, but once she was around the corner she scooted over to the terrace door.
Thank you, dear,' said Mrs Corcoran. She had found what she wanted – her sunglasses – and she put them on. 'I don't know what it is with you young people,' she said. 'I don't mean you in particular, but this is a very difficult time and we're all under a great deal of stress and we must try to make things go as smoothly as they possibly can.'
Cloke looked up, bloodshot and uncomprehending, at Camilla's soft rap on the glass. Then he looked past her into the living room, and all of a sudden his face changed. Shit, I saw him say, noiselessly, and a cloud of smoke escaped from his mouth.
Charles saw, too, and almost choked. Cloke snatched the joint from Bram and pinched it out with thumb and forefinger.
Mrs Corcoran, in big black sunglasses, remained thankfully unaware of this drama unfolding behind her back. 'The church is a bit of a drive, you know,' she said as Camilla circled behind her and went to fetch Francis. 'Mack and I will go ahead in the station wagon, and you people can follow either us or the boys.
I think you'll have to go in three cars, though maybe you can squeeze into two – Don't run in Grandmother's house,' she snapped at Brandon and his cousin Neale, who'd darted past her on the stairs and clattered into the living room. They wore little blue suits with snap-on bow ties, and their Sunday shoes made a terrific racket on the floor.
Brandon, panting, dodged behind the sofa. 'He hit me, Grandma.'
'He called me a bootywipe.'
'Did not.'
'Did too.'
'Boys,' she thundered. 'You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.'
She paused dramatically, to observe their silent, stricken faces.
'Your Uncle Bunny is dead and do you know what that means?
It means that he is gone forever. You will never see him again as long as you live.' She glared at them. Today is a very special day,' she said. 'It is a day for remembering him. You ought to be sitting quietly somewhere thinking about all the nice things he used to do for you instead of running around and scuffing up this pretty new floor that Grandmother just had refinished.'
There was a silence. Neale kicked sullenly at Brandon. 'One time Uncle Bunny called me a bastard,' he said.
I wasn't sure if she really didn't hear him or if she chose not to; the fixed expression on her face made me think maybe the latter, but then the terrace doors slid open and Cloke came in with Charles and Bram and Rooney.
'Oh. So there you are,' said Mrs Corcoran suspiciously. 'What are you doing out there in the rain?'
'Fresh air,' said Cloke. He looked really stoned. The tip of a Visine bottle stuck out from the handkerchief pocket of his suit.
They all looked really stoned. Poor Charles was bug-eyed and sweating. This was probably more than he'd bargained for: bright lights, too high, having to deal with a hostile adult.
She looked at them. I wondered if she knew. For a moment I thought she'd say something, but instead she reached out and grabbed hold of Brandon's arm. 'Well, you should all get a move on,' she said curtly, leaning down to run a hand through his mussed hair. 'It's getting late and I've been led to expect that there might be a little problem with seating.'
The church had been built in seventeen-something, according to the National Register of Historic Places. It was an age-blacked, dungeonlike building with its own rickety little graveyard in the back, set on a rolling country lane. When we arrived, damp and uncomfortable from Francis's sodden car seats, cars lined the road on both sides, as if for a rural dance or bingo night, sloping gently into the grassy ditch. A gray drizzle was falling. We parked near the country club, which was down a bit, and hiked the quarter-mile silently, in the mud.
The sanctuary was dim, and stepping inside I was blinded by a dazzle of candles. When my eyes cleared I saw iron lanterns, clammy stone floors, flowers everywhere. Startled, I noticed that one of the arrangements, quite near the altar, was wired in the shape of the number 27.
'I thought he was twenty-four,' I whispered to Camilla.
'No,' she said, 'that's his old football number.'
The church was packed. I looked for Henry but didn't see him; saw someone I thought was Julian but realized it wasn't when he turned around. For a moment we stood there in a knot, confused. There were metal folding chairs along the back wall to accommodate the crowd, but then someone spotted a half-empty pew and we headed for that: Francis and Sophie, the twins, and me. Charles, who stuck close to Camilla, was plainly freaking out. The doomy horrorhouse atmosphere of the church was not helping at all and he stared at his surroundings with frank terror, while Camilla took his arm and tried to nudge him down the row. Marion had disappeared to sit with some people who'd driven down from Hampden, and Cloke and Bram and Rooney had simply disappeared, somewhere between car and church.
It was a long service. The minister, who took his ecumenical and – some felt – slightly impersonal remarks from Saint Paul's sermon on Love from First Corinthians, talked for about half an hour. ('Didn't you feel that was a very inappropriate text?' said Julian, who had a pagan's gloomy view of death coupled with a horror of the non-specific.) Next was Hugh Corcoran ('He was the best little brother a guy could have'); then Bunny's old football coach, a dynamic Jaycee type who talked at length of Bunny's team spirit, telling a rousing anecdote about how Bunny had once saved the day against a particularly tough team from 'lower' Connecticut. ('That means black,' whispered Francis.) He wound up his story by pausing and staring at the lectern for a count of ten; then he looked up frankly. 'I don't know,' he said, 'a whole lot about Heaven. My business is teaching boys to play a game and play it hard. Today we're here to honor a boy who's been taken out of the game early. But that's not to say that while he was out on the field, he didn't give tis all he had. That's not to say he wasn't a winner.' A long, suspenseful pause. 'Bunny Corcoran,' he said gruffly, 'was a winner.'
A long, solitary wail went up from somebody towards the middle of the congregation.
Except in the movies (Knute Rockne, All-American) 1 don't know if I've ever seen such a bravura performance. When he sat down, half the place was in tears – the coach included. No one paid much attention to the final speaker, Henry himself, who went to the podium and read, inaudibly and without comment, a short poem by A. E. Housman.
The poem was called 'With Rue My Heart Is Laden.' I don't know why he chose that particular one. We knew that the Corcorans had asked him to read something and I expected that they had trusted him to choose something appropriate. It would have been so easy for him to choose something else, though, something you would think he would pick, for Christ's sake, from Lycidas or the Upanishads or anything, really – certainly not that poem, which Bunny had known by heart. He'd been very fond of the corny old poems he'd learned in grade school: 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,'
'In Flanders Fields,' a lot of strange old sentimental stuff whose authors and titles I never even knew.
The rest of us, who were snobs about such things, had thought this a shameful taste, akin to his taste for King Dons and Hostess Twinkies. Quite often I had heard Bunny say this Housman aloud – seriously when drunk, more mockingly when sober – so that the lines for me were set and hardened in the cadence of his voice; perhaps that is why hearing it then, in Henry's academic monotone (he was a terrible reader) there with the guttering candles and the draft shivering in the flowers and people crying all around, enkindled in me such a brief and yet so excruciating pain, like one of those weirdly scientific Japanese tortures calibrated to extract the greatest possible misery in the smallest space of time.
It was a very short poem.
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
During the closing prayer (overly long) I felt myself swaying, so much so that the sides of my new shoes dug in the tender spot beneath my anklebones. The air was close; people were crying; there was an insistent buzz which came in close to my ear and then receded. For a moment I was afraid I would black out. Then I realized the buzz actually came from a large wasp flying in erratic darts and circles over our heads. Francis, by flailing at it uselessly with the memorial service bulletin, had succeeded in enraging it; it dove towards the weeping Sophie's head but, finding her unresponsive, turned in midair and lit on the back of the pew to collect its wits. Stealthily Camilla leaned to one side and began to slip off" her shoe, but before she could, Charles had killed it with a resounding thwack from The Book of Common Prayer.
The pastor, at a key point in his prayer, started. He opened his eyes and his glance fell on Charles, still wielding the guilty prayerbook. 'That they may not languish in unavailing grief,'he said in a slightly amplified voice, 'nor sorrow as those who have no hope, but through their tears look always up to Thee Quickly I bowed my head. The wasp still clung with one black feeler to the edge of the pew. I stared down at it and thought of Bunny, poor old Bunny, expert killer of flying pests, stalking houseflies with a rolled-up copy of the Hampden Examiner.
Charles and Francis, who weren't speaking before the service, had managed somehow to make up during the course of it. After the final amen, in silent, perfect sympathy, they ducked into an empty corridor off the side aisle. I caught a glimpse of them speeding wordlessly down it before they turned into the men's room, Francis stopping for one last nervous glance behind and already reaching in his coat pocket for what I knew was there the flat pint bottle of something or other I'd seen him take from the glove compartment.
It was a muddy, black day in the churchyard. The rain had stopped but the sky was dark and the wind was blowing hard.
Someone was ringing the church bell and not doing a very good job of it; it clanged unevenly to and fro like a bell at a seance.
People straggled to their cars, dresses billowing, holding hats to head. A few paces in front of me Camilla struggled on tiptoe to pull down her umbrella, which dragged her along in little skipping steps – Mary Poppins in her black funeral dress. I stepped up to help her, but before I got there the umbrella blew inside out. For a moment it had a horrible life of its own, squawking and flapping its spines like a pterodactyl; with a sudden sharp cry she let it go and immediately it sailed ten feet in the air, somersaulting once or twice before it caught in the high branches of an ash tree.
'Damn,' she said, looking up at it and then down at her finger, from which a thin seam of blood sprang. 'Damn, damn, damn.'
'Are you okay?'
She stuck the injured finger in her mouth. 'It's not that,' she said peevishly, glancing up at the branches. 'This is my favorite umbrella.'
I fished around in my pocket, gave her my handkerchief. She shook it out and held it to her finger (flutter of white, blown hair, darkening sky) and as I watched time stopped and I was transfixed by a bright knife of memory: the sky was the same thundery gray as it had been then, new leaves, her hair had blown across her mouth just so…
(flutter of white)
(… at the ravine. She'd climbed down with Henry and was back at the top before him, the rest of us waiting at the edge, cold wind, jitters, springing to hoist her up; dead? is he…? She took a handkerchief,'Tom her pocket and wiped her muddy hands, not looking at any of us, really, her hair blowing back light against the sky and her face a blank for just about any emotion one might care to project…)
Behind us someone said, very loudly, 'Dad?'
I jumped, startled and guilty. It was Hugh. He was walking briskly, half-running, and in a moment had caught up with his father. 'Dad?' he said again, placing a hand on his father's slumping shoulder. There was no response. He shook him gently.
Up ahead, the pallbearers (Henry indistinct, somewhere among them) were sliding the casket into the open doors of the hearse.
'Dad,' said Hugh. He was tremendously agitated. 'Dad. You gotta listen to me for a sec.'
The doors slammed. Slowly, slowly, Mr Corcoran turned. He was carrying the baby they called Champ but today its presence seemed to offer him little comfort. The expression on his big slack face was haunted and lost. He stared at his son as if he had never seen him before.
'Dad,' said Hugh. 'Guess who I just saw. Guess who came. Mr Vanderfeller,' he said urgently, pressing his father's arm.
The syllables of this illustrious name – one which the Corcorans invoked with very nearly as much respect as that of God Almighty – had when uttered aloud a miraculous effect of healing on Mr Corcoran.'Vanderfeller's here?' he said, looking around. 'Where?'
This august personage, who loomed large in the collective unconscious of the Corcorans, was the head of a charitable foundation – endowed by his even more august grandpapa which happened to own a controlling interest in the stock of Mr Corcoran's bank. This entailed board meetings, and occasional social functions, and the Corcorans had an endless store of 'delightful' anecdotes about Paul Vanderfeller, of how European he was, what a celebrated 'wit,' and though the witticisms they found frequent occasion to repeat seemed poor things to me (the guards up at the security booth at Hampden were cleverer) they made the Corcorans rock with urbane and apparently quite sincere laughter. One of Bunny's favorite ways to start a sentence had been to let drop, quite casually: 'When Dad was lunching with Paul Vanderfeller the other day…"
And here he was, the great one himself, scorching us all with his rays of glory. I glanced in the direction Hugh indicated to his father and saw him – an ordinary-looking man with the good-natured expression of someone used to being constantly catered to; late forties; nicely dressed; nothing particularly 'European' about him except his ugly eyeglasses and the fact that he was considerably below the average height.
An expression of something very like tenderness spread itself across Mr Corcoran's face. Without a word he thrust the baby at Hugh and hurried off across the lawn.
Maybe it was because the Corcorans were Irish, maybe it was that Mr Corcoran was born in Boston, but the whole family seemed to feel, somehow, that it had a mysterious affinity with the Kennedys. It was a resemblance they tried to cultivate especially Mrs Corcoran, with her hairdo and faux-Jackie glasses – but it also had some slight physical basis: in Brady and Patrick's toothy, too-tanned gauntness there was a shadow of Bobby Kennedy while the other brothers, Bunny among them, were built on the Ted Kennedy model, much heavier, with little round features bunched in the middle of their faces. It would not have been difficult to mistake any of them for minor clan members, cousins perhaps. Francis had told me of walking into a fashionable, very crowded restaurant in Boston once, with Bunny. There was a long wait, and the waiter had asked for a name: 'Kennedy,'
Bun said briskly, rocking back on his heels, and the next instant half the staff was scrambling to clear a table.
And maybe it was these old associations which were clicking around in my mind or maybe it was that the only funerals I had ever seen were televised events, affairs of state: in any case, the funeral procession-long, black, rain-splashed cars, Mr Vanderfeller's Benrley among them – was linked for me in dreamlike fashion to another funeral and another, far more famous motorcade.
Slowly we rolled along. Open cars of flowers – like convertibles in some nightmare Rose Parade – crept behind the curtained hearse. Gladiola, dyed chrysanthemum, sprays of palm. The wind was blowing hard, and garish petals shook loose and tumbled back among the cars, sticking to the damp windshields like bits of confetti.
The cemetery was on a highway. We pulled over and got out of the Mustang (flat clack of car doors) and stood blinking on the littered shoulder. Cars whooshed past on the asphalt, not ten feet away.
It was a big cemetery, windy and flat and anonymous. The stones were laid out in rows like tract homes. The uniformed driver of the funeral-home Lincoln walked around to open the door for Mrs Corcoran. She was carrying – I didn't know why a small bouquet of rosebuds. Patrick offered her an arm and she slipped a gloved hand in the crook of his elbow, inscrutable behind her dark glasses, calm as a bride.
The back doors of the hearse were opened and the coffin slid out. Silently, the party drifted after it as it was borne aloft into the open field, bobbing across the sea of grass like a little boat.
Yellow ribbons fluttered gaily from the lid. The sky was hostile and enormous. We passed one grave, a child's, from which grinned a faded plastic jack-o'-lantern.
A green striped canopy, of the sort used for lawn parties, was set up over the grave. There was something vacuous and stupid about it, flapping out there in the middle of nowhere, something empty, banal, brutish. We stopped, stood, in awkward little groups. Somehow I had thought there would be more than this.
Bits of litter chewed up by the mowers lay scattered on the grass.
There were cigarette butts, a Twix wrapper, recognizable.
This is stupid, I thought, with a sudden rush of panic. How did this happen:'
Traffic washed past up on the expressway.
The grave was almost unspeakably horrible. I had never seen one before. It was a barbarous thing, a blind clayey hole with folding chairs for the family teetering on one side and raw dirt heaped on the other. My God, I thought. I was starting to see everything, all at once, with a blistering clarity. Why bother with the coffin, the awning or any of it if they were just going to dump him, shovel the dirt in, go home? Was this all there was to it? To get rid of him like a piece of garbage?
Bun, I thought, oh, Bun, I'm sorry.
The minister ran through the service fast, his bland face tinted green beneath the canopy. Julian was there – 1 saw him now, looking towards the four of us. First Francis, and then Charles and Camilla, moved to go stand with him but I didn't care, I was in a daze. The Corcorans sat very quietly, hands in laps: how can they just sit there? I thought, by that awful pit, do nothing? It was Wednesday. On Wednesdays at ten we had Greek Prose Composition and that was where we all ought to have been now.
The coffin lay dumbly by the grave. I knew they wouldn't open it, but I wished they would. It was just starting to dawn on me that I would never see him again.
The pallbearers stood in a dark row behind the coffin, like a chorus of elders in a tragedy. Henry was the youngest one. He stood there quietly, his hands folded before him – big, white, scholarly hands, capable and well-kept, the same hands that had dug in Bunny's neck for a pulse and rolled his head back and forth on its poor broken stem while the rest of us leaned over the edge, breathless, watching. Even from that distance we could see the terrible angle of his neck, the shoe turned the wrong way, the trickle of blood from nose and mouth. He pulled back the eyelids with his thumb, leaning close, careful not to touch the eyeglasses which were skewed on top of Bunny's head. One leg jerked in a solitary spasm which quieted gradually to a twitch and then stopped. Camilla's wristwatch had a second hand. We saw them silently conferring. Climbing up the hill after her, bracing his knee with his palm, he'd wiped his hands on his trousers and answered our clamorous whispers – dead? is he-? with the brief impersonal nod of a doctor…
– O Lord we beseech you, that while we lament the departure of our brother Edmund Grayden Corcoran your servant out of this life, we bear in mind that we are most certainly ready to follow him. Give us grace to make ready for that last hour, and protect us against a sudden and unprovided death…
He hadn't seen it coming at all. He hadn't even understood, there wasn't time. Teetering back as if on the edge of the swimming pool: comic yodel, windmilling arms. Then the surprised nightmare of falling. Someone who didn't know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn't believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him.
Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.
…,' am the Resurrection and the life; he who believeth in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die…
The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the grave with long, creaking straps. Henry's muscles quivered with the effort; his jaw was clenched tight. Sweat had soaked through to the back of his jacket.
I felt in the pocket of my jacket to make sure the painkillers were still there. It was going to be a long ride home.
The straps were pulled up. The minister blessed the grave and then sprinkled it with holy water. Dirt and dark. Mr Corcoran, his face buried in his hands, sobbed monotonously. The awning rattled in the wind.
The first spadeful of earth. The thud of it on the hollow lid gave me a sick, black, empty feeling. Mrs Corcoran – Patrick on one side, sober Ted on the other stepped forward. With a gloved hand she tossed the little bouquet of roses into the grave.
Slowly, slowly, with a drugged, fathomless calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged the hand across his chest, smearing mud upon his lapel, his tie, the starched immaculate white of his shirt.
I stared at him. So did Julian, and Francis, and the twins, with a kind of shocked horror. He seemed not to realize he had done anything out of the ordinary. He stood there perfectly still, the wind ruffling his hair and the dull light glinting from the rims of his glasses.
My memories of the Corcorans' post-funeral get-together are very foggy, due possibly to the handful of mixed painkillers I swallowed on the way there. But even morphia could not fully dull the horror of this event. Julian was there, which was something of a blessing; he drifted through the party like a good angel, making graceful small talk, knowing exactly the right thing to say to everyone, and behaving with such heavenly charm and diplomacy towards the Corcorans (whom he in fact disliked and vice versa) that even Mrs Corcoran was mollified. Besides – the pinnacle of glory as far as the Corcorans were concerned – it turned out that he was an old acquaintance of Paul Vanderfeller's, and Francis, who happened to be nearby, said he hoped he never forgot the expression on Mr Corcoran's face when Vanderfeller recognized Julian and greeted him ('European-style,' as Mrs Corcoran was heard explaining to a neighbor) with an embrace and a kiss on the cheek.
The little Corcorans – who seemed oddly elated by the morning's sad events – skidded around in hilarious spirits: throwing croissants, shrieking with laughter, chasing through the crowd with a horrible toy that made an explosive noise like a fart. The caterers had screwed up as well – too much liquor, not enough food, a recipe for certain trouble. Ted and his wife fought without stopping. Bram Guernsey was sick on a linen sofa. Mr Corcoran swung to and fro between euphoria and the wildest of despairs.
After a bit of this, Mrs Corcoran went up to the bedroom, and came down again with a look on her face that was terrible to see.
In low tones, she told her husband that there had been 'a burglary,' a remark which – repeated by a well-meaning eavesdropper to his neighbor – spread rapidly around the room and generated a flurry of unwanted concern. When had it happened?
What was missing? Had the police been called? People abandoned their conversations and gravitated towards her in a murmuring swarm. She evaded their questions masterfully, with a martyred air. No, she said, there was no point in calling the police: the missing items were small things, of sentimental value, and of no use to anyone but herself.
Cloke found occasion to leave not long after this. And though no one said much about it, Henry too had left. Almost immediately after the funeral he'd collected his bags, got in his car, and driven away, with only the most perfunctory of goodbyes to the Corcorans and without a word to Julian, who was very anxious to talk to him. 'He looks wretched,' he said to Camilla and me (I unresponsive, deep in my Dalmane stupor). 'I believe he should see a doctor.'
'The last week has been hard on him,' said Camilla.
'Certainly. But I think Henry is a more sensitive fellow than we often give him credit for being. In many ways it's hard to imagine that he'll ever get over this. He and Edmund were closer than I think you realize.' He sighed. That was a peculiar poem he read, wasn't it? I would have suggested something from the Phaedo.'
Things started to break up around two in the afternoon. We could have stayed for supper, could have stayed – if Mr Corcoran's drunken invitations held true (Mrs Corcoran's frosty smile behind his back informed us that they did not) – indefinitely, friends of the family, sleeping on our very own cots down in the basement; welcome to join in the life of the Corcoran household and share freely in its daily joys and sorrows: family holidays, babysitting the little ones, pitching in occasionally with the household chores, working together, as a team (he emphasized) which was the Corcoran way. It would not be a soft life – he was not soft with his boys – but it would be an almost unbelievably enriching one in terms of things like character, and pluck, and fine moral standards, the latter of which he did not expect that many of our parents had taken the trouble to teach us.
It was four o'clock before we finally got away. Now, for some reason, it was Charles and Camilla who weren't speaking. They'd fought about something – I'd seen them arguing in the yard and all the way home, in the back seat, they sat side by side and stared straight ahead, their arms folded across their chests in what I am sure they did not realize was a comically identical fashion.
It felt as if I'd been away longer than I had. My room seemed abandoned and small, like it had stood empty for weeks. I opened the window and lay on my unmade bed. The sheets smelled musty. It was twilight.
Finally it was over but I felt strangely let down. I had classes on Monday: Greek and French. I hadn't been to French in nearly three weeks and the thought of it gave me a twinge of anxiety.
Final papers. I rolled over on my stomach. Exams. And summer vacation in a month and a half, and where on earth was I going to spend it? Working for Dr Roland? Pumping gas in Piano?
I got up and took another Dalmane and lay down again.
Outside it was nearly dark. Through the walls I could hear my neighbor's stereo: David Bowie. 'This is Ground Control to Major Tom…'
I stared at the shadows on the ceiling.
In some strange country between dream and waking, I found myself in a cemetery, not the one Bunny was buried in but a different one, much older, and very famous – thick with hedges and evergreens, its cracked marble pavilions choked with vines.
I was walking along a narrow flagstone path. As I turned a corner, the white blossoms of an unexpected hydrangea – luminous clouds, floating pale in the shadows – brushed against my cheek.
I was looking for the tomb of a famous writer – Marcel Proust, I think, or maybe George Sand. Whoever it was, I knew they were buried in that place, but it was so overgrown I could hardly see the names on the stones, and it was getting dark besides.
I found myself at the top of a hill in a dark grove of pines. A smudged, smoky valley lay far beneath. I turned and looked back the way I'd come: a prickle of marble spires, dim mausoleums, pale in the growing darkness. Far below, a tiny light – a lantern, maybe, or a flashlight – bobbed towards me through the crowd of gravestones. I leaned forward to see more clearly, and then was startled by a crash in the shrubbery behind me.
It was the baby the Corcorans called Champ. It had tumbled the length of its body and was trying to stagger to its feet; after a moment it gave up and lay still, barefoot, shivering, its belly heaving in and out. It was wearing nothing but a plastic diaper and there were long ugly scratches on its arms and legs. I stared at it, aghast. The Corcorans were thoughtless but this was unconscionable; those monsters, I thought, those imbeciles, they just went off and left it here all by itself.
The baby was whimpering, its legs mottled blue with cold.
Clutched in one fat starfish of a hand was the plastic airplane which had come with its Happy Meal. I bent down to see if it was okay but as I did I heard, very near, the wry, ostentatious clearing of a throat.
What happened next took place in a flash. Looking over my shoulder I had only the most fleeting impression of the figure looming behind me, but the glimpse I got struck me stumbling backwards, screaming, falling down and down and down until at last I hit my own bed, which rushed up from the dark to meet me. The jolt knocked me awake. Trembling, I lay flat on my back for a moment, then scrambled for the light.
Desk, door, chair. I lay back, still trembling. Though his features had been clotted and ruined, with a thick, scabbed quality I that I did not like to remember even with the light on – still, 1 had known very well who it was, and in the dream he knew I knew.
After what we'd been through in the previous weeks, it was no wonder we were all a little sick of one another. For the first few days we stayed pretty much to ourselves, except in class and in the dining halls; with Bun dead and buried, -I suppose, there was much less to talk about, and no reason to stay up until four or five in the morning.
I felt strangely free. I took walks; saw some movies by myself; went to an off-campus party on Friday night, where I stood on the back porch of some teacher's house and drank beer and heard a girl whisper about me to another girl, 'He looks so sad, don't you think?' It was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars.
The girl was pretty, the bright-eyed, ebullient type I always go for. She struck up a conversation, and I could have gone home with her; but it was enough just to flirt, in the tender, uncertain way tragic characters do in films (shell-shocked veteran or brooding young widower; attracted to the young stranger yet haunted by a dark past which she in her innocence cannot share) and have the pleasure of watching the stars of empathy bloom in her kind eyes; feeling her sweet wish to rescue me from myself (and, oh, my dear, I thought, if you knew what a job you'd be taking on, if you only knew!); knowing that if I wanted to go home with her, I could.
Which I did not. Because – no matter what kindhearted strangers thought -1 was in need of neither company nor comfort.
All I wanted was to be alone. After the par. ty I didn't go to my room but to Dr Roland's office, where I knew no one would think to look for me. At night and on weekends it was wonderfully quiet, and once we got back from Connecticut I spent a great deal of time there – reading, napping on his couch, doing his work and my own.
At that time of night, even the janitors had left. The building was dark. I locked the office door behind me. The lamp on Dr Roland's desk cast a warm, buttery circle of light and, after turning the radio on low to the classical station in Boston, I settled on the couch with my French grammar. Later, when I got sleepy, there would be a mystery novel, a cup of tea if I felt like it. Dr Roland's bookshelves glowed warm and mysterious in the lamplight. Though I wasn't doing anything wrong, it seemed to me that I was sneaking around somehow, leading a secret life which, pleasant though it was, was bound to catch up with me sooner or later.
Between the twins, discord still reigned. At lunch they would sometimes arrive as much as an hour apart. I sensed that the fault lay with Charles, who was surly and uncommunicative and – as lately was par for the course – drinking a little more than was good for him. Francis claimed to know nothing about it, but I had an idea he knew more than he was saying.
I had not spoken to Henry since the funeral nor even seen him. He didn't show up at meals and wasn't answering the telephone. At lunch on Saturday, I said: 'Do you suppose Henry's all right?'
'Oh, he's fine,' said Camilla, busy with knife and fork.
'How do you know?'
She paused, the fork in mid-air; her glance was like a light turned suddenly into my face. 'Because I just saw him.'
'Where?'
'At his apartment. This morning,' she said, going back to her lunch.
'So how is he?'
'Okay. A little shaky still, but all right.'
Beside her, chin in hand, Charles glowered down at his untouched plate.
Neither of the twins was at dinner that night. Francis was talkative and in a good mood. Just back from Manchester and loaded with shopping bags, he showed me his purchases one by one: jackets, socks, suspenders, shirts in half a dozen different stripes, a fabulous array of neckties, one of which – a greeny-bronze silk with tangerine polka dots – was a present for me. (Francis was always generous with his clothes. He gave Charles and me his old suits by the armload; he was taller than Charles, and thinner than both of us, and we would have them altered by a tailor in town. I still wear a lot of those suits: Sulka, Aquascutum, Gieves and Hawkes.)
He had been to the bookstore, too. He had a biography of Cortes; a translation of Gregory of Tours; a study of Victorian murderesses, put out by the Harvard University Press. He had also bought a gift for Henry: a corpus of Mycenaean inscriptions from Knossos.
I looked through it. It was an enormous book. There was no text, only photograph after photograph of broken tablets with the inscriptions – in Linear B – reproduced in facsimile in the bottom. Some of the fragments had only a single character.
'He'll like this,' I said.
'Yes, I think he will,' said Francis. 'It was the most boring book I could find. I thought I might drop it off after dinner.'
'Maybe I'll come along,' I said.
Francis lit a cigarette. 'You can if you like. I'm not going in.
I'm just going to leave it on the porch.'
'Oh, well, then,' I said, oddly relieved.
I spent all day Sunday in Dr Roland's office, from ten in the morning on. Around eleven that night I realized I'd had nothing to eat all day, nothing but coffee and some crackers from the Student Services office, so I got my things, locked up, and walked down to see if the Rathskeller was still open.
It was. The Rat was an extension of the snack bar, with lousy food mostly but there were a couple of pinball machines, and a jukebox, and though you couldn't buy any kind of a real drink there they would give you a plastic cup of watered-down beer for only sixty cents.
That night it was loud and very crowded. The Rat made me nervous. To people like Jud and Frank, who were there every time the doors opened, it was the nexus of the universe. They were there now, at the center of an enthusiastic table of toadies and hangers-on, playing, with froth-mouthed relish, some game which apparently involved their trying to stab each other in the hand with a piece of broken glass.
I pushed my way to the front and ordered a slice of pizza and a beer. While I was waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven, I saw Charles, alone, at the end of the bar.
I said hello and he turned halfway. He was drunk; I could see it in the way he was sitting, not in an inebriated manner per se but as if a different person – a sluggish, sullen one – had occupied his body. 'Oh,' he said. 'Good. It's you.'
I wondered what he was doing in this obnoxious place, by himself, drinking bad beer when at home he had a cabinet full of the best liquor he could possibly want.
He was saying something I couldn't make out over the music and shouting. 'What?' I said, leaning closer.
'I said, could I borrow some money.'
'How much?'
He did some counting on his fingers. 'Five dollars.'
I gave it to him. He was not so drunk that he was able to accept it without repeated apologies and promises to repay it.
'I meant to go to the bank on Friday,' he said.
'It's okay.'
'No, really.' Carefully, he took a crumpled check from his pocket.
'My Nana sent me this. I can cash it on Monday no problem.'
'Don't worry,' I said. 'What are you doing here?'
'Felt like going out.'
'Where's Camilla?'
'Don't know.'
He was not so drunk, now, that he couldn't make it home on his own; but the Rat didn't close for another two hours, and I didn't much like the idea of his staying on by himself. Since Bunny's funeral several strangers – including the secretary in the Social Sciences office – had approached me and tried to pick me for information. I had frozen them out, a trick I'd learned from Henry (no expression, pitiless gaze, forcing intruder to retreat in embarrassment); it was a nearly infallible tactic but dealing with these people when you were sober was one thing, and quite another if you were drunk. I wasn't drunk, but I didn't feel like hanging around the Rat until Charles got ready to leave, either.
Any effort to draw him away would, I knew, serve only to entrench him further; when he was drunk he had a perverse way of always wanting to do exactly the opposite of what anyone suggested.
'Does Camilla know you're here?' I asked him.
He leaned over, palm on the bar to brace himself. 'What?'
I asked him again, louder this time. His face darkened. 'None of her business,' he said, and turned back to his beer.
My food came. I paid for it and told Charles, 'Excuse me, I'll be right back.'
The men's room was in a dank, smelly hallway that ran perpendicular to the bar. I turned down it, out of Charles's view, to the pay phone on the wall. Some girl was on it, though, talking in German. I waited for ages, and was just about to leave when finally she hung up, and I dug in my pocket for a quarter and dialed the twins' number.
The twins weren't like Henry; if they were home, they would generally answer the phone. But no one did answer. I dialed again and glanced at my watch. Eleven-twenty. I couldn't think where Camilla would be, that time of night, unless she was on her way over to get him.
I hung up the phone. The quarter tinkled into the slot. I pocketed it and headed back to Charles at the bar. For a moment I thought he had just moved somewhere into the crowd, but after standing there a moment or two I realized I wasn't seeing him because he wasn't there. He had drunk the rest of his beer and left.
Hampden, suddenly, was green as Heaven again. Most of the flowers had been killed by the snow except the late bloomers, honeysuckle and lilac and so forth, but the trees had come back bushier than ever, it seemed, deep and dark, foliage so dense that the way that ran through the woods to North Hampden was suddenly very narrow, green pushing in on both sides and shutting out the sunlight on the dank, buggy path.
On Monday I arrived at the Lyceum a little early and, in Julian's office, found the windows open and Henry arranging peonies in a white vase. He looked as if he'd lost ten or fifteen pounds, which was nothing to someone Henry's size but still I saw the thinness in his face and even in his wrists and hands; it wasn't that, though, but something else, indefinable, that somehow had changed since I had seen him last.
Julian and he were talking – in jocular, mocking, pedantic Latin – like a couple of priests tidying the vestry before a mass.
A dark smell of brewing tea hung strong in the air.
Henry glanced up. 'Salve, amice,' he said, and a subtle animation flickered in his rigid features, usually so locked up, and distant: 'Valesne? Quid est rei?'
'You look well,' I said to him, and he did.
He inclined his head slightly. His eyes, which had been murky and dilated while he was ill, were now the clearest of blues.
'Benigne diets,' he said. 'I feel much better.'
Julian was clearing away the last of the rolls and jam – he and Henry had had breakfast together, quite a large one from the looks of it – and he laughed and said something I didn't quite catch, some Horatian-sounding tag about meat being good for sorrow. I was glad to see that he seemed quite his bright, serene old self. He'd been almost inexplicably fond of Bunny, but strong emotion was distasteful to him, and a display of feeling normal by modern standards would to him have seemed exhibitionist and slightly shocking: I was fairly sure this death had affected him more than he let show. Then again, I suspect that Julian's cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death kept him from feeling too sad about anything for very long.
Francis arrived, and then Camilla; no Charles, he was probably in bed with a hangover. We all sat down at the big round table.
'And now,' said Julian, when everything was quiet, 'I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?'
Those days, I took an enormous relish in my new-found freedom.
Now it appeared that we were safe, a huge darkness had lifted from my mind. The world was a fresh and wonderful place to me, green and bracing and entirely new, and I looked at it now with fresh new eyes.
I went on a lot of long walks by myself, through North Hampden, down to the Battenkill River. I liked especially going to the little country grocery in North Hampden (whose ancient proprietors, mother and son, were said to have been the inspiration for a famous and frequently anthologized horror story from the 19505) to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons – a waste of time, I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.
On one of those afternoons I wandered by Henry's house and found him in his hack yard digging a flower bed. He had on his gardening clothes – old trousers, shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow – and in the wheelbarrow were tomato plants and cucumber, flats of strawberry and sunflower and scarlet geranium.
Three or four rosebushes with their roots tied in burlap were propped against the fence.
I let myself in through the side gate. I was quite drunk. 'Hello,'
I said, 'hello, hello, hello.'
He stopped and leaned on his shovel. A pale flush of sunburn glowed on the bridge of his nose.
'What are you doing?' I said.
'Putting out some lettuces.'
There was a long silence, in which I noticed the ferns he'd dug up the afternoon we killed Bunny. Spleenwort, I remembered him calling them; Camilla had remarked on the witchiness of the name. He had planted them on the shady side of the house, near the cellar, where they grew dark and foamy in the cool.
I lurched back a bit, caught myself on the gatepost. 'Are you going to stay here this summer?' I said.
He looked at me closely, dusted his hands on his trousers. 'I think so,' he said. 'What about you?'
'I don't know,' I said. I hadn't mentioned it to anyone, but only the day before I had put in an application at the Student Services office for an apartment-sitting job, in Brooklyn, for a history professor who was studying in England over the summer.
It sounded ideal – a rent-free place to stay in, nice part of Brooklyn, and no duties except watering the plants and taking care of a pair of Boston terriers, who couldn't go to England because of the quarantine. My experience with Leo and the mandolins had made me wary, but the clerk had assured me that no, this was different, and she'd shown me a file of letters from happy students who had previously held the job. I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city – any city, especially a strange one liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
Henry was still looking at me. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. 'You know,' he said, 'it's pretty early in the afternoon.'
I laughed. I knew what he was thinking: first Charles, now me.
'I'm okay,' I said.
'Are you?'
'Of course.'
He went back to his work, sticking the shovel into the ground, stepping down hard on one side of the blade with a khaki-gaitered foot. His suspenders made a black X across his back. 'Then you can give me a hand with these lettuces,' he said. 'There's another spade in the toolshed.'
Late that night – two a. m. – my house chairperson pounded on my door and yelled that I had a phone call. Dazed with sleep, I put on my bathrobe and stumbled downstairs.
It was Francis. 'What do you want?' I said.
'Richard, I'm having a heart attack,' I looked with one eye at my house chairperson – Veronica, Valerie, I forget her name – who was standing by the phone with her arms folded over her chest, head to one side in an attitude of concern. I turned my back. 'You're all right,' I said into the receiver. 'Go back to sleep.'
'Listen to me.' His voice was panicky. 'I'm having a heart attack. I think I'm going to die.'
'No you're not.'
'I have all the symptoms. Pain in the left arm. Tightness in chest. Difficulty breathing.'
'What do you want me to do?'
'I want you to come over here and drive me to the hospital.'
'Why don't you call the ambulance?' I was so sleepy my eyes kept closing.
'Because I'm scared of the ambulance,' said Francis, but I couldn't hear the rest because Veronica, whose ears had pricked up at the word ambulance, broke in excitedly.
'If you need a paramedic, the guys up at the security booth know CPR,' she said eagerly. They're on call from midnight to six. They also run a van service to the hospital. If you want me to I'll-'
'I don't need a paramedic,' I said. Francis was repeating my name frantically at the other end.
'Here I am,' I said.
'Richard?' His voice was weak and breathy. 'Who are you talking to? What's wrong?'
'Nothing. Now listen to me '
'Who said something about paramedic?'
'Nobody. Now listen. Listen,' I said, as he tried to talk over me. 'Calm down. Tell me what's wrong.'
'I want you to come over. I feel really bad. I think my heart just stopped beating for a moment. I '
'Are drugs involved?' said Veronica in a confidential tone.
'Look,' I said to her, 'I wish you'd be quiet and let me hear what this person is trying to say.'
'Richard?' said Francis. 'Will you just come get me? Please?'
There was a brief silence.
'All right,' I said, 'give me a few minutes,' and I hung up the phone.
At Francis's apartment I found him dressed except for his shoes, lying on his bed. 'Feel my pulse,' he said.
I did, to humor him. It was quick and strong. He lay there limply, eyelids fluttering. 'What do you think is wrong with me?' he said.
'I don't know,' I said. He was a bit flushed but he really didn't look that bad. Still – though it would be insane, I knew, to mention it at that moment – it was possible that he had food poisoning or appendicitis or something.
'Do you think I should go into the hospital?'
'You tell me.'
He lay there a moment. 'I don't know. I really think I should,' he said.
'All right, then. If it'll make you feel better. Come on. Sit up.'
He was not too ill to smoke in the car all the way to the hospital.
We circled around the drive and pulled up by the wide floodlit entrance marked Emergency. I stopped the car. We sat there for a moment.
'Are you sure you want to do this?' I said.
He looked at me with astonishment and contempt.
'You think I'm faking,' he said.
'No I don't,' I said, surprised; and, to be honest, the thought hadn't occurred to me. 'I just asked you a question.'
He got out of the car and slammed the door.
We had to wait about half an hour. Francis filled out his chart and sat sullenly reading back issues of Smithsonian magazine. But when the nurse finally called his name, he didn't stand up.
'That's you,' I said.
He still didn't move.
'Well, go on,' I said.
He didn't answer. He had a sort of wild look in his eye.
'Look here,' he finally said. 'I've changed my mind.'
'What?'
'I said I've changed my mind. I want to go home.'
The nurse was standing in the doorway, listening to this exchange with interest.
'That's stupid,' I said to him, irritated. 'You've waited this ^ long.' 1 'I changed my mind.'
'You were the one who wanted to come.'
I knew this would shame him. Annoyed, avoiding my gaze, he slammed down his magazine and stalked through the double doors without looking back.
About ten minutes later an exhausted-looking doctor in a scrub shirt poked his head into the waiting room. I was the only person there.
'Hi,' he said curtly. 'You with Mr Abernathy?'
'Yes,' 'Would you step back with me for a moment, please?'
I got up and followed him. Francis was sitting on the edge of an examining table, fully clad, bent almost double and looking miserable.
'Mr Abernathy will not put on a gown,' said the doctor. 'And he won't let the nurse take any blood. I don't know how he expects us to examine him if he won't cooperate.'
There was a silence. The lights in the examining room were very bright. I was horribly embarrassed.
The doctor walked over to a sink and began to wash his hands.
'You guys been doing any drugs tonight?' he said casually.
I felt my face getting red. 'No,' I said.
'A little cocaine? Some speed, maybe?'
'No.'
'If your friend here took something, it would help a lot if we knew what it was.'
'Francis,' I said weakly, and was silenced by a glare of hatred: et to, Brute.
'How dare you,' he snapped. 'I didn't take anything. You know very well I didn't.'
'Calm down,' said the doctor. 'Nobody's accusing you of anything. But your behavior is a little irrational tonight, don't you think?'
'No,' said Francis, after a confused pause.
The doctor rinsed his hands and dried them on a towel.
'No?' he said. 'You come here in the middle of the night saying you're having a heart attack and then you won't let anyone near you? How do you expect me to know what is wrong with you?'
Francis didn't answer. He was breathing hard. His eyes were cast downward and his face was a bright pink.
'I'm not a mind reader,' the doctor said at last. 'But in my experience, somebody your age saying they're having a heart attack, it's one of two things.'
'What?' I finally said.
'Well. Amphetamine poisoning, for one.'
'It's not that,' Francis said angrily, glancing up.
'All right, all right. Something else it could be is a panic disorder.'
'What's that?' I said, carefully avoiding looking in Francis's direction.
'Like an anxiety attack. A sudden rush of fear. Heart palpitations.
Trembling and sweating. It can be quite severe. People often think they're dying.'
Francis didn't say anything.
'Well?' said the doctor. 'Do you think that might be it?'
'I don't know,' said Francis, after another confused pause.
The doctor leaned back against the sink. 'Do you feel afraid a lot?' he said. 'For no good reason you can think of?'
By the time we left the hospital, it was a quarter after three.
Francis lit a cigarette in the parking lot. In his left hand he was grinding a piece of paper on which the doctor had written the name of a psychiatrist in town.
'Are you mad?' he said when we were in the car.
It was the second time he had asked. 'No,' I said.
'I know you arc.'
The streets were dream-lit, deserted. The car top was down.
We drove past dark houses, turned onto a covered bridge. The tires thumped on the wooden planks.
'Please don't be mad at me,' said Francis.
I ignored him. 'Are you going to see that psychiatrist?' I said.
'It wouldn't do any good. I know what's bothering me.'
I didn't say anything. When the word psychiatrist had come up, I had been alarmed. I was not a great believer in psychiatry but still, who knew what a trained eye might see in a personality test, a dream, even a slip of the tongue?
'I went through analysis when I was a kid,' Francis said. He sounded on the verge of tears. 'I guess I must've been eleven or twelve. My mother was on some kind of Yoga kick and she yanked me out of my old school in Boston and packed me off to this terrible place in Switzerland. The Something Institute.
Everyone wore sandals with socks. There were classes in dervish dancing and the Kabbalah. All the White Level – that was what they called my grade, or form, whatever it was – had to do Chinese Quigong every morning and have four hours of Reichian analysis a week. I had to have six.'
'How do you analyze a twelve-year-old kid?'
'Lots of word association. Also weird games they made you play with anatomically correct dolls. They'd caught me and a couple of little French girls trying to sneak off the grounds – we were half-starved, macrobiotic food, you know, we were only trying to get down to the bureau de tabac to buy some chocolates but of course they insisted it had somehow been some sort of sexual incident. Not that they minded that sort of thing but they liked you to tell them about it and I was too ignorant to oblige.
The girls knew more about such matters and had made up some wild French story to please the shrink – menage a trots in some haystack, you can't imagine how sick they thought I was for I repressing, this. Though I would've told them anything if I thought they'd send me home.' He laughed, without much humor. 'God. I remember the head of the Institute asking me once what character from fiction I most identified with, and I said Davy Balfour from Kidnapped.'
We were rounding a corner. Suddenly, in the wash of the headlights, a large animal loomed in my path. I hit the brakes hard. For half a moment I found myself looking through the windshield at a pair of glowing eyes. Then, in a flash, it bounded away.
We sat for a moment, shaken, at a full stop.
'What was that?' said Francis.
'I don't know. A deer maybe.'
'That wasn't a deer.'
'Then a dog.'
'It looked like some kind of a cat to me.'
Actually, that was what it had looked like to me too. 'But it was too big,' I said.
'Maybe it was a cougar or something,' 'They don't have those around here.'
'They used to. They called them catamounts. Cat-o-the Mountain. Like Catamount Street in town.'
The night breeze was chilly. A dog barked somewhere. There wasn't much traffic on that road at night.
I put the car in gear.
Francis had asked me not to tell anyone about our excursion to the emergency room but at the twins' apartment on Sunday night I had a little too much to drink and I found myself telling the story to Charles in the kitchen after dinner.
Charles was sympathetic. He'd had some drinks himself but not as many as me. He was wearing an old seersucker suit which hung very loosely on him – he, too, had lost some weight – and a frayed old Sulka tie.
'Poor Francois,' he said. 'He's such a fruitcake. Is he going to see that shrink?'
'I don't know.'
He shook a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes that Henry had left on the counter. 'If I were you,' he said, tapping the cigarette on the inside of his wrist and craning to make sure that no one was in the hall, 'if I were you, I would advise him not to mention this to Henry.'
I waited for him to continue. He lit the cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke.
'I mean, I've been drinking a bit more than I should,' he said quietly. 'I'm the first to admit that. But my God, I was the one who had to deal with the cops, not him. I'm the one who has to deal with Marion, for Christ sake. She calls me almost every night.
Let him try talking to her for a while and see how he feels… If I wanted to drink a bottle of whiskey a day I don't see what he could say about it. I told him it was none of his business, and none of his business what you did, either.'
The?'
He looked at me with a blank, childish expression. Then he laughed.
'Oh, you hadn't heard?' he said. 'Now it's you, too. Drinking too much. Wandering around drunk in the middle of the day.
Rolling down the road to ruin.'
I was startled. He laughed again at the look on my face but then we heard footsteps and the tinkle of ice in an advancing cocktail – Francis. He poked his head into the doorway and began to gabble good-naturedly about something or other, and after a few minutes we picked up our drinks and followed him back to the living room.
That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.
Henry was in excellent spirits. Relaxed, sitting in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, he was alert, well rested, quick with a laugh or a clever reply. Camilla looked enchanting.
She wore a narrow sleeveless dress, salmon-colored, which exposed a pair of pretty collarbones and the sweet frail vertebrae at the base of her neck – lovely kneecaps, lovely ankles, lovely bare, strong-muscled legs. The dress exaggerated her spareness of body, her unconscious and slightly masculine grace of posture; I loved her, loved the luscious, stuttering way she would blink while telling a story, or the way (faint echo of Charles) that she held a cigarette, caught in the knuckles of her bitten-nailed fingers.
She and Charles seemed to have made up. They didn't talk much, but the old silent thread of twinship seemed in place again. They perched on the arms of each other's chairs, and fetched drinks back and forth (a peculiar twin-ritual, complex and charged with meaning). Though I did not fully understand these observances, they were generally a sign that all was well. She, if anything, seemed the more conciliatory party, which seemed to disprove the hypothesis that he was at fault.
The mirror over the fireplace was the center of attention, a cloudy old mirror in a rosewood frame; nothing remarkable, they'd got it at a yard sale, but it was the first thing one saw when one stepped inside and now even more conspicuous because it was cracked – a dramatic splatter that radiated from the center like a spider's web. How that had happened was such a funny story that Charles had to tell it twice, though it was his reenactment of it that was funny, really – spring housecleaning, sneezing and miserable with dust, sneezing himself right off his stepladder and landing on the mirror, which had just been washed and was on the floor.
'What I don't understand,' said Henry, 'is how you got it back up again without the glass falling out.'
'It was a miracle. I wouldn't touch it now. Don't you think it looks kind of wonderful?'
Which it did, there was no denying it, the spotty dark glass shattered like a kaleidoscope and refracting the room into a hundred pieces.
Not until it was time to leave did I discover, quite by accident, how the mirror had actually been broken. I was standing on the hearth, my hand resting on the mantel, when I happened to look into the fireplace. The fireplace did not work. It had a screen and a pair of andirons, but the logs that lay across them were furry with dust. But now, glancing down, I saw something else: silver sparkles, bright-needled splinters from the broken mirror, mixed with large, unmistakable shards of a gold-rimmed highball glass, the twin of the one in my own hand. They were heavy old glasses, an inch thick at the bottom. Someone had thrown this one hard, with a pretty good arm, from across the room, hard enough to break it to pieces and to shatter the looking-glass behind my head.
Two nights later, I was woken again by a knock at my door.
Confused, in a foul temper, I switched on the lamp and reached blinking for my watch. It was three o'clock. 'Who's there?' I said.
'Henry,' came the surprising reply.
I let him in, somewhat reluctantly. He didn't sit down. 'Listen,' he said. 'I'm sorry to disturb you, but this is very important. I have a favor to ask of you.'
His tone was quick and businesslike. It alarmed me. I sat down on the edge of my bed.
'Are you listening to me?'
'What is it?' I said.
'About fifteen minutes ago I got a call from the police. Charles is in jail. He has been arrested for drunk driving. I want you to go down and get him out.'
A prickle rose on the nape of my neck. 'What?' I said.
'He was driving my car. They got my name from the registration sticker. I have no idea what kind of condition he's in.' He reached into his pocket and handed me an unsealed envelope. 'I expect it's going to cost something to get him out, I don't know what.'
I opened the envelope. Inside was a check, blank except for Henry's signature, and a twenty-dollar bill.
'I already told the police that I lent him the car,' said Henry.
'If there's any question about that, have them call me.' He was standing by the window, looking out. 'In the morning I'll get in touch with a lawyer. All I want you to do is get him out of there as soon as you can.'
It took a moment or two for this to sink in.
'What about the money?' I said at last.
'Pay them whatever it costs,' 'I mean this twenty dollars.'
'You'll have to take a taxi. I took one over here. It's waiting downstairs.'
There was a long silence. I still wasn't awake. I was sitting there in just an undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts.
While I dressed, he stood at the window looking out at the dark meadow, hands clasped behind his back, oblivious to the jangle of clothes-hangers and my clumsy, sleep-dazed fumbling through the bureau drawers – serene, preoccupied; lost, apparently, in his own abstract concerns.
It wasn't until I'd dropped Henry off and was being driven, at a rapid clip, towards the dark center of town, that I realized how poorly I had been apprised of the situation I was heading into.
Henry hadn't told me a thing. Had there been an accident? For that matter, was anyone hurt? Besides, if this was such a big deal – and it was Henry's car, after all – why wasn't he coming, too?
A lone traffic light rocked on a wire over the empty intersection.
The jail, in Hampden town, was in an annex of the courthouse.
It was also the only building in the square that had any lights on that time of night. I told the taxi driver to wait and went inside.
Two policemen were sitting in a large, well-lit room. There were many filing cabinets, and metal desks behind partitions; an old-fashioned water cooler; a gumball machine from the Civitan Club ('Your Change Changes Things'). I recognized one of the policemen – a fellow with a red moustache – from the search parties. The two of them were eating fried chicken, the sort you buy from under heat lamps in convenience stores, and watching 'Sally Jessy Raphael' on a portable black-and-white TV.
'Hi,' I said.
They looked up.
'I came to see about getting my friend out of jail.'
The one with the red moustache wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. He was big and pleasant-looking, in his thirties. 'That's Charles Macaulay, I bet,' he said.
He said this as if Charles were an old friend of his. Maybe he was. Charles had spent a lot of time down here when the stuff with Bunny was going on. The cops, he said, had been nice to him. They'd sent out for sandwiches, bought him Cokes from the machine.
'You're not the guy I talked to on the phone,' said the other policeman. He was large and relaxed, about forty, with gray hair and a froglike mouth. 'Is that your car out there?'
I explained. They ate their chicken and listened: big, friendly guys, big police.385 on their hips. The walls were covered in government-issue posters: fight birth defects, hire veterans, REPORT MAIL FRAUD.
'Well, you know, we can't let you have the car,' said the policeman with the red moustache. 'Mr Winter is going to have to come down here and pick it up himself.'
'I don't care about the car. I just want to get my friend out of jail.'
The other policeman looked at his watch. 'Well,' he said, 'come back in about six hours, then.'
Was he joking? 'I have the money,' I said.
'We can't set bail. The judge will have to do that at the arraignment. Nine o'clock in the morning.'
Arraignment? My heart pumped. What the hell was that?
The cops were looking at me blandly as if to say, 'Is that all?'
'Can you tell me what happened?' I said.
'What?'
My voice sounded flat and strange to me. 'What exactly did he do?'
'State trooper pulled him over out on Deep Kill Road,' said the gray-haired policeman. He said it as if he were reading it. 'He was obviously intoxicated. He agreed to a Breathalyzer and failed it when it was administered. The trooper brought him down here and we put him in the lock-up. That was about two-twenty five a. m.'
Things still weren't clear, but for the life of me I couldn't think of the right questions to ask. Finally I said, 'Can I see him?'
'He's fine, son,' said the policeman with the red moustache.
'You can see him first thing in the morning.'
All smiles, very friendly. There was nothing more to say. I thanked them and left.
When I got outside the cab was gone. I still had fifteen dollars from Henry's twenty but to call another cab I'd have to go back inside the jail and I didn't want to do that. So I walked down Main Street to the south end, where there was a pay phone in front of the lunch counter. It didn't work.
So tired I was almost dreaming, I walked back to the square past the post office, past the hardware store, past the movie theater with its dead marquee: plate glass, cracked sidewalks, stars. Mountain cats in bas-relief prowled the friezes of the public library. I walked a long way, till the stores got sparse and the road was dark, walked on the deep singing shoulder of the highway till I got to the Greyhound bus station, sad in the moonlight, the first glimpse I'd ever had of Hampden. The terminal was closed. I sat outside, on a wooden bench beneath a yellow light bulb, waiting for it to open so I could go in and use the phone and have a cup of coffee.
The clerk – a fat man with lifeless eyes – came to unlock the place at six. We were the only people there. I went into the men's room and washed my face and had not one cup of coffee but two, which the clerk sold me grudgingly from a pot he'd brewed on a hot plate behind the counter.
The sun was up, it was hard to see much through the grime streaked windows. Defunct timetables papered the walls; cigarette butts and chewing gum were stomped deep into the linoleum. The doors of the phone booth were covered in finger 4 prints. I closed them behind me and dialed Henry's number, half-expecting he wouldn't answer but to my surprise he did, on the second ring.
'Where are you? What's the matter?' he said.
I explained what had happened. Ominous silence on the other end.
'Was he in a cell by himself?' he said at last.
'I don't know.'
'Was he conscious? I mean, could he talk?'
'I don't know.'
Another long silence.
'Look,' I said, 'he's going before the judge at nine. Why don't you meet me at the courthouse.'
Henry didn't answer for a moment. Then he said: 'It's best if you handle it. There are other considerations involved.'
'If there are other considerations I'd appreciate knowing what they are.'
'Don't be angry,' he said quickly. 'It's just that I've had to deal with the police so much. They know me already, and they know him Coo. Besides' – he paused – "I am afraid that I'm the last person Charles wants to see,' 'And why is that?'
'Because we quarreled last night. It's a long story,' he said as I tried to interrupt. 'But he was very upset when I saw him last.
And of all of us, I think you're on the best terms with him at the moment.'
'Hmph,' I said, though secretly I was mollified.
'Charles is very fond of you. You know that. Besides, the police don't know who you are. I don't think they'll be likely to associate you with that other business.'
'I don't see that it matters at this point.'
'I am afraid that it does matter. More than you might think.'
There was a silence, during which I felt acutely the hopelessness of ever trying to get to the bottom of anything with Henry.
He was like a propagandist, routinely withholding information, leaking it only when it served his purposes. 'What are you trying to say to me?' I said.
'Now's not the time to discuss it.'
'If you want me to go down there, you'd better tell me what you're talking about.'
When he spoke, his voice was crackly and distant. 'Let's just say that for a while things were much more touch-and-go than you realized. Charles has had a hard time. It's no one's fault really but he's had to shoulder more than his share of the burden.'
Silence.
'I am not asking much of you.'
Only that I do what you tell me, I thought as I hung up the telephone.
The courtroom was down the hall from the cells, through a pair of swinging doors with windows at the top. It looked very much like what I'd seen of the rest of the courthouse, circa 1950 or so, with pecky linoleum tiles and paneling that was yellowed and sticky-looking with honey-colored varnish.
I had not expected so many people would be there. There were two tables before the judge's bench, one with a couple of state troopers, the other with three or four unidentified men; a court reporter with her funny little typewriter; three more unidentified men in the spectators' area, sitting well apart from each other, as well as a poor haggard lady in a tan raincoat who looked like she was getting beat up by somebody on a pretty regular basis.
We rose for the judge. Charles's case was called first.
He padded through the doors like a sleepwalker, in his stocking feet, a court officer following close behind him. His face was blurry and thick. They'd taken his belt and tie as well as his shoes and he looked a little like he was in his pajamas.
The judge peered down at him. He was sour-faced, about sixty, with a thin mouth and big meaty jowls like a bloodhound's.
'You have an attorney?' he said, in a strong Vermont accent.
'No, sir,' said Charles.
'Wife or parent present?'
'No, sir.'
'Can you post bail?'
'No, sir,' Charles said. He looked sweaty and disoriented.
I stood up. Charles didn't see me but the judge did. 'Are you here to post bail for Mr Macaulay?' he said.
'Yes, I am.'
Charles turned to stare, lips parted, his expression as blank and trancelike as a twelve-year-old's.
'It'll be five hundred dollars you can pay it at the window down the hall to your left,' said the judge in a bored monotone.
'You'll have to appear again in two weeks and I suggest you bring a lawyer. Do you have a job for which you need your vehicle?'
One of the shabby middle-aged men at the front spoke up.
'It's not his car, Your Honor.'
The judge glowered at Charles, suddenly fierce. 'Is that correct?' he said.
The owner was contacted. A Henry Winter. Goes to school up at the college. He says he lent the vehicle to Mr Macaulay for the evening.'
The judge snorted. To Charles he said gruffly: 'Your license is suspended pending resolution and have Mr Winter here on the twenty-eighth.'
The whole business was amazingly quick. We were out of the courthouse by ten after nine.
The morning was damp and dewy, cold for May. Birds chattered in the black treetops. I was reeling with fatigue.
Charles hugged himself. 'Christ, it's cold,' he said.
Across the empty streets, across the square, they were just pulling the blinds up at the bank. 'Wait here,' I said. Till go call a cab.'
He caught me by the arm. He was still drunk, but his night of boozing had done more damage to his clothes than to anything else; his face was fresh and flushed as a child's. 'Richard,' he said.
'What?'
'You're my friend, aren't you?'
I was in no mood to stand around on the courthouse steps and listen to this sort of thing. 'Sure,' I said, and tried to disengage my arm.
But he only clutched me tighter. 'Good old Richard,' he said. "I know you are. I'm so glad it was you who came. I just want you to do me this one little favor.'
'What's that?'
'Don't take me home.'
'What do you mean?'
'Take me to the country. To Francis's. I don't have the key but Mrs Hatch could let me in or I could bust a window or something – no, listen. Listen to this. I could get in through the basement. I've done it millions of times. Wait,' he said as I tried to interrupt again. 'You could come, too. You could swing by school and get some clothes and '
'Hold on,' I said, for the third time. 'I can't take you anywhere.
I don't have a car.'
His face changed, and he let go my arm. 'Oh, right,' he said with sudden bitterness. 'Thanks a lot.'
'Listen to me. I can't. I don't have a car. I came down here in a taxicab.'
'We can go in Henry's.'
'No we can't. The police took the keys.'
His hands were shaking. He ran them through his disordered hair. 'Then come home with me. I don't want to go home by myself.' 1 'All right,' I said. I was so tired I was seeing spots. 'All right. j| Just wait. I'll call a cab.'
'No. No cab,' he said, lurching backwards. 'I don't feel so hot.
I think I'd rather walk.'
This walk, from the courthouse steps to Charles's apartment in North Hampden, was not an inconsiderable one. It was three miles, at least. A good portion of it lay along a stretch of highway.
Cars whooshed past in a rush of exhaust. I was dead tired. My head ached and my feet were like lead. But the morning air was cool and fresh and it seemed to bring Charles around a little.
About halfway, he stopped at the dusty roadside window of a Tastee Freeze, across the highway from the Veterans Hospital, and bought an ice-cream soda.
Our feet crunched on the gravel. Charles smoked a cigarette and drank his soda through a red-and-white-striped straw.
Blackflies whined around our ears.
'So you and Henry had an argument,' I said, just for something to say.
'Who told you? Him?'
'Yes.'
'I couldn't remember. It doesn't matter. I'm tired of him telling me what to do.'
'You know what I wonder,' I said.
'What?'
'Not why he tells us what to do. But why we always do what he says.'
'Beats me,' said Charles. 'It's not as if much good has come of it.'
'Oh, I don't know.'
'Are you kidding? The idea of that fucking bacchanal in the first place – who thought of that? Whose idea was it to take Bunny to Italy? Who the hell wrote that diary and left it lying around? The son of a bitch. I blame every bit of this on him.
Besides, you have no idea how close they were to finding us out.'
'Who?' I said, startled. 'The police?'
The people from the FBI. There was a lot towards the end we didn't tell the rest of you. Henry made me swear not to tell.'
'Why? What happened?'
He threw down his cigarette. 'Well, I mean, they had it confused,' he said. 'They thought Cloke was mixed up in it, they thought a lot of things. It's funny. We're so used to Henry. We don't realize sometimes how he looks to other people.'
'What do you mean?'
'Oh, I don't know. I can think of a million examples.' He laughed sleepily. 'I remember last summer, when Henry was so gung-ho about renting a farmhouse, driving with him to a realtor's office upstate. It was perfectly straightforward. He had a specific house in mind – big old place built in the i Soos, way out on some dirt road, tremendous grounds, servants' quarters, the whole bit. He even had the cash in hand. They must've talked for two hours. The realtor called up her manager at home and asked him to come down to the office. The manager asked Henry a million questions. Called every one of his references. Everything was in order but even then they wouldn't rent it to him.'
'Why?'
He laughed. 'Well, Henry looks a bit too good to be true, doesn't he? They couldn't believe someone his age, a college student, would pay so much for a place that big and isolated, just to live all by himself and study the Twelve Great Cultures.'
'What? They thought he was some kind of a crook?'
'They thought he wasn't entirely above-board, let's put it that way. Apparently the men from the FBI thought the same thing.
They didn't think he killed Bunny, but they thought he knew something he wasn't telling. Obviously there had been a disagreement in Italy. Marion knew that, Cloke knew it, even Julian did.
They even tricked me into admitting it, though I didn't tell that to Henry. If you ask me, I think what they really thought was that he and Bunny had some money sunk in Cloke's drug-dealing business. That trip to Rome was a big mistake. They could've done it inconspicuously but Henry spent a fortune, throwing money around like crazy, they lived in a palazzo, for Christ sake.
People remembered them everywhere they went. I mean, you know Henry, that's just the way he is but you have to look at it from their point of view. That illness of his must've looked pretty suspicious, too. Wiring a doctor in the States for Demerol. Plus those tickets to South America. Putting them on his credit card was about the stupidest thing he ever did.'
They found out about that?' I said, horrified.
'Certainly. When they suspect somebody is dealing drugs, the financial records are the first thing they check – and good God, of all places, South America. Luckily Henry's dad really does own some property down there. Henry was able to cook up something fairly plausible – not that they believed him; it was more a matter of their not being able to disprove it.'
'But I don't understand where they got this stuff about drugs.'
'Imagine how it looked to them. On one hand, there was Cloke. The police knew he was dealing drugs on a pretty substantial scale; they also figured he was probably the middleman for somebody a lot bigger. There was no obvious connection between that and Bunny, but then there was Bunny s best friend, with all this money, they can't tell quite where it's coming from.
And during those last months Bunny was throwing around plenty of money himself. Henry was giving it to him, of course, but they didn't know that. Fancy restaurants. Italian suits. Besides.
Henry just looks suspicious. The way he acts. Even the way he dresses. He looks like one of those guys with horn-rimmed glasses and armbands in a gangster movie, you know, the one who cooks the books for Al Capone or something.' He lit another cigarette. 'Do you remember the night before they found Bunny's body?' he said. 'When you and I went to that awful bar, the one with the TV, and I got so drunk?'
'Yes.'
That was one of the worst nights of my life. It looked pretty bad for both of us. Henry was almost sure he was going to be arrested the next day.'
I was so appalled that for a moment I couldn't speak. 'Why, for God's sake?' I said at last.
He drew deeply on his cigarette. The FBI men came to see him that afternoon,' he said. 'Not long after they'd taken Cloke into custody. They told Henry they had enough probable cause to arrest half a dozen people, including himself, either for conspiracy or withholding evidence.'
'Christ!' I said, dumbfounded. 'Haifa dozen people? Who?'
'I don't know exactly. They might've been bluffing but Henry was worried sick. He warned me they'd probably be coming over to my place and I just had to get out of there, I couldn't sit around waiting for them. He made me promise not to tell you. Even Camilla didn't know.'
There was a long pause.
'But they didn't arrest you,' I said.
Charles laughed. I noticed that his hands still shook a little. 'I think we have dear old Hampden College to thank for that,' he said. 'Of course, a lot of the stuff didn't tie up; they figured that out from talking to Cloke. But still they knew they weren't getting the truth and they probably would've kept after it if the college had been a little more cooperative. Once Bunny's body was found, though, the administration just wanted to hush it up.
Too much bad publicity. Freshman applications had gone down something like twenty percent. And the town police – whose business it was, really – are very cooperative about such things.
Cloke was in a lot of trouble, you know – some of that drug stuff was serious, they could've thrown him in jail. But he got off with academic probation and fifty hours of community service. It didn't even go on his school record.'
It took me some moments to digest this. Cars and trucks whooshed past.
After a while Charles laughed again. 'It's funny,' he said, pushing his fists deep in his pockets. 'We thought we were putting our ace man up front but if one of the rest of us had handled it it would've been much better. If it had been you. Or Francis. Even my sister. We could have avoided half of this.'
'It doesn't matter. It's over now.'
'No thanks to him. I was the one who had to deal with the police. He takes the credit, but it was me who actually had to sit around that goddamned station all hours drinking coffee and trying to make them like me, you know, trying to convince them we were all just a bunch of regular kids. Same with the FBI, and that was even worse. Being the front for everybody, you know, always on guard, having to say exactly the right thing and doing my best to size up things from their point of view, and you had to hit exactly the right note with these people, too, you couldn't drop it for a second, trying to be all communicative and open yet concerned, too, you know, and at the same time not at all nervous, though I could hardly pick up a cup without being afraid of spilling it and a couple of times I was so panicky I thought I was just going to black out or break down or something. Do you know how hard that was? Do you think Henry would lower himself to do something like that? No. It was all right, of course, for me to do it but he couldn't be bothered. Those people had never seen anything like Henry in their lives. Ill tell you the sort of thing he worried about. Like if he was carrying around the right book, if Homer would make a better impression than Thomas Aquinas. He was like something from another planet. If he was the only one they'd had to deal with he would have landed us all in the gas chamber.'
A lumber truck rattled past.
'Good God,' I finally said. I was quite shaken. 'I'm glad I didn't know.'
He shrugged. 'Well, you're right. It all came out okay. But I still don't like the way he tries to lord it over me.'
We walked for a long time without saying anything.
'Do you know where you're going to spend the summer?' said Charles.
'I haven't thought about it much,' I said. I hadn't heard anything about the situation in Brooklyn, which tended to make me think it had fallen through.
'I'm going to Boston,' Charles said. 'Francis's great-aunt has an apartment on Marlborough Street. Just a few doors from the Public Garden. She goes to the country in the summer and Francis said if I wanted to stay there, I could.'
'Sounds nice.'
'It's a big place. If you wanted, you could come too.'
'Maybe.'
'You'd like it. Francis will be in New York but he'll come up sometimes. Have you ever been to Boston?'
'No.'
'We'll go to the Gardner Museum. And the piano bar at the Ritz.'
He was telling me about a museum they had at Harvard, some place where they had a million different flowers all made of colored glass, when all of a sudden, with alarming swiftness, a yellow Volkswagen swooped from the opposite lane and ground to a stop beside us.
It was Judy Poovey's friend Tracy. She rolled down her window and gave us a brilliant smile. 'Hi, guys,' she said. 'Want a ride?'
She dropped us off at Charles's place. It was ten o'clock. Camilla wasn't home.
'God,' said Charles, shouldering off his jacket. It fell, in a heap, on the floor.
'How do you feel?'
'Drunk.'
'Want some coffee?'
'There's some in the kitchen,' Charles said, yawning and running a hand through his hair. 'Mind if I have a bath?'
'Go ahead.'
'I'll be out in a minute. That cell was filthy. I think I might have fleas.'
He was more than a minute. I could hear him sneezing, running the hot and cold taps, humming to himself. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice and put some raisin bread in the toaster.
While looking through the cabinet for coffee, I found a half-full jar of Horlick's malted milk. The label stared at me like a reproach.
Bunny was the only one of us who ever drank malted milk.
I pushed it to the rear of the cabinet, behind a jug of maple syrup.
The coffee was ready and I was on my second batch of toast when I heard a key in the lock, the front door opening. Camilla stuck her head into the kitchen.
'Hi, you,' she said. Her hair was untidy and her face pale and watchful; she looked like a little boy.
'Hi yourself. Want some breakfast?'
She sat down at the table beside me. 'How did it go?' she said.
I told her. She listened attentively, reached out and took a triangle of buttered toast from my plate and ate it as she listened.
'Is he all right?' she said.
I didn't know exactly how she meant it, 'all right.'
'Sure,' I said.
There was a long silence. Very faintly, on a downstairs radio, a sprightly female voice sang a song about yogurt, backed by a chorus of mooing cows.
She finished her toast and got up to pour herself some coffee.
The refrigerator hummed. I watched her rummage in the cabinet for a cup.
'You know,' I said, 'you ought to throw away that jar of malted milk you have in there.'
It was a moment before she answered. 'I know,' she said. 'In the closet there's a scarf he left the last time he was here. I keep running across it. It still smells like him.'
'Why don't you get rid of it?'
'I keep hoping I won't have to. I hope one day I'll open the closet door and it'll be gone.'
'I thought I heard you,' said Charles, who had been standing in the kitchen door for I didn't know how long. His hair was wet and all he had on was a bathrobe and in his voice was still a trace of that liquory thickness I knew so well. 'I thought you were in class.'
'Small class. Julian let us out early. How do you feel?'
'Fabulous,' said Charles, padding into the kitchen, his moist feet tracking prints that evaporated instantly on the shiny, tomato-red linoleum. He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. 'How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?' he said.
She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek, but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth – not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His bathrobe fell slightly open as his left hand sank from her chin to neck, collarbone, base of throat, his fingertips just inside the edge of her thin polka-dot shirt and trembling over the warm skin there.
I was astounded. She didn't flinch, didn't move. When he came up for breath she pulled her chair in close to the table and reached for the sugar bowl as if nothing had happened. Spoon tinkled against china. The smell of Charles – damp, alcoholic, sweet with the linden-water he used for shaving – hung heavy in the air. She brought the cup up and took a sip and it was only then I remembered: Camilla didn't like sugar in her coffee. She drank it unsweetened, with milk.
I was astounded. I felt I should say something – anything but I couldn't think of a thing to say.
It was Charles who finally broke the silence. 'I'm starving to death,' he said, retying the knot of his bathrobe and pottering over to the refrigerator. The white door opened with a bark. He stooped to look in, his face radiant in the glacial light.
'I think I'm going to make some scrambled eggs,' he said.
'Anyone else want some?'
Late that afternoon, after I'd gone home and had a shower and a nap, I went to visit Francis.
'Come in, come in,' he said, waving me in frenetically. His Greek books were spread out on the desk; a cigarette burned in a full ashtray. 'What happened last night? Was Charles arrested'? Henry wouldn't tell me a thing. I got part of the story from Camilla but she didn't know the details… Sit down. Do you want a drink? What can I get for you?'
It was always fun to tell Francis a story. He leaned forward and hung on every word, reacting at appropriate intervals with astonishment, sympathy, dismay. When I was finished he bombarded me with questions. Normally, enjoying his rapt attention, I would have strung it out much longer, but after the first decent pause I said, 'Now I want to ask you something.'
He was lighting a fresh cigarette. He clicked shut the lighter and brought his eyebrows down. 'What is it?'
Though I had thought of various ways to phrase this question, it seemed, in the interests of clarity, most expedient to come to the point. 'Do you think Charles and Camilla ever sleep together?'
I said.
He had just drawn in a big lungful of smoke. At my question it spurted out his nose the wrong way.
'Do you?'
But he was coughing. 'What makes you ask something like that?' he finally said.
I told him what I'd seen that morning. He listened, his eyes red and streaming from the smoke.
'That's nothing,' he said. 'He was probably still drunk.'
'You haven't answered my question.'
He laid the burning cigarette in the ashtray. 'All right,' he said, blinking. 'If you want my opinion. Yes. I think sometimes they do.'
There was a long silence. Francis closed his eyes, rubbed them with thumb and forefinger.
'I don't think it's anything that happens too frequently,' he said. 'But you never know. Bunny always claimed he walked in on them once.'
I stared at him.
'He told Henry, not me. I'm afraid I don't know the details.
Apparently he had the key and you remember how he used to barge in without knocking – Come now,' he said. 'You must have had some idea.'
'No,' I said, though actually I had, from the time I'd first met them. I'd attributed this to my own mental perversity, some degenerate vagary of thought, a projection of my own desire because he was her brother, and they did look an awful lot alike, and the thought of them together brought, along with the predictable twinges of envy, scruple, surprise, another very much sharper one of excitement.
Francis was looking at me keenly. Suddenly I felt he knew exactly what I was thinking.
'They're very jealous of each other,' he said. 'He much more so than she. I always thought it was a childish, charming thing, you know, all verbal rough-and-tumble, even Julian used to tease them about it – I mean, I'm an only child, so is Henry, what do we know about such things? We used to talk about what fun it would be to have a sister.' He chuckled. 'More fun than either of us imagined, it seems,' he said. 'Not that I think it's so terrible, either – from a moral standpoint, that is – but it's not at all the casual, good-natured sort of thing that one might hope. It runs a lot more deep and nasty. Last fall, around the time when that farmer fellow…"
He trailed away, sat smoking for some moments, an expression of frustration and vague irritation on his face.
'Well?' I said. 'What happened?'
'Specifically?' He shrugged. 'I can't tell you. I remember hardly anything that happened that night, which isn't to say the tenor of it isn't clear enough…' He paused; started to speak but thought better of it; shook his head. 'I mean, after that night it was obvious to everyone,' he said. 'Not that it wasn't before. It's just that Charles was so much worse than anyone had expected.
I…'
He sat staring into space for a moment. Then he shook his head and reached for another cigarette.
'It's impossible to explain,' he said. 'But one can also look at it on an extremely simple level. They were always keen on each other, those two. And I'm no prude, but this jealousy I find astounding. One thing I'll say for Camilla, she's more reasonable about that sort of thing. Perhaps she has to be.'
'What sort of thing?'
'About Charles going to bed with people.'
'Who's he been to bed with?'
He brought up his glass and took a big drink. The for one,' he said. 'That shouldn't surprise you. If you drank as much as he does, I daresay I would have been to bed with you, too.'
Despite the archness of his tone – which normally would have irritated me – there was a melancholy undernote in his voice. He drained off the rest of the whiskey and set the glass down on the end table with a bang. He said, after a pause: 'It hasn't happened often. Three or four times. The first time when I was a sophomore and he was a freshman. We were up late, drinking in my room, one thing led to another. Loads of fun on a rainy night, but you should have seen us at breakfast the next morning.' He laughed bleakly. 'Remember the night Bunny died?' he said. 'When I was in your room? And Charles interrupted us at that rather unfortunate moment?'
I knew what he was going to tell me. 'You left my room with him,' I said.
'Yes. He was awfully drunk. Actually a little too drunk. Which was quite convenient for him as he pretended not to remember it the next day. Charles is very prone to these attacks of amnesia after he spends the night at my house.' He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. 'He denies it all quite convincingly and the thing is, he expects me to play along with him, you know, pretend it never happened,' he said. 'I don't even think he does it out of guilt. As a matter of fact he does it in this particularly lighthearted way which infuriates me.'
I said: 'You like him a lot, don't you?'
I don't know what made me say this. Francis didn't blink. 'I don't know,' he said coldly, reaching for a cigarette with his long, nicotine-stained fingers. 'I like him well enough, I suppose. We're old friends. Certainly I don't fool myself that it's more than that.
But I've had a lot of fun with him, which is a great deal more than you can say about Camilla.'
That was what Bunny would have called a shot across the bow. I was too surprised to even answer.
Francis – though his satisfaction was evident – did not acknowledge his point. He leaned back in his chair by the window; the edges of his hair glowed metallic red in the sun. He said: 'It's unfortunate, but there it is. Neither one cares about anybody but himself- or herself, as the case may be. They like to present a unified front but I don't even know how much they care about each other. Certainly they take a perverse pleasure in leading one on – yes, she does lead you on,' he said when I tried to interrupt, 'I've seen her do it. And the same with Henry. He used to be crazy about her, I'm sure you know that; for all I know he still is. As for Charles – well, basically, he likes girls. If he's drunk, I'll do. But -just when I've managed to harden my heart, he'll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don't know why.'
He was quiet for a moment. 'We don't run much to looks in my family, you know, all knuckles and cheekbones and beaky noses,' he said. 'Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes.' He leaned over and energetically stubbed out his cigarette. 'She'd behave a lot more like Charles if she were allowed to; he's so possessive, though, he keeps her reeled in pretty tight. Can you imagine a worse situation? He watches her like a hawk. And he's also rather poor – not that it matters much,' he said hastily, realizing to whom he was speaking, 'but he's quite self-conscious about it. Very proud of his family, you know, very well aware that he himself is a sot.
There's something kind of Roman about it, all this regard he puts in his sister's honor. Bunny wouldn't go near Camilla, you know, he would hardly even look at her. He used to say that she wasn't his type but I think the old Dutchman in him just knew she was 5i6 bad medicine. My God… I remember once, a long time ago, we had dinner at a ridiculous Chinese restaurant in Bennington.
The Lobster Pagoda. It's closed now. Red bead curtains and a shrine to the Buddha with an artificial waterfall. We drank a lot of drinks with umbrellas in them and Charles was horribly drunk – not that it was his fault, really; we were all drunk, the cocktails are always too strong in a place like that and besides, you never know quite what they put in them, do you? Outside, they had a footbridge to the parking lot that went over a moat with tame ducks and goldfish. Somehow Camilla and I got separated from everyone else, and we were waiting there. Comparing fortunes.
Hers said something like "Expect a kiss from the man of your dreams," which was too good to pass up, so I – well, we were both drunk, and we got a little carried away – and then Charles barreled out of nowhere and grabbed me by the back of the neck and I thought he was going to throw me over the rail. Bunny was there, too, he pulled him off, and Charles had the sense to say he'd been joking but he wasn't, he hurt me, twisted my arm behind my back and damn near pulled it out of the socket. I don't know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T'ang Dynasty.'
Subsequent events had knocked it from my mind, but the mention of Henry made me think of what Charles had told me that morning about the FBI – and of another question, this one regarding Henry too. I was wondering if this was the time to bring up either of them when Francis said, abruptly and in a tone suggestive of bad news to follow, 'You know, I was at the doctor's today.'
I waited for him to go on. He didn't.
'What for?' I finally said.
'Same stuff. Dizziness. Chest pains. I wake up in the night and can't get my breath. Last week I went back to the hospital and let them run some tests but nothing turned up. They referred me to this other fellow. A neurologist.'
'And?'
He shifted restlessly in his chair. 'He didn't find anything.
None of these hick doctors are any good. Julian gave me the name of a man in New York; he was the one who cured the Shah of Isram, you know, of that blood disease. It was in all the papers.
Julian says he's the best diagnostician in the country and one of the best in the world. He's booked two years in advance but Julian says maybe if he calls him, he might agree to see me.'
He was reaching for another cigarette, and the last, untouched, was still smoldering in the ashtray.
The way you smoke,' I said, 'no wonder you're short of breath.'
That has nothing to do with it,' he said irritably, tamping the cigarette on the back of his wrist. That's just what these stupid Vermonters tell you. Stop smoking, cut out booze and coffee.
I've been smoking half my life. You think I don't know how it affects me? You don't get these nasty cramping pains in your chest from cigarettes, nor from having a few drinks, either.
Besides, I have all these other symptoms. Heart palpitations.
Ringing in the ears.'
'Smoking can have totally weird effects on your body.'
Francis frequently made fun of me when I used some phrase he perceived as Californian. 'Totally weird?' he said maliciously, mimicking my accent: suburban, hollow, flat. 'Rillyf I looked at him slouching in his chair: polka-dot tie, narrow Bally shoes, foxy narrow face. His grin was foxy too, and showed too many teeth. I was sick of him. I stood up. The room was so smoky that my eyes watered. 'Yeah,' 1 said. 'I've got to go now.'
Francis's snide expression faded. 'You're mad, aren't you?' he said anxiously.
'No.'
'Yes you are.'
'No, I'm not,' I said. These sudden, panicky attempts at conciliation annoyed me more than his insults.
'I'm sorry. Don't listen to me. I'm drunk, I'm sick, I didn't mean it.'
Without warning I had a vision of Francis – twenty years later, fifty years, in a wheelchair. And of myself – older, too, sitting around with him in some smoky room, the two of us repeating this exchange for the thousandth time. At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny's death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.
On the walk home from Francis's – head down, sunk in a black, inarticulate tangle of anxiety and gloom – I heard Julian's voice saying my name.
I turned. He was just coming out of the Lyceum. At the sight of his quizzical, kindly face – so sweet, so agreeable, so glad to see me – something wrenched deep in my chest.
'Richard,' he said again, as if there were no one on earth he could possibly be so delighted to see. 'How are you?'
'Fine.'
'I'm just going over to North Hampden. Will you walk with me?'
I looked at the innocent, happy face and thought: If he only knew. It would kill him.
'Julian, I'd love to, thanks,' I said. 'But I have to be getting home.'
He looked at me closely. The concern in his eyes made me nearly sick with self-loathing.
'I see so little of you these days, Richard,' he said. 'I feel that you're becoming just a shadow in my life.'
The benevolence, the spiritual calm, that radiated from him seemed so clear and true that, for a dizzying moment, I felt the darkness lift almost palpably from my heart. The relief was such 5i9 that I almost broke down sobbing; but then, looking at him again, 1 felt the whole poisonous weight come crashing back down, full force.
'Are you sure you're all right?'
He can never know. We can never tell him.
'Oh. Sure I am,' I said. 'I'm fine.'
Though the fuss about Bunny had mostly blown over, the college had still not returned quite to normal – and not at all in the new 'Dragnet' spirit of drug enforcement which had spread across campus. Gone were the nights when, on one's way home from the Rathskeller, it was not unheard-of to see an occasional teacher standing under the bare light bulb of Durbinstall basement – Arnie Weinstein, say, the Marxist economist (Berkeley, '69), or the haggard, scraggle-haired Englishman who taught classes in Sterne and Defoe.
Long gone. I had watched grim security men dismantling the underground laboratory, hauling out cartons of beakers and copper piping, while Durbinstall's head chemist – a small, pimple faced boy from Akron named Cal Clarken – stood by and wept, still in his trademark high-top sneakers and lab coat. The anthropology teacher who for twenty years had taught 'Voices and Visions: The Thought of Carlos Castaneda' (a course which featured, at its conclusion, a mandatory campfire ritual at which pot was smoked) announced quite suddenly that he was leaving for Mexico on sabbatical. Arnie Weinstein took to frequenting the townie bars, where he attempted to discuss Marxist theory with hostile countermen. The scraggle-haired Englishman had returned to his primary interest, which was chasing girls twenty years younger than himself.
As part of the new 'Drug Awareness' policy, Hampden was hosting an intercollege tournament, in game-show format, which tested students' knowledge about drugs and alcohol. The questions were developed by the National Council for Alcoholism and Substance Abuse. The shows were moderated by a local TV personality (Liz Ocavello) and were broadcast live on Channel 12.
Unexpectedly, the quizzes proved wildly popular, though not in the spirit the sponsors might have hoped. Hampden had assembled a crack team which – like one of those commando forces in the movies, made up of desperate fugitives, men with freedom to gain and nothing to lose – proved virtually invincible.
It was an all-star lineup: Cloke Rayburn; Bram Guernsey; Jack Teitelbaum; Laura Stora; none other than the legendary Cal Clarken heading the team. Cal was participating in hopes of being allowed back into school next term; Cloke and Bram and Laura as part of their required hours of community service; Jack was merely along for the ride. Their combined expertise was nothing short of stunning. Together, they led Hampden to victory after crashing victory over Williams, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, fielding with dazzling speed and skill such questions as: Name five drugs in the Thorazine family, or: What are the effects of PCP?
But – even though business had been seriously curtailed – I was not surprised to find that Cloke was still plying his trade, though a good bit more discreetly than he had used to in the old days. One Thursday night before a party I went down to Judy's room to ask for an aspirin and, after a brief but mysterious inquisition from behind the locked door, found Cloke inside, shades pulled, busy with her mirror and her druggist's scales.
'Hi,' he said, ushering me quickly inside and locking the door behind me again. 'What can I do for you tonight?'
'Uh, nothing, thanks,' I said. 'I'm just looking for Judy. Where is she?'
'Oh,' he said, crossing back to his work. 'She's in the costume shop. I thought she probably sent you over. I like Judy but she's got to make such a big production of everything, which is definitely not cool. Not cool' – carefully, he tapped a measure of powder into an open fold of paper – 'at all.' His hands trembled; it was evident that he had been dipping pretty freely into his own wares. 'But I had to toss my own scales, you know, after all that shit happened and what the fuck am I supposed to do? Go up to the infirmary? She was running around all day, at lunch and stuff, rubbing her nose and saying, "Gramma's here, Gramma's here," lucky nobody knew what the fuck she was talking about, but still.' He nodded at the open book beside him – Janson's History of Art, which was cut practically to tatters. 'Even these fucking bindles. She got fixated on the idea that I had to make these fancy ones, Jesus, open them up and there's a fucking Tintoretto on the inside. And gets pissed if I cut them out so that the cupid's butt or whatever isn't, like, right in the center. How's Camilla?' he said, glancing up.
'Fine,' I said.1 didn't want to think about Camilla. I didn't want to think of anything having to do with Greek or Greek J class, either one. *
'How's she liking her new place?' said Cloke.
'What?'
He laughed. 'Don't you know?' he said. 'She moved.'
'What? Where to?'
'Don't know. Down the street, probably. Stopped by to see the twins – hand me that blade, would you? – stopped by to see them yesterday and Henry was helping her put her stuff in boxes.'
He had abandoned his work at the scales and was now cutting out lines on the mirror. 'Charles is going to Boston for the summer and she's staying here. Said she didn't want to stay there alone and it was too much of a pain to sublet. Sounds like there are going to be a lot of us here this summer.' He offered me the mirror and a rolled-up twenty. 'Bram and I are looking for a place right now.'
'This is very good,' I said, half a minute or so later, just as the first euphoric sparkle was starting to hit my synapses.
'Yeah. It's excellent, isn't it? Especially after that awful shit of Laura's that was going around. Those FBI guys analyzed it and said it was about eighty percent talcum powder or something.'
He wiped his nose. 'Did they ever come talk to you, by the way?'
The FBI? No.'
Tm surprised. After all that lifeboat shit they were feeding everybody.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Christ. They were saying all kinds of weird stuff. There was a conspiracy going on. They knew that Henry and Charles and I were involved. We were all in bad trouble and there was only room for one guy on the lifeboat out. And that guy was going to be the guy that talked first.' He sniffed again, and rubbed his nose with his knuckle. 'In a way, it got worse after my dad sent the lawyer up. "Why do you need a lawyer if you're innocent," all that kind of shit. Thing is, even the fucking lawyer couldn't figure out what they were trying to get me to confess to. They kept saying that my friends – Henry and Charles – had ratted on me.
That they were the guilty ones, and if I didn't start talking I might get blamed for something I didn't even do.'
My heart was pounding, and not just from the cocaine. 'Talking?'
I said. 'About what?'
'Search me. My lawyer said not to worry, that they were full of shit. I talked to Charles and he said they were giving him the same line, too. And 1 mean – I know you like Henry but I think he got pretty flipped out by the whole thing.'
'What?'
'Well, I mean, he's so straight, probably never even had an overdue library book, and out of the blue here comes the fucking FB7 all over him. I don't know what the hell he told them, but he was trying to point them in any direction but towards himself 'Like what direction?'
'Like me.' He reached for a cigarette. 'And, I hate to say it, but I think towards you.'
The?'
'I never brought your name up, man. I hardly fucking know you. But they got it from somewhere. And it wasn't from me.'
'You mean they actually mentioned my name"!' I said, after a stunned silence.
'Maybe Marion gave it to them or something, I don't know.
God knows, they had Bram's name, Laura's, even Jud Mac Kenna's… Yours was only once or twice, towards the end there.
Don't ask me why, but I had the idea the Feebies went over to talk to you. I guess that would've been the night before they found Bunny's body. They were coming over to talk to Charles again, I know that, but Henry called and tipped him off that they were on the way. That was when I was staying over at the twins'.
Well, I didn't want to see them, either, so I headed over to Bram's, and Charles I guess just went to some townie bar and got completely rucked up.'
My heart was thumping so wildly I thought it would burst in my chest like a red balloon. Had Henry got scared, tried to sic 1 the FBI on me? That didn't make sense. There was no way, at least that I could see, he could set me up without incriminating himself. Then again (paranoia, I thought,,' have to stop this), maybe it was no coincidence that Charles had stopped by my room that night on his way to the bar. Maybe he had been apprised of the whole thing and – unbeknownst to Henry – had come over and successfully lured me out of harm's way.
'You look like you could use a drink, man,' said Cloke presently.
'Yeah,' 1 said. I had been sitting for a long time without saying anything. 'Yeah, I guess I could.'
'Why don't you go to the Villager tonight? Thirsty Thursday.
Two for the price of one.'
'Are you going?'
'Everybody's going. Shit. You're trying to tell me you never went to Thirsty Thursday before?'
So I went to Thirsty Thursday, with Cloke and Judy, with Bram and Sophie Dearbold and some friends of Sophie's, and a lot of other people i didn't even know, and though I don't know what time I got home I didn't wake up till six the next evening, when Sophie knocked at my door. My stomach hurt and my head was splitting in two, but I put on my robe and let her in. She had just got out of ceramics class and was wearing a T-shirt and faded old jeans. She had brought me a bagel from the snack bar.
'Are you okay?' she said.
'Yes,' I said, though I had to hold on to the back of my chair to stand up.
'You were really drunk last night.'
'I know,' I said. Getting out of bed had made me feel, suddenly, much worse. Red spots jumped in front of my eyes.
'I was worried. I thought I'd better come check on you.' She laughed. 'Nobody's seen you all day. Somebody told me they saw the flag at the guard booth at half-mast and I was afraid you might be dead.'
I sat on the bed, breathing hard, and stared at her. Her face was like a half-remembered fragment of dream – bar? I thought.
There had been the bar – Irish whiskeys and a pinball game with Bram, Sophie's face blue in the sleazy neon light. More cocaine, cut into lines with a school ID, off the side of a compact-disc case. Then a ride in the back of someone's truck, a Gulf sign on the highway, someone's apartment? The rest of the evening was black. Vaguely I remembered a long, earnest conversation with Sophie, standing by an ice-filled sink in someone's kitchen (Meister Brau and Genesee, MOMA calendar on the wall). Certainly – a coil of fear wrenched in my stomach – certainly I hadn't said anything about Bunny. Certainly not. Rather frantically, I searched my memory. Certainly, if I had, she would not be in my room now, looking at me the way she was, would not have brought me this toasted bagel on a paper plate, the smell of which (it was an onion bagel) made me want to retch.
'How did I get home?' I said, looking up at her.
'Don't you remember?'
'No.' Blood hammered nightmarishly in my temples.
Then you were drunk. We called a cab from Jack Teitelbaum's.'
'And where did we go?'
'Here.'
Had we slept together? Her expression was neutral, offering no clue. If we had, I wasn't sorry – I liked Sophie, I knew she liked me, she was one of the prettiest girls at Hampden besides – but this was the kind of thing you like to know for sure. I was trying to think how I could ask her, tactfully, when someone knocked at the door. The raps were like gun shots. Sharp pains ricocheted through my head.
'Come in,' said Sophie.
Francis stuck his head around the door. 'Well, look at this, would you,' he said. He liked Sophie. 'It's the car trip reunion j| and nobody asked me.'
Sophie stood up. 'Francis! Hello! How've you been?'
'Good, thanks. I haven't talked to you since the funeral.'
'I know. I was thinking about you just the other day. How have you been?'
I lay back on the bed, my stomach boiling. The two of them were conversing animatedly. I wished they would both leave.
'Well well,' said Francis after a long interlude, peering over Sophie's shoulder at me. 'What's wrong with tiny patient?'
'Too much to drink.'
He came over to the bed. He seemed, up close, slightly agitated. 'Well, I hope you've learned your lesson,' he said brightly and then, in Greek, added: 'Important news, my friend.'
My heart sank. I had screwed up. I had been careless, talked too much, said something weird. 'What have I done?' I said, I had said it in English. If Francis was flustered, he didn't look it. 'I haven't the slightest idea,' he said. 'Do you want some tea or something?'
I tried to figure out what he was trying to say. The pounding agony in my head was such that I couldn't concentrate oil anything. Nausea swelled in a great green wave, trembled at the crest, sank and rolled again. I felt saturated with despair.
Everything, I thought tremulously, everything would be okay if only I could have a few moments of quiet and if I lay very, very still.
'No,' I said finally. 'Please.'
'Please what?'
The wave swelled again. I rolled over on my stomach and gave a long, miserable moan.
Sophie caught on first. 'Come on,' she said to Francis, 'let's go. I think we ought to let him go back to sleep.'
I fell into a tormented half-dreaming state from which I woke, several hours later, to a soft knock. The room was now dark.
The door creaked open and a flag of light fell in from the corridor.
Francis slipped in and closed the door behind him.
He switched on the weak reading lamp on my desk and pulled the chair over to my bed. 'I'm sorry but I've got to talk to you,' he said. 'Something very odd has happened.'
I had forgotten my earlier fright; it came back in a sick, bilious wash. 'What is it?'
'Camilla has moved. She's moved out of the apartment. All her things are gone. Charles is there right now, drunk nearly out of his mind. He says she's living at the Albemarle Inn. Can you imagine? The Albemarle?'
I rubbed my eyes, trying to collect my thoughts. 'But I knew that,' I said finally.
'You did?' He was astonished. 'Who told you?'
'I think it was Cloke.'
'Cloke? When was this?'
I explained, as far as memory allowed. 'I forgot about it,' I said.
'Forgot? How could you forget something like that?'
I sat up a bit. Fresh pain surged through my head. 'What ^ difference does it make?' I said, a little angrily. 'If she wants to w| leave I don't blame her. Charles will just have to straighten up.
That's all.'
'But the Albemarle?' said Francis. 'Do you have any idea how expensive it is?'
'Of course I do,' I said irritably. The Albemarle was the nicest inn in town. Presidents had stayed there, and movie stars. 'So what?'
Francis put his head in his hands. 'Richard,' he said, 'you're dense. You must have brain damage.'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'How about two hundred dollars a night? Do you think the twins have that kind of money? Who the hell do you think is paying for it?'
I stared at him.
'Henry, that's who,' said Francis. 'He came over when Charles was out and moved her there, lock, stock and barrel. Charles came home and her things were gone. Can you imagine? He can't even get in touch with her, she's registered under a different name. Henry won't tell him anything. For that matter, he won't tell me anything, either. Charles is absolutely beside himself. He asked me to call Henry and see if I could get anything out of him, I couldn't, of course, he was like a brick wall.'
'What's the big deal? Why are they making such a secret of it?'
'I don't know. I don't know Camilla's side but I think Henry is being very foolish.'
'Maybe she has reasons of her own.'
'She doesn't think that way,' said Francis, exasperated. 'I know Henry. This is just the sort of thing he'd do and it's just the way he'd do it. But even if there's a good reason it's the wrong way to go about it. Especially now. Charles is in a state. Henry should know better than to antagonize him after the other night.'
Uncomfortably, I thought of the walk home from the police station. 'You know, there's something I've meant to tell you,' I said, and I told him about Charles's outburst.
'Oh, he's mad at Henry all right,' said Francis tersely. 'He's told me the same thing – that Henry pushed it all off on him, basically. But what does he expect? When you get down to it, I don't think Henry asked all that much of him. That's not the reason he's angry. The real reason is Camilla. Do you want to know my theory?'
'What?'
'I think Camilla and Henry have been slipping around with each other for quite some time. I think Charles has been suspicious for a while but until lately he didn't have any proof. Then he found something out. I don't know what, exactly,' he said, raising his hand as I tried to interrupt, 'but it's not hard to imagine.
I think it's something he found out down at the Corcorans'.
Something he saw or heard. And I think it must've happened before we arrived. The night before they left for Connecticut with Cloke, everything seemed fine, but you remember what Charles was like when we got there. And by the time we left they weren't even speaking.'
I told Francis what Cloke had said to me in the upstairs hallway.
'God knows what happened, then, if Cloke was smart enough to catch on,' said Francis. 'Henry was sick, probably wasn't thinking too clearly. And the week we came back, you know, when he holed up in his apartment, I think Camilla was there a lot. She was there, I know, the day I went to take him that Mycenaean book and I think she might have even spent the night a couple of times. But then he got well and Camilla came home and for a while after that, things were okay. Remember? Around the time you took me to the hospital?'
'I don't know about that,' I said. I told him about the glass I had seen lying broken in the fireplace at the twins' apartment.
'Well, who knows what was really happening. At least they seemed better. And Henry was in good spirits too. Then there was that quarrel, the night Charles ended up in jail. Nobody seems to want to say exactly what that was all about but I'll bet it had something to do with her. And now this. Good God.
Charles is in a bloody rage.'
'Do you think he's sleeping with her? Henry?'
'If he's not, he's certainly done everything he possibly can to convince Charles that he is.' He stood up. 'I tried to call him again before I came over here,' he said. 'He wasn't in. I expect he's over at the Albemarle. I'm going to drive by and see if his car is there.'
'There must be some way you can find out what room she's in.'
'I've thought about that. I can't get anything out of the desk clerk. Maybe I'd have better luck talking to one of the maids, but I'm afraid I'm not very good at that sort of thing.' He sighed. 'I wish I could see her for just five minutes.'
'If you find her, do you think you can talk her into coming home?'
'I don't know. I must say, I wouldn't care to be living with Charles right now. But I still think everything would be okay if Henry would just keep out of it.'
After Francis left I fell asleep again. When I woke up it was four in the morning. I had slept for nearly twenty-four hours.
The nights that spring were unusually cold; this one was colder than most and the heat was on in the dormitories – steam heat, full blast, which made it unbearably stuffy even with the windows open. My sheets were damp with sweat. I got up and stuck my head out the window and took a few breaths. The chill air was so refreshing that I decided to put on some clothes and go for a walk.
The moon was full and very bright. Everything was silent except for the chirp of the crickets and the full foamy toss of the wind in the trees. Down at the Early Childhood Center, where Marion worked, the swings creaked gently to and fro, and the corkscrewed slide gleamed silver in the moonlight.
The most striking object in the playground was without question the giant snail. Some art students had built it, modeling it after the giant snail in the movie of Doctor Dolittle. It was pink, made of fiberglass, nearly eight feet tall, with a hollow shell so kids could play inside. Silent in the moonlight, it was like some patient prehistoric creature that had crawled down from the mountains: dumb, lonely, biding its time, untroubled by the articles of playground equipment which surrounded it.
Access to the snail's interior was gained by a child-sized tunnel, maybe two feet high, at the base of the tail. From this runnel, I was extremely startled to see protruding a pair of adult male feet, shod in some oddly familiar brown-and-white spectator shoes.
On hands and knees, I leaned forward and stuck my head in the tunnel and was overwhelmed by the raw, powerful stink of whiskey. Light snores echoed in the close, boozy darkness. The shell, apparently, had acted as a brandy snifter, gathering and concentrating the vapors until they were so pungent I felt nauseated just to breathe them.
I caught and shook a bony kneecap. 'Charles.' My voice boomed and reverberated in the dark interior. 'Charles.'
He began to flounder wildly, as if he had waked to find himself in ten feet of water. At length, and after repeated assurances that I was who I said I was, he fell on his back again, breathing hard.
'Richard,' he said thickly. 'Thank God. I thought you were some kind of creature from space.'
At first it had been completely dark inside but now my eyes had adjusted I was aware of a faint, pinkish light, moonlight, just enough to see by, glowing through the translucent walls. 'What are you doing here?' I asked him.
He sneezed. 'I was depressed,' he said. 'I thought if I slept here it might make me feel better.'
'Did it?'
'No.' He sneezed again, five or six times in a row. Then he slumped back on the floor.
I thought of the nursery-school kids, huddled round Charles the next morning like Lilliputians round the sleeping Gulliver.
The lady who ran the Childhood Center – a psychiatrist, whose office was down the hall from Dr Roland's – seemed to me a pleasant, grandmotherly sort, though who could predict how she'd react to finding a drunk passed out on her playground.
'Wake up, Charles,' I said.
'Leave me alone.'
'You can't sleep here.'
'I can do whatever I want,' he said haughtily.
'Why don't you come home with me? Have a drink.'
'I'm fine.'
'Oh, come on.'
'Well -just one.'
He bumped his head, hard, while crawling out. The little kids were certainly going to love that smell of Johnnie Walker when they came to school in a few hours.
He had to lean on me on the way up the hill to Monmouth House.
'Just one,' he reminded me.
I was not in terrific shape myself and had a hard time hauling him up the stairs. Finally I reached my room and deposited him on my bed. He offered little resistance and lay there, mumbling, while I went down to the kitchen.
My offer of a drink had been a ruse. Quickly I searched the refrigerator but all I could find was a screw-top bottle of some syrupy Kosher stuff, strawberry-flavored, which had been there since Hanukkah. I'd tasted it once, with the idea of stealing it, and hurriedly spit it out and put the bottle back on the shelf.
That had been months ago. I slipped it under my shirt; but when I got upstairs, Charles's head had rolled back against the wall where the headboard should have been and he was snoring.
Quietly, I put the bottle on my desk, got a book, and left.
Then I went to Dr Roland's office, where I lay reading on the couch with my jacket thrown over me until the sun came up, and I turned off the lamp and went to sleep.
I woke around ten. It was Saturday, which surprised me a little; I'd lost track of the days. I went to the dining hall and had a late breakfast of tea and soft-boiled eggs, the first thing I'd eaten since Thursday. When I went to my room to change, around noon, Charles was still asleep in my bed. I shaved, put on a clean shirt, got my Greek books and went back to Dr Roland's.
1 was ridiculously behind in my studies but not (as is often the case) so far behind as I'd thought. The hours went by without my noticing them. When I got hungry, around six, I went to the refrigerator in the Social Sciences office and found some leftover hors d'oeuvres and a piece of birthday cake, which I ate from my fingers off a paper plate at Dr Roland's desk.
Since I wanted a bath, I came home around eleven, but when I unlocked the door and turned on the light, I was startled to find Charles still in my bed. He was sleeping, but the bottle of Kosher wine on the desk was half-empty. His face was flushed and pink.
When I shook him, he felt as though he had a good deal of fever.
'Bunny,' he said, waking with a start. 'Where did he go?'
'You're dreaming.'
'But he was here,' he said, looking wildly round. 'For a long time. I saw him.'
'You're dreaming, Charles.'
'But I saw him. He was here. He was sitting on the foot of the bed.'
I went next door to borrow a thermometer. His temperature was nearly a hundred and three. I gave him two Tylenol and a glass of water and left him, rubbing his eyes and talking nonsense, to go downstairs and call Francis.
Francis wasn't home. I decided to try Henry. To my surprise it was Francis, not Henry, who answered the phone.
'Francis? What are you doing over there?' I said.
'Oh, hello, Richard,' said Francis. He said it in a stagy way, as if for Henry's benefit.
'I guess you can't really talk now.'
'No.'
'Look here. I need to ask you something.' I explained to him about Charles, playground and all. 'He seems pretty sick. What do you think I should do?'
'The snail?' said Francis. 'You found him inside that giant snail?'
'Yes. What should I do? I'm kind of worried.'
Francis put his hand over the receiver.1 could hear a muffled discussion. In a moment Henry came on the line. 'Hello, Richard,' he said. 'What's the matter?'
I had to explain all over again.
'How high, did you say? A hundred and three?'
'Yes.'
'That's rather a lot, isn't it?'
I said that I thought it was.
'Did you give him some aspirins?'
'A few minutes ago.'
'Well, then, why don't you wait and see. I'm sure he's fine.'
This was exactly what I wanted to hear.
'You're right,' I said.
'He probably caught cold sleeping out of doors. I'm sure he'll be better in the morning.'
I spent the night on Dr Roland's couch, and after breakfast, came back to my room with blueberry muffins and a half-gallon carton of orange juice which, with extraordinary difficulty, I had managed to steal from the buffet in the dining hall.
Charles was awake, but feverish and vague. From the state of the bedclothes, which were tumbled and tossed, blanket trailing on the floor and the stained ticking of the mattress showing where he'd pulled the sheets loose, I gathered he'd not had a very good night of it. He said he wasn't hungry, but he managed a few limp little sips of the orange juice. The rest of the Kosher wine had disappeared, I noticed, in the night.
'How do you feel?' I asked him.
He lolled his head on the crumpled pillow. 'Head hurts,' he said sleepily. 'I had a dream about Dante.'
'Alighieri?'
'Yes.'
'What?'
'We were at the Corcorans' house,' he mumbled. 'Dante was there. He had a fat friend in a plaid shirt who yelled at us.'
I took his temperature; it was an even hundred. A bit lower, but still kind of high for the first thing in the morning. I gave him some more aspirin and wrote down my number at Dr Roland's in case he wanted to call me, but when he realized I was leaving, he rolled his head back and gave me such a dazed and hopeless look that it stopped me cold in the middle of my explanation about how the switchboard re-routed calls to administrative offices on the weekends.
'Or, I could stay here,' I said. 'If I wouldn't be bothering you, that is.'
He pushed up on his elbows. His eyes were bloodshot and very bright. 'Don't go,' he said. 'I'm scared. Stay a little while.'
He asked me to read to him, but I didn't have anything around but Greek books, and he didn't want me to go to the library. So we played euchre on a dictionary balanced on his lap, and when that started to prove a bit much we switched to Casino. He won the first couple of games. Then he started losing. On the final hand – it was his deal – he shuffled the cards so poorly they were coming up in virtually exact sequence, which should not have made for very challenging play but he was so absentminded he kept trailing when he could easily have built or taken in. When I was reaching to increase a build, my hand brushed against his and I was taken aback by how dry and hot it was. And though the room was warm, he was shivering. I took his temperature. It had shot back to a hundred and three.
I went downstairs to call Francis, but neither he nor Henry was in. So I went back upstairs. There was no doubt about it: Charles looked terrible. I stood in the door looking at him for a moment, and then I said, 'Wait a minute' and went down the hall to Judy's room.
I found her lying on her bed, watching a Mel Gibson movie on a VCR she'd borrowed from the video department. She was managing somehow to polish her fingernails, smoke a cigarette, and drink a Diet Coke all at the same time.
'Look at Mel,' she said. 'Don't you just love him? If he called up and asked me to marry him I would do it in, like, one second.'
'Judy, what would you do if you had a hundred and three degrees of fever?'
'I would go to the fucking doctor,' she said without looking away from the TV.
I explained about Charles. 'He's really sick,' I said. 'What do you think I should do?'
She fanned a red taloned hand in the air, drying it, her eyes still fixed on the screen. 'Take him to the emergency room.'
'You think?'
'You're not going to find any doctors on Sunday afternoon.
Want to use my car?'
'That would be great.'
'Keys are on the desk,' she said absently. 'Bye.'
I drove Charles to the hospital in the red Corvette. He was bright-eyed and quiet, staring straight ahead, his right cheek pressed to the cool window-glass. In the waiting room, while I looked through magazines I'd seen before, he sat without moving, staring at a faded color photograph from the 19605 which hung opposite, of a nurse who had a white-nailed finger pressed to a white-lipsticked, vaguely pornographic mouth, in a sexy injunction to hospital silence.
The doctor on duty was a woman. She'd been with Charles for only about five or ten minutes when she came from the back with his chart; leaning over the counter, she consulted briefly with the receptionist, who indicated me.
The doctor came over and sat beside me. She was like one of those cheery young physicians in Hawaiian shirts and tennis shoes that you see on TV shows. 'Hello,' she said. 'I've just been looking at your friend. I think we're going to have to keep him with us for a couple of days.'
I put down my magazine. This I hadn't expected. 'What's wrong?' I said.
'It looks like bronchitis, but he's very dehydrated. I want to put him on an IV. Also we need to get that fever down. He'll be okay, but he needs rest and a good strong series of antibiotics, and to get those working as soon as we can we should give him those intravenously, too, for the first forty-eight hours at least.
You both in school up at the college?'
'Yes.'
'Is he under a lot of stress? Working on his thesis or something?'
'He works pretty hard,' I said cautiously. 'Why?'
'Oh, nothing. It just looks like he hasn't been eating properly.
Bruises on his arms and legs, which look like a C deficiency, and he may be running low on some of the B vitamins as well. Tell me. Does he smoke?'
I couldn't help but laugh. At any rate, she wouldn't let me see him; she said she wanted to get some blood work done before the lab technicians left for the day, so I drove to the twins' apartment to gather some of his things. The place was ominously neat. I packed pajamas, toothbrush, shaving kit, and a couple of paperback books (P. G. Wodehouse, who I thought might cheer him up) and left the suitcase with the receptionist.
Early the next morning, before I left for Greek, Judy knocked at my door and told me I had a call downstairs. I thought it was Francis or Henry – both of whom I'd tried to reach repeatedly the night before – or maybe even Camilla, but it was Charles.
'Hello,' I said. 'How are you feeling?'
'Oh, very well.' His voice had a strange, forced note of cheeriness.
'It's quite comfortable here. Thanks for bringing the suitcase by.'
'No problem. Do you have one of those beds you can crank up and down?'
'As a matter of fact I do. Listen. I want to ask you something.
Will you do me a favor?'
'Sure.'
'I'd like you to get a couple of things for me.' He mentioned a book, and letter paper, and a bathrobe which I would find hanging on the inside of his closet door – 'Also,' he said hurriedly, 'there's a bottle of Scotch. You'll find it in the drawer of my night table. Do you think you can get it out this morning?'
'I have to go to Greek.'
'Well, after Greek, then. What time do you think you'll be here?'
I told him I would have to see about borrowing a car.
'Don't worry about that. Take a taxi. I'll give you the money.
I really appreciate this, you know. What time should I expect you? Ten-thirty? Eleven?'
'Probably more like eleven-thirty.'
'That's fine. Listen. I can't talk, I'm in the patients' lounge. I have to get back to bed before they miss me. You will come, won't you?'
Till be there.'
'Bathrobe and letter paper.'
'Yes.'
'And the Scotch.'
'Of course.'
Camilla was not at class that morning, but Francis and Henry were. Julian was there when I arrived, and I explained that Charles was in the hospital.
Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture. But at this news he appeared genuinely concerned. 'Poor Charles,' he said. 'It's not serious, is it?'
"I don't think so.'
'Is he allowed any visitors? I shall telephone him this afternoon.
Can you think of anything he might like? Food is so dreadful in the hospital. I remember years ago, in New York, when a dear friend of mine was in Columbia Presbyterian – in the bloody Harkness Pavilion, for goodness' sake – the chef at the old Le Chasseur used to send her dinner to her every single day…"
Henry, across the table, was absolutely inscrutable. I tried to catch Francis's glance; he slid me a quick look, bit his lip and glanced away.
'… and flowers,' said Julian, 'you've never seen so many flowers, she had so many I could only suspect that she was sending at least some of them to herself.' He laughed. 'Anyway.
I suppose there's no need to ask where Camilla is this morning.'
I saw Francis's eyes snap open. For a moment I was startled too, before I realized that he'd assumed – naturally, of course that she was at the hospital with Charles.
Julian's eyebrows went down. 'What's wrong?' he said.
The utter blankness which met this question made him smile.
'It doesn't do to be too Spartan about these things,' he said kindly, after a very long pause; and I was grateful to see that, as usual, he was projecting his own tasteful interpretation upon the confusion. 'Edmund was your friend. I too am very sorry that he is dead. But I think you are grieving yourselves sick over this, and not only does that not help him, it hurts you. And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or – if death is a journey to another place – that you will not see him again?'
He opened his lexicon and began to search for his place. 'It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,' he said. 'You are like children. Afraid of the dark.'
Francis didn't have his car with him, so after class I got Henry to drive me to Charles's apartment. Francis – who came too – was nervous and on edge, chain-smoking and pacing in the foyer while Henry stood in the bedroom door and watched me get Charles's things: quiet, expressionless, his eyes following me with an abstract calculation that entirely precluded the possibility of my asking him about Camilla – which I had determined to do as soon as we were alone – or, in fact, of asking practically anything at all.
I got the book, the letter paper, the bathrobe. The Scotch I hesitated over.
'What's the matter?' said Henry.
I put the bottle back in the drawer and shut it. 'Nothing,' I said. Charles, I knew, would be furious. I would have to think of a good excuse.
He nodded at the closed drawer. 'Did he ask you to bring that to him?' he said.
I did not feel like discussing Charles's personal business with Henry. I said: 'He asked for cigarettes, too, but I don't think he ought to have them.'
Francis had been pacing in the hall outside, prowling restlessly back and forth like a cat. During this exchange he paused in the door. Now I saw him dart a quick worried glance at Henry.
'Well, you know…?' he said hesitantly.
Henry said to me: 'If he wants it – the bottle, that is – 1 think you'd better go ahead and take it to him.'
His tone annoyed me. 'He's sick,' I said. 'You haven't even seen him. If you think you're doing him a favor by -'
'Richard, he's right,' said Francis nervously, tapping a cigarette ash into his cupped palm. 'I know about this a little bit. Sometimes, if you drink, it's dangerous to stop too suddenly. Makes you sick. People can die of it.'
I was shocked by this. Charles's drinking had never seemed so bad as all that. I did not comment on this, though, only said: 'Well, if he's that bad off, he'll do a lot better in the hospital, won't he?'
'What do you mean?' said Francis. 'Do you want them to put him in a detox? Do you know what that's like? When my mother came off drink that first time, she was out of her head. Seeing things. Wrestling with the nurse and yelling nutty stuff at the top of her lungs.'
'Hate to think of Charles having DTs in the Catamount Memorial Hospital,' said Henry. He went to the night table and got the bottle. It was a fifth, a little less than half full. 'This will be cumbersome for him to hide,' he said, holding it up by the neck.
'We could pour it into something else,' said Francis.
'It would be easier, I think, if we bought him a new one. Less chance of it leaking all over everything. And if we get him one of those flat ones he can keep it under his pillow without much trouble.'
It was a drizzly morning, overcast and gray. Henry didn't go with us to the hospital. He had us drop him off at his apartment – he had some excuse, plausible enough, I can't remember what it was and when he got out of the car he gave me a hundred-dollar bill.
'Here,' he said. 'Give Charles my love. Will you buy some flowers for him or something?'
I looked at the bill, momentarily stunned. Francis snatched it from me and pushed it back at him. 'Come on, Henry,' he said, with an anger that surprised me. 'Stop it.'
'I want you to have it.'
'Right. We're supposed to get him a hundred dollars' worth of flowers.'
'Don't forget to stop at the package store,' said Henry coldly.
'Do what you like with the rest of the money. Just give him the change, if you want. I don't care.'
He pushed the money at me again and shut the car door, with a click that was more contemptuous than if he'd slammed it. I watched his stiff square back receding up the walk.
We bought Charles's whiskey – Cutty Sark, in a flat bottle – and a basket of fruit, and a box of petit-fours, and a game of Chinese checkers, and, instead of cleaning out the day's stock of carnations at the florist's downtown, an Oncidium orchid, yellow with russet tiger-stripes, in a red clay pot.
On the way to the hospital, I asked Francis what had happened over the weekend.
'Too upsetting. I don't want to talk about it now,' he said. 'I did see her. Over at Henry's.'
'How is she?'
'Fine. A little preoccupied but fine, basically. She said she didn't want Charles to know where she was and that was all there was to it. I wish I could've talked to her alone, and of course Henry didn't leave the room for a second.' Restlessly, he felt in his pocket for a cigarette. 'This may sound crazy,' he said, 'but before I saw her I'd been a little worried, you know? That something maybe had happened to her.'
I didn't say anything. The same thought had crossed my mind, more than once.
'I mean – not that I thought Henry would kill her or anything, but you know – it was strange. Her disappearing like that, without r a word to anybody. I -' He shook his head. 'I hate to say this, but sometimes I wonder about Henry,' he said. 'Especially with things like – well, you know what I mean?'
I didn't answer. Actually 1 did know what he meant, quite well. But it was too horrible for either of us to come out and say.
Charles had a semi-private room. He was in the bed nearer the door, separated by a curtain from his roommate: the Hampden County postmaster, as we later discovered, who was in for a prostate operation. On his side there were a lot of FTD flower arrangements, and corny get-well cards taped to the wall, and he was propped up in bed talking with some noisy family members: food smells, laughter, everything cheery and snug. More of his visitors trailed in after Francis and me, stopping, for an instant, to peer curiously over the curtain at Charles: silent, alone, flat on his back with an IV in his arm. His face was puffy and his skin rough and coarse-looking, broken out in some kind of a rash. His hair was so dirty it looked brown. He was watching cartoons on television, violent ones, little animals that looked like weasels cracking up cars and bashing each other on the head.
He struggled to sit up when we stepped into his partition.
Francis drew the curtain behind us, practically in the faces of the postmaster's inquisitive visitors, a pair of middle-aged ladies, who were dying to get a good look at Charles and one of whom had craned around and cawed 'Good morning!' through the gap in the curtain, in the hopes of initiating conversation.
'Dorothy! Louise!' someone called from the other side. 'Over here!'
There were rapid footsteps on the linoleum and henlike clucks and cries of greeting.
'Damn them,' said Charles. He was very hoarse and his voice was little more than a whisper. 'He's got people there all the time. They're always coming in and out and trying to look at me.'
By way of distraction, I presented Charles with the orchid..-, 'Really? You bought that for me, Richard?' He seemed touched. – '
I was going to explain that it was from all of us – without coming out and mentioning Henry, exactly – but Francis shot me a warning look and I kept my mouth shut.
We unloaded the sack of presents. I'd half expected him to pounce on the Cutty Sark and tear it open in front of us, but he only thanked us and put the bottle in the compartment underneath his upright gray-plastic bed tray.
'Have you talked to my sister?' he said to Francis. He said it in a very cold way, as if he were saying Have you talked to my lawyer?
'Yes,' Francis said.
'She's all right?'
'Seems to be.'.«'What does she have to say for herself?'
'I don't know what you mean.'
'I hope you told her I said go to hell.'
Francis didn't answer. Charles picked up one of the books I had brought him and began to leaf through it sporadically.
'Thanks for coming,' he said. 'I'm kind of tired now.'
'He looks awful,' said Francis in the car.
'There's got to be some way they can patch this up,' I said.
'Surely we can get Henry to call him and apologize.'
'What good do you think that's going to do? As long as Camilla's at the Albemarle?'
'Well, she doesn't know he's in the hospital, does she? This is kind of an emergency.'
'I don't know.'
The windshield wipers ticked back and forth. A cop in a rain slicker was directing traffic at the intersection. It was the cop with the red moustache. Recognizing Henry's car, he smiled at us and beckoned for us to go through. We smiled and waved back, happy day, two guys on a ride – then drove for a block or two in grim, superstitious silence.
'There's got to be something we can do,' I said at last.
'I think we had better stay out of it.'
'You can't tell me that if she knew how sick he was, she wouldn't be over at the hospital in five minutes.'
'I'm not kidding,' said Francis. 'I think we both had better just stay out of it.'
'Why?'
But he only lit another cigarette and wouldn't say anything else, no matter how I grilled him.
When I got back to my room I found Camilla sitting at my desk, reading a book. 'Hi,' she said, glancing up. 'Your door was open.
I hope you don't mind.'
Seeing her was like an electric shock. Unexpectedly I felt a surge of anger. Rain was blowing through the screen and I walked across the room to shut the window.
'What are you doing here?' I said.
'I wanted to talk to you.'
'About what?'
'How's my brother?'
'Why don't you go see him yourself?'
She put down the book – ah, lovely, I thought helplessly, I loved her, I loved the very sight of her: she was wearing a cashmere sweater, soft gray-green, and her gray eyes had a luminous celadon tint. 'You think you have to take sides,' she said. 'But you don't.'
'I'm not taking sides. I just think whatever you're doing, you picked a bad time to do it.'
'And what would be a good time?' she said. 'I want you to see something. Look.'
She held up a piece of the light hair near her temples. Underneath was a scabbed spot about the size of a quarter where someone had, apparently, pulled a handful of hair out by the roots. I was too startled to say a thing.
'And this.' She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. The wrist was swollen and a bit discolored, but what horrified me was a tiny, evil burn on the underside of the forearm: a cigarette burn, gouged deep and ugly in the flesh.
It was a moment before I found my voice. 'Good God, Camilla!
Charles did this?'
She pulled the sleeve down. 'See what I mean?' she said. Her voice was unemotional; her expression watchful, almost wry.
'How long has this been going on?'
She ignored my question. 'I know Charles,' she said. 'Better than you do. Staying away, just now, is much wiser.'
'Whose idea was it that you stay at the Albemarle?'
'Henry's.'
'How does he fit into this?'
She didn't answer.
A horrible thought flashed across my mind. 'He didn't do this to you, did he?' I said.
She looked at me in surprise. 'No. Why would you think that?'
'How am I supposed to know what to think?'
The sun came suddenly from behind a rain cloud, flooding the room with glorious light that wavered on the walls like water.
Camilla's face burst into glowing bloom. A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment – mirror, ceiling, floor – was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don't know what. And then the cloud passed over the sun again, and the life went out of everything.
'Why did you come here?' I said.
'Because I wanted to see you.'
'I don't know if you care what I think' – I hated the sound of my voice, was unable to control it, everything I said was coming out in the same haughty, injured tone – 'I don't know if you care what I think, but I think you're making things worse by staying at the Albemarle.'
'And what do you think I should do?'
'Why don't you stay with Francis?'
She laughed. 'Because Charles bullies poor Francis to death,' she said. 'Francis means well. I know that. But he couldn't stand up to Charles for five minutes.'
'If you asked him, he'd give you the money to go somewhere.'
'I know he would. He offered to.' She reached in her pocket for a cigarette; with a pang I saw they were Lucky Strikes, Henry's brand.
'You could take the money and stay wherever you like,' I said.
'You wouldn't have to tell him where.'
'Francis and I have gone over all this.' She paused. 'The thing is, I'm afraid of Charles. And Charles is afraid of Henry. That's really all there is to it.'
I was shocked by the coldness with which she said this.
'So is that it?' I said.
'What do you mean?'
'You're protecting your own interests?'
'He tried to kill me,' she said simply. Her eyes met mine, candid and clear.
'And is Henry not afraid of Charles too?'
'Why should he be?'
'You know.'
Once she realized what I meant, I was startled how quickly she leapt to his defense. 'Charles would never do that,' she said, with childlike swiftness.
'Let's say he did. Went to the police.'
'But he wouldn't.'
'How do you know?'
'And implicate the rest of us? Himself, too?'
'At this point, I think he might not care.'
I said this intending to hurt her, and with pleasure I saw that I had. Her startled eyes met mine. 'Maybe,' she said. 'But you've got to remember, Charles is sick now. He's not himself. And the thing is, I believe he knows it.' She paused. 'I love Charles,' she said. 'I love him, and I know him better than anybody in the world. But he's been under an awful lot of pressure, and when he's drinking like this, I don't know, he just becomes a different person. He won't listen to anybody; I don't know if he even remembers half the things he does. That's why I thank God he's in the hospital. If he has to stop for a day or two, maybe he'll start thinking straight again.'
What would she think, I wondered, if she knew that Henry was sending him whiskey.
'And do you think Henry really has Charles's best interest at heart?' I said.
'Of course,' she said, startled.
'And yours too?'
'Certainly. Why shouldn't he?'
'You do have a lot of faith in Henry, don't you,' I said.
'He's never let me down.'
For some reason, I felt a fresh swell of anger. 'And what about Charles?' I said.
'I don't know.'
'He'll be out of the hospital soon. You'll have to see him.
What are you going to do then?'
'Why are you so angry at me, Richard?'
I glanced at my hand. It was trembling. I hadn't even realized it. I was trembling all over with rage.
'Please leave,' I said. 'I wish you'd go.'
'What's wrong?'
'Just go. Please.'
She got up and took a step towards me. I stepped away. 'All right,' she said, 'all right,' and she turned around and left.
It rained all day and the rest of the night. I took some sleeping pills and went to the movies: Japanese film, I couldn't seem to follow it. The characters loitered in deserted rooms, no one talking, everything silent for whole minutes except the hiss of the projector and rain pounding on the roof. The theater was empty except for a shadowy man in the back. Dust motes floated in the projector beam. It was raining when I came out, no stars, sky black as the ceiling of the movie house. The marquee lights melted on the wet pavement in long white gleams. I went back inside the glass doors to wait for my taxi, in the carpeted, popcorn-smelling lobby. I called Charles on the pay phone, but the hospital switchboard wouldn't put me through: it was past visiting hours, she said, everyone was sleeping. I was still arguing with her when the taxi pulled up at the curb, long slants of rain illumined in the headlights and the tires throwing up low fans of water.
I dreamed about the stairs again that night. It was a dream I'd had often in the winter but seldom since. Once more, I was on the iron stairs at Leo's – rusted thin, no railing – except now they stretched down into a dark infinity and the steps were all different sizes: some tall, some short, some as narrow as the width of my shoe. The drop was bottomless on either side. For some reason, I had to hurry, though I was terrified of falling. Down and down.
The stairs got more and more precarious, until finally they weren't even stairs at all; farther down – and for some reason this was always the most terrifying thing of all – a man was going down them, far'ahead of me, really fast…
I woke around four, couldn't get back to sleep. Too many of Mrs Corcoran's tranquilizers: they'd started to backfire in my system, I was taking them in the daytime now, they wouldn't knock me out anymore. I got out of bed and sat by the window.
My heartbeat trembled in my fingertips. Outside the black panes, past my ghost in the glass (Why so pale and wan, fond lover?) I heard the wind in the trees, felt the hills crowding around me in the dark.
I wished I could stop myself from thinking. But all sorts of things had begun to occur to me. For instance: why had Henry let me in on this, only two months (it seemed years, a lifetime) before? Because it was obvious, now, that his decision to tell me was a calculated move. He had appealed to my vanity, allowing me to think I'd figured it out by myself (good for you, he'd said, leaning back in his chair; I could still remember the look on his face as he'd said it, good for you, you're just as smart as I'd thought you were); and I had congratulated myself in the glow of his praise, when in fact – I saw this now, I'd been too vain to see it then – he'd led me right to it, coaxing and flattering all the way. Perhaps – the thought crawled over me like a cold sweat – perhaps even my preliminary, accidental discovery had been engineered. The lexicon that had been misplaced, for instance: had Henry stolen it, knowing I'd come back for it? And the messy apartment I was sure to walk into; the flight numbers and so forth left deliberately, so it now seemed, by the phone; both were oversights unworthy of Henry. Maybe he'd wanted me to find out. Maybe he'd divined in me – correctly – this cowardice, this hideous pack instinct which would enable me to fall into step without question.
And it wasn't just a question of having kept my mouth shut, I thought, staring with a sick feeling at my blurred reflection in the windowpane. Because they couldn't have done it without me. Bunny had come to me, and I had delivered him right into Henry's hands. And I hadn't even thought twice about it.
'You were the alarm bell, Richard,' Henry had said. 'I knew if he told anybody, he'd tell you first. And now that he has, I feel that we're in for an extremely rapid progression of events.'
An extremely rapid progression of events. My flesh crawled, remembering the ironic, almost humorous twist he'd put on the last words – oh, God, I thought, my God, how could I have listened to him? He was right, too, about the rapid part at least.
Less than twenty-four hours later, Bunny was dead. And though I hadn't done the actual pushing – which had seemed an essential distinction at the time – now that didn't matter much anymore.
I was still trying to force back the blackest thought of all; the merest suggestion of it sent the rat's feet of panic skittering up my spine. Had Henry intended to make me the patsy if his plan had fallen through? If so, I wasn't quite sure how he'd meant to manage it, but if he'd felt like doing it, there was no doubt in my mind he would have been able to. So much of what I knew was only secondhand, so much of it was only what he'd told me; there was an awful lot, when you got right down to it, that I didn't even know. And – though the immediate danger was apparently gone – there was no guarantee that it wouldn't surface again a year, twenty years, fifty years from now. I knew, from television, that there was no statute of limitations on murder.
New evidence discovered. The case reopened. You read about these things all the time.
It was still dark. Birds were chirping in the eaves. I pulled out my desk drawer and counted the rest of the sleeping pills: candy-colored pretties, bright on a sheet of typing paper. There were still quite a lot of them, plenty for my purposes. (Would Mrs Corcoran feel better if she knew this twist: that her stolen pills had killed her son's killer?) So easy, to feel them go down my throat: but blinking in the glare of my desk lamp, I was struck with a wave of revulsion so strong it was almost nausea. Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny's face – stupid terror; the whole world opening upside down; his life exploding in a thunder of crows and the sky expanding empty over his stomach like a white ocean. Then nothing. Rotten stumps, sowbugs crawling in the fallen leaves. Dirt and dark.
I lay on my bed. I felt my heart limping in my chest, and was revolted by it, a pitiful muscle, sick and bloody, pulsing against 55i my ribs. Rain streamed down the windowpanes. The lawn out «side was sodden, swampy. When the sun came up, I saw, in the ™ small, cold light of dawn, that the flagstones outside were covered with earthworms: delicate, nasty, hundreds of them, twisting blind and helpless on the rain-dark sheets of slate.
In class on Tuesday, Julian mentioned he'd spoken to Charles on the telephone. 'You're right,' he murmured. 'He doesn't sound well. Very groggy and confused, don't you think? I suppose they have him under sedation?' He smiled, sifting through his papers.
'Poor Charles. I asked where Camilla was – I wanted to get her on the line, I couldn't make any sense of what he was trying to tell me – and he said' – (here his voice changed slightly, in imitation of Charles, a stranger might assume; but it was really Julian's own voice, cultured and purring, only raised slightly in tone, as if he could not bear, even in mimicry, to substantively alter its own melodious cadence) – 'he said, in the most melancholy voice, "She's hiding from me." He was dreaming, of course.
I thought it was rather sweet. So, to humor him, I said, "Well, then. You must hide your eyes and count to ten and she'll come back."'
He laughed. 'But he got angry at me. It was really rather charming of him. "No," he said, "no she won't."
"But you're dreaming," I said to him. "No," he said, "no I'm not. It's not a dream. It's real."'
The doctors couldn't figure out quite what was wrong with Charles. They'd tried two antibiotics over the course of the week, but the infection – whatever it was – didn't respond. The third try was more successful. Francis, who went to see him Wednesday and Thursday, was told that Charles was improving, and that if everything went well he could come home over the weekend.
About ten o'clock on Friday, after another sleepless night, I walked over to Francis's. It was a hot, overcast morning, trees shimmering in the heat. I felt haggard and exhausted. The warm air vibrated with the thrum of wasps and the drone of lawn mowers. Swifts chased and chittered, in fluttering pairs, through the sky.
My head hurt. I wished I had a pair of sunglasses. I wasn't supposed to meet Francis until eleven-thirty but my room was a wreck, I hadn't done laundry in weeks; it was too hot to do anything more taxing than lie on my tangled bed, and sweat, and try to ignore the bass of my neighbor's stereo thumping through the wall. Jud and Frank were building some enormous, ramshackle, modernistic structure out on Commons lawn, and the hammers and the power drills had started early in the morning.
I didn't know what it was – I had heard, variously, that it was a stage set, a sculpture, a Stonehenge-type monument to the Grateful Dead – but the first time I had looked out my window, dazed with Fiorinal, and seen the upright support posts rising stark from the lawn, I was flooded with black, irrational terror: gibbets, I thought, they're putting up gibbets, they're having a hanging on Commons lawn… The hallucination was over in a moment, but in a strange way it had persisted, manifesting itself in different lights like one of those pictures on the cover of horror paperbacks in the supermarket: turned one way, a smiling blond-haired child; turned the other, a skull in flames. Sometimes the structure was mundane, silly, perfectly harmless; though early in the morning, say, or around twilight, the world would drop away and there loomed a gallows, medieval and black, birds wheeling low in the skies overhead. At night, it cast its long shadow over what fitful sleep I was able to get.
The problem, basically, was that I had been taking too many pills; the ups now, periodically, mixed with the downs, because though the latter had ceased to put me effectively to sleep, they hung me over in the daytime, so that I wandered in a perpetual twilight. Unmedicated sleep was impossible, a fairy tale, some remote childhood dream. But I was running low on the downs; and though I knew I could probably get some more, from Cloke, or Bram, or somebody, I'd decided to cut them out for a couple of days – a good idea, in the abstract, but it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light. The world jangled with a sharp, discordant clarity: green everywhere, sweat and sap, weeds pushing through the spattered cracks of the old marble sidewalk; veined white slabs, heaved and buckled by a century's worth of hard January freezes. A millionaire had put them down, those marble walks, a man who summered in North Hampden and threw himself from a window on Park Avenue in the 19205.
Behind the mountains the sky was overcast, dark as slate. There was pressure in the air; rain coming, sometime soon. Geraniums blazed from the white housefronts, the red of them, against the chalky clapboard, fierce and harrowing.
I turned down Water Street, which ran north past Henry's house, and as I approached I saw a dark shadow in the back of his garden. No, I thought.
But it was. He was on his knees with a pail of water, and a cloth, and as I drew nearer I saw that he was washing not the flagstones, as I'd thought at first, but a rosebush. He was bent over it, polishing the leaves with meticulous care, like some crazed gardener from Alice in Wonderland.
I thought that any moment he must stop, but he didn't, and finally I let myself in through the back gate. 'Henry,' I said. 'What are you doing?'
He glanced up, calmly, not at all surprised to see me. 'Spider mites,' he said. 'We've had a damp spring. I've sprayed them twice, but to get the eggs off it's best to wash them by hand.' He dropped the cloth in the pail. I noted, not for the first time lately, how well he looked, how his stiff sad manner had relaxed into a more natural one. I had never thought Henry handsome – indeed, I'd always thought that only the formality of his bearing saved him from mediocrity, as far as looks went – but now, less rigid, I and lockcd-up in his movements, he had a sure, tigerish grace the swiftness and ease of which surprised me. A lock of hair blew upon his forehead. 'This is a Reine des Violettes,' he said, indicating the rosebush. 'A lovely old rose. Introduced in 1860.
And that is a Madame Isaac Pereire. The flowers smell of raspberries.'
I said: 'Is Camilla here?'
There was no trace of emotion upon his face, or of any effort to conceal it. 'No,' he said, turning back to his work. 'She was sleeping when I left. I didn't want to wake her.'
It was shocking to hear him speak of her with such intimacy.
Pluto and Persephone. I looked at his back, prim as a parson's, tried to imagine the two of them together. His big white hands with the square nails.
Henry said, unexpectedly: 'How is Charles?'
'All right,' I said, after an awkward pause.
'He'll be coming home soon, I suppose.'
A dirty tarpaulin flapped loudly on the roof. He kept working.
His dark trousers, with the suspenders crossed over his white shirted back, gave him a vaguely Amish appearance.
'Henry,' I said.
He didn't look up.
'Henry, it's none of my business, but I hope for God's sake you know what you're doing,' I said. I paused, expecting some response, but there was none. 'You haven't seen Charles, but I have, and I don't think you realize the shape he's in. Ask Francis, if you don't believe me. Even Julian's noticed. I mean, I've tried to tell you, but I just don't think you understand. He's out of his mind, and Camilla has no idea, and I don't know what we'll do when he gets home. I'm not even sure he'll be able to stay by himself. I mean '
'I'm sorry,' interrupted Henry, 'but would you mind handing me those shears?'
There was a long silence. Finally, he reached over and got them himself. 'All right,' he said pleasantly. 'Never mind.' Very conscientiously, he parted the canes and clipped one in the middle, holding the shears at a careful slant, taking care not to injure a larger cane adjacent to it.
'What the hell is wrong with you?' I had a hard time keeping my voice down. There were windows open in the upstairs apartment that faced the back; I heard people talking, listening to the radio, moving around. 'Why do you have to make things so hard for everybody?' He didn't turn around. I grabbed the shears from his hand and threw them, with a clatter, on the bricks. 'Answer me,' I said.
We looked at each other for a long moment. Behind his glasses, his eyes were steady and very blue.
Finally, he said, quietly: 'Tell me.'
The intensity of his gaze frightened me. 'What?'
'You don't feel a great deal of emotion for other people, do you?'
I was taken aback. 'What are you talking about?' I said. 'Of course I do.'
'Do you?' He raised an eyebrow. 'I don't think so. It doesn't matter,' he said, after a long, tense pause. 'I don't, either.'
'What are you trying to get at?'
He shrugged. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.'
He brushed the dirt from his hands. 'But then it changed,' he said. 'The night I killed that man.'
I was jarred – a little spooked, as well – at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms.
'It was the most important night of my life,' he said calmly. 'It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most.'
'Which is?'
'To live without thinking.'
Bees buzzed loudly in the honeysuckle. He went back to his rosebush, thinning the smaller branches at the top.
'Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn't really know it,' he said. 'It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized.'
'And now?'
'Now,' he said, 'now, I know that I can do anything that I want.' He glanced up. 'And, unless I'm very wrong, you've experienced something similar yourself 'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Oh, but I think you do. That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.'
He was talking about the ravine. And, to my horror, 1 realized that in a way he was right. As ghastly as it had been, there was no denying that Bunny's murder had thrown all subsequent events into a kind of glaring Technicolor. And, though this new lucidity of vision was frequently nerve-wracking, there was no denying that it was not an altogether unpleasant sensation.
'I don't understand what this has to do with anything,' I said, to his back.
'I'm not sure that I do, either,' he said, assessing the balance of his rosebush, then removing, very carefully, another cane in the center. 'Except that there's not much which matters a great deal. The last six months have made that plain. And lately it has seemed important to find a thing or two which do. That's all.'
As he said this, he trailed away. 'There,' he said at last. 'Does that look all right? Or do I need to open it up more in the middle?'
'Henry,' I said. 'Listen to me.'
'I don't want to take off too much,' he said vaguely. 'I should have done this a month ago. The canes bleed if they're pruned this late, but better late than never, as they say.'
'Henry. Please.' I was on the verge of tears. 'What's the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? Don't you understand what's going on?'
He stood up, dusted his hands on his trousers. 'I have to go in the house now,' he said.
I watched him hang the shears on a peg, then walk away. At the last, I thought he was going to turn and say something, goodbye, anything. But he didn't. He went inside. The door shut behind him.
I found Francis's apartment darkened, razor slits of light showing through the closed Venetian blinds. He was asleep. The place smelled sour, and ashy. Cigarette butts floated in a gin glass.
There was a black, bubbled scorch in the varnish of the night table beside his bed.
I pulled the blinds to let some sun in. He rubbed his eyes, J| called me a strange name. Then he recognized me. 'Oh,' he said, his face screwed up, albino-pale. 'You. What are you doing here?'
I reminded him that we had agreed to visit Charles.
'What day is it?'
'Friday,' 'Friday.' He slumped back down in the bed. 'I hate Fridays.
Wednesdays, too. Bad luck. Sorrowful Mystery on the Rosary.'
He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Then he said: 'Do you get the sense something really awful is about to happen?'
I was alarmed. 'No,' I said, defensively, though this was far from true. 'What do you think's going to happen?'
'I don't know,' he said without moving. 'Maybe I'm wrong.'
'You should open a window,' I said. 'It smells in here,' 'I don't care. I can't smell. I've got a sinus infection.' Listlessly, with one hand, he groped for his cigarettes on the night table. 'Jesus, I'm depressed,' he said. 'I can't handle seeing Charles right now,' 'We've got to,' 'What time is it?'
'About eleven,' He was silent for a moment, then said: 'Look here. I've got an idea. Let's have some lunch. Then we'll do it.'
'We'll worry about it the whole time.'
'Let's ask Julian, then. I'll bet he'll come.'
'Why do you want to ask Julian?'
'I'm depressed. Always nice to see him, anyway.' He rolled over on his stomach. 'Or maybe not. I don't know.'
Julian answered the door – just a crack, as he had the very first time I'd knocked – and opened it wide when he saw who it was.
Immediately Francis asked him if he wanted to come to lunch.
'Of course. I'd be delighted.' He laughed. 'This has been an odd morning indeed. Most peculiar. I'll tell you about it on the way.'
Things which were odd, by Julian's definition, often turned out to be amusingly mundane. By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket – cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans. All of us enjoyed hearing about these little forays of his into the twentieth century, so Francis and I pressed him to tell us what now had happened.
'Well, the secretary from the Literature and Languages Division was just here,' he said. 'She had a letter for me. They have in and out boxes, you know, in the literature office – one can leave things to be typed or pick up messages there, though I never do. Anyone with whom I have the slightest wish to talk knows to reach me here. This letter' – he indicated it, lying open on the table beside his reading glasses – 'which was meant for me, somehow wound up in the box of a Mr Morse, who apparently is on sabbatical. His son came round to pick up his mail this morning and found it had been put by mistake into his father's slot.'
'What kind of letter?' said Francis, leaning closer. 'Who's it from?'
'Bunny,' Julian said.
A bright knife of terror plunged through my heart. We stared at him, dumbstruck. Julian smiled at us, allowing a dramatic pause for our astonishment to blossom to the full.
'Well, of course, it's not really from Edmund,' he said. 'It's a forgery, and not a very clever one. The thing is typewritten, and there's no signature or date. That doesn't seem quite legitimate, does it?'
Francis had found his voice. Typewritten?' he said.
'Yes.'
'Bunny didn't own a typewriter.'
'Well, he was my student for nearly four years, and he never handed in anything typewritten to me. As far as I'm aware, he didn't know how to type-write at all. Or did he?' he said, looking up shrewdly.
'No,' said Francis, after an earnest, thoughtful pause, 'no, I think you're right'; and I echoed this, though I knew – and Francis knew, too – that as a matter of fact Bunny had known how to type. He didn't have a typewriter of his own – this was perfectly true; but he frequently borrowed Francis's, or used one of the sticky old manuals in the library. The fact was – though neither of us was about to point it out – that none of us, ever, gave typed things to Julian. There was a simple reason for this. It was impossible to write in Greek alphabet on an English typewriter; and though Henry actually had somewhere a little Greek alphabet portable, which he had purchased on holiday in Mykonos, he never used it because, as he explained to me, the keyboard was different from the English and it took him five minutes to type his own name.
'It's terribly sad that someone would want to play a trick like this,' Julian said. 'I can't imagine who would do such a thing.'
'How long had it been in the mailbox?' Francis said. 'Do you know?'
'Well, that's another thing,' Julian said. 'It might have been put in at any time. The secretary said that Mr Morse's son hadn't been to check his father's box since March. Which means, of course, that it might have been slipped in yesterday.' He indicated the envelope, on the table. 'You see. There's only my name, typewritten, on the front, no return address, no date, of course no postmark. Obviously it's the work of a crank. The thing is, though, I can't imagine why anyone would play such a cruel joke. I'd almost like to tell the Dean, though goodness knows I don't want to stir things up again after all that fuss.'
Now that the first, horrible shock was over, I was starting to breathe a bit easier. 'What sort of a letter is it?' I asked him.
Julian shrugged. 'You can have a look at it, if you like.'
I picked it up. Francis looked at it over my shoulder. It was single-spaced, on five or six small sheets of paper, some of which looked not unlike some writing paper which Bunny used to have.
But though the sheets were roughly the same size, they didn't all match. I could tell, by the way the ribbon had struck a letter sometimes half-red and half-black, that it had been written on the typewriter in the all-night study room.
The letter itself was disjointed, incoherent, and – to my astonished eyes – unquestionably genuine. I skimmed it only briefly, and remember so little about it that I am unable to reproduce it here, but I do remember thinking that if Bunny wrote it, he was a lot closer to a breakdown than any of us had thought. It was filled with profanities of various sorts which it was difficult, even in the most desperate of circumstances, to imagine Bunny using in a letter to Julian. It was unsigned, but there were several clear references which made it plain that Bunny Corcoran, or someone purporting to be him, was the author. It was badly spelled, with a great many of Bunny's characteristic errors, which fortunately couldn't have meant much to Julian, as Bunny was such a poor writer that he usually had someone else go over his work before he handed it in. Even I might have had doubts about the 56i authorship, the thing was so garbled and paranoid, if not for the reference to the Battenkill murder: 'He' – (Henry, that is. or so the letter ran approximately at one point) – 'is a fucking Monster.
He has killed a man and he wants to kill Me, too. Everybody is in on it. The man they killed in October, in Battenkill county.
His name was Mc Ree. I think they beat him to death I am not sure.' There were other accusations – some of them true (the twins' sexual practices), some not; all of which were so wild that they only served to discredit the whole. There was no mention of my name. The whole thing had a desperate, drunken tone that was not unfamiliar. Though this didn't occur to me until later, I now believe he must have gone to the all-night study room and written it on the same night that he came drunk to my room – either directly before or after, probably after – in which case it was a pure stroke of luck we didn't run into each other when I was on my way to the Science Building to telephone Henry. I remember only one other thing, which was its closing line, and the only thing I saw which struck a pang at me: 'Please Help me, this is why I wrote you, you are the only person that can.'
'Well, I don't know who wrote this,' said Francis at last, his tone offhand and perfectly casual, 'but whoever they were, they certainly couldn't spell.'
Julian laughed. I knew he didn't have the slightest idea that the letter was real.
Francis took the letter and shuffled ruminatively through the pages. He stopped at the next-to-last sheet – which was of a slightly different color than the rest – and idly turned it over. 'It seems that -' he said, and then stopped.
'Seems that what?' said Julian pleasantly.
There was a slight pause before Francis continued. 'Seems that whoever wrote this needed a new typewriter ribbon,' he said; but that was not what he was thinking, or I was thinking, or what he had been about to say. That had been struck from his mind when, turning the irregular sheet over, the two of us saw, with horror, what was on the back of it. It was a sheet of hotel stationery, engraved, at the top, with the address and letterhead of the Excelsior: the hotel where Bunny and Henry had stayed in Rome.
Henry told us, later, head in hands, that Bunny had asked him to buy him another box of stationery the day before he died. It was expensive stuff, white cream laid, imported from England; the best they had at the store in town. 'If only I'd bought it for him,' he said. 'He asked me half a dozen times. But I figured, there wasn't much point, you see…' The sheet from the Excelsior wasn't quite so heavy, or fine. Henry speculated – probably correctly – that Bunny had got to the bottom of the box, so he rooted around in his desk and found that piece, roughly the same size, and turned it over to use the back.
I tried not to look at it, but it kept obtruding at the corners of my vision. A palace, drawn in blue ink, with flowing script like the script on an Italian menu. Blue edges on the paper.
Unmistakable.
'To tell you the truth,' said Julian, 'I didn't even finish reading it. Obviously the perpetrator of this is quite disturbed. One can't say, of course, but I think it must have been written by another student, don't you?'
'I can't imagine that a member of the faculty would write something like this, if that's what you mean,' said Francis, turning the letterhead back over. We didn't look at each other. I knew exactly what he was thinking: how can we steal this page? how can we get it away?
To distract Julian's attention, I walked to the window. 'It's a beautiful day, isn't it?' I said, my back to both of them. 'It's hard to believe there was snow on the ground hardly a month ago…'
I babbled on, hardly aware of what I was saying, and afraid to look around.
'Yes,' said Julian politely, 'yes, it is lovely out,' but his voice came not from where I was expecting it but farther away, near the bookcase. I turned and saw that he was putting on his coat.
From the look on Francis's face, I knew he hadn't succeeded. He was turned halfway, watching Julian from the corner of his eye; for a moment, when Julian turned his head to cough, it seemed like he was going to be able to get away with it but no sooner had he pulled the page out than Julian turned around, and he had no choice but to casually place it where it had been, as if the pages were out of order and he was simply rearranging them.
Julian smiled at us, by the door. 'Are you boys ready?' he said.
'Certainly,' said Francis, with more enthusiasm than I knew he felt. He laid the letter, folded, back on the table and the two of us followed him out, smiling and talking, though I could see the tension in the back of Francis's shoulders and I was biting the inside of my bottom lip with frustration.
It was a miserable lunch. I remember hardly anything about it except that it was a very bright day, and we sat at a table too close to the window, and the glare in my eyes only increased my confusion and discomfort. And all the time we talked about the letter, the letter, the letter. Might whoever sent it have a grudge against Julian? Or was someone angry at us? Francis was more composed than me, but he was downing the glasses of house wine one after another, and a light sweat had broken out on his forehead.
Julian thought the letter was a fake. That was obvious. But if he saw the letterhead, the game was up, because he knew as well as we did that Bunny and Henry had stayed at the Excelsior for a couple of weeks. Our best hope was that he would simply throw it away, without showing it to anyone else or examining it further. But Julian liked intrigue, and secrecy, and this was the sort of thing that could keep him speculating for days. ('No. Could it have been a faculty member? Do you think?') I kept thinking about what he'd said earlier, about showing it to the Dean. We would have to get hold of it somehow. Break in his office, maybe.
But even assuming he left it there, in a place where we could find it, that meant waiting six or seven hours.
I drank a good deal during lunch, but by the time we were finished I was still so nervous that I had brandy with my dessert instead of coffee. Twice, Francis slipped away to telephone. I knew he was trying to get Henry, to ask him to go over to the office and nip the letter while we had Julian captive at the Brasserie; I knew also, from his tense smiles when he returned, that he wasn't having any luck. After the second time he came back, an idea occurred to me: if he could leave to telephone, why couldn't he just go out the back and get in his car and go get it himself? I would have slipped out and done it myself if I had only had the car keys. Too late – as Francis was paying the check – I realized what I should have said: that I'd left something in the car and needed the keys to go unlock the door and get it.
On the way back to school, in the charged silence, I realized that something we had always relied on was the ability to communicate whenever we wanted. Always, previously, in an emergency we could throw out something in Greek, under the guise of an aphorism or quotation. But now that was impossible.
Julian didn't invite us back up to his office. We watched him going up the walk, waved as he turned at the back door to the Lyceum. It was, by now, about one-thirty in the afternoon.
We sat motionless in the car for a moment after he disappeared.
Francis's chummy, goodbye smile had died on his face. Suddenly, and with a violence that frightened me, he leaned down and banged his forehead on the steering wheel. 'Shit!' he yelled. 'Shit!
Shit!'
I grabbed his arm and shook it. 'Shut up,' I said.
'Oh, shit,' he wailed, rolling his head back, the heels of his hands pressed to his temples. 'Shit. This is it, Richard.'
'Shut up.'
'It's over. We've had it. We're going to jail.'
'Shut up,' 1 said again. His panic, oddly, had sobered me.
'We've got to figure out what to do.'
'Look,' said Francis. 'Let's just go. If we leave now we can be in Montreal by dark. Nobody will ever find us.'
'You're not making any sense.'
'We'll stay in Montreal a couple of days. Sell the car. Then take the bus to, I don't know, Saskatchewan or something. We'll go to the weirdest place we can find.'
'Francis, I wish you would calm down for a minute. I think we can handle this.'
'What are we going to do?'
'Well, first, I think, we've got to find Henry.'
'Henry?' He looked at me in amazement. 'What makes you think he'll be any help? He's so whacked-out, he doesn't know which way -'
'Doesn't he have a key to Julian's office?'
He was quiet a moment. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I think he does.
Or he used to.'
'There you go,' I said. 'We'll find Henry and drive him over here. He can make some excuse to get Julian out of the office.
Then one of us can slip up the back stairs with the key.'
It was a good plan. The only problem was, running Henry down wasn't so easy as we'd hoped. He wasn't at his apartment, and when we went by the Albemarle, his car wasn't there.
We drove back to campus to check the library, then back to the Albemarle. This time Francis and I got out of the car and walked around the grounds.
The Albemarle had been built in the nineteenth century, as a retreat for rich convalescents. It was shady and luxurious, with tall shutters and a big, cool porch – everyone from Rudyard Kipling to FDR had stayed there – but it wasn't much bigger than a big private house.
'You tried the desk clerk?' 1 asked Francis.
'Don't even think about it. They're registered under a phony name, and I'm sure Henry gave the innkeeper some story, because when I tried to talk to her the other night she clammed up in a second.'
'Is there any way we can get in past the lobby?'
'I have no idea. My mother and Chris stayed here once. It isn't that big a place. There's only one set of stairs that I know of, and you have to walk past the desk to get to them.'
'What about downstairs?'
'The thing is, I think they're on an upper floor. Camilla said something about carrying bags upstairs. There might be fire stairs, but I wouldn't know how to go about finding them.'
We stepped up onto the porch. Through the screen door we could see a dark, cool lobby and, behind the desk, a man of about sixty, his half-moon glasses pulled low on his nose, reading a copy of the Bennington Banner.
'Is that the guy you talked to?' I whispered.
'No. His wife.'
'Has he seen you before?'
'No.'
I pushed open the door and stuck my head in for a moment, then went inside. The innkeeper glanced from his paper and gave us a supercilious up-and-down look. He was one of those prissy retirees one sees frequently in New England, the sort who subscribe to antique magazines and carry those canvas tote bags they give as gift premiums on public TV.
I gave him my best smile. Behind the desk, I noticed, was a pegboard with room keys. They were arranged in tiers according to floor. There were three keys – 2-B, -C, and -E – missing on the second floor, and only one – 3-A – on the third.
He was looking at us frostily. 'How may I help you?' he said.
'Excuse me,' I said, 'but do you know if our parents have arrived yet from California?'
He was surprised. He opened a ledger. 'What's the name?'
'Rayburn. Mr and Mrs Cloke Rayburn.
'I don't see a reservation.'
'I'm not sure they made one.'
He looked at me over the tops of his glasses. 'Generally, we require a reservation, with deposit, at least forty-eight hours in advance,' he said.
'They didn't think they'd need one this time of year.'
'Well, there's no guarantee that there'll be room for them when they arrive,' he said curtly.
I would have liked to have pointed out that his inn was more than half-empty, and that I didn't see the guests exactly fighting to get in, but I smiled again and said, 'I guess they'll have to take their chances, then. Their plane got into Albany at noon. They should be here any minute.'
'Well, then.'
'Do you mind if we wait?'
Obviously, he did. But he couldn't say so. He nodded, his mouth pursed – thinking, no doubt, about the lecture on reservation policy he would deliver to my parents – and, with an ostentatious rattle, went back to his paper.
We sat down on a cramped Victorian sofa, as far from the desk as possible.
Francis was jittery and kept glancing around. 'I don't want to stay here,' he whispered, his lips barely moving, close to my ear.
'I'm afraid the wife will come back.'
'This guy is from hell, isn't he?'
'She's worse.'
The innkeeper was, very pointedly, not looking in our direction.
In fact, his back was to us. I put my hand on Francis's arm.
I'll be right back,' I whispered. 'Tell him I went looking for the men's room.'
The stairs were carpeted and I managed to get up them without making much noise. I hurried down the corridor until I f saw 2-C, and 2.-B next to it. The doors were blank and foreboding, but this was no time to hesitate. I knocked oil 2-C. No answer. I knocked again, louder this time. 'Camilla!' I said.
At this, a small dog began to raise a racket, down the hall in 2-E. Nix that, I thought, and was about to knock on the third door, when suddenly it opened and there stood a middle-aged lady in a golfing skirt. 'Excuse me,' she said. 'Are you looking for someone?'
It was funny, 1 thought, as I shot up the last flight of stairs, but I'd had a premonition they'd be on the top floor. In the corridor I passed a gaunt, sixtyish woman – print dress, harlequin glasses, sharp nasty face like a poodle – carrying a stack of folded towels.
'Wait!' she yelped. 'Where are you going?'
But I was already past her, down the hall, banging at the door of 3-A. 'Camilla!' I shouted. 'It's Richard! Let me in!'
And then, there she was, like a miracle: sunlight streaming behind her into the hall, barefoot and blinking with surprise.
'Hello,' she said, 'hello! What are you doing here?' And, behind my shoulder, the innkeeper's wife: 'What do you think you're doing here? Who are you?'
'It's all right,' Camilla said.
I was out of breath. 'Let me in,' I gasped.
She pulled the door shut. It was a beautiful room – oak wainscoting, fireplace, only one bed, I noticed, in the room beyond, bedclothes tangled at the foot… 'Is Henry here?' I said.
'What's wrong?' Bright circles of color burned high in her cheeks. 'It's Charles, isn't it? What's happened?'
Charles. I'd forgotten about him. I struggled to catch my breath.
'No,' I said. 'I don't have time to explain. We've got to find Henry. Where is he?'
'Why' – she looked at the clock – 'I believe he's at Julian's office.'
'Julian's:1'
'Yes. What's the matter?' she said, seeing the astonishment on my face. 'He had an appointment, I think, at two.'
I hurried downstairs to get Francis before the innkeeper and his wife had a chance to compare notes.
'What should we do?' said Francis on the drive back to school.
'Wait outside and watch for him?'
'I'm afraid we'll lose him. I think one of us better run up and get him.'
Francis lit a cigarette. The match flame wavered. 'Maybe it's okay,' he said. 'Maybe Henry managed to get hold of it.'
'I don't know,' I said. But I was thinking the same thing. If Henry saw the letterhead, I was pretty sure he'd try to take it, and I was pretty sure he'd be more efficient about it than Francis or me. Besides – it sounded petty but it was true – Henry was Julian's favorite. If he put his mind to it, he could coerce away the whole letter on some pretext of giving it to the police, having the typing analyzed, who knew what he might come up with?
Francis glanced at me sideways. 'If Julian found out about this,' he said, 'what do you think he would do?'
'I don't know,' I said, and I didn't. It was such an unthinkable prospect that the only responses I could imagine him having were melodramatic and improbable. Julian suffering a fatal heart attack. Julian weeping uncontrollably, a broken man.
'I can't believe he'd turn us in.'
'I don't know.'
'But he couldn't. He loves us.'
I didn't say anything. Regardless of what Julian felt for me, there was no denying that what I felt for him was love and trust of a very genuine sort. As my own parents had distanced themselves from me more and more – a retreat they had been in the process of effecting for many years – it was Julian who had grown to be the sole figure of paternal benevolence in my life, or, indeed, of benevolence of any sort. To me, he seemed my only protector in the world.
'It was a mistake,' said Francis. 'He has to understand,' 'Maybe,' I said. I couldn't conceive of his finding out, but as I tried to visualize myself explaining this catastrophe to someone, I realized that we would have an easier time explaining it to Julian than to anyone else. Perhaps, I thought, his reaction would be similar to my own. Perhaps he would see these murders as a sad, wild thing, haunted and picturesque (Tve done everything,' old Tolstoy used to boast, 'I've even killed a man'), instead of the basically selfish, evil act which it was.
'You know that thingjulian used to say,' said Francis.
'Which thing?'
'About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.'
I had heard Julian say this, but had never understood what he meant. 'We're not Hindus,' I said.
'Richard,' Julian said, in a tone which simultaneously welcomed me and let me know that I had come at a bad time.
'Is Henry here? I need to talk to him about something.'
He looked surprised. 'Of course,' he said, and opened the door.
Henry was sitting at the table where we did our Greek. Julian's empty chair, on the side by the window, was pulled close to his.
There were other papers on the table but the letter was in front of them. He glanced up. He did not look pleased to see me.
'Henry, may I speak to you?'
'Certainly,' he said coldly.
I turned, to step into the hall, but he didn't make a move to follow. He was avoiding my eye. Damn him, I thought. He thought I was trying to continue our earlier conversation in the garden.
'Could you come out here for a minute?' I said.
'What is it?'
'I need to tell you something.'
He raised an eyebrow. 'You mean, it's something you want to tell me in private? he said.
1 could have killed him. Julian, politely, had been pretending not to follow this exchange, but his curiosity was aroused by this.
He was standing, waiting, behind his chair. 'Oh, dear,' he said. 'I hope nothing's wrong. Shall I leave?'
'Oh, no, Julian,' said Henry, looking not at Julian but at me.
'Don't bother.'
'Is everything all right?' Julian asked me.
'Yes, yes,' I said. 'I just need to see Henry for a second. It's kind of important.'
'Can't it wait?' said Henry.
The letter was spread out on the table. With horror, I saw that he was turning through it slowly, like a book, pretending to examine the pages one by one. He hadn't seen the letterhead.
He didn't know it was there.
'Henry,' I said. 'It's an emergency. I have to talk to you right now.'
He was struck by the urgency in my voice. He stopped, and pivoted in his chair to look at me – they were both staring now – and as he did, as part of the motion of turning, he turned over the page in his hand. My heart did a somersault. There was the letterhead, face-up on the table. White palace drawn in blue curlicues.
'All right,' said Henry. Then, to Julian: 'I'm sorry. We'll be back in a moment.'
'Certainly,' said Julian. He looked grave and concerned. 'I hope nothing's the matter.'
I wanted to cry. I had Henry's attention; I had it, now, but I didn't want it. The letterhead lay exposed on the table.
'What's wrong?' said Henry, his eyes locked on mine.
He was attentive, poised as a cat. Julian was looking at me too. The letter lay on the table, between them, directly in Julian's line of vision. He had only to glance down.
I darted my eyes at the letter, then at Henry. He understood in an instant, turned smooth but fast; but he wasn't fast enough, and in that split-second, Julian looked down – casually, just an afterthought, but a second too soon.
I do not like to think about the silence that followed. Julian leaned over and looked at the letterhead for a long time. Then he picked up the page and examined it. Excekior. Via Veneto. Blue-inked battlements. I felt curiously light and empty-headed.
Julian put on his glasses and sat down. He looked through the whole thing, very carefully, front and back. I heard kids laughing, faintly, somewhere outside. At last he folded the letter and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
'Well,' he said at last. 'Well, well, well.'
As is true of most incipient bad things in life, I had not really prepared myself for this possibility. And what I felt, standing there, was not fear or remorse but only terrible, crushing humiliation, a dreadful, red-faced shame I hadn't felt since childhood.
And what was even worse was to see Henry, and to realize that he was feeling the same thing, and if anything, more acutely than myself. I hated him – was so angry I wanted to kill him – but somehow I was not prepared to see him like that.
Nobody said anything. Dust motes floated in a sunbeam. I thought of Camilla at the Albemarle, Charles in the hospital, Francis waiting trustfully in the car.
'Julian,' said Henry, 'I can explain this.'
'Please do,' said Julian.
His voice chilled me to the bone. Though he and Henry had in common a distinct coldness of manner – sometimes, around them, the very temperature seemed almost to drop -1 had always thought Henry's coldness essential, to the marrow, and Julian's only a veneer for what was, at bottom, a warm and kindhearted nature. But the twinkle in Julian's eye, as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.
Henry started to talk. It was so painful to hear him – Henry!
– stumble over his words that I am afraid I blocked out much of what he said. He began, in typical fashion, by attempting to justify himself but that soon faltered in the white glare of Julian's silence. Then – I still shudder to remember it – a desperate, pleading note crept into his voice. 'I disliked having to lie, of course' – disliked! as if he were talking about an ugly necktie, a dull dinner party! – 'we never wanted to lie to you, but it was necessary. That is, I felt it was necessary. The first matter was an accident; there was no use in worrying you about it, was there?
And then, with Bunny… He wasn't a happy person in those last months. I'm sure you know that. He was having a lot of personal problems, problems with his family…'
He went on and on. Julian's silence was vast, arctic. A black buzzing noise echoed in my head.,' can't stand this, I thought, I've got to leave, but still Henry talked, and still I stood there, and the sicker and blacker I felt to hear Henry's voice and to see the look on Julian's face.
Unable to stand it, I finally turned to go. Julian saw me do it.
Abruptly, he cut Henry off. 'That's enough,' he said.
There was an awful pause. I stared at him. This is it, I thought, with a kind of fascinated horror. He won't listen anymore. He doesn't want to be left alone with him.
Julian reached into his pocket. The expression on his face was impossible to read. He took the letter out and handed it to Henry.
'I think you'd better keep this,' he said.
He didn't get up from the table. The two of us left his office without a word. Funny, when I think about it now. That was the last time I ever saw him.
Henry and I didn't speak in the hallway. Slowly, we drifted out, eyes averted, like strangers. As I went down the stairs he was standing by the windowsill on the landing, looking out, blind and unseeing.
Francis was panic-stricken when he saw the look on my face.
'Oh, no,' he said. 'Oh, my God. What's happened?'
It was a long time before I could say anything. 'Julian saw it,'
I said.
'What?'
'He saw the letterhead. Henry's got it now.'
'How'd he get it?'
'Julian gave it to him.'
Francis was jubilant. 'He gave it to him? He gave Henry the letter?'
'Yes.'
'And he's not going to tell anyone?'
'No, I don't think so.'
He was startled by the gloom in my voice.
'But what's the matter?' he said shrilly. 'You got it, didn't you?
It's okay. Everything's all right now. Isn't it?'
I was staring out the car window, at the window of Julian's office.
'No,' I said, 'no, I don't really think that it is.'
Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: 'One of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light.' And under it, in a different ink, 'maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well (?)'
It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; I and it is with him that i am most tempted to embroider, to.^ flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself "
" was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.
Now, of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say that the secret of Julian's charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy. But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality or why – even in the light of subsequent events – I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.
But even in fairy tales, these kindly old gentlemen with their fascinating offers are not always what they seem to be. That should not be a particularly difficult truth for me to accept at this point but for some reason it is. More than anything I wish I could say that Julian's face crumbled when he heard what we had done.
I wish I could say that he put his head on the table and wept, wept for Bunny, wept for us, wept for the wrong turns and the life wasted: wept for himself, for being so blind, for having over and over again refused to see.
And the thing is, I had a strong temptation to say he had done these things anyway, though it wasn't at all the truth.
George Orwell – a keen observer of what lay behind the glitter of constructed facades, social and otherwise – had met Julian on several occasions, and had not liked him. To a friend he wrote: 'Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his "Asiatic serenity" is, I think, a mask for great coldness. The face one shows him he invariably reflects back at one, creating the illusion of warmth and depth when in fact he is brittle and shallow as a mirror. Acton' – this, apparently, Harold Acton, who was also in Paris then and a friend to both Orwell and Julian 'disagrees.
But I think he is not a man to be trusted.'
I have thought a great deal about this passage, also about a particularly shrewd remark once made by, of all people, Bunny.
'Y'know,' he said, 'Julian is like one of those people that'll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest.' This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian's personality. It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies. 'Julian,' he said curtly, 'will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.'
When I disagreed – strenuously – and asked what was wrong with focusing one's entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: 'There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.'
It's funny. In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly – basically to falsify him – in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn't perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.
Charles was released from the hospital the following day. Despite Francis's insistence that he come to his house for a while, he insisted on going home to his own apartment. His cheeks were sunken; he'd lost a lot of weight and he needed a haircut. He was sullen and depressed. We didn't tell him what had happened.
I felt sorry for Francis. I could tell he was worried about Charles, and upset that he was so hostile and uncommunicative.
'Would you like some lunch?' he asked him.
'No.'
'Come on. Let's go to the Brasserie.'
'I'm not hungry.'
'It'll be good. I'll buy you one of those roulage things you like for dessert.'
We went to the Brasserie. It was eleven o'clock in the morning.
By an unfortunate coincidence, the waiter sat us at the table by the window where Francis and I had sat with Julian less than twenty-four hours before. Charles wouldn't look at a menu. He ordered two Bloody Marys and drank them in quick succession.
Then he ordered a third.
Francis and I put down our forks and exchanged an uneasy glance.
'Charles,' Francis said, 'why don't you get an omelet or something?'
'I told you I'm not hungry.'
Francis picked up a menu and gave it a quick once-over. Then he motioned to the waiter.
'I said I'm not fucking hungry,' said Charles without looking up.
He was having a hard time keeping his cigarette balanced between his first and middle fingers.
Nobody had much to say after that. We finished eating and got the check, not before Charles had time to finish his third Bloody Mary and order a fourth. We had to help him to the car.
I was not much looking forward to going to Greek class, but when Monday rolled around I got up and went anyway. Henry and Camilla arrived separately – in case Charles decided to show up, I think – which, thank God, he didn't. Henry, I noticed, was puffy and very pale. He stared out the window and ignored Francis and me.
Camilla was nervous – embarrassed, maybe, by the way Henry was acting. She was anxious to hear about Charles and asked a number of questions, to most of which she didn't receive any response at all. Soon it was ten after; then fifteen.
'I've never known Julian to be this late,' said Camilla, looking at her watch.
Suddenly, Henry cleared his throat. His voice was strange and rusty, as if fallen into disuse. 'He's not coming,' he said.
We turned to look at him.
'What?' said Francis.
'I don't think he's going to come today.'
Just then we heard footsteps, and a knock at the door. It wasn't Julian, but the Dean of Studies. He creaked open the door and looked inside.
'Well, well,' he said. He was a sly, balding man in his early fifties who had a reputation for being kind of a smart-aleck. 'So this is what the Inner Sanctum looks like. The Holy of Holies.
I've never once been allowed up here.'
We looked at him.
'Not bad,' he said ruminatively. 'I remember about fifteen years ago, before they built the new Science Building, they had to stick some of the counselors up here. This one psychologist liked to leave her door open, thought it gave things a friendly feeling. "Good morning," she'd say to Julian whenever he walked past her door, "have a nice day." Can you believe that Julian phoned Charming Williams, my wicked predecessor, and threat ened to quit unless she was moved?" He chuckled.' "That dreadful woman." That's what he called her. "I can't bear that dreadful woman accosting me every time I happen to walk by."'
This was a story which had some currency around Hampden, and the Dean had left some of it out. The psychologist had not only left her own door open but also had tried to get Julian to do the same.
'To tell the truth,' said the Dean, 'I'd expected something a little more classical. Oil lamps. Discus throwing. Nude youths wrestling on the floor.'
'What do you want?' said Camilla, not very politely.
He paused, caught short, and gave her an oily smile. 'We need to have a little talk,' he said. 'My office has just learned that Julian has been called away from school very suddenly. He has taken an indefinite leave of absence and does not know when he might return. Needless to say' – a phrase he delivered with sarcastic delicacy – 'this puts you all in a rather interesting position in terms of academics, especially as it is only three weeks until the end of term. I understand that he was not in the habit of giving a written examination?'
We stared at him.
'Did you write papers? Sing songs? How was he accustomed to determining your final grade?'
'An oral examination for the tutorials,' Camilla said, 'as well as a term paper for the Civilization class.' She was the only one of us who was collected enough to speak. 'For the composition classes, an extended translation, English to Greek, from a passage of his choosing.'
The Dean pretended to ponder this. Then he took a breath and said: 'The problem you face, as I'm sure you're aware, is that we currently have no other teacher able to take over your class.
Mr Delgado has a reading knowledge of Greek, and though he says he'd be happy to look at your written work he is teaching a full load this term. Julian himself was most unhelpful on this point. I asked him to suggest a possible replacement and he said there wasn't any that he knew of.'
He took a piece of paper from his pocket. 'Now here are the three possible alternatives which occur to me. The first is for you to take incompletes and finish the course work in the fall. The thing is, however, I'm far from certain that Literature and Languages will be hiring another Classics teacher. There is so little interest in the subject, and the general consensus seems to be that it should be phased out, especially now that we're attempting to get the new Semiotics department off the ground.'
He took a deep breath. 'The second alternative is for you to take incompletes and finish the work in summer school. The third possibility is that we bring in – mind you, on a temporary basis a substitute teacher. Understand this. At this point in time it is extremely doubtful that we will continue to offer the degree in Classics at Hampden. For those of you who choose to remain with us, I feel sure that the English department can absorb you with minimal loss of credit hours, though I think each of you in order to fulfill the department requirements are looking at two semesters of work above and beyond what you might've anticipated for graduation. At any rate.' He looked at his list. 'I am sure you have heard of Hackett, the preparatory school for boys,' he said. 'Hack ett has extensive offerings in the field of Classics. I contacted the headmaster this morning and he said he would be happy to send a master over twice a week to supervise you. Though this might seem the best option from your perspective, it would by no means be ideal, relying, as it does, upon the auspices of the '
It was at this moment that Charles chose to come crashing through the door.
He lurched in, looked around. Though he might not have been intoxicated technically, that very instant, he had been so recently enough for this to be an academic point. His shirttails hung out. His hair fell in long dirty strings over his eyes.
'What?' he said, after a moment. 'Where's Julian?'
'Don't you knock?' said the Dean.
Charles turned, unsteadily, and looked at him.
'What's this?' he said. 'Who the hell are you?'
'I,' said the Dean sweetly, 'am the Dean of Studies.'
'What have you done with Julian?'
'He has left you. And somewhat in the lurch if I dare say it.
He has been called very suddenly from the country and doesn't know – or hasn't thought – about his return. He gave me to understand that it was something with the State Department, the Isrami government and all that. I think we are fortunate not to have had more problems of this nature, with the princess having gone to school here. One thinks at the time only of the prestige of such a pupil, alas, and not for an instant of the possible repercussions. Though I can't for the life of me imagine what the Isramis would want with Julian. Hampden's own Salman Rushdie.' He chuckled appreciatively, then consulted his sheet again. 'At any rate. I have arranged for the master from Hackett to meet with you tomorrow, here, at three p. m. I hope there is no conflict of schedule for anyone. If that happens to be the case, however, it would be well for you to re-evaluate your priorities, as this is the only time that he will be available to answer your I knew that Camilla hadn't seen Charles in well over a week, and I knew she couldn't have been prepared to see him looking so bad, but she was gazing at him with an expression not so much of surprise as of panic, and horror. Even Henry looked taken aback.
'… and, of course, this will entail a certain spirit of compromise on your parts too, as '
'What?' said Charles, interrupting him. 'What did you say?
You said Julian's gone?'
'I must compliment you, young man, on your grasp of the English language.'
'What happened? He just picked up and left?'
'In essence, yes.
There was a brief pause. Then Charles said, in a loud, clear voice: 'Henry, why do I think for some reason that this is all your fault?'
There followed a long and not too pleasant silence. Then Charles spun and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
The Dean cleared his throat.
'As I was saying,' he continued.
It is strange, but true, to relate, that at this point in time I was still capable of being upset by the fact that my career at Hampden had pretty much gone down the drain. When the Dean had said 'two extra semesters,' my blood ran cold. I knew, with the certainty I knew that night follows day, there was no way I could get my parents to make their measly, but quite necessary, contribution for an extra year. I'd lost time already, in three changes of major, in the transfer from California, and I'd lose even more if I transferred again – assuming that I could even get into another school, that I could get another scholarship, with my spotty records, with my spotty grades: why, I asked myself, oh, why, had I been so foolish, why hadn't I picked something and stuck with it, how was it that I could currently be at the end of my third year of college and have basically nothing to show for it?
What made me angrier was that none of the others seemed to care. To them, I knew, this didn't make the slightest bit of difference. What was it to them if they had to go an extra term?
What did it matter, if they failed to graduate, if they had to go back home? At least they had homes to go to. They had trust funds, allowances, dividend checks, doting grandmas, well connected uncles, loving families. College for them was only a way station, a sort of youthful diversion. But this was my main chance, the only one. And I had blown it.
I spent a frantic couple of hours pacing in my room – that is, I'd come to think of it as 'mine' but it wasn't really, I had to be out in three weeks, already it seemed to be assuming a heartless air of impersonality – and drafting a memo to the financial aid office. The only way I could finish my degree – in essence, the only way I could ever acquire the means to support myself in any passably tolerable fashion – was if Hampden agreed to shoulder the entire cost of my education during this additional year. I pointed out, somewhat aggressively, that it wasn't my fault Julian had decided to leave. I brought up every miserable commendation and award I'd won since the eighth grade. I argued that a year of classics could only bolster and enrich this now highly desirable course of study in English Literature.
Finally, my plea finished, and my handwriting a passionate scrawl, I fell down on my bed and went to sleep. At eleven o'clock I woke, made some changes, and headed for the all-night study room to type it up. On the way I stopped at the post office, where, to my immense gratification, a note in my box informed me that I had got the job apartment-sitting in Brooklyn, and that the professor wanted to meet with me sometime in the coming week to discuss my schedule.
Well, that's the summer taken care of, I thought.
It was a beautiful night, full moon, the meadow like silver and the housefronts throwing square black shadows sharp as cutouts on the grass. Most of the windows were dark: everyone sleeping, early to bed. I hurried across the lawn to the library, where the lights of the all-night study room – The House of Eternal Learning,' Bunny had called it in happier days – burned clear and bright on the top floor, shining yellow through the treetops. I went up the outside stairs – iron stairs, like a fire escape, like the steps in my nightmare – my shoes clattering on the metal in a way that might have given me the heebie-jeebies in a less distracted mood.
Then, through the window, I saw a dark figure in a black suit, alone. It was Henry. Books were piled in front of him but he wasn't working. For some reason, 1 thought of that February night I had seen him standing in the shadows beneath the windows of Dr Roland's office, dark and solitary, hands in the pockets of his overcoat and the snow whirling high in the empty arc of the streetlights.
I closed the door. 'Henry,' I said. 'Henry. It's me.'
He didn't turn his head. 'I just got back from Julian's house,' he said, in a monotone.
I sat down. 'And?'
'The place is shut up. He's gone.'
There was a long silence.
'I find it very hard to believe he's done this, you know.' The light glinted off his spectacles; beneath the dark, glossy hair his face was deadly pale. 'It's just such a cowardly thing to have done. That's why he left, you know. Because he was afraid.'
The screens were open. A damp wind rustled in the trees.
Beyond them clouds sailed over the moon, fast and wild.
Henry took off his glasses. I never could get used to seeing him without them, that naked, vulnerable look he always had.
'He's a coward,' he said. 'In our circumstance, he would have done exactly what we did. He's just too much of a hypocrite to admit it.'
I didn't say anything.
'He doesn't even care that Bunny is dead. I could forgive him if that was why he felt this way, but it isn't. He wouldn't care if we'd killed half a dozen people. All that matters to him is keeping his own name out of it. Which is essentially what he said when I talked to him last night.'
'You went to see him?'
'Yes. One would hope that this matter would've seemed something more to him than just a question of his own comfort.
Even to have turned us in would have shown some strength of character, not that I wanted to be turned in. But it's nothing but cowardice. Running away like this.'
Even after all that had happened, the bitterness and disappointment in his voice cut me to the heart.
'Henry,' I said. I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood are frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers. But I found myself unable to say anything at all.
He turned his blind, unseeing eyes upon me.
'I loved him more than my own father,' he said.1 loved him more than anyone in the world.'
The wind was up. A gentle pitter of rain swept across the roof.
We sat there like that, not talking, for a very long time.
The next afternoon at three, I went to meet the new teacher.
When I stepped inside Julian's office I was shocked. It was completely empty. The books, the rugs, the big round table were gone. All that was left were the curtains on the windows and a tacked-up Japanese print that Bunny had given him. Camilla was there, and Francis, looking pretty uncomfortable, and Henry. He was standing by the window doing his best to ignore the stranger.
The teacher had dragged in some chairs from the dining hall. He was a round-faced, fair-haired man of about thirty, in turtleneck and jeans. A wedding band shone conspicuously on one pink hand; he had a conspicuous smell of after-shave. 'Welcome,' he said, leaning to shake my hand, and in his voice I heard the enthusiasm and condescension of a man accustomed to working with adolescents. 'My name is Dick Spence. Yours?'
It was a nightmarish hour. I really don't have the heart to go into it: his patronizing tone at the start (handing out a page from the New Testament, saying, 'Of course I don't expect you to pick up the finer points, if you can get the sense, it's okay with me'), a tone which metamorphosed gradually into surprise ('Well!
Rather advanced, for undergraduates!') and defensiveness ('It's been quite a while since I've seen students at your level') and, ultimately, embarrassment. He was the chaplain at Hackett and his Greek, which he had mostly learned at seminary, was crude and inferior even by my standards. He was one of those language teachers who rely heavily on mnemonics. ('Agathon. Do you know how I remember that word? "Agatha Christie writes good mysteries.'") Henry's look of contempt was indescribable. The rest of us were silent and humiliated. Matters were not helped by Charles stumbling in – obviously drunk – about twenty minutes into the class. His appearance prompted a rehash of previous formalities ('Welcome! My name is Dick Spence.
Yours?') and even, incredibly, a repetition of the agathon embarrassment.
When the lesson was over (teacher sneaking a look at his watch: 'Well! Looks like we're running out of time here!') the five of us filed out in grim silence.
'Well, it's only two more weeks,' said Francis, when we were outside.
Henry lit a cigarette. 'I'm not going back,' he said.
'Yeah,' Charles said sarcastically. That's right. That'll show him.'
'But Henry,' said Francis, 'you've got to go.'
He was smoking the cigarette with tight-lipped, resolute drags.
'No, I don't,' he said.
'Two weeks. That's it.'
'Poor fellow,' said Camilla. 'He's doing the best he can.'
'But that's not good enough for him,' said Charles loudly.
'Who does he expect? Fucking Richmond Lattimore?'
'Henry, if you don't go you'll fail,' said Francis.
'I don't care.'
'He doesn't have to go to school,' said Charles. 'He can do whatever he fucking pleases. He can fail every single fucking class and his dad'll still send him that fat allowance check every month '
'Don't say "fuck" anymore,' said Henry, in a quiet but ominous voice.
'Fuck? What's the matter, Henry? You never heard that word 1 before? Isn't that what you do to my sister every night?'
I remember, when I was a kid, once seeing my father strike my mother for absolutely no reason. Though he sometimes did the same thing to me, I did not realize that he did it sheerly out of bad temper, and believed that his trumped-up justifications ('You talk too much'; 'Don't look at me like that') somehow warranted the punishment. But the day I saw him hit my mother (because she had remarked, innocently, that the neighbors were building an addition to their house; later, he would claim she had,| provoked him, that it was a reproach about his abilities as wage earner, and she, tearfully, would agree) I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Piano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?
And the thing of it was, that Charles and Henry had to appear together in court in less than a week, because of the business with Henry's car.
Camilla, I knew, was worried sick. She – whom I had never known to fear anything – was afraid now; and though in a certain perverse way I was pleased at her distress, there was no denying that if Henry and Charles – who practically came to blows each time they were in the same room – were going to be forced to appear before a judge, and with some show of cooperation and friendship, there could be no possible outcome but disaster.
Henry had hired a lawyer in town. The hope that a third party would be able to reconcile these differences had granted Camilla a small measure of optimism, but in the afternoon on the day of the appointment, I received a telephone call from her.
'Richard,' she said. 'I've got to talk to you and Francis.'
Her tone frightened me. When I arrived at Francis's apartment, I found Francis badly shaken and Camilla in tears.
I had seen her cry only once before, and then only, I think, from nerves and exhaustion. But this was different. She was blank and hollow-eyed, and there was despair in the set of her features.
'Camilla,' I said. 'What's wrong?'
She didn't answer immediately. She smoked one cigarette, then another. Little by little the story came out. Henry and Charles had gone to see the lawyer and Camilla, in capacity of peacemaker, had gone along. At first, it had seemed as if everything might be all right. Henry, apparently, had not hired the lawyer entirely from altruism but because the judge before whom they were to appear had a reputation for being tough on drunk drivers and there was a possibility – as Charles neither had a valid driver's license nor was covered on Henry's insurance – that Henry might lose his license or car or both. Charles, though he obviously felt himself martyred by the whole business, had nonetheless been willing to go along: not, as he told anyone who would listen, because he had any affection for Henry but because he was sick of being blamed for things that weren't his fault, and if Henry lost his license he'd never hear the end of it.
But the meeting was a catastrophe. Charles, in the office, was sullen and uncommunicative. This was merely embarrassing but then – being prodded a bit too energetically by the attorney – he suddenly and quite without warning lost his head. 'You should have heard him,' said Camilla. 'He told Henry he didn't care if he lost his car. He told him he didn't care if the judge put them both in jail for fifty years. And Henry – well, you can imagine how Henry reacted. He blew up. The lawyer thought they were out of their minds. He kept trying to get Charles to calm down, be reasonable. And Charles said: "I don't care what happens to him. I don't care if he dies. I wish he was dead."'
It got so bad, she said, the lawyer kicked them out of his office.
Doors were opening up and down the hallway: an insurance agent, the tax assessor, a dentist in a white coat, all poking their heads out to see what the fuss was about. Charles stormed off walked home, got a taxi, she didn't know what he'd done.
'And Henry?'
She shook her head. 'He was in a rage,' she said; her voice was exhausted, hopeless. 'As I was following him to the car, the lawyer pulled me aside. "Look here," he said. "I don't know what the situation is, but your brother is obviously quite disturbed. Please try to make him understand that if he doesn't cool down, he's going to be in a lot more trouble than he bargained for. This judge is not going to be particularly amenable to them even if they walk in there like a pair of lambs. Your brother is almost sure to be sentenced to an alcohol treatment program, which might not be a bad idea from what I've seen of him today. There's a pretty good chance that the judge will give him probation, which is not as easy as it sounds. And there's more than a gambler's chance that he's going to get either jail time or he's going to get put in a locked ward over at the detox center in Manchester."'
She was extremely upset. Francis was ashen-faced.
'What does Henry say?' I asked her.
'He says he doesn't care about the car,' she said. 'He doesn't care about anything. "Let him go to jail," he says.'
'You saw this judge?' Francis said to me.
'Yes.'
'What was he like?'
'To tell you the truth, he looked like a pretty tough customer,'
I said.
Francis lit a cigarette. 'What would happen,' he said, 'if Charles didn't show up?'
'I'm not sure. I'm almost certain they'd come looking for him.'
'But if they couldn't find him?'
'What are you suggesting?' I said.
'I think we ought to get Charles out of town for a while,' said Francis. He looked tense and worried. 'School's almost over. It's not as if anything's keeping him here. I think we ought to pack him off to my mother and Chris in New York for a couple of weeks.'
'The way he's acting now?'
'Drunk, you mean? You think my mother minds drunks? He'd be safe as a baby.'
'I don't think,' said Camilla, 'you'd be able to get him to go.'
'I could take him myself,' said Francis.
'But what if he got away?' I pointed out. 'Vermont is one thing but he could get into a hell of a lot of trouble in New York.'
'All right,' said Francis irritably, 'all right, it was just an idea.'
He ran a hand through his hair. 'You know what we could do?
We could take him out to the country.'
'To your place, you mean?'
'Yes.'
'What would that accomplish?'
'Easy to get him there, for one thing. And once he's out there, what's he going to do? He won't have a car. It's miles from the road. You can't get a Hampden taxi driver to pick you up for love nor money.'
Camilla was looking at him thoughtfully.
'Charles loves to go to the country,' she said.
'I know,' said Francis, pleased. 'What could be simpler? And we won't have to keep him there long. Richard and I can stay with him. I'll buy a case of champagne. We'll make it look like a party.'
It was not easy to get Charles to come to the door. We knocked for what seemed like half an hour. Camilla had given us a key, which we didn't want to use unless we had to, but just as we were contemplating it the bolt snapped and Charles squinted at us through the crack.
He looked disordered, terrible. 'What do you want?' he said.
'Nothing,' said Francis, quite easily, despite a slight, stunned pause of maybe a second. 'Can we come in?'
Charles looked back and forth at the two of us. 'Is anybody with you?'
'No,' Francis said.
He opened the door and let us in. The shades were pulled and the place had the sour smell of garbage. As my eyes adjusted to the dim I saw dirty dishes, apple cores and soup cans littering almost every conceivable surface. Beside the refrigerator, arranged with perverse neatness, stood a row of empty Scotch bottles.
A lithe shadow darted across the kitchen counter, twisting through the dirty pans and empty milk cartons: Jesus, I thought, is that a rat? But then it jumped to the floor, tail switching, and I saw it was a cat. Its eyes glowed at us in the dark.
'Found her in an empty lot,' said Charles. His breath, I noticed, did not have an alcoholic odor but a suspiciously minty one.
'She's not too tame.' He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe and showed us a discolored, contaminated-looking crisscross of scratches on his forearm.
'Charles,' said Francis, jingling his car keys nervously, 'we stopped by because we're driving out to the country. Thought it might be nice to get away for a while. Do you want to come?'
Charles's eyes narrowed. He pushed down his sleeve. 'Did Henry send you?' he said.
'God, no,' said Francis, surprised.
'Are you sure?'
'I haven't seen him in days.'
Charles still didn t look convinced.
'We're not even speaking to him,' I said.
Charles turned to look at me. His gaze was watery and a little unfocused. 'Richard,' he said. 'Hi.'
'Hi.'
'You know,' he said, 'I've always liked you a lot.'
'I like you, too.'
'You wouldn't go behind my back, would you?'
'Of course not.'
'Because,' he said, nodding at Francis, 'because I know he would.'
Francis opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked as if he'd been slapped.
'You underestimate Francis,' I said to Charles, in a calm, quiet voice. It was a mistake the others often made with him, to try to reason with him in a methodical, aggressive way, when all he wanted was to be reassured like a child. 'Francis likes you very much. He's your friend. So am I.'
'Are you?' he said.
'Of course.'
He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down, heavily. The cat slunk over and began to twine round his ankles. 'I'm afraid,' he said hoarsely. 'I'm afraid Henry's going to kill me.'
Francis and I looked at each other.
'Why?' said Francis. 'Why would he want to do that?'
'Because I'm in the way.' He looked up at us. 'He'd do it, too, you know,' he said. 'For two cents.' He nodded at a small, unlabeled medicine bottle on the counter. 'You see that?' he said.
'Henry gave it to me. Couple of days ago.'
I picked it up. With a chill I recognized the Nembutals I'd stolen for Henry at the Corcorans'.
'I don't know what they are,' said Charles, pushing the dirty hair from his eyes. 'He told me they'd help me sleep. God knows I need something, but I'm afraid to take them.'
I handed the bottle to Francis. He looked at it, then up at me, horrified.
'Capsules, too,' said Charles. 'No telling what he rilled them with.'
But he wouldn't even have to, that was the evil thing. I remembered, with a sick feeling, having tried to impress upon Henry how dangerous these were when mixed with liquor.
Charles passed a hand over his eyes. 'I've seen him sneaking around here at night,' he said. 'Out back. I don't know what he's doing.'
'Henry?'
'Yes. And if he tries anything with me,' he said, 'it'll be the worst mistake he ever made in his life.'
We had less trouble enticing him to the car than I'd expected.
He was in a rambling, paranoid humor and was somewhat jj comforted by our solicitude. He asked repeatedly if Henry knew where we were going. 'You haven't talked to him, have you?'
'No,' we assured him, 'no, of course not.'
He insisted on taking the cat with him. We had a terrible time catching it – Francis and I dodging round the dark kitchen, knocking dishes to the floor, trying to corner it behind the water heater while Charles stood anxiously by saying things like 'Come on' and 'Good kitty.' Finally, in desperation, I seized it by a scrawny black hindquarter – it thrashed around and sank its teeth into my arm – and, together, we managed to wrap it up in a dish towel so that only its head stuck out, eyes bulging and ears flattened back against the skull. We gave the mummified, hissing bundle to Charles. 'Now, hold her tight,' Francis kept saying in the car, glancing anxiously back in the rear-view mirror, 'watch out, don't let it get away '
But, of course, it did get away, catapulting into the front seat and nearly running Francis off the road. Then, after scrabbling around under the brake and gas pedal – Francis aghast, attempting simultaneously to avoid touching it and to kick it away from him – it settled on the floorboard by my feet, succumbing to an attack of diarrhea before falling into a glaring, prickle-haired trance.
I had not been out to Francis's since the week before Bunny died.
The trees in the drive were in full leaf and the yard was overgrown and dark. Bees droned in the lilacs. Mr Hatch, mowing the lawn some thirty yards away, nodded and raised a hand at us.
The house was shadowy and cool. There were sheets on some of the furniture and dust balls on the hardwood floor. We locked the cat in an upstairs bathroom and Charles went down to the kitchen, to make himself something to eat, he said. He came back up with a jar of peanuts and a double martini in a water glass, which he carried into his room, and shut the door.
We didn't see an awful lot of Charles for the next thirty-six hours or so. He stayed in his room eating peanuts, and drinking, and looking out the window like the old pirate in Treasure Island. Once he came down to the library while Francis and I were playing cards, but he refused our invitation to join in and poked listlessly through the shelves, finally meandering upstairs without choosing a book. He came down for coffee in the mornings, in an old bathrobe of Francis's, and sat in the kitchen windowsill looking moodily over the lawn as if he were waiting for someone.
'When do you think is the last time he had a bath?' Francis whispered to me.
He had lost all interest in the cat. Francis sent Mr Hatch out for some cat food and each morning and evening Francis let himself in the bathroom to feed it ('Get away,' I heard him muttering, 'get away from me, you devil,') and came out again with a fouled crumple of newspaper, which he held from his body at arm's length.
About six o'clock in the afternoon of our third day there, Francis was up in the attic digging around for ajar of old coins his aunt had said he could have if he could find it, and I was lying on the couch downstairs drinking iced tea and trying to memorize the irregular subjunctive verbs in French (for my final exam was in less than a week) when I heard the phone ringing in the kitchen.
I went to answer it.
It was Henry. 'So there you are,' he said.
'Yes.'
There was a long, crackly silence. At last he said: 'May I speak to Francis?'
'He can't come to the phone,' I said. 'What is it?'
'I suppose you've got Charles out there with you.'
'Look here, Henry,' I said. 'What's the big idea giving Charles those sleeping pills?'
His voice came back at me brisk and cool. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Yes you do. I saw them.'
'Those pills you gave me, you mean?'
'Yes.'
'Well, if he has them, he must have taken them from my medicine cabinet.'
'He says you gave them to him,' I said. 'He thinks you're trying to poison him.'
That's nonsense.'
'Is it?'
'He is there, isn't he?'
'Yes,' I said, 'we brought him out the day before yesterday…" and then I stopped, because it seemed to me that somewhere towards the beginning of this sentence I had heard a stealthy but distinct click, as of an extension being picked up.
'Well, listen,' Henry said. 'I'd appreciate it if you could keep him out there a day or two longer. Everyone seems to think this should be some big secret but believe me, I'm happy to have him out of the way for a while. If he doesn't come to court he'll be guilty by default, but I don't think there's an awful lot they can do to him.'
It seemed 1 could hear breathing on the other end.
'What is it?' said Henry, suddenly wary.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
'Charles?' I said. 'Charles, is that you?'
Upstairs, the telephone slammed down.
I went up and knocked on Charles's door. No answer. When I tried the knob, it was locked.
'Charles,' I said. 'Let me in.'
No answer.
'Charles, it wasn't anything,' I said. 'He called out of the blue.
All I did was answer the phone.'
Still no answer. I stood in the hall for a few minutes, the afternoon sun shining golden on the polished oak floor.
'Really, Charles, I think you're being a bit silly. Henry can't hurt you. You're perfectly safe out here.'
'Bullshit,' came the muffled reply from within.
There was nothing more to say. I went downstairs again, and back to the subjunctive verbs.
I must have fallen asleep on the couch, and I don't know how much later it was – not a whole lot later, because it was still light out – when Francis shook me awake, not too gently.
'Richard,' he said. 'Richard, you've got to wake up. Charles is gone.'
I sat up, rubbed my eyes. 'Gone?' I said. 'But where could he go?'
'I don't know. He's not in the house.'
'Are you sure?'
'I've looked everywhere.'
'He's got to be around somewhere. Maybe he's in the yard.'
'I can't find him.'
'Maybe he's hiding.'
'Get up and help me look.'
I went upstairs. Francis ran outside. The screen door slammed behind him.
Charles's room was in disarray and a half-empty bottle of Bombay gin – from the liquor cabinet in the library – was on the night table. None of his things were gone.
I went through all the upstairs rooms, then up to the attic.
Lampshades and picture frames, organdy party dresses yellowed with age. Gray wide-plank floors, so worn they -were almost fuzzy. A shaft of dusty cathedral light filtered through the stained glass porthole that faced the front of the house.
I went down the back staircase – low and claustrophobic, scarcely three feet wide – through the kitchen and butler's pantry, and out onto the back porch. Some distance away, Francis and Mr Hatch were standing in the driveway. Mr Hatch was talking to Francis. I had never heard Mr Hatch say much of anything to anyone and he was plainly uncomfortable. He kept running a hand over his scalp. His manner was cringing and apologetic. i!
I met Francis on his way back to the house.
'Well,' he said, 'this is a hell of a note.' He looked a bit stunned.
'Mr Hatch says he gave Charles the keys to his truck about an hour and a half ago.'
'What?'
'He said Charles came looking for him and said he had to run an errand. He promised to have the truck back in fifteen minutes.'
We looked at each other.
'Where do you think he went?' I said.
'How should I know?'
'Do you think he just took off?'
'Looks that way, doesn't it?'
We went back in the house – dim now with twilight – and sat by the window on a long davenport that had a sheet thrown over it. The warm air smelled like lilac. Across the lawn, we could hear Mr Hatch trying to get the lawn mower started up again.
Francis had his arms folded across the back of the davenport and his chin resting on his arms. He was looking out the window.
'I don't know what to do,' he said. 'He's stolen that truck, you know.'
'Maybe he'll be back.'
'I'm afraid he'll have a wreck. Or a cop will pull him over. I'll bet you anything he's plastered. That's all he needs, getting stopped for drunk driving.'
'Shouldn't we go look for him?'
'I wouldn't know where to start. He could be halfway to Boston for all we know,' 'What else can we do? Sit around and wait for the phone to ring?'
First we tried the bars: the Farmer's Inn, the Villager, the Boulder Tap and the Notty Pine. The Notch. The Four Squires. The Man of Kent. It was a hazy, gorgeous summer twilight and the gravel parking lots were packed with trucks but none of the trucks was Mr Hatch's.
Just for the hell of it, we drove by the State Liquor Store. The aisles were bright and empty, splashy rum displays ('Tropical Island Sweepstakes!') competing with somber, medicinal rows of vodka and gin. A cardboard cutout advertising wine coolers twirled from the ceiling. There were no customers, and a fat old Vermonter with a naked woman tattooed on his forearm was leaning against the cash register, passing time with a kid who worked at the Mini-Mart next door.
'So then,' I heard him say in an undertone, 'so then the guy pulls out a sawed-off shotgun. Emmett's standing here beside me, right where I am now. "We don't have the key to the cashbox," he says. And the guy pulls the trigger and I seen Emmett's brains' – he gestured – 'splatter all over that wall back there We drove to campus, to the library ('He's not there,' said Francis, Till bet a million dollars') and back to the bars again.
'He's left town,' said Francis. 'I know it,' 'Do you think Mr Hatch will call the police?'
'What would you do? If it was your truck? He won't do anything without talking to me, but if Charles isn't back, say, by tomorrow afternoon…"
We decided to drive by the Albemarle. Henry's car was parked out front. Francis and I went in the lobby cautiously, not knowing quite how we were going to deal with the innkeeper, but, miraculously, there was no one at the desk.
We went upstairs to 3-A. Camilla let us in. She and Henry were eating their dinner, from room service – lamb chops, bottle of burgundy, yellow rose in a bud vase.
Henry was not pleased to see us. 'What can I do for you?' he said, putting down his fork.
'It's Charles,' said Francis. 'He's gone AWOL.'
He told them about the truck. I sat down beside Camilla. I was hungry and her lamb chops looked pretty good. She saw me looking at them and pushed the plate at me distractedly. 'Here, have some,' she said.
I did, and a glass of wine, too. Henry ate steadily as he listened.
'Where do you think he's gone?' he said when Francis had finished.
'How the hell should I know?'
'You can keep Mr Hatch from pressing charges, can't you?'
'Not if he doesn't get the truck back. Or if Charles cracks it up.'
'How much could a truck like that possibly cost? Assuming your aunt didn't buy it for him in the first place.'
'That's beside the point.'
Henry wiped his mouth with a napkin and reached in his pocket for a cigarette. 'Charles is getting to be quite a problem,' he said. 'You know what I've been thinking? I wonder how much it would cost to hire a private nurse.'
'To get him off drink, you mean?'
'Of course. We can't send him to the hospital, obviously.
Perhaps if we got a hotel room – not here, of course, but somewhere – and if we found some trustworthy person, maybe someone who didn't speak English all that well…"
Camilla looked ill. She was slumped back in her chair. She said: 'Henry, what are you going to do? Kidnap him?'
'Kidnap is not the word that I would use.'
'I'm afraid he'll have a wreck. I think we ought to go look for him.'
'We've looked all over town,' said Francis. 'I don't think he's in Hampden.'
'Have you called the hospital?'
'No.'
'What I think we really ought to do,' said Henry, 'is call the police. Ask if there have been any traffic accidents. Do you think Mr Hatch will agree to say that he lent Charles the truck?'
'He did lend Charles the truck.'
'In that case,' said Henry, 'there should be no problem. Unless, of course, he gets stopped for drunk driving.'
'Or unless we can't find him.'
'From my point of view,' said Henry, 'the best thing that Charles could do right now is to disappear entirely from the face of the earth.'
Suddenly there was a loud, frenetic banging at the door. We looked at one other.
Camilla's face had gone blank with relief. 'Charles,' she said, 'Charles,' and she jumped up from her chair and started to the door; but no one had locked it behind us, and before she got there it flew open with a crash.
It was Charles. He stood in the doorway, blinking drunkenly around the room, and I was so surprised and glad to see him that it was a moment before I realized that he had a gun.
He stepped inside and kicked the door shut behind him. It was the little Beretta that Francis's aunt kept in the night table, the one we'd used for target practice the fall before. We stared at him, thunderstruck.
At last Camilla said, and in a voice which was fairly steady: 'Charles, what do you think you are doing?'
'Out of the way,' said Charles. He was very drunk.
'So you've come to kill me?' said Henry. He was still holding his cigarette. He was remarkably composed. 'Is that it?'
'Yes.'
'And what do you suppose that will solve?'
'You've ruined my life, you son of a bitch.' He had the gun pointed at Henry's chest. With a sinking feeling, I remembered what an expert shot he was, how he'd broken the rows of mason jars one by one.
'Don't be an idiot,' Henry snapped; and I felt the first prickle of real panic at the back of my neck. This belligerent, bullying tone might work with Francis, maybe even with me, but it was a disastrous tack to take with Charles. 'If anyone's to blame for your problems, it's you.'
I wanted to tell him to shut up, but before I could say anything Charles lurched abruptly to the side, to clear his shot.
Camilla stepped into his path. 'Charles, give me the gun,' she said.
He pushed the hair from his eyes with his forearm, holding the gun remarkably steady with his other hand. 'I'm telling you, Milly.' It was a pet name he had for her, one he seldom used.
'You better get out of the way.'
'Charles,' said Francis. He was white as a ghost. 'Sit down.
Have some wine. Let's just forget about this.'
The window was open and the chirrup of the crickets washed in harsh and strong.
'You bastard,' said Charles, reeling backwards, and it was a moment before I realized, startled, that he was speaking not to Francis or Henry but to me. 'I trusted you. You told him where I was.'
I was too petrified to answer. I blinked at him.
'I knew where you were,' said Henry coolly. 'If you want to shoot me, Charles, go ahead and do it. It'll be the stupidest thing you ever did in your life.'
'The stupidest thing I ever did in my life was listening to you,'
Charles said.
What happened next took place in an instant. Charles raised his arm; and quick as a flash, Francis, who was standing closest to him, threw a glass of wine in his face. At the same time Henry sprang from his chair and rushed in. There were four pops in rapid succession, like a cap gun. With the second pop, I heard a windowpane shatter. And with the third I was conscious of a warm, stinging sensation in my abdomen, to the left of my navel.
Henry was holding Charles's right forearm above his head with both hands, bending him backwards; Charles was struggling to get the gun with his left hand, but Henry twisted it from his wrist and it dropped to the carpet. Charles dove for it but Henry was too quick.
I was still standing. I'm shot, I thought, I'm shot. I reached down and touched my stomach. Blood. There was a small hole, slightly charred, in my white shirt: my Paul Smith shin, 1 thought, with a pang of anguish. I'd paid a week's salary for it in San Francisco. My stomach felt very hot. Waves of heat radiating from the bull's-eye.
Henry had the gun. He twisted Charles's arm behind his back – Charles fighting, thrashing wildly about – and, nosing the pistol into his spine, shoved him away from the door.
I still hadn't quite grasped what had happened. Maybe I should sit down, I thought. Was the bullet still in me? Was I going to die? The thought was ridiculous; it didn't seem possible. My stomach burned but I felt oddly calm. Getting shot, I'd always thought, would hurt a lot more than this. Carefully, I stepped back, and felt the back of the chair I had been sitting in bump against my legs. I sat down.
Charles, despite having one arm pinned behind him, was trying to elbow Henry in the stomach with the other. Henry pushed him, staggering, across the room and into a chair. 'Sit down,' he said.
Charles tried to get up. Henry mashed him back down. He tried to get up a second time and Henry slapped him across the face with his open hand with a whack that was louder than the gunshots. Then, with the pistol on him, he stepped to the windows and drew the shades.
I put my hand over the hole in my shirt. Bending forward slightly, I felt a sharp pain. I expected everyone to stop and look at me. No one did. I wondered if I should call it to their attention.
Charles's head was rolled against the back of the chair. I noticed that there was blood on his mouth. His eyes were glassy.
Awkwardly – he was holding the gun in his good hand Henry reached up and took off his spectacles and rubbed them on the front of his shirt. Then he hooked them over his ears again. 'Well, Charles,' he said. 'You've done it now.'
I heard some kind of commotion downstairs, through the open window – footsteps, voices, a door slamming.
'Do you think anybody heard?' said Francis anxiously.
'I should think they did,' Henry said.
Camilla went over to Charles. Drunkenly, he made as if to push her away.
'Get away from him,' Henry said.
'What are we going to do about this window?' said Francis.
'What are we going to do about me?' I said.
They all turned and looked at me.
'He shot me.'
Somehow, this remark did not elicit the dramatic response I expected. Before I had the chance to elaborate, there were footsteps on the stairs and somebody banged at the door.
'What's going on in there?' I recognized the innkeeper's voice.
'What's happening?'
Francis put his face in his hands. 'Oh, shit,' he said.
'Open up in there.'
Charles, drunkenly, mumbled something and tried to raise his head. Henry bit his lip. He went to the window and looked out the corner of the shade.
Then he turned around. He still had the pistol. 'Come here,' he said to Camilla.
She looked at him in horror. So did Francis and I.
He beckoned to her with his gun arm. 'Come here,' he said.
'Quick.'
I felt faint. What's he doing? I thought, bewildered.
Camilla took a step away from him. Her gaze was terrified.
'No, Henry,' she said, 'don't…'
To my surprise, he smiled at her. 'You think I'd hurt you?' he said. 'Come here.'
She went to him. He kissed her between the eyes, then whispered something – what, I've always wondered – in her ear.
'I've got a key,' the innkeeper yelled, pounding away at the door. Till use it.'
The room was swimming. Idiot, I thought wildly, just try the knob.
Henry kissed Camilla again. 'I love you,' he said. Then he said, out loud: 'Come in.'
The door flew open. Henry raised the arm with the gun. He's going to shoot them, I thought, dazed; the innkeeper and his wife, behind him, thought the same thing, because they froze about three steps into the room – but then I heard Camilla scream, 'No, Henry!' and, too late, I realized what he was going to do.
He put the pistol to his temple and fired, twice. Two flat cracks. They slammed his head to the left. It was the kick of the gun, I think, that triggered the second shot.
His mouth fell open. A draft, created by the open door, sucked the curtains into the gap of the open window. For a moment or two, they shuddered against the screen. Then they breathed out again, with something like a sigh; and Henry, his eyes squeezed tight, and his knees giving way beneath him, fell with a thud to the carpet.