Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  And yet, even in the perfection of it all, even in the wonder of being with her and touching her fingers and laughing with her, in the back of his mind, like the hiss of a snake, Thomas heard the words of Robert Staines. “She wants it,” said the voice. “They always act like they don’t, but they do.”

  And Thomas’s heart throbbed a beat quicker.

  SCENE 21

  Cynthia put on a dry Montpelier School sweatshirt over her blouse. She had changed skirts and knee socks and had found some boots. She patted her hair dry with a towel and reentered Ben’s study. He crossed an entire line out and tapped the paper with his pen.

  “It’s 7:30,” she said. “I’m going over to the mixer.”

  Ben said nothing. He had not heard her.

  She approached his desk.

  “Ben,” she said, as she touched him on the shoulder.

  “Yes,” he said without looking up.

  “Have you seen Kevin’s pass key to the gym?”

  Then he did look up.

  “What?” he said.

  “The key. Have you seen it?”

  He shuffled some papers on the desktop. “It was here,” he said. “I wonder what I did with it.”

  “What did you do with your trash from dinner?”

  “Trash?”

  “The Coke can and the lasagna plate,” Cynthia said. “The silverware?”

  Warden looked around the room, then into the wastebasket half filled with balls of paper.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  Cynthia found the Styrofoam plate and the empty Coke can in his bottom drawer. Their silverware was in the wastebasket.

  The key, apparently, had disappeared.

  SCENE 22

  Greg Lipscomb was the only student in Hathaway Library. He was also the only male and the only black person. He was, he teased himself, the only person, unless you wanted to count Mrs. Shepherd, the librarian, who was an old white bag (she was at least forty-five years old), who talked on the phone, laughed a lot, and was always asking you what you were reading.

  He’d checked out the buses when they arrived. There had been only two black chicks in the whole load, both of them with boyfriends here. The white folks’ schools were trying, he supposed, but that didn’t make it any easier if you were one of the trailblazers.

  To hell with them. He’d come over to the library to browse around in the Archives Room, which Mrs. Shepherd was delighted to open for him after she’d gone through the usual jive about his social life.

  “Why aren’t you at the mixer tonight?” she had said. “You might be able to meet a girl.”

  He hated the way she emphasized her key words. Why is the library even open tonight, he’d wanted to say to her, but instead he’d said something about going over to the dance later on. That was so typical of the way these adults operated. They open up the library, but then they act surprised and start messing with you when you go there. It was 8:30. He’d been here for half an hour, and he had ninety minutes to go until Mrs. Shepherd finished moving magazines from one stack to another and closed the place down.

  He was sitting at a rectangular, plastic-wood-covered table with a large folder the size of an artist’s portfolio open in front of him. Beside him in a chair he had dumped his hunting cap and his damp green ski jacket, which his parents had given him at Thanksgiving as an early Christmas present. He had on a white button-down shirt and a good pair of jeans; he was dressed for the mixer anyway. But for now he was looking through old blueprints. The one Mr. Delaney had given him for art class had dated from the 1920s. Greg wanted to find one from an earlier era.

  The diagrams weren’t just of Stringfellow Hall. He’d already run into some interesting floor plans for Hathaway Library, from before the time they’d added the periodicals wing and the audiovisual center, and for Stratford House, which apparently was exactly the same since they’d built it in the 1940s—thirteen rooms for twenty-six boys and a faculty apartment tacked onto each side.

  Somebody had stuck in with the plans an old clipping from The Washington Post. It had a big picture of Stringfellow Hall and a smaller picture of Mr. Somerville in front of the Homestead and another one of some boys playing lacrosse. It was a big feature article, over half a newspaper page long, all about the school, and Greg read part of it with a mixture of pride and embarrassment over being a part of the place:

  Before Montpelier Plantation became a school in 1868, it was a working vegetable farm. The old wooden Homestead had been the original farmhouse since the previous century, but in 1858 Virginius Stringfellow had started to build himself an extensive plantation house two hundred yards away. He and his sons had raised the walls and the roof and had roughed out the interior just before the Civil War started, and the house had stood like a ruin until 1868, when ex-Captain Stringfellow, his men, and their families decided that if the South was going to rise again, it needed to be well educated.

  The first schoolboys lived in the old brick-and-log kitchen while the unfinished Big House—now renamed Main Hall—was completed. It took five years for Captain Stringfellow, his five sons, and the schoolboys to get the place habitable, a big, square three-story box of a building with a dozen classrooms and a barracks dormitory in the attic. In 1905 the enterprising Stringfellow clan added a wing and built a modest library; in 1920 they added another wing; and in the late 1920s, just before the stock market crash of 1929, they completed a major capital campaign that raised the roof of the entire building, added another entire floor plus an attic, and modernized the plumbing, wiring, and heat. That same campaign was responsible for the building of the current library building and a mammoth gymnasium, which subsumed several of the older outbuildings on the property. (Lost to the gym were the original library and the old kitchen, the school’s first dormitory.) It was the last great triumph for Captain Stringfellow, who died riding a horse in 1930 at the age of ninety. He had been the school’s only headmaster for sixty-two years.

  During the 1930s Montpelier School did little building, but it accomplished something much more important: it established a reputation. By now it had a student population of 150 boys in grades seven through twelve. Talented alumni who could not get good jobs came back to the school to teach, and before long, word spread through Virginia and the Carolinas, then later to Georgia and Tennessee, that Captain Stringfellow’s school was a good one. For years, graduates of the school had attended colleges like the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina, but by 1940, Princeton, Williams, and Yale were attracting Montpelier alumni. In the 1940s and 1950s, the school built a series of residential houses and expanded its student population to 300. It reached its current size of 360 students and fifty faculty members in the mid-1960s. And now, with graduates enrolling in every school in the Ivy League, the Montpelier School is one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country.

  It sounded good on paper.

  Clipped to the newspaper article was what looked, at first, like a large piece of scrap paper. When he looked again, Greg could see it was an old blueprint. Or rather, it was a copy of an old blueprint, with which somebody had done a lot of work. It had round, brown coffee stains around the edges, penciled computations, and all kinds of lines drawn from nearly every corner and every wall. Most of the lines were scratched out or partially erased.

  The drawing itself was of two rectangular rooms, the ground floor and the basement of one building. The dimensions were 20’ x 30’. The upper floor was dominated by a gigantic fireplace along what Greg assumed was the northern wall, since it was at the top of the page, with a door on the east wall, and a total of three windows in the other two walls. Opposite the fireplace stairs led down to the clearly labeled cellar, a room with no windows and only one door.

  He looked at that door in the cellar more closely. Where the hell could it be leading? It opened onto a little hallway of some sort, one that peeled off toward the left-hand corner of the page—southwest, if the top of the paper was north. Bu
t the strange thing was that the hallway seemed to just open up into the ground. Was it a larder of some sort? He turned the sheet over to look for some kind of identifying label on the plans, and what he read momentarily confused him. Someone on the back had written in pencil GYMNASIUM.

  He looked back at the drawing. This couldn’t be the gym. The gym was huge. Had there been an old gym at Montpelier? Why would they have a fireplace in the gym?

  Oh, yes. He had it. Why would somebody clip this drawing to that article if there weren’t a connection? What he was looking at, he realized with delight, was one of the older outbuildings absorbed by the new gymnasium.

  The old caretaker’s cottage. It had to be. The dimensions were right, and the place still had a fireplace. And that hallway leading off from the cellar could be a closet, or it could be a larder.

  Or it could be a tunnel. His heart went into a tap dance.

  Okay, okay, now don’t panic. Think clearly.

  What if it was a tunnel? What would the tunnel connect? He closed his eyes and pictured the fireplace in the lobby of the gym. It was on the south end. So if he twisted the drawing around with the fireplace on the south, then the tunnel led off across the Quad toward Stratford House.

  That made no sense.

  Why would the caretaker’s cottage have a tunnel at all? And why would it lead to Stratford House? The outer houses weren’t even built until twenty years after the gym got finished.

  For a moment he was dejected. Then he realized that it didn’t have to be the caretaker’s cottage at all. There were two other outbuildings swallowed by the gym. And one of them was the old kitchen for the Homestead. Sure, that was it. They would want a kitchen to have a tunnel so that the food would stay warm in cold weather. Mr. McPhee’s apartment was right on the site of the old kitchen, according to Mr. Somerville, and he had a good-sized fireplace.

  But there was another problem. Mr. McPhee’s fireplace was on the east side of the gym, bordering the Quad. Greg looked at the plans again. If this were the fireplace in Mr. McPhee’s apartment, then the tunnel in this blueprint would lead off toward the athletic fields, directly away from Stringfellow Hall and from the Homestead. Would they want a kitchen with a tunnel leading to the outside? Maybe.

  But there was another fireplace in Mr. Farnham’s apartment on the south end of the gym. Mr. Farnham’s fireplace was on the west wall. So if you considered the fireplace in this drawing to be on a west wall instead of a north one, as Greg had assumed at first, then the tunnel led off not to the southwest, but to the southeast. Straight to Stringfellow Hall. Greg turned the blueprint ninety degrees counterclockwise and imagined the fireplace as Farnham’s. That was the one. The tunnel—if it was a tunnel, he reminded himself—connected Farnham’s apartment with the main building on campus. And Greg had found it.

  He had maybe, conceivably, possibly found the secret passage Mr. Delaney was talking about, and it was right in a teacher’s home. It made so much sense. The reason nobody had been able to find the tunnel before was that it didn’t connect the Homestead itself with Stringfellow; it connected the old library of the school with Stringfellow. Sure, they would want to be able to get to the books if it snowed or something.

  Greg was having a good time playing with the possibilities.

  The gym was built so that when you entered the building from the Quad, you were actually on the second floor, the floor with the basketball court. The tunnel, being in the cellar of the old library, would then be on the basement floor, the locker room level of the gym. Was it behind a closet? Or maybe it was still open, with a piece of furniture in front of the entrance. Could Mr. Farnham know about it? He closed the blueprints carefully back into the large folder and left it, as he had been told to do, on the table in the Archives Room. Through the glass separating him from the library’s office, he could see Mrs. Shepherd typing index cards. He knocked on the glass and waved a combination thank-you and goodbye to her, grabbed his ski jacket, and ran out of the building. He could get into trouble for being out on the campus alone at night, but it was just a short run down to Bradley Hall. Thomas would want to hear about this. Maybe Mr. Farnham would even let them into his apartment to look.

  A tiny voice of misgiving—that it had all been conjecture so far, that he could be making a mistake—whispered to him to slow down. He ignored it and ran for Bradley Hall, to the mixer.

  SCENE 23

  Cynthia Warden ran into the towering Felix Grayson in the lobby of Bradley Hall. Noise from both sides of the building indicated that the bands were indeed performing as promised.

  She explained that her husband had lost Kevin Delaney’s key and that she needed some way of getting into the gym.

  The information did not improve Grayson’s mood. “I sure as hell hope none of these kids find it,” he said.

  “It’s at home somewhere,” she said.

  He asked her if she had seen Kemper Carella, one of his missing duty men.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been trying to find someone who could let me into the gym.” She had tried to call Pat McPhee but had gotten no answer.

  “Farnham’s back in that scene shop,” said Grayson. “He’s spent his whole duty day over here. Get a key from him.”

  Cynthia hesitated. “I don’t want to bother him if he’s working,” she said.

  “Bother him,” said Grayson. “He needs to clean himself up and start acting like a chaperone.”

  “Would you like to walk back with me?”

  Grayson looked to see if she was joking. “I’m getting some air,” he said. “The eardrums can stand only so much.”

  They stood in the tiled lobby as students passed them going to and from the auditorium on the right and the art studio on the left off the hallway behind the stage. The idea for two bands had been Cynthia’s. One group played on the stage as a concert group; the other band was set up in the large art studio for dancing. Her plan had been to achieve intimacy in the dance space and still to provide an open concert atmosphere for those who wanted to sit and listen. From the traffic it seemed that all students wanted merely to move from one band to the other.

  Cynthia turned away from the auditorium and maneuvered down the crowded backstage hallway. In the scene shop she found Daniel Farnham staining the frame of a four-poster bed. Farnham looked like one of the boys in his jeans and his old green Izod. Even the little mustache gave him the appearance of an adolescent who had not yet started to shave. Despite the closed door between stage and scene shop, they struggled to communicate, even with shouting. The conversation would have required mime and lip reading had the neighboring band not decided to take a break.

  “Isn’t it terrific?” said Farnham, pointing to the bed. “I got it in a junk shop in town. Just finished sanding it and putting it together this afternoon.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to stain the pieces separately before you joined them?”

  “Yes.”

  Cynthia laughed. “But you’re doing it this way.”

  “Nobody in the audience will be able to see my mistakes anyway.”

  Cynthia liked the bed. It was a queen-size, with four tall posts rising at each corner and a sturdy wooden headboard at one end. There was no mattress or box springs.

  “That’s my next step,” said Farnham. “We want something comfortable for you to lie on before you die.”

  “I’ve been studying lines,” said Cynthia. “I want to come back to rehearsal next week.”

  Farnham said that was the best news he’d heard since Grayson had told him the mixer would be over by 11:00.

  “The good Mrs. Kaufman is willing, but not able,” he said. “We need you as Desdemona.”

  “I need to do it,” she said.

  Farnham brushed the wood of the bed a few more times.

  “Do they know what’s wrong?” He did not look at her when he asked.

  “We have to get a second opinion.” Cynthia watched him brush more stain onto the frame. She said she had never delivered
a line lying down before.

  “It’s tough. You have to practice the breathing.”

  Farnham dipped the brush into the can of stain and applied more to the darkening surface of the wood. They spoke simultaneously, then paused.

  “Go ahead,” said Cynthia.

  Farnham shook his head.

  “I was wondering if you were planning to go home soon,” said Cynthia. “I need to get into the gym.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour or so. Grayson told me to change before I took a turn in the noise inferno.” He asked her why she needed to go to the gym.

  “I’m inspecting to make sure no miscreant students sneak in,” she said.

  “I could do that for you.”

  “I want to do it,” said Cynthia. She was both amused and annoyed with all the male chivalry.

  “You want to go now?” said Farnham. “My apartment is unlocked. You can cut through to the trophy room.”

  “It’s not a good idea to leave your apartment unlocked,” said Cynthia. She was remembering Robert Staines’s visit to her home yesterday.

  “There’s nothing to steal.” Farnham continued to stain the bed. “I didn’t think you’d be back here after Monday night,” he said.

  “Dan, drop it.”

  “I don’t know how I could lose my self-control like that. I promise you it won’t happen again,” he said.

  “I’d better go,” said Cynthia.

  “My feelings just got the best of me,” he said.

  Cynthia said she was leaving now.

  “Cynthia,” he said, “give me a chance to apologize.”

  She buttoned her raincoat and pulled a plastic scarf over her head. “Your apology is accepted,” she said.

  After she left, Farnham continued his brush strokes on the bed for half a minute. Then he hurled the brush at the cinder-block wall, where it left a brown smear and fell, with a faint clatter, to the floor.