The Books of Fell

by M. E. Kerr

  My voice always played tricks on me at this point in the story, and I’d feel breathless, and a sting behind my eyes.

  Keats said, “So you just left school — walked out and the heck with your final exams and everything.”

  “Yeah. I just walked out and the heck with my final exams and everything.”

  “So now you don’t even have a high school diploma.”

  “Nada,” I agreed.

  “Fell, it’s not like you. You stayed together when your father died.”

  “Don’t keep saying that…. Maybe that’s why I let go this time.”

  “Oh?”

  She looked across at me. She smelled of Obsession and she had on something silky and green, to match her eyes. I was glad I was in this phony place with her, because I needed things to be familiar. I needed to believe the world hadn’t changed.

  She looked like she belonged in that roomy armchair she was sitting in, under the colossal chandelier.

  I was out of place. I had on some old seersucker suit of my dad’s that’d looked great in the ‘70s, and my bow tie was a clip-on. I didn’t have the clothes or the energy to try and look like someone who belonged with the beautiful people. Keats didn’t need any extra push to look that way. She was part of that scene. When we went someplace like that, the maitre d’ always addressed all his remarks to her.

  Keats thought a few seconds about what I’d said.

  She said, “Are you saying that you’re having a delayed reaction to your father’s death?”

  “I don’t know what I’m having,” I said.

  “I think you’re experiencing a displacement,”

  Keats said. “That means you might let something big go by, and then later on, without knowing it, react the way you should have earlier over something much less important.”

  “My shrink would love you,” I said.

  “Fell! You’re seeing a shrink? I can’t believe this!”

  “I was seeing one for a while. Mom insisted I at least talk to one. I didn’t go more than three times…. Do you know what they cost?”

  “Of course I know! I’m a graduate! I went for five years!”

  “I remember.”

  “You must be hurting, Fell.”

  “Not anymore. Not hurting.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m mad as hell, Keats. That’s all.”

  “At yourself?”

  “No, I’m over the self-blame, finally. I’m not over the feeling I’d like to get my hands on Little Jack.”

  “What would that solve, Fell?”

  “It wouldn’t solve anything. It’d satisfy something.”

  “Diogenes said forgiveness is better than revenge.”

  “You just made that up.”

  “No, he said it. I did a paper on him.”

  “I’ve never believed what The Cottersville Compass wrote about that accident. They claimed it was the guy who hit Dib and Little Jack who was drunk…. I saw Little Jack get behind the wheel drunk.”

  “Maybe they were both drunk. Who was the other guy?”

  “Some stand-up comedian from Las Vegas.”

  The sommelier was circling. I always thought I looked twenty-one and not seventeen, but he wasn’t fooled and passed on by with the wine list.

  While we ate, I told Keats what little I knew about this man named Lenny Last. I only had one write-up in The Compass to go by. I’d read that on the train when I was leaving Gardner. Last had driven his old white Cadillac through a red light just as Little Jack turned the corner. Dib and Last were both killed.

  Keats thought she might have heard the name … maybe from The Tonight Show. … I didn’t push it. I wanted Keats to talk about herself, too. Mom had pointed out that I was so wrapped up in myself lately, I didn’t show any interest in other people. I hadn’t even realized Mom was dating the guy across the hall.

  “Mom,” I’d said, “you’re dating that tailor?”

  “What did you think I was doing with him?”

  “Going to the movies with him, I don’t know.”

  “That’s dating, Johnny.”

  Keats told me she was going to become a psychoanalyst. Maybe not a psychoanalyst, she said, maybe just a therapist because she didn’t think she could go through medical school.

  “It’s too hard,” she said, “and it takes too long…. How’s your duck?”

  “It’s good,” I said. I didn’t say that there wasn’t enough sour cherry sauce on it, remembering my promise.

  Keats said anything from Long Island had to be good.

  She was most partial to her hometown, Seaville, in The Hamptons.

  For a short time it’d been my hometown, too. Brooklyn would always be my real home, but sometimes I remembered the ocean and the beaches, the roads winding through potato fields down to ponds with swans nesting there. The clean air and the blue sky and the smell of summer.

  Keats glanced across the table at me and said suddenly, “Let me drive you back there.”

  The restaurant where I worked was open seven days, so we took turns getting weekends off. It wasn’t my turn. But I wouldn’t have minded heading out to The Hamptons, where so far there weren’t people without homes sleeping in doorways and drug addicts stalking you…. All of that was hard enough to take when you were in good shape, but if you were on shaky ground, you had to wonder how long before you’d be out there, with everything you owned in a shopping cart you’d stolen from a supermarket.

  “What would Daddy say if you showed up with me?” I asked her.

  “I didn’t mean Seaville, Fell. I meant let me drive you back to Gardner School. I’ve never seen the place.”

  “I could get my clothes, finally.”

  “And you could look up Little Jack…. He’s a townie, right? So he’d be there.”

  “I’m sure he would.”

  “I think you need to tell him off.”

  “I need to wipe up a dirty floor with him, more.”

  “Whatever…. You haven’t been back at all, have you?”

  I shook my head. “If I want to graduate, I have to go back this fall.”

  “I thought Sevens was so powerful you could get away with anything.”

  “Sevens can’t do anything about academics. I didn’t take my finals.” I shrugged. I wished I’d taken them. I must have been getting better, because I couldn’t imagine myself just walking out on everything.

  “I’d love to see Sevens House,” she said.

  “You’re just being nice, Keats. Thanks, but you don’t need to change your whole personality just because I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

  We both laughed. I figured that she couldn’t care less about seeing some prep-school clubhouse now that she was a college girl. In the fall she’d be a sophomore at Sweetbriar, in Virginia.

  Then she smiled at me. I’d always loved her smile. It made her look more sophisticated than she was, and gentler than she was, too, though I couldn’t fault her in that regard this night.

  “I need to get out of The Hamptons,” she said. “August is two weeks away, and you know what August is like. What we never dreamed would ever find their way out to the South Fork arrives in August, along with all the shrinks who take the month off, and all their nut cases.”

  “You should definitely be a psychoanalyst,” I said. “You have all the sensitivity one needs for that profession.”

  “Only if you’ll be my first patient and listen to me.”

  “I thought you were supposed to listen to me.”

  “Fell, be serious for a minute. Do you think you’ll repeat the year so you can get your diploma? You should. It’s a very fancy school.”

  “I might get a job as a cook’s apprentice and forget my high school diploma. All I want is to own a restaurant someday.”

  Keats nodded. “I know that. But it’d only be one more year out of your life.”

  I was working at a French place on the waterfront, over in Brooklyn Heights. It was called Le Rêve. The Dr
eam.

  One night my boss had told me if I stuck with him, I could end up owning the place. He didn’t have a child to pass it on to.

  But you can’t step into someone else’s dream.

  I can’t, anyway.

  “You know what’s wrong with me, Fell?” said Keats, who had just set an all-time record for Keats, by going for over an hour without mentioning what was wrong with her.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m not in love…. Do you know how pointless everything is when you’re not in love?”

  I nodded. I knew.

  “I don’t even know why I’m shopping anymore.”

  “You still want to look great, and you do.”

  “Why do I want to look great?” she said. “Who for?”

  “For whom,” I said.

  “Exactly! But I’m not sure you’re sympathetic. Sometimes I think you hang on to that old romance with Delia so you don’t have to deal with reality.”

  “I’m over Delia,” I said. Do you know what an oxymoron is? It’s the official name for something combining contradictory expressions. If that sounds complicated, just think of cold fire, or hot snow, or over Delia.

  But I would never admit to anyone that she was still there. I’d rather agree to the idea that Little Jack didn’t kill Dib, Lenny Last did.

  “Keats,” I said, “you’re right. We need to get away.”

  THE MOUTH

  Of course Lenny Last was not his real name.

  In 1961, he was enrolled in Gardner School as Leonard Tralastski.

  Until he’d won the scholarship to The Hill, his life had not amounted to a hill of beans.

  I yawn and snore to think of it!

  Get out the violins until we’re past the part where little Lenny’s daddy goes down flying a torpedo bomber in World War II.

  On the very day the Japs surrendered, September 1, 1945, Baby Leonard was born.

  Happy Birthday, Tralastski!

  Just when the Japs were crying in their saki as their emperor surrendered in Tokyo Bay, Mommy’s little sweetums was at Lenox Hill Hospital bawling in his crib.

  I know, I know: We don’t say Japs anymore. But when we did, back when we did, there was no sign that Leonard Tralastski would have anything but a very ordinary fate.

  His long-suffering mother raised him in a tiny two-room apartment on the West Side in New York City.

  He was never poor.

  His long-suffering mother worked in Hosiery at Macy’s six days a week, and several nights sold tickets at a nearby Loew’s.

  But in a way our boy was a poor thing: poor in spirit and in poor health. He was, for an eternity, this too-tall, too-skinny kid who suffered from severe asthma, from mild acne, and from growing up without a dad.

  He had no friends, no knack for making any.

  He spent most of his time talking to his own hand.

  He had a white glove that he pulled over his right hand, then closed the hand to a fist. On the back of the glove he painted a face, a lipstick mouth where the thumb and forefinger met. The thing’s mouth moved when Lenny moved his thumb.

  He called it Handy.

  Sometimes he’d entertain his mother with Handy.

  LENNY: Good morning, Handy.

  HANDY: What’s good about it?

  LENNY: Well, the sun’s out.

  HANDY: Whose son?

  LENNY: S-u-n! Not s-o-n. The s-u-n is out.

  HANDY: Who let it out?

  Only ? mother would have clapped after, and cheered an encore out of him.

  She was his only cheerleader, until the day he got off the train in Trenton, New Jersey, and got on the Gardner School bus, bound for Cottersville, Pennsylvania.

  He was going to prep school.

  He was going to be a junior.

  They say in this life you have a very narrow chance of meeting the one person who is your other: your double, your doppelgänger. It is not a romantic meeting but a meeting of the minds. Some say the souls. And it is agreed that had you two never found each other, as most do not, then neither one would rise to the heights or sink to the depths such a coupling often inspires or propels.

  Folie à deux.

  That’s the official name for it.

  Would Gilbert have written without Sullivan? Would Lewis have discovered anything without Clark?… Would Loeb have murdered without Leopold?

  On that bus, on that autumn day in Bucks County, when the leaves were being torn from the trees by a bitter wind in an early snap, Lenny Tralastski met his other.

  “Is this seat taken?” said he.

  I am not going to introduce myself.

  I will tell you the story of Lenny Last with as few asides as possible.

  You’ll notice that I take some liberties, the privilege of any storyteller…. Maybe the dialogue isn’t verbatim; maybe this one wasn’t smiling, that one wasn’t frowning when I said he was.

  It’ll all come out in the wash.

  • • •

  Aside:

  Folie à deux means simultaneous insanity.

  It takes two to tango … to tangle, too.

  chapter 2

  Keats, this is Mrs. Violet, the Sevens’ housemother.”

  “Keats?” she said, raising one eyebrow the way she did when we’d do something she wasn’t sure we should do.

  “Helen Keating,” Keats said.

  “Keats. That’s a nice nickname. I like that.”

  I thought of the fact I didn’t even know Mrs. Violet’s first name. I’d never seen her out of Sevens House, and I’d never imagined her having any other life.

  “I didn’t think you’d be here,” I said. “Don’t you ever take a vacation?”

  She was all in white. When wasn’t she? These thin-legged silk pants that grabbed her ankles, high heels, pearls under a flimsy blouse, and the blond hair loose, not held back in the bun as usual.

  “I always go somewhere in summer,” she said, “but now I have to help prepare for the girls.”

  “What girls?”

  “The girls, Fell,” she said. “The girls! Surely you know about it, or were you gone by the time it was announced?”

  “We didn’t go coed, I trust.” I laughed a bit smugly.

  “As a matter of fact, we did…. When I saw you two coming up the walk, I thought Keats was one of our prospective students, looking over the campus.”

  I was in shock.

  Keats said, “Will the girls be able to come here?”

  “When one gets into Sevens, yes, or as a visitor of a Sevens.”

  “Oh no!” I groaned. “Girls in Sevens!”

  Keats gave me a look. “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “I just can’t imagine it.”

  “I thought you were a little brighter than that.”

  Mrs. Violet said, “So did I, Fell. You are, too.”

  “Some sexist pigs are bright,” said Keats, “but they lack emotional maturity.”

  “Don’t gang up on me,” I said.

  “Oh, poor baby,” said Keats.

  Mrs. Violet was laughing. “You’ll get used to the idea, Fell,” she said.

  She just assumed I was coming back. If I didn’t, I supposed there’d be those who’d imagine it was because females were finally going to be a part of life at The Hill. Gardner’d gone coed. I tried to picture them there, but nothing would come through in focus.

  I finally got around to showing Keats my suite, which was what had brought us to Sevens House.

  If you’ve made a decision not to return, we must know immediately, Fell, the headmaster’d written just last week. And, of course, you must alert Sevens.

  The place had the eerie look of some dead person’s rooms whose loved ones had decided to keep just as he left them.

  There was the Smith-Corona word processor Dib and I had bought together. There was a photograph on my desk of me dressed up as Sevens’ founder, Damon Charles. I’d gone to The Charles Dance that way — every male attended as someo
ne named Charles. I’d caught a lot of flak because it was disrespectful to dare to pose as him.

  There were a few bottles of Soho lemon spritzer on the windowsill, and the jacket to my tan gabardine suit on the back of the desk chair.

  And there, between a history of the downfall of the Roman empire and a Paul Zindel novel, was the little black folder, with the fleur-de-lys stamped on it in gold. Inside, Delia’s letters with the Switzerland postmark, a paper napkin from The Surf Club in The Hamptons, a newspaper photo of her in Zurich, in a raincoat, a scarf around her long black hair, a cigarette burning…. Delia: the antidote to Keats, the one who’d “pulled me out in time,” as Paul McCartney used to sing in one song…. A year later what I needed was the antidote to Delia.

  I wondered where she was and if she ever thought about me. And I thought then what I couldn’t get out of my head all summer: Dib had never even been with a girl, except that first time at Willing Wanda’s. He hadn’t had a clue to what it was all about.

  Behind me, Keats said, “You guys are really spoiled! I live in one room half the size of this one.”

  “I wonder if I could ever come back here.”

  “You mean because it’s coed?”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” I said. But I did. I meant could I ever be the old John Fell again? I’d lied when I’d told Keats I was through blaming myself for what happened to Dib. That was like saying you’d gotten the mildew off something … and maybe you had. But it’d be back.

  I couldn’t shake the idea that if only I’d spent a little more time with him, he wouldn’t have turned to Little Jack … and after he finally did, I was still too busy being a Sevens, and being me: self-absorbed, and self-important.

  “It’s too hot up here,” Keats said. “I think I should go and check into that Howard Johnson’s we saw coming into Cottersville. Obviously, you can stay here after all.”

  We hadn’t been certain that Sevens House would be open.

  I could remember the day when, given this situation, I’d be scheming to be in the same place she was that night.

  Instead, I told her, “Most girls stay at The Cottersville Inn right in town.”

  “Then I’ll check in there. You should pack some of your stuff up … and maybe call Little Jack, hmmm?”