The Secret History (15 page)

I was surprised by how easily they managed to incorporate me into their cyclical, Byzantine existence. They were all so used to one another that I think they found me refreshing, and they were intrigued by even the most mundane of my habits: by my fondness for mystery novels and my chronic movie-going; by the fact that I used disposable razors from the supermarket and cut my own hair instead of going to the barber; even by the fact that I read papers and watched news on television from time to time (a habit which seemed to them an outrageous eccentricity, peculiar to me alone; none of them were the least bit interested in anything that went on in the world, and their ignorance of current events and even recent history was rather astounding. Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me that men had walked on the moon. “No,” he said, putting down his fork.

“It’s true,” chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up along the way.

“I don’t believe it.”

“I saw it,” said Bunny. “It was on television.”

“
How did they get there? When did this happen?”)
.

They were still overwhelming as a group, and it was on an
individual basis that I really got to know them. Because he knew I kept late hours, too, Henry would sometimes stop by late at night, on his way home from the library. Francis, who was a terrible hypochondriac and refused to go to the doctor alone, frequently dragged me along and it was, oddly enough, during those drives to the allergist in Manchester or the ear-nose-and-throat man in Keene that we became friends. That fall, he had to have a root canal, over about four or five weeks; each Wednesday afternoon he would show up, white-faced and silent, at my room, and we would go together to a bar in town and drink until his appointment, at three. The ostensible purpose of my coming was so I could drive him home when he got out, woozy with laughing gas, but as I waited for him at the bar while he went across the street to the dentist’s office, I was generally in no better condition to drive than he was.

I liked the twins most. They treated me in a happy, offhand manner which implied I’d known them much longer than I had. Camilla I was fondest of, but as much as I enjoyed her company I was slightly uneasy in her presence; not because of any lack of charm or kindness on her part, but because of a too-strong wish to impress her on mine. Though I looked forward to seeing her, and thought of her anxiously and often, I was more comfortable with Charles. He was a lot like his sister, impulsive and generous, but more moody; and though he sometimes had long gloomy spells, he was very talkative when not suffering from these. In either mood, I got along with him well. We borrowed Henry’s car, drove to Maine so he could have a club sandwich in a bar he liked there; went to Bennington, Manchester, the greyhound track in Pownal, where he ended up bringing home a dog too old to race, in order to save it from being put to sleep. The dog’s name was Frost. It loved Camilla, and followed her everywhere: Henry quoted long passages about Emma Bovary and her greyhound: “
Sa pensée, sans but d’abord, vagabondait au hasard, comme sa levrette, qui faisait des cercles dans la campagne
.…” But the dog was weak, and highly strung, and suffered a heart attack one bright December morning in the country, leaping from the porch in happy pursuit of a squirrel. This was by no means unexpected; the man at the track had warned Charles that she might not live the week; still, the twins were upset, and we spent a sad afternoon burying her in the back garden of Francis’s house, where one of Francis’s aunts had an elaborate cat cemetery, complete with headstones.

The dog was fond of Bunny, too. It used to go with Bunny and me on long, grueling rambles through the countryside every Sunday, over fences and streams, through bogs and pastures. Bunny was himself as fond of walks as an old mutt—his hikes were so exhausting, he had a hard time finding anyone to accompany him except me and the dog—but it was because of those walks that I became familiar with the land around Hampden, the logging roads and hunter’s trails, all his hidden waterfalls and secret swimming holes.

Bunny’s girlfriend, Marion, was around surprisingly little; partially, I think, because he didn’t want her there but also, I think, because she was even less interested in us than we were in her. (“She likes to be with her girlfriends a lot,” Bunny would say boastfully to Charles and me. “They talk about clothes and boys and all that kind of malarkey. You know.”) She was a small, petulant blonde from Connecticut, pretty in the same standard, round-faced way in which Bunny was handsome, and her manner of dress was at once girlish and shockingly matronly—flowered skirts, monogrammed sweaters with bags and shoes to match. From time to time I would see her at a distance in the playground of the Early Childhood Center as I walked to class. It was some branch of the Elementary Education department at Hampden; kids from the town went to nursery school and kindergarten there, and there she would be with them, in her monogrammed sweaters, blowing a whistle and trying to make them all shut up and get in line.

No one would talk about it much, but I gathered that earlier, abortive attempts to include Marion in the activities of the group had ended in disaster. She liked Charles, who was generally polite to everyone and had the unflagging capacity to carry on conversations with anyone from little kids to the ladies who worked in the cafeteria; and she regarded Henry, as did most everyone who knew him, with a kind of fearful respect; but she hated Camilla, and between her and Francis there had been some catastrophic incident which was so frightful that no one would even talk about it. She and Bunny had a relationship the likes of which I had seldom seen except in couples married for twenty years or more, a relationship which vacillated between the touching and the annoying. In her dealings with him she was very bossy and businesslike, treating him in much the same way she handled her kindergarten pupils; he responded in kind, alternately wheedling, affectionate, or sulky. Most of the time he bore her nagging
patiently, but when he did not, terrible fights ensued. Sometimes he would knock on my door late at night, looking haggard and wild-eyed and more rumpled than usual, mumbling, “Lemme in, old man, you gotta help me, Marion’s on the warpath.…” Minutes later, there would be a neat report of sharp knocks at the door:
rat-a-tat-tat
. It would be Marion, her little mouth tight, looking like a small, angry doll.

“Is Bunny there?” she would say, stretching up on tiptoe and craning to look past me into the room.

“He’s not here.”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s not here, Marion.”

“Bunny!” she would call out ominously.

No answer.

“
Bunny!
”

And then, to my acute embarrassment, Bunny would emerge sheepishly in the doorway. “Hello, sweetie.”

“Where have you been?”

Bunny would hem and haw.

“Well, I think we need to talk.”

“I’m busy now, honey.”

“Well—” she would look at her tasteful little Carrier watch—“I’m going home now. I’ll be up for about thirty minutes and then I’m going to sleep.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll see you in about twenty minutes, then.”

“Hey, wait just a second there. I never said I was going to—”

“See you in a little while,” she would say, and leave.

“I’m not going,” Bunny would say.

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“I mean, who does she think she is.”

“Don’t go.”

“I mean, gotta teach her a lesson sometime. I’m a busy man. On the move. My time’s my own.”

“Exactly.”

An uneasy silence would fall. Finally Bunny would get up. “Guess I better go.”

“All right, Bun.”

“I mean, I’m not gonna go over to Marion’s, if that’s what you think,” he’d say defensively.

“Of course not.”

“Yes, yes,” Bunny would say distractedly, and bluster away.

The next day, he and Marion would be having lunch together or walking down by the playground. “So you and Marion got everything straightened out, huh?” one of us would ask when next we saw him alone.

“Oh, yeah,” Bunny would say, embarrassed.

The weekends at Francis’s house were the happiest times. The trees turned early that fall but the days stayed warm well into October, and in the country we spent most of our time outside. Apart from the occasional, half-hearted game of tennis (overhead volley going out of court; poking dispiritedly in the tall grass with the ends of our rackets for the lost ball) we never did anything very athletic; something about the place inspired a magnificent laziness I hadn’t known since childhood.

Now that I think about it, it seems while we were out there we drank almost constantly—never very much at once, but the thin trickle of spirits which began with the Bloody Marys at breakfast would last until bedtime, and that, more than anything else, was probably responsible for our torpor. Bringing a book outside to read, I would fall asleep almost immediately in my chair; when I took the boat out I soon tired of rowing and allowed myself to drift all afternoon. (That boat! Sometimes, even now, when I have trouble sleeping, I try to imagine that I am lying in that rowboat, my head pillowed on the cross-slats of the stern, water lapping hollow through the wood and yellow birch leaves floating down to brush my face.) Occasionally, we would attempt something a little more ambitious. Once, when Francis found a Beretta and ammunition in his aunt’s night table, we went through a brief spate of target practice (the greyhound, jumpy from years of the starting gun, had to be secluded in the cellar), shooting at mason jars that were lined on a wicker tea-table we’d dragged into the yard. But that came to a quick end when Henry, who was very nearsighted, shot and killed a duck by mistake. He was quite shaken by it and we put the pistol away.

The others liked croquet, but Bunny and I didn’t; neither of us ever quite got the hang of it, and we always hacked and sliced at the ball as if we were playing golf. Every now and then, we roused ourselves sufficiently to go on a picnic. We were always too ambitious at the outset—the menu elaborate, the chosen spot distant and obscure—they invariably ended with all of us hot and sleepy and slightly drunk, reluctant to start the long trudge home with the picnic things. Usually we lay around on the grass all
afternoon, drinking martinis from a thermos bottle and watching the ants crawl in a glittering black thread on the messy cake plate, until finally the martinis ran out, and the sun went down, and we had to straggle home for dinner in the dark.

It was always a tremendous occasion if Julian accepted an invitation to dinner in the country. Francis would order all kinds of food from the grocery store and leaf through cookbooks and worry for days about what to serve, what wine to serve with it, which dishes to use, what to have in the wings as a backup course should the soufflé fall. Tuxedos went to the cleaners; flowers came from the florists; Bunny put away his copy of
The Bride of Fu Manchu
and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.

I don’t know why we insisted on making such a production of these dinners, because by the time Julian arrived we were invariably nervous and exhausted. They were a dreadful strain for everyone, the guest included, I am sure—though he always behaved with the greatest good cheer, and was graceful, and charming, and unflaggingly delighted with everyone and everything—this despite the fact that he only accepted on the average about one of every three such invitations. I found myself less able to conceal the evidences of stress, in my uncomfortable borrowed tuxedo, and with my less-than-extensive knowledge of dining etiquette. The others were more practiced at this particular dissimulation. Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room—curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in the kitchen, everyone tugging at collars and dull-eyed with fatigue—but the instant the doorbell rang their spines would straighten, conversation would snap to life, the very wrinkles would fall from their clothes.

Though, at the time, I found those dinners wearing and troublesome, now I find something very wonderful in my memory of them: that dark cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our faces luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.

There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. “Live forever,” he says.

And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. “Live forever,” we chorus, throwing our glasses back in unison.