“I should be with her,” said Warden.
“My wife is acceptable company.”
“I’m scared she has cancer,” said Warden.
It was a word Somerville hated to hear. His son Alfred had died of intestinal cancer twenty-nine months ago, just before Ben’s wedding to Cynthia. Alfred had been thirty-one years old. But Somerville accepted Warden’s amateur diagnosis. He and Kathleen had discussed Cynthia’s symptoms and had speculated the same conclusion. “She might,” he said. “I pray not.”
“What should I do?” asked Warden.
“Wait. Hope. She’s a young woman,” he said. “Don’t bury her yet.”
Warden said that was exactly what he had been doing—acting as though her death were already decreed. “What are the five stages you’re supposed to go through? Depression, anger?”
Oh, Lord, he’s been reading those pop psychology books. Somerville had tried that route himself a few years ago, but he had found that the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer was sufficient psychology for him. (And then they changed the prayer book!) He forced himself to concentrate on Warden. “Denial is the first stage,” said Somerville. “Anger, depression, bargaining.” How many times he had searched those books for some source of comfort. “Finally you get to acceptance. It took me a while to reach that last stage.”
Warden asked him the difference between denial and optimism.
Somerville did not answer. He stared at the three-year-old calendar on the white wall of his classroom and sought a fresh way of articulating the peace that accompanied religious faith. It was one of their favorite topics of argument. Warden must have misunderstood his silence. “I’m afraid I’ve dredged up some sad memories, Horace,” he said.” I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Somerville. “Alfred had a good life, no matter how short.” He wanted to stress the positive. “He went out with dignity and knowing we loved him.”
“At least he died quickly,” said Warden.
“Yes,” said Somerville, “it would have been much worse to watch him . . .”
“Linger,” Warden finished the sentence for him.
Damn it to hell, that was careless. Somerville knew Warden had watched both of his parents die very slowly over the past five years. “It’s my turn to apologize, Ben,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.” But he was silently annoyed with Warden for trapping him into a faux pas.
Warden waved his apology away.
“I came in here to be distracted,” he said. “You’re doing your best.”
Somerville asked him about his trip to New York.
“Absolutely uneventful,” said Warden. “Nothing newsworthy happened at all.” But as he sat with his friend, Warden recalled uneasily that something indeed had happened. Something he could not mention to anybody.
Not yet.
SCENE 5
As a JV basketball player, Thomas Boatwright practiced in the old gym. The varsity teams—basketball, wrestling, swimming, and indoor track—got all the locker rooms and the facilities in the huge new sports complex called the Fieldhouse, which was built out the back of the old gym, but Thomas did not especially mind. There was something nice about the traditions attached to the older building. He stepped into the vestibule of the gym and immediately turned down the stairs to his right. All the locker rooms were on the same basement level. He supposed they’d have to change that if the place ever went coed.
Angus Farrier was pushing a dust mop down the smooth concrete halls as Thomas approached the door to the JV basketball locker room.
“Use the handle,” said Angus, which was his way of telling Thomas that he had just cleaned the glass of the door and that he didn’t want fingerprints on the surface.
“Window open?” asked Thomas.
“Them’s already in there,” said Angus. “Had some help.”
Thomas had never seen Angus dressed in anything other than what he had on now: a white tee shirt and clean olive trousers. Angus was thin and tall and very strong, with white hair in a crew cut and wrinkles all over his face. His eyes were a light blue, his skin doughy white, as though he never emerged into the sunlight. Some of the boys said he never did, that he lived in his lair in the basement all the time, where he kept an old desk beside the furnace and the boiler. He had probably been working at the school ever since Mr. Stringfellow started the place a million years ago. Everybody knew Angus. He ran the gym, kept it clean, washed all the uniforms and practice equipment, and prepared daily the 350 rolls of jocks, socks, shorts, shirts, and towels nearly every boy on the campus would use in the course of a practice. Sometimes, when he had fewer chores on a given day, he would distribute the rolls to each boy’s locker in each locker room, rather than wait at his wiremesh window for the boys to pick them up.
Inside the locker room bright fluorescent ceiling lights shone on carpet the color of ripe watermelon and on dark green benches. One row of lockers ran along the walls, and another group was clustered in an island in the center of the room. The lockers were not actually lockers, but wooden cubicles, also painted green. Thomas’s was just to the right of the door. A white adhesive tape strip saying BOATWRIGHT ran across the top of Thomas’s locker. He was proud of it. On the shelf at eye level was a rolled-up towel containing all his practice clothes.
Ralph Musgrove was already in the locker room and getting dressed for practice.
“Hey, Tom.”
“Hey, Ralph.”
Ralph was the starting center, five inches taller than Thomas, 6'5" as opposed to 6'0", and he was stockier, stronger, and quicker. He had a great shot too, and he could zip passes through all kinds of traffic. His only weakness was that he couldn’t dribble with his left hand. Thomas was the second-string point guard, but he would soon be third-string if his shooting did not improve.
Robert Staines entered the locker room while Thomas was getting undressed. Staines was a starter at wing.
“Hey, Musgrove. Hey, Boatwright.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Staines was the kind of person who seemed like the greatest guy in the world for the first thirty seconds of seeing him. He looked just like one of those surfers in the Pepsi ads on TV. He had blond hair that flopped just above his ears and perfect teeth, which he was always showing you in a big grin. He was a couple of inches shorter than Thomas, but much stockier. He probably weighed twenty pounds more, and he looked older, broader-shouldered, thicker in the chest.
“You have a good holiday, Ralph?” asked Staines as he stripped off his clothes. Staines was the fastest dresser you ever saw.
“Pretty good.”
“I got laid so many times I lost count.”
Ralph said it wasn’t too hard to count to zero.
“How about you, Boatwright? You get your paddle wet?”
“Not really.” Same old conversation.
“You’re not aggressive enough,” said Staines. “You got to know what you want, and go after it.”
Thomas had roomed with Staines during their freshman year and had hated his guts most days of the week. Staines was never, ever serious about anything except sports. Not that Thomas was some big study fish or anything, but Staines was a ridiculous goof-off. For the first month of school they were always getting demerits from Mr. Delaney, the house master over on Kean House, where most of the third-formers lived, and a couple of times they got called into Mr. Grayson’s office for playing their stereo during study hours. Mr. Delaney, who was also the varsity basketball coach, liked Staines because Staines was a good athlete; but Delaney was also fair, and finally, after about a million times of his walking into their room and finding Thomas lying in bed with a history book open and Staines lip-synching in the middle of the room to his Springsteen album, Delaney realized that maybe these guys weren’t equally responsible for the noise. So Staines started going to the disciplinarian’s office alone, and then, when his fall trimester grades came out, he started going to required supervised study hall durin
g the evenings in the big lecture hall in the basement of Fleming.
The problem with Staines was that he would never shut up. Study hours ran from 7:30 to 9:30 every night, Sunday through Friday, and about the only time the room was quiet for Thomas was the time that Staines was required to be in supervised study hall. As soon as the bell rang at 9:30, Thomas would leave his room and go next door to visit with his friend Richard Blackburn, who’d gotten stuck rooming with the geek of all geeks, Landon Hopkins. Since most of the freshmen didn’t know anybody else coming to the school, it was a waste of time for them to request roommates, so they just got matched up by Dean Kaufman. Dean Kaufman was a dork.
He had been able to escape Staines until 10:00, when all the freshmen were required to be on dorm and in their rooms. They had to have their lights out at 10:30, which had given Staines thirty minutes to talk Thomas’s buns off. He would talk about two subjects—sports and sex.
“Are you a virgin?” Staines had asked him once early in the year in one of his rare non-rhetorical questions.
Thomas had said, yeah, sure, of course he was, he was only fourteen years old.
“Hell, I lost it in the eighth grade,” Staines had said. “My girlfriend used to come watch my football practice. . . .”And he had been off and running down the field of his story.
He was always claiming to be unable to keep track of his own exploits.
“I got laid so many times over Christmas I lost count,” he’d say, or “Did you have a good spring break? I got laid so many times I lost count.”
Finally Richard Blackburn had suggested that he get a pocket calculator, to which Staines had replied by punching Richard on the upper arm, for which Richard had retaliated later by going into Staines’s dresser drawers and putting Ben-Gay in Staines’s jockstrap. The result, when Staines finally had put the damn thing on, was that he had done this weird little dance all the way down the hall to the shower. That had inspired Richard to call him The Big Blond Gorilla. Staines had responded just by pounding the hell out of Richard.
But that was all last year. They were old boys now. Staines tied his white Converse basketball shoes with double knots and headed for the bathroom.
“You know what your problem with girls is, Boatwright?” he called from the urinals. His voice echoed off the tiles. “No offense?”
Thomas knew that whatever followed was going to be highly offensive. People like Staines thought they could say any damn thing they wanted to, as long as they prefaced it with some disclaimer.
Staines did not wait for a reply. “It’s probably some unconscious hormone they smell,” he said. “I noticed a certain odor in your dorm room last night.”
Thomas said he hadn’t noticed any smell.
“It’s nigger,” Staines said. “You probably can’t smell it. You live with them, you start to smell like them, too.”
That can’t be true, Thomas thought. I lived with you all last year, and I never smelled like an asshole. He felt like saying he was tired of Staines’s bigotry and boorishness and didn’t want to hear the guy’s voice again.
But, as usual, what he said instead was nothing.
SCENE 6
Practice was terrible, partly because Thomas Boatwright had not worked enough on basketball over the holidays, and partly because he was so distracted by Robert Staines. The guy had called his roommate a nigger. What a jerk. And Thomas had said nothing about it. What a bigger jerk.
Many times Thomas had practiced the speech he was going to make to Staines one day, the speech in which he would tell the guy just what a cheese-brained, smelly-footed, hormonally imbalanced, white-supremacist ball of kitty litter he really was. Thomas polished that speech constantly. One day he would have the nerve to deliver it.
Staines was intimidating. He seemed so socially sophisticated, so well coordinated, so comfortable with what he wanted out of life. He was a great athlete, and most of his friends were upperclassmen. Thomas regarded Staines with equal measures of envy and scorn. The problem was that Thomas did not want to receive the scorn of Staines in return. So he kept his mouth shut and told himself that Greg wasn’t worth the hassle anyway.
The whole day was turning out to be a pain in the posterior.
It was nearly 6:00 in the evening and had been dark for over half an hour. Thomas was freezing as he walked from the gym across the Quad to Bradley Hall, where he’d promised Farnham that he’d come by about an audition for Othello. His head was still wet from the shower, and the wind was blowing so hard that he thought his hair might freeze. Out of the pocket of his trench coat he pulled a blue knit stocking cap and tugged it all the way down over his ears. There were too many damn things going on around this place at the same time. Farnham wanted him in the play; McPhee knew that practice was supposed to be out at 5:30 but kept everyone back shooting free throws for an extra fifteen minutes; Hesta was counting on him to call her sometime today; and he still had all that Shakespeare to read.
Bradley Hall was one of a row of buildings behind and parallel to the buildings lining the eastern edge of the Quad. It was built in the 1960s, with glass doors and lots of floor-to-ceiling windows in the entrance hall. All the lights were still burning in the plaster-and-marble lobby.
When he was still fifty yards away, Thomas saw someone emerge from the building through the big glass doors, lurch, stagger, and then limp on off into the darkness, heading north, toward the dorms. It was a figure so bundled up against the cold that he could not tell who it was, or even how old. It looked like the person was drunk.
“Richard?” Thomas called. The person did not answer, but hurried off into the darkness.
Richard had signed up to be on the technical crew for the play on the grounds that it would be the easiest, warmest, most convenient way to spend the winter. That would be just great, thought Thomas, if Richard got himself thrown out of school for partying down at the theater. Dr. Lane, the headmaster, was so strict about enforcing the rules banning drugs and alcohol from the campus that hardly anybody took the risk. It was easy enough to get away for the weekend, where school rules didn’t apply. Whoever was at Bradley had been heading off toward the dorms on the eastern Quad, one of which was Stratford House, which was Richard’s dorm. Don’t be stupid, Richard, thought Thomas as he entered the warm brightness of Bradley.
The foyer was a large room with a couple of sofas and an Oriental rug and portraits of famous alumni on the walls. Straight ahead were the doors to the bathrooms. To the left was the hallway leading to the rooms for studio art and music and the backstage area. To the right was the entrance to the auditorium itself. Thomas heard noises to the left and headed down the hallway for the backstage area. He could hear a regular thwacking sound, as if someone were trying to open a crate by throwing it regularly onto the floor.
Hardly any lights were on in the hall, just every other ceiling spot shining out through the white acoustical tile. The door to his left led to the gigantic art studio, which was now dark. There were two doors to his right. The nearer door led backstage, which was also dark. Thomas did not see anyone in the building, but he assumed somebody was here. He saw a light and heard noise coming from the door to the scene shop. His basketball shoes were quiet on the sleek green linoleum as he approached the open door.
In the scene shop Thomas could see Mr. Farnham standing with his back toward him. Farnham was wearing an old sweater and paint-speckled blue jeans and Adidas running shoes. He was holding a two-by-four about three feet long—holding it with both hands, raising it over his head, and bringing it down hard onto the concrete floor, as if it were an axe and the floor were a tough log. As he swung, he grunted wildly, almost as if he were the one being hit. Thomas watched him swing it three times. He grunted louder and louder and swung harder and harder with the board until it splintered and broke off at the end.
There was an energy in the air that made Thomas shudder. Anger was radiating out of Mr. Farnham like light from a torch, and Thomas could feel it, sense it. Mr. Farnha
m took the broken board and threw it hard against the cinder-block wall. Then he turned toward the door. Thomas himself spun away out of the light of the door and ran back down the hall to the exit. He did not want Mr. Farnham to know that he’d been there, that he had seen the teacher acting like King Kong on speed.
No winter play for me, he thought, thank you just the same.
It was time to go home.
SCENE 7
Thomas Boatwright and Greg Lipscomb lived in a typical dormitory room: nearly a perfect square, symmetric, with a single bed on each side of the room, two desks between the beds, two dressers at the foot of the beds, two closets facing the dressers, the entrance to the room between the two closets. There was one big window over the desks. They had an oval hooked rug in the middle of the floor and posters of everybody you’ve ever seen all over the walls. Greg had a stereo next to his dresser with tapes and albums, but half of them—Thomas couldn’t believe this—were sound tracks to Broadway musicals or, even worse, classical music.
Greg was lying on his bed and reading a paperback when Thomas entered the room. The stereo was playing something by Bach or Schubert or somebody. Thomas turned it down.
“Hey,” said Greg. He looked at Thomas over the top edge of his book.
“I got to ask you about Farnham,” said Thomas. He took off his hat and coat, sat on his own bed, and faced Greg. “What kind of mood was he in at play practice this afternoon?”
Greg had on white socks, jeans, and a thick yellow wool sweater. His skin was the color of black coffee, and his fuzzy hair was cut to within an inch of his head—a small Afro.
“Just fine,” said Greg. He did not look up from his book.
“Something weird happened just now,” said Thomas, “when I went over to talk about the play.”
“You’re going to be in the play?” Now Greg looked up at him. The whites of his eyes looked faintly yellow in the light of the study lamp.
The way he said it pissed Thomas off a little. “Maybe,” he said. “If I want to be in the play, I’ll be in the play. What’s the matter with it?”
Passion Play Page 4