His father was not in the limo. The car was a black Mercedes-Benz with a gold Vanderbilt crest on its sleek backside. The chauffeur tipped his cap – it was embroidered with the same baroque leaf-and-scroll-encircled V in gold thread – and held the back door open. ‘I’m Castano, Mr Vanderbilt,’ the chauffeur said. ‘Your father’s personal driver. He regrets that he is detained in the Hamptons today. He asked that I convey you to your school. I’ll take care of your luggage.’
‘Thank you, Castano.’ Ti-Loup’s most immediate reaction was one of massive relief. He’d been given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, a magic gift he’d been dealt once before, and a bodily memory of that prior sensation moved through his veins. He was warmed to the tips of his fingers. The moment returned to him, intense. He had just dropped, for the first time, from the window of his room in the chateau. He had paused in the shrubbery in sheer amazement at what he had done and the thrill of it. It was one of his safe houses, that memory. He could close his eyes any time and return.
His second reaction, as he sank into the cushioned glove-soft leather of the back seat, was of sensual pleasure. This wasn’t just first class, it was transcendent. He imagined his mother’s gloss: I’m surprised he didn’t send a yellow cab for you. He would have, but he knew there’d be people watching: other parents, other members of the Board of Trustees, gossip columnists for the New York Post.
‘We’ll be taking Interstate 95 to New Haven,’ Castano explained. ‘And then Interstate 91 to Hartford. After we cross the Mass Pike, we’ll take Route 10 into Dryden. Depending on traffic, we should be there in about four hours. Make yourself comfortable, Mr Vanderbilt. Juice and soft drinks in the fridge, fruit and cookies and candy in the cupboard. You can make your music selection from the armrest on your right.’
Ti-Loup chose classical and passed through Connecticut enfolded in Bach.
He felt the cashmere caress of entitlement. Perhaps I will enjoy my third life, he thought. No one at Dryden knew about the blue dress. No one knew that his mother required him to say the rosary at her side every day and every night. He felt as though he were free to put on any costume he wished. He decided he would start by being as scholarly and reserved as Father JG, that his French accent would be high-class French and his English accent would be British. He would be as devoid of detectable emotion as his parents were. He would be inscrutable.
‘Ivy League and Prep School Row,’ Castano said. ‘That’s what all the chauffeurs call Route 10 once we get north of Springfield. You saw the turn-offs to Smith and Holyoke, etcetera, right? Your father says the Smith girls can be wild. Village of Dryden just ahead. We’re in the Connecticut River valley and those hills are the Pocumtuck Ridge. Students climb up there to the Rock for a spectacular view of the campus, all two hundred and eighty acres of it. Haven’t done it myself, of course, but your father does it every time I bring him here for the annual Board of Trustees. He says you should do it the first or second day. It’s a ritual.’
The view from the drive was breathtaking, as beautiful as the Château de Boissy and the valleys of the Vienne and the Loire. Ti-Loup began to feel happy.
‘This is where I leave you,’ Castano said. ‘Administration building. They’ll tell you what to do next. I’ll get one of the staff to put your bags in your dorm.’
There were other limousines scattered about the great drive like starlings crowding a ripening vineyard. There were more modestly sized family cars too, Jaguars, Porsches, BMWs, Audis, Lincolns. Parents and new students milled about in a chaos of boxes and duffel bags. Ti-Loup had rarely ever, in his fifteen years, been in the company of more than three people at any one time, and those few occasions had been at mass in the church of St Gilles on liturgical festival days. He felt dizzy. He felt slightly agoraphobic. He watched the Vanderbilt limousine receding down the long Dryden drive and he thought it looked like one of Van Gogh’s crows, a black smudge coasting on a current of air towards the horizon and the edge of the painting, flying south on Route 10. That black speck seemed to him a final punctuation point, the end of his second life.
A tall blond boy whose hair flopped over one eyebrow approached him. ‘Vanderbilt?’ he said. He extended his right hand and Ti-Loup shook it, firmly, as his father required. ‘Saw you get out of the Vanderbilt limo. Pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Dryden. I’m Cabot.’ Cabot tossed his head slightly, in the manner of a cantering horse, so that the mane of blond hair lifted and then fell back again. ‘I’m the senior proctor on your corridor. Always confusing on your first day, but you’ll get the hang of it. I’ll show you to your dorm. There’ll be eight freshmen in your corridor but you’ll each have a room to yourself. Not everyone does, you know, but most of us do.’
Ti-Loup absorbed this information as inscrutably as possible. It had not even occurred to him that he might not have a room to himself. ‘That will be congenial,’ he said in Father JG’s voice.
‘You sound British,’ Cabot said. ‘I thought you’d been living in France.’
‘France, yes. New York. Wherever.’ Ti-Loup shrugged in the manner of Father JG being dismissive. ‘My father travels a lot.’
‘Oh, mine too,’ Cabot said. ‘We spend summers in Italy. Florence mainly. Here’s our dorm. The staff has got your bags here already. I’ll leave you to yourself to get settled.’ He leaned against the doorframe to watch Ti-Loup getting settled. There was a small brown mole on Cabot’s face about an inch to the right of his nose. He had a habit, Ti-Loup observed, of touching this mole with his fingertips every few minutes as though to hide it or perhaps to assure himself that it had not moved or grown larger. He had a habit of tossing back his forelock at the same time and then letting it fall across his eyebrows again.
‘I can’t tell you how pleased we are to have a Vanderbilt in our hall,’ he said.
Ti-Loup absorbed the astonishing information that Cabot was anxious to please him. He smiled and said nothing. He inclined his head slightly as though to the manner born.
3.
Dinner in the massive dining hall, with more than six hundred students, was both unruly and cosy, each student assigned to a table for ten, each table presided over by a proctor or faculty member. Cabot was not at Ti-Loup’s table. The person on Ti-Loup’s right announced, ‘Hi, everyone. Welcome to Dryden. I’m John Semple. I teach math and I’m a college adviser. This will be your family dinner table for the next three weeks and then you’ll be assigned a new table and a new dining family. Why don’t we start by introducing ourselves while the first course is being served. Vanderbilt? Can we start with you and then proceed in clockwise direction? You should each give your name, your home town and why you came to Dryden.’
‘My name is Ti –’ Ti-Loup had a moment of absolute panic. He touched his blazer and expected to feel blue silk. He braced for ridicule. What he touched was pure cashmere of the finest and softest sort. He felt disoriented. Mentally, he tossed the blue dress into an incinerator and threw in a match. He watched what happened. He saw it in his mind’s eye: a roar of flames, highly coloured, skyrocketing up and showering down again like birds with their wings on fire. Bye-bye, Bluebird, he said to the ashes.
‘My name is Gwynne Patrice de la Vallière Vanderbilt,’ he said levelly. ‘I was born in New York but I have spent the last ten years in France in my mother’s chateau in the Loire Valley.’ He spoke in Father JG’s voice, with measured authority but offhandedly, as though this were throwaway information. ‘My mother is a countess related to the royal house of the Bourbon kings. I came to Dryden because it is my father’s old school.’
John Semple, math teacher and college adviser, informed the table: ‘Vanderbilt’s father is on the Board of Trustees and is a very generous benefactor of our school.’
Ti-Loup observed that he was regarded with deference and a certain amount of awe. The sensation was as heady as it was unprecedented. For a moment, he believed he could fly. He could not only visualise the possibility, he could feel the loft and updraft in his body.
The boy o
n his left said: ‘My name is Fouad Abdullah. My home town is Jeddah. I also came to Dryden because it is my father’s old school.’
John Semple, math teacher and college adviser, provided a gloss. ‘Fouad’s father is part of the royal family of Saud,’ he explained. ‘We owe one of our science labs to him.’
And so it went, around the table. Not everyone’s father had been to Dryden, but most had. Two boys explained that they were at Dryden because they had won full scholarships. The home town of one was Shreveport, Louisiana, the home town of the other was Paducah, Kentucky. John Semple greeted these introductions with great warmth. ‘One of the triumphs of Dryden,’ he said, ‘is that the school seeks out the highest achievers of the next generation and provides unprecedented opportunity to those from underprivileged backgrounds.’
The boys from underprivileged backgrounds kept their eyes on the table while Semple led their co-diners in applause.
Between the main course and dessert, Fouad draped an arm around Ti-Loup’s shoulder. ‘Great to meet you, Vanderbilt,’ he said. ‘My father and your father get together at Ascot every year, as you no doubt know. I hope you’ll consider spending mid-term break with us in Jeddah.’
‘Thank you,’ Ti-Loup said politely. ‘I will certainly keep your invitation in mind.’
Classes were small, never more than twelve students in any one class. Ti-Loup found his teachers quite splendid. There was never a question they could not answer in detail, they were demanding but kind and patient. He loved his courses and was pleasantly surprised to find them as rigorous as seminars with Father JG, though much more exciting. The Jesuit had been absolutely right about class dynamics. The greater the number of razor-sharp minds competitively chopping at a subject, the more irresistibly spiced the intellectual cassoulet. He felt that his brain matter, his thoughts, his ideas were being tuned to the highest pitch. His in-class and after-class discussions were like debates with Cap in spades, like having two Father JG’s and eleven other Capucines in the room.
Cap! He had not thought of her in three weeks, not since his arrival at Dryden. This startled him and briefly disturbed him, but she belonged to a different life and the window between that life and his present one was so heavily fogged that he saw only as through a glass darkly and saw shadows that moved.
He received no communication of any sort from his father but the mail brought a letter from his mother every week. He did not answer these letters. He did not read them. He did not open them. He placed them, neatly and chronologically, in a shoebox which he kept in his dresser, in the bottom drawer, the same shoebox in which he kept the rosary his mother had given him, that delicate chain of pearls and jade. He felt that if he so much as touched it, a trapdoor could open beneath him and the rosary would be his noose and he would find himself dangling from an old stone bridge, condemned to swing back and forth over two bloody corpses, back and forth, back and forth, slowly and forever, and he would never be able to breathe again but nor would he ever die, nor would his eyes ever close.
As for the miniature portraits of Lilith and Grand Loup: at first he kept them propped up on the desk in his room, his waking view and his last view at night. But after Cabot asked him: ‘Are they your French relatives?’ he realised he did not want to explain. He wrapped the portraits in a silk scarf and added them to the box where he kept his mother’s rosary and her letters.
In October, after more than one month at Dryden, he received a letter mailed from New York which bore the return address of Myriam Goldberg. A terrible disturbance moved through him, like the tremor that precedes an earthquake or a tsunami or a volcanic eruption. He held the envelope for a long time, sitting at his desk and staring out his window at the mountains. He could not control the quiver in his hands.
When the storm subsided, he slit the envelope open with his paper knife. Inside was another envelope, as well as a note from Myriam Goldberg. The enclosed envelope bore French stamps and a postmark of Tours. The handwritten note said:
Dear Petit Loup,
At last the channels of communication are safely open and no doubt Lilith will update you in her letter (which is enclosed) on her own changing circumstances and those of the chateau. We are so alarmed by the news that Grand Loup has had a heart attack and by his rapidly deteriorating condition and his emotional state that we plan to fly to France next week. If it is necessary, and if we can arrange it, we will bring Grand Loup back to New York for medical treatment. Perhaps we will bring Lilith back with us.
In any case, we will spend time with her in Tours and in St Gilles and will give you a full report on our return. We are assuming you will spend Thanksgiving with your father in New York. We will certainly be home by then and we hope you will visit. Of course you will want to observe the festival dinner with your father, but perhaps you can visit us for dinner the next day? Perhaps Lilith and Grand Loup will be with us by then. You are welcome to drop in at any time.
Fondly,
Myriam Goldberg
Ti-Loup held the envelope with the French stamps and the Tours postmark for quite some time. He ran the tip of his index finger over Cap’s handwriting, slowly, tracing each letter as though deciphering hieroglyphs.
There was a knock at his door which barely registered. There was a pause and a second knock. There was something he was supposed to do but he could not remember what it was and then the door opened and Cabot leaned in. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’
Ti-Loup looked at him blankly.
‘Listen,’ Cabot said. ‘Everyone goes through a stage in the first few weeks. Don’t let it get to you. It’s normal. Can I make a suggestion as your proctor? You’re not in great physical shape, I mean by Dryden standards, and there’s a mind–body loop, you know. I’m on the cross-country team and I’d like to invite you to join us. We have a great coach. You don’t have to be an Olympic prospect when you start but you will certainly be a few quantum leaps closer by the end of term. Practice is before breakfast, at six a.m. Can I count on you for tomorrow morning?’
‘Uh … Let me think about it.’
‘I’d advise against that. You’ll lose your nerve. You should just jump in. Can we make a deal? If you hate it, you can quit in two weeks, but I hope I can count on you for a two-week try. Can I?’
‘Sure,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘Sure. Okay. Thanks for the invitation.’
‘Hey. Good publicity. A Vanderbilt and a Cabot on the cross-country team? That’ll give Choate and Phillips Exeter something to chew on. I’ll knock on your door in the morning. See you at dawn.’ Cabot touched his mole and flicked back his hair as he closed the door.
Ti-Loup opened the bottom drawer of his dresser and added the envelope with French stamps and Cap’s handwriting, unopened, to the shoebox of unread correspondence.
He had a terrible night. He could not get to sleep and when he finally did, long past midnight, he was dangling from his windowsill in the chateau. The height of the drop had increased alarmingly and he found he was twenty feet above the ground. He dropped and felt his ankle and leg bones shatter, but he knew his business was urgent, a matter of life and death. He crawled into the woods, propelling himself on his arms, dragging his broken legs behind him. He had to reach the stone bridge in time. He knew where it was, or he thought he did, but all the footpaths and trails were blocked by undergrowth that was spiny and vicious with thorns. He was punctured all over. He could see beads of blood on his arms, feel the blood trickling down his cheeks. But he would get there. He would get there. He would get to the old stone bridge and he would get there in time.
He got there just as he woke, but it was too late.
4.
At sunrise, the autumn air in rural Massachusetts was decidedly crisp. Ti-Loup, running, concentrated on gulping in enough oxygen to survive, though this felt like inhaling dry ice. His feet were killing him. Every muscle in his legs was on fire. Ten boys were running in concert, their running shoes pounding the earth. Cabot was slightly ahead of him and to his left. H
e did not know anyone else. There was no way he was going to quit before the coach, running close on his right, gave permission, but he thought the chances were high that he would drop dead before then.
He became an automaton, conscious of nothing but propulsion and pain, and then not even conscious of those.
‘Listen, Vanderbilt,’ Coach said. ‘I’m not going to pretend that you look like someone who could make the cross-country team, but you’ve got something I can work with. You’re not a quitter. You serious about giving this a try? You committed?’
‘I’m committed, Coach.’
‘Cabot seems to want you on this team. But do you want it?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘You think so? Not the right answer. Do you want it or not, yes or no?’
‘Yes, sir, I want it.’
‘But do you want it enough?’
‘Yes, sir, I want it enough to do whatever you tell me to do.’
‘Good. Okay then. Here’s what we have to do. You meet me in the gym at five-thirty every morning, before the team run. And you meet me again between study time and dinner. You lift weights. You bench press. You do sit-ups and push-ups. We transform you from softie to Superman.’
‘Yes, sir.’
There was another boy who thudded beside him on the morning run, footfall for footfall. This boy never spoke, at least not within Vanderbilt’s hearing. This boy did not live on his hallway or in his dorm. He had not sat at the same table in dining hall. Not yet. He did not even know this boy’s name although they often stood side by side in the showers after the run. At first it did not bother Vanderbilt that they did not speak, and then it did.
‘Hey,’ he said one day as they were towelling off after the shower. ‘I’m Vanderbilt.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ the boy said. ‘I’m McVie.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Boston. Full scholarship.’ McVie announced this as though declaring a herpes infection upfront. His accent was the English equivalent of French peasant. He looked Vanderbilt directly in the eyes and held his gaze. ‘Boston Irish. My father’s a butcher. That a problem for you?’
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