Chapter 8

We looked at him.

“Not bad,” he said ruminatively. “I remember about fifteen years ago, before they built the new Science Building, they had to stick some of the counselors up here. This one psychologist liked to leave her door open, thought it gave things a friendly feeling. ‘Good morning,’ she’d say to Julian whenever he walked past her door,

‘have a nice day.’ Can you believe that Julian phoned Channing Williams, my wicked predecessor, and threatened to quit unless she was moved?” He chuckled. “ ‘That dreadful woman.’ That’s what he called her. ‘I can’t bear that dreadful woman accosting me every time I happen to walk by.’ ”

This was a story which had some currency around Hampden, and the Dean had left some of it out. The psychologist had not only left her own door open but also had tried to get Julian to do the same.

“To tell the truth,” said the Dean, “I’d expected something a little more classical. Oil lamps. Discus throwing. Nude youths wrestling on the floor.”

“What do you want?” said Camilla, not very politely.

He paused, caught short, and gave her an oily smile. “We need to have a little talk,” he said. “My office has just learned that Julian has been called away from school very suddenly. He has taken an indefinite leave of absence and does not know when he might return.

Needless to say”—a phrase he delivered with sarcastic delicacy

—“this puts you all in a rather interesting position in terms of academics, especially as it is only three weeks until the end of term.

I understand that he was not in the habit of giving a written examination?”

We stared at him.

“Did you write papers? Sing songs? How was he accustomed to determining your final grade?”

“An oral examination for the tutorials,” Camilla said, “as well as a term paper for the Civilization class.” She was the only one of us who was collected enough to speak. “For the composition classes, an extended translation, English to Greek, from a passage of his choosing.”

The Dean pretended to ponder this. Then he took a breath and said: “The problem you face, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that we currently have no other teacher able to take over your class. Mr.

Delgado has a reading knowledge of Greek, and though he says he’d be happy to look at your written work he is teaching a full load this term. Julian himself was most unhelpful on this point. I asked him to suggest a possible replacement and he said there wasn’t any that he knew of.”

He took a piece of paper from his pocket. “Now here are the three possible alternatives which occur to me. The first is for you to take incompletes and finish the course work in the fall. The thing is, however, I’m far from certain that Literature and Languages will be hiring another Classics teacher. There is so little interest in the subject, and the general consensus seems to be that it should be phased out, especially now that we’re attempting to get the new Semiotics department off the ground.”

He took a deep breath. “The second alternative is for you to take incompletes and finish the work in summer school. The third possibility is that we bring in—mind you, on a temporary basis—a substitute teacher. Understand this. At this point in time it is extremely doubtful that we will continue to offer the degree in Classics at Hampden. For those of you who choose to remain with us, I feel sure that the English department can absorb you with minimal loss of credit hours, though I think each of you in order to fulfill the department requirements are looking at two semesters of work above and beyond what you might’ve anticipated for graduation. At any rate.” He looked at his list. “I am sure you have heard of Hackett, the preparatory school for boys,” he said. “Hackett has extensive offerings in the field of Classics. I contacted the headmaster this morning and he said he would be happy to send a master over twice a week to supervise you. Though this might seem the best option from your perspective, it would by no means be ideal, relying, as it does, upon the auspices of the—”

It was at this moment that Charles chose to come crashing through the door.

He lurched in, looked around. Though he might not have been intoxicated technically, that very instant, he had been so recently enough for this to be an academic point. His shirttails hung out. His hair fell in long dirty strings over his eyes.

“What?” he said, after a moment. “Where’s Julian?”

“Don’t you knock?” said the Dean.

Charles turned, unsteadily, and looked at him.

“What’s this?” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

“I,” said the Dean sweetly, “am the Dean of Studies.”

“What have you done with Julian?”

“He has left you. And somewhat in the lurch if I dare say it. He has been called very suddenly from the country and doesn’t know—or hasn’t thought—about his return. He gave me to understand that it was something with the State Department, the Isrami government and all that. I think we are fortunate not to have had more problems of this nature, with the princess having gone to school here. One thinks at the time only of the prestige of such a pupil, alas, and not for an instant of the possible repercussions. Though I can’t for the life of me imagine what the Isramis would want with Julian.

Hampden’s own Salman Rushdie.” He chuckled appreciatively, then consulted his sheet again. “At any rate. I have arranged for the master from Hackett to meet with you tomorrow, here, at three p.m. I hope there is no conflict of schedule for anyone. If that happens to be the case, however, it would be well for you to re-evaluate your priorities, as this is the only time that he will be available to answer your.…”

I knew that Camilla hadn’t seen Charles in well over a week, and I knew she couldn’t have been prepared to see him looking so bad, but she was gazing at him with an expression not so much of surprise as of panic, and horror. Even Henry looked taken aback.

“… and, of course, this will entail a certain spirit of compromise on your parts too, as—”

“What?” said Charles, interrupting him. “What did you say? You said Julian’s gone? ”

“I must compliment you, young man, on your grasp of the English language.”

“What happened? He just picked up and left?”

“In essence, yes.”

There was a brief pause. Then Charles said, in a loud, clear voice:

“Henry, why do I think for some reason that this is all your fault?”

There followed a long and not too pleasant silence. Then Charles spun and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. The Dean cleared his throat.

“As I was saying, ” he continued.

It is strange, but true, to relate, that at this point in time I was still capable of being upset by the fact that my career at Hampden had pretty much gone down the drain. When the Dean had said “two extra semesters,” my blood ran cold. I knew, with the certainty I knew that night follows day, there was no way I could get my parents to make their measly, but quite necessary, contribution for an extra year. I’d lost time already, in three changes of major, in the transfer from California, and I’d lose even more if I transferred again—

assuming that I could even get into another school, that I could get another scholarship, with my spotty records, with my spotty grades: why, I asked myself, oh, why, had I been so foolish, why hadn’t I picked something and stuck with it, how was it that I could currently be at the end of my third year of college and have basically nothing to show for it?

What made me angrier was that none of the others seemed to care. To them, I knew, this didn’t make the slightest bit of difference.

What was it to them if they had to go an extra term? What did it matter, if they failed to graduate, if they had to go back home? At least they had homes to go to. They had trust funds, allowances, dividend checks, doting grandmas, well-connected uncles, loving families. College for them was only a way station, a sort of youthful diversion. But this was my main chance, the only one. And I had blown it.

I spent a frantic couple of hours pacing in my room—that is, I’d come to think of it as “mine” but it wasn’t really, I had to be out in three weeks, already it seemed to be assuming a heartless air of

impersonality—and drafting a memo to the financial aid office. The only way I could finish my degree—in essence, the only way I could ever acquire the means to support myself in any passably tolerable fashion—was if Hampden agreed to shoulder the entire cost of my education during this additional year. I pointed out, somewhat aggressively, that it wasn’t my fault Julian had decided to leave. I brought up every miserable commendation and award I’d won since the eighth grade. I argued that a year of classics could only bolster and enrich this now highly desirable course of study in English Literature.

Finally, my plea finished, and my handwriting a passionate scrawl, I fell down on my bed and went to sleep. At eleven o’clock I woke, made some changes, and headed for the all-night study room to type it up. On the way I stopped at the post office, where, to my immense gratification, a note in my box informed me that I had got the job apartment-sitting in Brooklyn, and that the professor wanted to meet with me sometime in the coming week to discuss my schedule.

Well, that’s the summer taken care of, I thought.

It was a beautiful night, full moon, the meadow like silver and the housefronts throwing square black shadows sharp as cutouts on the grass. Most of the windows were dark: everyone sleeping, early to bed. I hurried across the lawn to the library, where the lights of the All-Night Study Room—“The House of Eternal Learning,” Bunny had called it in happier days—burned clear and bright on the top floor, shining yellow through the treetops. I went up the outside stairs—

iron stairs, like a fire escape, like the steps in my nightmare—my shoes clattering on the metal in a way that might have given me the heebie-jeebies in a less distracted mood.

Then, through the window, I saw a dark figure in a black suit, alone. It was Henry. Books were piled in front of him but he wasn’t working. For some reason, I thought of that February night I had seen him standing in the shadows beneath the windows of Dr.

Roland’s office, dark and solitary, hands in the pockets of his

overcoat and the snow whirling high in the empty arc of the streetlights.

I closed the door. “Henry,” I said. “Henry. It’s me.”

He didn’t turn his head. “I just got back from Julian’s house,” he said, in a monotone.

I sat down. “And?”

“The place is shut up. He’s gone.”

There was a long silence.

“I find it very hard to believe he’s done this, you know.” The light glinted off his spectacles; beneath the dark, glossy hair his face was deadly pale. “It’s just such a cowardly thing to have done. That’s why he left, you know. Because he was afraid.”

The screens were open. A damp wind rustled in the trees. Beyond them clouds sailed over the moon, fast and wild.

Henry took off his glasses. I never could get used to seeing him without them, that naked, vulnerable look he always had.

“He’s a coward,” he said. “In our circumstance, he would have done exactly what we did. He’s just too much of a hypocrite to admit it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He doesn’t even care that Bunny is dead. I could forgive him if that was why he felt this way, but it isn’t. He wouldn’t care if we’d killed half a dozen people. All that matters to him is keeping his own name out of it. Which is essentially what he said when I talked to him last night.”

“You went to see him?”

“Yes. One would hope that this matter would’ve seemed something more to him than just a question of his own comfort. Even to have turned us in would have shown some strength of character, not that I wanted to be turned in. But it’s nothing but cowardice.

Running away like this.”

Even after all that had happened, the bitterness and disappointment in his voice cut me to the heart.

“Henry,” I said. I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood are frail and

weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers. But I found myself unable to say anything at all.

He turned his blind, unseeing eyes upon me.

“I loved him more than my own father,” he said. “I loved him more than anyone in the world.”

The wind was up. A gentle pitter of rain swept across the roof. We sat there like that, not talking, for a very long time.

The next afternoon at three, I went to meet the new teacher.

When I stepped inside Julian’s office I was shocked. It was completely empty. The books, the rugs, the big round table were gone. All that was left were the curtains on the windows and a tacked-up Japanese print that Bunny had given him. Camilla was there, and Francis, looking pretty uncomfortable, and Henry. He was standing by the window doing his best to ignore the stranger.

The teacher had dragged in some chairs from the dining hall. He was a round-faced, fair-haired man of about thirty, in turtleneck and jeans. A wedding band shone conspicuously on one pink hand; he had a conspicuous smell of after-shave. “Welcome,” he said, leaning to shake my hand, and in his voice I heard the enthusiasm and condescension of a man accustomed to working with adolescents.

“My name is Dick Spence. Yours?”

It was a nightmarish hour. I really don’t have the heart to go into it: his patronizing tone at the start (handing out a page from the New Testament, saying, “Of course I don’t expect you to pick up the finer points, if you can get the sense, it’s okay with me”), a tone which metamorphosed gradually into surprise (“Well! Rather advanced, for undergraduates!”) and defensiveness (“It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen students at your level”) and, ultimately, embarrassment. He was the chaplain at Hackett and his Greek, which he had mostly learned at seminary, was crude and inferior even by my standards.

He was one of those language teachers who rely heavily on mnemonics. (“Agathon. Do you know how I remember that word?

‘Agatha Christie writes good mysteries.’ ”) Henry’s look of contempt was indescribable. The rest of us were silent and humiliated. Matters

were not helped by Charles stumbling in—obviously drunk—about twenty minutes into the class. His appearance prompted a rehash of previous formalities (“Welcome! My name is Dick Spence. Yours?”) and even, incredibly, a repetition of the agathon embarrassment.

When the lesson was over (teacher sneaking a look at his watch:

“Well! Looks like we’re running out of time here!”) the five of us filed out in grim silence.

“Well, it’s only two more weeks,” said Francis, when we were outside.

Henry lit a cigarette. “I’m not going back,” he said.

“Yeah,” Charles said sarcastically. “That’s right. That’ll show him.”

“But Henry,” said Francis, “you’ve got to go.”

He was smoking the cigarette with tight-lipped, resolute drags.

“No, I don’t,” he said.

“Two weeks. That’s it.”

“Poor fellow,” said Camilla. “He’s doing the best he can.”

“But that’s not good enough for him, ” said Charles loudly. “Who does he expect? Fucking Richmond Lattimore?”

“Henry, if you don’t go you’ll fail,” said Francis.

“I don’t care.”

“He doesn’t have to go to school,” said Charles. “He can do whatever he fucking pleases. He can fail every single fucking class and his dad’ll still send him that fat allowance check every month—”

“Don’t say ‘fuck’ anymore,” said Henry, in a quiet but ominous voice.

“Fuck? What’s the matter, Henry? You never heard that word before? Isn’t that what you do to my sister every night?”

I remember, when I was a kid, once seeing my father strike my mother for absolutely no reason. Though he sometimes did the same thing to me, I did not realize that he did it sheerly out of bad temper, and believed that his trumped-up justifications (“You talk too much”;

“Don’t look at me like that”) somehow warranted the punishment. But the day I saw him hit my mother (because she had remarked, innocently, that the neighbors were building an addition to their

house; later, he would claim she had provoked him, that it was a reproach about his abilities as wage earner, and she, tearfully, would agree) I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?

And the thing of it was, that Charles and Henry had to appear together in court in less than a week, because of the business with Henry’s car.

Camilla, I knew, was worried sick. She—whom I had never known to fear anything—was afraid now; and though in a certain perverse way I was pleased at her distress, there was no denying that if Henry and Charles—who practically came to blows each time they were in the same room—were going to be forced to appear before a judge, and with some show of cooperation and friendship, there could be no possible outcome but disaster.

Henry had hired a lawyer in town. The hope that a third party would be able to reconcile these differences had granted Camilla a small measure of optimism, but in the afternoon on the day of the appointment, I received a telephone call from her.

“Richard,” she said. “I’ve got to talk to you and Francis.”

Her tone frightened me. When I arrived at Francis’s apartment, I found Francis badly shaken and Camilla in tears.

I had seen her cry only once before, and then only, I think, from nerves and exhaustion. But this was different. She was blank and hollow-eyed, and there was despair in the set of her features.

“Camilla,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She smoked one cigarette, then another. Little by little the story came out. Henry and Charles had gone to see the lawyer and Camilla, in capacity of peacemaker, had gone along. At first, it had seemed as if everything might be all right.

Henry, apparently, had not hired the lawyer entirely from altruism but because the judge before whom they were to appear had a reputation for being tough on drunk drivers and there was a possibility—as Charles neither had a valid driver’s license nor was covered on Henry’s insurance—that Henry might lose his license or car or both. Charles, though he obviously felt martyred by the whole business, had nonetheless been willing to go along: not, as he told anyone who would listen, because he had any affection for Henry but because he was sick of being blamed for things that weren’t his fault, and if Henry lost his license he’d never hear the end of it.

But the meeting was a catastrophe. Charles, in the office, was sullen and uncommunicative. This was merely embarrassing but then—being prodded a bit too energetically by the attorney—he suddenly and quite without warning lost his head. “You should have heard him,” said Camilla. “He told Henry he didn’t care if he lost his car. He told him he didn’t care if the judge put them both in jail for fifty years. And Henry—well, you can imagine how Henry reacted.

He blew up. The lawyer thought they were out of their minds. He kept trying to get Charles to calm down, be reasonable. And Charles said: “I don’t care what happens to him. I don’t care if he dies. I wish he was dead.”

It got so bad, she said, the lawyer kicked them out of his office.

Doors were opening up and down the hallway: an insurance agent, the tax assessor, a dentist in a white coat, all poking their heads out to see what the fuss was about. Charles stormed off—walked home, got a taxi, she didn’t know what he’d done.

“And Henry?”

She shook her head. “He was in a rage,” she said; her voice was exhausted, hopeless. “As I was following him to the car, the lawyer pulled me aside. Took here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the situation is, but your brother is obviously quite disturbed. Please try to make him understand that if he doesn’t cool down, he’s going to be in a lot

more trouble than he bargained for. This judge is not going to be particularly amenable to them even if they walk in there like a pair of lambs. Your brother is almost sure to be sentenced to an alcohol treatment program, which might not be a bad idea from what I’ve seen of him today. There’s a pretty good chance that the judge will give him probation, which is not as easy as it sounds. And there’s more than a gambler’s chance that he’s going to get either jail time or he’s going to get put in a locked ward over at the detox center in Manchester.’ ”

She was extremely upset. Francis was ashen-faced.

“What does Henry say?” I asked her.

“He says he doesn’t care about the car,” she said. “He doesn’t care about anything. ‘Let him go to jail,’ he says.”

“You saw this judge?” Francis said to me.

“Yes.”

“What was he like?”

“To tell you the truth, he looked like a pretty tough customer,” I said.

Francis lit a cigarette. “What would happen,” he said, “if Charles didn’t show up?”

“I’m not sure. I’m almost certain they’d come looking for him.”

“But if they couldn’t find him?”

“What are you suggesting?” I said.

“I think we ought to get Charles out of town for a while,” said Francis. He looked tense and worried. “School’s almost over. It’s not as if anything’s keeping him here. I think we ought to pack him off to my mother and Chris in New York for a couple of weeks.”

“The way he’s acting now?”

“Drunk, you mean? You think my mother minds drunks? He’d be safe as a baby.”

“I don’t think,” said Camilla, “you’d be able to get him to go.”

“I could take him myself,” said Francis.

“But what if he got away?” I pointed out. “Vermont is one thing but he could get into a hell of a lot of trouble in New York.”

“All right,” said Francis irritably, “all right, it was just an idea.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You know what we could do? We could

take him out to the country.”

“To your place, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“What would that accomplish?”

“Easy to get him there, for one thing. And once he’s out there, what’s he going to do? He won’t have a car. It’s miles from the road.

You can’t get a Hampden taxi driver to pick you up for love nor money.”

Camilla was looking at him thoughtfully.

“Charles loves to go to the country,” she said.

“I know,” said Francis, pleased. “What could be simpler? And we won’t have to keep him there long. Richard and I can stay with him.

I’ll buy a case of champagne. We’ll make it look like a party.”

It was not easy to get Charles to come to the door. We knocked for what seemed like half an hour. Camilla had given us a key, which we didn’t want to use unless we had to, but just as we were contemplating it the bolt snapped and Charles squinted at us through the crack.

He looked disordered, terrible. “What do you want?” he said.

“Nothing,” said Francis, quite easily, despite a slight, stunned pause of maybe a second. “Can we come in?”

Charles looked back and forth at the two of us. “Is anybody with you?”

“No,” Francis said.

He opened the door and let us in. The shades were pulled and the place had the sour smell of garbage. As my eyes adjusted to the dim I saw dirty dishes, apple cores and soup cans littering almost every conceivable surface. Beside the refrigerator, arranged with perverse neatness, stood a row of empty Scotch bottles.

A lithe shadow darted across the kitchen counter, twisting through the dirty pans and empty milk cartons: Jesus, I thought, is that a rat?

But then it jumped to the floor, tail switching, and I saw it was a cat.

Its eyes glowed at us in the dark.

“Found her in an empty lot,” said Charles. His breath, I noticed, did not have an alcoholic odor but a suspiciously minty one. “She’s not too tame.” He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe and showed us a discolored, contaminated-looking crisscross of scratches on his forearm.

“Charles,” said Francis, jingling his car keys nervously, “we stopped by because we’re driving out to the country. Thought it might be nice to get away for a while. Do you want to come?”

Charles’s eyes narrowed. He pushed down his sleeve. “Did Henry send you?” he said,

“God, no,” said Francis, surprised.

“Are you sure?”

“I haven’t seen him in days.”

Charles still didn’t look convinced.

“We’re not even speaking to him,” I said.

Charles turned to look at me. His gaze was watery and a little unfocused. “Richard,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always liked you a lot.”

“I like you, too.”

“You wouldn’t go behind my back, would you?”

“Of course not.”

“Because,” he said, nodding at Francis, “because I know he would.”

Francis opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked as if he’d been slapped.

“You underestimate Francis,” I said to Charles, in a calm, quiet voice. It was a mistake the others often made with him, to try to reason with him in a methodical, aggressive way, when all he wanted was to be reassured like a child. “Francis likes you very much. He’s your friend. So am I.”

“Are you?” he said.

“Of course.”

He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down, heavily. The cat slunk over and began to twine round his ankles. “I’m afraid,” he said hoarsely. “I’m afraid Henry’s going to kill me.”

Francis and I looked at each other.

“Why?” said Francis. “Why would he want to do that?”

“Because I’m in the way.” He looked up at us. “He’d do it, too, you know,” he said. “For two cents.” He nodded at a small, unlabeled medicine bottle on the counter. “You see that?” he said. “Henry gave it to me. Couple of days ago.”

I picked it up. With a chill I recognized the Nembutals I’d stolen for Henry at the Corcorans.

“I don’t know what they are,” said Charles, pushing the dirty hair from his eyes. “He told me they’d help me sleep. God knows I need something, but I’m afraid to take them.”

I handed the bottle to Francis. He looked at it, then up at me, horrified.

“Capsules, too,” said Charles. “No telling what he filled them with.”

But he wouldn’t even have to, that was the evil thing. I remembered, with a sick feeling, having tried to impress upon Henry how dangerous these were when mixed with liquor.

Charles passed a hand over his eyes. “I’ve seen him sneaking around here at night,” he said. “Out back. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“Henry? ”

“Yes. And if he tries anything with me,” he said, “it’ll be the worst mistake he ever made in his life.”

We had less trouble enticing him to the car than I’d expected. He was in a rambling, paranoid humor and was somewhat comforted by our solicitude. He asked repeatedly if Henry knew where we were going. “You haven’t talked to him, have you?”

“No,” we assured him, “no, of course not.”

He insisted on taking the cat with him. We had a terrible time catching it—Francis and I dodging round the dark kitchen, knocking dishes to the floor, trying to corner it behind the water heater while Charles stood anxiously by saying things like “Come on” and “Good kitty.” Finally, in desperation, I seized it by a scrawny black hindquarter—it thrashed around and sank its teeth into my arm—

and, together, we managed to wrap it up in a dish towel so that only its head stuck out, eyes bulging and ears flattened back against the

skull. We gave the mummified, hissing bundle to Charles. “Now, hold her tight,” Francis kept saying in the car, glancing anxiously back in the rear-view mirror, “watch out, don’t let it get away—”

But, of course, it did get away, catapulting into the front seat and nearly running Francis off the road. Then, after scrabbling around under the brake and gas pedal—Francis aghast, attempting simultaneously to avoid touching it and to kick it away from him—it settled on the floorboard by my feet, succumbing to an attack of diarrhea before falling into a glaring, prickle-haired trance.

I had not been out to Francis’s since the week before Bunny died.

The trees in the drive were in full leaf and the yard was overgrown and dark. Bees droned in the lilacs. Mr. Hatch, mowing the lawn some thirty yards away, nodded and raised a hand at us.

The house was shadowy and cool. There were sheets on some of the furniture and dust balls on the hardwood floor. We locked the cat in an upstairs bathroom and Charles went down to the kitchen, to make himself something to eat, he said. He came back up with a jar of peanuts and a double martini in a water glass, which he carried into his room, and shut the door.

We didn’t see an awful lot of Charles for the next thirty-six hours or so. He stayed in his room eating peanuts, and drinking, and looking out the window like the old pirate in Treasure Island. Once he came down to the library while Francis and I were playing cards, but he refused our invitation to join in and poked listlessly through the shelves, finally meandering upstairs without choosing a book. He came down for coffee in the mornings, in an old bathrobe of Francis’s, and sat in the kitchen windowsill looking moodily over the lawn as if he were waiting for someone.

“When do you think is the last time he had a bath?” Francis whispered to me.

He lost all interest in the cat. Francis sent Mr. Hatch out for some cat food and each morning and evening Francis let himself in the

bathroom to feed it (“Get away,” I heard him muttering, “get away from me, you devil.”) and came out again with a fouled crumple of newspaper, which he held from his body at arm’s length.

About six o’clock in the afternoon of our third day there, Francis was up in the attic digging around for a jar of old coins his aunt had said he could have if he could find it, and I was lying on the couch downstairs drinking iced tea and trying to memorize the irregular subjunctive verbs in French (for my final exam was in less than a week) when I heard the phone ringing in the kitchen. I went to answer it.

It was Henry. “So there you are,” he said.

“Yes.”

There was a long, crackly silence. At last he said: “May I speak to Francis?”

“He can’t come to the phone,” I said. “What is it?”

“I suppose you’ve got Charles out there with you.”

“Look here, Henry,” I said. “What’s the big idea giving Charles those sleeping pills?”

His voice came back at me brisk and cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do. I saw them.”

“Those pills you gave me, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if he has them he must have taken them from my medicine cabinet.”

“He says you gave them to him,” I said. “He thinks you’re trying to poison him.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Is it?”

“He is there, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, “we brought him out the day before yesterday …” and then I stopped, because it seemed to me that somewhere towards the beginning of this sentence I had heard a stealthy but distinct click, as of an extension being picked up.

“Well, listen,” Henry said. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep him out there a day or two longer. Everyone seems to think this should be some big secret but believe me, I’m happy to have him out of the way for a while. If he doesn’t come to court he’ll be guilty by default, but I don’t think there’s an awful lot they can do to him.”

It seemed I could hear breathing on the other end.

“What is it?” said Henry, suddenly wary.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Charles?” I said. “Charles, is that you?”

Upstairs, the telephone slammed down.

I went up and knocked on Charles’s door. No answer. When I tried the knob, it was locked.

“Charles,” I said. “Let me in.”

No answer.

“Charles, it wasn’t anything,” I said. “He called out of the blue. All I did was answer the phone.”

Still no answer. I stood in the hall for a few minutes, the afternoon sun shining golden on the polished oak floor.

“Really, Charles, I think you’re being a bit silly. Henry can’t hurt you. You’re perfectly safe out here.”

“Bullshit,” came the muffled reply from within.

There was nothing more to say. I went downstairs again, and back to the subjunctive verbs.

I must have fallen asleep on the couch, and I don’t know how much later it was—not a whole lot later, because it was still light out—when Francis shook me awake, not too gently.

“Richard,” he said. “Richard, you’ve got to wake up. Charles is gone.”

I sat up, rubbed my eyes. “Gone?” I said. “But where could he go?”

“I don’t know. He’s not in the house.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve looked everywhere.”

“He’s got to be around somewhere. Maybe he’s in the yard.”

“I can’t find him.”

“Maybe he’s hiding.”

“Get up and help me look.”

I went upstairs. Francis ran outside. The screen door slammed behind him.

Charles’s room was in disarray and a half-empty bottle of Bombay gin—from the liquor cabinet in the library—was on the night table.

None of his things were gone.

I went through all the upstairs rooms, then up to the attic.

Lampshades and picture frames, organdy party dresses yellowed with age. Gray wide-plank floors, so worn they were almost fuzzy. A shaft of dusty cathedral light filtered through the stained-glass porthole that faced the front of the house.

I went down the back staircase—low and claustrophobic, scarcely three feet wide—through the kitchen and butler’s pantry, and out onto the back porch. Some distance away, Francis and Mr. Hatch were standing in the driveway. Mr. Hatch was talking to Francis. I had never heard Mr. Hatch say much of anything to anyone and he was plainly uncomfortable. He kept running a hand over his scalp.

His manner was cringing and apologetic.

I met Francis on his way back to the house.

“Well,” he said, “this is a hell of a note.” He looked a bit stunned.

“Mr. Hatch says he gave Charles the keys to his truck about an hour and a half ago.”

“What? ”

“He said Charles came looking for him and said he had to run an errand. He promised to have the truck back in fifteen minutes.”

We looked at each other.

“Where do you think he went?” I said.

“How should I know?”

“Do you think he just took off?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

We went back in the house—dim now with twilight—and sat by the window on a long davenport that had a sheet thrown over it. The warm air smelled like lilac. Across the lawn, we could hear Mr. Hatch trying to get the lawn mower started up again.

Francis had his arms folded across the back of the davenport and his chin resting on his arms. He was looking out the window. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “He’s stolen that truck, you know.”

“Maybe he’ll be back.”

“I’m afraid he’ll have a wreck. Or a cop will pull him over. I’ll bet you anything he’s plastered. That’s all he needs, getting stopped for drunk driving.”

“Shouldn’t we go look for him?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start. He could be halfway to Boston for all we know.”

“What else can we do? Sit around and wait for the phone to ring?”

First we tried the bars: the Farmer’s Inn, the Villager, the Boulder Tap and the Notty Pine. The Notch. The Four Squires. The Man of Kent.

It was a hazy, gorgeous summer twilight and the gravel parking lots were packed with trucks but none of the trucks was Mr. Hatch’s.

Just for the hell of it, we drove by the State Liquor Store. The aisles were bright and empty, splashy rum displays (“Tropical Island Sweepstakes!”) competing with somber, medicinal rows of vodka and gin. A cardboard cutout advertising wine coolers twirled from the ceiling. There were no customers, and a fat old Vermonter with a naked woman tattooed on his forearm was leaning against the cash register, passing time with a kid who worked at the Mini-Mart next door.

“So then,” I heard him say in an undertone, “so then the guy pulls out a sawed-off shotgun. Emmett’s standing here beside me, right where I am now. ‘We don’t have the key to the cashbox,’ he says.

And the guy pulls the trigger and I seen Emmett’s brains”—he gestured—“splatter all over that wall back there.…”

We drove to campus, to the library (“He’s not there,” said Francis,

“I’ll bet a million dollars”) and back to the bars again.

“He’s left town,” said Francis. “I know it.”

“Do you think Mr. Hatch will call the police?”

“What would you do? If it was your truck? He won’t do anything without talking to me, but if Charles isn’t back, say, by tomorrow

afternoon.…”

We decided to drive by the Albemarle. Henry’s car was parked out front. Francis and I went in the lobby cautiously, not knowing quite how we were going to deal with the innkeeper, but, miraculously, there was no one at the desk.

We went upstairs to 3-A. Camilla let us in. She and Henry were eating their dinner, from room service—lamb chops, bottle of burgundy, yellow rose in a bud vase.

Henry was not pleased to see us. “What can I do for you?” he said, putting down his fork.

“It’s Charles,” said Francis. “He’s gone AWOL.”

He told them about the truck. I sat down beside Camilla. I was hungry and her lamb chops looked pretty good. She saw me looking at them and pushed the plate at me distractedly. “Here, have some,”

she said.

I did, and a glass of wine, too. Henry ate steadily as he listened.

“Where do you think he’s gone?” he said when Francis had finished.

“How the hell should I know?”

“You can keep Mr. Hatch from pressing charges, can’t you?”

“Not if he doesn’t get the truck back. Or if Charles cracks it up”

“How much could a truck like that possibly cost? Assuming your aunt didn’t buy it for him in the first place.”

“That’s beside the point.”

Henry wiped his mouth with a napkin and reached in his pocket for a cigarette. “Charles is getting to be quite a problem,” he said. “You know what I’ve been thinking? I wonder how much it would cost to hire a private nurse.”

“To get him off drink, you mean?”

“Of course. We can’t send him to the hospital, obviously. Perhaps if we got a hotel room—not here, of course, but somewhere—and if we found some trustworthy person, maybe someone who didn’t speak English all that well.…”

Camilla looked ill. She was slumped back in her chair. She said:

“Henry, what are you going to do? Kidnap him?”

“Kidnap is not the word that I would use.”

“I’m afraid he’ll have a wreck. I think we ought to go look for him.”

“We’ve looked all over town,” said Francis. “I don’t think he’s in Hampden.”

“Have you called the hospital?”

“No.”

“What I think we really ought to do,” said Henry, “is call the police.

Ask if there have been any traffic accidents. Do you think Mr. Hatch will agree to say that he lent Charles the truck?”

“He did lend Charles the truck.”

“In that case,” said Henry, “there should be no problem. Unless, of course, he gets stopped for drunk driving.”

“Or unless we can’t find him.”

“From my point of view,” said Henry, “the best thing that Charles could do right now is to disappear entirely from the face of the earth.”

Suddenly there was a loud, frenetic banging at the door. We looked at one other.

Camilla’s face had gone blank with relief. “Charles,” she said,

“Charles, ” and she jumped up from her chair and started to the door; but no one had locked it behind us, and before she got there it flew open with a crash.

It was Charles. He stood in the doorway, blinking drunkenly around the room, and I was so surprised and glad to see him that it was a moment before I realized that he had a gun.

He stepped inside and kicked the door shut behind him. It was the little Beretta that Francis’s aunt kept in the night table, the one we’d used for target practice the fall before. We stared at him, thunderstruck.

At last Camilla said, and in a voice which was fairly steady:

“Charles, what do you think you are doing?”

“Out of the way,” said Charles. He was very drunk.

“So you’ve come to kill me?” said Henry. He was still holding his cigarette. He was remarkably composed. “Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you suppose that will solve?”

“You’ve ruined my life, you son of a bitch.” He had the gun pointed at Henry’s chest. With a sinking feeling, I remembered what an

expert shot he was, how he’d broken the rows of mason jars one by one.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Henry snapped; and I felt the first prickle of real panic at the back of my neck. This belligerent, bullying tone might work with Francis, maybe even with me, but it was a disastrous tack to take with Charles. “If anyone’s to blame for your problems, it’s you.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up, but before I could say anything Charles lurched abruptly to the side, to clear his shot. Camilla stepped into his path. “Charles, give me the gun,” she said.

He pushed the hair from his eyes with his forearm, holding the gun remarkably steady with his other hand. “I’m telling you, Milly.” It was a pet name he had for her, one he seldom used. “You better get out of the way.”

“Charles,” said Francis. He was white as a ghost. “Sit down. Have some wine. Let’s just forget about this.”

The window was open and the chirrup of the crickets washed in harsh and strong.

“You bastard,” said Charles, reeling backwards, and it was a moment before I realized, startled, that he was speaking not to Francis or Henry but to me. “I trusted you. You told him where I was.”

I was too petrified to answer. I blinked at him.

“I knew where you were,” said Henry coolly. “If you want to shoot me, Charles, go ahead and do it. It’ll be the stupidest thing you ever did in your life.”

“The stupidest thing I ever did in my life was listening to you,”

Charles said.

What happened next took place in an instant. Charles raised his arm; and quick as a flash, Francis, who was standing closest to him, threw a glass of wine in his face. At the same time Henry sprang from his chair and rushed in. There were four pops in rapid succession, like a cap gun. With the second pop, I heard a windowpane shatter. And with the third I was conscious of a warm, stinging sensation in my abdomen, to the left of my navel.

Henry was holding Charles’s right forearm above his head with both hands, bending him backward; Charles was struggling to get

the gun with his left hand, but Henry twisted it from his wrist and it dropped to the carpet. Charles dove for it but Henry was too quick.

I was still standing. I’m shot, I thought, I’m shot. I reached down and touched my stomach. Blood. There was a small hole, slightly charred, in my white shirt: my Paul Smith shirt, I thought, with a pang of anguish. I’d paid a week’s salary for it in San Francisco. My stomach felt very hot. Waves of heat radiating from the bull’s-eye.

Henry had the gun. He twisted Charles’s arm behind his back—

Charles fighting, thrashing wildly about—and, nosing the pistol into his spine, shoved him away from the door.

I still hadn’t quite grasped what had happened. Maybe I should sit down, I thought. Was the bullet still in me? Was I going to die? The thought was ridiculous; it didn’t seem possible. My stomach burned but I felt oddly calm. Getting shot, I’d always thought, would hurt a lot more than this. Carefully, I stepped back, and felt the back of the chair I had been sitting in bump against my legs. I sat down.

Charles, despite having one arm pinned behind him, was trying to elbow Henry in the stomach with the other. Henry pushed him, staggering, across the room and into a chair. “Sit down,” he said.

Charles tried to get up. Henry mashed him back down. He tried to get up a second time and Henry slapped him across the face with his open hand with a whack that was louder than the gunshots. Then, with the pistol on him, he stepped to the windows and drew the shades.

I put my hand over the hole in my shirt. Bending forward slightly, I felt a sharp pain. I expected everyone to stop and look at me. No one did. I wondered if I should call it to their attention.

Charles’s head was rolled against the back of the chair. I noticed that there was blood on his mouth. His eyes were glassy.

Awkwardly—he was holding the gun in his good hand—Henry reached up and took off his spectacles and rubbed them on the front of his shirt. Then he hooked them over his ears again. “Well, Charles,” he said. “You’ve done it now.”

I heard some kind of commotion downstairs, through the open window—footsteps, voices, a door slamming.

“Do you think anybody heard?” said Francis anxiously.

“I should think they did,” Henry said.

Camilla went over to Charles. Drunkenly, he made as if to push her away.

“Get away from him,” Henry said.

“What are we going to do about this window?” said Francis.

“What are we going to do about me? ” I said.

They all turned and looked at me.

“He shot me.”

Somehow, this remark did not elicit the dramatic response I expected. Before I had the chance to elaborate, there were footsteps on the stairs and somebody banged at the door.

“What’s going on in there?” I recognized the innkeeper’s voice.

“What’s happening?”

Francis put his face in his hands. “Oh, shit,” he said.

“Open up in there.”

Charles, drunkenly, mumbled something and tried to raise his head. Henry bit his lip. He went to the window and looked out the corner of the shade.

Then he turned around. He still had the pistol. “Come here,” he said to Camilla.

She looked at him in horror. So did Francis and I.

He beckoned to her with his gun arm. “Come here,” he said.

“Quick.”

I felt faint. What’s he doing? I thought, bewildered.

Camilla took a step away from him. Her gaze was terrified. “No, Henry,” she said, “don’t …”

To my surprise, he smiled at her. “You think I’d hurt you?” he said.

“Come here.”

She went to him. He kissed her between the eyes, then whispered something—what, I’ve always wondered—in her ear.

“I’ve got a key,” the innkeeper yelled, pounding away at the door.

“I’ll use it.”

The room was swimming. Idiot, I thought wildly, just try the knob.

Henry kissed Camilla again. “I love you,” he said. Then he said, out loud: “Come in.”

The door flew open. Henry raised the arm with the gun. He’s going to shoot them, I thought, dazed; the innkeeper and his wife, behind him, thought the same thing, because they froze about three steps into the room—but then I heard Camilla scream, “No, Henry!” and, too late, I realized what he was going to do.

He put the pistol to his temple and fired, twice. Two flat cracks.

They slammed his head to the left. It was the kick of the gun, I think, that triggered the second shot.

His mouth fell open. A draft, created by the open door, sucked the curtains into the gap of the open window. For a moment or two, they shuddered against the screen. Then they breathed out again, with something like a sigh; and Henry, his eyes squeezed tight, and his knees giving way beneath him, fell with a thud to the carpet.