The Secret History (61 page)

My black eye was the source of much interest, speculation, and debate—I told Francis that the FBI men had done it just to watch his eyes get round—but not nearly so much as was an article in the Boston
Herald
. They’d sent a reporter up the day before, as had the New York
Post
and the New York
Daily News
, but the
Herald
reporter had scooped them all.

DRUGS MAY BE INVOLVED
IN VERMONT DISAPPEARANCE

Federal agents investigating the April 24 disappearance of Edmund Corcoran, a twenty-four-year-old Hampden College student who has been the subject of an intensive manhunt in Vermont for the past three days, have found that the missing youth may have been involved with drugs. Federal authorities who searched Corcoran’s room discovered drug paraphernalia and heavy cocaine residue. Though Corcoran had no known history of drug abuse, sources close to the boy say that the normally extroverted Corcoran had become moody and withdrawn in the months prior to the disappearance. (See “What Your Child Won’t Tell You,” p. 6.)

We were puzzled by this account, though everyone else on campus seemed to know all about it. I got the story from Judy Poovey.

“You know what it was they found in his room? It was, like, this mirror that belonged to Laura Stora. I bet everybody in Durbinstall has done coke off that thing. Really old, with little grooves carved in the side, Jack Teitelbaum used to call it the Snow Queen because you could always scrape up a line or two if you were desperate or something. And sure, I guess it’s technically her mirror, but really it’s kind of public property and she said she hadn’t even seen it in about a million years, somebody took it from a living room in one of the new houses in March. Bram Guernsey said that Cloke said it wasn’t in Bunny’s room when he was there before, that the Feds had planted it, but then Bram said that Cloke thought this whole thing was some kind of a set-up. A frame. Like in ‘Mission: Impossible,’ he meant, or one of those paranoia books by Philip K. Dick. He told Bram he thought the Feebies had a hidden camera planted somewhere in Durbinstall, all this wild stuff. Bram says it’s because Cloke is afraid to go to sleep and been up on crystal meth for forty-eight hours. He sits around in his room with the door locked and does lines and listens to this song by the Buffalo Springfield, over and over … you know that one? ‘Something’s happening here … what it is ain’t exactly clear.…’ It’s weird. People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind, when my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these Simon and Garfunkel records. Anyway.” She lit a cigarette. “How did I get off on this? Right, Laura’s freaking out, somehow they traced the mirror to her and she’s already on probation, you know, had to do all this community service last fall because Flipper Leach got in trouble and ratted on Laura and Jack Teitelbaum—oh, you remember all that stuff, don’t you?”

“I never heard of Flipper Leach.”

“Oh, you know Flipper. She’s a bitch. Everybody calls her Flipper because she flipped over her dad’s Volvo, like, four times freshman year.”

“I don’t understand what this Flipper person has to do with this.”

“Well, she doesn’t have anything to do with it, Richard, you’re just like that guy in ‘Dragnet’ that always wants the facts. It’s just that Laura is freaking out, okay, and Student Services is threatening to call her parents unless she tells them how that mirror got in Bunny’s room, which she doesn’t even have a fucking
clue
, and, get this, those FBI men found out about the Ecstasy she had at Swing into Spring last week and they want her to give up the names. I said, ‘Laura, don’t do it, it’ll be just like that thing with Flipper and everybody’ll hate you and you’ll have to transfer to another school.’ It’s like Bram was saying—”

“Where is Cloke now?”

“That’s what I was going to tell you if you’d shut up a minute. Nobody knows. He was really wigged out and asked if he could borrow Bram’s car last night, to leave school, but this morning the car was back in the parking lot with the keys in it and nobody’s seen him and he’s not in his room and something weird is happening there, too, but for sure I don’t know what it is.… I just won’t even do meth anymore. Heebiejeebieville. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you, what did you do to your eye?”

Back at Francis’s with the twins—Henry was having lunch with the Corcorans—I told them what Judy had told me.

“But I know that mirror,” said Camilla.

“I do, too,” said Francis. “Spotty old dark one. Bunny’s had it in his room for a while.”

“I thought it was his.”

“I wonder how he got hold of it.”

“If the girl left it in a living room,” said Charles, “he probably just found it and took it.”

This was highly probable. Bunny had had a mild tendency towards kleptomania, and was apt to pocket any small, valueless articles that caught his eye—nail clippers, buttons, spools of tape. These he hid around his room in jumbled little nests. It was a vice he practiced in secret, but at the same time he had felt no compunction about quite openly carrying away objects of greater
value which he found unattended. He did this with such assurance and authority—tucking bottles of liquor or unguarded boxes from the florist under his arm and walking away without a backwards glance—that I wondered if he knew it was stealing. I once heard him explaining vigorously and quite unselfconsciously to Marion what he thought ought to be done to people who stole food from house refrigerators.

As bad as things were for Laura Stora, they were worse for the luckless Cloke. We were to discover later that he had not brought Bram Guernsey’s car back of his own volition, but had been impelled to do so by the FBI agents, who had had him pulled over before he was ten miles out of Hampden. They took him back to the classroom where they had set up headquarters, and kept him there for most of Sunday night, and while I don’t know what they said to him, I do know that by Monday morning he had requested to have an attorney present at the interview.

Mrs. Corcoran (said Henry) was burned up that anyone had dared suggest Bunny was on drugs. At lunch at the Brasserie, a reporter had edged up to the Corcoran table to ask if they had any comment to make about the “drug paraphernalia” found in Bunny’s room.

Mr. Corcoran, startled, had lowered his eyebrows impressively and said, “Well, of course, haw, ahem,” but Mrs. Corcoran, sawing at her steak
au poivre
with subdued violence, launched without even looking up into a tart diatribe. Drug paraphernalia, as they chose to call it, was not drugs, and it was a pity the press chose to level accusations at persons not present to defend themselves, and she was having a hard enough time as it was without having strangers imply that her son was a drug kingpin. All of which was more or less reasonable and true, and which the
Post
reported dutifully the next day word for word, alongside an unflattering picture of Mrs. Corcoran with her mouth open and a headline which read:
MOM SEZ: NOT MY KID
.

On Monday night, about two in the morning, Camilla asked me to walk her home from Francis’s. Henry had left around midnight; and Francis and Charles, who’d been drinking hard since four o’clock, showed no signs of slowing down. They were entrenched in Francis’s kitchen with the lights turned out, preparing, with what I felt was alarming hilarity, a series of hazardous
cocktails called “Blue Blazers” which involved ignited whiskey poured back and forth in a flaming arc between two pewter mugs.

At her apartment Camilla—shivering, preoccupied, her cheeks fever-red from the cold—asked me upstairs for a cup of tea. “I wonder if we should have left them there,” she said, switching on the lamp. “I’m afraid they’re going to set themselves on fire.”

“They’ll be all right,” I said, though the same thought had occurred to me.

We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean conveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book; opportunities which I would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.

The teacup was too hot; it burned my fingertips. I set it down and looked at her—oblivious, smoking a cigarette, scarcely two feet away. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth.
Come here, you. Let’s shut the light out, shall we?
When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself.

And yet: why should it be? She had been party to the killing of two men; had stood calm as a Madonna and watched Bunny die. I remembered Henry’s cool voice, scarcely six weeks earlier.
There was a certain carnal element to the proceedings, yes
.

“Camilla?” I said.

She glanced up, distracted.

“What really happened, that night in the woods?”

I think I had been expecting, if not surprise, at least a show of it. But she didn’t blink. “Well, I don’t remember an awful lot,” she said slowly. “And what I do remember is almost impossible to describe. It’s all much less clear than it was even a few months ago. I suppose I should have tried to write it down or something.”

“But what
do
you remember?”

It was a moment before she answered. “Well, I’m sure you’ve heard it all from Henry,” she said. “It seems a bit silly to even say it aloud. I remember a pack of dogs. Snakes twining around my arms. Trees on fire, pines bursting into flames like enormous torches. There was a fifth person with us for part of the time.”

“A fifth person?”

“It wasn’t always a person.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know what the Greeks called Dionysus.
. The Many-Formed One. Sometimes it was a man, sometimes a woman. And sometimes something else. I—I’ll tell you something that I do remember,” she said abruptly.