Chapter 2

“Do you know many people here from California?” said Camilla.

“No.”

“You know Judy Poovey.”

I was startled: how did she know that? “She’s not my friend,” I said.

“Nor mine,” she said. “Last year she threw a drink in my face.”

“I heard about that,” I said, laughing, but she didn’t smile. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said, and took another sip of her drink. “Do you know who Cloke Rayburn is?”

I knew of him. There was a tight, fashionable clique of Californians at Hampden, mostly from San Francisco and L.A.; Cloke Rayburn was at its center, all bored smiles and sleepy eyes and cigarettes.

The girls from Los Angeles, Judy Poovey included, were fanatically

devoted to him. He was the sort you saw in the men’s room at parties, doing coke on the edge of the sink.

“He’s a friend of Bunny’s.”

“How’s that?” I said, surprised.

“They were at prep school together. At Saint Jerome’s in Pennsylvania.”

“You know Hampden,” said Charles, taking a large gulp of his drink. “These progressive schools, they love the problem student, the underdog. Cloke came in from some college in Colorado after his first year. He went skiing every day and failed every class.

Hampden’s the last place on earth—”

“For the worst people in the world,” said Camilla, laughing.

“Oh, come now,” I said.

“Well, in a way, I think it’s true,” said Charles. “Half the people here are here because nowhere else would let them in. Not that Hampden’s not a wonderful school. Maybe that’s why it’s wonderful.

Take Henry, for instance. If Hampden hadn’t let him in, he probably wouldn’t have been able to go to college at all.”

“I can’t believe that,” I said.

“Well, it does sound absurd, but he never went past tenth grade in high school and, I mean, how many decent colleges are likely to take a tenth-grade dropout? Then there’s the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs—he’d probably score off the charts if he did, but he’s got some kind of aesthetic objection to them. You can imagine how that looks to an admissions board.” He took another sip of his drink. “So, how did you end up here?”

The expression in his eyes was hard to read. “I liked the catalogue,” I said.

“And to the admissions board I’m sure that seemed a perfectly sensible reason for letting you in.”

I wished I had a glass of water. The room was hot and my throat was dry and the whiskey had left a terrible taste in my mouth, not that it was bad whiskey; it was actually quite good, but I had a hangover and I hadn’t eaten all day, and I felt, all at once, very nauseous.

There was a knock at the door and then a flurry of knocks. Without a word, Charles drained his drink and ducked back into the kitchen while Camilla went to answer it.

Before it was even open all the way I could see the glint of little round glasses. There was a chorus of hellos, and there they were: Henry; Bunny, with a brown paper bag from the supermarket; Francis, majestic in his long black coat, clutching, with a black-gloved hand, the neck of a bottle of champagne. The last inside, he leaned to kiss Camilla—not on the cheek, but on the mouth, with a loud and satisfied smack. “Hello, dear,” he said. “What a happy mistake we have made. I’ve got champagne, and Bunny brought stout, so we can make black and tans. What have we got to eat tonight?”

I stood up.

For a fraction of a second they were struck silent. Then Bunny shoved his paper bag at Henry and stepped forward to shake my hand. “Well, well. If it isn’t my partner in crime,” he said. “Haven’t had enough of going out to dinner, eh?”

He slapped me on the back and started to babble. I felt hot, and rather sick. My eyes wandered around the room. Francis was talking to Camilla. Henry, by the door, gave me a small nod and a smile, nearly imperceptible.

“Excuse me,” I said to Bunny. “I’ll be back in just a minute.”

I found my way to the kitchen. It was like a kitchen in an old person’s house, with shabby red linoleum and—in keeping with this odd apartment—a door that led onto the roof. I filled a glass from the tap and bolted it, a case of too much, too quickly. Charles had the oven open and was poking at some lamb chops with a fork.

I—due largely to a rather harrowing tour my sixth-grade class took through a meat-packing plant—have never been much of a meat eater; the smell of lamb I would not have found appealing in the best of circumstances, but it was particularly repulsive in my current state.

The door to the roof was propped open with a kitchen chair, a draft blowing through the rusty screen. I filled my glass again and went to stand by the door: deep breaths, I thought, fresh air, that’s the

ticket … Charles burned his finger, cursed, and slammed the oven shut. When he turned around he seemed surprised to find me.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “What is it? Can I get you another drink?”

“No, thanks.”

He peered at my glass. “What’ve you got? Is that gin? Where did you dig that up?”

Henry appeared in the door. “Do you have an aspirin?” he said to Charles.

“Over there. Have a drink, why don’t you.”

Henry shook a few aspirin into his hand, along with a couple of mystery pills from his pocket, and washed them down with the glass of whiskey Charles gave him.

He had left the aspirin bottle on the counter and surreptitiously I went over and got a couple for myself, but Henry saw me do it. “Are you ill?” he said, not unkindly.

“No, just a headache,” I said.

“You don’t have them often, I hope?”

“What?” said Charles. “Is everybody sick?”

“Why is everybody in here?” Bunny’s pained voice came booming from the hallway. “When do we eat?”

“Hold on, Bun, it’ll only be a minute.”

He sauntered in, peering over Charles’s shoulder at the tray of chops he’d just removed from the broiler. “Looks done to me,” he said, and he reached over and picked up a tiny chop by the bone end and began to gnaw on it.

“Bunny, don’t, really,” said Charles. “There won’t be enough to go around.”

“I’m starving,” said Bunny with his mouth full. “Weak from hunger.”

“Maybe we can save the bones for you to chew on,” Henry said rudely.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Really, Bun, I wish you would wait just a minute,” said Charles.

“Okay,” Bunny said, but he reached over and stole another chop when Charles’s back was turned. A thin trickle of pinkish juice trickled down his hand and disappeared into the cuff of his sleeve.

To say that the dinner went badly would be an exaggeration, but it didn’t go all that well, either. Though I didn’t do anything stupid, exactly, or say anything that I shouldn’t, I felt dejected and bilious, and I talked little and ate even less. Much of the talk centered around events to which I was not privy, and even Charles’s kind parenthetical remarks of explanation did not help much to clarify it.

Henry and Francis argued interminably about how far apart the soldiers in a Roman legion had stood: shoulder to shoulder (as Francis said) or (as Henry maintained) three or four feet apart. This led into an even longer argument—hard to follow and, to me, intensely boring—about whether Hesiod’s primordial Chaos was simply empty space or chaos in the modern sense of the word.

Camilla put on a Josephine Baker record; Bunny ate my lamb chop.

I left early. Both Francis and Henry offered to drive me home, which for some reason made me feel even worse. I told them I’d rather walk, thanks, and backed out of the apartment, smiling, practically delirious, my face burning under the collective gaze of cool, curious solicitude.

It wasn’t far to school, only fifteen minutes, but it was getting cold and my head hurt and the whole evening had left me with a keen sense of inadequacy and failure which grew keener with every step. I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might’ve missed, and my mind—quite willingly—

supplied various distortions.

When I got to my room it was silver and alien with moonlight, the window still open and the Parmenides open on the desk where I had left it; a half-drunk coffee from the snack bar stood beside it, cold in its styrofoam cup. The room was chilly but I didn’t shut the window.

Instead, I lay down on my bed, without taking off my shoes, without turning on the light.

As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as

ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the pages of the Parmenides rippled back and forth.

I had meant to sleep only a few hours, but I woke with a start the next morning to find sunlight pouring in and the clock reading five of nine. Without stopping to shave or comb my hair or even change my clothes from the night before, I grabbed my Greek Prose composition book and my Liddell and Scott and ran to Julian’s office.

Except for Julian, who always made a point of arriving a few minutes late, everyone was there. From the hall I heard them talking, but when I opened the door they all fell quiet and looked at me.

No one said anything for a moment. Then Henry said: “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I said. In the clear northern light they all looked fresh, well rested, startled at my appearance; they stared at me as I ran a self-conscious hand though my disheveled hair.

“Looks like you didn’t meet up with a razor this morning, chap,”

said Bunny to me. “Looks like—”

Then the door opened and Julian walked in.

There was a great deal to do in class that day, especially for me, being so far behind; on Tuesdays and Thursdays it might be pleasant to sit around and talk about literature, or philosophy, but the rest of the week was taken up in Greek grammar and prose composition and that, for the most part, was brutal, bludgeoning labor, labor that I—being older now, and a little less hardy—would scarcely be able to force myself to do today. I had certainly plenty to worry about besides the coldness which apparently had infected my classmates once again, their crisp air of solidarity, the cool way their eyes seemed to look right through me. There had been an opening in their ranks, but now it was closed; I was back, it seemed, exactly where I’d begun.

That afternoon, I went to see Julian on the pretext of talking about credit transfers, but with something very different on my mind. For it

seemed, quite suddenly, that my decision to drop everything for Greek had been a rash and foolish one, and made for all the wrong reasons. What had I been thinking of? I liked Greek, and I liked Julian, but I wasn’t sure if I liked his pupils and anyway, did I really want to spend my college career and subsequently my life looking at pictures of broken kouroi and poring over the Greek particles? Two years before, I had made a similar heedless decision which had plummeted me into a nightmarish, year-long round of chloroformed rabbits and day trips to the morgue, from which I had barely escaped at all. This was by no means as bad (with a shudder I remembered my old zoology lab, eight in the morning, the bobbing vats of fetal pigs), by no means—I told myself—as bad as that. But still it seemed like a big mistake, and it was too late in the term to pick up my old classes or change counselors again.

I suppose I’d gone to see Julian in order to revive my flagging assurance, in hopes he would make me feel as certain as I had that first day. And I am fairly sure he would have done just that if only I had made it in to see him. But as it happened, I didn’t get to talk to him at all. Stepping onto the landing outside his office, I heard voices in the hall and stopped.

It was Julian and Henry. Neither of them had heard me come up the stairs. Henry was leaving; Julian was standing in the open door.

His brow was furrowed and he looked very somber, as if he were saying something of the gravest importance. Making the vain, or rather paranoid, assumption that they might be talking about me, I took a step closer and peered as far as I could risk around the corner.

Julian finished speaking. He looked away for a moment, then bit his lower lip and looked up at Henry.

Then Henry spoke. His words were low but deliberate and distinct.

“Should I do what is necessary?”

To my surprise, Julian took both Henry’s hands in his own. “You should only, ever, do what is necessary,” he said.

What, I thought, the hell is going on? I stood at the top of the stairs, trying not to make a sound, wanting to leave before they saw me but afraid to move.

To my utter, utter surprise Henry leaned over and gave Julian a quick little businesslike kiss on the cheek. Then he turned to leave, but fortunately for me he looked over his shoulder to say one last thing; I crept down the stairs as quietly as I could, breaking into a run when I was at the second landing and out of earshot.

The week that followed was a solitary and surreal one. The leaves were changing; it rained a good deal and got dark early; in Monmouth House people gathered around the downstairs fireplace, burning logs stolen by stealth of night from the faculty house, and drank warm cider in their stocking feet. But I went straight to my classes and straight back to Monmouth and up the stairs to my room, bypassing all these homey firelit scenes and hardly speaking to a soul, even to the chummier sorts who invited me down to join in all this communal dorm fun.

I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers. I thought I was sick, though I don’t believe I really was; I was just cold all the time and unable to sleep, sometimes no more than an hour or two a night.

Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia. I spent the nights reading Greek until four in the morning, until my eyes burned and my head swam, until the only light burning in Monmouth House was my own. When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

“I’m a survivor,” the girl at the party was saying to me. She was blond and tan and too tall—almost my height—and without even asking I

knew she was from California. I suppose it was something in her voice, something about the expanse of reddened, freckled skin, stretched taut over a bony clavicle and a bonier sternum and ribcage and entirely unrelieved by breasts of any sort—which presented itself to me through the lacuna of a Gaultier corselet. It was Gaultier, I knew, because she’d sort of casually let that slip. To my eyes it looked only like a wet suit, laced crudely up the front.

She was shouting at me over the music. “I guess I’ve had a pretty hard life, with my injury and all” (I had heard about this previously; loose tendons; dance world’s loss; performance-art’s gain) “but I guess I just have a very strong sense of myself, of my own needs.

Other people are important to me, sure, but I always get what I want from them, you know.” Her voice was brusque with the staccato Californians sometimes affect when they’re trying too hard to be from New York, but there was a bright hard edge of that Golden State cheeriness, too. A Cheerleader of the Damned. She was the kind of pretty, burnt-out, vacuous girl who at home wouldn’t have given me the time of day. But now I realized she was trying to pick me up. I hadn’t slept with anybody in Vermont except a little red-haired girl I met at a party on the first weekend. Somebody told me later she was a paper-mill heiress from the Midwest. Now I cut my eyes away whenever we met. (The gentleman’s way out, as my classmates used to joke.)

“Do you want a cigarette?” I shouted at this one.

“I don’t smoke.”

“I don’t, either, except at parties.”

She laughed. “Well, sure, give me one,” she yelled in my ear. “You don’t know where we can find any pot, do you?”

While I was lighting the cigarette for her, someone elbowed me in the back and I lurched forward. The music was insanely loud and people were dancing and there was beer puddled on the floor and a rowdy mob at the bar. I couldn’t see much but a Dantesque mass of bodies on the dance floor and a cloud of smoke hovering near the ceiling, but I could see, where light from the corridor spilled into the darkness, an upturned glass here, a wide lipsticked laughing mouth there. As parties go, this was a nasty one and getting worse—

already certain of the freshmen had begun to throw up as they waited in dismal lines for the bathroom—but it was Friday and I’d spent all week reading and I didn’t care. I knew none of my fellow Greek students would be there. Having been to every Friday night party since school began, I knew they avoided them like the Black Death.

“Thanks,” said the girl. She had edged into a stairwell, where things were a little quieter. Now it was possible to talk without shouting but I’d had about six vodka tonics and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to her, I couldn’t even remember her name.

“Uh, what’s your major,” I said drunkenly at last.

She smiled. “Performance art. You asked me that already.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

She looked at me critically. “You ought to loosen up. Look at your hands. You’re very tense.”

“This is about as loose as I get,” I said, quite truthfully.

She looked at me, and a light of recognition began to dawn in her eye. “I know who you are,” she said, looking at my jacket and my tie that had the pictures of the men hunting deer on it. “Judy told me all about you. You’re the new guy who’s studying Greek with those creepos.”

“Judy? What do you mean, Judy told you about me?”

She ignored this. “You had better watch out,” she said. “I have heard some weird shit about those people.”

“Like what?”

“Like they worship the fucking Devil.”

“The Greeks have no Devil,” I said pedantically.

“Well, that’s not what I heard.”

“Well, so what. You’re wrong.”

“That’s not all. I’ve heard some other stuff, too.”

“What else?”

She wouldn’t say.

“Who told you this? Judy?”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“Seth Gartrell,” she said, as if that settled the matter.

As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word “postmodernist.” “That swine,” I said. “You know him?”

She looked at me with a glitter of antagonism. “Seth Gartrell is my good friend.”

I really had had a bit much to drink. “Is he?” I said. “Tell me, then.

How does his girlfriend get all those black eyes? And does he really piss on his paintings like Jackson Pollock?”

“Seth,” she said coldly, “is a genius.”

“Is that so? Then he’s certainly a master of deception, isn’t he?”

“He is a wonderful painter. Conceptually, that is. Everybody in the art department says so.”

“Well then. If everybody says it, it must be true.”

“A lot of people don’t like Seth.” She was angry now. “I think a lot of people are just jealous of him.”

A hand tugged at the back of my sleeve, near the elbow. I shrugged it off. With my luck it could only be Judy Poovey, trying to hit up on me as she inevitably did about this time every Friday night.

But the tug came again, this time sharper and more impatient; irritably I turned, and almost stumbled backward into the blonde.

It was Camilla. Her iron-colored eyes were all I saw at first—

luminous, bemused, bright in the dim light from the bar. “Hi,” she said.

I stared at her. “Hel lo,” I said, trying to be nonchalant but delighted and beaming down at her all the same. “How are you? What are you doing here? Can I get you a drink?”

“Are you busy?” she said.

It was hard to think. The little gold hairs were curled in a very engaging way at her temples. “No, no, I’m not busy at all,” I said, looking not at her eyes but at this fascinating area around her forehead.

“If you are, just say so,” she said in an undertone, looking over my shoulder. “I don’t want to drag you away from anything.”

Of course: Miss Gaultier. I turned around, half-expecting some snide comment, but she’d lost interest and was talking pointedly to

someone else. “No,” I said. “I’m not doing a thing.”

“Do you want to go to the country this weekend?”

“What?”

“We’re leaving now. Francis and me. He has a house about an hour from here.”

I was really drunk; otherwise I wouldn’t have just nodded and followed her without a single question. To get to the door, we had to make our way through the dance floor: sweat and heat, blinking Christmas lights, a dreadful crush of bodies. When finally we stepped outside, it was like falling into a pool of cool, still water.

Shrieks and depraved music throbbed, muffled, through the closed windows.

“My God,” said Camilla. “Those things are hellish. People being sick all over the place.”

The pebbled drive was silver in the moonlight. Francis was standing in the shadows under some trees. When he saw us coming he stepped suddenly onto the lighted path. “Boo,” he said.

We both jumped back. Francis smiled thinly, light glinting off his fraudulent pince-nez. Cigarette smoke curled from his nostrils.

“Hello,” he said to me, then glanced at Camilla. “I thought you’d run off,” he said.

“You should have come in with me.”

“I’m glad I didn’t,” said Francis, “because I saw some interesting things out here.”

“Like what?”

“Like some security guards handing out a girl on a stretcher and a black dog attacking some hippies.” He laughed, then tossed his car keys in the air and caught them with a jingle. “Are you ready?”

He had a convertible, an old Mustang, and we drove all the way to the country with the top down and the three of us in the front seat.

Amazingly, I had never been in a convertible before, and it is even more amazing that I managed to fall asleep when both momentum and nerves should’ve kept me awake but I did, fell asleep with my

cheek resting on the padded leather of the door, my sleepless week and the six vodka tonics hitting me hard as an injection.

I remember little of the ride. Francis drove at a reasonable clip—

he was a careful driver, unlike Henry, who drove fast and often recklessly and whose eyes were none too good besides. The night wind in my hair, their indistinct talk, the songs on the radio all mingled and blurred in my dreams. It seemed we’d been driving for only a few minutes when suddenly I was conscious of silence, and of Camilla’s hand on my shoulder. “Wake up,” she said. “We’re here.”

Dazed, half dreaming, not quite sure where I was, I shook my head and inched up in my seat. There was drool on my cheek and I wiped it off with the flat of my hand.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t. It was dark and I couldn’t see a thing. My fingers finally closed on the door handle and only then, as I was climbing out of the car, the moon came out from behind a cloud and I saw the house. It was tremendous. I saw, in sharp, ink-black silhouette against the sky, turrets and pikes, a widow’s walk.

“Geez,” I said.

Francis was standing beside me, but I was scarcely aware of it till he spoke, and I was startled by the closeness of his voice. “You can’t get a very good idea of it at night,” he said.

“This belongs to you?” I said.

He laughed. “No. It’s my aunt’s. Way too big for her, but she won’t sell it. She and my cousins come in the summer, and only a caretaker the rest of the year.”

The entrance hall had a sweet, musty smell and was so dim it seemed almost gaslit; the walls were spidery with the shadows of potted palms and on the ceilings, so high they made my head reel, loomed distorted traces of our own shadows. Someone in the back of the house was playing the piano. Photographs and gloomy, gilt-framed portraits lined the hall in long perspectives.

“It smells terrible in here,” said Francis. “Tomorrow, if it’s warm, we’ll air it out, Bunny gets asthma from all this dust.… That’s my great-grandmother,” he said, pointing at a photograph which he saw had caught my attention. “And that’s her brother next to her—he

went down on the Titanic, poor thing. They found his tennis racket floating around in the North Atlantic about three weeks afterward.”

“Come see the library,” said Camilla.

Francis close behind us, we went down the hall and through several rooms—a lemon-yellow sitting room with gilt mirrors and chandeliers, a dining room dark with mahogany, rooms I wanted to linger in but got only a glimpse of. The piano music got closer; it was Chopin, one of the preludes, maybe.

Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass-fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier—

dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading—sparkled in the dim.

There was a grand piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another. A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair.

“Golly,” I said.

The playing stopped abruptly and Charles looked up. “Well there you are,” he said. “You’re awfully late. Bunny’s gone to sleep.”

“Where’s Henry?” said Francis.

“Working. He might come down before bed.”

Camilla went to the piano and took a sip from Charles’s glass.

“You should have a look at these books,” she said to me. “There’s a first edition of Ivanhoe here.”

“Actually, I think they sold that one,” said Francis, sitting in a leather armchair and lighting a cigarette. “There are one or two interesting things but mostly it’s Marie Corelli and old Rover Boys. ”

I walked over to the shelves. Something called London by somebody called Pennant, six volumes bound in red leather—

massive books, two feet tall. Next to it The Club History of London, an equally massive set, bound in pale calfhide. The libretto of The Pirates of Penzance. Numberless Bobbsey Twins. Byron’s Marino Faliero, bound in black leather, with the date 1821 stamped in gold on the spine.

“Here, go make your own drink if you want one,” Charles was saying to Camilla.

“I don’t want my own. I want some of yours.”

He gave her the glass with one hand and with the other, wobbled up a difficult backwards-and-forwards scale.

“Play something,” I said.

He rolled his eyes.

“Oh, come on,” said Camilla.

“No.”

“Of course, he can’t really play anything,” Francis said in a sympathetic undertone.

Charles took a swallow of his drink and ran up another octave, trilling nonsensically on the keys with his right hand. Then he handed the glass to Camilla and, left hand free, reached down and turned the fibrillation into the opening notes of a Scott Joplin rag.

He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase. Camilla, on the seat beside him, smiled at me. I smiled back, a little dazed. The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I’d never known.

Charlestons on the wings of airborne biplanes. Parties on sinking ships, the icy water bubbling around the waists of the orchestra as they sawed out a last brave chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.” Actually, it wasn’t “Auld Lang Syne” they’d sung, the night the Titanic went down, but hymns. Lots of hymns, and the Catholic priest saying Hail Marys, and the first-class salon which had really looked a lot like this: dark wood, potted palms, rose silk lampshades with their swaying fringe. I really had had a bit much to drink. I was sitting sideways in my chair, holding tight to the arms (Holy Mary, Mother of God), and even the floors were listing, like the decks of a foundering ship; like we might all slide to the other end with a hysterical wheeee! piano and all.

There were footsteps on the stair and Bunny, his eyes screwed up and his hair standing on end, tottered in wearing his pajamas. “What

the hell,” he said. “You woke me up.” But nobody paid any attention to him, and finally he poured himself a drink and tottered back up the stairs with it, in his bare feet, to bed.

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business.

Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off—

though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be—but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.

I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories: watchful and grudging, oddly silent. All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another.

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

At any rate, this was the weekend that things started to change, that the dark gaps between the street lamps begin to grow smaller, and smaller, and farther apart, the first sign that one’s train is approaching familiar territory, and will soon be passing through the well-known, well-lighted streets of town. The house was their trump card, their fondest treasure, and that weekend they revealed it to me slyly, by degrees—the dizzy little turret rooms, the high-beamed attic, the old sleigh in the cellar, big enough to be pulled by four horses, astring with bells. The carriage barn was a caretaker’s house.

(“That’s Mrs. Hatch in the yard. She’s very sweet but her husband is a Seventh-Day Adventist or something, quite strict. We have to hide all the bottles when he comes inside.”

“Or what?”

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

In the afternoon we wandered down to the lake, which was shared, discreetly, by several adjoining properties. On the way they pointed out the tennis court and the old summerhouse, a mock tholos, Doric by way of Pompeii, and Stanford White, and (said Francis, who was scornful of this Victorian effort at classicism) D. W.

Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille. It was made of plaster, he said, and had come in pieces from Sears, Roebuck. The grounds, in places, bore signs of the geometric Victorian trimness which had been their original form: drained fish-pools; the long white colonnades of skeleton pergolas; rock-bordered parterres where flowers no longer grew. But for the most part, these traces were obliterated, with the hedges running wild and native trees—slippery elm and tamarack—

outnumbering the quince and Japanese maple.

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

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

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

I had never been in a boat in my life. Henry and Camilla went out with me—Henry at the oars, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his dark jacket on the seat beside him. He had a habit, as I was later to

discover, of trailing off into absorbed, didactic, entirely self-contained monologues, about whatever he happened to be interested in at the time—the Catuvellauni, or late Byzantine painting, or headhunting in the Solomon Islands. That day he was talking about Elizabeth and Leicester, I remember: the murdered wife, the royal barge, the queen on a white horse talking to the troops at Tilbury Fort, and Leicester and the Earl of Essex holding the bridle rein.… The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone. Camilla, flushed and sleepy, trailed her hand in the water.

Yellow birch leaves blew from the trees and drifted down to rest on the surface. It was many years later, and far away, when I came across this passage in The Waste-Land:

Elizabeth and Leicester

Beating oars

The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

The peal of bells

White towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leilala

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

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

“Where is it?”

“In the teapot.”

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

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

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

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

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

Startled, I turned to see Henry sitting at the other end of the porch.

He was without a jacket but otherwise immaculate for such an ungodly hour: trousers knife-pressed, his white shirt crisp with starch. On the table in front of him were books and papers, a steaming espresso pot and a tiny cup, and—I was surprised to see—

an unfiltered cigarette burning in an ashtray.

“You’re up early,” I said.

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

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

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

“Into what language?”

“Latin,” he said solemnly.

“Hmm,” I said. “Why?”

“I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English—of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I’m referring to is the later work. In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits

but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose.” He lay his cigarette back in the ashtray. I stared at it burning. “Will you have some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“I hope you slept well.”

“Yes, thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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