Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  “It’s fine.” Greg turned back to his book.

  “You know,” said Thomas, “maybe I’d talk to you more if you gave me some kind of reason to start a conversation.”

  Greg kept his eyes on the page. “You told me Staines got on your nerves last year for talking. Now, you say I don’t talk enough. Staines is right next door if you want somebody to talk. I don’t.”

  Screw this. Thomas walked out of the room. On his way, he turned up the stereo to louder than it had been before.

  “Hey,” Greg yelled. Thomas kept walking. Maybe it did stink a little in their room. Maybe Staines wasn’t so bigoted after all.

  Next door, Staines had his own stereo cranked, playing brassy pep songs from the University of North Carolina. Somehow he was tying his necktie for dinner at the same time that he pretended to play the drums. He lived in a single, which meant that his room was the size of a good walk-in closet. Nevertheless, he was so wound up in his own performance and so deafened by the music that he did not notice Thomas’s entry at first.

  Staines was from Morganton, North Carolina, and if he wasn’t discussing sex, then he was likely to be talking some kind of trash about the University of North Carolina’s basketball team. Dean Smith, the four corners, Carolina Blue, Blue Heaven, Tar Heel born and Tar Heel bred-Thomas had gotten tired of the spiel by October, before the basketball season had even started.

  This is what you wanted to get away from, Thomas thought. He had made a mistake to come here. Staines was no guy to confide in about anything. But before he could leave, Staines saw him in the mirror, boogied a little, then turned down the stereo one notch.

  “Are you trying to drown out my music over there?” Staines yelled.

  “It’s not me,” Thomas yelled back.

  “What?” yelled Staines.

  They might have gone hoarse if Mr. Carella hadn’t burst into the room on them. He didn’t say anything. He just turned off the power switch on the stereo. The record croaked to a stop.

  Mr. Carella was the dorm master on their floor and lived in the faculty apartment at the end of the hall. He was in the same age bracket chronologically as Farnham, but he seemed about fifty years younger. Not only was he the perfect dorm master—young, funny, and hardly ever around—but he was also the first good science teacher Thomas had ever had in his life.

  “Sounds of silence,” said Carella. “Lipscomb’s Mozart is better than your Tar Heel crap, but my first choice is to hear nothing but my own stomach growling.”

  It was quiet next door, too. Carella must have stopped there on the way over.

  As usual he seemed to be like a truck idling, slightly bouncing with all that potential energy. He was short and broad and muscular, with a head one size too big and black hair that curled down over his ears. He was barefooted and had his tie halfway on.

  “I have some bad news for you, gentlemen,” said Mr. Carella.

  Staines interrupted him. “No demerits,” he said. “Not with the mixer this weekend.”

  “No demerits this time,” said Carella. “Schoolwork. I have posted a change in the biology syllabus on the bulletin board downstairs. Your lab reports are due tomorrow instead of Wednesday.”

  “Because of a loud stereo?” said Staines.

  “Of course not. This assignment is for the whole class,” said Carella. He was a new teacher who wasn’t very well organized.

  They both protested.

  “I know, I know, things are rough all over,” said Carella. “Spread the word to the others. I’ll make an announcement at dinner tonight. Lab reports due tomorrow.”

  He slapped Thomas on the shoulder as if he had just delivered a baby and then left. Thomas was shell-shocked: quadruple damn it to hell’s shit supply; that was all he needed, more schoolwork to do.

  “Have you started your lab report yet?” said Staines.

  “Hell no.”

  “You want to work together on it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Thomas. “I’ve got so much to do tonight.” He knew that working with Staines meant that Thomas would do the work and Staines would try to copy it. You just couldn’t trust him. Montpelier operated on an honor system, and Staines was always pushing it to the limit. At basketball practice he would call you for stepping out of bounds when you didn’t, or call you for a foul when you hadn’t touched him. There was talk on the dorm last year when Staines came into a good bit of cash at the same time that Landon Hopkins missed the money he’d gotten for his birthday. And once, in October, Thomas had surprised Staines going through Greg’s dresser.

  “You’ve got to do the lab, too, don’t you?” said Staines.

  “Maybe I’ll do it in the morning.”

  It wasn’t ever quite enough to call in the honor council, but it was enough to make you want to move off his dorm, which is exactly what Thomas tried to do at the end of last year. And now here was Staines as his closest neighbor. Maybe he should just live in the damn gym like McPhee and Farnham. Dean Kaufman could move Farnham onto the dorm to work with Greg on the play, and Thomas could take over his apartment.

  “I need to work on that lab with somebody,” said Staines.

  “Ask Greg,” said Thomas. “He’s in the class.”

  “Boys like Greg are for cleaning up labs, not writing reports on them,” said Staines.

  It was enough to drive Thomas back to his own room.

  SCENE 8

  Thomas’s problems with Greg went back a long way.

  Montpelier School for Boys was over a hundred years old, but it had been racially integrated for only about twenty years. They still had a hard time recruiting African-Americans. This year, for instance, there were only five black guys in the whole school.

  One of them was Thomas’s roommate.

  Dean Kaufman had called Thomas in last spring at the end of his newboy year to ask him if he’d be willing to room with a new black student.

  “He’s very interested in theater,” the dean had said. “And considering your background, I thought . . .”

  Finish your sentence, Dean Kaufman, Thomas had thought. That was a running joke around the school, the way the dean never finished his sentences. Kaufman the Clueless, everybody called him.

  “I was going to room with Richard Blackburn,” Thomas had said. He hadn’t wanted a black roommate. Not that he was prejudiced. He’d gone to school at Cathedral Academy with black kids before he’d come to Montpelier and believed in affirmative action and equal opportunity and civil rights. Still, there was something unsettling about rooming with a black guy, a total stranger and all.

  “You and Richard could still be very good friends,” Dean Kaufman had said.

  “Could we be on the same dorm?”

  “Sure, sure,” Dean Kaufman had said. “Of course you could. And I think you’d really enjoy Greg. He’ll be a fourth-former, like you, and he’s from Baltimore, so maybe during vacations, I don’t know, since you’re from Washington, maybe you could, you know . . .”

  “Get together.”

  “Exactly.”

  Dean Kaufman was such a loser. Everybody called him Bozo because of his thick black glasses frames and his frizzy brown hair he combed straight back off his high forehead.

  What else could Thomas have said except sure, he’d be glad to? When he’d told his parents, they’d been very happy—good opportunity, high tribute to you, son, and all that other stuff. So he’d written Greg Lipscomb a letter over the summer, and Greg’d written back in that really tidy block print he always wrote in, and in August Greg’s mom had driven him down to Washington in their new Honda Civic, and they’d spent the weekend messing around in Washington just to get to know each other before the fall.

  Greg had really been fun that weekend, cracking hilarious jokes and eager to do anything anybody’d suggested. Thomas had been looking forward to rooming with him. And in September, when they’d moved into their room on Middle Stringfellow, things had been nearly perfect at first. Thomas had been mad that Richa
rd Blackburn wasn’t living on Stringfellow at all, that Richard and Ralph Musgrove, his roommate, had been put in a room all the way over on Stratford House. It was so typical of Dean Kaufman to screw everything up. That was still okay, though, because Thomas went over to Stratford House a lot anyway to see his advisor, Mr. Warden, who lived there in one of the apartments. And it turned out that Thomas and Richard were in a bunch of classes together anyway, and they were both third-string on the JV football team.

  At first Greg had fit right in. You would have hardly thought he was a newboy at all, the way he learned his way around the school so quickly—not the geography so much, which was easy, but the other stuff, the stuff you never see written down but just understand somehow, like always standing up at the dinner table until the master of the table arrives or letting the seniors break in line at the snack bar during study hall break.

  Then something had changed. It was gradual, though, for Thomas couldn’t pin it down to a particular day or incident. Maybe it was when they’d found out that Greg was going to audition for the fall play instead of go out for a sport. Everybody at Montpelier had to participate in athletics all year long—football, basketball, and baseball; or cross-country, wrestling, and track; or soccer, swimming, and tennis; or some other combination—but you could get out of sports for a season if you were involved in a play. They said the play was equivalent to the athletic commitment. That was true enough as far as the time went; those guys spent hours over at Bradley getting ready for the performances. The students were wary, however, about drama. You had to be careful about which play you were in. It was okay to be in the spring play, because a bunch of seniors usually went out for parts just to say they’d done it before they graduated. It was even okay most of the time to be in the winter play, as long as some cool people were in it. But you never, never went out for the fall play. Fall was football season, and football was king of the sports; you were considered a geek if you did drama in the fall.

  Especially if you were a good athlete, like Greg. He was big, around six feet tall and 170 pounds, and he was only fifteen years old. They’d shot some basketball on the tiny little court Thomas’s dad had put into their backyard at the townhouse in Georgetown, and Greg had eaten Thomas up. He’d killed him. He could catch a football, too, as they’d seen within a day or so of his arrival at school, when a pass from a pickup game on the Quad had gone wild and from the sidewalk Greg had just snared it with one hand—with one single hand—and had flipped it back about forty yards to the players. He was an awesome athlete. Thomas just couldn’t understand it when he said he wasn’t going out for football. “I didn’t come here to play football,” Greg had said. “I could have played football at home.”

  “Yeah, but you could probably make varsity. You could still go out for a play in the spring.”

  “I’m playing tennis in the spring,” Greg had said.

  Thomas had warned him that nobody would think he was cool.

  “I didn’t come here to be cool,” Greg had said.

  Thomas had said he didn’t understand why a person would deliberately sabotage his chance to fit in.

  So Greg had done a dinky little one-act play in the fall, and then damned if he hadn’t gone out for the winter play as well. He’d even asked Farnham to do Othello so he could be the star.

  Thomas had begged him to go out for basketball. “We need you,” he’d said. “We don’t have a single black guy on our team.”

  Greg had just shaken his head in that irritatingly stubborn way of his.

  After that day, they hadn’t done much talking. Greg spent most of his time reading or studying by himself. Sometimes an entire evening in the room would pass without either one saying a word to the other.

  And just before Thanksgiving, Thomas had arranged to room with Richard Blackburn for the next academic year.

  SCENE 9

  A tumor.

  Cynthia and Benjamin Warden sat side by side on the sofa in their living room. It was 7:15 P.M., and the dormitory around them was noisy in the last-minute rush before study hours began at 7:30. It had been their decision, though, to live in such turmoil. When they were married, Eldridge Lane, the headmaster, had offered them a quiet, private house outside the perimeter of the central campus, but Cynthia had objected on the grounds that she would not have been as active in the life of the school. In typical fashion, she had demanded to participate. So they had taken Stratford House on the Quad.

  Tonight was the first time Warden had regretted their choice of housing. Cynthia, trying to rest, had her eyes closed and her head back on the corduroy slipcover.

  “It’s the oddest sensation,” she said. “Like falling but never hitting the bottom. I’m falling to the left.”

  Degenerative nerve disease.

  Warden told her that she should be in bed.

  “I could just go to sleep right here.”

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  “Because we have to talk about Christmas.”

  Warden thought it was crazy for them to be sitting here having such an ordinary conversation under such extraordinary circumstances. Cynthia had come home at 3:00 in the afternoon exhausted from tests and doctors. She was to check into the hospital for more tests tomorrow.

  “Shouldn’t we wait to find out what’s making you sick?”

  “Maybe we should,” she said, “but Margaret deserves a reply to her letter.”

  Margaret was Warden’s sister-in-law, married to his brother Lawrence. They lived in Atlanta with their son, Joshua, who had drawn the decoration for the refrigerator door, and they had invited the Wardens to stay with them for Christmas. Harold Cunningham, Cynthia’s father, had also issued an invitation for them to spend Christmas with him on his farm in Warrenton.

  A stroke.

  Dr. Manning had sent her from his office to that of a neurologist. The specialist had told her that he wasn’t sure of what she might have; it could be anything from a freak viral infection that would pass from her system to something more serious: a growth, a stroke, cancer.

  Cancer.

  Warden was trying to sensitize himself to the word, the ugly, hard, cutting syllables with the serpent’s hiss at the end. He was playing over and over all the dreadful possibilities.

  But, he reminded himself, it could be nothing serious.

  “I vote for a holiday here,” said Warden. “Start our own traditions. Atlanta is too far. Harold could come visit us.”

  “Dad doesn’t leave the farm.”

  “Not for ordinary events like our wedding. But maybe he’d come if we invited him for Christmas.” Maybe, he thought, if Harold knew his daughter was dying. Harold had raised Cynthia on his horse farm single-handedly since the divorce almost two decades ago. Cynthia’s mother had bred dogs. Upon discovering that she liked dogs better than babies, Mrs. Cunningham had moved away when Cynthia was three, taking all the dogs and leaving her only child. Cynthia had stopped hearing from her mother after her sixteenth birthday.

  “Dad’s been trying, Ben,” said Cynthia. “It’s just taking him a long time to get used to having his daughter married, that’s all.”

  “To having his daughter married to a freak,” said Warden. He touched his birthmark.

  “A poet.”

  “An imperfect foal.”

  “Go to, sirrah,” she said. “He invited us for Christmas. That’s progress.”

  He said he would go if she wanted, would do whatever she liked. “Tomorrow I’m going to wake up and this whole thing is going to be a dream. It’s going to be last week again, and we won’t have had Thanksgiving yet, and I won’t have gone to New York, and you won’t have gotten sick.”

  “We’re not going to advertise this trip to the hospital,” Cynthia said. She looked so beautiful with her head laid back on the sofa, with her blond hair loose and fanning behind her face. It was like the hair of Ophelia in Holman Hunt’s painting Warden had seen in the Tate Gallery. A painting of double death: Ophelia died before the play was
over; Hunt’s model for the painting, his lover, caught a cold from lying in water to pose and also died.

  Warden reminded her that the Somervilles knew already, and that the inevitable rumor machine at Montpelier would undoubtedly circulate the news.

  “I was thinking of family,” said Cynthia. “People who aren’t here. My dad. Your brother. They don’t need to be worried unnecessarily.”

  Warden agreed.

  Cynthia held his hand in her lap palm up, as though she were reading it. “I’m only twenty-three years old,” she said. “That’s too young to be seriously ill.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Only it’s hard to deny this sense of free-fall.” She pulled his hand up to her face. “It helps to know you’re falling with me.”

  Warden encircled her with an arm and held her to him. “We are not accomplishing anything except to tire you out,” he said. He accused her of suffering a classic case of psychological denial; she had insisted upon dining with the boys tonight.

  Cynthia said he was right, that she’d been unwise. “I just want life to be exactly the way it had been before,” she said.

  But how is that, thought Warden. No day is like the previous one. The earth is slowing down, the sun is burning out, the universe itself is expanding so quickly that eventually it must tear itself down the middle like a patch of putty.

  They had gone to the dining hall early, at 6:15 for the 6:30 dinner, so that the boys would not see Cynthia limping to the table. They had remained at the table afterward until the room was clear.

  “I start feeling so sorry for myself,” said Cynthia, “and then I look around at your advisees, and I wonder what kinds of trouble they’re suffering. You know how awful life is when you’re that age.”

  “My advisees are privileged little preppies. The worst trouble they have is getting through Great Expectations without using Cliff’s Notes.”

  Cynthia said he was wrong. “Tonight I was watching Thomas Boatwright,” she said. “Did you notice him before we ate? He stared at Chuck Heilman the whole time Chuck was saying the blessing. He was oblivious.”