Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  “I say we wait for the police to finish their investigation,” said Grayson. “They said they wanted to look at our yearbook and our cash register receipts. Let them.”

  “I agree,” said Lane.

  “Shouldn’t we call a faculty meeting?” said Grayson. “Tell everyone to be on guard? Inform them that the police think it might not have been a suicide at all?”

  “I’m considering that,” said Lane.

  “Why hesitate? We need the extra security. We could have fifty vigilant adults on campus with their eyes open.”

  “Horace has already advised me otherwise,” said Lane. “Though I do not think his reasoning is sound.”

  Horace Somerville spoke before Grayson had an opportunity. “I believe that Russell was murdered. He was my advisee and I knew him, and I don’t believe he was a candidate for suicide. But we can’t tell the faculty that.”

  “Why not?” said Grayson.

  “Because,” said Somerville, “I’m worried that the killer is somebody on the faculty.”

  Lane said that was ridiculous.

  Grayson did not appear rattled by the suggestion.

  “Why on the faculty?” he asked.

  “Because we are isolated and rural and do not have strangers wandering around our campus at night. We notice them.”

  Grayson said that strangers were on the campus all the time.

  “They don’t congregate at the gymnasium,” said Somerville.

  “Why not a student?” asked Grayson.

  “Exactly,” said Lane. “Why not somebody on the staff? Why not a friend of the school from town? Say it’s not a suicide. That’s some leap in logic to assume automatically that he was killed by a member of the faculty.”

  Somerville said he was going on instinct and hoped he was wrong.

  “But who? Who on the faculty could it possibly be?” said Lane.

  It was Grayson who answered. “McPhee.”

  “Why McPhee?” said Lane.

  “He found the boy. Pretty convenient for him just to stumble onto a body at the side of the gym at midnight.”

  “Pat McPhee was the day master,” said Lane. “He went looking for Russell Phillips when the boy was reported missing from his dormitory.”

  Grayson continued. “Plus an ex-professional athlete? You know he’s in good shape. And he lives in the gym. Easy access.”

  “What a miracle that Carol Scott didn’t arrest him on the spot,” said Lane. “Why are you so eager to convict McPhee? Where were you last night when the boy died?”

  “I’m not accusing,” said Grayson, “just playing along. I heard McPhee went chasing off to Boston over the holidays and came back without his wife or her son. I imagine that must have rattled him some.”

  “So he starts killing our students?” said Lane.

  “They were married just last summer,” said Grayson. “I bet he’s still got his honeymoon hormones.”

  “Don’t waste my time, Felix,” said Lane. “Are you seriously suggesting that Patrick McPhee is capable of murder?”

  “No,” said Grayson. He turned serious. “I think Horace, here, is cuckoo.”

  “Is there anyone on this faculty who is capable of murder?”

  “No,” said Grayson.

  “I agree,” said Lane. “Let’s not complicate matters with rumors and innuendoes.”

  “If you think it’s so silly,” said Horace Somerville, “why did you ask our advice? Why take any precautions whatsoever?”

  This time Eldridge Lane said nothing. He knew of at least two members of the faculty who had been in New York on Sunday.

  SCENE 2

  By the end of second period, everyone on campus knew that one of the newboys had taken his own life.

  Thomas Boatwright learned about it between classes from Richard Blackburn.

  “They said he broke the lock on the rooftop door with a hammer and dived off the roof,” said Richard. “I heard it was because he couldn’t make weight for the wrestling team and was depressed.”

  Thomas said he couldn’t believe it. “I sure as hell wouldn’t kill myself if I got cut from the basketball team.”

  “That’s because you don’t understand the mind of your basic wrestler,” said Richard. “They’re all crazy. They’re obsessed with themselves. They’re narcissistic and anorexic all at the same time.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “Hell, no,” said Richard. “Wrestlers can’t write. I’ve got to go.”

  They were standing in the brightly lighted cinder block and tile hallway of Reid Hall, the science building. It was 9:30, third period, time for biology. Montpelier’s weekly schedule was pretty neat except for the part about going to classes on Saturdays. Your classes were always rotating around, so that you didn’t have the same class at the same time of day every day. English, for example, met Monday at 8:00 but didn’t meet Tuesday until 2:15, after lunch, and it didn’t meet at all on Thursday. Biology, on the other hand, didn’t meet on Monday, and Spanish didn’t meet on Saturday. Nobody had classes at all on Friday or Saturday afternoons, so that all the athletic teams could play games without missing classes. It worked pretty well, so you didn’t get stuck in a rut with the boring classes like English and religion as your first thing to look forward to every day of the week, and the fun classes like biology and Spanish sort of got sprinkled throughout your schedule like candy.

  Science was usually Thomas’s worst subject. He just couldn’t keep all those terms straight.

  “Where’s the carotid artery?” Richard would ask him.

  “In the thigh,” he’d say.

  “No.”

  “The lungs.”

  “No way.”

  “Where, then?”

  The carotid artery was in the neck. Richard would laugh at him for always forgetting, but Thomas couldn’t see what difference it made where the damn carotid artery was.

  But Mr. Carella made biology class lively and fun. He was Italian and from the North and talked really fast and always cut jokes in class and on dorm, where the worst thing he ever did was to ask you to turn down your stereo. He’d played football and wrestled on the varsity teams at Union College, and he was also excellent in basketball, tennis, and lacrosse. On weekends he took groups kayaking and rappelling.

  Thomas always looked forward to biology class the most, but today he was dreading it.

  Carella helped coach the JV wrestling team. Russell Phillips had been one of his wrestlers.

  Instead of being depressed, however, Mr. Carella was his usual upbeat self.

  “Boatwright, Boatwright, can’t even float right,” said Mr. Carella as Thomas entered the biology lab. He was sitting on a gray metal lab stool behind the long black lab table at the front of the room, and the biggest surprise for Thomas was that he was so dressed up, in blue slacks, a white button down shirt, and a tie. Carella didn’t wear ties most days; instead he wore open-necked shirts, jeans, and sneakers. One day he even wore a Redskins T-shirt, but Dean Kaufman saw it and made him go back and change.

  “Boatwright doesn’t even have to come to class today,” said Mr. Carella. “He knows all about sex already.”

  Then Thomas noticed the two big plastic models on the black-topped table in front of Mr. Carella. One was a big limp penis with scrotum, all made of ribbed beige plastic and hinged so that you could open it up and see everything inside. It was open now, and Thomas could see a bunch of red blood vessels and blue tubes and green globules and a bunch of parts he couldn’t identify. The other model Thomas did not recognize at first, but then he realized with a jolt that it was an equally gigantic uterus and that it, too, was hinged and open so you could see all the places inside. Thomas laughed involuntarily and blushed.

  He piled his flat lab report on the stack at the corner of the front table. There were already a dozen reports in the pile; Thomas was one of the last people getting to class. He took his seat at one of the smaller student tables next to Greg, who told him Hesta had called d
uring first period.

  Damn. They’d been missing each other’s calls since Sunday.

  “Let’s get started, fellows,” said Carella.

  A second later Robert Staines skidded into the room.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. He took it for granted that Carella wouldn’t mind.

  “Where’s your lab report?” asked Carella. He was all business.

  “Yeah, right, the lab report,” said Staines. He motioned to the disorderly load of spiral notebooks, loose papers, and textbooks under his left arm. “It’s in here somewhere.”

  “Put it in the pile and sit down.”

  “Actually,” said Staines, “it’s not exactly finished.”

  “See me after class,” said Carella.

  Staines said he had to clean his room after class. During the 10:15 recess your room got inspected by one of the teachers on duty, and if it was messy, you got demerits.

  “You should have cleaned your room this morning. See me after class.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Staines.

  “Watch your mouth,” said Mr. Carella. “Sit down and shut up.”

  “Didn’t you hear what happened? One of the newboys jumped off the gym roof,” said Staines. He was looking particularly blond and gorilla-ish today, with scuffed old cordovan loafers on his tiny little feet that everybody said were like pigs’ feet, jeans with a tiny hole in the crotch, and a gigantic gray and red ski sweater. His nose was running, and he hadn’t shaved, so that light glinted off the stubble on his face.

  “Sit your buns down, Staines, and plan on staying for a while.”

  Staines took his seat at a table behind Greg and Thomas. There were four pairs of the black-topped tables in all, with seats for sixteen, but there were only fourteen boys in the class. The walls of the lab were covered with charts—the periodic table of elements, the different eras of prehistoric existence, human anatomy, and the parts of a cell.

  Mr. Carella started the class with a little speech. He said it was in honor of Russell Phillips that he wore his best clothes. “Russell died, and I’m sick about it, and when I go to mass in Montpelier, I’m going to light a candle for Russell and pray that his soul finds peace. Have any of you guys prayed for Russell? Maybe you should.”

  Everyone was very quiet. He told them nobody was going to use this death as some lame excuse for not doing his homework, that Russell was dead and we were alive, that we were in biology class to study life. He said they were starting a unit today on the life force, the sex act, and that they were going to treat it seriously. The room was quieter than the library.

  “I hope that if any of you guys get depressed, you won’t hesitate to come and talk to me or to your advisor or to somebody,” said Mr. Carella. “We care.”

  His eyes got very bright and wet, and he brushed them with quick light flicks of his fingers.

  “Let’s do some biology,” he said.

  And they did biology for the rest of the period. They talked about the male reproductive system and the female reproductive system and estrogen and testosterone and ovulation and penetration and masturbation and herpes and gonorrhea and AIDS. At first Mr. Carella was really clinical and serious about the whole thing, but after a while he started joking around in his usual way and made everything fun. “This is that thing you’ve been dreaming about, fellows,” he said. He had his hand on the big plastic vagina and was rubbing it in a really seductive way. “White women, black women, even Italian women, they’ve all got the same thing. It’s not so mysterious when you look at it in biology class, is it? Well, tomorrow I thought I’d ask my friend Jamie Lee Curtis to come in from Hollywood and show us a real one.”

  Mr. Carella was just a killer in class.

  Robert Staines raised his hand and asked whether Mr. Carella thought it would help some of the less experienced boys at Montpelier if the school went coed.

  Mr. Carella pretended to go berserk. “‘The less experienced boys,’ Staines?” he said. “You have plenty of experience yourself, of course, is that it?”

  “Lots of fun over the holidays,” said Staines.

  “The holidays,” said Mr.Carella. He stood and thought for at least a minute without saying anything. When he spoke again, he had switched tones back to the serious one. “We joke too much,” he said. Then he went into a speech about how sex was a very powerful, very dangerous force to abuse, how it was what generated life and was a gift from God that deserved respect. “We can identify every fluid and every organ and every step of the process, gentlemen, but we can’t explain that incredible urge or that explosion of power we get from sex. I can’t teach what passion is, boys. But I can sure tell you not to treat it lightly.”

  The bell rang. That was the way it always was in biology class, over before you expected it.

  “Hold it,” said Mr. Carella. He read from a piece of paper announcing a special assembly in the chapel at 11:30. Typical of the school to choose a time when nobody would miss any classes. At 11:30 you had consultation period, where teachers could yank you into their rooms for individual tutoring.

  “Dismissed,” said Carella. “Except Staines.”

  Everybody gathered his books to leave. Robert Staines tugged on Thomas’s sweater. “Wait up,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to you about the mixer this weekend.”

  It suited Thomas to wait. He and Greg always cleaned their room before breakfast.

  Within fifteen seconds the only people remaining in the classroom were Staines, Thomas, and Mr. Carella. Thomas sat on top of a student table while in the front of the room Carella dissected Staines without a knife.

  “You are the most irresponsible, arrogant, flippant, disruptive student I have ever seen,” said Carella.

  “And you love it,” said Staines. The guy was incredibly brazen. And the thing was, Carella did love it. He laughed.

  “Where’s your lab report?” he asked. Staines said he hadn’t done it.

  “None of it?”

  “I put my name on it.”

  Carella shook his head as though Staines were his mischievous little brother and told him to get the report done by tomorrow. It made Thomas a little mad. Everybody else had to get his work in on time. But that was typical of Robert Staines. Somehow he charmed people into letting him get away with felonies.

  “I got to have some coffee,” said Mr. Carella. “You boys keep the place clean.” He took the stack of lab reports and left the classroom.

  Staines swaggered back to where Thomas sat.

  “I’ve got that guy completely figured out,” he said. “If you’re a good athlete in his class, you’ve got it made.”

  Thomas asked him what he wanted.

  “Your sister’s at Mason, right?” Staines asked.

  “Right,” said Thomas. Hell, Staines had only been his roommate for a whole nine months last year. They’d only talked about fifty million times about how Barbara was a student at Mason School.

  “She knows Katrina Olson?”

  “I don’t know,” said Thomas. “Probably.” Barbara knew Katrina Olson. Everybody at Mason knew Katrina Olson. Even Hesta, who was new at the school this year, knew her. Katrina Olson was nicknamed the Bay Bridge Tunnel because of all the traffic that entered her.

  “I’m trying to get the Kat-woman to come down for the mixer Saturday,” said Staines. “You know how it is when you get the urge.”

  “Yeah,” said Thomas.

  “You know, passion,” said Staines. “Like what Carella was talking about.”

  “Yeah.” It was a tribute to Mr. Carella that even Staines listened in his class.

  “You think your sister could set it up for me?”

  Thomas did not want to get into the pimping business. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if she knows her that well.”

  “I could probably just call old Katrina myself,” said Staines.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about you? I hear you’ve got a girlfriend up there now,” said S
taines.

  Hell. “Sort of,” said Thomas.

  “Just get her to ask if Katrina’s got a date already,” said Staines. “If she doesn’t, then I’ll call her.”

  This was his chance to tell Staines no for once. “Yeah, okay,” said Thomas. “If I can ever get Hesta on the phone myself.”

  He started to leave. Staines drifted back to the front of the room and walked around to the teacher’s side of the large lab table.

  “You coming to the dorm?” Thomas asked.

  “Yeah,” said Staines. He started opening drawers under the lab table. Thomas was appalled. Teachers’ desks, closets, and drawers were strictly off limits.

  “A teacher’s desk is Red Flag,” said Thomas. “Are you crazy?”

  “He doesn’t care.”

  Staines continued to open and close drawers. He asked if the lab report had been difficult.

  “Not really.” Not if you knew that the carotid artery was in the neck.

  Staines asked where Carella kept the sample lab reports. He said that over the holidays he had forgotten the format they were supposed to use to write them. It was a ridiculous excuse, since the class had been writing lab reports with the same format every week since September. But Staines was just stupid enough for it possibly to be true. He moved to the teacher’s desk beside the lab table.

  Thomas was getting uneasy. Breaking a Red Flag was a very serious offense. He wanted both of them to leave.

  “You aren’t going to find the answers,” said Thomas.

  “I’m not looking for answers,” said Staines. “That would be cheating. Just some examples to get me started.”

  He opened the middle drawer of Carella’s desk and froze.

  Thomas asked him why he did not bring up the sample reports when Carella was still in the room.

  Staines did not answer. He reached into the open desk drawer and pulled out something metallic.

  “Now what do you suppose Carella would be doing with these?” he said. He held up a pair of shiny handcuffs.

  Somehow it was funny as hell.

  SCENE 3

  At 11:30 the whole school assembled in the chapel. Dr. Lane, the headmaster, sat beside Mr. Heilman behind the lectern. Heilman was in his vestments; Lane was in civvies. Thomas and Richard sat together toward the back. It was very quiet, and Thomas felt himself getting sad. He hadn’t even known the boy Russell Phillips, and yet, now that he was here in the chapel, with its familiar white walls and clear windowpanes and huge marble altar with a dark blue rug running up the aisle to it, Thomas felt himself ready to cry. Somebody who was alive yesterday was no longer alive today. What if Thomas’s parents died suddenly? Or Barbara? Or Jeff? What if Hesta died?