Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  Little grains of tea were floating around in the bottom of his teacup. That wasn’t normal, was it? Did the Somervilles have holes in their teabags? Maybe this was just an extraordinarily bad Wednesday for everyone.

  Wednesday was Hump Day out in the real world. If you could get through Wednesday, you were over the hump, and you had only two more days till the weekend. Here at Montpelier, though, Wednesday was just the third day in the week. When you have classes on Saturday morning, it’s hard to find a Hump Day.

  Today, however, was significant in one way: it was Wednesday, December 1. November was over for good, and there were only sixteen more days, not counting today, until Friday, December 17, when Christmas vacation began. And only fifteen days, not counting today, until Thursday, December 16, when Thomas Boatwright turned sixteen years old. He liked the idea of turning sixteen on the 16th. It was an event he’d looked forward to all his life. Maybe the driver’s license was it, or maybe the driver’s license was just a sign that you were more independent and more grown up. He’d been practicing his driving and studying his handbook during the Thanksgiving holiday and thought he had both the driving and the rules down pretty well. Of course, the way Montpelier made you wait until Friday the seventeenth to get out for the holidays, he’d have the weekend to practice up before he went down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get his license. Years ago they had dropped a requirement for you to parallel park, but Thomas could parallel park anyway. As soon as he got his license, he was going to drive his mother back home, drop her off, and drive over to Hesta’s house, where he’d pick her up and they’d go off to some secluded spot and park and then, just to make the day complete, they’d go all the way and make passionate love.

  That was his favorite fantasy lately. The problem was that there weren’t too many secluded places in northern Virginia, and he wasn’t at all sure that his mother would just let him drop her off and solo like that on his very first day with his license, even though he knew perfectly well that he was an excellent driver. It just had to work out that way. Monday, December 20, was going to be the real Hump Day.

  “Thomas?”

  He realized that Mrs. Somerville had just spoken to him. Greg and all the other guys and Mr. Somerville were staring at him like he’d just had an epileptic seizure or something. It was quiet as hell, but you could see the guys getting ready to laugh. He hated it when he was caught daydreaming.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Would you repeat the question?”

  Then all the guys did laugh.

  She hadn’t asked him a question. She had invited him to try one of the scones on the table next to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. He picked up one of the flat brown biscuits and popped the whole thing into his mouth. Everyone in the room laughed again. Even Mr. and Mrs. Somerville cracked a smile. Thomas realized he was the only one in the room eating a biscuit.

  “Perhaps you’d like to pass the plate to the boy on your left,” said Mrs. Somerville. Thomas knew as he passed the plate that this would be the last time he was ever invited to tea at the Homestead.

  Greg stepped in to rescue him. “Mr. Delaney told us there was a secret tunnel from this building to Stringfellow Hall,” he said. “Does anybody here know where it is?”

  Horace Somerville reacted immediately. “I don’t have much patience with that kind of speculative history,” he said. “We’ve had tales of secret passages around this school since I enrolled here over fifty years ago, but I’ve never seen an actual tunnel. There’s plenty of documented campus history here. Learn the facts.”

  It sounded as bad as class, but then Mrs. Somerville told her husband not to be so harsh with their guests. She asked him to entertain them with some tales.

  Mr. Somerville was more inclined to lecture than to entertain. “There used to be three buildings where the gym is now,” he said. “Up at this end, where the boiler room and Mr. McPhee’s apartment are, used to be the old kitchen for the Homestead.” He said the kitchen had been outside for safety, in case there was a fire.

  “The lobby of the gym is the old caretaker’s cottage,” he said. “You can still see the old brick fireplace and the remains of the chimney on the outside. And at the south end, at Mr. Farnham’s apartment, is the site of the original school library.”

  Greg asked why they tore down all those old buildings.

  “Didn’t tear them down entirely,” said Mr. Somerville. “Swallowed them up. You can still see some of the old foundations if you go snoop around in the basement over there.”

  He spoke specifically to Thomas. “Ask your advisor about it,” he said. “Mr. Warden used to live in that south apartment before Mr. Farnham moved in. Ask him about the old brickwork in the fireplace and the chimney.”

  The sound of a siren interrupted him. Everybody jumped.

  “It’s coming from next door,” said Mrs. Somerville. It was the fire alarm for the gym.

  “We’d better see,” said Mr. Somerville. They all put down their teacups, some on the end tables, some on the Oriental rugs on the floor, and they ran to the front porch of the Homestead. At a school like Montpelier a fire was the most frightening prospect possible. You could lose a whole building as well as a bunch of lives.

  From the porch they could see people from all over the campus rushing to find out what was wrong.

  The gym was by far the largest building on the Quad, a huge box of brick and glass and white columns. Decorative white trim outlined the tall windows of the basketball court where Thomas had just been practicing. Below the middle windows was a squat cube of a lobby jutting like a wart from the rectangular face of the building. That was the old caretaker’s cottage Mr. Somerville was just telling them about, with its truncated chimney barely reaching over the roofline of the lobby. It looked odd, now that Thomas knew what it had been, like a Rubik’s Cube attached to a shoebox. The building was dark except for the lights on in the two faculty apartments at each end. Everyone speculated loudly over where the first flames would appear.

  In a couple of minutes he heard the long, low hoot of a fire truck. The alarm system at Montpelier automatically notified the fire department and the sheriff’s office in town. Soon three fire trucks were lined up on the Quad in front of them.

  But it was a false alarm. People came and went from the Homestead, Mr. and Mrs. Somerville included, and gradually the news drifted back to Thomas and Greg on the porch. Information at Montpelier spread almost instantaneously, as though all of them were psychic. Someone had pulled the alarm on the basement level, the locker room level. The doors had been shut and locked, Angus Farrier would swear to it.

  Mr. McPhee’s front door on the north end of the gym was only twenty yards away, and they could see him on the threshold talking to some firemen. What had Mr. Somerville said about this end of the gym? It used to be the old kitchen for the Homestead.

  “It’s weird to think of going outside to your kitchen,” said Thomas. Mr. McPhee’s chimney was a little more than a free-throw shot’s distance away from them. “Don’t you think the food would get cold when they brought it over?”

  “It’s not that far,” said Greg. “I can believe in an outside kitchen easier than I can believe in a tunnel from here to Stringfellow.”

  Directly across the Quad they could see the lights of Stringfellow Hall. It looked far away in the dark and the cold, a couple of football fields from them.

  “There’s no way somebody could have dug a tunnel that far,” said Greg. “Look at it. The grass would all be dead, or the ground would be sunken. It would have collapsed somewhere.”

  “Does that mean you’ve stopped looking?”

  “As long as Delaney is offering extra credit,” said Greg, “I’m still in the tunnel business.”

  It was 6:15. They just had time to get back for dinner at 6:30.

  They walked together across the Quad to Stringfellow Hall. Greg pointed to the lights on in Farnham’s apartment. “That place is awfully small to have been the lib
rary,” he said. “They must not have had many books in the old days.”

  Thomas was not listening.

  “Hey,” said Greg. He poked Thomas in the arm. “Tune in to my station.”

  “Sorry,” said Thomas. “What’d you say?”

  “I said that looks like Richard on top of Farnham’s chimney,” said Greg. “He’s got a handful of dynamite.”

  Thomas looked. There was nobody on Farnham’s chimney.

  “That was a joke,” said Greg. “This is called Getting Your Friends to Relax.”

  Thomas said he was too busy to relax.

  “You want to talk about it?” said Greg.

  Yes, he did. “I can’t,” said Thomas.

  “How long are you going to keep this up?” said Greg. “It wasn’t too long ago when you were on my case for keeping too quiet.”

  Thomas promised Greg it had nothing to do with him.

  “I know,” said Greg. “It has to do with somebody huffing aerosol on the dorm.”

  Thomas kept walking.

  Greg said he was in the school store today when Robert Staines bought himself a new can of Right Guard deodorant.

  Thomas was afraid to say anything.

  “Seems to me old Robert runs through quite a load of that stuff,” said Greg. “What a coincidence.”

  Thomas took a breath. “Are you sure you want to get involved in this?” he said.

  “Bring it on.”

  Thomas told Greg all about Staines and the deodorant spray and the question of honor and standing in Mr. Carella’s apartment and then leaving when he changed his mind.

  “What do I do?” said Thomas.

  “You know what to do,” said Greg.

  “No, I don’t,” said Thomas. “I’ve been worrying about it for twenty-four hours.”

  “You mean you’ve been talking yourself out of it,” said Greg. “You know what to do.”

  Yes, he did.

  “But can I do it?” said Thomas.

  “Yes,” said Greg. “You’re going to do it right after dinner.”

  Yes. It was a relief. He was going to turn himself in to the councilmen as soon as the meal was over.

  SCENE 11

  Warden felt cold in the car as he drove in the darkness to the hospital in Charlottesville. There was too much to think about. He did not want to ask Cynthia about her meeting with Dan Farnham, not when she was in the hospital. She was his wife, she loved him, it was not healthy for him to be so possessive. And yet the knowledge of that meeting nagged.

  It was one of several competing distractions. Until his return from New York, his life had seemed headed in the proper direction, toward improvement. They had liked his poetry at the reading. Some people from Columbia had even paid him a compliment. But he had not been able to do any decent work since. Monday night’s attempts at writing had resulted in confused, incoherent gibberish, from which he could never get a grip on his ideas. Cynthia’s illness was infecting his own muse.

  Tonight, however, he had an idea. It was merely an image, that was all, but it fascinated him. He saw an attractive, middle-aged woman standing in front of a large fire. She was disillusioned. Why? He did not yet know. But he had a couplet:

  Why am I bitter? Here’s a cryptic hint:

  The hottest fire springs from the coldest flint.

  He very desperately wished he had the opportunity to sit and write and get to know this woman better. For him writing was a discovery, and it was also an addiction, a craving he had to satisfy. But there was no time. He owed Cynthia a visit.

  The results of the tests were coming in, all of them negative. No cancer. No brain tumor. No masses anywhere. It was strange how the relief was replaced so quickly by frustration. What was it, then? They were both hungry to know the name of this enemy that was attacking them. Today they had given her a myelogram. She had to drink as many liquids as possible in order to foreshorten the dehydrating effects of the drug she’d get. Then she’d have to sit up in bed for hours in order to keep the dye in her spinal column from trickling into her cranium and giving her a headache.

  It took fifteen minutes to find a parking place near the university hospital in Charlottesville. He finally found a meter on Jefferson Park Avenue and walked a quarter mile. The hospital was dreary, clean but cold. In the white-tiled lobby he had to pick up a visitor’s badge and wait for an elevator. It was after 7:00 by the time he reached Cynthia’s room on the eighth floor.

  The wide wooden door was open when Warden approached her room, number 816, a private room for which they paid an extra fifteen dollars a day. Cynthia was propped up in the bed to a sitting position with her head supported by an extra pillow. Her hair swirled on the linens like that of Botticelli’s Venus. She looked very tired. Warden went to her and kissed her lightly.

  “They say I should sit up all night to be safe,” Cynthia told Warden. He pulled a chair up to the side of her bed. She told him about the myelogram. “Russell Phillips was on the television news,” she said. “I could hear it. Everything still looks blurry.”

  Warden had not known. They did not own a television set.

  She told him she had called her father. “He was ready to drive down here tonight,” she said. “I talked him out of it.”

  “By telling him I’d be here,” said Warden.

  “I didn’t need to mention anything that horrible.” Her tone helped to relax him.

  He asked whether the doctors had predicted when she could leave.

  “Not at all. They want to do a CAT scan tomorrow.” She asked him to warn Sam Kaufman that she might not be on campus for the mixer this weekend.

  He told her Sam Kaufman already knew.

  She gently scratched the top of his hand. “Tell me what you did today.”

  Warden told her about the special assembly, then about his chance to meet with Thomas Boatwright.

  “He wants to audition for the play,” said Warden. “That was his big concern.”

  “I’m sorry you can remember it all so clearly,” said Cynthia.

  “Me too.”

  They joked about his memory lapses, which were nearly always the function of his best writing. Warden was never so absentminded as when he was working on a poem. When he was at the height of his concentration, he could blank out several hours of the day. He’d been known to hold classes, drive to the grocery store, even sit through a dinner party, and have no memory whatever of the events later.

  “Let me tell you about my meals,” said Cynthia. “In the beginning, there was Jell-O.” She tried to make him laugh for a half hour before she gave up. “Don’t be so glum,” she said. “I’m the one in the hospital, remember.”

  Warden apologized. He did not want to tell her everything on his mind.

  “I got a rejection today,” he said.

  “Oh, those silly, silly editors,” she said. “What else is competing with me for your attention?”

  What else, he thought. Shall I tell her what else?

  “Dan Farnham helped me plan my classes today,” Warden said.

  The expression on his face helped her guess immediately why he had broached the subject. “He told you I’d been down to see him backstage before dinner.”

  “He did not tell me. Thomas Boatwright did.”

  “But of course you did not become anxious or jealous or peevish because you understood that I had to tell him where I would be,” she said. “I had to let him know why I wouldn’t be at rehearsals. The telephones backstage were busy, so I walked down before dinner.”

  Warden admitted to becoming peevish, but not terribly so.

  She looked at him straight on with her wobbly eyes. “Is that an improvement?” she asked.

  “I just don’t understand why I couldn’t deliver the message for you,” he said.

  “Ben, it’s the same conversation every six months. Will you please stop worrying about younger men? There are too many of them out there for you to compete against. You just have to trust me.”

  “
I trust you,” he said.

  “Then stop imagining that I’ve packed a suitcase to elope every time I speak to another male.”

  The hyperbole made him smile. “I don’t think he’s a healthy friendship for you to cultivate.”

  “You think he’s going to pounce on me?” she asked.

  Warden said he thought Daniel Farnham was too unstable. “He’s going to explode someday,” he said. “The boys already talk about his temper. I don’t want you to be there for the eruption.”

  Cynthia had seen Farnham’s temper quite recently. She had survived. “So now you’re pretending to protect me?” she asked.

  “I do want to protect you.”

  “But you can’t. Something has already got me.”

  Both were silent.

  “It’s because I love you,” he said.

  She knew, she knew.

  “This is not ‘The Miller’s Tale,’” she said. “You are not an old cuckold. I am not a young flirt. One foolish young woman dumped you a long time ago. Don’t hold her mistake against all of us.”

  “I do trust you,” he said.

  “Then let me breathe.”

  The evening had almost ended well. But outside, alone and in the cold, he realized that he’d forgotten where he’d parked the car.

  SCENE 12

  Nathan Somerville was about the nicest guy Thomas had ever met. You’re supposed to be nice if you’re the senior councilman, but Thomas figured Nathan would just be nice anyway. As the councilman on Upper Stringfellow, he was responsible for running Thomas’s dorm. He was hardly ever irritable, even in the morning. If you walked into the bathroom and caught him putting in his contacts or shaving, he would make some joke or give you some greeting that sounded like he was really glad to see you. It was good, sort of like having your dad or a big brother there. He was one of the few seniors who would actually be friendly to the underclassmen and not beat on them for entertainment, and he was always willing to help you out if you were having trouble with algebra or Spanish.

  Thomas knocked on the door and figured that with the worst possible luck, Nathan wouldn’t be in, but his roommate, Ned Wood, would be. There was nothing really wrong with Ned Wood; he was just always hitting you in the arm or calling you some obscene name. He could actually be pretty funny at times. But the voice that said “Come in” was Nathan’s voice, and when Thomas entered the room, he saw Nathan was the only one there.