The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  It was an exercise in the grotesque far beyond anything Louis could have imagined. He watched the boy carefully, trying to detect what effect his father’s words must be having. But Noah simply sat there. Knowing what he knew, was this perhaps a secret victory for him, the only kind he was allowed? For the first time in this whole sordid episode, Louis felt compassion. Against his father this son had not a single weapon. Not even Tracy Parker, as it turned out.

  “I am distressed at the pain my son has caused,” said Noah Senior, sublimely clueless to the abuse of power his son had suffered. But of course that was perfect: abuses of power were not something Noah Senior would be particularly primed to see. His son, to use a phrase of Reid’s, was doubly screwed. He would have no advocate whatsoever—unless, that is, Louis were to be his advocate. “I wish to make remuneration,” Noah Senior continued. “I have written out a check for ten thousand dollars, for the school to use as it sees fit.” From his sports jacket he pulled a yellow slip of paper and brandished it in the air between them.

  This could only be a test, Louis thought wildly. The moment to speak the truth was now. He watched the younger Noah, trying to discover something, anything, but the boy’s face was inscrutable. It could not possibly be so easy as this.

  “This is generosity far beyond—” he found himself saying when the knock on the door interrupted him. With the same grace and assurance he had possessed that day back in August, Tracy Parker walked into the office. His present straits had scarcely dimmed him at all. His smile remained clear and winning. He had decided, apparently, to face all this down as heroically as possible. For an instant Louis felt nothing but alarm. Go away, he wanted to tell the young man. It’s all settled. You’ll ruin everything.

  “I’m terribly sorry I’m late,” Tracy said. “Hello, Noah. Mr. Lathrop.”

  Noah wouldn’t look at his teacher. His lover, Louis told himself, gazing in a kind of wonder at these two who had touched and kissed…and what else his imagination could scarcely contain the joy and panic of?

  “Mr. Parker,” said Noah Senior, rising to shake Tracy’s hand in a move that clearly took the young man by complete surprise. Tracy looked at Louis with an expression of sheer terror, and Louis wished he could somehow signal him—but what look could possibly convey the absurd miracle that seemed to have occurred? For really, there was no other explanation than that. Even as they spoke, the angel of havoc and disgrace was passing silently over the school—whose lintels had been marked, no doubt, with poor Betsy’s blood.

  “Please be seated,” Louis said, gesturing to the available chair whose particular perspective on the room he had tried out several times.

  Tracy took a deep breath. “I know we’re here to discuss serious business,” he said while Louis waited for the fragile flame of hope-against-hope to be doused by a single ill-advised sentence. “But first I have to tell everybody the excellent news.”

  In the second before Tracy continued Louis had to wonder whether, despite his brave demeanor, the poor young man hadn’t cracked under the pressure after all.

  Beaming broadly, he announced, with a flair even the surrounding circumstances could not entirely mute, “Betsy is found.”

  They all seemed to say “No!” simultaneously, each with his own inflection of surprise or relief—or even, in Louis’s case, patent disbelief. How could Betsy possibly be found? He had known, from the instant he played Noah Senior’s message, that there was no hope. The dog would be the casualty; the dog would somehow pay for everything else. See? he could almost hear Reid Fallone exclaim. The universe is not the abyss of darkness you think it is.

  Still, superstitiously, he feared the silent angel’s return. Someone, somehow, would have to suffer. Of that he was quite certain.

  “Claire’s got her back at my house,” Tracy said. “She’s a little shaken up but otherwise just fine. We just got back from the city.”

  “Claire?” Louis said.

  “It all happened so fast,” Tracy explained. “I got this call, this man in New York telling me he had my dog. I couldn’t believe it; at first I thought it was some sick prank, but he said he got my phone number off the collar. He said he was there in Central Park when she ran away. He tried to find you, Noah”—Tracy turned to the boy and spoke in a tone remarkably clear of reproach—“but I guess you’d already gone by then.”

  Noah stared at Tracy as if overwhelmed. “I tried to find her,” he said in a small, frightened voice. “I looked everywhere.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tracy said. “We’ve got her back. She’s safe and sound. Lucky me. I didn’t even know she was lost till she was found.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” Noah Senior told him. “You were certainly saved a lot of unnecessary grief.”

  But Tracy wasn’t through. The words poured out in a torrent. “I was so excited,” he said, his voice still shaky with relief. “I drove right over to your house, Louis, but you weren’t there. Claire said, What’re we waiting for? She’s amazing that way. We zipped right down to the city and picked Betsy up, simple as that. The man who found her was really sweet. He was so apologetic, and I kept telling him, What’s there to apologize for? You did a great thing. He made us hot chocolate and we sat there in this tiny little apartment in Chelsea crammed full of plants and he went on and on about how sorry he was, how he was afraid he freaked you out, Noah.”

  And by the perturbed expression on Noah’s face, Louis decided, he had indeed.

  “You didn’t mention anything about this fellow,” Noah Senior said sternly.

  “It was nothing,” Noah said. “I thought he was a mugger. I thought he had a knife.” Louis could see he was a boy who was used to lying, but who was less good at it than he probably thought.

  “Hardly a mugger,” Tracy said, seemingly oblivious to Noah’s deceit. Was it possible, despite everything, that he knew nothing about the object of his intimate attentions? “I’m sure he didn’t want to spook you. He works for the Metropolitan Opera. He’s a costume designer.”

  Having apparently heard enough to satisfy him, Noah Senior rose from his chair. “So,” he said. “All’s well that ends well. You’ve been very lucky, Noah.” He turned to his son. “Luck like that comes once or twice. Remember that. I hope, Mr. Parker, you won’t hold any of this against my son. He’s too impulsive for his own good. He develops enthusiasms that should not be encouraged. In the future, I trust you will keep that in mind. We Lathrops have a reputation for being difficult—well earned, I’m afraid. My son is no exception. Though I still expect him to apologize to you.

  “Noah.” He spoke his son’s name with military precision.

  Louis watched the boy carefully. Noah who was the key, the linchpin to everything that stood so precarious in that room. Who despite that, Louis saw with savage clarity, was absolutely helpless. Left in the lurch as no one should ever find themselves left in the lurch—by father, by lover, by teacher. All of them.

  “I’m sorry, Trace, I mean Mr. Parker,” Noah conceded. Bravely he held out his hand.

  No one would intervene. No one would save this boy. And neither, Louis realized with a jolt of shame, would he. In this very room he had stood up to Jack Emmerich. In this very room he had said, raising his voice in anger against his friend and mentor, “I will not allow you to damage this boy any more than you already have. I will do whatever I have to to stop you.” Now he sat behind Jack Emmerich’s desk and allowed the carnage to be wrought unhindered. Never had his admiration for anyone been greater than for this boy, trapped between the demands and desires of adults far more powerful and impossible than he; who waited in stoic silence when he could, by a single word, bring everything crashing down.

  “Apology accepted,” Tracy said gravely, no doubt mystified but nonetheless acting his part perfectly. He took Noah’s hand and they shook. What wild or bitter regrets hid behind the perfectly ordinary-looking gesture? Louis could not tell. No one but Tracy and Noah could tell. They held their handshake only a second long
er than necessary, then relinquished each other’s grip. But not before the strains had stolen into Louis’s head, blazing and sorrowful, of that final trio he loved so much from Rosenkavalier, the three sopranos soaring and then falling around the Marschallin’s heroic renunciation. “Um Gottes Willen,” he breathed silently, sorry never to have played that great music for Tracy, but seeing now that it had not, in fact, been necessary.

  Whatever Noah Senior saw or heard just then, he too seemed convinced. “No hard feelings,” he said. “I think my son has learned his lesson.” To the end he was powerfully, even providentially, clueless. But perhaps that was his stunning secret after all. He had brokered this reconciliation without speaking a word of the language. Uzbekistan, shimmering with oriental deceits, had better beware.

  “The contribution to the Forge School remains,” Noah Senior concluded. “I thank both of you”—he looked from the grateful Louis to the baffled Tracy—“for your understanding. I am profoundly sorry for this intrusion into your time, and for the anxiety that has been caused. Mr. Tremper. Mr. Parker.” He nodded curtly, as if to dismiss them. “Come, Noah,” he commanded. “We’ve been enough of a burden to these gentlemen for a day.”

  Docile, the boy made to follow, but at the door he turned and looked back at them, and it was not Tracy’s eye that he met but Louis’s. Despite himself Louis nodded in acknowledgment. But acknowledgment of what? Noah seemed, in his enigmatic way, to be smiling.

  The door clicked shut. Father and son had gone. Silence filled the room. He was gratified to find that Tracy was looking at him in astonishment.

  “Did what I think just happened actually happen?” Tracy asked.

  “We’re saved,” Louis said. “You’re saved. Apparently your Noah didn’t breathe a word to his father. Perhaps Betsy being lost was a good thing. It let you make your escape.”

  “My escape,” Tracy said sardonically. “My offer of resignation still stands.”

  “Yes. Of course.” From the window Louis could see father and son striding across the quad, the younger lagging a step behind. He still could barely believe the catastrophe had been averted, and yet he knew that nothing was ever ended. For as long as Noah remained at the Forge School, the two of them would know the truth. And even after that. For the rest of their lives. “With deep regret,” he told Tracy without taking his eyes off the two retreating figures, “I accept your resignation. Effective immediately.”

  “I understand,” Tracy said with what seemed like reluctance. Was he surprised?

  “It would be impossible for you to stay here,” Louis reminded him, as if he should need any reminding.

  “I know, I know.” Tracy sank slowly into his chair and put his head in his hands. Only now did the full measure of his disgrace seem to sink in on him.

  “I’m very sorry things had to happen this way,” Louis told him gently.

  “So am I. It was all going so well here. I thought—I’m finally on track.”

  Louis did not say, You allowed this to happen. You brought this down on yourself. Instead he thought, for a moment, about putting a fatherly hand on Tracy’s shoulder, but decided, given everything that had happened, the gesture would not be appropriate. “What will you do?” he asked his disgraced comrade.

  Tracy shrugged. He looked up with a defeat in his eyes that was shocking. “Who knows? I’ll go to New York. I’ll disappear,” he said dramatically. “New York’s good for that.”

  If that were the case, then Louis envied the fortunate citizens of that great anonymous city. Soon enough, among new faces, Tracy’s state of grace, his nimbus of charm, would no doubt be entirely restored. Or would this sad escapade follow him and haunt him? Even now he longed to ask the unaskable: What had it felt like to possess, for a moment, the love of a boy for whom one had risked everything? But the unaskable remained just that; he had long ago made his particular choices. They hemmed him in as surely as Tracy’s now did. One thing did occur to him. “When you see Arthur Branson,” he said. “Will you give him…” He had planned to say regards, or perhaps apologies, but what he said was, “Will you give him my love?”

  “Of course,” Tracy said.

  There should have been more, somehow, but there wasn’t. An awkward, even unbearable silence enfolded them.

  “Well,” said Tracy. “I’d better go make arrangements.”

  “Yes,” Louis agreed. “I suppose you should.”

  Claire had cooked one of his favorite dinners, a winter feast of pork roast, garlicked potatoes, braised fennel, the sort of meal that anchored one to the earth on unforgiving nights. She had brought out the willowware, her grandmother’s silver; she had lit candles that flickered warmly in their brass holders in the center of the table.

  She looked as if, at some point during the long day, she had suffered a prolonged spell of tears.

  He would not ask. The meal had been warming in the oven for perhaps an hour, awaiting his late arrival. Her attempt to make amends vaguely embarrassed him—as if either of them had done anything wrong. He had not meant to be so late, he told her.

  “That’s quite all right,” she said. “I’m sure you had much to do.” He could feel acutely the distance in her; how tentative everything was between them, as between strangers. Even after forty years, a marriage could end in an afternoon—that was how fragile life was.

  He had not meant to fall asleep in his office, but the brandy, whose consolations he had rather boldly invoked once the meeting was over, and an extraordinary sense of hollowness within him had led him to stretch out on the seldom-used sofa, whose carpeting of books and papers he swept aside to accommodate his sudden need for unconsciousness. When he awoke, dusk had come and gone and he was in the dark.

  As if afraid to speak for fear of what might be said, he and Claire ate in silence. They were usually rather good at silence—comfortable, domestic silences. They did not need to chatter in order to preserve their communion. But tonight the silence of their meal was distinctly that of dangerous estrangement.

  Claire, always the braver of the two, was the one to break it at last. “Well,” she said, “don’t we have anything at all to say?”

  “Dinner is very good,” Louis told her. “Especially the pork roast.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Tracy Parker has resigned.”

  “Yes,” she told him.

  “Of course,” he said. “You were keeping Betsy. You were waiting for him at his house when he came back from the meeting.”

  “Louis,” she said. “Can you understand why I had to be there?”

  She had loved their young man as well. He had not realized that before. The small perception dug at him, and he said, wanting for her sake to sound generous, “You did the right thing. You’ve been quite a good friend to him, I believe.”

  “At the expense of…?” Claire said.

  “I didn’t say that,” he told her.

  “But I think you implied it.”

  She knew him too well, but that had never stopped him from pretending she didn’t. “Perhaps I did imply it,” he admitted. “I wish everything wasn’t such a muddle. I wish I didn’t feel like something has been allowed to happen that ought not to have happened and which everyone, myself included, has colluded in.”

  “You think Tracy got away with something. That he didn’t get punished. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “He did get away. You know he did. Unlawful sexual activity with a minor. Criminal acts, and now he’s scot free.” But who was he to assert such things, he who had imagined those same acts with such secret avidity? Was he not also guilty?

  The fact remained, he told himself defiantly: he had not acted; he had only dreamed. There lay all the difference. It was no crime to dream.

  Nonetheless, uncomfortably, he felt critically compromised, a judge unworthy to judge.

  “Trust me,” Claire reassured him. “You did exactly what you should have done. Tracy’s not getting off scot free. This
will haunt him. He’ll never be free of it. Absolutely nothing would have been served by ruining his life any more than it already is.”

  “It’s not Tracy’s life that I’m concerned about,” Louis said righteously. “It’s the boy’s. I’m afraid I haven’t served him well at all.”

  “But perhaps you did,” Claire told him. “He could have spoken, you know. He could have told his father everything. He chose not to. You have to grant him agency in this.”

  “Agency,” Louis said with disgust. “What agency? He’s a child. He’s fifteen years old. What could he do? It was up to me to allow him to speak, and I could have. I could have asked him if there was anything he had to say. But I didn’t. I saw my chance and took it. Noah’s father believes about his son exactly what he chooses to believe, and I was willing—no, I was grateful to let that stand. Justice was not done here.”

  “Whose justice, Louis?” Claire asked, and when he did not answer, she continued. “I don’t understand why you’ve come to hate Tracy Parker so much.”

  “I don’t hate him,” he told her. “I hate what he did. He betrayed his trust. That’s what I find hard to forgive. Though no one else seems to be having much trouble there. Reid, I can understand. He’s all passion with no sense of duty. But you, Claire. That’s what I find surprising.”

  She smiled sadly. “I suppose that should tell you something, now shouldn’t it? I know this is all very upsetting. Believe me, no one’s more upset about betraying his trust, as you call it, than Tracy. If you’d been talking to him for the last month you’d know how upset he’s been.”

  Was it his fault, then, that Tracy had done what he’d done? Because the headmaster had cut him off, left him in the lurch with his sick friend Arthur and his confused student Noah?

  “I wash my hands of Tracy Parker,” Louis told Claire brutally. “He is no longer my concern. My duty is to the well-being of the students of the Forge School.”