Chapter 7

CHAPTER

7

ALTHOUGH BUNNY hadn’t known many people at Hampden, it was such a small school that almost everyone had been aware of him in some way or other; people knew his name, knew him by sight, remembered the sound of his voice which was in many ways his most distinct feature of all. Odd, but even though I have a snapshot or two of Bunny it is not the face but the voice, the lost voice, which has stayed with me over the years—strident, garrulous, abnormally resonant, once heard it was not easily forgotten, and in those first days after his death the dining halls were strangely quiet without that great braying hee-haw of his echoing in its customary place by the milk machine.

It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned—for it’s a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances. No one had seemed very torn up by his disappearance, even in those grim final days when it seemed that the news when it came must certainly be bad; nor, in the public eye, had the search seemed much besides a massive inconvenience. But now, at news of his death, people were strangely frantic. Everyone, suddenly, had known him; everyone was deranged with grief; everyone was just going to have to try and get on as well

as they could without him. “He would have wanted it that way.” That was a phrase I heard many times that week on the lips of people who had absolutely no idea what Bunny wanted; college officials, anonymous weepers, strangers who clutched and sobbed outside the dining halls; from the Board of Trustees, who, in a defensive and carefully worded statement, said that “in harmony with the unique spirit of Bunny Corcoran, as well as the humane and progressive ideals of Hampden College,” a large gift was being made in his name to the American Civil Liberties Union—an organization Bunny would certainly have abhorred, had he been aware of its existence.

I really could go on for pages about all the public histrionics in the days after Bunny’s death. The flag flew at half-mast. The psychological counselors were on call twenty-four hours a day. A few oddballs from the Political Science department wore black armbands. There was an agitated flurry of tree plantings, memorial services, fund-raisers and concerts. A freshman girl attempted suicide—for entirely unrelated reasons—by eating poison berries from a bush outside the Music Building, but somehow this was all tied in with the general hysteria. Everyone wore sunglasses for days.

Frank and Jud, taking as always the view that Life Must Go On, went around with their paint can collecting money for a Beer Blast to be held in Bunny’s memory. This was thought to be in bad taste by certain of the school officials, especially as Bunny’s death had brought to public attention the large number of alcohol-related functions at Hampden, but Frank and Jud were unmoved. “He would have wanted us to party,” they said sullenly, which certainly was not the case; but then again, the Student Services office lived in mortal fear of Frank and Jud. Their fathers were on the lifetime board of directors; Frank’s dad had donated money for a new library and Jud’s had built the science building; theory had it that the two of them were unexpellable, and a reprimand from the Dean of Studies was not going to stop them from doing anything they felt like doing.

So the Beer Blast went on, and was just the sort of tasteless and incoherent event you might expect—but I am getting ahead of my story.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke.

Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People screamed, wept, gave away their possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn’t know the words to “Sugar Magnolia.” Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward.

Though not nearly so spectacular, this manifestation of grief for Bunny was in many ways a similar phenomenon—an affirmation of community, a formulaic expression of homage and dread. Learn by Doing is the motto of Hampden. People experienced a sense of invulnerability and well-being by attending rap sessions, outdoor flute concerts; enjoyed having an official excuse to compare nightmares or break down in public. In a certain sense it was simply play-acting but at Hampden, where creative expression was valued above all else, play-acting was itself a kind of work, and people went about their grief as seriously as small children will sometimes play quite grimly and without pleasure in make-believe offices and stores.

The mourning of the hippies, in particular, had an almost anthropological significance. Bunny, in life, had been at almost perpetual war with them: the hippies contaminating the bathtub with tie-dye and playing their stereos loudly to annoy him; Bunny bombarding them with empty soda cans and calling Security whenever he thought they were smoking pot. Now that he was dead,

they marked his passage to another plane in impersonal and almost tribal fashion—chanting, weaving mandalas, beating on drums, performing their own inscrutable and mysterious rites. Henry stopped to watch them at a distance, resting the ferrule of his umbrella on the toe of his khaki-gaitered shoe.

“Is ‘mandala’ a Pali word?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Sanskrit. Means ‘circle’.”

“So this is some Hindu kind of thing?”

“Not necessarily,” he said, looking the hippies up and down as if they were animals in a zoo. “They have come to be associated with Tantrism—mandalas, that is. Tantrism acted as a kind of corrupting influence upon the Indian Buddhist pantheon, though of course elements of it were assimilated into and restructured by the Buddhist tradition, until, by A.D. 800, say, Tantrism had an academic tradition of its own—a corrupt tradition, to my way of thinking, but a tradition nonetheless.” He paused, watching a girl with a tambourine twirling dizzily on the lawn. “But to answer your question,” he said, “I believe that the mandala actually has quite a respectable place in the history of Theravada, Buddhism proper. One finds their features in reliquary mounds on the Gangetic plain and elsewhere from as early as the first century A.D.”

Reading back over this, I feel that in some respects I’ve done Bunny an injustice. People really did like him. No one had known him all that well but it was a strange feature of his personality that the less one actually knew him, the more one felt one did. Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence

overheard. People who had never once spoken to him suddenly remembered, with a pang of affection, having seen him throwing sticks to a dog or stealing tulips from a teacher’s garden. “He touched people’s lives,” said the college president, leaning forward to grip the podium with both his hands; and though he was to repeat the exact phrase, in the exact way, two months later at a memorial service for the freshman girl (who’d fared better with a single-edged razor blade than with the poison berries) it was, in Bunny’s case at least, strangely true. He did touch people’s lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him—or what they thought was him—with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

It was this unreality of character, this cartoonishness if you will, which was the secret of his appeal and what finally made his death so sad. Like any great comedian, he colored his environment wherever he went; in order to marvel at his constancy you wanted to see him in all sorts of alien situations: Bunny riding a camel, Bunny babysitting, Bunny in space. Now, in death, this constancy crystallized and became something else entirely: he was an old familiar jokester cast—with surprising effect—in the tragic role.

When the snow finally melted it went as quickly as it had come. In twenty-four hours it was all gone except for some lovely shady patches in the woods—white-laced branches dripping rain holes in the crust—and the slushy gray piles at the roadside. Commons lawn stretched out wide and desolate like some Napoleonic battlefield: churned, sordid, roiled with footprints.

It was a strange, fragmented time. In the days before the funeral none of us saw each other very much. The Corcorans had spirited Henry back to Connecticut with them; Cloke, who seemed to me close on the verge of a nervous breakdown, went uninvited to stay at Charles and Camilla’s, where he drank Grolsch beer by the six-pack and fell asleep on the couch with lighted cigarettes. I myself was encumbered with Judy Poovey and her friends Tracy and Beth. At mealtimes they came regularly to fetch me (“Richard,” Judy would

say, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand, “you must eat”) and for the rest of the time I was captive to little activities they planned for me—drive-in movies and Mexican food, going to Tracy’s apartment for Margaritas and MTV. Though I didn’t mind the drive-ins, I did not care for the continual parade of nachos and tequila-based drinks. They were crazy about something called Kamikazes, and liked to dye their Margaritas a horrifying electric blue.

Actually, I was often glad of their company. Despite her faults, Judy was a kindly soul, and she was so bossy and talkative that I felt oddly safe with her. Beth I disliked. She was a dancer, from Santa Fe, with a rubbery face and an idiotic giggle and dimples all over when she smiled. At Hampden she was thought something of a beauty but I loathed her lolloping, spaniel-like walk and her little-girl voice—very affected, it seemed to me—which degenerated frequently into a whine. She had also had a nervous breakdown or two, and sometimes, in repose, she got a kind of walleyed look that made me nervous. Tracy was great. She was pretty and Jewish, with a dazzling smile and a penchant for Mary Tyler Moore mannerisms like hugging herself or twirling around with her arms outstretched.

The three of them smoked a lot, told long boring stories (“So, like, our plane just sat on the runway for five hours”) and talked about people I didn’t know. I, the absentminded bereaved, was free to stare peacefully out the window. But sometimes I grew tired of them, and if I complained of a headache or said I wanted to go to sleep, Tracy and Beth would disappear with prearranged swiftness and there I would be, alone with Judy. She meant well, I suppose, but the type of comfort she wished to offer did not much appeal to me and after ten or twenty minutes alone with her I was ready again for any amount of Margaritas and MTV at Tracy’s.

Francis, alone of us all, was unencumbered and occasionally he stopped by to see me. Sometimes he found me alone; when he did not he would sit stiffly in my desk chair and pretend, Henrylike, to examine my Greek books until even dimwit Tracy got the hint and left. As soon as the door closed and he heard footsteps on the stairs he would shut the book on his finger and lean forward, agitated and blinking. Our main worry at the time was the autopsy Bunny’s family

had requested; we were shocked when Henry, in Connecticut, got us word that one was in progress, by slipping away from the Corcorans’

house one afternoon to call Francis from a pay phone, under the flapping banners and striped awnings of a used-car lot, with a highway roaring in the background. He’d overheard Mrs. Corcoran tell Mr. Corcoran that it was all for the best, that otherwise (and Henry swore he’d heard this very distinctly) they’d never know for sure.

Whatever else one may say about guilt, it certainly lends one diabolical powers of invention; and I spent two or three of the worst nights I had, then or ever, lying awake drunk with a horrible taste of tequila in my mouth and worrying about clothing filaments, fingerprints, strands of hair. All I knew about autopsies was what I had seen on reruns of “Quincy,” but somehow it never occurred to me that my information might be inaccurate because it came from a TV show. Didn’t they research these things carefully, have a consulting physician on the set? I sat up, turned on the lights; my mouth was stained a ghastly blue. When the drinks came up in the bathroom they were brilliant-hued, perfectly clear, a rush of vibrant acid turquoise the color of Ty-D-Bol.

But Henry, free as he was to observe the Corcorans in their own habitat, soon figured out what was going on. Francis was so impatient with his happy news that he did not even wait for Tracy and Judy to leave the room but told me immediately, in sloppily inflected Greek, while sweet dopey Tracy wondered aloud at our wanting to keep up our schoolwork at a time like this.

“Do not fear, ” he said to me. “It is the mother. She is concerned with the dishonor of the son having to do with wine. ”

I did not understand what he meant. The form of “dishonor” (

)

that he used also meant “loss of civil rights.” “Atimia? ” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“But rights are for living men, not for the dead. ”

“Oiμ, ” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, dear. No. No.”

He cast about, snapping his fingers, while Judy and Tracy looked on in interest. It is harder to carry on a conversation in a dead language than you might think. “There has been much rumor, ” he

said at last. “The mother grieves. Not for her son, ” he added hastily, when he saw I was about to speak, “for she is a wicked woman.

Rather she grieves for the shame which has fallen on her house. ”

“What shame is this? ”

“Oivov, ” he said impatiently. “

. She seeks to show that his

corpse does not hold wine” (and here he employed a very elegant and untranslatable metaphor: dregs in the empty wineskin of his body).

“And why, pray tell, does she care? ”

“Because there is talk among the citizens. It is shameful for a young man to die while drunk. ”

This was true, about the talk at least. Mrs. Corcoran, who previously had put herself at the disposal of anyone who would listen, was angry at the unflattering position in which she now found herself. Early articles, which had depicted her as “well-dressed,”

“striking,” the family “perfect,” had given way to snide and vaguely accusatory ones of the ilk of MOM SEZ: NOT MY KID. Though there was only a poor beer bottle to suggest the presence of alcohol, and no real evidence of drugs at all, psychologists on the evening news spoke of dysfunctional families, the phenomenon of denial, pointed out that addictive tendencies were often passed from parent to child.

It was a hard blow. Mrs. Corcoran, leaving Hampden, walked through the crush of her old pals the reporters with her eyes averted and her teeth clenched in a brilliant hateful smile.

Of course, it was unfair. From the news accounts one would have thought Bunny the most stereotypical of “substance abusers” or

“troubled teens.” It did not matter a whit that everyone who knew him (including us: Bunny was no juvenile delinquent) denied this; no matter that the autopsy showed only a tiny percentage of blood alcohol and no drugs at all; no matter that he was not even a teenager: the rumors—wheeling vulture-like in the skies above his corpse—had finally descended and sunk in their claws for good. A paragraph which blandly stated the results of the autopsy appeared in the back of the Hampden Examiner. But in college folklore he is remembered as a stumbling teen inebriate; his beery ghost is still evoked in darkened rooms, for freshmen, along with the car-crash

decapitees and the bobby soxer who hanged herself in Putnam attic and all the rest of the shadowy ranks of the Hampden dead.

The funeral was set for Wednesday. On Monday morning I found two envelopes in my mailbox: one from Henry, the other from Julian. I opened Julian’s first. It was postmarked New York and was written hastily, in the red pen he used for correcting our Greek.

Dear Richard—How very unhappy I am this morning, as I know I will be for many mornings to come. The news of our friend’s death has saddened me greatly. I do not know if you have tried to reach me, I have been away, I have not been well, I doubt if I shall return to Hampden until after the funeral–

How sad it is to think that Wednesday will be the last time that we shall all be together. I hope this letter finds you well. It brings love.

At the bottom were his initials.

Henry’s letter, from Connecticut, was as stilted as a cryptogram from the western front.

Dear Richard,

I hope you are well. For several days I have been at the Corcorans’ house. Although I feel I am less comfort to them than they, in their bereavement, can recognize, they have allowed me to be of help to them in many small household matters.

Mr. Corcoran has asked me to write to Bunny’s friends at school and extend an invitation to spend the night before the funeral at his house. I understand you will be put up in the basement. If you do not plan to attend, please telephone Mrs. Corcoran and let her know.

I look forward to seeing you at the funeral if not, as I hope, before.

There was no signature, but instead a tag from the Iliad, in Greek.

It was from the eleventh book, when Odysseus, cut off from his friends, finds himself alone and on enemy territory:

Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;

I have seen worse sights than this.

I rode down to Connecticut with Francis. Though I’d expected the twins to come with us, instead they went a day earlier with Cloke—

who, to everyone’s surprise, had received a personal invitation from Mrs. Corcoran herself. We had thought he would not be invited at all.

After Sciola and Davenport caught him trying to leave town, Mrs.

Corcoran had refused to even speak to him. (“She’s saving face,”

said Francis.) At any rate, he’d got the personal invitation, and there had also been invitations—relayed through Henry—for Cloke’s friends Rooney Wynne and Bram Guernsey.

Actually, the Corcorans had invited quite a few people from Hampden—dorm acquaintances, people I didn’t know Bunny even knew. A girl named Sophie Dearbold, whom I knew slightly from French class, was to ride down with Francis and me.

“How did Bunny know her?” I asked Francis on the way to her dorm.

“I don’t think he did, not well. He did have a crush on her, though, freshman year. I’m sure Marion won’t like it a bit that they’ve asked her.”

Though I’d feared that the ride down might be awkward, in fact it was a wonderful relief to be around a stranger. We almost had fun, with the radio going and Sophie (brown-eyed, gravel-voiced) leaning on folded arms over the front seat talking to us, and Francis in a better mood than I’d seen him in in ages. “You look like Audrey Hepburn,” he told her, “you know that?” She gave us Kools and cinnamon gumballs, told funny stories. I laughed and looked out the window and prayed we’d miss our turn. I had never been to Connecticut in my life. I had never been to a funeral, either.

Shady Brook was on a narrow road that veered off sharply from the highway and twisted along for many miles, over bridges, past farmland and horse pastures and fields. After a time the rolling meadows segued into a golf course. SHADY BROOK COUNTRY CLUB, said

the wood-burned sign that swung in front of the mock-Tudor clubhouse. The houses began after that–large, handsome, widely spaced, each set on its own six or seven acres of land.

The place was like a maze. Frances looked for numbers on the mailboxes, nosing into one false trail after another and backing out again, cursing, grinding the gears. There were no signs and no apparent logic to the house numbers, and after we’d poked around blind for about half an hour, I began to hope that we would never find it at all, that we could just turn around and have a jolly ride back to Hampden.

But of course we did find it. At the end of its own cul-de-sac, it was a large modern house of the “architectural” sort, bleached cedar, its split levels and asymmetrical terraces self-consciously bare. The yard was paved with black cinder, and there was no greenery at all except a few gingko trees in postmodern tubs, placed at dramatic intervals.

“Wow,” said Sophie, a true Hampden girl, ever dutiful in homage to the New.

I looked over at Francis and he shrugged.

“His mom likes modern architecture,” he said.

I had never seen the man who answered the door but with a sick, dreamlike feeling I recognized him instantly. He was big and red in the face, with a heavy jaw and a full head of white hair; for a moment he stared at us, his smallish mouth fallen open into a tight, round o.

Then, surprisingly boyish and quick, he sprang forward and seized Francis’s hand. “Well,” he said. “Well, well, well.” His voice was nasal, garrulous, Bunny’s voice. “If it’s not the old Carrot Top. How are you, boy?”

“Pretty good,” said Francis, and I was a little surprised at the depth and warmth with which he said it, and the strength with which he returned the handshake.

Mr. Corcoran slung a heavy arm around his neck and pulled him close. “This one’s my boy,” he said to Sophie and me, reaching up to tousle Francis’s hair. “All my brothers were redheads and out of my

boys there’s not an honest-to-god redhead in the bunch. Can’t understand it. Who are you, sweetheart?” he said to Sophie, disengaging his arm and reaching for her hand.

“Hi. I’m Sophie Dearbold.”

“Well, you’re mighty pretty. Isn’t she pretty, boys. You look just like your aunt Jean, honey.”

“What?” said Sophie, after a confused pause.

“Why, your aunt, honey. Your daddy’s sister. That pretty Jean Lickfold that won the ladies’ golf tournament out at the club last year.”

“No, sir. Dearbold.

“Dearfold. Well, isn’t that strange. I don’t know of any Dearfolds around here. Now, I used to know a fellow name of Breedlow, but that must have been, oh, twenty years ago. He was in business.

They say he embezzled a cool five million from his partner.”

“I’m not from around here.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, in a manner reminiscent of Bunny.

“No?” he said.

“No.”

“Not from Shady Brook?” He said it as if he could hardly believe it.

“No.”

“Then where you from, honey? Greenwich?”

“Detroit.”

“Bless your heart then. To come all this way.”

Sophie, smiling, shook her head and started to explain when, with absolutely no warning, Mr. Corcoran flung his arms around her and burst into tears.

We were frozen with horror. Sophie’s eyes, over his heaving shoulder, were round and aghast as if he’d run her through with a knife.

“Oh, darling,” he wailed, his face buried deep in her neck. “Honey, how are we going to get along without him?”

“Come on, Mr. Corcoran,” said Francis, tugging at his sleeve.

“We loved him a lot, honey,” sobbed Mr. Corcoran. “Didn’t we? He loved you, too. He would have wanted you to know that. You know that, don’t you, dear?”

“Mr. Corcoran,” said Francis, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him hard. “Mr. Corcoran. ”

He turned and fell back against Francis, bellowing.

I ran around to the other side and managed to get his arm around my neck. His knees sagged; he almost pulled me down but somehow, staggering beneath his weight, Francis and I got him to his feet and together we maneuvered him inside and weaved down the hall with him (“Oh, shit,” I heard Sophie murmur, “shit.”) and got him into a chair.

He was still crying. His face was purple. When I reached down to loosen his collar he grabbed me by the wrist. “Gone,” he wailed, looking me straight in the eye. “My baby. ”

His gaze—helpless, wild—hit me like a blackjack. Suddenly, and for the first time, really, I was struck by the bitter, irrevocable truth of it; the evil of what we had done. It was like running full speed into a brick wall. I let go his collar, feeling completely helpless. I wanted to die. “Oh, God,” I mumbled, “God help me, I’m sorry—”

I felt a fierce kick in my anklebone. It was Francis. His face was as white as chalk.

A shaft of light splintered painfully in my vision. I clutched the back of the chair, closed my eyes and saw luminous red as the rhythmic noise of his sobs fell over and over again, like a bludgeon.

Then, very abruptly, they stopped. Everything was quiet. I opened my eyes. Mr. Corcoran—leftover tears still rolling down his cheeks but his face otherwise composed—was looking with interest at a spaniel puppy who was gnawing furtively at the toe of his shoe.

“Jennie,” he said severely. “Bad girl. Didn’t Mama put you out?

Huh?”

With a cooing, baby noise, he reached down and scooped up the little dog—its feet paddling furiously in midair—and carried her out of the room.

“Now, go on,” I heard him say airily. “Scat.”

A screen door creaked somewhere. In a moment he was back: calm now, beaming, a dad from an ad.

“Any of you kids care for a beer?” he said.

We were all agog. No one answered him. I stared at him, trembling, ashen-faced.

“Come on, guys,” he said, and winked. “No takers?”

At last, Francis cleared his throat with a rasping sound. “Ah, I believe I’d like one, yes.”

There was a silence.

“Me, too,” said Sophie.

“Three?” said Mr. Corcoran to me jovially, holding up three fingers.

I moved my mouth but no sound came out of it.

He put his head to the side, as if fixing me with his good eye. “I don’t think we’ve met, have we, son?”

I shook my head.

“Macdonald Corcoran,” he said, leaning forward to offer his hand.

“Call me Mack.”

I mumbled my own name.

“What’s that?” he said brightly, hand to ear.

I said it again, louder this time.

“Ah! So you’re the one from California! Where’s your tan, son?” He laughed loudly at his joke and went to fetch the beers.

I sat down hard, exhausted and almost sick. We were in an overscaled, Architectural Digest sort of room, big and loft-like, with skylights and a fieldstone fireplace, chairs upholstered in white leather, kidney-shaped coffee table—modern, expensive, Italian stuff. Running along the back wall was a long glass trophy case filled with loving cups, ribbons, school and sports memorabilia; in ominous proximity were several large funeral wreaths which, in conjunction with the trophies, gave that corner of the room a Kentucky Derby sort of look.

“This is a beautiful space,” said Sophie. Her voice echoed amid the sharp surfaces and the polished floor.

“Why, thank you, honey,” Mr. Corcoran said from the kitchen. “We were in House Beautiful last year, and the Home section of the Times the year before that. Not quite what I’d pick myself, but Kathy’s the decorator in the family, y’know.”

The doorbell rang. We looked at each other. Then it rang again, two melodious chimes, and Mrs. Corcoran clicked through from the

back of the house and past us without a word or a glance.

“Henry, ” she called. “Your guests are here.” Then she opened the front door. “Hello,” she said to the delivery boy who was standing outside. “Which one are you? Are you from Sunset Florists?”

“Yes, ma’am. Please sign.”

“Now wait just a minute. I called you people earlier. I want to know why you delivered all these wreaths here while I was out this morning.”

“I didn’t deliver them. I just came on shift.”

“You’re with Sunset Florists, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I felt sorry for him. He was a teenager, with blotches of flesh-colored Clearasil scattered over his face.

“I asked specifically that only floral arrangements and house plants be sent here. These wreaths should all be down at the funeral home.”

“I’m sorry, lady. If you want to call the manager or something—”

“I’m afraid you don’t understand. I don’t want these wreaths in my house. I want you to pack them right back up in your truck and take them to the funeral home. And don’t try to give me that one, either,”

she said as he held up a gaudy wreath of red and yellow carnations.

“Just tell me who it’s from.”

The boy squinted at his clipboard. “ ‘With sympathy, Mr. and Mrs.

Robert Bartle.’ ”

“Ah!” said Mr. Corcoran, who had come back with the beers; he had them all clasped together in his hands, very clumsily, without a tray. “That from Betty and Bob?”

Mrs. Corcoran ignored him. “I guess you can go ahead and bring in those ferns,” she said to the delivery boy, eyeing the foil-wrapped pots with loathing.

After he had gone Mrs. Corcoran began to inspect the ferns, lifting up the fronds to check for dead foliage, making notes on the backs of the envelopes with a tiny silver screw-point pencil. To her husband she said: “Did you see that wreath the Bartles sent?”

“Wasn’t that nice of them.”

“No, in fact I don’t think it appropriate for an employee to send something like that. I wonder, is Bob thinking about asking you for a

raise?”

“Now, hon.”

“I can’t believe these plants, either,” she said, jabbing a forefinger into the soil. “This African violet is almost dead. Louise would be humiliated if she knew.”

“It’s the thought that counts.”

“I know, but still, if I’ve learned one thing from this it is never to order flowers from Sunset Florists again. All the things from Tina’s Flowerland are so much nicer. Francis, ” she said, in the same bored tone and without looking up. “You haven’t been to see us since last Easter.”

Francis took a sip of his beer. “Oh, I’ve been fine,” he said stagily.

“How are you?”

She sighed and shook her head. “It’s been terribly hard,” she said.

“We’re all trying to take things one day at a time. I never realized before how very difficult it can be for a parent to just let go and … Henry, is that you?” she said sharply at the sound of some scuffling on the landing.

A pause. “No, Mom, just me.”

“Go find him, Pat, and tell him to get down here,” she said. Then she turned back to Francis. “We got a lovely spray of Easter lilies from your mother this morning,” she said to him. “How is she?”

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s in the city now. She was really upset,” he added uncomfortably, “when she heard about Bunny.” (Francis had told me she was hysterical on the telephone and had to go take a pill.)

“She is such a lovely person,” said Mrs. Corcoran sweetly. “I was so sorry when I heard she’d been admitted to the Betty Ford Center.”

“She was only there for a couple of days,” said Francis.

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? She made that much progress, did she? I’ve always heard it was an excellent place.”

Francis cleared his throat. “Well, she mainly went out there for a rest. Quite a number of people do that, you know.”

Mrs. Corcoran looked surprised. “Oh, you don’t mind talking about it, do you?” she said. “I don’t think you should. I think it’s very modern of your mother to realize that she needed help. Not so long

ago one simply didn’t admit to problems of that nature. When I was a girl—”

“Well, well, speak of the Devil,” boomed Mr. Corcoran.

Henry, in dark suit, was creaking down the stairs with a stiff, measured tread.

Francis stood up. I did, too. He ignored us.

“Come on in here, son,” said Mr. Corcoran. “Grab yourself a brewski.”

“Thank you, no,” said Henry.

Up close, I was startled to see how pale he was. His face was leaden and set and beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.

“What you boys been doing up there all afternoon?” Mr. Corcoran said through a mouthful of ice.

Henry blinked at him.

“Huh?” said Mr. Corcoran pleasantly. “Looking at girlie magazines?

Building yourselves a ham radio set?”

Henry passed a hand—which, I saw, trembled slightly—over his forehead. “I was reading,” he said.

“Reading? ” said Mr. Corcoran, as if he’d never heard of such a thing.

“Yes, sir.”

“What is it? Something good?”

“The Upanishads. ”

“Well aren’t you smart. You know, I’ve got a whole shelf of books down in the basement if you want to take a look. Even have a couple old Perry Masons. They’re pretty good. Exactly like the TV show, except Perry gets a little sexy with Della and sometimes he’ll say

‘damn’ and stuff.”

Mrs. Corcoran cleared her throat.

“Henry,” she said smoothly, reaching for her drink, “I’m sure the young people would like to see where they’ll be staying. Maybe they have some luggage in the car.”

“All right.”

“Check the downstairs bathroom to make sure there are enough washcloths and towels. If there aren’t, get some from the linen closet in the hall.”

Henry nodded but before he could answer Mr. Corcoran suddenly came up behind him. “This boy,” he said, slapping him on the back—

I saw Henry’s neck clench and his teeth sink into his lower lip—“is one in a million. Isn’t he a prince, Kathy?”

“He has certainly been quite a help,” said Mrs. Corcoran coolly.

“You bet your boots he has. I don’t know what we would’ve done this week without him. You kids,” said Mr. Corcoran, a hand clamped on Henry’s shoulder, “better hope you’ve got friends like this one.

They don’t come along like this every day. No, sir. Why, I’ll never forget, it was Bunny’s first night at Hampden, he called me up on the telephone. ‘Dad,’ he said to me, ‘Dad, you ought to see this nut they gave me for a roommate.’ ‘Stick it out, son,’ I told him, ‘give it a chance’ and before you could spit it was Henry this, Henry that, he’s changing his major from whatever the hell it was to ancient Greek.

Tearing off to Italy. Happy as a clam.” The tears were welling in his eyes. “Just goes to show,” he said, shaking Henry’s shoulder with a kind of rough affection. “Never judge a book by its cover. Old Henry here may look like he’s got a stick up his butt but there never breathed a finer fella. Why, just about the last time I spoke to the old Bunster he was all excited about taking off to France with this guy in the summer—”

“Now, Mack,” said Mrs. Corcoran, but it was too late. He was crying again.

It was not as bad as the first time but still it was bad. He threw his arms around Henry and sobbed in his lapel while Henry just stood there, gazing off into the distance with a haggard, stoic calm.

Everyone was embarrassed. Mrs. Corcoran began to pick at the house plants and I, ears burning, was staring at my lap when a door slammed and two young men sauntered into the wide, high-raftered hall. There was no mistaking for an instant who they were. The light was behind them, I couldn’t see either of them very well but they were laughing and talking and, oh, God, what a bright sudden stab in my heart at the echo of Bunny which rang—harsh, derisive, vibrant—

through their laughter.

They ignored their father’s tears and marched right up to him.

“Hey, Pop,” said the eldest. He was curly haired, about thirty, and

looked very much like Bunny in the face. A baby wearing a little cap that said Red Sox was perched high on his hip.

The other brother—freckled, thinner, with a too-dark tan and black circles under his blue eyes—took the baby. “Here,” he said. “Go see Grandpa.”

Mr. Corcoran stopped crying instantly, in mid-sob; he held the baby high in the air and looked up at it adoringly. “Champ!” he shouted. “Did you go for a ride with Daddy and Uncle Brady?”

“We took him to McDonald’s,” said Brady. “Got him a Happy Meal.”

Mr. Corcoran’s jaw dropped in wonder. “Did you eat it all?” he asked the baby. “All that Happy Meal?”

“Say yes,” cooed the baby’s father. “ ‘ Yes, Drampaw.’ ”

“That’s baloney, Ted,” said Brady, laughing. “He didn’t eat a bite of it.”

“He got a prize in the box, though, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Huh?”

“Let’s see it,” said Mr. Corcoran, busily prying the baby’s fingers from around it.

“Henry,” said Mrs. Corcoran, “perhaps you’ll help the young lady with her bags and show her to her room. Brady, you can take the boys downstairs.”

Mr. Corcoran had got the prize—a plastic airplane—away from the baby and was making it fly back and forth.

“Look!” he said, in a tone of hushed awe.

“Since it’s only for a night,” Mrs. Corcoran said to us, “I’m sure that no one will mind doubling up.”

As we were leaving with Brady, Mr. Corcoran plumped the baby down on the hearth rug and was rolling around, tickling him. I could hear the baby’s high screams of terror and delight all the way down the stairs.

We were to stay in the basement. Along the back wall, near the Ping-Pong and pool tables, several army cots had been set up, and in the corner was a pile of sleeping bags.

“Isn’t this wretched,” said Francis as soon as we were alone.

“It’s just for tonight.”

“I can’t sleep in rooms with lots of people. I’ll be up all night.”

I sat down on a cot. The room had a damp, unused smell and the light from the lamp over the pool table was greenish and depressing.

“It’s dusty, too,” said Francis. “I think we ought to just go check into a hotel.”

Sniffing noisily, he complained about the dust as he searched for an ashtray but deadly radon could have been seeping into the room, it didn’t matter to me. All I wondered was how, in the name of Heaven and a merciful God, was I going to make it through the hours ahead. We had been there only twenty minutes and already I felt like shooting myself.

He was still complaining and I was still sunk in despair when Camilla came down. She was wearing jet earrings, patent-leather shoes, a natty, closely cut black velvet suit.

“Hello,” Francis said, handing her a cigarette. “Let’s go check into the Ramada Inn.”

As she put the cigarette between her parched lips I realized how much I’d missed her for the last few days.

“Oh, you don’t have it so bad,” she said. “Last night I had to sleep with Marion. ”

“Same room?”

“Same bed. ”

Francis’s eyes widened with admiration and horror. “Oh, really?

Oh, I say. That’s awful,” he said in a hushed, respectful voice.

“Charles is upstairs with her now. She’s hysterical because somebody asked that poor girl who rode down with you.”

“Where’s Henry?”

“Haven’t you seen him yet?”

“I saw him. I didn’t talk to him.”

She paused to blow out a cloud of smoke. “How does he seem to you?”

“I’ve seen him looking better. Why?”

“Because he’s sick. Those headaches.”

“One of the bad ones?”

“That’s what he says.”

Francis looked at her in disbelief. “How is he up and walking around, then?”

“I don’t know. He’s all doped up. He has his pills and he’s been taking them for days.”

“Well, where is he now? Why isn’t he in bed?”

“I don’t know. Mrs. Corcoran just sent him down to the Cumberland Farms to get that damn baby a quart of milk.”

“Can he drive? ”

“I have no idea.”

“Francis,” I said, “your cigarette.”

He jumped up, grabbed for it too quickly and burned his fingers.

He’d laid it on the edge of the pool table and the coal had burned down to the wood; a charred spot was spreading on the varnish.

“Boys?” Mrs. Corcoran called from the head of the stairs. “Boys?

Do you mind if I come down to check the thermostat?”

“Quick,” Camilla whispered, mashing out her cigarette. “We’re not supposed to smoke down here.”

“Who’s there?” said Mrs. Corcoran sharply. “Is something burning?”

“No, ma’am,” Francis said, wiping at the burned spot and scrambling to hide the cigarette butt as she came down the steps.

It was one of the worst nights of my life. The house was filling with people and the hours passed in a dreadful streaky blur of relatives, neighbors, crying children, covered dishes, blocked driveways, ringing telephones, bright lights, strange faces, awkward conversations. Some swinish, hard-faced man trapped me in a corner for hours, boasting of bass tournaments and businesses in Chicago and Nashville and Kansas City until finally I excused myself and locked myself in an upstairs bathroom, ignoring the beating and piteous cries of an unknown toddler who pled, weeping, for admittance.

Dinner was set out at seven, an unappetizing combination of gourmet carry-out—orzo salad, duck in Campari, miniature foie gras tarts—and food the neighbors had made: tuna casseroles, gelatin

molds in Tupperware, and a frightful dessert called a “wacky cake”

that I am at a loss to even describe. People roamed with paper plates. It was dark outside and raining. Hugh Corcoran, in shirtsleeves, went around with a bottle freshening drinks, nudging his way through the dark, murmuring crowd. He brushed by me without a glance. Of all the brothers, he bore the strongest resemblance to Bunny (Bunny’s death was starting to seem some horrible kind of generative act, more Bunnys popping up everywhere I looked, Bunnys coming out of the woodwork), and it was akin to looking into the future and seeing what Bunny would have looked like at thirty-five, just as looking at his father was like seeing him at sixty. I knew him and he didn’t know me. I had a strong, nearly irresistible urge to take him by the arm, say something to him, what I didn’t know: just to see the brows drop abruptly in the way I knew so well, to see the startled expression in the naive, muddy eyes.

It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.

Laughter, vertigo. Strangers kept wandering up and talking at me. I disengaged myself from one of Bunny’s teenaged cousins—who, upon hearing I was from California, had begun to ask me a lot of very complicated questions about surfing—and, swimming through the bobbling crowd, found Henry. He was standing by himself in front of some glass doors, his back to the room, smoking a cigarette.

I stood beside him. He didn’t look at me or speak. The doors faced out on a barren, floodlit terrace—black cinder, privet in concrete urns, a statue artfully broken in white pieces on the ground. Rain slanted in the lights, which were angled to cast long, dramatic shadows. The effect was fashionable, post-nuclear but ancient, too, like some pumice-strewn courtyard from Pompeii.

“That is the ugliest garden I have ever seen,” I said.

“Yes,” said Henry. He was very pale. “Rubble and ash.”

People laughed and talked behind us. The lights, through the rain-spattered window, cast a pattern of droplets trickling down his face.

“Maybe you’d better lie down,” I said after a while.

He bit his lip. The ash on his cigarette was about an inch long. “I don’t have any more medicine,” he said.

I looked at the side of his face. “Can you get along?”

“I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?” he said without moving.

Camilla locked the door of the bathroom behind us and the two of us, on our hands and knees, began to rummage through the mess of prescription bottles under the sink.

“ ‘For high blood pressure,’ ” she read.

“No.”

“ ‘For asthma.’ ”

There was a knock on the door.

“Somebody’s in here,” I yelled.

Camilla’s head was wedged all the way in the cabinet by the water pipes, so that her rear end stuck out. I could hear the medicine bottles clinking. “ ‘Inner ear?’ ” she said, her voice muffled. “ ‘One cap twice daily’?”

“Let’s see.”

She handed me some antibiotics, at least ten years old.

“This won’t do,” I said, edging closer. “Do you see anything with a no-refill sticker? From a dentist, maybe?”

“No.”

“ ‘May Cause Drowsiness’? ‘Do Not Drive or Operate Heavy Machinery’?”

Someone knocked on the door again and rattled the knob. I knocked back, then reached up and turned on both taps full-blast.

Our findings were not good. If Henry had been suffering from poison ivy, hay fever, rheumatism, pinkeye, we would have been in luck but the only painkiller they had was Excedrin. Out of sheer desperation I took a handful, also two ambiguous capsules that had a Drowsiness sticker but which I suspected of being antihistamines.

I’d thought our mystery guest had left, but venturing out I was annoyed to find Cloke lurking outside. He gave me a contemptuous look that turned to a stare when Camilla—hair tousled, tugging at her skirt—stepped out behind me.

If she was surprised to see him, she didn’t show it. “Oh, hello,” she said to him, reaching down to dust off her knees.

“Hi.” He glanced away in a studied, offhanded manner. We all knew Cloke was sort of interested in her, but even if he hadn’t been, Camilla was not exactly the sort of girl one expected to find making out with someone in a locked bathroom.

She brushed past us and headed downstairs. I started down, too, but Cloke coughed in a significant manner and I turned around.

He leaned back against the wall, looking at me as if he’d had me figured out from the day I was born. “So,” he said. His shirt was unironed and his shirttails were out; and though his eyes were red, I didn’t know if he was stoned or just tired. “How’s it going?”

I paused on the landing. Camilla was at the foot of the steps, out of earshot. “All right,” I said.

“What’s the story?”

“What?”

“Better not let Kathy catch you guys screwing around in her bathroom. She’ll make you walk to the bus station.”

His tone was neutral. Still, I was reminded of the business with Mona’s boyfriend the week before. Cloke, however, presented little or nothing in the way of physical threat and besides, he had problems enough of his own.