The Secret History (38 page)

Or perhaps they weren’t so inexplicable as that. Because the worst thing about all of this, as Camilla once remarked, was not that Bunny had suffered some total change of personality, some schizophrenic break, but rather that various unpleasant elements of his personality which heretofore we had only glimpsed had orchestrated and magnified themselves to a startling level of potency. Distasteful as his behavior was, we had seen it all before, only in less concentrated and vitriolic form. Even in the happiest times he’d made fun of my California accent, my secondhand overcoat and my room barren of tasteful
bibelots
, but in such an ingenuous way I couldn’t possibly do anything but laugh. (“Good Lord, Richard,” he would say, picking up one of my old wingtips and poking his finger through the hole in the bottom. “What is it with you California kids? Richer you are, the more shoddy you look. Won’t even go to the barber. Before I know it, you’ll have hair down to your shoulders and be skulking around in rags like Howard Hughes.”) It never occurred to me to be offended; this was Bunny, my friend, who had even less pocket money than I did and a big rip in the seat of his trousers besides. A good deal
of my horror at his new behavior sprang from the fact that it was so similar to the old and frankly endearing way he used to tease me, and I was as baffled and enraged at his sudden departure from the rules as though—if we had been in the habit of doing a little friendly sparring—he had boxed me into the corner and beaten me half to death.

To compound this—all these unpleasant recollections to the contrary—so much remained of the old Bunny, the one I knew and loved. Sometimes when I saw him at a distance—fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk—I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. It seemed impossible then that one could ever be angry at him, no matter what he did. Unfortunately, these were often the moments when he chose to attack. He would be amiable, charming, chatting in his old distracted manner when, in the same manner and without missing a beat, he would lean back in his chair and come out with something so horrendous, so backhanded, so unanswerable, that I would vow not to forget it, and never to forgive him again. I broke that promise many times. I was about to say that it was a promise I finally had to keep, but that’s not really true. Even today I cannot muster anything resembling anger for Bunny. In fact, I can’t think of much I’d like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: “Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?”

One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude
amor vincit omnia
. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Camilla he tormented simply because she was a girl. In some ways she was his most vulnerable target—through no fault of her own, but simply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures, better seen than heard. This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.

Bunny, through no impulse towards Hellenic purity but simply out of mean-spiritedness, championed this view. He didn’t like women, didn’t enjoy their company, and even Marion, his self-proclaimed
raison d’être
, was tolerated as grudgingly as a concubine. With Camilla he was forced to assume a slightly more paternalistic stance, beaming down at her with the condescension of an old papa towards a dimwit child. To the rest of us he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship. We all found this pretty funny. To be honest, none of us, not even the brightest of us, were destined for academic achievement in subsequent years, Francis being too lazy, Charles too diffuse, and Henry too erratic and generally strange, a sort of Mycroft Holmes of classical philology. Camilla was no different, secretly preferring, as I did, the easy delights of English literature to the coolie labor of Greek. What was laughable was that poor Bunny should display concern about anyone else’s intellectual capacities.

Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; a girl as bewitching, and clever, as any girl who ever lived. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not at all the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof. Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

If I found the twins so fascinating, I think it was because there was something a tiny bit inexplicable about them, something I was often on the verge of grasping but never quite did. Charles, kind and slightly ethereal soul that he was, was something of an enigma but Camilla was the real mystery, the safe I could never crack. I was never sure what she thought about anything, and I knew that Bunny found her even harder to read than I did. In good times he’d often offended her clumsily, without meaning
to; as soon as they turned bad, he tried to insult and belittle her in a variety of ways, most of which struck wide of the mark. She was impervious to slights about her appearance; met his eye, unblinking, as he told the most vulgar and humiliating jokes; laughed if he attempted to insult her taste or intelligence; ignored his frequent discourses, peppered with erudite misquotations he must have gone to great trouble to dig up, all to the effect that all women were categorically inferior to himself: not designed—as he was—for Philosophy, and Art, and Higher Reasoning, but to attract a husband and to Tend the Home.

Only once did I ever see him get to her. It was over at the twins’ apartment, very late. Charles, fortunately, was out with Henry getting ice; he’d had a lot to drink and if he’d been around things would almost certainly have gotten out of hand. Bunny was so drunk he could hardly sit up. For most of the evening, he’d been in a passable mood, but then, without warning, he turned to Camilla and said: “How come you kids live together?”

She shrugged, in that odd, one-shouldered way the twins had.

“Huh?”

“It’s convenient,” said Camilla. “Cheap.”

“Well, I think it’s pretty damned peculiar.”

“I’ve lived with Charles all my life.”

“Not much privacy, is there? Little place like this? On top of each other all the time?”

“It’s a two-bedroom apartment.”

“And when you get lonesome in the middle of the night?”

There was a brief silence.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” she said icily.

“Sure you do,” said Bunny. “Convenient as hell. Kinda classical, too. Those Greeks carried on with their brothers and sisters like nobody’s—whoops,” he said, retrieving the whiskey glass which was about to fall off the arm of his chair. “Sure, it’s against the law and stuff,” he said. “But what’s that to you. Break one, you might as well break ’em all, eh?”

I was stunned. Francis and I gaped at him as he unconcernedly drained his glass and reached for the bottle again.

To my utter, utter surprise, Camilla said tartly: “You mustn’t think I’m sleeping with my brother just because I won’t sleep with
you.
”

Bunny laughed a low, nasty laugh. “You couldn’t pay me to sleep with you, girlie,” he said. “Not for all the tea in China.”

She looked at him with absolutely no expression in her pale
eyes. Then she got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Francis and me to one of the more tortuous silences I have ever experienced.

Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants—too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive. To ascribe it to such a motive would be easy enough. There was one, certainly. But the instinct for self-preservation is not so compelling an instinct as one might think. The danger which he presented was, after all, not immediate but slow and simmering, a sort which can, at least in the abstract, be postponed or diverted in any number of ways. I can easily imagine us there, at the appointed time and place, anxious suddenly to reconsider, perhaps even to grant a disastrous last-minute reprieve. Fear for our own lives might have induced us to lead him to the gallows and slip the noose around his neck, but a more urgent impetus was necessary to make us actually go ahead and kick out the chair.

Bunny, unawares, had himself supplied us with such an impetus. I would like to say I was driven to what I did by some overwhelming, tragic motive. But I think I would be lying if I told you that; if I led you to believe that on that Sunday afternoon in April, I was actually being driven by anything of the sort.

An interesting question: what was I thinking, as I watched his eyes widen with startled incredulity
(“come on, fellas, you’re joking, right?”)
for what would be the very last time? Not of the fact that I was helping to save my friends, certainly not; nor of fear; nor guilt. But little things. Insults, innuendos, petty cruelties. The hundreds of small, unavenged humiliations which had been rising in me for months. It was of them I thought, and nothing more. It was because of them that I was able to watch him at all, without the slightest tinge of pity or regret, as he teetered on the cliff’s edge for one long moment—arms flailing, eyes rolling, a silent-movie comedian slipping on a banana peel—before he toppled backwards, and fell to his death.

Henry, I believed, had a plan. What it was I didn’t know. He was always disappearing on mysterious errands, and perhaps these were only more of the same; but now, anxious to believe that
someone, at least, had the situation in hand, I imbued them with a certain hopeful significance. Not infrequently he refused to answer his door, even late at night when a light was burning and I knew he was at home; more than once he appeared late for dinner with wet shoes, and windblown hair, and mud on the cuffs of his neat dark trousers. A stack of mysterious books, in a Near Eastern language which looked like Arabic and bearing the stamp of the Williams College Library, materialized in the back seat of his car. This was doubly puzzling, as I did not think he read Arabic; nor, to my knowledge, did he have borrowing privileges at the Williams College Library. Glancing surreptitiously at the back pocket of one of them, I found the card was still in it, and that the last person to check it out was an F. Lockett, back in 1929.