He wondered how long it had taken her to come up with that last line. She’d probably been practicing it for days. He tried to work himself into indignation, but he couldn’t get it to stay. He was building it on a shaky, soggy bog of guilt and self-disgust, and his anger was only an illusion. He felt sick and ashamed and very lonely.
On the dormitory he called the familiar number for Mason, only this time he asked for his sister’s dormitory.
“Thomas!” Barbara said. “How are you? What is going on down there? I hear you had some mad slasher on the loose.”
“They caught him. He was my English teacher.”
“Gross!” she said. “Does it make you feel weird?”
Thomas said he supposed so. It was so comforting just to hear Barbara’s voice. She talked like a damn airhead but was only about the smartest person in the eastern United States. She was going to be valedictorian of her class and was going to hear any day from Amherst about her early application. Ever since he’d been a little kid, Barbara had been there as his protective older sister, showing him around, spoiling him probably, but there. He could imagine her there by the telephone, her long black hair pulled back by her right hand into a makeshift ponytail while her left hand held the receiver. She’d be wearing some sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, and she’d have on her favorite little gold pegged earrings.
“Have you talked to Hesta lately?” he asked her.
“Thomas, that’s bad,” said Barbara. He felt himself going weaker and colder with shame. “She hasn’t said anything to me at all since Saturday. What happened?”
“I guess I was stupid,” he said. “Could you talk to her for me?”
“Did you do something wrong?”
“I guess so.”
“I could tell her you’re sorry,” said Barbara. “That’s not much.”
“That’s why I’m calling you,” said Thomas. “What else can I do?”
“Wait and see,” said Barbara. “She may never forgive you. You might just have to learn a lesson the hard way.”
Thomas was tired of learning lessons.
Barbara had to go to gymnastics. Thomas hung up and went immediately to basketball practice, where he hit eight out of nine shots from the floor and got called for seven fouls during the intrasquad scrimmage.
“There’s a new fire in Boatwright,” said Coach McPhee. “I wish we could just turn down the thermostat a little.”
After practice, Thomas stayed and shot free throws. He hit thirty-eight out of fifty, and he and Coach McPhee talked about women.
“You remember how you told me about that girl in the other apartment?” said Thomas. “The one you used to watch when you were my age?”
“I knew I’d regret mentioning her,” said Coach McPhee. He was joking.
“I was just wondering,” said Thomas, “if you ever knew her name.”
Coach McPhee was surprised by the question. “I don’t think so,” he said. “She went to a girls’ school. What brought this up?”
“I don’t know,” said Thomas. “It just seems easier to like girls in general than to like one in particular.” It was hard to explain. “If you’d known her name, somehow that would have made it less funny. To be watching her in private like that. To be using her. I don’t know what I mean.”
Coach McPhee didn’t answer. He took a couple of shots himself before he threw the ball back to Thomas.
“So you’re still bothered by some girl trouble,” said Coach McPhee.
“Yes sir.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“It’s embarrassing,” said Thomas. He wanted to talk, but he didn’t know where to start.
Coach McPhee said it didn’t matter. “I’ve heard the story many times before,” he said. “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wants girl back but she won’t come.”
“That’s it,” said Thomas.
“Exercise and abstinence are the best cures,” said Coach McPhee. “Take my word for it.” He dribbled the length of the court and shot a lay-up, leaving Thomas to rebound his own shots.
Thomas felt like a freak. All the guys just moved from girl to girl without a qualm. Coach McPhee lost his wife and didn’t even blink. Nobody at Montpelier seemed to understand how much he was hurting. Maybe if he’d been at home he could have talked about it with Dad, but not over the telephone, not on the dorm with people walking by. The guy he really wanted to see was Mr. Warden, his advisor, who was away to prepare for his wife’s funeral. Mr. Warden seemed to be the only one who could understand what it meant to grieve.
Coach McPhee dribbled back up the court.
“You’re better off without them,” he said. “Trust me.”
“You’re right,” said Thomas. “I’m never going to fool with girls again.” He shot the basketball. Coach McPhee rebounded and shot one himself.
“Do you think I’ll be able to keep that promise?” Thomas asked him.
“No way,” said Coach McPhee. They both laughed.
“That’s the spirit,” said the coach.
But Thomas felt like an actor who was only providing his audience what it wanted. He couldn’t stand thinking that she hated him so much, and he couldn’t find anybody who could sympathize.
The Final Act
SCENE 1
Warden sat in his office and looked out the window at the crusting snow. He knew he would be looking at the same snow in March, even with the inevitable January thaw that would give everyone a false hope of spring before the arctic wind currents shifted and again forced everyone into hats and gloves and scarves.
It was Wednesday, December 15. Cynthia had been dead for nine days. It was over. Lawrence and Margaret had come up from Atlanta for the funeral. Joseph Moore, his literary agent, had flown in from New York. There had been many friends—editors, other writers, people from the university, women Cynthia had known in school. For a week his apartment had been jammed with casseroles and cakes and hams and congealed salads and coffee and beer and wine. He had been surprised at how much publicity there was; Time magazine even ran a short piece. People he had never met had written him notes of sympathy. Television crews had come out for interviews.
Warden had received a kind word from every person he knew in the world during the past week, it seemed, except for one.
Harold Cunningham.
His father-in-law had attended the funeral. It was held by the graveside at the Warden family’s plot in Charlottesville. Harold had come, had rebuffed Warden’s invitation to sit with the rest of his family, had left after delivering only one brutal line to Warden.
“She would still be alive today,” Harold had said, “if she had not married you.”
Warden had been convicting himself on the same charge for days. Why had he been so selfish as to bring her to Montpelier? Why had he not remained in the theater with her that afternoon? But the result of Harold’s accusation was to show Warden the absurdity of such thinking. Harold had accomplished the opposite of his mission; he had helped Warden start to forgive himself.
That was the past. It was Wednesday, December 15. Cynthia had been dead for nine days. It was over.
It was over, he corrected himself, except for the legal aftermath. Carol Scott had come out with a woman from the district attorney’s office to ask him questions about Daniel Farnham, who was still in police custody but was now in the hospital with anemia and a bleeding ulcer. The man continued to claim that it must have been the still-missing Angus Farrier who had set him up. Warden was certain that Angus was dead—there was no other explanation for his extended absence—but his missing body complicated the case against Farnham.
Warden shook the memory out of his head. It was Wednesday, December 15. Cynthia had been dead for nine days. It was time for him to get on with his own life. It was time to remember the rest of the world. Now it was time to remember his vocation.
He looked at the blank paper in front of him. He was trying to write, but there was nothing to write. His wife was dead and
buried. He had thought that nothing could be worse than knowing she was ill, and he had been wrong. This absence was worse. Two days ago he had read that most wives stay with husbands who have multiple sclerosis while most men leave their sick wives. Such betrayal was inconceivable to him, as untenable as the abstract thoughts of euthanasia he had abandoned after the briefest of flirtations. He had chosen to stay with Cynthia for better or for worse. But she had left unexpectedly.
It was 10:15 in the morning. Boys walked to dormitories. A normal life occurred in the hallways and on the sidewalks around him. In half an hour he had a class to teach. And he was numb.
He heard a knock. It was Thomas Boatwright, his advisee. Warden had forgotten that he’d asked the boy to come by today. He seemed to be forgetting everything except his life with Cynthia, which he recalled constantly in agonizingly fresh detail.
For the moment, however, he turned his attention to the boy. Boatwright had been just as depressed as Warden himself for the past week. You could tell it in everything about him, from the way his head drooped to the way he dressed. Even today Warden noticed the grime on his jeans and the dirt on the old sweatshirt the boy had on. The kid’s hair was poorly washed and unkempt—unkempt for Boatwright, who was usually tidy—but his eyes still looked okay. No glaze, no hostility. This was a boy who wasn’t turning to drugs, Warden decided. He was a boy in some kind of spiritual pain, and it was Warden’s duty as Boatwright’s advisor to help if he could.
“Sit down, Thomas.” The boy took a chair beside the desk and sat with his blue hardback notebook and three thick textbooks in his lap. Warden caught a faint odor of funk. He decided not to ask about the last time the sweatshirt had been washed.
“I owe you an apology,” Warden said. “I’ve been so wrapped up in my own problems that I haven’t paid any attention to yours. Is there anything bothering you? Anything you’d like to discuss with me?”
He saw the boy’s eyes brim with tears, saw the lashes blink them back before they could trickle onto his cheeks.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for so long,” said Boatwright. “But I thought it would be so unfair.”
“Why unfair?”
“Because of what happened to Mrs. Warden. It would be selfish of me to ask for your sympathy.”
Warden’s fingertips casually brushed the birthmark on the left side of his face.
“I can appreciate your thinking that way, Thomas,” said Warden. “But you’re doing me a favor right now. You’re giving me a chance to think about somebody besides myself.”
Boatwright managed a rueful grunt of recognition. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about, too.”
“What’s the trouble?”
The boy was hesitant at first, hard to get started in his narrative. But once he began, the whole story cascaded like effluvium out of his mouth. Warden could watch the weight depart from the boy’s shoulders as he talked, as the words tripped and fell and shoved one another for the chance finally to get out into the daylight.
“I didn’t know I was hurting her, you know?” he said. “I called her and then wrote her to apologize. She wrote back and it’s like she hates me. I always thought, you know, you could make up for your mistakes. But I can’t do anything. I keep calling, she won’t talk. I keep writing, she never answers. I feel like such an ass, and nobody around here seems to care. They act like I’m a wimp for even wanting to see her again. And all my dad can say is that there are plenty more fish in the sea.”
Warden wanted to tell him it would be all right, but it would have been the same, standard conventional wisdom Warden himself had found so unsatisfactory. They had both suffered a loss. They both needed time to recover.
“I’m sorry,” Warden said. “I know it hurts. And you know that I care.”
“Coach McPhee says the best thing to do is to pour myself into basketball. Physical exercise helps, he says.”
“That’s good advice. So does mental exercise. Schoolwork can be a fine distraction.”
“Yes sir.” He pulled out a cream-colored envelope from his notebook. “I got invited to tea at the Homestead tonight by the Somervilles,” he said. “Do you think it’s a mistake? I was just there two weeks ago.”
“I think the Somervilles are trying to look after us,” said Warden. “I got an invitation myself. Will you be there?”
“If practice is over in time, yes sir.”
“Good. I’ll see you there.”
Boatwright stood up to leave as though he had just been unshackled.
“Mr. Warden?”
“Yes?”
“Who’s going to be taking Mr. Farnham’s classes for good?”
Warden explained that they were looking for a qualified substitute, that if they could find none, the rest of the members of the department would divide the duties. “Or maybe Dean Kaufman and his wife,” he added.
“Could I make a request?” asked Boatwright.
“Certainly.”
“I’d really like to have you.”
“You’re not enjoying Mr. McPhee?”
“He’s great,” said Boatwright. “Everybody just says you’re the best when it’s time for poetry.”
“We’ll see what happens,” said Warden. The boy left. There was something warming about genuine praise devoid of all sycophancy. The surge of joy Warden felt surprised him, like a warm current in a cold lake. And then he felt terribly guilty. He had forgiven himself for marrying Cynthia and bringing her to Montpelier, but he was not entitled to know happiness. How could he be happy with Cynthia dead? How could he dare be happy? What an insensitive, selfish lout he was.
He turned his attention back to the blank sheet of paper on his desktop and picked up his pen. Then, instead of writing, he drew a human face, a face blotched and disfigured down the left side, a face that was ugly and frightening and evil.
SCENE 2
At 4:00 on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 15, just a few hours after Thomas Boatwright had his conference with Benjamin Warden, Horace Somerville found Kevin Delaney in the art room in Bradley Hall cleaning paintbrushes at the sink.
“I tried the gym first,” said Somerville. “I thought you’d be having practice.”
“Yeah,” said Delaney. “With two cases of the flu, one separated shoulder, three sprained ankles, a knee with the ligaments twisted, and at least four people with a major history test tomorrow, I guess I could have had practice with the single available boy left on the team, but I decided to give him the day off. Yesterday’s game demolished us. I’m too old for this.”
Somerville had long ago decided Delaney was the kind of art teacher who would have been sculpted by Henry Moore: heavy and rounded everywhere, with a double chin and drooping eyelids, arms like a blacksmith’s, and a beach-balloon belly. He wore socks that rarely matched and occasionally even two different kinds of shoes. A man of his size belonged in the art room, which was the largest single classroom on campus, at least fifty feet square, with one half given over to blackboards and four large tables with chairs and the other half to easels, boards for working clay, and a pottery wheel. Shelves throughout held residue from the past decade of students: figurines of every medium from clay to alabaster, charcoal drawings, acrylics, oils, watercolors, misshapen pots with peculiar glazes, broken mobiles awaiting repairs, plaster models of bizarre buildings.
Somerville had a rolled tube of paper. He took off his topcoat and laid it, folded, on a nearby stool. He held on to the paper.
“Look at this place,” said Delaney. “I still can’t find my pastel crayons. I am never letting them hold a mixer in here again.”
“It looks neater than my classroom,” said Somerville. “Can you talk while you wash?”
He could.
“Tell me about this secret tunnel.”
Delaney laughed. “You’ve been here longer than I have,” he said. “You tell me.”
“There have always been legends around here,” said Somerville. “What exactly have you heard?” �
�
Delaney said he’d heard stories about secret escape passages and hidden rooms and ghosts when he’d come to Montpelier twenty years before, and so he had decided to turn the rumors into an assignment.
“I told the kids to see if they could find a secret tunnel built by the Stringfellows from the Homestead to Stringfellow Hall.”
“Under the entire length of the Quad?”
“Sure.”
“But you knew all the time that there was no such tunnel.”
“I never told them exactly that there was a tunnel. I just encouraged them to find it,” said Delaney. He was shaking off the brushes.
“So the rumor of that particular passage started with you,” said Horace Somerville. “I thought so. I’d never heard of any tunnel from the Homestead to Stringfellow until you arrived here.”
“Okay,” said Delaney. “What’s the harm? It gets the boys looking at buildings, it gets them thinking about design. Who gets hurt?”
“I didn’t come here to file charges, Kevin.”
“I’m not the one who originated all the old tunnel lore, you know,” said Delaney. “I just embellished it a little.”
Horace Somerville admitted that the rumors about secret rooms and ghosts had preceded Delaney by decades.
“I’ve been thinking about those old stories recently,” he said. “A stray conversation I heard in the dining hall a week and a half ago started me off. Some boys were saying that there was an unpleasant odor in the basement of the gym. Kathleen and I have been having a terrible time with an odor in our own basement. I started to wonder whether the two odors could have the same source.”
Delaney said he didn’t follow.
“Have you ever considered there being a passage between the gym and the Homestead?” asked Somerville.
“Of course,” said Delaney. “That’s the one that makes the most sense, with part of the gym being your old kitchen for the Homestead. I’ve considered every permutation at one point or another. There’s a blueprint in the Archives Room of the library. Some kids have tampered with it, I think. It’s got some pencil marks showing a tunnel leading from the gym. But that particular tunnel seems to lead to Stringfellow.”
Passion Play Page 28
