Through the Hidden Door

by Rosemary Wells

  By the third Saturday in November I was up to my third disaster, India, a famine that killed three million. No one but Snowy and I were in the library that afternoon. The whole school had gone thirty miles away to cheer the team on as they faced Our Lady of Perpetual Help Middle School in Amherst. I prayed that Our Lady herself was watching the game and would personally see to it that Rudy got sacked painfully ten times and that Danny ran into a goalpost.

  During the hours I’d spent in the stacks Snowy had not once raised his eyes to me or said a single word. Frequently I’d found myself staring at him, unblinking, as if I were gazing at a fire in a hearth. I decided that either Snowy was afraid of me, or he plain hated me.

  But what was he looking up so feverishly? What was the little gray thing that he kept putting down on the pages? I would never have found out and everything that followed would never have happened except for a slow-flying hornet that started buzzing over Snowy’s head. He swatted at it, and his magnifier fell and smashed on the floor.

  Snowy bit his lip. Then he knelt and began picking up the bits of glass. He swore softly. I cleared my throat. “Bad luck,” I said. “When’s your paper due?”

  He glanced at me coldly from under his soft corn-silk hair. I figured he couldn’t weigh more than sixty pounds. After a little he decided to answer. “It isn’t a paper,” he grumbled.

  “What is it, then?” I got up from my desk and ambled over to him.

  “Research,” he snapped.

  “On what?” I worked my way over to his desk.

  “None of your business.” The little gray object on his desk was a bone. Tiny and all scratched up. It was no bigger than a joint on one of his fingers. The reference book was opened to a skeleton of a rhesus monkey. The text was in Latin.

  “You read Latin?” I asked. He couldn’t have had much more than two months of Latin IA.

  “Go away,” said Snowy. “Go away and be with your friends.”

  “Snowy, they’re not my friends anymore. They’ve threatened to kill me because I ratted on them. That’s why I spend my afternoons in the library instead of checking books out. I’m scared to be anywhere on campus alone.”

  Snowy closed the book with a slam. He began tracing the foil-stamped design on its cover with an index finger. The big hand on the library clock clucked the passing minutes several times before he opened his mouth. Finally he muttered, “You have a reputation of being thoroughly rotten. Mr. Silks said in assembly that certain boys were thoroughly rotten, and everybody knows who he means.”

  “I am thoroughly rotten,” I said miserably. “But I’m trying to be better. My life isn’t over yet. At least I hope it’s not.”

  Snowy opened the book again and flattened the spine. “That’s not the page you were on before,” I said. “This is a lemur. You were on rhesus monkey.”

  “This is the rhesus monkey.”

  “No, it isn’t. Can’t you see ... I stopped myself. Of course he couldn’t see. His magnifier was gone. “Would you like some help?” I asked. “I can read this pretty well.”

  He shifted in his chair. “I guess so,” he answered.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “See this bone?” He held it up. “It’s a leg bone from something.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “It was in Mr. Finney’s collie’s mouth. I went with Dr. Dorothy to the vet when we got the dog untangled. The vet pried it out from between two of the dog’s teeth. It took him a good fifteen minutes to get it out. When the bone fell out, it dropped on the floor. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.”

  “And now you’re trying to find out what it’s from?”

  “Well, yes. You see, it looked strange to me. The next day I showed it to Mrs. Glickman, in science class. She told me to go to the library and find out what it was. I haven’t found it yet, but at least I’m safe here from Sader and Damascus. They’re after me too, you know. I keep looking. This is my two-hundredth skeleton. The bone doesn’t match with anything.”

  “How do you know it’s a leg bone?”

  “It’s just a guess. It looks just like the femur, the upper leg bone in the human skeleton.”

  I shrugged. “Then it’s got to be a monkey of some kind.”

  “Yes, but all the monkey leg bones are curved and thin.” He pointed to one of the drawings in the book. “This is a straight bone, and thick.”

  Again I shrugged. “How old do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I picked the bone up off his desk. From what I’d seen of museums of natural history and a few science books, it did look like a leg bone. It had scratches and grooves up the shaft to the knob, which was cracked and half gone. “Can’t be very old. There were never great apes or missing links a zillion years ago in Massachusetts, I don’t think. It must be from a monkey.” I ransacked my feeble store of knowledge. “But this wasn’t ever, you know, a jungle or anything. I’m sure no monkeys ever lived here. It must have come from somewhere else. But how could a monkey get here? In the middle of Greenfield, Massachusetts?”

  “Could have been a pet,” said Snowy. “Mr. Finney says it might have been brought by a sailor who got it in Africa in the old days. It might have been an organ-grinder’s monkey.”

  “Mr. Finney! Where is Mr. Finney?”

  “In town. I visit them nearly every night after supper.”

  “But I thought ... They said he was sick!”

  “He’s not sick. He resigned in a big huff. There was a meeting with the school trustees after he expelled Rudy and Danny and the gang. At the end of the meeting Mr. Finney ripped off his necktie, the one with the school crest, and threw it on the floor in front of all the trustees and stamped out of the room. I heard the whole thing.”

  “How? Where?” I asked.

  “You know the boys’ lavatory in the old building, next to the common room?”

  “Yes.”

  “The north wall of the boys’ room backs up on the wall of the common room. First they made me come and talk to the trustees. Bunch of old men in pinstripe suits. They asked me questions for a while. About what I saw when the dog was attacked. Then they told me to leave. I went out and stood on a john in the boys’ room and listened to the whole rest of the meeting right through the wall with a water glass over my ear.”

  “Well ... go on.”

  “When I was in the meeting, before I listened through the wall, I told the trustees what happened, same as I told Mr. Finney before. I told them five boys I could not see well enough to recognize were torturing the dog to death. I told them a sixth boy with a lisp was trying to stop the others. That’s all. Silks said that there were no boys here at Winchester who lisped. The men decided it was five words against one. Mine. They also said throwing a few stones at a dog was a boyish prank and not worth two cents compared to selling dope or something serious. Finney protested that he ran the school. He was headmaster and the boys had been expelled and that was that. The trustees said Finney was going to wreck Winchester’s chances of winning a conference championship in football, hockey, and baseball if Rudy and his friends weren’t on the teams. They also said that Mr. Damascus had just made the kind offer of an indoor swimming pool for Winchester. They’ve been trying to raise money for the pool for a long time. That’s when Finney stamped out of the meeting.

  “When it was over, I went back in the common room. I found Finney’s tie on the floor. I know it was his because his Navy tie clip was still on it.”

  I didn’t see Snowy for a week after that, although I waited for him every afternoon and evening in the library. My interest in tidal waves and volcanoes had flagged to the point of no work at all. Instead I began going through the fat volumes of Snowy’s Latin encyclopedia of natural history. Nowhere in any part of any skeleton did I find a bone even close to Snowy’s.

  I next saw Snowy just before an English class. I asked him where he’d been. “Mr. Finney took the bone,” he said, “and sent it off to a frien
d of his at the University of Massachusetts. They have something called a carbon dating department there.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He scrunched his nose under the bridge of his glasses. “It’s a way of finding out how old something that was once alive is. U. Mass. sent it back. They did the test as a special favor for Mr. Finney. According to the guy at U. Mass. they get a thousand and one bones sent in from all over the world every month. People find things in their backyards that they think are prehistoric saber-toothed-tiger skulls and they turn out to be groundhog’s jaws.”

  “Well, go on,” I said impatiently, but I was beginning to learn that Snowy could not be rushed.

  “It’s old, all right,” said Snowy. “Maybe even a hundred thousand years. They don’t really know. Their test goes back only fifty thousand years. The test could have been wrecked by the dog’s blood and saliva that soaked into the bone.”

  “A hundred thousand years! Wow! What kind of bone is it?”

  “Well, that’s the thing of it. The guy said it looked like a primate. Since there were no monkeys or anything ever found here in Massachusetts, it must have come from somewhere else. Been dropped, like Mr. Finney said.”

  “But an organ-grinder’s monkey doesn’t have hundred-thousand-year-old leg bones,” I argued.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Snowy. “Somewhere out in California they found eighty-thousand-year-old bone knives and arrowheads. The bones are Stone Age all right, but they were only carved up by Indians many, many centuries later. The Indians just found some ancient bones lying around and whittled them. The guy at U. Mass. looked at the marks on my bone and said it had pretty likely been carved. Maybe a hundred years ago by Massachusetts Indians here, copying a human skeleton. Mr. Finney says probably some early Indian tribe used to carve human skeletons as part of a religious burial ceremony. Or maybe a sailor traded for it in China in 1850. Massachusetts had a lot of ships coming in from all over the world. Or maybe South Yemenis carved it after a monkey skeleton and a traveler brought it to Greenfield five years ago. Maybe someone else did.

  “Anyway, all the stuff they’ve dug up in Africa looking for the missing link and all that junk? Well, it was discovered pretty recently, but it was there in the earth forever. This could have been buried in Australia or Lapland or Japan, then carved to look like a leg bone and brought here.”

  “So we’ll never know,” I said sadly.

  Snowy didn’t answer this. He held the bone up between his thumb and index finger. “It could have been carved,” he said. “But then, it got some rough sawing inside the collie’s mouth, and that could have made the scratches.”

  “U. Mass. doesn’t sound very interested,” I grumbled.

  Snowy dropped the bone in his shirt pocket. “Since they figured it was brought here from somewhere else and the dog could have picked it up anywhere, they said there was no sense in going around looking for the whole skeleton. Mr. Finney talked to them on the phone. They don’t have the money to study every single bone. I’m late for class,” he added, and dashed away down the hall.

  For the next week and a half, until it was nearly Thanksgiving, Snowy disappeared again, but wherever he was, I guessed it had something to do with the bone. The funny little bone had me by the short hairs too, and I knew if I were to have any time at all to spend on it, I had better finish up my disaster paper. I did. I made it one hundred and nineteen pages. I don’t think Silks bothered to read it. He did not return it to me, nor did he do anything but grunt and look daggers at me when I showed up mornings to recite “If.”

  The night before Thanksgiving break I lay in bed, my mind full of skeletons, labeled in Latin, all drawn before the First World War, of wild boars and antelopes, gorillas and Shetland ponies.

  An idea circled my head like a fly. It had to do with Snowy’s bone, but it was fuzzy and I could not get hold of it. Was it only this, that because of a tiny unknowable little object my mind had begun to work beyond cheating rings, friends I hated? I let myself think of my father, when he and I had discovered an early Cézanne crammed in a dusty bassinet at the back of a San Luis Obispo thrift shop. Dad and I had celebrated that night, as if we’d been Balboa and son and had just discovered the Pacific Ocean. I meandered down the corridor to the john. Yes. That was just how I felt about the bone.

  We had to find out where the dog had dug the bone up. There my thoughts stopped.

  I threw myself back in bed, wondering how I could explain the bone to my dad.

  In my bed was a body. Before I could scream, big hands slid around my throat and over my mouth, cutting off my voice. Then, wildly laughing, Rudy leapt from the bed and left the room. “Didn’t want you to forget about me!” he whispered with an awful giggle.

  Chapter Four

  BY THANKSGIVING MORNING MY father had settled his rage enough to talk sensibly to me.

  Silks had written him every detail of my miserable record, from mushroom eating to cheating rings.

  Dad picked me up at the Denver airport. In the car he said I deserved to be belted within an inch of my life, but he didn’t believe in hitting. Maybe he should have whacked me when I was young. I might have turned out better. He called me a jackass, a fool, a moron. He asked me to explain each of the dumb things I had done.

  “Because I wanted them to like me, Dad,” was all I could answer to every question.

  “But why? Why them? Why choose the lowest scum of the earth to be your friends?”

  “Because they teased me when I first came. They made fun of my lisp. I knew it would go on like that for three years unless ... unless I somehow joined up with them.”

  From that point Dad went on about being an absent father. What would have happened if my mother had lived. He called himself worse names than he did me.

  At three thirty in the morning we decided to take a walk.

  “Sky’s so big out here,” I said. “You forget what it’s like when you’re in the East.”

  “Can you put this behind you, Barney?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t like you going back to a place with a half-nutty prison warden like Silks in charge. I don’t like five linebackers twice your size prowling around till they wring your neck. I don’t like you being punished and not them, and it makes me puke to hear about Papa Damascus and his stinking swimming pool.”

  “Can’t do much about it, can we?” I said. “I mean, I can’t switch to another school midterm with my record. I can’t live home with Uncle Edward and go to Red Arrow High.”

  “Pit Bull High,” said my father.

  “What?”

  “They’ve changed the name. The football team’s now called the Red River Pit Bulls. They’re putting up a twelve-foot-high statue of a bullterrier between the cannons at the entrance. They wanted it on the roof, but that got voted down.”

  We watched the sun come up behind the mountains.

  “There’s a school in Monterey, California,” said Dad after a while. “I know the dean of students. He collects old glass. I could get you in there.”

  “I’ll stay, Dad. I’ll stay where I am and keep my nose clean and somehow go to Hotchkiss.”

  “You can be three thousand miles away from Silks and Sader and Damascus.”

  “I’ll think it over, Dad,” I said.

  We walked until dawn warmed our backs.

  I covered miles that weekend, through the still streets of Lantry in jeans and an old poncho. I took a horse out and rode in the mountains. I had been far from Colorado for a long time and wasn’t completely at home there anymore.

  Boarding school is where your center is, and once you’re part of it, you can only get halfway home again. Home is still where your family is. Home is still where your bedroom is. But that bedroom is changed once you leave. I’ve seen it in my house and in other boys’ houses when I’ve spent weekends. Things in our rooms are thrown away the minute we leave home. There are no month-old septic Pepsi cans lying on the desk. Piles of
mildewed underwear vanish like spring snow. What our parents think are disgusting and violent posters are removed from the wall. Beds are freshly made and tucked in, and a permanent month-of-March smell pervades everything, just the way it does in a guest room. Home becomes school and school becomes home.

  As I sunk my teeth into a leftover drumstick Saturday night I knew I would go back to Winchester.

  Dad sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire. He lit a cheroot. “You won’t consider Monterey?” he asked.

  I shook my head and gnawed on the turkey leg. “Monterey’s for rich basket cases who couldn’t pull a D average at Winchester,” I said. “I looked it up in the town library in Peterson’s Secondary School Guide.”

  “So does Peterson’s tell you flat out it’s for rich basket cases?”

  “No, but it lists the SSAT scores for Winchester boys. Average is high six hundreds. Monterey’s average is low three hundreds. Monterey goes through grade twelve. They got only one kid out of two-hundred-and-fifty graduates into an Ivy League school last year. It’s the pits, Dad. They don’t offer Latin, and they give credits for surfing and bird watching. It’s all there in black and white, Dad. In Monterey you major in braiding lanyards.”

  “God, Barney, what a snob you’ve become!”

  I shrugged, selected a turkey wing, and muttered, “Once you get on the roller coaster, you stay for the whole ride, I guess.”

  “It’s my stupid fault, Barney,” my dad said. “I’ve brought you up to think you have to go to Winchester, Hotchkiss, Harvard. Just because I did. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. Maybe you’ll want to be a beach bum someday. Or a carpenter. Or even work, God forbid, nine to five for IBM.”

  “I want to go back East.”

  “Only because I’ve drummed it into your head for thirteen years.”

  I finished the turkey wing. I found myself looking at it critically. It made me think of the little leg bone back in Massachusetts, sitting in Snowy’s locker. “Yup,” I answered him. “But it’s too late now, Dad. I’m a twenty-four-carat Yankee prep. Ice water in my veins and I sleep in button-down Oxford-cloth pajamas from L.L. Bean.”