by Paul Russell
“Knock it off,” Noah told him, half kidding but half serious as well. He’d have loved hearing those words earlier, they’d have made him blush with shy vanity, but now those same words made him uncomfortable, even edgy. Did people always feel like this afterward? Degraded and spent and vaguely lacking something?
“No, I mean it,” Tracy insisted.
“Let’s don’t talk, okay?” Noah said. “Let’s just go to sleep. I’m really tired.”
He hadn’t been burned to cinder and ash. There was nothing to it, in fact, this sweat-lathered mingling of bodies. People got fucked all over the world every day and survived, and though he couldn’t say he’d come through it untouched, at the same time he was still the same Noah Lathrop III as before.
XIII
The paths between the buildings had been cleared, the parking lots plowed: nice to see that the grounds crew, more often than not a weak link in the school’s great chain of being, had proved reliable in his absence. And how happy he was to have missed altogether what people were calling the Great New Year’s Eve Blizzard, a Northeaster prominent enough to have made the front page of the Arizona Daily Star (WINTER’S ICY GRIP…). Seated in his daughter Caroline’s comfortable Tucson kitchen over a morning cup of coffee, he had read of its fury. Even now, two weeks later, evidence of the onslaught remained everywhere in mountainous piles of unmelted snow a second blizzard had added to a few days later. Large trees—including several old beauties on campus, he noted sadly—were down. Some outlying areas in the county still lacked electricity. And in his own home, brown water stains spotting the upstairs ceilings told of ice dams along the roof’s edges. The weight of snow had brought down a length of front gutter on top of the rhododendrons.
Lux, however, was still alive, and that alone gladdened him greatly. Louis had felt guilty leaving the poor creature behind, though one couldn’t very well refuse to visit one’s daughter just because an aged and infirm dog occupied a perhaps too-prominent spot in one’s emotional life. A kennel, of course, had been out of the question at Lux’s age; despite some qualms about giving a comparative stranger free run of his house and its secrets, he had engaged Sandra Robertson, the Forge School’s young biology teacher, to house-sit for the holidays. He and Claire were very fond of Sandra, and Claire had even suggested, on more than one occasion, that it might be nice to have her over for dinner sometime when Tracy was also invited. But that had been before Tracy, with motives that still seemed fathomless, had chosen to ambush his unsuspecting friends not only with the unwelcome specter of Arthur Branson and all his attendant ghosts, but with his own unasked-for revelation as well, an announcement all the more eloquent for its lack of overt articulation, and from whose numinous shock Louis had still not recovered.
Trudging up the salted steps to the administration building, he paused to fumble among several nearly identical keys—he kept intending to mark them, somehow, but never got around to it—and after several unsuccessful attempts managed to let himself in the front door. The air inside had the stale smell of having been held close for a month, like breath in the lungs, though Security had supposedly been around to each of the campus buildings every few days to inspect for any damage—which, campuswide, had mercifully been minimal. It was a good thing he’d gone ahead and had Goethe Hall reroofed in November.
For some years now the start of a new semester had brought a strange heaviness of heart. It had been good to get away to Arizona; the dramatic change of climate, the clear desert air had thrilled him. He’d always scoffed at people who went south for the winter—snowbirds, he’d heard someone call them, a name far too magical for those sagging, liver-spotted fugitives. This year, however, for the first time, strolling around the development where his daughter lived, he understood the allure of warm, dry winters in a landscape beautifully reduced to its bare essentials.
Though the Hudson River Valley under snow, he thought loyally as he entered his office and reencountered, artistically framed through his windows, the impeccable sheet of white covering the quad, had its own essential beauty as well. If only it didn’t make ordinary life so difficult.
The red light on his answering machine blinked furiously, and while his first inclination was to leave all that till tomorrow, on second thought, with some sixth sense of dread, he pushed the Play button.
The voice was curt and to the point. “This is the father of one of your students, Noah Lathrop. It seems he’s gone off without telling anybody what he was up to, and I have a hunch he may be up there at the Forge School. He’s great buddies with one of your teachers, I can’t remember his name. So if you could, please get back to me. It’s very important.” He gave his number, also the date, which was New Year’s, a good two weeks ago. The next message, from later that same day, was also from Noah Senior; and the next message and the next, nine in all, each sounding slightly less concerned about the boy and slightly more irritated with Louis. The last message, from the tenth of January, informed him: “Noah Lathrop again. It’s fucking ridiculous that no one there seems to want to get back to me. Hello? Is anybody awake behind the goddamned steering wheel?”
Louis felt suitably chastised, reduced to a negligent schoolboy himself. Of course he should have checked his office messages long-distance, that would have been the prudent thing for a headmaster to do, but he could never remember the code he had to punch in to do so, and even when he had the code, as with most wonderful new technology, half the time he couldn’t make it work.
Without delay he called the number in New York, only to have the unforgiving voice on that answering machine rebuke him curtly. “I’m out of the country till the end of January. Leave a message. If I deem it important, I’ll get back to you.” How odd, Louis thought. Had the man found his son? What was going on? He remembered how he’d had an uneasy feeling about Noah’s father back in December—a whisper so vague he’d barely admitted it to himself. But it had been there nonetheless, a hint of ruthlessness, a dash of rapacious will that warned one—of what? At the same time he had found himself quietly compelled. Every now and again a parent would induce such a complicated reaction in him—as if they knew that, in the end, the headmaster of a school like the Forge School hardly counted in the scheme of the world.
He found his voice less steady than he would have liked. “Mr. Lathrop,” he said. “Louis Tremper here returning your call. I apologize terribly for the delay in getting back to you.” He paused, unsure what more to say. He would not grovel; he would be brisk and professional. Nonetheless he was afraid. “Perhaps you could call me at your earliest convenience,” he said quickly and then hung up.
In defiance or penance he played the messages through a second time. It was all distinctly worrying. He had no doubt that the faculty member Noah was “buddies” with would be Tracy Parker, and there was no denying that he’d been troubled, ever since that day he’d visited Tracy’s class back in the fall, by something in the dynamic between Tracy and that particular student, a tension he couldn’t really attribute to anything in particular. As far as Noah was concerned, Louis had learned, over the years, to be cautious about taking an instant dislike to a boy; on closer examination, the dislike all too often concealed other, less easily classifiable currents. But the fact remained that, from the very first, he had felt wary, and given what he now knew about Tracy’s particular situation—and sympathetic as he might be—any relationship with the boy, even if it were wholly beneficent and professional, could prove to have its vexing aspects.
Surely, he thought squeamishly, Tracy would have sense enough not to do anything irresponsible; surely he had that much judgment. And yet at the same time Louis could not feel entirely sanguine; he’d witnessed too much in the way of regrettable misjudgment, down through the years, in the halls of this very building.
Hoping to clear up the matter once and for all, he dialed Tracy’s number, which he knew by heart, but of course there was no answer on Tracy’s end of the line, only his mild recorded voice asking the caller
to leave a message. Would some future civilization think it bizarre that humans, at the end of the twentieth century, wasted so much time and energy in a futile attempt just to talk to each other?
“Oh hello,” Louis spoke into the machine, suddenly conscious that he and Tracy had had hardly any contact at all, mechanical or otherwise, that final, hectic week of the semester. That he had, in fact, for reasons that now seemed just short of shameful, assiduously avoided his junior colleague. He cleared his throat. “This is Louis Tremper. I’ve got a bit of school business I need to discuss with you. If you’d be so good as to give me a call when you get this, I’d appreciate it.” He hesitated, and then added, “I hope you had a good break, and are looking forward to the start of a new semester.”
He hesitated once more, feeling that his message was somehow woefully inadequate, that he’d like to go back and redo it, but of course one couldn’t do that with an answering machine, so he concluded by saying “Bye, bye” in a way he hoped sounded fond and conciliatory. For what, after all, had Tracy done? The reasonable answer was, of course, nothing at all—as he had told himself repeatedly during those long, solitary circumambulations of Caroline’s neighborhood he’d found himself taking. He thought he understood now that it had been nothing less than panic that had blindsided him that evening. Part of it—indeed, much of it—had no doubt been the shock of seeing Arthur Branson after all these years, seeing him ill and wasting, all that brilliant promise come to nothing. And how much of that, not the dreadful illness of course, but his failure to live up to the luminous future he’d once seemed destined for, was Louis’s own fault, either directly or indirectly? What should he have done that he had failed to do? He did not like to think of those dark, compromised times; the years had taught him it did no good to think of them. What had happened had happened, and the dead, as always, kept their own counsel. He had wept tears of remorse that night—he who prided himself on never weeping, except perhaps a tear or two at the end of Rosenkavalier or Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Sequestered in his darkened study, sipping scotch and crying noiselessly, so Claire would not hear, he’d stared out at the moonlit, snow-dusted garden his wife spent so many hours in, a ruin now as the year staggered to a close.
What had Arthur told Tracy? What of the full story, secrets held close for years, did his colleague know?
Perhaps it was precisely because he was certain he wouldn’t find Tracy at home that he decided to walk over to his house just to make sure. The day was cloudy, dull, relieved momentarily by the bright flicker of a cardinal alighting in a somber hemlock. In front of Goethe Hall, a taxi from the train station was discharging returning students. He seemed to remember that Noah lived in Goethe Hall; he’d have to call Doug Brill later to find out if the prodigal had returned.
At the edge of the lake, three boys were skating on the ice—an activity strictly forbidden by the school’s insurance company. He thought about calling out to them, ordering them in, but the temperatures hadn’t been above freezing in days, and what harm could there possibly be? One winter, in Dr. Emmerich’s time, they had built a bonfire out on the frozen lake, faculty and students gathering around its inspiriting warmth beneath a clear night sky crowded with constellations Dr. Emmerich picked out for them—Orion and Gemini and Hercules—lifting them all into a great imaginary voyage around the heavens before setting them back down gently on the ice. There were so many ways of living dangerously. That was what he had always liked about boys: their capacity for adventure; their brave questing idealism. It was what he had loved so much in Arthur Branson.
But with that thought, Louis was the one skating on treacherously thin ice. Without another glance in that dangerous direction, he headed back for the safety of solid ground. He refused, these days, to live dangerously—if, indeed, he ever had.
Arthur Branson, on the other hand, had fallen right through the ice. Arthur Branson was drowning in the black viral waters. It was hideous, hideous.
He desperately regretted that he’d behaved so very badly that evening. He’d give anything to be able to rewind the tape and do it over, but life, like the answering machine, didn’t offer that option. Which was fortunate, he supposed, for once one started to relive the past, making changes as one went along, where would one ever stop? The very pinprick of conception—was that where one’s intervention finally would lead, gently, sorrowfully steering aside the conjunction that would produce the very being who, returning to that moment, knowing what he knew, would have no moral recourse but to firmly, regretfully, say, No, it stops here?
More and more often these days, it seemed, Louis caught himself in the throes of a really despicable self-pity; an encroaching disease, perhaps not unrelated to his somewhat increased indulgence, lately, in the nightly ritual of scotch-sipping. He increased his pace, hoping the crisply articulated air, as sharp in his lungs as the wicked-looking icicles depending from the eaves of the houses he passed, might goad him into a brisker outlook on the present, anxious situation. He should have called Brill from his office and at least gotten over that particular hurdle, but that was how he seemed to live these days, deferring the resolution of exactly those things he fretted over the most, as if secretly he enjoyed the fretting, the worry, as if at least he knew his way around its disconsolate swamplands.
Tracy’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, one of a handful of rather stately houses owned by the Forge School but these days mostly rented, for the extra income, to townspeople—or not so much townspeople as the well-to-do young couples from Manhattan who were appearing in ever greater numbers in Middle Forge, and who represented, depending on one’s point of view, either hope for the future or a death knell tolling for the past. Louis had always thought Tracy’s house the nicest of the bunch, and for that reason—as well as Dr. Emmerich’s having lived there when he was headmaster—had kept it available for Forge School faculty, particularly those with families. He was secretly glad that Tracy had had the run of it for the year; come September, however, it would be home to Douglas Brill and his burgeoning brood, of which number five was reportedly on the way. How the man managed, on what the Forge School paid him, was beyond Louis’s reckoning. The graceful white frame building, with its ample front porch where in fine weather Dr. Emmerich used to host his late afternoon martini hour, stood deserted in its snowy lawn. From the street, where Louis stood, there were no signs of life.
A fluted note of longing or nostalgia stirred in him as he gazed at the dark windows staring vacantly back at him. Someone had shoveled the driveway and the path to the front door after the first storm, but the foot dropped by the second storm had not been cleared away. He made his way awkwardly through the knee-high mess that overwhelmed his low snow boots and clung to his trousers. Feeling very much the detective, he constructed what he could of a chronology—not, of course, that there had been anything remotely resembling a crime. He figured Tracy must have been in Middle Forge around New Year’s, but had left before the fifth of January, and now, the day before classes, was nowhere to be found. There was no reason, of course, that racy should have let anyone know of his travel plans, but still, under the blank afternoon sky, it felt vaguely ominous.
Deciding it might make sense to pay a visit to Goethe Hall in person, Louis reluctantly turned and trudged back down the driveway and out to the street. He brushed his trouser legs but the damage was already done; he would have to suffer cold, wet calves till he got home. Crows were calling their awful death music back and forth to one another. Another taxi full of boys had pulled up from the train station, and his heart leaped with relief as he thought he recognized, from the distance, Noah Lathrop. But then he saw he was mistaken. These closely cropped heads that were all the rage among some of the boys could make them resemble one another rather remarkably. The unmistakable person he did see, as he approached the steps, was lemon-haired Christian Tyler, looking theatrically elegant if too thin in his black cloth coat and turquoise scarf. Seated nonchalantly on the low brick wall next to the s
teps, he appeared to be smoking a last forbidden cigarette before surrendering himself to another semester of the Forge School’s rules. He cast a sly, defiant look at the other boys as they headed past him into the building, chattering among themselves and ignoring him completely. Seeing Louis, he turned and said, politely, not bothering to hide his cigarette, “Hey, Mr. Tremper. Happy New Year. Hope it’s another wet and wild one.”
Curious, how Louis’s head swam suddenly with images of Arthur Branson, since the two, except for their height and thinness, resembled one another not in the least. Nevertheless, Louis couldn’t resist warmly extending his hand to the somewhat startled Christian, who hesitated a moment before accepting. “Welcome back,” he told him heartily. “I trust you’re well? You must stop by my office soon.”
“Oh, I’m just fine and dandy,” Christian said, and though it sounded arch, as was his manner, Louis had the impression that he actually meant it. “I’ll definitely stop by. Say, early next week, once things get settled down.”
“Excellent,” Louis told him. Then, on the off chance, he asked, “You haven’t seen Noah Lathrop, have you? Sophomore. I believe he lives in this dorm.”
For a moment Christian seemed startled. “I just got here myself,” he said. “So, no, I have no idea what Noah Lathrop may be up to.” If Christian sounded vaguely offended that he should be expected to know anything about Noah, Louis reminded himself that Christian was after all not on the best of terms with his hallmates. Boys were a heartless bunch, pack animals who rarely missed the scent of blood. From their perspective Christian was undoubtedly standoffish, eccentric, queer. So naturally they baited him; he in turn refused to take the bait; it inflamed them all the more. Boys, unfortunately, being boys, there had been the occasional unpleasant incident in the dorm last semester, which Louis had made sure Doug Brill attended to promptly and properly.
