Marieke held up the tap shoes, offering them again. I said, “You don’t remember, do you? You don’t remember the last time you spoke with Aidan.”
“I know it was a few weeks ago.” She cleared her throat. “I just don’t remember anything my daughter said.” She held the tap shoes against her chest, then put them down between us.
“You shouldn’t give them away,” I said. “You’ll regret it.”
“They’re ghost shoes,” she said. “All they’ll do is haunt me.”
I left the tap shoes in the car, watched Marieke drive off behind tinted windows. She had a plane to catch, a life to return to. There were an infinite number of ways to mourn, and I figured that Marieke would try on as many as she could. For now she seemed resigned to her daughter’s death. Maybe Aidan really was her father’s daughter. Maybe she had inherited his fate.
Before Marieke left, she told me I was handsome. She held her hand up to my cheek and asked if I’d ever broken my nose. I told her it had been broken for me. “I bet you photograph well,” she said. “That broken nose of yours gives you character. Be sure to take care of it.”
“My nose?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “your character.”
I’d ditched my classes and failed to make it to the infirmary. I’d ridden in cars without permission, violated curfew, brazenly sneaked in and out of dorms, smoked countless cigarettes, imbibed all sorts of cheap liquor. Even for a school that catered to rule breakers, I’d broken an extreme number of rules. It wasn’t clear that anyone would be looking for me or that anyone even cared about the rules I’d broken, but I decided to turn myself in, to go to the headmaster and tell him that I was having problems. I also thought that maybe there was some small chance that if I mentioned my doubts about Aidan’s suicide, if I brought up Race’s party and, without saying anything specific about Leo, suggested that Aidan had been out on Powder Point during the storm, then maybe Windsor would feel the need to do something.
I hadn’t been inside the administrative offices since arriving at Bellingham. Tinks sat behind the reception desk barking into a red phone. A pair of eyeglasses balanced on the tip of her nose while another rested on the top of her head. I saw a third pair by the typewriter on her desk. Three different ways of seeing. In the background, two different phone lines were ringing and a small portable TV was turned on and flickering. Red banners flashed along the top and bottom of the screen as numbers scrolled by. A voice narrated film of a warship and images of oil platforms. Tinks nodded at me and held up two fingers, signaling for me to wait. I could hear the phones in Windsor’s and Warr’s offices ringing.
Tinks returned the phone to its cradle and it began to ring again. She flashed a quick smile. “You need help?”
I explained that I wanted to meet with the headmaster and she informed me that that wouldn’t be possible. “Why are you out of dress code?”
“I’m sick,” I said. “Caught that cholera Windsor warned us about.” “Quel tragedy.” Tinks clucked her tongue and switched the glasses on her nose with the ones on her head. The phone rang again and Tinks answered and asked the person on the other end to hold. “You’re Jason Prosper,” she said, as though informing me of some crucial unknown fact. “We’re going to need to speak with your father.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Crisis control,” she said.
“Does this have anything to do with Aidan?” I wondered if somehow the news of Race’s party had leaked, if Leo had gone to the police.
“Everything’s topsy-turvy. The stock market’s crashing. We bombed some oil platforms and might be going to war with Iran. The dean can meet with you in an hour or so. In the meantime, let’s try and get your dad on the phone. Maybe he can save us.”
I hardly ever called my father at work, but when I did his secretaries usually put me straight through. Every number I tried was busy, and when I finally reached a person, she told me that my father was unavailable. “I’m his son,” I said.
The voice on the other end said, “I’m sure he’ll call you back.” Tinks looked up from her desk. “Couldn’t reach him? Not as much pull as I thought.”
“This crash couldn’t come at a worse time.” Dean Warr ushered me into his office. “Our endowment’s going to take a hit. Have you spoken to your father yet? Will he come out of this with his shirt?”
“My father’s divorcing my mother. I think she gets to keep all his shirts.”
“Laughing to keep from crying,” Warr said. “We’re counting on your father for those dorms.”
This was the second time I’d been pawned off on the dean. I wasn’t qualified to talk about money. Riegel was right—I didn’t really care about wealth. I could afford not to. “I’m sure everything will work out,” I said, wondering just how bad this crash would turn out to be. If, at that moment, bankers were diving out of windows. “My father prides himself on weathering storms.”
Warr’s arms were small for his body, like a dinosaur’s, a T.rex. He waved them in front of himself, declaring their uselessness, then got up from his desk. “Well, be sure to have your dad call us when he has a minute.” Warr struck me on the back and began escorting me from his office.
We’d barely spoken, and already I was being shown the door.
“I wanted to talk to you about Aiden.”
He nodded his head. “Terrible business. The mother was here this morning. The headmaster and I did our best to comfort her. Poor child was a lost cause.”
“See, that’s the thing,” I said. “Aidan wasn’t a lost cause.”
Tinks came into the office with a stack of papers. She said, “The Dow dropped five hundred points, lost over twenty percent of its value. Tuition is due this week.” Tinks looked at me and said, “You’re still here?” She walked out without waiting for an answer.
Warr flipped through the papers Tinks had dropped on his desk. He half listened as I explained about the party, how I wasn’t there but how I knew that Aidan had been out at Powder Point. When I finished, Warr looked up and asked. “Anything else?”
“I just don’t think it was a suicide.”
“You were sweet on this girl.” Warr’s lip caught on his dry teeth. “I’m glad to hear things are going in that direction.”
It was a straight shot and I felt the blow.
“I’ll look into this party matter.” Warr nodded toward the door.
It was time to leave. “One last thing.” My pulse quickened. “The party was at Race Goodwyn’s house. I’m pretty sure your son was there.”
It was a ballsy move on my part, but I figured I could risk it. Warr didn’t need me, but he needed my father’s money. If the world had in fact come crashing down, if the stock market had fallen, if we were headed toward a war, I was happy to lead the charge. Happy to let it all crumble.
In Whitehall that night, Tazewell kept playing the same R.E.M. song over and over again. The lyrics carrying down the hallway and into my room. The voice resigned but sincere: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”
ELEVEN
Parents’ Weekend coincided with the Halloween Dance. I wasn’t thrilled about seeing my dad or watching my classmates prance around as monsters and superheroes. Mom chose to stay in New York so that Dad could drive up in his Cadillac and bask in the attention surrounding the big Prosper Hall and Windsor House groundbreakings. Half a pine forest would need to be cleared in order to make room for the new dorms. I stood sandwiched between Dad and Windsor as we dug into the loamy earth with our ceremonial shovels. A photographer flashed his camera, and my dad said to Windsor, “Make sure I get a copy of this. I’m starting a bragging wall.”
Dad looked surprisingly good. He’d lost weight and seemed relaxed, like he was on an indefinite golf vacation. “The St. Regis is agreeing with you,” I said.
“Let’s give credit where credit is due. The divorce was your mother’s idea.”
After the groundbreaking, Windsor held a rece
ption for visiting parents at his home. His wife, Charlotte, played hostess, leading parents through the large white complex past the colonnade of what I knew from freshman ancient history to be Doric and not Ionic columns, and inside the sunny atrium. “We think of this home as the school’s family room. Students are always welcome here.” I’d never been inside the headmaster’s house before. Had never even seen Charlotte Windsor. She was a reed-thin woman with perfect posture. Rumor had it that she lived on a horse farm in Virginia and flew up only to perform these wifely duties.
The house was all dark wood and red walls, the marble floors interrupted by bursts of gold carpets. A fire warmed the grand room, silver bowls shimmering atop the mantel. While parents clung awkwardly to their children, caterers sharked around the party with trays of cheese puffs. My father drank scotch and soda and kept sending me off to the bar to refill his glass while he held court, bragging to Tazewell’s dad about the killing he’d made on the stock market crash, touting the strength of trea sury bonds. “When you know what you’re doing, even in a bear market, there’s a fortune to be made.”
It wasn’t like my dad to talk about money. He was usually pretty tight-lipped and restrained, but the crash seemed to have brought something out in him. Maybe he needed people to know he was still on top.
Windsor also couldn’t stop talking about money, shamelessly fund- raising. The twin elms the storm had uprooted from Windsor’s front lawn had been hauled away, but Windsor hadn’t replaced them. He’d left the grass bedding raw, the soil exposed, and kept pointing out the window and asking parents for donations. “We’ve got to fill up the holes,” he said. “We don’t want any babies falling down and getting trapped.” Kriffo’s dad went outside and made a big ceremony of tossing a twenty- dollar bill into the deeper of the two cavities. As parents joined and left the party, a spirit of giving developed and more bills were added until both holes were covered in a fresh turf of green money. No one bothered to collect the donations. Maybe Windsor didn’t want to be seen crouched down and literally money grubbing, or maybe he couldn’t bring himself to trust one of the caterers to collect the cash.
The winds stirred, and soon the bills simply blew away, tumbleweeding across campus. For weeks afterward I saw tens, twenties, and fifties nesting in the lower branches of trees, clogging sewer drains. Even then no one from Bellingham claimed the currency. Earlier in the semester, Kriffo had told a story about Malcolm Forbes. “You know how rich that guy is? If Forbes was on his way to a business meeting and he saw a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk, it wouldn’t be worth it for him to pick it up. In the time it took him to stoop down, he’d actually lose money.” The story spread and found a captive audience. None of my classmates snatched up any of the stray dollars.
It was weird to see my classmates with their parents. Tazewell’s father, Archwell, had a shock of bright white hair, a frail body. More like a grandpa than a dad. At one point Taze actually locked arms with his father, steadying him, guide-dogging his dad to the bathroom. I watched Race help his mother out of her coat. A sparrow of a woman, she stood beside Race, licking her hand and pressing down her son’s red cowlick. She had a pretty face, a tiny nose, and thin pale lips, but she didn’t seem to have any eyebrows. It looked as though her eyebrows had been singed off. Kriffo’s dad was average-sized with a bald head and a barrel chest. However, his mother was enormous. Everything about her was big: her breasts, her hair, her voice. She looked like the world’s scariest gym teacher. I heard her say, “My son is a champion.”
It was strange to witness these guys with their parents, to see them as sons, to know that there were people in the world who would do anything to protect them. I had yet to ask any of these guys about the p arty, knowing how easy it would be for them to lie to me.
Through a window, I spied Yazid alone without any family in tow. Since Aidan’s death I’d felt numb. I resented going through the motions of this social ceremony. Yazid saw me and grinned. I made my way out onto the veranda, hoping he might smoke me up and strengthen my numbness.
By the time I got outside, Yazid had been joined by an older man. The guy leaned toward one of the columns and pressed his ear against the white shaft. The stranger saw me and said, “Would you believe these are hollow?”
The man motioned for Yazid and me to place our ears against the column. He knocked lightly and we heard an echo.
“They look solid,” Yazid said, “but you’re correct. There’s nothing inside.”
The man had dark hair, a patch of gray skunked on his right temple. While the other fathers were all dressed in suits and ties, this man wore brown corduroys, a green plaid Pendleton. His chin bristled with black-and-white stubble. I didn’t recognize him at first, but I’d seen this guy before. Diana’s father.
“These columns.” He tapped the wood. “Back when I was a student here, the seniors used to tie a sophomore to each column right after Winter Break. First snow. ‘Getting shafted.’ That’s what we called it. We’d do it in the early morning so the headmaster could wake up and see those sophomores in their pajamas. You boys still do that?”
Yazid shrugged.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I haven’t been here that long.”
“It was good fun. Or maybe it was a crummy thing to do. Either way.” He rubbed his hands against his chin, itching his beard, then he asked us if we knew his daughter. Yazid and I both told him what we figured every parent hopes to hear: that Diana was nice, sweet.
“Smart girl,” he said. “But don’t let her fool you. She’s a tough one.”
Yazid gave me a wink, then brought his thumb and index finger up to his lips, motioning that he was escaping to toke up. I started to follow Yazid, but Diana’s father asked a question about night swimming. “Do you guys still swim after dark?”
“I did once,” I said. “The water in the harbor stays pretty warm.”
Diana’s father told me about a farm his grandparents owned up in Vermont. “There’s a lake, water’s so damn cold and pure. Ruined me for swimming anywhere else. Diana hates it up there. Too quiet for her.” He turned away from me and looked through the windows down into the party.
Diana was inside chatting with Archwell. She wore a blue kilt and white blouse, her hair pulled off her face with a black headband. She looked professionally pretty, not overly primped like a model but like it was her job to be worth looking at.
“You know, you try,” Diana’s father said, “to do everything for your kids.” With that he walked down the colonnade, knocking lightly on each column as he went.
Chester’s mother, Lorraine, had her son’s curly eyelashes and soft voice. Together we strolled over to the dining hall for the Parents’ Weekend banquet. Lorraine remembered me from Martha’s Vineyard, and I thanked her for sending Chester care packages. “Bet nothing at dinner will taste as good.”
The Dining Hall had been transformed. The long tables covered in white linen cloths, formal place settings, glass bowls swimming with baby roses. Instead of the typical salad bar fare, the school had sprung for a buffet of raw oysters, crab claws, and shrimp cocktail surrounded by a fleet of ice sculptures. Carved replicas of tall ships with votive candles set around the glistening ice. I admired the sailboats as they dripped, melting away. Dad said, “Our tuition dollars hard at work.”
The cafeteria staff had been forced into tuxedos and served us standing rib roast, creamed spinach, and potatoes au gratin. “You eat like this every night?” my father asked. “Hardly,” I said. I looked around for Leo. He hadn’t shown his face to me in days, and I’d begun to lose any hope that he might speak to the police. I thought of asking my father for advice, but he’d probably tell me to forget about Aidan, to put her behind me. That’s what he had insisted upon with Cal. I knew that wouldn’t work. I thought about Aidan and Cal all the time. But they didn’t live in my imagination. They were more real to me, more present in my daily life than my family.
I introduce Dad to Lorraine, and he was instantly sm
itten. Chester’s father had stayed back in New York and my dad assumed the role of Lorraine’s escort. He pulled out her chair and poured her wine. Reminding me of how he used to be with my mom. It was embarrassing to see him flirt, to be so brazen as to stare at Lorraine’s cleavage. He asked how she filled her days, imagining her to be some perfect housewife, and was visibly surprised to learn that she was an executive at Kidder, Peabody & Co.
“Your crew is having a tough time,” he said.
“We’re built for it,” Lorraine challenged.
Our parents discussed corporate takeovers, junk bonds, derivatives,
and insider trading. They argued over some guy named Marty Siegel who was either a genius banker or a no-good criminal.
Chester asked me if I was going to the Halloween Dance that night.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “I don’t have a costume.”
“Just wear your suit,” he said. “Say that you’re an insider trader.” “Are you dressing up?” I asked. “Do people here do that?”
Chester told me that he’d been working on his costume for days and couldn’t wait to unveil it. His mother leaned forward and said, “Halloween is Chester’s favorite holiday. When he was little, he would dress up as a ghost. He was always so serious. It was a treat to see him have fun.”
“Cool it, Mom,” Chester warned.
Lorraine described one Halloween when she and Chester were walking through their neighborhood in White Plains. As she held Chester’s hand and he swung his plastic jack-o’-lantern, he said, “I’m so happy. I’m so happy.”
“He’s won every tennis match he’s ever played, but that’s the only time I ever heard him say he was happy.” Lorraine reached out and touched the scar on Chester’s face.
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