The Secret History (17 page)

We took off our shoes and socks. The water near the bank was a clear, pale green, cool over my ankles, and the pebbles at the bottom were dappled with sunlight. Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, an old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting. A wind rustled through the birches, blowing up the pale undersides of the leaves, and it caught in Camilla’s dress and billowed it out like a white balloon. She laughed, and smoothed it down quickly, only to have it blow out again.

The two of us walked near the shore, in the shallows barely covering our feet. The sun shimmered off the lake in bright waves—it didn’t look like a real lake but a mirage in the Sahara. Henry and Francis were further out: Francis talking, gesticulating wildly in his white robe and Henry with his hands clasped behind his back, Satan listening patiently to the rantings of some desert prophet.

We walked a good distance around the lake’s edge, she and I, then started back. Camilla, one hand shading her light-dazzled eyes, was telling me a long story about something the dog had done—chewing up a sheepskin rug that belonged to the landlord, their efforts to disguise and finally to destroy the evidence—but I wasn’t following her very closely: she looked so much like her brother, yet his straightforward, uncompromising good looks were almost magical when repeated, with only slight variations, in her. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.

I was looking at the side of her face, listening to the sweet,
throaty cadences of her voice, when I was jolted from my musing by a sharp exclamation. She stopped.

“What is it?”

She was staring down at the water. “Look.”

In the water, a dark plume of blood blossomed by her foot; as I blinked, a thin red tendril spiraled up and curled over her pale toes, undulating in the water like a thread of crimson smoke.

“Jesus, what did you do?”

“I don’t know. I stepped on something sharp.” She put a hand on my shoulder and I held her by the waist. There was a shard of green glass, about three inches long, stuck in her foot just above the arch. The blood pulsed thickly with her heartbeat; the glass, stained with red, glittered wickedly in the sun.

“What is it?” she said, trying to lean over to see. “Is it bad?”

She had cut an artery. The blood was spurting out strong and fast.

“Francis?” I yelled. “Henry?”

“Mother of God,” said Francis when he got close enough to see, and started splashing towards us, holding the skirt of his robe out of the water with one hand. “What have you done to yourself? Can you walk? Let me see,” he said, out of breath.

Camilla tightened her grip on my arm. The bottom of her foot was glazed with red. Fat droplets ticked off the edge, spreading and dispersing like drops of ink in the clear water.

“Oh, God,” said Francis, closing his eyes. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” she said briskly, but I knew it did; I could feel her trembling and her face had gone white.

Suddenly Henry was there, too, leaning over her. “Put your arm around my neck,” he said; deftly he whisked her up, as lightly as if she were made of straw, one arm under her head and the other beneath her knees. “Francis, run get the first-aid kit out of your car. We’ll meet you halfway.”

“All right,” said Francis, glad to be told what to do, and started splashing for the bank.

“Henry,
put me down
. I’m bleeding all over you.”

He didn’t pay any attention to her. “Here, Richard,” he said, “get that sock and tie it around her ankle.”

It was the first time I had even thought of a tourniquet; some kind of doctor I would have made. “Too tight?” I asked her.

“That’s fine. Henry, I wish you’d put me down. I’m too heavy for you.”

He smiled at her. There was a slight chip in one of his front
teeth I’d never noticed before; it gave his smile a very engaging quality. “You’re light as a feather,” he said.

Sometimes, when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things—a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf—are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And that was what happened then, walking over the meadow to the house. It was like a painting too vivid to be real—every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at it. Camilla was limp in Henry’s arms, her head thrown back like a dead girl’s, and the curve of her throat beautiful and lifeless. The hem of her dress fluttered abstractly in the breeze. Henry’s trousers were spattered with drops the size of quarters, too red to be blood, as if he’d had a paintbrush slung at him. In the overwhelming stillness, between our echoless footsteps, the pulse sang thin and fast in my ears.

Charles skidded down the hill, barefoot, still in his bathrobe, Francis at his heels. Henry knelt and set her on the grass, and she raised herself on her elbows.

“Camilla, are you dead?” said Charles, breathless, as he dropped to the ground to look at the wound.

“Somebody,” said Francis, unrolling a length of bandage, “is going to have to take that glass out of her foot.”

“Want me to try?” said Charles, looking up at her.

“Be careful.”

Charles, her heel in his hand, caught the glass between thumb and forefinger and pulled gently. Camilla caught her breath in a quick, wincing gasp.

Charles drew back like he’d been scalded. He made as if to touch her foot again, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. His fingertips were wet with blood.

“Well, go on,” said Camilla, her voice fairly steady.

“I can’t do it. I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”

“It hurts anyway.”

“I can’t,” Charles said miserably, looking up at her.

“Get out of the way,” said Henry impatiently, and he knelt quickly and took her foot in his hand.

Charles turned away; he was almost as white as she was, and I wondered if that old story was true, that one twin felt pain when the other was injured.

Camilla flinched, her eyes wide; Henry held up the curved piece of glass in one bloody hand. “
Consummatum est
,” he said.

Francis set to work with the iodine and the bandages.

“My God,” I said, picking up the red-stained shard and holding it to the light.

“Good girl,” said Francis, winding the bandages around the arch of her foot. Like most hypochondriacs, he had an oddly soothing bedside manner. “Look at you. You didn’t even cry.”

“It didn’t hurt that much.”

“The hell it didn’t,” Francis said. “You were really brave.”

Henry stood up. “She was brave,” he said.

Late that afternoon, Charles and I were sitting on the porch. It had turned suddenly cold; the sky was brilliantly sunny but the wind was up. Mr. Hatch had come inside to start a fire, and I smelled a faint tang of wood smoke. Francis was inside, too, starting dinner; he was singing, and his high, clear voice, slightly out of key, floated out the kitchen window.

Camilla’s cut hadn’t been a serious one. Francis drove her to the emergency room—Bunny went, too, because he was annoyed at having slept through the excitement—and in an hour she was back, with six stitches in her foot, a bandage, and a bottle of Tylenol with codeine. Now Bunny and Henry were out playing croquet and she was with them, hopping around on her good foot and the toe of the other with a skipping gait that, from the porch, looked oddly jaunty.

Charles and I were drinking whiskey and soda. He had been trying to teach me to play piquet (“because it’s what Rawdon Crawley plays in
Vanity Fair”)
but I was a slow learner and the cards lay abandoned.

Charles took a sip of his drink. He hadn’t bothered to dress all day. “I wish we didn’t have to go back to Hampden tomorrow,” he said.

“I wish we never had to go back,” I said. “I wish we lived here.”

“Well, maybe we can.”

“What?”

“I don’t mean now. But maybe we could. After school.”

“How’s that?”

He shrugged. “Well, Francis’s aunt won’t sell the house because she wants to keep it in the family. Francis could get it from her for next to nothing when he turns twenty-one. And even if
he couldn’t, Henry has more money than he knows what to do with. They could go in together and buy it. Easy.”

I was startled by this pragmatic answer.

“I mean, all Henry wants to do when he finishes school, if he finishes, is to find some place where he can write his books and study the Twelve Great Cultures.”

“What do you mean,
if
he finishes?”

“I mean, he may not want to. He may get bored. He’s talked about leaving before. There’s no reason he’s got to be here, and he’s surely never going to have a job.”

“You think not?” I said, curious; I had always pictured Henry teaching Greek, in some forlorn but excellent college out in the Midwest.

Charles snorted. “Certainly not. Why should he? He doesn’t need the money, and he’d make a terrible teacher. And Francis has never worked in his life. I guess he could live with his mother, except he can’t stand that husband of hers. He’d like it better here. Julian wouldn’t be far away, either.”

I took a sip of my drink and looked out at the faraway figures on the lawn. Bunny, hair falling into his eyes, was preparing to make a shot, flexing the mallet and shifting back and forth on his feet like a professional golfer.

“Does Julian have any family?” I said.

“No,” said Charles, his mouth full of ice. “He has some nephews but he hates them. Look at this, would you,” he said suddenly, half rising from his chair.

I looked. Across the lawn, Bunny had finally made his shot; the ball went wide of the sixth and seventh arches but, incredibly, hit the turning stake.

“Watch,” I said. “I bet he’ll try for another shot.”

“He won’t get it, though,” said Charles, sitting down again, his eyes still on the lawn. “Look at Henry. He’s putting his foot down.”

Henry was pointing at the neglected arches and, even at that distance, I could tell he was quoting from the rule book; faintly, we could hear Bunny’s startled cries of protest.

“My hangover’s about gone,” Charles said presently.

“Mine, too,” I said. The light on the lawn was golden, casting long velvety shadows, and the cloudy, radiant sky was straight out of Constable; though I didn’t want to admit it, I was about half-drunk.

We were quiet for a while, watching. From the lawn I could
hear the faint
pock
of mallet against croquet ball; from the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: “ ‘We are little black sheep who have gone astray … Baa
baa
baa …’ ”

“And if Francis buys the house?” I said finally. “Think he’d let us live here?”

“Sure. He’d be bored stiff if it was just him and Henry. I guess Bunny might have to work in the bank but he could always come up on weekends, if he leaves Marion and the kids at home.”

I laughed. Bunny had been talking the night before about how he wanted eight children, four boys and four girls; which had prompted a long, humorless speech from Henry about how the fulfillment of the reproductive cycle was, in nature, an invariable harbinger of swift decline and death.

“It’s terrible,” said Charles. “Really, I can just see him. Standing out in a yard wearing some kind of stupid apron.”

“Cooking hamburgers on the grill.”

“And about twenty kids running around him and screaming.”

“Kiwanis picnics.”

“La-Z-Boy recliners.”

“Jesus.”

A sudden wind rustled through the birches; a gust of yellow leaves came storming down. I took a sip of my drink. If I had grown up in that house I couldn’t have loved it more, couldn’t have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible—just barely—in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.

It was getting dark; soon it would be time for dinner. I finished my drink in a swallow. The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular
furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant—the idea was so truly heavenly that I’m not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.