by M. E. Kerr
He’d been watching me, I think. He looked away and back, shaking his head. Then he said, “I thought you’d be a lot more interested in all of this than you are, Fell.” “Why is that, sir?”
“Oh, never mind the sir…. I wish my boy had picked up some of that Hill polish. I guess being a day student is different.”
“Yes, it’s hard to be a townie at Gardner.”
“And of course you’re in the famous Sevens club.”
“How did you know that?” “I remember Jack telling me that Dib’s best friend was a Sevens. That’s you, isn’t it?” “That’s me.”
“It’s why I thought you’d be more enthusiastic about all this involvement my boy’s had with Lenny Last. He was the last one to speak to him … and now he’s got the dummy.”
“I don’t get it, Mr. Horner. What’s the connection with Sevens?”
“Why, he was a Sevens, Fell!”
“Are you sure, Mr. Horner?”
“He was staying at your residence.”
“That wasn’t mentioned in The Compass.”
“I noticed. We protect our own. You protect your own. It wasn’t even mentioned that he was visiting Gardner. I guess Sevens and the school just can’t take any more bad publicity … But I sent some drugs to him there. Asthma medicine, and a little Valium. A Mrs. Violet signed for them.”
“During Easter vacation?”
“That’s right, Fell. And when he left … there was the accident. That same day.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“I’ve always been curious about the club…. The things you hear, sometimes it’s hard to believe.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know the things. That you take care of your own throughout a lifetime. That you live all over the world, and you keep in touch … the rewards … The Revenge.”
I knew he was going to get around to that.
“I think The Sevens Revenge is more myth than reality,” I said.
“Oh, Fell, I’m not trying to pin you down…. You should be proud of yourself. You must have done something good to get in with that group.”
That’s what everybody thought. If they only knew I hadn’t done anything but name a tree something with seven letters in it.
It was the great secret of Sevens, known only to its members.
We’d gotten in by mere chance.
Keats was carrying the suitcase when she came back with Mrs. Horner. It looked like the little cowhide carry-on my mom had ordered from the Sharper Image catalog for me.
I reached for the bag, and we thanked them for dinner.
“Fell?” said Mr. Horner. “Will you do me a favor? Will you let Jack talk to you before you say anything to him? He’s just a kid. He doesn’t have that Sevens polish.”
Keats gave me a poke in the ribs, grinning. “Not like Fell, hmmm?” she said to them.
The one sure thing to break Keats up was the idea I was cool. She’d known me from way back when I was wrestling wheels of cheese after school, in Plain and Fancy, then tooling up the long drive to her palatial home, my old 1977 Dodge Dart backfiring to announce me.
We stuck Plumsie’s suitcase in the trunk of the Benz and waved good-bye to the Horners.
Keats asked me to drive. She was tired.
“I’m so excited, Fell! To think you’re going to be upstairs in Adieu again … this time with Daddy’s permission.”
Her father had named their house Adieu, because it was the last one he would ever design before his retirement.
I could see her father’s face very clearly, the grimace after he’d asked me what my father did for a living and I’d said he was a detective.
“Was?” he said. “Is he dead?” He made it sound very déclassé to be fatherless.
I didn’t have the right stuff for Keats’s crowd, only for Keats herself, and that was enough to blackball me forever.
“I think I’d better sleep on the beach,” I said.
“No. I think Daddy likes you now that he knows we’re not involved that way anymore.”
“To me, that’s more bizarre than a ventriloquists’ convention: keeping Daddy posted when you’re not involved that way anymore.”
“We’re a very close family,” she said.
I said, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Remind me of close families,” I said. “My mother’s starting to date and I hate it!”
She reached over and messed up my hair. “Fell,” she said, “you’re so available when you’re down…. It’s nice.”
THE MOUTH
Nels said, “What’s the seven supposed to mean?” “Search me,” Lenny said.
“Well, it must mean something,” said Nels.
“I wonder if they assign roommates or what,” said Lenny.
“If not, I’m your man,” said Nels.
In no time at all Plummer/Tralastski was on the nameplate in 2B, South Dormitory. (Or was it 3B? I never can remember.)
No one at Gardner could help being impressed by the Sevens, except Nels. Lenny wanted to think that his new best friend was just putting on an act. They couldn’t be that far apart in what they liked and what they didn’t, and Lenny admired the Sevens. They had such style.
“If you’re after style,” Nels told him, “throw out that orlon sweater. Never wear any clothes made out of petroleum — only fibers made by sheep, plants, or worms.”
“You can afford that. I can’t,” Lenny complained.
Nels had shoes that cost five hundred dollars each. Not each pair. Each foot.
They were John Loeb handmade reversed waxed calf.
“But that’s not style,” said Nels. “That’s extravagance. That’s what I learned at my father’s knee.”
“What did he do for a living?” Lenny asked him.
“What I’m going to do, probably. Inherit.”
• • •
One November day, near twilight, seven of the Sevens cornered Nels as he was coming from track.
He was in shorts and an old T-shirt, the sweat on his body just beginning to turn cold.
Nels thought he was in for some kind of new-boy harassment from Sevens. Apparently they were in charge of whatever hazing there was at Gardner. New boys had been warned that they were to have memorized as many seven things that went together as they could.
Nels liked to stroll around their room while Lenny was studying, pretending to practice for this very moment. He’d say, “Let’s see: ca-ca, shit, merde, poop, feces, turd, number two.
“And, let’s see: pee-pee, tinkle, wee-wee — ”
“SHUT UP!” Lenny would holler.
• • •
“Sevens!” a senior shouted at him.
Nels named the seven wonders of the world.
But in between the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Tomb of Mausolus, as he faced the steely-eyed, self-assured Sevens who’d barked the order, Nels thought, Dog-Breath, you stink! And after the Pharos of Alexandria, before the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Nels thought, When you go home, throw your mother a bone.
He told Lenny that was how he got through it.
Once he was one of them, he said to the same senior, “I hope this isn’t going to conflict with my membership in the Book-of-the-Month club.”
The senior roared with laughter.
What a joker! … Right?
• • •
Across campus, the lights were just going on.
There, on a pathway near the library, another confrontation was taking place.
“Sevens!” a senior shouted at Leonard Tralastski.
Lenny named the seven hills on which Rome was built.
Soon, members of Sevens in both locations appeared with lighted candles, singing.
Singing Plummer and Tralastski into the most privileged organization there … and, some thought, anywhere.
For a while the reason was not clear to them, particularly since their backgrounds were so different, and particularly because they we
re the only two new members admitted that year. Why just the two of them?
It was weeks before they were told the truth, the same day they were moved into suites across the hall from each other, in Sevens House.
They had both almost forgotten all about a tree-planting ceremony after they got off the bus that first afternoon.
But they did remember how they laughed, later, when they found out each one unbeknownst to the other had chosen to name the tree after one of its relatives: Celeste.
chapter 4
Packing up, Fell?”
“Just a few suits, Mrs. Violet. I’ll be back for the rest if I decide not to stay on.”
“I hope you decide to stay.”
“Thanks. I’m glad you’re still up. I wanted to ask you something.”
It was ten thirty when I dropped off Keats at the inn. She was too tired to take me back to The Hill, so I’d borrowed the Benz. I’d seen only one dim light on in Mrs. Violet’s suite. I figured she was probably tucked in with the TV on.
But no — she was bright-eyed and high-heeled, and she said she’d just gotten in herself. She thought she’d see how I was coming along. I had an idea she thought she’d see if I’d invited Keats back for the night, which was against the rules. Even though we were supposed to be self-governing, Mrs. Violet always seemed to know everything that was going on.
“What did you want to ask me, Fell?”
While I told her about the evening at the Horners’, and asked her what she could tell me about Lenny Last, she came all the way into the suite and sat down on the couch.
“Yes, he was here,” she said. “He stayed in the guest suite for a few days.”
“Did you talk with him?”
“Far more than I cared to. Every time I came out of my door, there he sat in the reception area, chain-smoking his Kent cigarettes and wheezing. He had very bad asthma.”
“And the dummy?”
“Was locked in the car. Plumsie he called him, sometimes just Plum … and he never called him a dummy. He said Plumsie insisted on being called a figure. That’s when I knew I had very little to say to the man…. Do you have any instant coffee, Fell?”
“Sure!” I got up and went across to plug in the hot plate. “No milk, though,” I said.
“I take it black.”
“Did he just hang around here by himself?”
“Here and in the video stores. He was looking for an old film called I Love Las Vegas. He said it’d inspired him to become a professional ventriloquist. He said Elvis had a cameo role in it.”
“I’d like to see it myself. I’m curious now.”
“Now? You’re always curious, Fell.”
“So you never saw the dummy?”
“I began to think it was alive. He bought candy for it! Can you believe that? A certain candy bar — the name skips my mind right now.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, Fell, I’m not.”
I was jabbing a fork inside a jar of Taster’s Choice to try and chip away a teaspoon of the stuff. The coffee’d been sitting in the sun on my windowsill.
“Never mind,” she said.
“I’m getting some, just be patient.”
“I don’t feel like it anymore. It’s too hot up here.”
I put down the jar and unplugged the hot plate.
Mrs. Violet uncrossed her long legs and stretched. “I’m tired, too…. You know, he wasn’t called Lenny Last when he was on The Hill. He was Leonard Tralastski. And he was best friends with the mysterious Nels Plummer.”
Nels Plummer was sort of a minor legend at Gardner, and particularly in Sevens. He was like James Hoffa, or Judge Crater, or Etan Patz. One day he’d just disappeared.
She said, “There’s a writer named Tobias who’s fascinated with missing people. He calls here sometimes, still. He called after Lenny Last’s death notice appeared in The Times. He thought I was the old housemother and he started in saying Mrs. Kropper, you know what I want: I want to hear the account of the accident in The Cottersville Compass.”
Mrs. Violet was standing, ready to leave. She said, “Apparently Lenny Last made a habit of coming back here from time to time. He told me everything started here for him. I said you mean being a ventriloquist? He said no, the whole miesse meshina. I didn’t know what that meant and he said it’s Yiddish; it rhymes with Lisa Farina, and it means wretched Fate. I liked that, and I wrote it down…. Then he laughed and said he was exaggerating. He said what he meant was he came into his own here: I’ll never forget what he said next.” “What?”
“He said that the best was right here, that after this nothing could ever measure up.”
That had a familiar ring. I’d heard a few old grads say the same thing.
“I guess he went downhill after he graduated,” said Mrs. Violet. “He didn’t look too successful. He had nice clothes but he was driving that old boat of a white Cadillac.”
“Some people prize those old cars.”
“He was wheezing and coughing so much and he smelled of liquor. I bet Mrs. Kropper liked that a lot,” she said sarcastically. “She was such an old biddy…. But he said they got along famously. He said she’d known them both: Plummer and him.”
“Plumsie must have been named for Plummer.”
“You know, I never thought of that, Fell.”
“Didn’t this Tobias write a book about Nels Plummer?”
“He wrote a book about four famous missing people. Plummer was one of the four.”
“Famous, I guess, because he was rich.”
Mrs. Violet nodded. “Tobias claims the two boys were fast friends and may have had a fight right before Plummer’s disappearance. Do you know anything about all of that?”
“I wasn’t even born,” I said.
“Don’t be cruel,” Mrs. Violet said.
She walked over to the door. “There was something else, too. He couldn’t get over my first name.”
“Which is?”
“Laura.”
“Laura Violet. Nice.”
“But Laura isn’t all that rare a name, Fell. He said he’d known someone named Laura, and wasn’t that odd that it was my name, too? I didn’t think it was so odd.”
“I don’t either.”
“But he went on and on about it, as though it was some kind of omen. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘How extraordinary! A dear, dear friend of mine was named Laura. Now she’s a shrink in Philadelphia. I haven’t seen her for years!’ … He made so much of it, Fell. Perhaps he was just very lonely. He said my name took him on a little trip down Memory Lane.”
“He talked that way?”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s pretty corny.”
“As you get older, the corn gets dearer.” She gave me a little farewell salute. “Come back this fall, Fell.”
I said, “We’ll see.”
As soon as she left, I finished packing.
What did I care about Last or Plummer? One was History, the other Ancient History. I had the clothes I’d come for, and Fate had arranged a meeting for me with Little Jack.
Laura Violet poked her head back inside the door. “The candy bars Plumsie likes are Snickers, Fell…. Maybe you should take him some,” and she snickered herself.
THE MOUTH
In tennis love means zero and in Sanskrit it means trembling elbows.
It surprised Lenny how fast and how much Nels liked him.
Adored him, truly. Zero … Trembling elbows.
Lenny had never been adored by anyone but his mother, who was so busy working so he could have things, that he never had enough of her.
Now there was someone always there for him.
And that someone was not ordinary, nor was the time they spent together ever predictable or dull.
Nels taught Lenny about sex and psychoanalysis. His father had hired people to introduce him to both, said Nels.
Nels liked Republicans, and Lenny Democrats. They pushed their politics a
t each other ardently, both night owls who liked to stay up to study and argue and eat.
While Lenny went out for the drama club, Nels threw himself into debating, and made the Gardner team…. When Lenny danced and sang a lead role in The Sound of Music, Nels’s argument for invading Cuba “now!” put his team over the top against Groton.
Of the pair, it was Nels who could express affection, and Lenny who didn’t know how.
Lenny wished he could be more relaxed and accepting.
Instead, he would cringe down the school hall when Nels called out, “Hey, Lover-Boy, wait up!”
He would jump when Nels took his arm under an umbrella.
He would suffer, get red, and then ask Nels, “What’s this thing you have about acting like a fairy when people are watching us?”
“A fairy wouldn’t dare act as I do, Lenny.”
“I guess not…. You have to realize that my mother and I only kiss at birthdays or at bus and train stations.”
“My father always said he’d die young, so we’d better get our hugs in. Plummer males don’t live long. I won’t, either!… Annette learned from Daddy. She hugged me and kissed me and told me she loved me every day. Of course, she told Celeste the same damn thing. I’d hear her in Celeste’s room cooing at her, promising her this and that, and that little witch would make fun of it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Lenny, who had no patience with his crazy talk about Celeste.
• • •
Sometimes Nels would come running quietly from a long distance and hop on Lenny’s back, hook his legs and arms around Lenny, and say playfully, “Giddyap, horsiel Your master wants a ride!”
Lenny was miserable if it was in Sevens House and others saw. He’d try to look as though he wasn’t miserable, but he blushed so easily, and then as his face got hot, so did his temper, and it showed in his features he hated Nels doing that. Any minute he’d expect someone to crack the wrong kind of joke, but the Sevens loved Nels.
His aweless approach to their sacred club was unique.
They’d ask themselves, What would impress a Nels Plummer?
No. Wait. They wouldn’t say “a Nels Plummer” as though there was more than one.
They’d ask themselves, What would impress Nels Plummer?