The Winter After This Summer Page 2

  “Didn’t you see him sleeping there in the bed next to yours?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I don’t know. I don’t know what I knew when flame shot up in front of me and rancid smoke boiled over me and voices bellowed and cried out in terror from a distance and there was an open window and a soft, cool, black night welcoming me. I don’t know if I saw him there and left him in a panic, or saw him there and wanted him dead, or didn’t see him there. I don’t know because I wasn’t meant to know, and I couldn’t make them understand that.

  What is the crime, Egan?

  The crime is in betraying Benedetto Gennaro.

  Are you sure?

  No.

  What is the crime, Egan?

  The crime is in not remembering.

  Non me ricordo, Benedetto, you scorched and strangled hero. I do not remember, and that is the way you would have wanted it. A Daniel come to judgment.

  They crowded around me and jabbered at me. One of them stepped back to make a small cleared space between us, and kneeled down, and aimed his camera at me. I had room to swing my leg, and I swung it as hard as I could. The camera flew out of his hands, struck him alongside the face, and bounded into the air. Everyone ducked, and the camera hit the floor with a noise of metal and shattering glass. Someone put a hand against my chest and pushed hard so that I fell back against the fireplace. It was not the photographer. He ran to his camera, picked up its dented remains and looked at them with awe. “My God,” he said, not believing the horrid sight. “Look at that. Three hundred dollars. Look at that.”

  Roebuck pulled out a handkerchief. He mopped his brow. “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll take care of that. It’s all right.”

  The photographer stood up fondling his camera. “He’ll take care of it,” he said. “My God, look at that. Three hundred dollars.”

  “Don’t anybody want to ask me any questions?” said Ossie Detzendorf. “Do you all know what Ben’s loss means to us here?”

  Across the hall from the Founder’s Room was the Dean’s office. Outside the office was the garden where generations of deans’ wives had snipped and clipped and plucked. Through the open window of the office, between the slats of the swaying Venetian blind, came the scent of fresh-blooming roses, the smell of damp earth, the flickering of butter-colored sunlight.

  My dossier on the desk, Dr. Sprague’s face, the somber portrait by Eakins on the wall behind him all brightened and darkened in the changing light. Dr. Sprague said: “Sometimes I wonder. At your age to equate idealism with naïveté—is that what you’ve gained from us in three years? And I meet more and more of that attitude lately. Why, I wonder. Have we failed you in some way, or can it be that you’ve failed us? It seems to me as unnatural to have a generation of old idealists and youthful cynics as to have the son die before his father. Yet, that’s what we have, Daniel. It’s all around us. You’re not as unrepresentative as you’d like to think you are.”

  I said: “Maybe I’m not. But if you take someone like Swift—”

  “No, let’s not have Swift. Let’s not have any display of erudition, Daniel, because I know quite well that you’re just as good a student in literature as you are totally inept in your other subjects. I don’t need any demonstration of your talents. I was talking about your attitude.”

  “I don’t think it’s any different from the attitude your generation had.”

  “Then you know very little about my generation, Daniel. We were not cynical, we were iconoclastic, and that is something considerably different. Yes, we had our War, too, and what it did was to open our eyes to what Victorianism and Edwardianism represented. Or, perhaps, misrepresented. But, may I ask, what particular idols do you propose to destroy?”

  “None,” I said. “I’ve already destroyed the only one that seemed to matter around here.”

  Dr. Sprague turned his chair away from me. He looked at the window where the Venetian blind gently swayed back and forth. “Yes,” he said at last, “after you had your telephone conversation with your father yesterday I had a long talk with him, too. He said just what you did now. He seemed to think that we were wreaking vengeance on you for the accident. And strangely enough, he seemed to think we were justified.”

  “That’s the way he is,” I said.

  “And that’s the way you are, too, Daniel, because I don’t think he believed me any more than you do now. But I want you to know—you must know—that whatever the opinions of your fraternity brothers or the student body or whatever the innuendoes published in any newspaper, they have nothing to do with the case. No one would ever be asked to leave here for such a reason.”

  “Not even for the good of the University?”

  “Yes, I recognize that phrase; I’m not altogether unfamiliar with Mr. Roebuck’s peculiar idiom. But not even for the good of the University, Daniel. Only for your own good.”

  I got up. When I had entered that office three years before and seen the Eakins there I had secretly taken possession of it, the way you will sometimes with a picture when it hits you hard in the diaphragm at first look. It hurt to give it up now, especially to someone like Sprague, who would rather have it behind his back than before his face. It was the portrait of Dr. Flexner, Gorham Professor of Chemistry, commissioned by the faculty, and then buried away in a basement for forty years, because it was, I suppose, too harsh and unflattering for the genteel faculty eye to bear. Then someone had the sense to take it out of the dark and hang it, and there it was, a magnificent Eakins, one of the finest, the picture of a tired old man with an embittered mouth and a coarse nose with a pattern of veins showing on it and fine eyes with some of Tom Eakins’ soul in them. I hated to leave it and the Copley and some other things, but I was not being offered any choice. All I was being offered was the knowledge that it’s not wise to secretly take possession of people like Ben Gennaro who will die before their time, or pictures like these which must be yielded up before mine.

  “Well,” I said to Dr. Sprague, “I think I’ll take the late train out tonight. For my own good, of course.”

  TWO

  That was Monday, and since nearly everyone had headed for home as soon as exam week was over Saturday afternoon, it was not too bad crossing the Arts and Sciences quadrangle. There were only a few men in sight, and I didn’t recognize any of them. It was different walking up the hill to Iobacchoi. Halfway up the hill was the Deke house, and outside it were some whilom familiars. A few of them were loading the station wagon parked there, and one pair was putting a golf ball at a coffee cup on the lawn. I stopped short involuntarily, and thought about crossing over to the other side of the street, and then was sorry I had stopped. I knew they had already seen me, and to hell with them. I started walking again, not too fast, not too slow, just walking, smiling a little at my own gay thoughts, trying to get down the gob of saliva stuck in my throat.

  Stu Clark was one of the men loading the station wagon, wearing dirty fatigues and with his battered Air Force cap on the back of his head in case anyone might forget that he had been in Korea. The last time I had seen him, he had been sitting on my bed in the Iobacchoi house arguing with Ben, both of them with their hands zooming this way and that to show how you take off from a MIG that’s sneaked up on your tail. One difference between them was that Ben had come home with nine kills and a metal plate where his kneecap used to be, and Stu had come home with a Good Conduct Medal and a beat-up Air Force cap. There were other differences, too, but that was the one that used to amuse Ben.

  Just before I passed the station wagon Stu was loading he backed out of it and turned around, so we were face to face and there was no way of avoiding the issue. “How’s everything, Stu?” I said.

  He wasn’t a fast thinker, and his round baby-face wasn’t equipped to express much more than apathy or drunken pleasure, but now he shaped it into something that might have been loathing, and managed with a little more effort to come up with an appropriate insult.

  “Run along
, boy,” he said.

  I took one step toward him, and this time I stopped short with a purpose. “Go on,” I told him pleasantly, “my father can lick your father any time.”

  He looked at me as if I were crazy, and then looked at the others for confirmation of this. They stood frozen into a tableau around us, their faces registering concern. Only Bannerman, who had been one of the team putting the golf ball, came across the lawn, with the golf club over his shoulder, and pushed between Stu and me, shouldering us apart. “You heard the man, Egan,” he said. “You’re not deaf, are you? Why not run along, and we’ll all stay out of trouble.”

  That was too bad, because I had always liked Bannerman. As editor of The Quill he ran the best literary magazine of any college in the country and was already slated for a job on the editorial board of the University Quarterly when he got his degree. More than that, every time he turned down something I submitted to The Quill he did it in a way that had me eager to try again, and I needed that feeling. But not any longer.

  I reached over his shoulder and lifted Stu’s cap off his head, and when Stu grabbed at it I held it out of his reach. “What’s wrong?” I said. “All I want to do is count the bullet holes in this thing. Didn’t anybody around here ever wonder how many of them there were?”

  Before Stu could try to do what I was hoping he would, Bannerman hooked the cap out of my hand with the golf club, and with his other hand shoved me in the chest. It seemed to me then that most of that day had been spent with someone’s hand on my chest shoving me away from critical situations. “Nobody’s wondering about anything, Egan,” Bannerman said. “Not around here they’re not. So you can take that chip off your shoulder and play with it over at the Back house. They’ll explain the whole thing to you there.”

  “Yellow bastard,” said Stu.

  I was glad he had said it. I went for him so hard that I took Bannerman along with me, and the three of us landed sprawling in a heap together. But Stu and I were up first, and I hit him viciously enough—two or three shots in the middle of his blubbery face—to send him sprawling on his back. He got up as I lunged at him and grabbed me around the knees, and this time when we went down everybody else landed on top of us. I didn’t know who was hitting me on the neck or twisting one arm behind my back and didn’t care. I had one arm free, and even in the blur and the confusion I could swing it at Stu’s face with its popping eyes and teeth showing until I was dragged away and heaved to my feet.

  I stood there trying to catch my breath, every part of me starting to hurt all at once, and a taste of blood in my mouth. Stu sat spraddle-legged on the ground, gasping, his face already starting to show the lumps under the skin, his eyes glassy.

  “Yellow bastard,” he whispered, and spat at me.

  Bannerman grabbed my arm, but he didn’t have to. I had tried to make my point and failed, and that was all there was to it. I didn’t want to play the game any more. I just wanted to go away from there.

  I pulled free of Bannerman’s hand and made my way up the rest of the hill, hurting inside and out. Hurting and hating, and unable to do anything about it. No one could, least of all myself. Myself with my late afternoon shadow long before me, and blood dribbling down my chin and marking the trail with little drops along the way, until I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped my mouth and chin with it, and my forehead and the back of my neck, all of which hurt.

  The Iobacchoi house stood on the crest of the hill, its rear windows overlooking the lake far below, its portico facing the road, so that the brethren gathered before it must have had a good view of the proceedings. It was the first time I had seen the house since the fire, and it was painful to look at it now. It was a handsome building designed in the Federal style, and deserved better than what had happened to it. The portico and columns hadn’t been touched by the fire, but the side wall facing the road was charred in places and scabrous, all the windows smashed, and shards of broken glass on the ground among pieces of luggage and clothing scattered there. There had been two days to start clearing up the mess, but for some reason or other nobody had.

  Five of them were standing in front of the house when I walked up, Noel Claiborne and Bobby Ingle, the commanding officers, and Llewelyn, Garret, and Chandler, the troops in the rear ranks, all watching me guardedly as I approached and passed by and went up the steps of the portico and opened the door, their heads all turning in unison like spectators at a tennis match.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Egan?” said Ingle. He and Claiborne walked up the steps, and the rest, good soldiers all, followed them.

  I turned and looked at him. “I want to get some stuff from my room. Any objections?”

  “You’re not supposed to go fooling around in there until the insurance people look the place over.” Ingle was always a great man for the rules. “You can just leave everything where it is until you get the word.”

  I didn’t bother to answer him. I went inside, leaving the door open behind me, and looked around. It was strange how the fire had worked over one half the building and left the other half untouched. To my left, the dining room and living room beyond it were unmarked; even the party decorations and crepe paper twined all around their ceilings were there as they had been on Saturday night. But to my right the game room was a shambles, burned litter all over the floor, the walls blackened and peeling. And the staircase ahead of me, barred by a rope hung across the bottom, was charred in places and sagging in the middle. The lower part of the balustrade was completely gone; the upper part hung out over the hallway looking ready to fall off at a touch. I stepped over the rope and started up, pressing close against the wall when the stairs suddenly creaked and swayed underfoot.

  The rest of them had silently followed me inside. They stood at the foot of the stairway watching me, and Noel Claiborne said, “Don’t be a damn fool, Egan. The fire department put that thing there. Those stairs aren’t safe.”

  I went up to the second floor, feeling the stairway dip and lurch every time I put my weight down, and turned down the hallway to my room. To the room Ben and I had shared. The top hinge of the door had been knocked off; the door with its panels smashed out hung inside the room leaving the way open. I didn’t want to go in, but I went in. There was a scorched smell all around me, but the room had not been touched by the flames. My bed was nearer the door, and beyond it was Ben’s, and looking at it I felt a horror rising in me and cold sweat breaking on my forehead so that when I drew my hand over it the hand came away dripping wet.

  I looked at the bed, empty now and forever of Ben Gennaro, and for all that my muscles tightened and strained and were waiting to be driven I could not drive myself past the bed to the shattered window. I thought, all I have to do is walk past the bed and live over again one minute of my life, and that is the purge. But I could not. The horror gripped me like an ague, so that my teeth chattered with it and the sweat poured from me. I moved back a step and struck the door with my shoulder. Enough of the spell was broken so that I could force myself to turn away and go to the closet and take my suitcase from it. There was an acrid smell in the closet, and it clung to the suitcase when I opened it on the floor before my dresser. I emptied the dresser drawers into the suitcase, and the smell was stronger than ever now. Then I went out of the room and down the stairs, never looking back.

  Claiborne and the others were still there at the foot of the staircase, but when I walked past them and went into the kitchen they didn’t follow. I washed at the kitchen sink from the thin trickle of cold water which was all the tap yielded, and changed my clothes. The smell in the kitchen was not acrid; it was foul from the refuse heaped high in the two disposal cans. I took the two cans out into the back yard and emptied them into the dump box and brought them back into the kitchen. Then I picked up the suitcase and went through the hallway to the front door.

  The quintet trailed after me out the door to the portico.

  “Now wait a second, Egan,” said Ingle. “We’ve got something we’
d like to talk to you about.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s about something important,” said Ingle.

  “All right, it’s about something important,” I said. I put down the suitcase and waited.

  Ingle looked unhappily at the silent conclave around us and cleared his throat. “Well, I’m in a spot, Egan. I mean, we’re all in a spot. When I took over collecting funds for the house I got your uncle’s word he’d give two thousand dollars this fall, and your father said he’d be good for five hundred. That’s a lot of money, Egan. I mean, when I took over the job of raising funds I counted on certain people, and now I don’t know.”

  I suddenly found myself enjoying this. “Don’t know what?”

  “Well, the way things stand now, that’s what. After what happened do you think your folks will still contribute like they said they would? I mean, this is a very serious thing for the house, Egan. Hell, I don’t have to tell you about it.”

  “No,” I said seriously, “I guess you don’t. And you want to know what I think, Ingle?”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re a venal, humorless, bucktoothed little bastard, that’s what I think.”

  “I told you you’d be a damn fool to talk to him about it,” Noel Claiborne said contemptuously to Ingle. Then he said to me, “And nobody here wants your opinion about any of us, Egan. We’ve already gotten a pretty good notion of it by now.”

  “Maybe so, but that doesn’t happen to be only my opinion of Ingle,” I said. “Why, Ben told me the same thing about him after one look.”

  Ingle went white. “The hell he did. Ben was too big a man to go around talking like that. You know it, Egan. And what right do you have to drag his name into this? Especially you!”

  Ted Chandler stirred himself. “Why, God damn it, Ben was the biggest thing ever happened to this house. He was a big man every which way.”

  “How many football players you know ever got on the cover of Time, Egan?” said Olin Garret. “And when they came out here to get Iobacchoi into the story did you see the way Ben handled them? And did you see what he said about the house? Everybody whose name got into that story was Ben’s friend, whether you like it or not.”