The Books of Fell (26 page)

“If not, I’m your man,” said Nels.

In no time at all Plummer/Tralastski was on the nameplate in 2B, South Dormitory. (Or was it 3B? I never can remember.)

No one at Gardner could help being impressed by the Sevens, except Nels. Lenny wanted to think that his new best friend was just putting on an act. They couldn’t be that far apart in what they liked and what they didn’t, and Lenny admired the Sevens. They had such style.

“If you’re after style,” Nels told him, “throw out that orlon sweater. Never wear any clothes made out of petroleum — only fibers made by sheep, plants, or worms.”

“You can afford that. I can’t,” Lenny complained.

Nels had shoes that cost five hundred dollars each. Not each pair. Each foot.

They were John Loeb handmade reversed waxed calf.

“But that’s not style,” said Nels. “That’s extravagance. That’s what I learned at my father’s knee.”

“What did he do for a living?” Lenny asked him.

“What I’m going to do, probably. Inherit.”

• • •

One November day, near twilight, seven of the Sevens cornered Nels as he was coming from track.

He was in shorts and an old T-shirt, the sweat on his body just beginning to turn cold.

Nels thought he was in for some kind of new-boy harassment from Sevens. Apparently they were in charge of whatever hazing there was at Gardner. New boys had been warned that they were to have memorized as many seven things that went together as they could.

Nels liked to stroll around their room while Lenny was studying, pretending to practice for this very moment. He’d say, “Let’s see: ca-ca, shit, merde, poop, feces, turd, number two.

“And, let’s see: pee-pee, tinkle, wee-wee — ”

“SHUT UP!” Lenny would holler.

• • •

“Sevens!” a senior shouted at him.

Nels named the seven wonders of the world.

But in between the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Tomb of Mausolus, as he faced the steely-eyed, self-assured Sevens who’d barked the order, Nels thought, Dog-Breath, you stink! And after the Pharos of Alexandria, before the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Nels thought, When you go home, throw your mother a bone.

He told Lenny that was how he got through it.

Once he was one of them, he said to the same senior, “I hope this isn’t going to conflict with my membership in the Book-of-the-Month club.”

The senior roared with laughter.

What a joker! … Right?

• • •

Across campus, the lights were just going on.

There, on a pathway near the library, another confrontation was taking place.

“Sevens!” a senior shouted at Leonard Tralastski.

Lenny named the seven hills on which Rome was built.

Soon, members of Sevens in both locations appeared with lighted candles, singing.

Singing Plummer and Tralastski into the most privileged organization there … and, some thought,
anywhere.

For a while the reason was not clear to them, particularly since their backgrounds were so different, and particularly because they were the only two new members admitted that year. Why just the two of them?

It was weeks before they were told the truth, the same day they were moved into suites across the hall from each other, in Sevens House.

They had both almost forgotten all about a tree-planting ceremony after they got off the bus that first afternoon.

But they did remember how they laughed, later, when they found out each one unbeknownst to the other had chosen to name the tree after one of its relatives: Celeste.

Packing up, Fell?”

“Just a few suits, Mrs. Violet. I’ll be back for the rest if I decide not to stay on.”

“I hope you decide to stay.”

“Thanks. I’m glad you’re still up. I wanted to ask you something.”

It was ten thirty when I dropped off Keats at the inn. She was too tired to take me back to The Hill, so I’d borrowed the Benz. I’d seen only one dim light on in Mrs. Violet’s suite. I figured she was probably tucked in with the TV on.

But no — she was bright-eyed and high-heeled, and she said she’d just gotten in herself. She thought she’d see how I was coming along. I had an idea she thought she’d see if I’d invited Keats back for the night, which was against the rules. Even though we were supposed to be self-governing, Mrs. Violet always seemed to know everything that was going on.

“What did you want to ask me, Fell?”

While I told her about the evening at the Horners’, and asked her what she could tell me about Lenny Last, she came all the way into the suite and sat down on the couch.

“Yes, he was here,” she said. “He stayed in the guest suite for a few days.”

“Did you talk with him?”

“Far more than I cared to. Every time I came out of my door, there he sat in the reception area, chain-smoking his Kent cigarettes and wheezing. He had very bad asthma.”

“And the dummy?”

“Was locked in the car. Plumsie he called him, sometimes just Plum … and he never called him a dummy. He said Plumsie insisted on being called a figure. That’s when I knew I had very little to say to the man…. Do you have any instant coffee, Fell?”

“Sure!” I got up and went across to plug in the hot plate. “No milk, though,” I said.

“I take it black.”

“Did he just hang around here by himself?”

“Here and in the video stores. He was looking for an old film called I
Love Las Vegas.
He said it’d inspired him to become a professional ventriloquist. He said Elvis had a cameo role in it.”

“I’d like to see it myself. I’m curious now.”

“Now?
You’re always curious, Fell.”

“So you never saw the dummy?”

“I began to think it was alive. He bought candy for it! Can you believe that? A certain candy bar — the name skips my mind right now.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No, Fell, I’m not.”

I was jabbing a fork inside a jar of Taster’s Choice to try and chip away a teaspoon of the stuff. The coffee’d been sitting in the sun on my windowsill.

“Never mind,” she said.

“I’m getting some, just be patient.”

“I don’t feel like it anymore. It’s too hot up here.”

I put down the jar and unplugged the hot plate.

Mrs. Violet uncrossed her long legs and stretched. “I’m tired, too…. You know, he wasn’t called Lenny Last when he was on The Hill. He was Leonard Tralastski. And he was best friends with the mysterious Nels Plummer.”

Nels Plummer was sort of a minor legend at Gardner, and particularly in Sevens. He was like James Hoffa, or Judge Crater, or Etan Patz. One day he’d just disappeared.

She said, “There’s a writer named Tobias who’s fascinated with missing people. He calls here sometimes, still. He called after Lenny Last’s death notice appeared in
The Times.
He thought I was the old housemother and he started in saying Mrs. Kropper, you know what I want: I want to hear the account of the accident in
The Cottersville Compass.”

Mrs. Violet was standing, ready to leave. She said, “Apparently Lenny Last made a habit of coming back here from time to time. He told me everything started here for him. I said you mean being a ventriloquist? He said no, the whole
miesse meshina. I
didn’t know what that meant and he said it’s Yiddish; it rhymes with Lisa Farina, and it means wretched Fate. I liked that, and I wrote it down…. Then he laughed and said he was exaggerating. He said what he meant was he came into his own here: I’ll never forget what he said next.” “What?”

“He said that the best was right here, that after this nothing could ever measure up.”

That had a familiar ring. I’d heard a few old grads say the same thing.

“I guess he went downhill after he graduated,” said Mrs. Violet. “He didn’t look too successful. He had nice clothes but he was driving that old boat of a white Cadillac.”

“Some people prize those old cars.”

“He was wheezing and coughing so much and he smelled of liquor. I bet Mrs. Kropper liked that a lot,” she said sarcastically. “She was such an old biddy…. But he said they got along famously. He said she’d known them both: Plummer and him.”

“Plumsie must have been named for Plummer.”

“You know, I never thought of that, Fell.”

“Didn’t this Tobias write a book about Nels Plummer?”

“He wrote a book about four famous missing people. Plummer was one of the four.”

“Famous, I guess, because he was rich.”

Mrs. Violet nodded. “Tobias claims the two boys were fast friends and may have had a fight right before Plummer’s disappearance. Do you know anything about all of that?”

“I wasn’t even born,” I said.

“Don’t be cruel,” Mrs. Violet said.

She walked over to the door. “There was something else, too. He couldn’t get over my first name.”

“Which is?”

“Laura.”

“Laura Violet. Nice.”

“But Laura isn’t all that rare a name, Fell. He said he’d known someone named Laura, and wasn’t that odd that it was my name, too? I didn’t think it was so odd.”

“I don’t either.”

“But he went on and on about it, as though it was some kind of omen.
‘Really?’
he said. ‘How extraordinary! A dear, dear friend of mine was named Laura. Now she’s a shrink in Philadelphia. I haven’t seen her for years!’ … He made so much of it, Fell. Perhaps he was just very lonely. He said my name took him on a little trip down Memory Lane.”

“He talked that way?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“It’s pretty corny.”

“As you get older, the corn gets dearer.” She gave me a little farewell salute. “Come back this fall, Fell.”

I said, “We’ll see.”

As soon as she left, I finished packing.

What did I care about Last or Plummer? One was History, the other Ancient History. I had the clothes I’d come for, and Fate had arranged a meeting for me with Little Jack.

Laura Violet poked her head back inside the door. “The candy bars Plumsie likes are Snickers, Fell…. Maybe you should take him some,” and she snickered herself.

In tennis love means zero and in Sanskrit it means trembling elbows.

It surprised Lenny how fast and how much Nels liked him.

Adored him, truly. Zero … Trembling elbows.

Lenny had never been adored by anyone but his mother, who was so busy working so he could have things, that he never had enough of her.

Now there was someone always there for him.

And that someone was not ordinary, nor was the time they spent together ever predictable or dull.

Nels taught Lenny about sex and psychoanalysis. His father had hired people to introduce him to both, said Nels.

Nels liked Republicans, and Lenny Democrats. They pushed their politics at each other ardently, both night owls who liked to stay up to study and argue and eat.

While Lenny went out for the drama club, Nels threw himself into debating, and made the Gardner team…. When Lenny danced and sang a lead role in The
Sound of Music,
Nels’s argument for invading Cuba “now!” put his team over the top against Groton.

Of the pair, it was Nels who could express affection, and Lenny who didn’t know how.

Lenny wished he could be more relaxed and accepting.

Instead, he would cringe down the school hall when Nels called out, “Hey, Lover-Boy, wait up!”

He would jump when Nels took his arm under an umbrella.

He would suffer, get red, and then ask Nels, “What’s this thing you have about acting like a fairy when people are watching us?”

“A fairy wouldn’t dare act as I do, Lenny.”

“I guess not…. You have to realize that my mother and I only kiss at birthdays or at bus and train stations.”

“My father always said he’d die young, so we’d better get our hugs in. Plummer males don’t live long. I won’t, either!… Annette learned from Daddy. She hugged me and kissed me and told me she loved me every day. Of course, she told Celeste the same damn thing. I’d hear her in Celeste’s room cooing at her, promising her this and that, and that little witch would make fun of it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Lenny, who had no patience with his crazy talk about Celeste.

• • •

Sometimes Nels would come running quietly from a long distance and hop on Lenny’s back, hook his legs and arms around Lenny, and say playfully, “Giddyap, horsiel Your master wants a ride!”

Lenny was miserable if it was in Sevens House and others saw. He’d try to look as though he wasn’t miserable, but he blushed so easily, and then as his face got hot, so did his temper, and it showed in his features he hated Nels doing that. Any minute he’d expect someone to crack the wrong kind of joke, but the Sevens loved Nels.

His aweless approach to their sacred club was unique.

They’d ask themselves, What would impress a Nels Plummer?

No. Wait. They wouldn’t say “a Nels Plummer” as though there was more than one.

They’d ask themselves, What would impress Nels Plummer?

There was only one Nels.

• • •

I’ll tell you someone who impressed our boy. Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Never heard of him, right?)

This twisted poet of yore (a lush, yes; none of them are ever happy) inspired Nels to underline so many passages!

One afternoon Lenny took a good look at what it was that captured his pal’s attention.

Oh, yes … and how about this one?

Sick, sick sick … and he was all Lenny’s.

My five-year-old sister answered the phone and told the operator she’d accept the charges. I thought the operator’d tell her to ask an adult if it was all right, but the operator didn’t pay the phone bills.

“Mommy’s across the hall with Mr. Lopez,” Jazzy said.

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“You know what he’s doing to her?”

I held my breath. “What?”

“He’s taking up the hems on all her skirts!”

I had to laugh or I’d cry. “Well, that’s good isn’t it? What are boyfriends for, anyway?”

“They’re not for that!”

“How do
you
know?”

“Because boys don’t sew!”

“But honey, Mr. Lopez is a tailor.”

“I know what he is! I hate it!”

“Oh, come on. Boys sew, girls sew — who’s to say who’s supposed to sew and who isn’t?”

“Daddy wouldn’t sew. He wouldn’t never sew!” “He
would
never sew.”

“That’s what I just said, Johnny. When are you coming home?”

“Soon, sweetheart. Go get Mommy.”

“Tell her Daddy wouldn’t want her going to the movies with Mr. Lopez, Johnny!”

“Jazzy, I know it’s hard to get used to, but Mommy has a right to go out. Daddy’s in heaven.”

“Daddy’s not. He’s rolling over in his grave.”

“What?”

“That’s what Aunt Clara said. She said Daddy’s probably rolling over in his grave.”

Jazzy let the phone drop on the table with a clunk, and I stood waiting, in the phone booth just outside The Tower. It was another hot July morning, and in Bucks County it always felt hotter than anyplace else.

It was ten o’clock on a Saturday. Keats was picking me up in another hour. She liked to sleep in and she liked to take her time dressing.

At least I was back in my clothes — had on a pair of my favorite khakis and an old Depeche Mode T-shirt Jazzy’d picked out for me for Christmas one year. My Sperry topsiders, with my left toe coming through the hole.

When Mom took the phone, she asked me what was so urgent.

“I’m going out to The Hamptons.”

“Couldn’t you have told Jazzy that?”

“I thought you might want to know the reason.”

“I know the reason,” Mom said. “You’re with
her
and she leads you around like a dog on a leash.”

“Mom, Keats and I are just friends now.”

Mom made some deprecating noises. She’d never forgive Keats for the time she stood me up on the night of her Senior Prom. Forget the fact it was long gone where I was concerned.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you when I get back,” I said. I was expecting her to ask me some questions: What
was
the reason? How long would I be away? What about my job? (I figured she could call Le Rêve and tell them I was sick; I’d be back Monday night.)

“Next time don’t make me stop everything for something Jazzy could have told me.”

“Why, because your seamstress is waiting with a beating heart?”

“He’s a
tailor,
Johnny, and his beating heart is my business, not yours.”

“At least Dad did man’s work.” I couldn’t believe I was saying those things.

“Mr. Lopez does man’s work, too — and he doesn’t call up his mother to get her to call the place he works and say he’s sick…. That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”

“No, that’s not what I really want!” My voice croaked in midsentence, so that I even sounded like a liar. “I didn’t even think about that. I had something important to tell you, but you’d rather get back across the hall and have your skirts pinned up!”

There was a pause.

My heart was pounding.

“Oh, Johnny,” my mother finally said softly. “What’s the matter with us? Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry, too, Mom.”

“Let’s start all over, hmmm? Where are you calling from?”

I told her, and I told her all about where I was going and why. But it wasn’t an easy conversation. Once you’ve spit out a lot of venom at each other, it’s hard to just get past it.

“Lenny Last, sure,” Mom said. “I saw him on
The Tonight Show, I
think. Lenny Last and Plumsie … I remember Plumsie called him Tra La, and Lenny got so mad!”

“Why Tra La?”

“How do I know? At first I thought he was singing. You know: Tra la la la. But no. He was calling Lenny that.”

“See, Mom, all those years of staying up late waiting for Dad have paid off. You know everything about show business.”

I suppose I should have left Dad out of it. I didn’t know what was right anymore.

Mom skipped by it and said, “I thought you didn’t like this Horner kid. Why go out of your way to see him then?”

“I don’t like
him. I
like his folks. I want to face up to him…. I don’t even know what I’ll say. But I want to put him behind me.”

“And you have to go to The Hamptons to do that?” Mom asked. “I hope you’re not just running, Johnny. You’ve got your job now, and it’s a good job. They like you there.”

“I’m not running,” I lied.

I said, “It’s better than sitting on a park bench all day, isn’t it?”

For a long time I’d done that. I’d gone to the Esplanade in Brooklyn Heights and stared across the river at the New York skyline and out at the Statue of Liberty. I’d thought about jumping in and swimming out until I wouldn’t have the breath to make it back.

“Johnny, I love you,” Mom said.

“I love you, too,” I said. “Will you call Le Rêve for me and tell them I have a very bad case of flu, that I won’t be in tonight or tomorrow?”

• • •

When I got off the phone, I walked into The Tower. Deem Library was there. The infamous Sevens alumnus David Deem had donated it to the Sevens clubhouse. Before he’d died a mysterious death last spring, he’d fooled everyone. He was your all-around good citizen, owner of a sporting goods store, dutiful father to one daughter and one dachshund. All of Cottersville and Gardner were shocked when he was indicted for dealing drugs.

While he was out on bail, he was shot in his car one afternoon at twilight, seven times through the heart. There was a dead rat in his mouth, said to be the signature of The Sevens Revenge, the deadly punishment Little Jack’s father’d mentioned. It was rumored to be meted out by a Sevens on a member who had disgraced Sevens.

Twilight was a special time for Sevens. No one really knew why that was, but there were many rituals at twilight and songs with “twilight” in the verse.

I’d known Deem and trusted him. All of that was part of my breakdown, too, and I wasn’t eager to hang around in there. What I wanted was to glance at something I knew would be in the library.

It didn’t take me long to find his name in the directory, along with the years he’d attended Gardner.

Then from the collection I pulled out the light-blue leather-bound volume with
The Hill Book, 1963
stamped across it in white.

I opened to the P’s and there he was: some male version of the old child star Shirley Temple: all curls and dimples, and a big grin.

New York, New York

Neb … Nelly

The Severn Club, ‘62, ‘63. Debating, ‘62, ‘63.

Ambition: To continue as is.

Remembered for: His ego and his alter ego, Tra La.

Slogan: Here’s to Swinburne et moi!

Future Occupation: Leader

I flipped a few pages to find Tralastski, who was a serious young man with dark frames on his eyeglasses and his dark hair parted down the middle, lending him an old-fashioned, somewhat scholarly appearance.

New York, New York

Lenny … Tra La

The Sevens Club, ‘62, ‘63. Drama Club, ‘62, ‘63. Tennis, ‘63.

Gardner Follies, ‘63.

Ambition: To be an actor.

Remembered for: Being buddies with Plummer.

Slogan: We three: My echo, my shadow, and Laura.

Future Occupation: Show Biz.

Not knowing one tiny thing about Sanskrit, I can’t promise you that love means trembling elbows, so you may feel let down by me. Or question my reliability.

Nels made Lenny feel the same way sometimes.

For example:

One summer day when Lenny was little, his mother took him to Central Park, to escape the heat.

There was a lake in the park. His mother rowed one of the boats out to the middle of it.

“Just think, Leonard,” said she, “we wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for an awful murder.”

That was her way of starting the same lesson over again, which she would teach Lenny as long as she drew breath: that if he thought for one minute the rich were happy,
listen!

Then she told him of two young men: one filthy rich named Loeb, the other Leopold. Of how they snatched this small boy and murdered him. (It left Lenny terrified of being kidnapped.)

“Why wouldn’t we be here if it wasn’t for them?” Lenny asked her.

“Because the Loeb family didn’t want everyone to remember them for that awful crime a relative committed, so they gave this boathouse to the community.”

It was one of the stories Lenny told Nels Plummer, to give him an example of what his mother was like.

Nels used it when he wrote his New Boy’s Composition, something required of all entering students.

The theme was “History in Our Daily Lives.”

One
morning, Sister and I took a boat out on the little lake in Central Park.

“Just think, Nels,” said Sister, “we wouldn’t be here if there hadn’t been a certain violent crime
some
years ago.”

As Nels was reading this to Lenny, Lenny stopped him.

“Very funny!” said Lenny.

“It’s not supposed to be funny.”

“I ought to know that, since it’s my story.”

“Your story?”

“I told you my mother took me to the park and told me that! Come on, Nels!”

“Did you, Lenny? I don’t remember that.”

“Well, where do you think it came from? Your sister never took you there and said that.”

Nels thought about it. “She could have. We lived right across the street.”

“But she
didn’t,
Nels!”

“Sometimes I get us all mixed up, Lenny. I don’t know where you stop and I begin and vice versa.” “I think you mean it.”

“I do! I swear I don’t remember you telling me that. Don’t be mad at Nelly, okay?”

“Do you have to call yourself that?” Lenny asked him.

“My father was called that and his father was, too. It’s a proud old name in our family.”

“It sounds faggy.”

“Not to us…. But Celeste always said that Captain Stir-Crazy thought it was faggy, too.”

Stir-Crazy was Nels’s nickname for the Captain of the
Seastar.
Captain Ian Stirman. Nels didn’t like him. Nels didn’t like anyone his sister admired.

Jealousy, they say in Hong Kong, comes into the eye as a little yellow freckle.

Nels said, “Stir-Crazy claims that Nelly is what Englishmen call the old ones. Nellies. Why should I care what the English do? Why should he? … Unless he’s a fag himself.”

Lenny wanted to get back to the subject. “Are you going to hand in that essay?”

“I don’t have another, Lenny, and it’s awfully good. Do you mind?”

“Be my guest, I guess.”

“Well, you weren’t making use of the incident, were you, in yours?”

Lenny’d written a very dull essay about a trip to the Statue of Liberty. The only people in it were “the French” and “the Americans.”

• • •

From time to time, Lenny’d catch Nels doing more things like that. He’d made Lenny teach him chess because it was Lenny’s favorite game. In no time he played it as though he had for years. Eventually he could beat Lenny, though Lenny knew at times he let Lenny win.

He took on all of Lenny’s enthusiasms, forgetting (so he claimed) that they were Lenny’s. He’d never even heard of Lenny’s favorite poet, Leonard Cohen, never read science-fiction writers like Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, or Alfred Bester. He glommed onto them and began finding things in them Lenny hadn’t found … and of course sometimes he’d recommend something to Lenny that Lenny had told him about.

Sometimes, after one of their bull sessions in Lenny’s suite, when they sneaked in a bottle of chianti, Nels would cry, “Toodle-oo to boo-hoo-hoo,” which was something Celeste said sometimes in her act, and he’d cross the hall singing Annette’s old song to him when he was little: “Seeing Nelly Home.”

It was her sign-off, and Celeste would add remarks like “Who
wants
him home?” or “Get
yourself
home next time, jerk!”

Celeste always called Nels “Big Guy.”

Nels had a nickname for Lenny, too, but Lenny loathed being called it. Tra La. From Tralastski.

“What’s this thing you have against nicknames?” Nels asked him. (Even the expression
What’s this thing you have
… was Lenny’s.)

“I just don’t like Tra La,” Lenny insisted.

The only other nickname Lenny had ever had he had hated more. It was Wheezy … because of his asthma.

Since he had arrived on The Hill, he had not had a single asthma attack.

He attributed that to the clean country air of Cottersville, although there was a tire factory just outside town. Nels claimed it was Nels; Nels said no one ever gave a damn about you before, that’s all.

“Tra La and Nelly,” said Lenny. “That sounds awful!”

“Agreed,” said Nels. “It would sound much better if it were Nelly and Tra La.”

A lot of things Nels thought were funny Lenny didn’t, at least not right away.

Sometimes not ever.

Tra La not ever.