The Secret History (16 page)

And always, always, that same toast. Live
forever
.

I wonder now that I was around them so much and yet knew so little of what was happening at the end of that term. Physically, there was very little indication that anything was happening at all—they were too clever for that—but even the tiny discrepancies that squeaked through their guard I met with a kind of willful blindness. That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn’t let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same. I knew, for instance, that the five of them sometimes did things—what, exactly, I didn’t know—without inviting me, and that if put on the spot they would all stick together and lie about it, in a casual and quite convincing fashion. They were so convincing, in fact, so faultlessly orchestrated in the variations and counterpoint of falsehood (the twins’s unblinking carelessness striking a bright true note against Bunny’s tomfoolery, or Henry’s bored irritation at rehashing a trivial sequence of events) that I usually found myself believing them, often against evidence to the contrary.

Of course, I can see traces of what went on—to their credit, quite small traces—in retrospect; in the way they would sometimes disappear, very mysteriously, and hours later be vague about their whereabouts; in private jokes, asides in Greek or even Latin which I was well aware were meant to go over my head. Naturally, I disliked this, but there seemed nothing alarming or unusual about it; though some of those casual remarks and private jokes assumed a horrific significance much later. Towards the end of that term, for instance, Bunny had a maddening habit of breaking out into choruses of “The Farmer in the Dell”; I found it merely annoying and could not understand the violent agitation to which it provoked the rest of them:
not knowing then, as I do now, that it must have chilled them all to the bone.

Of course I noticed things. I suppose, being around them as much as I was, it would have been impossible not to. But they were mostly quirks, discrepancies, most of them so minor that it will perhaps show you how little reason I had to imagine that anything was wrong. For instance: All five of them seemed unusually accident-prone. They were always getting scratched by cats, or cutting themselves shaving, or stumbling over footstools in the dark—reasonable explanations, certainly, but for sedentary people they had an odd excess of bruises and small wounds. There was also a strange preoccupation with the weather; strange, to me, because none of them seemed to be involved in activity which might be aided or impeded by weather of any sort. And yet they were obsessed with it, Henry in particular. He was concerned, primarily, with rapid drops in temperature; sometimes, in the car, he would punch around as frantically on the radio as a sea captain before a storm, searching for barometric readings, long-range forecasts, data of any sort. The news that the mercury was sinking would plunge him into a sudden, inexplicable gloom. I wondered what he would do when winter came; but by the first snowfall, the preoccupation had vanished, never to return.

Little things. I remember waking up once in the country at six o’clock, while everyone was still in bed, and going downstairs to find the kitchen floors freshly washed, still wet, immaculate except for the bare, mysterious footprint of a Man Friday in the clean sandbank between water heater and porch. Sometimes I woke nights out there, half-dreaming, but vaguely conscious of something; muffled voices, movement, the greyhound whining softly and pawing at my bedroom door.… Once I heard a muttered exchange between the twins about some bed sheets. “Silly,” Camilla was whispering—and I caught a glimpse of ragged, fluttering cloth, streaked with mud—“you took the wrong ones. We can’t bring them back like this.”

“We’ll substitute the others.”

“But they’ll know. The Linen Service ones have a stamp. We’ll have to say we lost them.”

Though this exchange did not remain in my mind for long, I was puzzled, and even more so by the twins’ unsatisfactory manner when I asked about it. Another oddity was my discovery, one afternoon, of a large copper pot bubbling on the back burner of
the stove, a peculiar smell emanating from it. I lifted the lid and a cloud of pungent, bitter steam hit me in the face. The pot was filled with limp, almond-shaped leaves, boiling away in about half a gallon of blackish water. What in God’s name, I thought, perplexed but also amused, and when I asked Francis he said, curtly, “For my bath.”

It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together—my future, my past, the whole of my life—and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say
oh! oh! oh!

We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing showers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers. While the twins played cards at one end of the table, and Henry worked at the other, Francis sat curled in the window seat with a plate of little sandwiches in his lap, reading, in French, the
Mémoires
of the Duc de Saint-Simon, which for some reason he was determined to get through. He had gone to several schools in Europe and spoke excellent French, though he pronounced it with the same lazy, snob accent as his English; sometimes I got him to help me with my own lessons in first-year French, tedious little stories about Marie and Jean-Claude going to the
tabac
, which he read aloud in a languishing, hilarious drawl
(“Marie a apporté des légumes à son frère”)
that sent everyone into hysterics. Bunny lay on his stomach on the hearth rug, doing his homework; occasionally he would steal one of Francis’s sandwiches or ask a pained question. Though Greek gave him so much trouble, he’d actually studied it far longer than any of the rest of us, since he was twelve, a circumstance about which he perpetually boasted.
He suggested slyly that this had simply been a childish whim of his, a manifestation of early genius
à la
Alexander Pope; but the truth of the matter (as I learned from Henry) was that he suffered from fairly severe dyslexia and the Greek had been a mandatory course of therapy, his prep school having theorized it was good to force dyslexic students to study languages like Greek, Hebrew and Russian, which did not utilize the Roman alphabet. At any rate, his talent as a linguist was considerably less than he led one to believe, and he was unable to wade through even the simplest assignments without continual questions, complaints, and infusions of food. Towards the end of term he had a flare-up of asthma and wandered wheezing around the house in pajamas and bathrobe, hair standing on end, gasping theatrically at his inhaler. The pills he took for it (I was informed, behind his back) made him irritable, kept him up at night, made him gain weight. And I accepted this explanation for much of Bunny’s crabbiness at the end of the term, which subsequently I was to find was due to entirely different reasons.

What should I tell you? About the Saturday in December that Bunny ran around the house at five in the morning, yelling “First snow!” and pouncing on our beds? Or the time Camilla tried to teach me the box step; or the time Bunny turned the boat over—with Henry and Francis in it—because he thought he saw a water snake? About Henry’s birthday party, or about the two instances when Francis’s mother—all red hair and alligator pumps and emeralds—turned up on her way to New York, trailing the Yorkshire terrier and the second husband? (She was a wild card, that mother of his; and Chris, her new husband, was a bit player in a soap opera, barely older than Francis. Olivia was her name. At the time I first met her, she had just been released from the Betty Ford Center after having been cured of alcoholism and an unspecified drug habit, and was launching merrily down the path of sin again. Charles once told me that she had knocked on his door in the middle of the night and asked if he would care to join her and Chris in bed. I still get cards from her at Christmas.)

One day, however, remains particularly vivid, a brilliant Saturday in October, one of the last summery days we had that year. The night before—which had been rather cold—we’d stayed up drinking and talking till almost dawn, and I woke late, hot and vaguely nauseated, to find my blankets kicked to the foot of the bed and sun pouring through the window. I lay very still for a
long time. The sun filtered through my eyelids a bright, painful red, and my damp legs prickled with the heat. Beneath me, the house was silent, shimmering and oppressive.

I made my way downstairs, my feet creaking on the steps. The house was motionless, empty. Finally I found Francis and Bunny on the shady side of the porch. Bunny had on a T-shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts; Francis, his face flushed a blotchy albino pink, and his eyelids closed and almost fluttering with pain, was wearing a ratty terry-cloth robe that was stolen from a hotel.

They were drinking prairie oysters. Francis pushed his over to me without looking at it. “Here, drink this,” he said, “I’ll be sick if I look at it another second.”

The yolk quivered, gently, in its bloody bath of ketchup and Worcestershire. “
I
don’t want it,” I said, and pushed it back.

He crossed his legs and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know why I make these things,” he said. “They never work. I have to go get some Alka-Seltzer.”

Charles closed the screen door behind him and wandered listlessly onto the porch in his red-striped bathrobe. “What you need,” he said, “is an ice-cream float.”

“You and your ice-cream floats.”

“They
work
, I tell you. It’s very scientific. Cold things are good for nausea and—”

“You’re always saying that, Charles, but I just don’t think it’s true.”

“Would you just listen to me for a second? The ice cream slows down your digestion. The Coke settles your stomach and the caffeine cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy. And besides, it makes you metabolize the alcohol faster. It’s the perfect food.”

“Go make me one, would you?” said Bunny.

“Go make it yourself,” said Charles, suddenly irritable.

“Really,” Francis said, “I think I just need an Alka-Seltzer.”

Henry—who had been up, and dressed, since the first wink of dawn—came down shortly, followed by a sleepy Camilla, damp and flushed from her bath, and her gold chrysanthemum of a head curled and chaotic. It was almost two in the afternoon. The greyhound lay on its side, drowsing, one chestnut-colored eye only partly closed and rolling grotesquely in the socket.

There was no Alka-Seltzer, so Francis went in and got a bottle of ginger ale and some glasses and ice and we sat for a while as the afternoon got brighter and hotter. Camilla—who was rarely
content to sit still but was always itching to do something, anything, play cards, go for a picnic or a drive—was bored and restless, and made no secret of it. She had a book, but she wasn’t reading; her legs were thrown over the arm of her chair, one bare heel kicking, with obstinate, lethargic rhythm, at the wicker side. Finally, as much to humor her as anything, Francis suggested a walk to the lake. This cheered her instantly. There was nothing else to do, so Henry and I decided to go along. Charles and Bunny were asleep, and snoring in their chairs.

The sky was a fierce, burning blue, the trees ferocious shades of red and yellow. Francis, barefoot and still in his bathrobe, stepped precariously over rocks and branches, balancing his glass of ginger ale. Once we got to the lake he waded in, up to his knees, and beckoned dramatically like Saint John the Baptist.