Impulse

by Frederick Ramsay

  In Frank’s senior year, the Academy expelled his younger brother, Jack. It caused a small sensation. Some anonymous students accused Jack of homosexual behavior. Whether he was, in fact, gay, not a word used in that way then, had never been addressed. Fifty years ago, suspicion and rumor sufficed, indeed, were cause enough. No one ever attempted to discover the truth. No one offered to defend him. After all, everyone knew Jack was a little fey. And that was that.

  Frank went off to college that fall. His brother committed suicide over the Christmas holidays and Frank vowed he’d never return to the Academy. Never. It took him nearly thirty years to forgive his parents and deal with his own guilt. He’d kept his vow until this year. But now, as he finished off his sixty-eighth year, and mellowed somewhat by his own tragedy, he decided he needed to forgive the school and have one last look, to touch his past one last time before the judicial system or old age had their way and succeeded in closing him down forever.

  Chapter Four

  Scott Academy provided housing for as many of its faculty and staff as possible. Young couples, without sufficient down payments for houses, and older men and women consolidating their assets for retirement found this possibility an attractive perquisite, and that, in turn, helped the school recruit many above average teachers. Brad and Judith Stark occupied an end unit in a row of six townhouses. The complex had been built into a hillside so that the front door and first storey were at ground level facing the main campus but the basement door also opened at ground level in the back. On the whole Brad seemed satisfied with the arrangement but said he missed the annual deduction from his Schedule A for interest and taxes and the equity build home ownership provided.

  This morning he sat in the tiny kitchen amidst disorder and clutter. He valued order while his wife, Judith, had a cavalier attitude about housekeeping. In fact, she hated it and put off doing it as long as possible. She sat across from him in a Kelly green robe. Its tie had come loose and the robe was perilously close to falling open. As much as he enjoyed looking at his wife’s naked body, it made him uncomfortable with the children tumbling around the house gathering their school things.

  “The twenty-fifth year reuners may be a problem,” he said, more to himself than to her.

  “Well, you can hardly blame them. It must have been a big deal at the time.”

  “Yeah, but it’s been twenty-five years. Enough is enough.”

  “Brad, you are too sensitive about that day. I mean, it was in all the papers and television news then. What’d you expect? For some of those guys, it might have been the only important thing that ever happened to them.”

  “It was for me. They were my friends, Judith. More than that. I could have been—it could have been me….”

  Judith nodded. She’d heard it all before. She had not wanted to move to Scott Academy. She liked her job and her home in Squirrel Hill and did not understand Brad’s insistence on returning to the school where, by his own admission, he had been desperately unhappy as a child. His descriptions of life as a teacher’s kid, a TK, were anything but glowing. Yet, when the offer to move east and become the school’s development officer came along, he’d jumped at it. No consultation, no “should we,” just pack up and go. She had to admit he seemed happier than he was as a stockbroker. And the pay was good. Good enough so that with the housing provided by the school and other perks, free tuition chief among them, she reckoned it a positive exchange. Still, when reunion weekends came around, she wondered. And then there was the unhappy fact that Brad had not yet distinguished himself as a fund raiser. Selling securities to people ready to buy anything is different from prying dollars from alumni. She wondered how much longer they’d be at Scott. She made up her mind to call her father, just in case.

  Brad pushed back from the table, frowning.

  “Four boys go into the woods and disappear forever. No sign of them. No bodies, no motive, no suspects. No one ever figured it out. It is a big deal,” he said.

  “It’ll be fine,” she replied. “Wait and see. A few ghost stories and some wild speculation, maybe. The farther away in time it moves, the dimmer the memories. By their fiftieth, they won’t remember a thing.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. The one thing I’ve learned in this business is this, as the alumni become increasingly geriatric, their memories about their school days become sharper. It’s a law of nature; the memories retrieved are directly proportional to the gray cells lost. Some of those old geezers can repeat the dining hall menu from September to June of their senior year.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Only a little.”

  “Look, you had better get used to it. Every class for the next several years will have that incident on their list of school day memories, right up to your own.”

  “That’s a happy thought.”

  “Why don’t you have a second coffee? I’ll walk the kids up the hill to school today.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that. I have a ton of things to do. I need time to figure out how to approach Meredith Smith.”

  Judith Stark moved like a ballerina, which at one time in her youth she’d dreamed of becoming. Five foot eleven in her stocking feet, hair as black as obsidian, thin and elegant, she dominated any room she entered. She rose and glided toward their tiny foyer. The children were waiting, backpacks slung low on their spines.

  “Tighten your straps.”

  “Mom!”

  “I mean it. Put the weight of those packs up high. You’ll all turn into Quasimodo if you don’t.”

  “What’s a Quasimodo?” Lillith, the youngest, asked.

  “The goofy looking guy who rang the bells, stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “Be still. Pull up those straps…. Don’t even say it. I don’t care what the other kids do.”

  She imagined in the next decade or two, there would be legions of deformed men and women hunched over at bus stops, in offices, and on street corners—victims of a peer pressure that insisted that backpacks should be worn like fanny packs—an orthopedic disaster waiting to happen. She glanced back at her husband. He stared, eyes out of focus, off into space, lost in his private world. Where was he now, she wondered.

  ***

  “C’mon Ned, let’s go.”

  “Shhh….Wait a minute. There’s someone over there in those trees.”

  “Who?”

  “I think it’s Light and Hot Pants.”

  “No way! What would they be doing out here?”

  “Shhh.”

  “Don’t be such a jerk, Bobby. What do you think they’re doing?”

  “They’re doing ‘it,’ you dope.”

  “Oh, you know so much, Tom, like the time you said we could sneak in the Pikes Theater through the back door.”

  “Well, we could have if you hadn’t been such a jerk.”

  “Jerk? You could have gotten us arrested and anyway, who let the door slam?”

  “Shut up you guys, they’ll hear us.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “In a minute. Let’s sneak up and watch them do it.”

  “Are you crazy? We’re not even supposed to be here. You know what your dad said.”

  “I’m going to look.”

  “Jeez, Ned…okay, if you go, I will too. Who else?”

  “Shhh.”

  “They’re not doing it.”

  “Shhh.”

  “They’re just talking.”

  “Well, she’s old enough to be his mother.”

  “That makes him a mother—”

  “Shhh.”

  “Maybe they’ll do it later.”

  “Well, I’m not waiting to find out—Light’ll kill us if he catches us.”

  “Big deal. What’s he gonna do? We could tell about him and Mrs. Parker. Then what?”

  “Shhh.”

  “I really gotta go. I’ll be late and I can’t get more demerits or my dad will kill me. Never mind Light.”

  “Okay, okay, in a min
ute. You still have time. Listen, follow me. I found something really neat last weekend.”

  “What now, Ned?”

  “Wait and see.”

  They followed him along the west bank of the small stream that wound through the thick canopy of oaks and maples. They pushed their way through the underbrush carefully at first, until they forgot all about the couple behind them. Then they kicked at the leaves and tossed stones at frogs.

  “My dad said these are sugar maples. We could come out here in the spring, you know, like early when there’s still snow, and collect the sap and make syrup and sell it.”

  “Tom, you dork. How are we going to make syrup? You need equipment to do that.”

  “We could make it in Shop.”

  “Oh, sure. ‘Hey Mr. Simpson, we want to make stuff to go into the maple syrup business, can you help us?’”

  “Shut up.”

  “Make me.”

  “Come on, you guys.”

  “Look, here it is.”

  The stream, one of those meandering creeks that carve their way through the woods and countryside in the area, made a gentle right turn. For the last several decades it had slowly cut into the earth to the left. Roots of trees ready to fall dangled in the cold water where it undercut the bank. Opposite, on the right bank, the stream had deposited a sandy delta. Above that, an embankment rose nearly six feet to form a minor escarpment, evidence of the stream’s original course. A wilted bush punctuated its center.

  “I found it and put that bush in front so nobody else would.”

  “What’s the big deal about a dead bush?”

  “Not the bush, moron, behind the bush.”

  The boys clambered up the bank and pulled away the bush.

  “Wow! That is so cool.”

  “Nobody knows it’s here except us.”

  “Well, somebody else must know. I mean this is not natural.”

  “Maybe a bear did it.”

  “Bobby, you are so dense. There haven’t been any bears in these woods since, jeez, colonial times, I bet.”

  “Like you know.”

  “My dad said he saw a bear in Cumberland.”

  “Well, that’s not near here, is it?”

  “Boy, if the Empire ever attacks, we could hide out here and be like guerillas.”

  “Like Ewoks?”

  “No, like Luke—”

  “Teddy can be R2D2.”

  “Yeah and you can be Darth Vader, peabrain.”

  “We could get a machine gun.”

  “Maybe we could fix up the one in the museum—”

  “That was an old World War I machine gun. I don’t think they make ammo for that anymore.”

  “Tommy could make us some in Shop.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Boy, this is so neat. We could light a fire.”

  “I gotta go now. What time is it?”

  “You have fifteen minutes. If you hurry, you’ll make it.”

  ***

  Brad stared at the cold coffee in his cup and let his mind return to the moment. He still wasn’t sure how he would approach Smith. He wasn’t sure about anything. He shook his head to stave off the tears that threatened to spill out over his cheeks. Tom, Ned, Teddy, and Bobby. He caught his breath, wiped his face and looked at this watch. What happened to time, he wondered. Where did it all go? If he hurried he’d make it.

  Chapter Five

  The Chesapeake Club survived Baltimore’s historic cycles from antebellum overindulgence through Depression-era austerity. Many of its members could trace their ancestry through that same history. The years had not been kind to the exterior of the building, a flaking brownstone, but the interior retained much of its past elegance. The club endured over the years as a reminder of an earlier, gentler age, a men’s club complete with squash courts, Turkish baths, and a smoking lounge reeking with decades of accumulated cigar smoke. It boasted dining facilities featuring crab cakes, terrapin soup, and all the imagined traditions of those same bygone eras. Frank parked his car in a lot, paid the attendant, and walked two blocks to the stately, if somewhat city-begrimed building. He paused on its gray granite steps and wondered for a moment if he hadn’t made a mistake. What could he possibly gain from eating dinner with twenty-five or twenty-six superannuated preppies whose names he could barely remember? Names he’d spent the last fifty years trying to forget.

  The door swung open and Don Hudson, exuding the aroma of alcohol and tobacco, bald but still recognizable, stuck out his hand, his grin amplified by expensive dental work.

  “Frank Smith, Smitty, you’re here.”

  No one had called him Smitty since he left Scott. Smitty!

  “How are you, Don?” He did know one name. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  “Great, great. The guys are inside working the bar, telling lies about the good old days, the usual stuff. You’re the last.”

  They crossed the marble paneled lobby and turned left into a smallish dining room. He heard the babble of voices and the clink of glasses. When he entered, twenty-five pairs of eyes snapped his way and beamed in on him. A moment later they were followed by another fifteen pairs—wives who’d decided to tag along. Frank managed a weak smile and a wave.

  “Bar’s over there,” Don said and waved toward the corner where an ancient black man poured drinks and kept up a steady stream of chatter with his customers. Hudson moved off to schmooze with someone else. Frank made his way to the bar and asked for a Coke. He’d given up booze three years ago when its siren call to sink into mind-numbing oblivion nearly destroyed him. He looked around at the room. Dusty animal heads and hunting gear hung on the walls, nearly lost in the gloom of high ceilings. He counted a moose, two bears, and a couple of animals he took to be gazelles or elands. His knowledge of African fauna was limited. The horns were straight and spiraled and he felt certain they were neither elk nor deer. Fascinating. He sighed. The walls were painted a deep red, or perhaps they were some other color but time and grime had combined to create a dark terra cotta. Either way, he thought, the room must be oppressive in the daylight. At that moment, however, candles lighted tables and lowered the visual perspective. It appeared warm and welcoming. He sipped his drink.

  “Hi, remember me?” A woman’s voice.

  He turned and looked into a pair of soft brown eyes. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face…who wrote that? She must have been sixty-five or six, but could have passed for fifty-something.

  “I’m embarrassed, but no. Sorry.”

  “Rosemary Mitchell.”

  He scoured his brain, opened every one of the cluttered file drawers that constituted his memory and still drew a blank. He thought about early onset Alzheimer’s and whether it began here.

  “Rosemary Bartlett Mitchell,” she said. She smiled. Perfect small teeth.

  In the years before he started the third grade, he and Rosemary Bartlett practically lived in each other’s apartments. The Bartletts lived on the first floor of a building long ago demolished to make room for more classrooms. The Smiths occupied the second floor of the same building. He and Rosemary played on its big L-shaped front porch, shared sleds, candy, and secrets. They drifted apart when the Bartletts moved off campus. He would have been nine or ten, Rosemary a year younger.

  “My God, Rosemary! Where did you come from? Mitchell? You’re married to George Mitchell? Wait, I thought he….I’m sorry. I’ve been out of touch. ”

  “It’s all right. He died six years ago, just long enough for me to be okay with it. Widows get invited to these shindigs. This year, when I heard you were coming, I decided to accept.”

  Someone tapped a water glass with a knife.

  “At ease,” Don Hudson barked. “You all have assigned seats. There are name cards at the tables, cleverly placed there by our Alumni Secretary, Brad Stark. Dinner will be served in a moment. The Reverend Alistair Forsythe will say grace.” A rotund clergyman in a Black Watch tartan rabat muttered a brief invocation askin
g the Almighty to keep an eye on the gathering and ended with an Amen. Hudson then cleared his throat and intoned, “Cadets…Attention…Seats.”

  Heels clicked together as two dozen dried out, paunchy men attempted to snap to attention.

  “You can take the boy out of military school but you will never get the military school out of the boy,” someone shouted. Frank smiled and began to relax.

  People moved in and around the tables laughing and searching for their places.

  “Listen, Rosemary, This is great. Can we catch up, after dinner maybe?”

  “No need to wait. I switched your name card so you’re next to me now instead of Mr. ‘Dialing for Dollars’ Stark.”

  “You always were a naughty girl.”

  “You remembered.”

  ***

  There were only two things Frank ever really missed when he left Maryland—crab cakes and the Baltimore Colts. When the latter were shanghaied to Indianapolis, only the crab cakes remained. The Chesapeake Club made what were undeniably the finest crab cakes in the state, well, in Baltimore, anyway. The rest of the meal was merely adequate.

  Frank surveyed the room trying to connect names to ancient faces. He found a name badge at his place—his senior yearbook picture next to his name. Very cute, he thought, but he would have preferred a roster of current pictures with names to study first. Someone waved to him. Who? Too far away to make out a name, and the face did not ring a bell. He wondered what all these men would look like with a full head of hair. He imagined the waver with hair. Whilamon, Sam Whilamon.

  “Hey, Sam,” he called, and waved back.

  “When did you decide to become Meredith instead of Frank?” Rosemary asked.

  “When my first book came out. My publisher said since most books were bought and read by women, I ought to consider writing under an assumed name. He thought Ellen Carstairs would work.”

  “Ellen Carstairs? Where’d he come up with that one?”