Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

  Then he was shouting in her ear that they had to go, go, go. He didn’t tuck himself in, scooted to the edge of the roof, leapt into the sago palms below. Gwennie floated down to him, her skirt up-petaling like a tulip. They crawled out of the bushes, his ween hanging out of his fly, and were greeted by firemen sardonically applauding. “Nice work, Romeo,” one said.

  “Lancelot,” he whispered.

  “Call me Don Juan,” a cop said, cranking handcuffs around Lotto’s wrists, then Gwennie’s. The ride was short. She wouldn’t look at him. He would never see her again.

  Then there was the cell with its filthy troll of a toilet in the corner, Lotto scrambling for splinters he could use as a shiv, the sputtering lightbulb that finally popped in a rain of glass at dawn.

  —

  HOME. Sallie’s bleak face, Rachel resting on Lotto’s chest, sucking her thumb. One year old and already clenched with anxiety. It had been decided: they had to get him away from those delinquents. Antoinette closed the door behind her, cracked her thumbs, picked up the phone. Enough cash will grease any wheel. By afternoon, it was done. By evening, he was on a gangplank shuffling into a plane. He looked back. Sallie was holding Rachel, and both were bawling. Antoinette stood, arms akimbo. She wore a twisted look on her face. Anger, he thought. [Wrong.]

  The hatch closed on Lotto, boy banished for his sins.

  He would never remember the trip northward, only the shock. Waking in the morning to sun and Florida, going to bed that same day in cold New Hampshire gloom. A dormitory smelling of boys’ feet. An ache of hunger in his gut.

  At supper that evening in the dining hall, a wedge of pumpkin pie had smacked his forehead. He looked up to find the boys laughing at him. Someone yelled, Aw, poor Punkin Pie. Someone else said, Poor Florida Pie, and someone else said, Bumblefuck Pie, and this got the most laughs, so this was what they called him. He, who all his life had walked everywhere in the sultry heat as if he had owned the place [he’d owned the place], felt his shoulders press to his ears as he scuttled over the cold, hard ground. Bumblefuck Pie, a hick to these boys from Boston and New York. Zitty, the childhood loveliness vanished, too tall, too skinny. A Southerner, inferior. His wealth, which had once singled him out, unremarkable among the wealthy.

  He woke before dawn and sat shivering at the edge of the bed, watching the window lighten. DOOM-doom, DOOM-doom, went his heart. The cafeteria with the cold pancakes and half-cooked eggs, the walk over frozen ground to the chapel.

  He called every Sunday at six PM, but Sallie was not much for small talk, and Antoinette went nowhere these days and had little to report beyond her television programs, and Rachel was too tiny to put together sentences. His call was over in five minutes. A dark sea to swim until the next call. Nothing in New Hampshire was warm. Even the sky bore an amphibian chill. Lotto went to the hot tub by the pool as soon as the gym opened at five-thirty, trying to boil ice out of his bones. He’d float, imagining his friends smoking up in the sun. If he were near Gwennie, they’d already have exhausted every mode of intercourse he knew of, even the apocryphal. Only Chollie sent mail, though it was little more than jokes on pornographic postcards.

  Lotto fantasized about the gym’s beams, which were at least fifty feet high. A swan dive into the shallow end would put an end to it all. No, he’d climb to the top of the observatory, tie a rope around his neck, jump. No. He’d steal into the physical plant and take some of the white powders used to clean the bathrooms and eat them like ice cream until his innards frothed out. An element of the theatrical already in his imaginings. He wasn’t allowed to come home for Thanksgiving, for Christmas. “Am I still being punished?” he asked. He tried to keep his voice manly, but it wobbled. “Oh, honey,” Sallie said. “It’s not punishment. Your mama wants you to have a better life.” Better life? He was Bumblefuck Pie here; he didn’t ever swear, so he couldn’t even complain of his own nickname. His loneliness howled louder. All boys did sports, and he was forced to row in the novice eight and his hands grew blisters that grew calluses, their own shells.

  —

  THE DEAN SUMMONED HIM. He’d heard that Lancelot was troubled. His grades were perfect; he was no dummy. Was he unhappy? The dean’s eyebrows were caterpillars that chew down apple trees overnight. Yes, Lotto said, he was unhappy. Hm, the dean said. Lotto was tall, smart, rich. [White.] Boys like him were meant to be leaders. Perhaps, the dean hazarded, if he bought facial soap, he might find a higher perch on the totem pole? He had a friend who could write a prescription; he searched for a notepad to write the number down. In the open drawer, Lotto caught a glimpse of the familiar oily gleam of a pistol. [Gawain’s nightstand, leather holster.] It was all Lotto could see before him as he stumbled through his days afterward, that brief glimpse of gun, the weight he could feel in his hands.

  —

  IN FEBRUARY, the door of his English class opened and a toad in a red cape walked in. Grublike face. Pasty sheen, sparse hair. A round of snickers. The little man swirled the cape off his shoulders, wrote Denton Thrasher on the chalkboard. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them, his face was racked with pain, his arms extended as if holding something heavy.

  Howl, howl, howl, howl! he whispered. O, you are men of stones:

  Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

  That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!

  I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

  She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

  If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

  Why, then she lives.

  Silence. No scoffing. The boys were still.

  An unknown room in Lotto illuminated. Here, the answer to everything. You could leave yourself behind, transform into someone you weren’t. You could strike the most frightening thing in the world—a roomful of boys—silent. Lotto had gone vague since his father died. In this moment, his sharpness snapped back.

  The man heaved a sigh and became himself again. “Your teacher has been stricken with some disease. Pleurisy. Dropsy? I shall be taking his place. I am Denton Thrasher. Now,” he said, “tell me, striplings, what are you reading?”

  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Arnold Cabot whispered.

  “Lord save us,” Denton Thrasher said, and took the wastebasket and swept up and down the rows, tossing the boys’ paperbacks in. “One mustn’t concern oneself with lesser mortals when one has barely breached the Bard. Before I am through with you, you will be sweating Shakespeare. And they call this a fine education. The Japanese will be our imperial masters in twenty years.” He sat on the edge of the desk, buttressing himself before the groin with his arms. “Firstly,” he said, “tell me the difference between tragedy and comedy.”

  Francisco Rodríguez said, “Solemnity versus humor. Gravity versus lightness.”

  “False,” Denton Thrasher said. “A trick. There’s no difference. It’s a question of perspective. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing. Look here,” he said, and made his hands into a box, which he moved across the room until it settled on Jelly Roll, the sad boy whose neck gooped out over his collar. Denton swallowed what he was about to say, moved the box of his hands on to Samuel Harris, a quick, popular, brown boy, the cox of Lotto’s boat, and said, “Tragedy.” The boys laughed, Samuel loudest of all; his confidence was a wall of wind. Denton Thrasher moved the frame until it alighted with Lotto’s face, and Lotto could see the man’s beady eyes on him. “Comedy,” he said. Lotto laughed with the others, not because he was a punch line, but because he was grateful to Denton Thrasher for revealing theater to him. The one way, Lotto had finally found, that he could live in this world.

  —

  HE WAS FALSTAFF IN THE SPRING PLAY; but out of makeup, his own miserable self slid back into him. “Bravo!” said Denton Thrasher in class when Lotto delivered a monologu
e from Othello, but Lotto only gave a half smile, returned to his seat. In rowing, his novice eight beat the varsity in practice and he was promoted to stroke, setting the rhythm. Still, all was drear, even when the buds tipped the trees and the birds returned.

  In April, Sallie called, weeping. Lotto couldn’t come home for the summer. “There are . . . dangers,” she said, and he knew she meant his friends were still hanging around. He imagined Sallie seeing them walking up the highway, her hands of their own accord veering the car to smush them. Oh, he longed to hold his sister; she was growing, she wouldn’t remember him. To taste Sallie’s food. To smell his mother’s perfume, to let her tell him in her dreamy voice about Moses or Job as if they were people she’d known. Please, please, he wouldn’t even leave the house, he whispered, and Sallie had said, in consolation, that the three of them would come visit and they would all go to Boston in the summer. Florida had gone sun-bright in his mind. He felt he might go blind if he looked directly at it. His childhood was obscured in the blaze, impossible to see.

  He hung up the phone, hopeless. Friendless. Abandoned. Hysterical with self-pity.

  A plan solidified at dinner, after a food fight with mint brownies.

  When it was dark, flowers on the trees like pale moths, Lotto went out.

  The administrative building held the dean’s office; the office held the drawer that held the gun. He pictured the dean opening the door in the morning to find the splatter, his shuddering backward step.

  Sallie and his mother would explode from grief. Good! He wanted them to cry for the rest of their lives. He wanted them to die crying for what they’d done to him. He felt wobbly only when he thought of his sister. Oh, but she was so little. She wouldn’t know what she’d lost.

  The building was a lightless chunk. He felt for the door—unlocked—it slid open under his hand. Luck was on his side. [Someone was.] He couldn’t risk turning on the lights. He felt along the wall: bulletin board, coat rack, bulletin board, door, wall, door, corner. The edge of a great black space that was the enormous hall. He saw it in his mind’s eye as if it were daylit: double curved staircase at the far end. Second-floor catwalk lined with oils of fleshy white men. Antique boat hanging from the rafters. During the day, high clerestory windows shifted light one to the next. Tonight they were pits of dark.

  He closed his eyes. He would walk bravely toward the end. He took one step, another. Loving the swishy feel of the carpet, the giddy blankness before him, he took three joyous running steps.

  He was smacked in the face.

  He’d fallen to his knees, was scrabbling on the carpet. Hit him again in the nose. He reached up but nothing was there; no, here it was again, and he fell back, felt the thing graze over him. His hands flailed, touched cloth. Cloth over wood, no, not wood, foam with a steel core, no, not foam, pudding with a tough skin? Felt down. Felt leather. Laces? Shoe? He was dabbed in the teeth.

  He crabwalked backward, a high-pitched keening noise coming from somewhere, and moved wildly down the walls, and after an eternity found the light switch, and in the horrible bright found himself looking at the boat suspended from the ceiling, tipped down on one side, dangling the worst Christmas ornament ever. A boy. Dead boy. Blue-faced. Tongue out. Glasses cocked. In a moment came the recognition: oh, poor Jelly Roll, hanging from the bow ball of a sweep eight. He’d climbed up, tied the noose. Leapt. Mint brownie from dinner all over his shirt. The sound died out of Lotto’s chest. He ran.

  —

  AFTER THE POLICE, the ambulance, came the dean. He brought Lotto doughnuts and a cup of cocoa. His eyebrows danced all over his face, chewing on lawsuits, copycat suicides, leaks to newspapers. He dropped Lotto at his dorm, but when the taillights winked away, Lotto came out again. He couldn’t be near all the other boys, who were, just then, dreaming innocent anxiety dreams of girl bits and summer internships.

  He found himself sitting in the auditorium on the stage when the chapel bell chimed three AM.

  The long sweep of seats held the memory of bodies. He pulled out the joint he’d been intending to smoke just before he touched the barrel to his teeth.

  Nothing made sense. There was an airy whistling off stage right. Denton Thrasher, sans glasses and in frayed plaid pajamas, crossed the stage, dopp kit in hand.

  “Denton?” Lotto said.

  The man peered into the shadows, clutching the bag to his chest. “Who’s there?” he said.

  “Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself,” Lotto said.

  Denton padded upstage. “Oh, Lancelot. You startled the sap out of me.” He gave a cough and said, “Do I scent the sultry waft of cannabis?”

  Lotto put the joint into his outstretched fingers, and Denton took a drag.

  “What are you doing in your pajamas?” Lotto said.

  “The question is, my dear, what you are doing here.” He sat next to Lotto, then said, with a sideways grin, “Or were you looking for me?”

  “No,” Lotto said.

  “Oh,” Denton said.

  “But here you are,” Lotto said.

  When there was no more joint to smoke, Denton said, “Saving my pennies. Crashing in the costume room. I’m resigned to a destitute old age. It’s not the worst. No bedbugs. And I like the constant bells.”

  On cue, the three-thirty bell chimed, and they laughed.

  Lotto said, “Tonight I found a boy who hanged himself. Hung himself. Hanged himself.”

  Denton went still. “Oh, child,” he said.

  “I didn’t really know him. They called him Jelly Roll.”

  “Harold,” Denton said. “That boy. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he was so sad. You boys were terrible. Savages. Oh, not you, Lotto. I never meant you. I’m so sorry you had to be the one to find him.”

  Lotto’s throat filled with something, and he saw himself swinging from the scull until the door opened, the light flicked on. It came over him that even had he crept up the stairs and found the dean’s office unlocked and opened the drawer and felt the weight of the gun in his hand, something in him would have resisted. It would never have ended that way. [True. It was not his time.]

  Denton Thrasher gathered Lotto in his arms and wiped his face with the hem of his pajama top, revealing a furry white belly, and Lotto was rocked on the edge of the stage, smelling witch hazel and Listerine and pajamas worn too many times between washes.

  —

  THIS LANCELOT CHILD in Denton’s lap. So young, crying past the point of immediate sorrow into something deeper. It frightened Denton. Four o’clock. Sweet Lancelot, so talented, but this was a little much, even if Denton saw in him the rare spark. His looks were both promising and as if some essential promise had fled and left wreckage in its wake, which was odd, the boy being fifteen at most. Well, beauty could come back, perhaps. In ten years he might be ravishing, grow into his great goofy body, into his charm: already, there was the bigness of a real actor on the stage. Alas, Denton knew, the world was full of real actors. Christ, the bells of four-thirty, he was about to go out of his skull. Denton could not hold this sorrow. He was too weak. [Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.] He thought, I’ll be stuck here with this boy forever. He knew only one thing that could shut off this flow of tears, and in a panic, he pushed the child upright and scrabbled in his lap and took the surprised pale worm out of his jeans, and it grew impressively in his mouth, thank god, and this alone was enough to stop the sobs. Baton of youth! Youthfully swift, too. O, that this too too solid flesh was now melting, thawing, resolving itself into a spunky dew. Denton Thrasher wiped his mouth and sat up. What had he done? The boy’s eyes vanished in shadow: “Going to bed,” he whispered, and he ran down the aisles, through the doors, out. A shame, Denton thought. Dramatic, to be forced to flee in the night. He would miss this place. He would regret not watching Lancelot grow. He stood and took a bow. “Be blessed,” he said to the great emp
ty theater and went off to the costume room to pack.

  —

  SAMUEL HARRIS, up early for crew, was watching out the window when he saw poor Bumblefuck Pie run across the dark quad, weeping. Ever since the other boy had arrived halfway through the fall semester, he’d been so blue he was almost iridescent with sadness. Samuel was the cox of Bumblefuck’s boat, practically nestled every day in his lap, and despite the fact that the other kid was kind of a pariah, Samuel worried about him, six-foot-three and only a hundred fifty pounds, frozen-looking, cheeks like slabs of beaten tenderloin. It seemed clear he was going to hurt himself. When Samuel heard Lotto rushing up the stairs, he opened his door and manhandled him into the room, fed him oatmeal cookies that his mother sent from home, and this way got the whole story. Oh god, Jelly Roll! Lotto said that after the police came, he’d sat in the theater for hours to calm down. He seemed to want to say something more, considered it, packed it away. Samuel wondered. He thought of what his father the senator would do, and drew a man’s stern face over his own. He reached out a hand to Lotto’s shoulder and patted him until he calmed. It felt as if they’d crossed a bridge a second before it collapsed.