by Peter Straub
The two of them stood up together. It seemed to Tom that Mr. von Heilitz communicated in two separate ways, and the way in which he said the important things was silently. If you didn’t get it, you missed it.
Von Heilitz walked him through the files and past the lamps like stars and moons in the night sky. He opened his front door. “You’re better than I was at your age.”
Tom felt the old man’s nearly weightless arm on his shoulders.
Across the street, one light burned in a downstairs window of his house. Down the block in the Langenheim house, every light blazed. Long cars and horse-drawn carriages stood at the curb. Uniformed drivers leaned and smoked against their cars, set apart from the carriage drivers who would not look at or speak to them.
“Ah, the night is so beautiful,” the old man said. He stepped outside.
Tom said goodbye, and the Shadow waved a dark blue glove, nearly invisible in the crystalline moonlight.
For the next few weeks, the Friedrich Hasselgard scandal and a series of revelations about the Treasury filled the nightly broadcasts and the headlines of the Eyewitness. The Finance Minister had misappropriated funds, misdirected funds, buried funds, misplaced funds in transfers from one account to another and from ledger to ledger. Through a combination of criminality and incompetence he had lost or stolen an amount of money that multiplied with each new investigation until it appeared to add up to the almost unthinkable sum of ten million dollars. “Criminal associates,” not terrorists, were now supposed to have shot the Minister’s sister. By the time Dennis Handley told Katinka Redwing at a dinner party that he had not been following the stories about the scandal and was not at all interested in that kind of thing, few other adults on the island of Mill Walk would have been able to utter such a statement.
One day, Dennis Handley asked Tom to see him after the end of school.
As soon as Tom walked into his room, Dennis said, “I suppose I know the answer to this question, but I have to ask it anyway.” He looked down at his desk, then out of the classroom window, which gave him a fine view of narrow, treelined School Road and the headmaster’s house, opposite the school. Tom waited for the question.
“That car you wanted to find—the Corvette in Weasel Hollow. Did that car belong to the person I think it belonged to?”
Tom sighed. “It belonged to the person it obviously belonged to.”
Dennis groaned and pressed his palms against his forehead.
“Why don’t you want me to say his name? Do you think you might get in trouble?”
“A couple of weeks ago,” Dennis said, “I wanted to have a friendly talk with you—your mother asked me to bring something up with you, a minor thing, but it was my idea to invite you to my apartment in order to see that manuscript, which I thought you might enjoy. Instead, you pretended to be sick and made me drive you all the way back across the island to a crime scene. The next day, the gentleman who owned that car disappears. Another man is gunned down. Blood is shed. Two lives are lost.”
Dennis raised his hands in theatrical horror.
“Did you write that letter the policeman mentioned at his press conference?”
Tom frowned, but did not speak.
“I feel sick,” Dennis said. “This whole situation is unhealthy, and my stomach knows it. Can’t you see that you had no business meddling in that kind of thing?”
“A man got away with murder,” Tom said. “Sooner or later they would have executed some innocent man and declared the whole thing solved.”
“And what happened instead? Do you call that a tea party?” Dennis shook his head and gazed out the window again, rather than look at Tom. “I am sick. You were my hope—you have gift enough for two.”
“For you and me both, you mean.”
“I want you to concentrate on the things that matter,” Dennis said in a slow, furious voice. “Don’t throw yourself away on garbage. You have a treasure within you. Don’t you see?” Dennis’s broad, fleshy face, suited to jokes and confidences and ruminations about novelists, strained to express all he felt. “There is the real world and the false world. The real world is internal. If you’re lucky, and you could be, you sustain it by the right work, by your responses to works of art, by loyalty to your friends, by a refusal to be caught up in public or private falsehoods. Think of E. M. Forster—two cheers for democracy.”
“I’m not going to run for office, Mr. Handley,” he said.
Dennis’s face closed like a trap. He looked down at his thick, pale hands, locked together on top of his desk. “I know things are difficult for you at home, Tom. I want you to know that you can always come to me. I don’t suppose I’ll ever say this to another student, no matter how long I might teach, but you can call me any time.”
A flash of perception that seemed to come from the adult he would be told Tom that Dennis would make a similar speech to a particularly favored student once every four or five years for the rest of his life.
“There’s nothing wrong with my home life,” he said, and heard his mother’s almost unemotional screams.
“Just remember what I told you.”
“Can I go now?”
Dennis sighed. “Listen, Tom—I just want you to know who you are. That’s what I care about—who you are.”
Tom could not stop himself from standing up. His breath had caught in a hot little pocket deep in his throat, and could not move up or down.
Dennis sent him a complicated look that combined resentment, surprise, and a desire to repeat everything he had just said. “Go on.” Tom took a step backwards. “I won’t keep you.”
Tom left the room and found Fritz Redwing sitting in the hallway with his back against the plate glass window overlooking the school’s courtyard. Fritz had been kept back at the start of what should have been his freshman year, and had been in Tom’s class ever since.
“What’d he do?” Fritz scrambled to his feet.
Tom swallowed the burning air in his throat. “He didn’t do anything.”
“We can still make the cart to dancing class—the kids who had sports are still down in the locker room.”
The two boys began moving down the corridor.
Fritz Redwing’s hair was a thick blond thatch, but in most other ways he was a typical Redwing—short, broad-shouldered, with short thick legs and virtually no waist. Fritz was a kind and friendly boy, not very highly regarded by his family; he had been pleased to find his old friend Tom Pasmore back in the class into which failure had thrown him, almost as if he imagined that Tom kept him company in his disgrace. Tom knew that when people spoke of the stupidity of the younger Redwings, it was Fritz they had most in mind, but Fritz seemed merely slow to him, and for that reason not much inclined to thought. Thinking took time, and Fritz tended to be lazy. When he bothered to think, Fritz generally did all right. The top of his blond head came only to the middle of Tom’s chest. Next to Tom, he resembled a small, shaggy blond bear.
Tom and Fritz came out of the school’s side door and walked toward the parking lot in hot steady sunlight. The cart stood at the far end of the parking lot, and from it a hum of high-pitched voices, pierced now and then by a shriek, came to the two boys. Tom instantly saw Sarah Spence’s blond head in the second of the four front rows, which had been filled with girls. The cart’s fluttering cover cast a greenish shade over the rows of girls. For different reasons, both Tom and Fritz Redwing slowed their pace and turned off the path to stand in the darker shade at the side of the school building.
Tom thought that Sarah Spence, seated between Marion Hufstetter and Moonie Firestone on the second bench, flashed her eyes at him as she leaned over to whisper something in Marion’s ear. He suspected that she was saying something about him, and his blood froze.
“You can pick your nose,” Fritz said, turning to him with an upraised index finger, “and you can pick your friends. But you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” He laughed; then because Tom remained silent, looked at him sideways with his q
ueer light-filled eyes.
A lizard the size of a cat ran on pinwheeling legs across the asphalt parking lot and disappeared beneath the cart. Sarah Spence grinned at something said by Moonie Firestone. Tom thought she had forgotten he was there, but in the green shade her eyes moved toward him, and his blood froze again.
“I suppose Buddy’s coming home soon,” he said to Fritz.
“Buddy’s so cool. Life is one big party to Buddy. You heard about how he wrecked his mom’s car last summer. Totaled it. Just walked away. I can’t wait till we get up to Eagle Lake this summer.”
“But when is he coming home?”
“Who?”
“Buddy. Your cousin Buddy, the one-man demolition derby.”
“Mr. Cool,” Fritz said.
“When is Mr. Cool coming to Mill Walk?”
“He isn’t,” Fritz said. “He’s going straight from Arizona to Wisconsin. Him and some other guys are going to drive straight through. Par-ty. All the way cross-country.”
They watched a stream of third- and fourth-year boys pour from the Field House, slinging their jackets over their shoulders on their way up the hill to the parking lot. As soon as the other boys had passed them, Tom and Fritz began moving together toward the cart.
Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy of Dance occupied a narrow four-story townhouse on a sidestreet off Calle Berghofstrasse. Only a small, gleaming brass plaque on the front door identified the dancing school. When the cart pulled up before the white stone steps, the Brooks-Lowood students climbed out and spread out along the sidewalk. The driver jingled the reins and drove around the block. While they waited on the sidewalk, the boys buttoned their collars, adjusted their neckties, and gave quick looks at their hands. The girls combed their hair and inspected their faces in hand mirrors. After a minute or two had passed, the door at the top of the stairs swung open, and Miss Ellinghausen, a tiny white-haired woman in a grey dress, pearls, and low-heeled black shoes, stepped out and said, “You may come in, my dears, and line up to be inspected.”
Girls before boys, the students toiled up the steps. Inside the townhouse, they formed a long single line from the front door past the entrance to the parlor all the way to Miss Ellinghausen’s kitchen, which smelled of disinfectant and ammonia. The little woman walked down the row of students, looking closely at their hands and faces. Fritz Redwing was sent upstairs to wash his hands, and all the rest filed into the larger of the two downstairs studios, a large bright room with a polished parquet floor and a bay window filled with an enormous arrangement of silk flowers. Miss Gonsalves, a woman as tiny and ancient as Miss Ellinghausen, but with glossy black hair and elaborate facial makeup, sat poised at an upright piano. Miss Ellinghausen and Miss Gonsalves lived on the upper floors of the Academy, and no one had ever seen either one of them anywhere but in this building.
When Fritz Redwing came back downstairs, grinning foolishly and wiping his hands on the back of his trousers, Miss Ellinghausen said, “We shall begin with a waltz, if you please, Miss Gonsalves. Partners, ladies and gentlemen, partners.”
Since there were more girls than boys, two or three pairs of girls always partnered each other at these lessons. As Buddy Redwing’s acknowledged girlfriend, Sarah Spence generally danced with Moonie Firestone, whose boyfriend was in a military school in Delaware.
On grounds of height rather than compatibility, Tom had long been partnered with a girl named Posy Tuttle, six feet tall exactly. She never spoke to Tom during the classes and avoided even looking him in the eye.
Miss Ellinghausen moved slowly through the laboriously waltzing couples, uttering brief remarks as she went, and gradually worked her way around to Tom and Posy. She stopped beside them, and Posy blushed.
“Try to glide a bit more, Posy,” she said.
Posy bit her lip and tried to glide to the severe meter coming from the upright.
“Are your parents well?”
“Yes, Miss Ellinghausen,” Posy said, blushing all the harder.
“And your mother, Thomas?”
“She’s fine, Miss Ellinghausen.”
“Such a … delicate child she was.”
Tom pushed Posy around in a clumsy circle.
“Thomas, I’d like you to partner Sarah Spence for the rest of the lesson. Posy, I’m sure you will be of more assistance to Marybeth.” This was Moonie’s real name.
Posy dropped Tom’s hand as if it were a hot brick, and Tom followed her across the polished floor to the corner where Sarah Spence and Moonie Firestone were executing bored, perfect waltz steps. “New partners, girls!” exclaimed the old woman, and Tom found himself inches away from Sarah Spence. She was almost instantly in his arms, smiling and looking gravely into his eyes. He heard Posy Tuttle begin rattling away in her flat, ironic voice to Moonie, saying everything she had been saving up.
For an instant Tom and Sarah were awkwardly out of rhythm with one another.
“Sorry,” Tom said.
“Don’t be,” Sarah said. “I’m so used to dancing with Moonie, I forgot what it was like with a boy.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, I’m glad.”
That silenced Tom for a time.
“I haven’t talked to you in so long,” she said at last.
“I know.”
“Are you nervous?”
“No,” Tom said, though he knew that she could feel him trembling. “Maybe a little.”
“I’m sorry I don’t see you anymore.”
“Are you?” said Tom, surprised.
“Sure. We were friends, and now I only see you in Miss Ellinghausen’s cart.”
The music ceased, and like the other couples Tom and Sarah broke apart and waited for instructions. He had not imagined that Sarah Spence actually paid any attention to him in the dancing school cart.
“Fox trot,” the old woman said. Miss Gonsalves began thumping out “But Not For Me.”
“Are you still doing Fritzie’s homework for him?”
“Somebody has to do it,” Tom said.
She laughed and hugged him in a manner that would have brought a reprimand if Miss Ellinghausen had seen it.
“Moonie and I were so bored with each other. You’d think we were being punished. I thought the only boy I’d ever dance with for the rest of my life was Buddy. And Buddy’s sense of rhythm is a little personal.”
“How is he?”
“Does Buddy Redwing seem to you like the kind of person who would write letters? I’m sick of thinking about Buddy—I’m always sick of thinking about Buddy whenever he isn’t around.”
“And when he is around?”
“Oh, you know—Buddy’s so active you can’t think about anything.”
This sentence left Tom feeling a little depressed. He looked down at her smiling up at him, and took in that she was smaller than he remembered, that her blue-grey eyes were very widely spaced, that she smiled easily and warmly and that her smile was surprisingly wide.
“It was so nice of Miss Ellinghausen to give you to me. Or would you rather dance with Posy Tuttle?”
“Posy and I didn’t have much to say to each other.”
“Posy was scared stiff of you, couldn’t you tell?”
“What?”
“You’re so hulking, for one thing, with those enormous shoulders. Posy is used to looking down at boys, that’s why she has that terrible stoop. And I think she found your reputation forbidding. I mean your reputation as the school intellectual.”
“Is that what I am?” This was a little disingenuous.
“But Not For Me” came to an end, and “Cocktails For Two” began.
“Do you remember when I visited you in the hospital?”
“You talked about Buddy then too.”
“I was impressed with him, I will admit. It was interesting to—that he was a Redwing was interesting.”
“Boys,” Miss Ellinghausen said, “right hands on your partners’ spines. Fritz, stop daydreaming.”
When Tom said n
othing, Sarah went on, “I mean, they’re so definite. So set apart.”
“What goes on at the compound?”
“They watch movies a lot. They talk about sports. The men get together and talk about business—I saw your grandfather a couple of times. He comes over to see Ralph Redwing. If it wasn’t them, it’d be kind of boring. And Buddy isn’t too boring.” She looked up at him with a flickering smile. “I always think of you when I see your grandfather.”
“I think of you too.” Tom’s depression had blown away as if it never existed.
“You’re not shaking anymore,” she said.
Miss Gonsalves began thumping out something that sounded like “Begin the Beguine.”
“I was so stupid, that day I saw you in the hospital. You know how you go over certain conversations after you had them, and feel terrible about the dumb things you said? That’s how I feel about that day.”
“I was just happy you came.”
“But you were—” She waited.
“You were so different. Grown up.”
“Well, you’ve caught up with me! We’re friends again, aren’t we? We wouldn’t have stopped being friends, if you hadn’t walked in front of a car.” She looked up at him with a face in which an idea was just being born. “Why don’t you come up to Eagle Lake this summer? Fritz could invite you. I could see you every day. We could sit around and talk while Buddy is blowing up fish and wrecking cars.”
Holding Sarah Spence in his arms, Tom felt himself claimed by the daily world, which had seemed so insubstantial in Lamont von Heilitz’s house. This extraordinarily pretty and self-possessed girl seemed to imply, with her long warm smile and stream of sentences that went straight into him like a series of shapely arrows, that everything could always be as it was at this moment. He could dance, he could talk, he could hold Sarah Spence’s surprisingly firm and solid body in his arms without shaking or stuttering. He was the school intellectual—the school something, anyhow. He was hulking, with his enormous shoulders.