'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.