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.