The Secret History (4 page)

All of them, to me, seemed highly unapproachable. But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing past at the wheel of a little white car, with Julian in the passenger’s seat; Bunny leaning out of an upstairs window to yell something at the twins on the lawn below. Slowly, more information came my way. Francis Abernathy was from Boston and, from most accounts, quite wealthy. Henry, too, was said to be wealthy; what’s more, he was a linguistic genius. He spoke a number of languages, ancient and modern, and had published a translation of Anacreon, with commentary, when he was only eighteen. (I found this out from Georges Laforgue, who was otherwise sour and reticent on the topic; later I discovered that Henry, during his freshman year, had embarrassed Laforgue badly in front of the entire literature faculty during the question-and-answer period of his annual lecture on Racine.) The twins had an apartment off campus, and were from somewhere down south. And Bunny
Corcoran had a habit of playing John Philip Sousa march tunes in his room, at full volume, late at night.

Not to imply that I was overly preoccupied with any of this. I was settling in at school by this time; classes had begun and I was busy with my work. My interest in Julian Morrow and his Greek pupils, though still keen, was starting to wane when a curious coincidence happened.

It happened the Wednesday morning of my second week, when I was in the library making some Xeroxes for Dr. Roland before my eleven o’clock class. After about thirty minutes, spots of light swimming in front of my eyes, I went back to the front desk to give the Xerox key to the librarian and as I turned to leave I saw them, Bunny and the twins, sitting at a table that was spread with papers and pens and bottles of ink. The bottles of ink I remember particularly, because I was very charmed by them, and by the long black straight pens, which looked incredibly archaic and troublesome. Charles was wearing a white tennis sweater, and Camilla a sun dress with a sailor collar, and a straw hat. Bunny’s tweed jacket was slung across the back of his chair, exposing several large rips and stains in the lining. He was leaning his elbows on the table, hair in eyes, his rumpled shirtsleeves held up with striped garters. Their heads were close together and they were talking quietly.

I suddenly wanted to know what they were saying. I went to the bookshelf behind their table—the long way, as if I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—all the way down until I was so close I could’ve reached out and touched Bunny’s arm. My back to them, I picked a book at random—a ridiculous sociological text, as it happened—and pretended to study the index. Secondary Analysis. Secondary Deviance. Secondary Groups. Secondary Schools.

“I don’t know about that,” Camilla was saying. “If the Greeks are sailing
to
Carthage, it should be accusative. Remember? Place whither? That’s the rule.”

“Can’t be.” This was Bunny. His voice was nasal, garrulous, W. C. Fields with a bad case of Long Island lockjaw. “It’s not place whither, it’s place to. I put my money on the ablative case.”

There was a confused rattling of papers.

“Wait,” said Charles. His voice was a lot like his sister’s—hoarse, slightly southern. “Look at this. They’re not just sailing to Carthage, they’re sailing to
attack
it.”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, they are. Look at the next sentence. We need a dative.”

“Are you sure?”

More rustling of papers.

“Absolutely.
Epi tō karchidona.
”

“I don’t see how,” said Bunny. He sounded like Thurston Howell on “Gilligan’s Island.” “Ablative’s the ticket. The hard ones are always ablative.”

A slight pause. “Bunny,” said Charles, “you’re mixed up. The ablative is in Latin.”

“Well,
of course
, I know that,” said Bunny irritably, after a confused pause which seemed to indicate the contrary, “but you know what I mean. Aorist, ablative, all the same thing, really …”

“Look, Charles,” said Camilla. “This dative won’t work.”

“Yes it will. They’re sailing to attack, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but the Greeks sailed over the sea
to
Carthage.”

“But I put that
epi
in front of it.”

“Well, we can attack and still use
epi
, but we have to use an accusative because of the first rules.”

Segregation. Self. Self-concept. I looked down at the index and racked my brains for the case they were looking for. The Greeks sailed over the sea to Carthage. To Carthage. Place whither. Place whence. Carthage.

Suddenly something occurred to me. I closed the book and put it on the shelf and turned around. “Excuse me?” I said.

Immediately they stopped talking, startled, and turned to stare at me.

“I’m sorry, but would the locative case do?”

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

“Locative?” said Charles.

“Just add
zde
to
karchido,
” I said. “I think it’s
zde
. If you use that, you won’t need a preposition, except the
epi
if they’re going to war. It implies ‘Carthage-ward,’ so you won’t have to worry about a case, either.”

Charles looked at his paper, then at me. “Locative?” he said. “That’s pretty obscure.”

“Are you sure it exists for Carthage?” said Camilla.

I hadn’t thought of this. “Maybe not,” I said. “I know it does for Athens.”

Charles reached over and hauled the lexicon towards him over the table and began to leaf through it.

“Oh, hell, don’t bother,” said Bunny stridently. “If you don’t have to decline it and it doesn’t need a preposition it sounds good to me.” He reared back in his chair and looked up at me. “I’d like to shake your hand, stranger.” I offered it to him; he clasped and shook it firmly, almost knocking an ink bottle over with his elbow as he did so. “Glad to meet you, yes, yes,” he said, reaching up with the other hand to brush the hair from his eyes.

I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me. Only the day before Francis, in a swish of black cashmere and cigarette smoke, had brushed past me in a corridor. For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me as ghosts, in their shadowy rounds, are said to be heedless of the living.

Charles, still fumbling with the lexicon, rose and offered his hand. “My name is Charles Macaulay.”

“Richard Papen.”

“Oh, you’re the one,” said Camilla suddenly.

“What?”

“You. You came by to ask about the Greek class.”

“This is my sister,” said Charles, “and this is—Bun, did you tell him your name already?”

“No, no, don’t think so. You’ve made me a happy man, sir. We had ten more like this to do and five minutes to do them in. Edmund Corcoran’s the name,” said Bunny, grasping my hand again.

“How long have you studied Greek?” said Camilla.

“Two years.”

“You’re rather good at it.”

“Pity you aren’t in our class,” said Bunny.

A strained silence.

“Well,” said Charles uncomfortably, “Julian is funny about things like that.”

“Go see him again, why don’t you,” Bunny said. “Take him some flowers and tell him you love Plato and he’ll be eating out of your hand.”

Another silence, this one more disagreeable than the first. Camilla smiled, not exactly at me—a sweet, unfocused smile, quite impersonal, as if I were a waiter or a clerk in a store. Beside
her Charles, who was still standing, smiled too and raised a polite eyebrow—a gesture which might have been nervous, might have meant anything, really, but which I took to mean
Is that all?

I mumbled something and was about to turn away when Bunny—who was staring in the opposite direction—shot out an arm and grabbed me by the wrist. “Wait,” he said.

Startled, I looked up. Henry had just come in the door—dark suit, umbrella, and all.

When he got to the table he pretended not to see me. “Hello,” he said to them. “Are you finished?”

Bunny tossed his head at me. “Look here, Henry, we’ve got someone to meet you,” he said.

Henry glanced up. His expression did not change. He shut his eyes and then reopened them, as if he found it extraordinary that someone such as myself should stand in his path of vision.

“Yes, yes,” said Bunny. “This man’s name is Richard—Richard what?”

“Papen.”

“Yes, yes. Richard Papen. Studies Greek.”

Henry brought his head up to look at me. “Not here, surely,” he said.

“No,” I said, meeting his gaze, but his stare was so rude I was forced to cut my eyes away.

“Oh, Henry, look at this, would you,” said Charles hastily, rustling through the papers again. “We were going to use a dative or an accusative here but he suggested locative?”

Henry leaned over his shoulder and inspected the page. “Hmm, archaic locative,” he said. “Very Homeric. Of course, it would be grammatically correct but perhaps a bit off contextually.” He brought his head back up to scrutinize me. The light was at an angle that glinted off his tiny spectacles, and I couldn’t see his eyes behind them. “Very interesting. You’re a Homeric scholar?”

I might have said yes, but I had the feeling he would be glad to catch me in a mistake, and that he would be able to do it easily. “I like Homer,” I said weakly.

He regarded me with chill distaste. “I love Homer,” he said. “Of course we’re studying things rather more modern, Plato and the tragedians and so forth.”

I was trying to think of some response when he looked away in disinterest.

“We should go,” he said.

Charles shuffled his papers together, stood up again; Camilla
stood beside him and this time she offered me her hand, too. Side by side, they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gesture which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other’s eyelid. Their eyes were the same color of gray, intelligent and calm. She, I thought, was very beautiful, in an unsettling, almost medieval way which would not be apparent to the casual observer.

Bunny pushed his chair back and slapped me between the shoulder blades. “Well, sir,” he said, “we must get together sometime and talk about Greek, yes?”

“Goodbye,” Henry said, with a nod.

“Goodbye,” I said. They strolled off and I stood where I was and watched them go, walking out of the library in a wide phalanx, side by side.

When I went by Dr. Roland’s office a few minutes later to drop off the Xeroxes, I asked him if he could give me an advance on my work-study check.

He leaned back in his chair and trained his watery, red-rimmed eyes on me. “Well, you know,” he said, “for the past ten years, I’ve made it my practice not to do that. Let me tell you why that is.”

“I know, sir,” I said hastily. Dr. Roland’s discourses on his “practices” could sometimes take half an hour or more. “I understand. Only it’s kind of an emergency.”

He leaned forward again and cleared his throat. “And what,” he said, “might that be?”

His hands, folded on the desk before him, were gnarled with veins and had a bluish, pearly sheen around the knuckles. I stared at them. I needed ten or twenty dollars, needed it badly, but I had come in without first deciding what to say. “I don’t know,” I said. “Something has come up.”

He furrowed his eyebrows impressively. Dr. Roland’s senile manner was said to be a facade; to me it seemed quite genuine but sometimes, when you were off your guard, he would display an unexpected flash of lucidity, which—though it frequently did not relate to the topic at hand—was evidence that rational processes rumbled somewhere in the muddied depths of his consciousness.

“It’s my car,” I said, suddenly inspired. I didn’t have a car. “I need to get it fixed.”

I had not expected him to inquire further but instead he perked up noticeably. “What’s the trouble?”

“Something with the transmission.”

“Is it dual-pathed? Air-cooled?”

“Air-cooled,” I said, shifting to the other foot. I did not care for the conversational turn. I don’t know a thing about cars and am hard-pressed to change a tire.

“What’ve you got, one of those little V-6 numbers?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not surprised. All the kids seem to crave them.”

I had no idea how to respond to this.

He pulled out his desk drawer and began to pick things up and bring them close to his eyes and put them back in again. “Once a transmission goes,” he said, “in my experience the car is gone. Especially on a V-6. You might as well take that vehicle to the junk heap. Now, myself, I’ve got a 98 Regency Brougham, ten years old. With me, it’s regular checkups, new filter every fifteen hundred miles, and new oil every three thousand. Runs like a dream. Watch out for these garages in town,” he said sharply.

“Pardon?”

He’d found his checkbook at last. “Well, you ought to go to the Bursar but I guess this’ll be all right,” he said, opening it and beginning to write laboriously. “Some of these places in Hampden, they find out you’re from the college, they’ll charge you double. Redeemed Repair is generally the best—they’re a bunch of born-agains down there but they’ll still shake you down pretty good if you don’t keep an eye on them.”