'
I finished my composition in less than an hour. After I'd gone through it and checked the endings, I washed my face and changed my shirt and went, with my books, over to Bunny's room.
Of the six of us, Bunny and I were the only two who lived on campus, and his house was across the lawn on the opposite end of Commons. He had a room on the ground floor, which I am sure was inconvenient for him since he spent most of his time upstairs in the house kitchen: ironing his pants, rummaging through the refrigerator, leaning out the window in his shirtsleeves to yell at passers-by. When he didn't answer his door I I went to look for him there, and I found him sitting in the ^ windowsill in his undershirt, drinking a cup of coffee and leafing through a magazine. I was a little surprised to see the twins there, too: Charles, standing with his left ankle crossed over his right, stirring moodily at his coffee and looking out the window; Camilla – and this surprised me, because Camilla wasn't much of one for domestic tasks – ironing one of Bunny's shirts.
'Oh, hello, old man,' said Bunny. 'Come on in. Having a little kaffeeklatsch. Yes, women are good for one or two things,' he added, when he saw me looking at Camilla and the ironing board, 'though, being a gentleman' – he winked broadly – 'I don't like to say what the other thing is, mixed company and all.
Charles, get him a cup of coffee, would you? No need to wash it, it's clean enough,' he said stridently, as Charles got a dirty cup from the drain board and turned on the tap. 'Do your prose composition?'
'Yeah.'
'Which epigram?'
'Twenty-two.'
'Hmn. Sounds like everybody went for the tearjerkers. Charles did that one about the girl who died, and all her friends missed her, and you, Camilla, you picked '
'Fourteen,' said Camilla, without looking up, pressing rather savagely on the collar band with the tip of the iron.
'Hah. I picked one of the racy ones myself. Ever been to France, Richard?'
'No,' I said.
'Then you better come with us this summer.'
'Us? Who?'
'Henry and me.'
I was so taken aback that all I could do was blink at him.
'France?' I said.
'May wee. Two-month tour. A real doozy. Have a look.' He tossed me the magazine, which I now saw was a glossy brochure.
I glanced through it. It was a lollapalooza of a tour, all right a 'luxury hotel harge cruise' which began in the Champagne country and then went, via hot air balloon, to Burgundy for more barging, through Beaujolais, to the Riviera and Cannes and Monte Carlo – it was lavishly illustrated, full of brightly colored pictures of gourmet meals, flower-decked barges, happy tourists popping champagne corks and waving from the basket of their balloon at the disgruntled old peasants in the fields below.
'Looks great, doesn't it?' said Bunny.
'Fabulous.'
'Rome was all right but actually it was kind of a sinkhole when you get right down to it. Besides, I like to gad about a little more myself. Stay on the move, see a few of the native customs. Just between you and me, I bet Henry's going to have a ball with this.'
I bet he will, too, I thought, staring at a picture of a woman holding up a stick of French bread at the camera and grinning like a maniac.
The twins were studiously avoiding my eye, Camilla bent over Bunny's shirt, Charles with his back to me and his elbows on the sideboard, looking out the kitchen window.
'Of course, this balloon thing's great,' Bunny said conversationally, 'but you know, I've been wondering, where do you go to the bathroom? Off the side or something?'
'Look here, I think this is going to take several minutes,' said Camilla abruptly. 'It's almost nine. Why don't you go ahead with Richard, Charles. Tell Julian not to wait.'
'Well, it's not going to take you that much longer, is it?' said Bunny crossly, craning over to see. 'What's the big problem?
Where'd you learn how to iron, anyway?'
'I never did. We send our shirts to the laundry.'
Charles followed me out the door, a few paces behind. We walked through the hall and down the stairs without a word, but once downstairs he stepped close behind me and, catching my arm, pulled me into an empty card room. In the twenties and thirties, rhere had been a hridge fad at Hampden; when the enthusiasm faded, the rooms were never subsequently put to any function and no one used them now except for drug deals, or typing, or illicit romantic trysts.
He shut the door. I found myself looking at the ancient card table – inlaid at its four corners with a diamond, a heart, a club and a spade.
'Henry called us,' said Charles. He was scratching at the raised edge of the diamond with his thumb, his head studiously down.
'When?'
'Early this morning.'
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
'I'm sorry,' said Charles, glancing up.
'Sorry for what?'
'Sorry he told you. Sorry for everything. Camilla's all upset.'
He seemed calm enough, tired but calm, and his intelligent eyes met mine with a sad, quiet candor. All of a sudden I felt terribly upset. I was fond of Francis and Henry but it was unthinkable that anything should happen to the twins. I thought, with a pang, of how kind they had always been; of how sweet Camilla was in those first awkward weeks and how Charles had always had a way of showing up in my room, or turning to me in a crowd with a tranquil assumption – heartwarming to me that he and I were particular friends; of walks and car trips and dinners at their house; of their letters – frequently unacknowledged on my part – which had come so faithfully over the long winter months.
From somewhere overhead I heard the shriek and groan of water pipes. We looked at each other.
'What are you going to do?' I said. It seemed the only question I had asked of anyone for the last twenty-four hours, and yet no one had given me a satisfactory answer.
He shrugged, a funny little one-shouldered shrug, a mannerism he and his sister had in common. 'Search me,' he said wearily. 'I guess we should go.'
When we got to Julian's office, Henry and Francis were already there. Francis hadn't finished his essay. He was scratching rapidly at the second page, his fingers blue with ink, while Henry proofread the first one, dashing in subscripts and aspirants with his fountain pen.
He didn't look up. 'Hello,' he said. 'Close the door, would you?'
Charles kicked at the door with his foot. 'Bad news,' he said.
'Very bad?'
'Financially, yes.'
Francis swore, in a quick hissing underbreath, without pausing in his work. Henry dashed in a few final marks, then fanned the paper in the air to dry it.
'Well for goodness' sakes,' he said mildly.
'I hope it can wait.
I don't want to have to think about it during class. How's that last page coming, Francis?'
'Just a minute,' said Francis, laboriously, his words lagging behind the hurried scrawl of his pen.
Henry stood behind Francis's chair and leaned over his shoulder and began to proofread the top of the last page, one elbow resting on the table. 'Camilla's with him?' he said.
'Yes. Ironing his nasty old shirt.'
'Hmnn.' He pointed at something with the end of his pen.
'Francis, you need the optative here instead of the subjunctive.'
Francis reached up quickly from his work – he was nearly at the end of the page – to change it.
'And this labial becomes pi, not kappa.'
Bunny arrived late, and in a foul temper. 'Charles,' he snapped, 'if you want this sister of yours to ever get a husband, you better teach her how to use an iron.' I was exhausted and ill prepared and it was all I could do to keep my mind on the class. I had._, French at two. but after Greek I went straight hack to my room and took a sleeping pill and went to bed. The sleeping pill was an extraneous gesture; I didn't need it, but the mere possibility of restlessness, of an afternoon full of bad dreams and distant plumbing noises, was too unpleasant to even contemplate.
So I slept soundly, more soundly than I should have, and the day slipped easily away. It was almost dark when somewhere, through great depths, I became aware that someone was knocking at my door.
It was Camilla. I must have looked terrible, because she raised an eyebrow and laughed at me. 'All you ever do is sleep,' she said. 'Why is it you're always sleeping when I come to see you?'
I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.
'Come in,' I said. s She did, and closed the door behind her. I sat on the side of * the unmade bed, feet bare and collar loose, and thought how wonderful it would be if this really were a dream, if I could walk over to where she sat and put my hands on either side of her face and kiss her, on the eyelids, on the mouth, on the place at her temple where the honey-colored hair graded into silky gold.
We looked at each other for a long time.
'Are you sick?' she said.
The gleam of her gold bracelet in the dark. I swallowed. It was hard to think what to say.
She stood up again. 'I'd better go,' she said. 'I'm sorry to have bothered you. I came to ask if you wanted to go on a drive.'
'What?'
'A drive. It's all right, though. Some other time.'
'Where?'
'Somewhere. Nowhere. I'm meeting Francis at Commons in ten minutes.'
'No, wait,' I said. I felt sort of marvelous. A narcotic heaviness still clung deliriously to my limbs and I imagined what fun it would be to wander with her – drowsy, hypnotized – up to Commons in the fading light, the snow.
I stood up – it took forever to do it, the floor receding gradually before my eyes as if I were simply growing taller and taller by some organic process – and walked to my closet. The floor swayed as gently beneath me as the deck of an airship. I found my overcoat, then a scarf. Gloves were too complicated to bother with.
'Okay,' I said. 'Ready.'
She raised an eyebrow. 'It's sort of cold out,' she said. 'Don't you think you should wear some shoes?'
We walked to Commons through slush and cold rain, and when we got there Charles, Francis, and Henry were waiting for us.
The configuration struck me as significant, in some way that was not entirely clear, everyone except for Bunny – 'What's going on?' I said, blinking at them.
'Nothing,' said Henry, tracing a pattern on the floor with the sharp, glinting ferrule of his umbrella. 'We're just going for a drive. I thought it might be fun' – he paused delicately – 'if we got away from school for a while, maybe had some dinner Without Bunny, that is the subtext here, I thought. Where was he? The tip of Henry's umbrella glittered. I glanced up and noticed that Francis was looking at me with lifted eyebrows.
'What is it?' I said irritably, swaying slightly in the doorway.
He exhaled with a sharp, amused sound. 'Are you drunk?' he said.
They were all looking at me in kind of a funny way. 'Yes,' I said. It wasn't the truth, but I didn't feel much like explaining.
The chill sky, misty with fine rain near the treetops, made even the familiar landscape around Hampden seem indifferent and remote. The valleys were white with fog and the top of Mount Cataract was entirely obscured, invisible in the cold haze. Not being able to see it, that omniscient mountain which grounded Hampden and its environs in my senses, I found it difficult to get my bearings, and it seemed as if we were heading into strange and unmarked territory, though I had been down this road a hundred times in all weathers. Henry drove, rather fast as he always did, the tires whining on the wet black road and water spraying high on either side.
'I looked at this place about a month ago,' he said, slowing as we approached a white farmhouse on a hill, forlorn bales of hay dotting the snowy pasture. 'It's still for sale, but I think they want too much.'
'How many acres?' said Camilla.
'A hundred and fifty.'
'What on earth would you do with that much land?' She raised her hand to clear the hair from her eyes and again I caught the gleam of her bracelet: blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown… 'You wouldn't want to farm it, would you?'
'To my way of thinking,' Henry said, 'the more land the better.
I'd love to have so much land that from where I lived I couldn't see a highway or a telephone pole or anything I didn't want to see. I suppose that's impossible, this day and age, and that place is practically on the road. There was another farm I saw, over the line in New York State…'
A truck shot past in a whine of spray.
Everyone seemed unusually calm and at ease and I thought I knew why. It was because. Bunny wasn't with us. They were avoiding the topic with a deliberate unconcern; he must be somewhere now, I thought, doing something, what I didn't want to ask. I leaned back and looked at the silvery, staggering paths the raindrops made as they blew across my window.
'If I bought a house anywhere I'd buy one here,' said Camilla.
'I've always liked the mountains better than the seashore.'
'So have I,' said Henry. 'I suppose in that regard my tastes are rather Hellenistic.