The Secret History (37 page)

“I just like to have an idea,” Henry explained, “where he goes.” But actually it was quite simple to keep tabs on Bunny: I think because he, too, was unwilling to let the others, and Henry in particular, out of his sight for long.

If he treated Henry with deference, it was the rest of us who were forced to bear the wearing, day-to-day brunt of his anger. Most of the time he was simply irritating: for example, in his ill-informed and frequent tirades against the Catholic Church. Bunny’s family was Episcopalian, and my parents, as far as I knew, had no religious affiliation at all; but Henry and Francis and the twins had been reared as Catholics; and though none of them went to church much, Bunny’s ignorant, tireless stream of blasphemies enraged them. With leers and winks he told stories about lapsed nuns, sluttish Catholic girls, pederastic priests (“So then, this Father What’s-His-Name, he said to the altar boy—
this kid is nine years old, mind you, he’s in my Cub Scout troop—he says to Tim Mulrooney, ‘Son, would you like to see where me and all the other fathers sleep at night?’ ”). He invented outrageous stories of the perversions of various Popes; informed them of little-known points of Catholic doctrine; raved about Vatican conspiracies, ignoring Henry’s bald refutations and Francis’s muttered asides about social-climbing Protestants.

What was worse was when he chose to zero in on one person in particular. With some preternatural craftiness he always knew the right nerve to touch, at exactly the right moment, to wound and outrage most. Charles was good-natured, and slow to anger, but he was sometimes so disturbed by these anti-Catholic diatribes that his very teacup would clatter upon its saucer. He was also sensitive to remarks about his drinking. As a matter of fact, Charles did drink a lot. We all did: but still, though he didn’t indulge in any very conspicuous excess, I’d frequently had the experience of smelling liquor on his breath at odd hours or dropping by unexpectedly in the early afternoon to find him with a glass in his hand—which was perhaps understandable, things being what they were. Bunny made a show of fraudulent, infuriating concern, peppered with snide comments about drunkards and sots. He kept exaggerated tallies of Charles’s cocktail consumption. He left questionnaires (“Do you sometimes feel you need a drink to get through the day?”) and pamphlets (freckle-faced child gazing plaintively at parent, asking, “Mommy, what’s ‘drunk’?”) anonymously in Charles’s box, and once went so far as to give his name to the campus chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon Charles was deluged with tracts and phone calls and even a personal visit from a well-meaning Twelfth-Stepper.

With Francis, on the other hand, things were more pointed and unpleasant. Nobody said anything about it, ever, but we all knew he was gay. Though he was not promiscuous, every so often he would disappear quite mysteriously at a party and once, very early in our acquaintance, he’d made a subtle but unmistakable pass at me one afternoon when we were drunk and by ourselves in the rowboat. I’d dropped an oar, and in the confusion of retrieving it I felt his fingertips brush in a casual yet deliberate fashion along my cheek near the jawbone. I glanced up, startled, and our eyes met in that way that eyes will, and we looked at each other for a moment, the boat wobbling around us and the lost oar forgotten. I was dreadfully flustered; embarrassed, I
looked away; when suddenly, and to my great surprise, he burst out laughing at my distress.

“No?” he said.

“No,” I said, relieved.

It might seem that this episode would have imposed a certain coolness upon our friendship. While I don’t suppose that anyone who has devoted much energy to the study of Classics can be very much disturbed by homosexuality, neither am I particularly comfortable with it as it concerns me directly. Though I liked Francis well enough, I had always been nervous around him; oddly, it was this pass of his that cleared the air between us. I suppose I knew it was inevitable, and dreaded it. Once it was out of the way I was perfectly comfortable being alone with him even in the most questionable situations—drunk, or in his apartment, or even wedged in the back seat of a car.

With Francis and Bunny it was a different story. They were happy enough to be together in company, but if one was around either of them for too long it became obvious that they seldom did things with each other and almost never spent time alone. I knew why this was; we all did. Still, it never occurred to me that they weren’t genuinely fond of each other on some level, nor that Bunny’s gruff jokes concealed, however beguilingly, a keen and very pointed streak of malice toward Francis in particular.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. I’d never considered, though I should have, that these crackpot prejudices of Bunny’s which I found so amusing were not remotely ironic but deadly serious.

Not that Francis, in normal circumstances, wasn’t perfectly able to take care of himself. He had a quick temper, and a sharp tongue, and though he could’ve put Bunny in his place pretty much any time he chose, he was understandably apprehensive about doing so. We were all of us painfully aware of that metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine which Bunny carried around with him day and night, and which, from time to time, he allowed us a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always with him, and he had the power to dash it to the floor whenever he pleased.

I don’t really have the heart to recount all the vile things he said and did to Francis, the practical jokes, the remarks about faggots and queers, the public, humiliating stream of questions about his preference and practices: clinical and incredibly detailed
ones, having to do with such things as enemas, and gerbils, and incandescent light bulbs.

“
Just once
,” I remember Francis hissing, through clenched teeth. “
Just once
I’d like to …”

But there was absolutely nothing that anyone could say or do.

One might expect that I, being at that time perfectly innocent of any crime against either Bunny or humanity, would not myself be a target of this ongoing sniper fire. Unfortunately I was, perhaps more unfortunately for him than for me. How could he have been so blind as not to see how dangerous it might be for him to alienate the one impartial party, his one potential ally? Because, as fond as I was of the others, I was fond of Bunny, too, and I would not have been nearly so quick to cast in my lot with the rest of them had he not turned on me so ferociously. Perhaps, in his mind, there was the justification of jealousy; his position in the group had started to slip at roughly the same time I’d arrived; his resentment was of the most petty and childish sort, and doubtless would never have surfaced had he not been in such a paranoid state, unable to distinguish his enemies from his friends.

By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: “Gorgeous necktie,” he’d say, “that’s a Hermès, isn’t it?”—and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie’s humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: “Richard, old man, why don’t you keep any pictures of your folks around?”

It was just the sort of detail he would seize upon. His own room was filled with an array of flawless family memorabilia, all of them perfect as a series of advertisements: Bunny and his brothers, waving lacrosse sticks on a luminous black-and-white playing field; family Christmases, a pair of cool, tasteful parents in expensive bathrobes, five little yellow-haired boys in identical pajamas rolling on the floor with a laughing spaniel, and a ridiculously lavish train set, and the tree rising sumptuous in the background; Bunny’s mother at her debutante ball, young and disdainful in white mink.

“What?” he’d ask with mock innocence. “No cameras in California? Or can’t you have your friends seeing Mom in polyester pantsuits? Where’d your parents go to school anyway?” he’d say, interrupting before I could interject. “Are they Ivy League material? Or did they go to some kind of a State U?”

It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty. My lies about my family were adequate, I suppose, but they could not stand up under these glaring attacks. Neither of my parents had finished high school; my mother did wear pants suits, which she purchased at a factory outlet. In the only photograph I had of her, a snapshot, she squinted blurrily at the camera, one hand on the Cyclone fence and the other on my father’s new riding lawn mower. This, ostensibly, was the reason that the photo had been sent me, my mother having some notion that I would be interested in the new acquisition; I’d kept it because it was the only picture I had of her, kept it tucked inside a Webster’s dictionary (under M for Mother) on my desk. But one night I rose from my bed, suddenly consumed with fear that Bunny would find it while snooping around my room. No hiding place seemed safe enough. Finally I burned it in an ashtray.

They were unpleasant enough, these private inquisitions, but I cannot find words to adequately express the torments I suffered when he chose to ply this art of his in public. Bunny’s dead now,
requiescat in pace
, but so long as I live I will never forget a particular interlude of sadism to which he subjected me at the twins’ apartment.

A few days earlier, Bunny had been grilling me about where I’d gone to prep school. I don’t know why I couldn’t just have admitted the truth, that I’d gone to the public school in Plano. Francis had gone to any number of wildly exclusive schools in England and Switzerland, and Henry had been at correspondingly exclusive American ones before he dropped out entirely in the eleventh grade; but the twins had only gone to a little country day school in Roanoke, and even Bunny’s own hallowed Saint Jerome’s was really only an expensive remedial school, the sort of place you see advertised in the back of
Town and Country
as offering specialized attention for the academic underachiever. My own school was not particularly shameful in this context, yet I evaded the question long as I could till finally, cornered and desperate, I had told him I’d gone to Renfrew Hall, which is a tennis-y, indifferent sort of boys’ school near San Francisco. That
had seemed to satisfy him, but then, to my immense discomfort, and in front of everybody, he brought it up again.

“So you were at Renfrew,” he said chummily, turning to me and popping a handful of pistachios in his mouth.

“Yes.”

“When’d ya graduate?”

I offered the date of my real high school graduation.

“Ah,” he said, chomping busily on his nuts. “So you were there with Von Raumer.”

“What?”

“Alec. Alec Von Raumer. From San Fran. Friend of Cloke’s. He was in the room the other day and we got talking. Lots of old Renfrew boys at Hampden, he says.”

I said nothing, hoping he’d leave it at that.

“So you know Alec and all.”

“Uh, slightly,” I said.

“Funny, he said he didn’t remember you,” said Bunny, reaching over for another handful of pistachios without taking his eyes off me. “Not at all.”

“It’s a big school.”

He cleared his throat. “Think so?”

“Yes.”

“Von Raumer said it was tiny. Only about two hundred people.” He paused and threw another handful of pistachios into his mouth, and chewed as he talked. “What dormitory did you say you were in?”

“You wouldn’t know it.”

“Von Raumer told me to make a point of asking you.”

“What difference does it make?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing at all, old horse,” said Bunny pleasantly. “Just that it’s pretty damn peculiar,
n’est-ce pas?
You and Alec being there together for four years, in a tiny place like Renfrew, and he never laid eyes on you even once?”

“I was only there for two years.”

“How come you’re not in the yearbook?”

“I am in the yearbook.”

“No you’re not.”

The twins looked stricken. Henry had his back turned, pretending not to listen. Now he said, quite suddenly and without turning around: “How do
you
know if he was in the yearbook or not?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a yearbook in my life,” said
Francis nervously. “I can’t stand to have my picture taken. Whenever I try to—”

Bunny paid no attention. He leaned back in his chair.

“Come on,” he said to me. “I’ll give you five dollars if you can tell me the name of the dorm you lived in.”

His eyes were riveted on mine; they were bright with a horrible relish. I said something incoherent and then in consternation got up and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Leaning on the sink, I held the glass to my temple; from the living room, Francis whispered something indistinct but angry, and then Bunny laughed harshly. I poured the water down the sink and turned on the tap so I wouldn’t have to listen.

How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny’s eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter? I still think about this sometimes. If what Bunny really wanted was revenge, he could have had it easily enough and without putting himself at risk. What did he imagine was to be gained from this slow and potentially explosive kind of torture, had it, in his mind, some purpose, some goal? Or were his own actions as inexplicable to him as they were to us?