The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “It’s his own fault,” Louis said bitterly.

  “I know, I know,” Reid agreed. “But it’s one of those things. What I mean is, we say we’re all for love, then we hem it in on all sides, we prescribe what’s allowed and not allowed, we tax it to death, so to speak. But you know what? And this is the great secret we all fool ourselves into trying not to know: more than anything else, Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.” He’d folded his arms across his chest and stood looking defiantly Louis’s way.

  “Oh, stop it,” Louis said, suddenly impatient, even angry. It was simply not true. Look at his love for Claire: that was love, no doubt about it, and it had certainly never been havoc or anarchy. But then it occurred to him, a terrible thought indeed, that that was perhaps the very reason things had gone so wrong. The pages from his notebook shone in his mind. He had thought thoughts that should not be thought. He had entertained anarchic, havoc-wreaking notions and failed to banish them promptly. Indeed, he had welcomed their revels and rampages. He had allowed himself to be secretly intoxicated.

  “I must call the boy’s father,” Louis said abruptly. “I must face all this out.”

  “You know you’ve got my support,” Reid told him. “Whatever difficult decisions you need to make. All I would ask is that you be alert to…” For a moment he seemed at a loss.

  “To what?” Louis said impatiently.

  Reid picked up a votive candle from the dresser top and observed its flickering light. “The shimmer of things,” he said. “The spirit and not the letter.”

  It made sense, Louis thought, to place the call from his office; he needed the bolster and support of its authority. But when he arrived there he was unnerved to discover the red light blinking furiously on his answering machine. At eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning it could mean only one thing. Life, meaningless life, was at times fraught with fearful symmetries.

  With great trepidation he punched the Play button and prepared himself for whatever message poised ready to strike him in the heart.

  “This is Noah Lathrop,” announced the terse, assured voice. “My son is one of your students. As you may well know by now, we’ve had an unfortunate episode regarding one of your colleagues’ dogs, which my son the brilliant fuckup seems to have brought to New York and, I am desperately sorry to say, managed to lose. We’ve searched everywhere, but I think, unfortunately, there is little to hope for. My son is entirely to blame. I am bringing him back to the Forge School this afternoon. I suggest he and I meet you and—I believe his name is Mr. Parker. Your office. Three o’clock. Again, I desperately regret this.”

  Tracy’s dog. In the midst of the breaking storm he had somehow managed to forget about her altogether, and yet Betsy seemed to be the whole of the dreaded message on his machine. How strange that news that in other circumstances would be terrible now came as nothing short of relief. Scarcely daring to believe he hadn’t missed something, he played the message again, and then a third time—but there seemed not even a hint of anything more serious than a lost dog. It barely seemed possible. Unless, of course, Noah Senior had laid a trap that he and Tracy were meant to walk right into.

  But that was too dazzlingly dark even to contemplate, and he did his best to quell its whisper in his brain. He did not even consider calling Tracy on the telephone. He must bear this sad news of Betsy’s disappearance in person. He had never been particularly taken with the animal—beagles were rather poor excuses for dogs. Nevertheless, he felt a surge of fury toward Noah’s criminal carelessness. What happened to poor creatures lost in the unforgiving labyrinth of Manhattan? Surely they didn’t last very long. He found himself hoping that her demise was quick and merciful. He remembered how Claire had gone with Tracy that day to the pound—it was when they barely knew the young man—and he’d wondered, at the time, why she hadn’t steered him toward some choice of animal more in keeping with his character, or what had seemed to be his character: something noble and affectionate, a golden retriever, perhaps, or a Labrador. Of course he now saw that Claire and Tracy had had more between them—an innate sympathy, a shared understanding—than he’d ever guessed. As he left the building, he wondered if he should perhaps check in with his wife, let her know his whereabouts, his progress through the morning’s tangled skein, but something in him rebelled, as if his silence, his absence, might be counted on to dramatize his distress. He supposed, in the midst of all this, that he wanted her to worry about him just a little.

  It wasn’t that he felt angry with Claire; he didn’t believe she had been disloyal or even irresponsible. Rather, it was as if he had discovered that he’d never really known her—though that was nonsense, of course; he had known her very well indeed, as only husband and wife could. But he had chosen to register about her only those things that were pertinent to his purpose.

  The campus was quiet and empty; usually about half the boys left for the weekend. More than ever, the Forge School seemed a walled garden protected from the rough and treacherous world, a park in which roamed, without fear, graceful and innocent creatures. Had that not always been its lure? Was that not why he had temporarily dropped anchor at the school in the first place, only to remain for forty years within its safe harbor? Why else would a man elect to spend his life in the company of boys, if not out of fear of the adults they all one day became? Was that not the secret in every teacher’s heart?

  He realized how greatly he dreaded the prospect of a face-to-face encounter with Noah Lathrop’s father. For such men he felt the keenest admiration tempered by the stark knowledge that they could sweep him and his kind off the face of the earth with a single careless gesture. Those few sentences on the answering machine—pared down, declarative, to the point—showed the man exactly as he was: powerful, persuasive, in his way perhaps quite mad. As Jack Emmerich had been. As the vastly powerful, the psychotically assured, the indispensibly bold always were.

  Approaching the cluster of houses on the cul-de-sac, he saw with a disappointment unmixed with any relief that Tracy’s Toyota wasn’t in the drive. His walk had been for nothing. But where could the young man have gone? Instantly Louis was thrown back into the apprehension that had managed, somewhat, to abate itself with Noah Senior’s message. Once again all the possibilities loomed dark. Surely Tracy wasn’t the kind of person to do himself harm? Had he perhaps fled in panic? Or simply gone out to get milk or, perhaps more to the point, a bottle of whiskey? But that would be his own solution to the predicament, not Tracy’s. The young man was not much of a drinker, which had no doubt been the reason Louis had always felt a stir of excitement whenever Tracy accepted his offer of liquor: as if the door had opened onto some kind of possibility. That it—whatever intangible thing “it” was—remained only a possibility was more than compensated for by the simple awareness of its shimmer, its dangerous allure.

  Was it possible, Louis asked himself, that he might actually, under the right circumstances, consider throwing Noah Lathrop to the wolves in order to save Tracy’s skin? As he turned to leave the porch with that scandalous thought in mind, he suddenly felt light-headed. He’d eaten nothing all day, his macédoine left untouched on the kitchen counter, his toast untoasted in the toaster, those few swallows of brandy long since soured in his stomach and fanned out through his veins. Still, he did not want to return home. Foolish, yes; like insisting that Lux must be buried in the frozen ground of the garden. But now as then, he felt estranged, utterly alone.

  His watch said 11:30. An idea occurred to him: He would eat among the boys in the cafeteria. It was good, occasionally, for the headmaster to make an appearance. But first, he had one more errand to run. He set off for Academy Avenue, walking briskly but feeling, as cars shot past, the agonizingly slow pace of even a briskly walking man. He might as well be crawling on his hands and knees, as he did in certain unbearable dreams that seemed to last the entire night.

  He seldom entered the little liquor store on the corner of Academy and B
roadway. The selection was much better at Palumbo’s Wine and Spirits out in the Middle Forge Plaza. Broadway Liquor catered to a more desperate clientele: no French wines here, just jugs that practically had headache written on the label, and no-nonsense, anonymous brands of vodka and gin. What he wanted, pace the morning’s radio news, was a nice little pint bottle of Slivovitz he could slip into his overcoat pocket, but of course there was none to be had. “Never even heard of it,” said the middle-aged desperado behind the counter.

  “What kind of brandy do you have in pints?” Louis asked.

  “Hiram Walker,” the man said. “Blackberry. Apricot. That’s about it.”

  “No plum?” Louis asked hopefully.

  “No plum,” said the man. “Nope. What you see here is what we got.”

  “Well then, apricot I suppose,” Louis told him, aware once again, as he had been back at the motel desk, how in that moment he could well be anybody. The headmaster of the Forge School or just another drunk in for his Saturday start-me-up. The thought actually soothed him. He understood Tracy’s impulse to flee—if that had ever been Tracy’s impulse rather than his own. He even considered, for a moment, heading back down Broadway to the cemetery where Jack Emmerich slumbered peacefully, perhaps to sit cross-legged in the snow and contemplate the sweetness of death, the warm embrace of oblivion, the welcoming shade of the linden tree.

  Reluctantly he began his trek back to the campus.

  In the cafeteria, Doug Brill sat with his family at the head table. Louis had forgotten: of course the Brills would be there. It was one of the perks the dorm advisers got. And Doug, unfortunately, had sighted him, and with a wave of his hand was gesturing the headmaster over to his table. Sighing inwardly, Louis passed among the sparsely populated tables of boys. At least he had been wise in refraining from more than the merest sip of brandy; he planned to reserve stiffer fortification until right before his meeting with the Lathrops.

  “To what do we owe this honor?” Doug greeted him. Louis wondered if a note of sarcasm lurked somewhere there, though he had long ago decided that Doug Brill lacked anything but the most earnest sense of the world. Louis supposed he should thank him for his attentiveness last night: without his vigilance, Tracy’s house might have burned to the ground. Perhaps, all in all, that would not have been the worst thing to happen. Houses could always be rebuilt.

  “It seemed like a good day to inspect the troops,” Louis said. “I suppose I was feeling a little stir crazy.”

  “Last night’s excitement,” Doug diagnosed. “I know my adrenaline’s still pumping.”

  “Yes,” Louis said reluctantly. “I do want to thank you; we all want to thank you for your quick thinking.” Irked that he’d been coaxed into this public gratitude, he turned to Mary Ann, who was trying, without much success, to divide her attention between the children and her husband’s colloquy with the boss (how much, he wondered, did it cost the school to feed the Brill clan each year?). “You’ve heard about our little drama, I presume.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Doug gave me a full report. Thank the Lord he happened by when he did.”

  He hated to think what Doug might know. The man was not stupid, unfortunately, and Louis could tell that he had taken a dislike to Tracy Parker from the beginning.

  “Yes,” Louis said. “I suppose the Lord should be thanked.”

  “For that and many blessings,” Mary Ann said.

  Louis cautioned himself to keep his tone in check. Perhaps apricot brandy on an empty stomach had been a less than brilliant idea. “Speaking of blessings,” he said, “what are we blessed with on the menu today?”

  “Well,” Doug informed him, mustering an enthusiasm that would be comic were it not genuine, “the choice today is fish sticks or spaghetti with meatballs. I guess you can tell how the Brills voted.” And indeed, without exception, the Brills were feasting on fish sticks.

  Then he would be sure to have the spaghetti, he told himself as he laid his coat, his scarf, his earmuffs on an empty chair and proceeded to the cafeteria line. Four boys who had just come in stood ahead of him. With a combination of interest and sadness he watched them, envying their unselfconscious grace, their barely containable high spirits. He tried to discern what they were bantering about, but couldn’t.

  “Hello, Dr. Tremper,” said one of them. It startled Louis; he wondered if he had been caught staring.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, trying to sound distracted, as if he had in fact been oblivious to their presence. He realized with dismay that the boy who had spoken was Tim Vaughn—the roommate, if he was not mistaken, of Noah Lathrop. It hadn’t even occurred to him to worry that news of Tracy’s and Noah’s goings-on might circulate among the boys; that they might, in fact, have been the first to know. But surely he would have heard something. As far as he knew they were decent, respectable, conventional boys, and hadn’t Reid reported to him just this morning the high esteem in which Tracy was held by precisely these boys, all of whom—Gary Marks, Kevin Motes, Patrick Varga—he had observed in Tracy’s classroom the day he had sat in on English II? Such boys could be trusted not to tolerate the slightest whiff of scandal.

  He was glad to see—though he knew it was entirely petty, even meaningless—that all four of the boys chose, without hesitation, the spaghetti and meatballs, revolting and messy though it looked. He followed suit, smiling to the black woman who served him and whose name he didn’t know. “It all looks very good today,” he complimented cheerfully, though it was clear, from the look she gave him—friendly but blank—that she really had no idea who he was. “The spaghetti,” he said stoically, “looks particularly good.”

  He had always hated waiting. Hell—in which, as opposed to heaven, he perhaps still believed—was no doubt an immense waiting room before an ominous appointment to which one was never called. Occasionally he paced back and forth, or looked out the window at the crows scavenging on the snowy quad, but mostly he took turns sitting in one chair or another, testing how the room would appear from each perspective. He regarded the sofa, still covered in stacks of papers, and decided there were enough chairs already; no further seating would be necessary. Now and then he would surrender to the need to retreat behind his desk, where he would draw the pint of apricot brandy from his desk drawer, take a cautious swallow, then slide his shameful secret back into its hiding place. He knew he should not be drinking before a meeting as important as this; already the fact that he had done so—and continued to do so as three o’clock came and went and no one appeared—made him feel cowardly, despicable. He was conscious of walking a very fine line, and that the line would undoubtedly grow finer as the afternoon progressed.

  The knock on his door, though he had been expecting it for the last half hour, nonetheless startled him. Wishing he had time for one more swig but deciding he’d better not chance it, he positioned himself behind his desk, in a pose to suggest he’d been working, and said in a less-than-assured voice, “Come in.”

  Noah Senior ushered his son into the office with a casual brusqueness meant to indicate that he, and he alone, was in charge. The younger Noah looked shell-shocked. It took little to imagine the temperature of the car ride up from the city.

  Louis rose and extended his hand. Noah Senior’s tough grip was brief and to the point, as if the necessary gesture of physical contact repelled him. “I appreciate your coming all this way,” Louis said politely.

  “Yes, well,” Noah Senior replied, casting his gaze around the room as if expecting to find Tracy Parker stashed away in some corner.

  “I’m afraid my colleague isn’t here,” Louis apologized nervously. “I’ve left messages for him all day but I don’t seem to have gotten through.” Above all else, he wished to avoid the appearance that he might be hiding something.

  Noah Senior looked briefly annoyed. “You have no idea where he is?” he asked, as though to say that he, for one, kept tabs on his employees.

  “None,” Louis admitted.

  “That�
��s a shame. I’ve primarily brought my son to apologize to Mr. Parker. And to consult on an appropriate punishment, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Louis warily. Punishment for whom, and for what?

  “I do not wish expulsion for him,” Noah Senior went on, “though, understandably, this is what you may seek. I ask your leniency in that regard.”

  Louis nodded thoughtfully. He kept waiting for the depth charge to detonate, but it did not. “This is all most unfortunate, dreadfully so, but I don’t think expulsion is in order,” he said, aware, at the same time, that expelling Noah would, in a sense, solve everything. But now it was no longer an option. And of course, he reminded himself, it would solve nothing. Noah was not the problem.

  “My sense is that the Forge School has served Noah well,” Noah Senior said. “His grades have improved markedly since he arrived here. I have been pleased. I would even say that his outlook on his studies has somewhat improved. And that, I take it, is due in large part to Mr. Parker. From what Noah has told me, you have a remarkable teacher in him.”

  “Yes,” Louis said uncomfortably. “I think he is generally much admired.”

  Noah Senior nodded his assent. He was a man who liked for reasonable people to agree. “As for Noah, however,” he said, “there remains a question of character. I will speak openly here. You are aware of certain difficulties my son has had in the past, at his previous school. Other difficulties you may not be so aware of. Let me put it to you bluntly. He has a tendency to idealize certain of his teachers in ways that are not particularly appropriate. His imagination is unruly, and that gets him into difficulties from time to time. I will not embarrass him by elaborating further. But Mr. Parker should be made aware that my son can develop morbid attachments to adults who show him what he misinterprets to be special attention.”