The Secret History (28 page)

“Did he know about this,” I said, “your father?”

“He would have eventually. As a matter of fact I was hoping to ask you to get in touch with him once we were there. Had something unforeseen happened he would’ve been able to help us, even get us out of the country if need be. He knows people down there, people in the government. Otherwise, no one would know.”

“He would do that for you?”

“My father and I are not close,” said Henry, “but I am his only child.” He drank the rest of his Scotch and rattled the ice around in his glass. “But anyway. Even though I didn’t have much ready cash, my credit cards were more than adequate, leaving only the problem of raising a sum large enough to live on for a while. Which is where Francis came in. He and his mother live off the income of a trust, as I expect you know, but they also have the right to withdraw as much as three percent of the principal per year, which would amount to a sum of about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Generally this isn’t touched when it turns up, but in theory either of them can take it out whenever they like. A law firm in Boston serves as the trustees, and on Thursday morning we left the country house, came into Hampden for a few minutes so the twins and I could get our things, and then we all went to Boston and checked into the Parker House. That’s a lovely hotel, do you know it? No? Dickens used to stay there when he came to America.

“At any rate. Francis had an appointment with his lawyers, and the twins had some things to straighten out with the passport office. It takes more planning than you might think to pick up and leave the country, but everything was pretty much taken care of; we were leaving the next night and there seemed no way things could go wrong. We were a bit worried about the twins, but of course it wouldn’t have posed a problem even if they’d had to wait ten days or so and follow us down later. I had some things to do myself, but not many, and Francis had assured me that getting the money was a simple matter of going downtown and signing some papers. His mother would find out he’d taken it, but what could she do once he was gone?

“But he wasn’t back when he said he would be, and three hours passed, then four. The twins came back, and the three of us had just ordered up some lunch from room service when Francis burst in, half-hysterical. The money for that year was all gone, you see. His mother had checked out every cent of the principal at the first of the year and hadn’t told him about it. It was a nasty surprise, but even nastier given the circumstances. He’d tried everything he could think of—to borrow money on the trust itself, even to assign his interests, which is, if you know anything about trusts, about the most desperate thing one can do. The twins were all for going ahead and taking our chances. But … It was a difficult situation. Once we left we couldn’t come back and anyway, what were we supposed to do when we got there? Live in a treehouse like Wendy and the Lost Boys?” He sighed. “So there we were, with our suitcases packed and passports ready, but no money. I mean, literally none. Between the four of us we had hardly five thousand dollars. There was quite a bit of discussion, but in the end we decided our only choice was to come back to Hampden. For the time being, at least.”

He said this all quite calmly but I, listening to him, felt a lump growing in the pit of my stomach. The picture was still wholly obscure, but what I saw of it I didn’t like at all. I said nothing for a long time, only looked at the shadows the lamp cast on the ceiling.

“Henry, my God,” I said at last. My voice was flat and strange even to my own ears.

He raised an eyebrow and said nothing, empty glass in hand, face half in shadow.

I looked at him. “My God,” I said. “What have you done?”

He smiled wryly, and leaned forward out of the light to pour himself some more Scotch. “I think you already have a pretty good idea,” he said. “Now let me ask you something. Why have you been covering up for us?”

“What?”

“You knew we were leaving the country. You knew it all the time and you didn’t tell a soul. Why is that?”

The walls had fallen away and the room was black. Henry’s face, lit starkly by the lamp, was pale against the darkness and stray points of light winked from the rim of his spectacles, glowed in the amber depths of his whiskey glass, shone blue in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He smiled. “No?” he said.

I stared at him and didn’t say anything.

“After all, we hadn’t confided in
you
,” he said. His gaze on mine was steady, intense. “You could have stopped us any time you wanted and yet you didn’t. Why?”

“Henry, what in God’s name have you done?”

He smiled. “You tell me,” he said.

And the horrible thing was, somehow, that I did know. “You killed somebody,” I said, “didn’t you?”

He looked at me for a moment, and then, to my utter, utter surprise, he leaned back in his chair and laughed.

“Good for you,” he said. “You’re just as smart as I thought you were. I knew you’d figure it out, sooner or later, that’s what I’ve told the others all along.”

The darkness hung about our tiny circle of lamplight as heavy and palpable as a curtain. With a rush of what was almost motion sickness, I experienced for a moment both the claustrophobic feeling that the walls had rushed in toward us and the vertiginous one that they receded infinitely, leaving both of us suspended in some boundless expanse of dark. I swallowed, and looked back at Henry. “Who was it?” I said.

He shrugged. “A minor thing, really. An accident.”

“Not on purpose?”

“Heavens, no,” he said, surprised.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know where to begin.” He paused, and took a drink. “Do you remember last fall, in Julian’s class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness?
Bakcheia?
Dionysiac frenzy?”

“Yes,” I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now.

“Well, we decided to try to have one.”

For a moment I thought I hadn’t understood him. “What?” I said.

“I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.”

“Come on.”

“We did.”

I looked at him. “You must be joking.”

“No.”

“That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.”

He shrugged.

“Why would you want to do something like that?”

“I was obsessed with the idea.”

“Why?”

“Well, as far as I knew, it hadn’t been done for two thousand years.” He paused, when he saw he hadn’t convinced me. “After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,” he said. “To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.”

“Like what?”

“Well, it’s not called a mystery for nothing,” said Henry sourly. “Take my word for it. But one mustn’t underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one’s self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time. That was attractive to me from the first, even when I knew nothing about the topic and approached it less as potential
mystes
than anthropologist. Ancient commentators are very circumspect about the whole thing. It was possible, with a great deal of work, to figure out some of the sacred rituals—the hymns, the sacred objects, what to wear and do and say. More difficult was the mystery itself: how did one propel oneself into such a state, what was the catalyst?” His voice was dreamy, amused. “We tried
everything
. Drink, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison. On the night of our first attempt, we simply overdrank and passed out in our chitons in the woods near Francis’s house.”

“You wore
chitons?
”

“Yes,” said Henry, irritated. “It was all in the interests of science. We made them from bed sheets in Francis’s attic. At any rate. The first night nothing happened at all, except we were hung over and stiff from having slept on the ground. So the next
time we didn’t drink as much, but there we all were, in the middle of the night on the hill behind Francis’s house, drunk and in chitons and singing Greek hymns like something from a fraternity initiation, and all at once Bunny began to laugh so hard that he fell over like a ninepin and rolled down the hill.

“It was rather obvious that drink alone wasn’t going to do the trick. Goodness. I couldn’t tell you all the things we tried. Vigils. Fasting. Libations. It depresses me even to think about it. We burned hemlock branches and breathed the fumes. I knew the Pythia had chewed laurel leaves, but that didn’t work either. You found those laurel leaves, if you recall, on the stove in Francis’s kitchen.”

I stared at him. “Why didn’t I know about any of this?” I said.

Henry reached into his pocket for a cigarette. “Well, really,” he said, “I think that’s kind of obvious.”

“What do you mean?”

“
Of course
we weren’t going to tell you. We hardly knew you. You would have thought we were crazy.” He was quiet for a moment. “You see, we had almost nothing to go on,” he said. “I suppose in a certain way I was misled by accounts of the Pythia, the
pneuma enthusiastikon
, poisonous vapors and so forth. Those processes, though sketchy, are more well documented than Bacchic methods, and I thought for a while that the two must be related. Only after a long period of trial and error did it become evident that they were not, and that what we were missing was something, in all likelihood, quite simple. Which it was.”

“And what might that have been?”

“Only this. To receive the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of
euphemia
, cultic purity. That is at the very center of bacchic mystery. Even Plato speaks of it. Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self—the dust of us, the part that decays—must be made clean as possible.”

“How is that?”

“Through symbolic acts, most of them fairly universal in the Greek world. Water poured over the head, baths, fasting—Bunny wasn’t so good about the fasting nor about the baths, either, if you ask me but the rest of us went through the motions. The more we did it, though, the more meaningless it all began to seem, until, one day, I was struck by something rather obvious—namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to
see past it to a deeper meaning.” He paused. “Do you know,” he said, “what Julian says about the
Divine Comedy?
”

“No, Henry, I don’t.”

“That it’s incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a Christian? That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one. At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obsfucated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.” He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out. “Quite simply,” he said, “we didn’t believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.”

I waited for him to continue.

“At this point, you must understand, we were on the verge of giving up,” he said calmly. “The enterprise had been interesting, but not that interesting; and besides, it was a good deal of trouble. You don’t know how many times you almost stumbled on us.”

“No?”

“No.” He took a drink of his whiskey. “I don’t suppose you remember coming downstairs one night in the country, about three in the morning,” he said. “Down to the library to get a book. We heard you on the stairs. I was hidden behind the draperies; I could have reached out and touched you if I’d wanted. Another time you woke up before we even got home. We had to slip around to the back door, sneak up the stairs like cat burglars—it was very tiresome, all that creeping around barefoot in the dark. Besides, it was getting cold. They say that the
oreibasia
took place in midwinter, but I daresay the Peloponnesus is considerably milder that time of year than Vermont.

“We’d worked on it so long, though, and it seemed senseless, in light of our revelation, not to try once more before the weather turned. Everything got serious all of a sudden. We fasted for three days, longer than we ever had before. A messenger came to me in a dream. Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I’d never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn’t understand, towards an end I did not know.” He reached for his drink again. “The only problem was Bunny. He didn’t grasp, in
some fundamental way, that things had changed significantly. We were closer than we’d ever been, and every day counted; already it was terribly cold, and if it snowed, which it might have any day, we’d have had to wait till spring. I couldn’t bear the thought that, after everything we’d done, he’d ruin it at the last minute. And I knew he would. At the crucial moment he’d start to tell some asinine joke and ruin everything. By the second day I was having my doubts, and then, on the afternoon of the night itself, Charles saw him in Commons having a grilled cheese sandwich and a milk shake. That did it. We decided to slip away without him. To go out on the weekends was too risky, since you’d almost caught us several times already, so we’d been driving out late on Thursday and getting back about three or four the next morning. Except this time we left early, before dinner, and didn’t say a word to him about it.”

He lit a cigarette. There was a long pause.

“So?” I said. “What happened?”

He laughed. “I don’t know what to say.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it worked.”

“It
worked?
”

“Absolutely.”

“But how could—?”

“It worked.”

“I don’t think I understand what you mean when you say ‘it worked.’ ”

“I mean it in the most literal sense.”