The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Carefully Claire laid aside her writing board and papers. She put her green felt-tipped pen on the nightstand beside her and spoke with firm resignation. “I did what I thought best, Louis. I don’t regret that. You’re not the only person in the world who’s allowed to keep certain things private. Did it ever occur to you, when you banished Tracy from your life, meaning our life, that I may have had some stake in the friendship as well? Or were you so concerned with managing the situation, making certain that Louis Tremper was not in any way compromised, that you forgot that the people around you, namely me, might have some agency in their lives as well?”

  He profoundly mistrusted words like agency, words Claire would never have used before she’d started commuting to Albany in order to become a feminist. His sudden bitterness took him by surprise, and he remembered yet another unsettling coincidence: all those nights he and Arthur Branson had sat on the sofa and listened to Wagner, his wife had been learning words like agency.

  “I know certain things make you nervous,” his wife the professor continued, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean they make me nervous.”

  What was she talking about? They never had arguments, and this, certainly, couldn’t be called an argument. She hadn’t raised her voice. She spoke reasonably, almost as she might to a student who was having difficulties with the material.

  With some consternation he realized that he was, in fact, having difficulties with the material. “I’m at a loss as to what to do,” he confessed.

  She looked at him curiously. “Do you have to do anything?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said darkly, “as a matter of fact I do. All hell is about to break loose. And if Tracy Parker must pay, then Tracy Parker must pay.” He had been in these circumstances before; there was no other choice. Knowing what he now knew, anything less would be criminal.

  He would not call Noah Senior yet. He would wait till a reasonable hour—as if any of the twenty-four hours in the day might be reasonable for such a task. And what, in any event, would he say? Nice to speak to you? I understand one of my teachers has been romancing your son? Has had carnal and unlawful knowledge of? Is guilty of criminal sodomy with?

  If Noah Senior struck back with everything at his disposal, who could reasonably blame him? A father had the right, after all, to protect his son from predation, especially when the school he had entrusted with his son’s well-being had failed so miserably in that task. Had even, one might argue, assisted in the predation by turning a blind eye to the situation once that situation had first begun to make itself clear.

  But he had not known for certain, Louis argued with the invisible court convened in his head. How could he have known?

  Of course you knew, accused the court. You watched with great fascination, even a perverse joy. Your misery fed your joy: a young man and a boy in illicit, forbidden congress with each other. It secretly intoxicated you. Deny that if you dare. Your words on paper prove it.

  Picking up the phone, he dialed Reid’s number.

  “Hello, Libby,” he said, realizing, when she answered, that it was still scarcely past eight o’clock, and the Fallones might well be slumbering peacefully, no cares such as his on their heads. “I hope I didn’t wake you. I wonder if I could I speak to Reid.”

  Libby spoke with that veneer of brittle cheer that had always made Louis suspicious. “Reid’s not here,” she said.

  “Well, when he gets in, would you ask him to give me a call?”

  “There’s been a change of address. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  He waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, he prompted, “Libby, are you all right? I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He’s gone. Moved out. Or, I should say, I threw him out. How’s that?” There was a tone of eerie satisfaction in her voice. He had never liked her.

  “But where is he?” he asked.

  There was a silence on the other end.

  “Libby?” What, he wondered, was she doing? Opening another bottle? Loading a firearm? Then she spoke. “I’ve got the number here. It’s the King’s Arms. On Broadway.”

  “He’s staying in a motel? Why didn’t I know this?”

  “I don’t know why you don’t. I assumed my husband always told you everything. Maybe he’s embarrassed. He should be, you know—and about more than just getting kicked out of the house.”

  Louis had never known Reid to be embarrassed by anything. Secretive, yes, but never embarrassed. And then it occurred to him: for whatever reason, Reid had withdrawn his confidence in him. No longer was he entrusting his secrets to his collaborator of so many reckless years. Louis stood, phone in hand, a line of sweat breaking out across his brow, and felt a quiet devastation settle in. He had fretted, had writhed with compunction, and in the end had come to depend absolutely on those confidences of Reid’s; they had been his lifeline to the greater world. They had kept him alive.

  He knew it was hardly appropriate, but all he could do was utter a hysterical chirp of a laugh at his realization.

  “What’s so funny?” Libby asked him suspiciously.

  “Nothing,” he told her. “That’s what’s so funny. That nothing is.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, “but frankly, Louis, and I feel free to tell you this, there’s a lot about you that I’ve never understood.”

  “The feeling,” he told her without acrimony, “is mutual. Now good day to you. I’m sure all of this will get sorted out in the fullness of time.”

  He hung up, but not before hearing, from Libby’s end, her own snort of mirth. He felt—but what did he feel? Nothing that he felt seemed to have any correlation with what was happening around him. He felt an odd elation. An inexplicable whiff of Schadenfreude. Things had come crashing down all around him, the shards splintering, the damage considerable. And yet he stood untouched in its midst.

  At least for now.

  “I’m going out for a bit,” he said, looking in on Claire, who still lay in bed but was in the process of dialing the telephone. “I’ve got to get all this sorted out.”

  “Do you need me to drive you anywhere?” she asked, putting down the phone—and who was it she’d been calling at this hour? Her life, he knew now, moved beyond him in ways he had never bothered to imagine.

  Feeling suddenly helpless and not wanting her help, or anyone’s, he told her, “I’m fine walking.”

  “Louis,” she said. “Talk to me. You’re not angry, are you?”

  “I’m mystified,” he told her, and turned abruptly away. At the head of the stairs he paused for a moment before descending, half expecting her to call him back, but she didn’t, and so he went on down.

  The King’s Arms couldn’t be more than a mile, just past the Heidelberg, and though he might easily ring up the motel’s front desk and be instantly connected to Reid’s room, he thought the exertion would do him good. He had managed to walk off nearly every emotional upset life had dealt him.

  The brandy sat in his stomach, warm and slightly burning. He wrapped his coat around him, draped his neck in his long wool scarf, settled his earmuffs around his ears.

  February had been a month of endlessly overcast skies, and this Saturday was no exception. Snow—lingering, dismal-looking snow—lay everywhere except on roads and sidewalks, where incessant labor had temporarily beat it back, and even on the sidewalks there was the occasional icy patch he skirted carefully. This early on a Saturday morning, Middle Forge looked particularly moribund. No one was stirring, only a miserable-looking dog, a black retriever mix of some sort that followed for five blocks before abandoning him, and he thought of Tracy’s clumsy, excitable dog whose fate was now unknown.

  The Heidelberg was of course shut tight, the neon Dinkelacker sign in the window turned off. Some vandal, it annoyed him to see, had pasted a pink triangle on the front door. Some vandal or gay activist; he was not unaware of the symbol’s significance. Nevertheless, this misguided anti- German sentiment saddened him.
If only one could separate the Nazis from the Germans. But that was it, over and over again, wasn’t it? The best and the worst, commingled inextricably in a single body, the one inseparable from the other. In the snowy cemetery of the Dutch Reformed Church across the street, which did not beckon, Jack Emmerich’s grave was indistinguishable from its fellows. There had been the time he and Claire had made a pilgrimage to Rommel’s grave at Herrlingen; in the little churchyard, a simple iron cross, emblem of the old Kaiserreich, marked the site. Several dozen white roses had recently been left, probably that same morning; their buds still tight and virginal, they had covered the grave like new-fallen snow.

  There was a sense, he told himself without regret or anger, in which Tracy Parker had magnificently fulfilled every expectation he’d had of him when he’d first crossed the threshold that sweltering day in August.

  By the time he reached the King’s Arms, an unprepossessing L-shaped structure erected in the early 1970s on a lot carved out of what had once been a pleasing row of browns tones, it was a quarter to nine. He had never particularly cared for the hollow pomposity of Castel Fallone, but this, on the other hand, was desperate indeed. The man in the motel office, a bleary-eyed, bestubbled fellow with the distinct smell of whiskey and sickness about him, somewhat reluctantly directed Louis to Room 2D.

  “There better not be no drug-dealing going on up there,” he said ominously.

  “Sir,” Louis told him, “what do I look like?”

  “You could’ve had a shave. You could’ve just put on them clothes. How’m I supposed to know who you are? You could be anybody. All I’m saying is, I’m warning you.” And with that he turned his attention to rearranging the dusty plastic flowers in a vase on the counter.

  At 2D Louis knocked and waited, then knocked again. He stood for some minutes, unwilling to concede that his half-hour walk had been in vain. Down on the sidewalk, an ancient woman bundled in rags picked through a waste can, retrieving several cans and bottles, which she carefully, as though they were holy relics, tucked into the half-full garbage bag in her shopping cart. He knocked once more, a last futile rap, and as if by magic the door opened instantly. Wet hair standing up in points, naked except for the bath towel he clutched around his waist and the gold Greek cross that hung in the hairy cleft of his chest, Reid Fallone stood before him in all his fallen glory.

  “You,” said Reid. “I hope you’re not trying to sell something.”

  “I should have called before coming by,” Louis told him. “Libby said you were here.”

  “Someone actually did come by the other day,” Reid said, “and wanted to sell me a set of encyclopedias. Can you believe it? No one ever offered to sell me a set of encyclopedias when I might have considered buying them.”

  Greedily, warily, Louis’s gaze canvassed the small, extremely messy room.

  “Here,” Reid offered, “entrez vous into my very humble abode, my hermitage in the desert where I am struggling with my demons and worshipping my God.” He pulled a wad of clothes from the room’s only chair and threw them negligently across the unmade bed. The painting above the bed, an apple orchard in bloom, surely was never intended to seem surreal, though its colors, explosive pinks and whites amid a haze of pastel green, inadvertently made it so. On the dresser sat a half-empty bottle of ouzo and a Greek icon of the Virgin and child, in front of which several votive candles were burning.

  “The Panagia Hodegetria,” Reid explained. “The faithful believe icons are the actual presence of God. It’s been a comfort to me, I must say. Though the manager’s been giving me hell about the candles.”

  Louis couldn’t resist. “I hope God’s paying his share of the rent,” he said, then immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. He had not come to start a fight.

  “I accept,” Reid told him. “So tell me what brings you here to my penitential exile.” Unself-consciously he removed the towel from his waist and began to dry his hair. The simple gesture took Louis by surprise. He had never, in all his years of friendship with Reid, seen his friend naked. The Reid who, at twenty-five, had cut a such a romantic figure was at sixty-five a hairy, sagging old beast. With a faint repulsion Louis stole a glance at the thick, well-used penis swinging beneath his old friend’s bloated stomach. Then he looked guiltily away, into the sad, hypnotic, perhaps slightly mad eyes of the Panagia Hodegetria, saying, as much to the Virgin in whom he did not believe as to Reid in whom he believed only slightly more strongly, “I need your advice. Something very distressing has come to my attention.” Even now he hesitated to say it plainly; with each person he told, Tracy’s predicament become more substantial, more irrevocable. “It turns out that Tracy Parker has been carrying on an affair with one of our students.”

  Reid stopped toweling his hair. Without going into irrelevant detail, Louis rehearsed the events of the morning and also of the previous night.

  Reid looked appropriately grim. “Well this is a fine mess,” he said. “And he was working out so well, didn’t you think? The students were all crazy about him—and I guess he was crazy about them as well. It’s such a pity.” He pulled on a pair of boxers, then rummaged distractedly for some pants; finding a rumpled pair of corduroys, he shook them out, stepped first into one leg, then the other. He sat on the side of the bed as he buttoned his shirt.

  “The question is,” Louis said, “what do you think I should do? As you can see, the situation is very delicate. I’ve asked him to resign, of course.”

  “Such a shame,” Reid said.

  “I don’t see any way around it. As it is, there could well be legal ramifications.”

  Reid looked perplexed. “You’re not saying he could be charged with a crime, are you? But then, I suppose he could be, couldn’t he?”

  “It happens more often than you might think,” Louis told him, all too bleakly conscious of the hoard of newspaper articles he kept in his desk drawer at home.

  “I suppose it does,” Reid said. “One never really pays attention to these things.”

  “The law is quite specific,” Louis said. “And the penalties are extraordinarily harsh.”

  Reid shook his head. “I don’t like it,” he said vehemently. “This was a consensual relationship, right? This sort of thing goes on all the time. It’s just a question of whether or not you get caught, isn’t that what it is?”

  That line of argument made Louis acutely nervous. Did he regret the immense pains he had taken to keep the truth about Jack Emmerich and Arthur Branson from his colleague? Would shared knowledge of that sad affair have helped them now? “I’d say this is a special case,” he said.

  “But is it?” Reid countered. “I taught Noah Lathrop last year. I’d say he’s bright, capable, a little unfocused, but which of them isn’t? Certainly capable of making decisions for himself Certainly bright enough to know he’s in love.”

  “I would really question whether he’s been in love,” Louis said testily, “or only thinks he has.” Had he come to Reid to be talked into leniency? But what was done was done. No leniency was possible. “A relationship like that could be any number of things,” he continued vociferously. “Hero worship, need for attention. We both know that. The boy’s undoubtedly caught up in the glamor of something he’s far too young to understand. And that’s where our Tracy Parker has blundered so badly. He’s broken the law, true enough, but he’s broken something far more precious. He’s broken a sacred trust, the bond between a teacher and a student. That’s the damage that can’t be undone.”

  “Louis, you’re always so dire,” Reid said. “It’s not the end of the world, and the institution of education will undoubtedly survive. Look at the Greeks. They certainly knew all about education in a way that would make a conventional moralist’s hair stand on end.”

  “For better or worse,” Louis said, “we are not the ancient Greeks. So that’s neither here nor there.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Reid told him. “Certainly our old friend Jack Emmerich was not so sure
.”

  A chill seized Louis’s heart. He did not want Jack Emmerich here in this tawdry motel room with them. They never talked about him; for fifteen years Jack had lain peacefully in his grave, and Louis had always been certain—as certain as the circumstances allowed—that he had managed to keep from Reid, as well as from everyone else, the darkest depths of their former headmaster’s plunge. Indeed, that had been nothing less than his greatest feat: to stand alone against his friend and mentor, to contain the damage, to preserve the institution Jack had built and then so recklessly endangered.

  “What are you implying about Jack Emmerich?” he asked cautiously, waiting for Reid finally to say, after fifteen years, that he’d known all along what went on out there at the farm.

  But Reid was smiling broadly—generously, if that were possible. He did not look like a man about to rend the veil of silence. “Only what you and I have always known, Louis,” he said. “That Eros goes a long way in anything. You don’t devote your entire life to boys without having a passion for them.”

  Louis pondered, for a moment, the perilous implication of those words. “Then, if I may ask, what does that say about you?”

  Reid only laughed. “My good friend, I may have spent my life teaching boys, but I have not devoted my life to them. As my presence in this motel room sadly suggests.”

  “Yes,” said Louis drearily. “We need to talk about that too, I suppose. Do you want to tell me exactly what is going on here?”

  “I was going to apprise you of everything,” Reid told him. “Down to the last sordid detail. But I wanted to wait while I finalized my plans. This gives both Libby and myself a great opportunity, you know. And I fully intend to seize it. But I’ll wait to talk till I’m ready. Which will be soon, I promise. But now, back to our problem at hand.” He rose from the bed and paced grandly the room’s confined space. “These are my thoughts. Does Tracy Parker have to go? Sadly, yes. Can we protect him from his fate? Sadly, no. But I think it’s a damned shame that such a promising teacher has to come to an end like this. I’d like to think there’s a way, somehow, to avert catastrophe.”