The Secret History (14 page)

There were footsteps on the stair and Bunny, his eyes screwed up and his hair standing on end, tottered in wearing his pajamas. “What the hell,” he said. “You woke me up.” But nobody paid any attention to him, and finally he poured himself a drink and tottered back up the stairs with it, in his bare feet, to bed.

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off—though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be—but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.

I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories: watchful and grudging, oddly silent. All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another. “Stop looking so superior!” my father sometimes used to shout at me when I was eating, watching television, or otherwise minding my own business. But this facial cast of mine (that’s what I think it is, really, a way my mouth has of turning down at the corners, it has little to do with my actual moods) has worked as often to my favor as to my disadvantage. Months after I got to know the five of them, I found to my surprise that at the start they’d been nearly as bewildered by me
as I by them. It never occurred to me that my behavior could seem to them anything but awkward and provincial, certainly not that it would appear as enigmatic as it in fact did; why, they eventually asked me, hadn’t I told anyone
anything
about myself? Why had I gone to such lengths to avoid them? (Startled, I realized my trick of ducking into doorways wasn’t as clandestine as I’d thought.) And why hadn’t I returned any of their invitations? Though I had believed they were snubbing me, now I realize they were only waiting, politely as maiden aunts, for me to make the next move.

At any rate, this was the weekend that things started to change, that the dark gaps between the street lamps begin to grow smaller, and smaller, and farther apart, the first sign that one’s train is approaching familiar territory, and will soon be passing through the well-known, well-lighted streets of town. The house was their trump card, their fondest treasure, and that weekend they revealed it to me slyly, by degrees—the dizzy little turret rooms, the high-beamed attic, the old sleigh in the cellar, big enough to be pulled by four horses, astring with bells. The carriage barn was a caretaker’s house. (“That’s Mrs. Hatch in the yard. She’s very sweet but her husband is a Seventh-Day Adventist or something, quite strict. We have to hide all the bottles when he comes inside.”

“Or what?”

“Or he’ll get depressed and start leaving little tracts all over the place.”)

In the afternoon we wandered down to the lake, which was shared, discreetly, by several adjoining properties. On the way they pointed out the tennis court and the old summerhouse, a mock
tholos
, Doric by way of Pompeii, and Stanford White, and (said Francis, who was scornful of this Victorian effort at classicism) D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille. It was made of plaster, he said, and had come in pieces from Sears, Roebuck. The grounds, in places, bore signs of the geometric Victorian trimness which had been their original form: drained fish-pools; the long white colonnades of skeleton pergolas; rock-bordered parterres where flowers no longer grew. But for the most part, these traces were obliterated, with the hedges running wild and native trees—slippery elm and tamarack—outnumbering the quince and Japanese maple.

The lake, surrounded by birches, was bright and very still.
Huddled in the rushes was a small wooden rowboat, painted white on the outside and blue within.

“Can we take it out?” I said, intrigued.

“Of course. But we can’t all go, we’ll sink.”

I had never been in a boat in my life. Henry and Camilla went out with me—Henry at the oars, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his dark jacket on the seat beside him. He had a habit, as I was later to discover, of trailing off into absorbed, didactic, entirely self-contained monologues, about whatever he happened to be interested in at the time—the Catuvellauni, or late Byzantine painting, or headhunting in the Solomon Islands. That day he was talking about Elizabeth and Leicester, I remember: the murdered wife, the royal barge, the queen on a white horse talking to the troops at Tilbury Fort, and Leicester and the Earl of Essex holding the bridle rein.… The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone. Camilla, flushed and sleepy, trailed her hand in the water. Yellow birch leaves blew from the trees and drifted down to rest on the surface. It was many years later, and far away, when I came across this passage in
The Waste-Land:

   Elizabeth and Leicester
     Beating oars
     The stern was formed
     A gilded shell
     Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
       Weialala leia
       Wallala leilala

We went to the other side of the lake and returned, half-blinded by the light on the water, to find Bunny and Charles on the front porch, eating ham sandwiches and playing cards.

“Have some champagne, quick,” Bunny said. “It’s going flat.”

“Where is it?”

“In the teapot.”

“Mr. Hatch would be beside himself if he saw a bottle on the porch,” said Charles.

They were playing Go Fish: it was the only card game that Bunny knew.

On Sunday I woke early to a quiet house. Francis had given my clothes to Mrs. Hatch to be laundered; putting on a bathrobe he’d lent me, I went downstairs to sit on the porch for a few minutes before the others woke up.

Outside, it was cool and still, the sky that hazy shade of white peculiar to autumn mornings, and the wicker chairs were drenched with dew. The hedges and the acres and acres of lawn were covered in a network of spider web that caught the dew in beads so that it glistened white as frost. Preparing for their journey south, the martins flapped and fretted in the eaves, and, from the blanket of mist hovering over the lake, I heard the harsh, lonely cry of the mallards.

“Good morning,” a cool voice behind me said.

Startled, I turned to see Henry sitting at the other end of the porch. He was without a jacket but otherwise immaculate for such an ungodly hour: trousers knife-pressed, his white shirt crisp with starch. On the table in front of him were books and papers, a steaming espresso pot and a tiny cup, and—I was surprised to see—an unfiltered cigarette burning in an ashtray.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“I always rise early. The morning is the best time for me to work.”

I glanced at the books. “What are you doing, Greek?”

Henry set the cup back into its saucer. “A translation of
Paradise Lost.
”

“Into what language?”

“Latin,” he said solemnly.

“Hmm,” I said. “Why?”

“I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English—of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I’m referring to is the later work. In
Paradise Lost
he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts
to impose.” He lay his cigarette back in the ashtray. I stared at it burning. “Will you have some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“I hope you slept well.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“I sleep better out here than I usually do,” said Henry, adjusting his glasses and bending back over the lexicon. There was a subtle evidence of fatigue, and strain, in the slope of his shoulder which I, a veteran of many sleepless nights, recognized immediately. Suddenly I realized that this unprofitable task of his was probably nothing more than a method of whiling away the early morning hours, much as other insomniacs do crossword puzzles.

“Are you always up this early?” I asked him.

“Almost always,” he said without looking up. “It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, and I did. About the only time of day I had been able to stand in Plano was the very early morning, almost dawn, when the streets were empty and the light was golden and kind on the dry grass, the chain-link fences, the solitary scrub-oaks.

Henry looked up from his books at me, almost curiously. “You’re not very happy where you come from, are you?” he said.

I was startled at this Holmes-like deduction. He smiled at my evident discomfiture.

“Don’t worry. You hide it very cleverly,” he said, going back to his book. Then he looked up again. “The others really don’t understand that sort of thing, you know.”

He said this without malice, without empathy, without even much in the way of interest. I was not even sure what he meant, but, for the first time, I had a glimmer of something I had not previously understood: why the others were all so fond of him. Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes; the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry’s very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term
I spent at Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food—acquired then, and largely, I must admit, in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class—have stayed with me through the years. It is easy, even now, for me to remember what their daily routines, which subsequently became my own, were like. Regardless of circumstance they lived like clockwork, with surprisingly little of that chaos which to me had always seemed so inherent a part of college life—irregular diet and work habits, trips to the laundromat at one a.m. There were certain times of the day or night, even when the world was falling in, when you could always find Henry in the all-night study room of the library, or when you knew it would be useless to even look for Bunny, because he was on his Wednesday date with Marion or his Sunday walk. (Rather in the way that the Roman Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained intact even during the terrible days after Bunny’s death. Up until the very end there was always, always, Sunday-night dinner at Charles and Camilla’s, except on the evening of the murder itself, when no one felt much like eating and it was postponed until Monday.)