The Secret History (34 page)

Back in my room, dizzy and exhausted, I wanted more than anything to pull the shades and lie down on my bed—which seemed suddenly the most enticing bed in the world, musty pillow,
dirty sheets, and all. But that was impossible. Greek Prose Composition was in two hours, and I hadn’t done my homework.

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I’d done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one’s head, it taught one to think in Greek. One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an
incendium
is in its nature entirely different from the
feu
with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman
pur
that the Greeks knew, the
pur
that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.

Pur:
that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not
their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular. Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms—the world, in fact, was not their home, at least not the world as I knew it—and far from being occasional visitors to this land which I myself knew only as an admiring tourist, they were pretty much its permanent residents, as permanent as I suppose it was possible for them to be. Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, and it is eminently possible to study it all one’s life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry’s calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvelous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek—quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times, I’ve seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious ‘Hello,’ and may I never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his “
Khairei!
” when Julian happened to be at the other end.

I was a bit uncomfortable—after the story I’d just heard—with the Callimachean epigrams having to do with flushed cheeks, and wine, and the kisses of fair-limbed youths by torchlight. I’d chosen instead a rather sad one, which in English runs as follows: “At morn we buried Melanippus; as the sun set the maiden Basilo died by her own hand, as she could not endure to lay her brother on the pyre and live; and the house beheld a twofold woe, and all Cyrene bowed her head, to see the home of happy children made desolate.”

I finished my composition in less than an hour. After I’d gone through it and checked the endings, I washed my face and changed my shirt and went, with my books, over to Bunny’s room.

Of the six of us, Bunny and I were the only two who lived on campus, and his house was across the lawn on the opposite end of Commons. He had a room on the ground floor, which I am sure was inconvenient for him since he spent most of his time upstairs in the house kitchen: ironing his pants, rummaging through the refrigerator, leaning out the window in his shirtsleeves to yell at passers-by. When he didn’t answer his door I went to look for him there, and I found him sitting in the windowsill in his undershirt, drinking a cup of coffee and leafing
through a magazine. I was a little surprised to see the twins there, too: Charles, standing with his left ankle crossed over his right, stirring moodily at his coffee and looking out the window; Camilla—and this surprised me, because Camilla wasn’t much of one for domestic tasks—ironing one of Bunny’s shirts.

“Oh, hello, old man,” said Bunny. “Come on in. Having a little kaffeeklatsch. Yes, women are good for one or
two
things,” he added, when he saw me looking at Camilla and the ironing board, “though, being a gentleman—” he winked broadly—“I don’t like to say what the other thing is, mixed company and all. Charles, get him a cup of coffee, would you? No need to wash it, it’s clean enough,” he said stridently, as Charles got a dirty cup from the drain board and turned on the tap. “Do your prose composition?”

“Yeah.”

“Which epigram?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Hmn. Sounds like everybody went for the tearjerkers. Charles did that one about the girl who died, and all her friends missed her, and you, Camilla, you picked—”

“Fourteen,” said Camilla, without looking up, pressing rather savagely on the collar band with the tip of the iron.

“Hah. I picked one of the racy ones myself. Ever been to France, Richard?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you better come with us this summer.”

“Us? Who?”

“Henry and me.”

I was so taken aback that all I could do was blink at him.

“France?” I said.

“May wee. Two-month tour. A real doozy. Have a look.” He tossed me the magazine, which I now saw was a glossy brochure.

I glanced through it. It was a lollapalooza of a tour, all right—a “luxury hotel barge cruise” which began in the Champagne country and then went, via hot air balloon, to Burgundy for more barging, through Beaujolais, to the Riviera and Cannes and Monte Carlo—it was lavishly illustrated, full of brightly colored pictures of gourmet meals, flower-decked barges, happy tourists popping champagne corks and waving from the basket of their balloon at the disgruntled old peasants in the fields below.

“Looks great, doesn’t it?” said Bunny.

“Fabulous.”

“Rome was all right but actually it was kind of a sinkhole when you get right down to it. Besides, I like to gad about a little more myself. Stay on the move, see a few of the native customs. Just between you and me, I bet Henry’s going to have a ball with this.”

I bet he will, too
, I thought, staring at a picture of a woman holding up a stick of French bread at the camera and grinning like a maniac.

The twins were studiously avoiding my eye, Camilla bent over Bunny’s shirt, Charles with his back to me and his elbows on the sideboard, looking out the kitchen window.

“Of course, this balloon thing’s great,” Bunny said conversationally, “but you know, I’ve been wondering, where do you go to the bathroom? Off the side or something?”

“Look here, I think this is going to take several minutes,” said Camilla abruptly. “It’s almost nine. Why don’t you go ahead with Richard, Charles. Tell Julian not to wait.”

“Well, it’s not going to take you
that
much longer, is it?” said Bunny crossly, craning over to see. “What’s the big problem? Where’d you learn how to iron, anyway?”

“I never did.
We
send our shirts to the laundry.”

Charles followed me out the door, a few paces behind. We walked through the hall and down the stairs without a word, but once downstairs he stepped close behind me and, catching my arm, pulled me into an empty card room. In the twenties and thirties, there had been a bridge fad at Hampden; when the enthusiasm faded, the rooms were never subsequently put to any function and no one used them now except for drug deals, or typing, or illicit romantic trysts.

He shut the door. I found myself looking at the ancient card table—inlaid at its four corners with a diamond, a heart, a club and a spade.

“Henry called us,” said Charles. He was scratching at the raised edge of the diamond with his thumb, his head studiously down.

“When?”

“Early this morning.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” said Charles, glancing up.

“Sorry for what?”

“Sorry he told you. Sorry for everything. Camilla’s all upset.”

He seemed calm enough, tired but calm, and his intelligent
eyes met mine with a sad, quiet candor. All of a sudden I felt terribly upset. I was fond of Francis and Henry but it was unthinkable that anything should happen to the twins. I thought, with a pang, of how kind they had always been; of how sweet Camilla was in those first awkward weeks and how Charles had always had a way of showing up in my room, or turning to me in a crowd with a tranquil assumption—heartwarming to me—that he and I were particular friends; of walks and car trips and dinners at their house; of their letters—frequently unacknowledged on my part—which had come so faithfully over the long winter months.

From somewhere overhead I heard the shriek and groan of water pipes. We looked at each other.

“What are you going to do?” I said. It seemed the only question I had asked of anyone for the last twenty-four hours, and yet no one had given me a satisfactory answer.

He shrugged, a funny little one-shouldered shrug, a mannerism he and his sister had in common. “Search me,” he said wearily. “I guess we should go.”

When we got to Julian’s office, Henry and Francis were already there. Francis hadn’t finished his essay. He was scratching rapidly at the second page, his fingers blue with ink, while Henry proofread the first one, dashing in subscripts and aspirants with his fountain pen.

He didn’t look up. “Hello,” he said. “Close the door, would you?”

Charles kicked at the door with his foot. “Bad news,” he said.

“Very bad?”

“Financially, yes.”

Francis swore, in a quick hissing underbreath, without pausing in his work. Henry dashed in a few final marks, then fanned the paper in the air to dry it.

“Well for goodness’ sakes,” he said mildly. “I hope it can wait. I don’t want to have to think about it during class. How’s that last page coming, Francis?”

“Just a minute,” said Francis, laboriously, his words lagging behind the hurried scrawl of his pen.

Henry stood behind Francis’s chair and leaned over his shoulder and began to proofread the top of the last page, one elbow resting on the table. “Camilla’s with him?” he said.

“Yes. Ironing his nasty old shirt.”

“Hmnn.” He pointed at something with the end of his pen. “Francis, you need the optative here instead of the subjunctive.”

Francis reached up quickly from his work—he was nearly at the end of the page—to change it.

“And this labial becomes pi, not kappa.”