by Stephen Fry
It was Hubbard’s turn to stand now. He drew back the curtains and the strong, white light of dawn filled the room, making my eyes ache. My father rose too, unsteadily.
“So we can take our son home now?”
“You can do what the Sam Hill you please with him, Colonel. I’m only sorry to have taken up so much of your time. But you heard the story I had to tell; it was worth checking out.”
“I understand.”
“And you understand, don’t you, Mikey, that oath you swore?”
I nodded as I too stood and stretched. Goose pimples were breaking out on my thighs in the chilly air. I couldn’t believe I was still wearing the same damned pair of chino shorts I had pulled on the previous morning.
A sudden thought struck me. “What about Steve?” I asked. “What have you done with him?”
“Done with him? We haven’t done anything with him, Mikey. He was back in his dormitory on campus hours ago.”
“You’re quite wrong about him, you know,” I said. “All that suspected homosexual stuff. I don’t know where you got that, but it’s not true. It’s just not true.”
Brown’s eyes widened slightly. “No? Well, we’re obliged for the information, Mikey.” He nodded to me slowly, and I felt another chill run through me as he swung round to face my father. “You fixing to go straight on home, Colonel? We made a reservation at the Peacock Inn for you in Bayard Lane, fine place, very comfortable, may be more convenient.”
I turned quickly to my father. “That’s a much better idea, Dad, sir . . .” Shit, what on earth do I call him? “. . . let’s go there and have breakfast. Much better than driving all the way to Connecticut.”
Oh no, I wasn’t leaving Princeton. Not until I’d found Bauer. Zuckermann. Whatever he was called now. Wherever he was now.
SECRET HISTORY
A lonely life
“Well now this is what I call nice,” my mother said, standing in the narrow hallway of the Peacock Inn, the boards creaking beneath her feet.
“Like an English hotel,” my father agreed, with a decisive, approving nod.
An English hotel, I thought. Right.
White painted steps had led us up to an outer porch, the kind on which old folks sit knitting in rocking chairs while their grandchildren hide their baseball card collections in secret caches in the crawl space below. Inside there was no plastic, no smoked glass, no nylon carpeting, no mock Raj cane furniture, no gray rag-rolling or futile stenciling on the walls, no pale green pseudo-chintzes, no collection of accessorized prints in ash frames, no scream of computer printout behind the reception desk, no cream plastic portcullis slammed down over a closed bar, no clattering of discarded peanuts through whining vacuum cleaner hoses in distant function rooms, no reek of last night’s Cuban Evening, no forlorn air of minimally staffed, polyester-trousered failure—instead it was pleasantly dark, homey and, in an unforced, unpretentious, Grandma Moses kind of way, elegant and stylish.
“When were you last in an English hotel?” I asked my father. He grunted noncommittally and we passed through into the dining room. Maybe under the Nazi hegemony all the hotels were still Agatha Christie palaces or cheery, Margaret Lockwood boarding- houses. I doubted it somehow.
The breakfast was good here. No maple syrup to drizzle on bacon and famous pancakes, but huge, fluffy muffins, shining Danish pastries, jugs of juice, huge china breakfast cups of coffee and a big plate of fruit. In an English hotel they would have called it a “Fresh Fruit Platter,” but here, the woman serving us, who looked as if she might have been the owner, said as she set it down on our table, “. . . and here’s a plate of fruit for you.” I liked that.
I bit into one of the muffins and a fat blueberry that I had no idea was hiding inside exploded its juice onto my tongue.
“Ng,” I said. “I’d no idea I was so hungry.”
“That’s it, honey. You tuck in,” said my mother, slicing a grape in half and popping it into her mouth between forefinger and thumb. Somehow as if she had gloves on.
“The young man who drove us down,” said my father, who was tackling one of those pastries on which half an apricot sits, facedown, looking like an egg yolk, “will be back in six hours. So we should all be able to get plenty of sleep before the journey home.”
“About that,” I said. “I think I’ll stay on.”
My mother dropped her knife onto the plate and turned anxious eyes on me. “Darling!”
“No really,” I said. “My memory is coming back all the time. I got . . . you know, work to do. It’s catch-up time.”
“But you’re still sick. You ought to be getting some rest. Your memory will come back at home just as much as here. More. Think how pleased to see you Bella would be. You could go with her to all your favorite places.”
Bella? This was a new one.
“I’ll write to her,” I said, patting my mother’s hand. “She’ll understand.”
My mother let go of my hand as if she’d been stung and let out a squeak. “Honey! You see, you just aren’t well yet.”
“Really, Mom, I’m fine. Truly.”
“Your brain is still a little funny. Writing to a dog . . . that’s just not normal, dear, and you know it.”
Oops.
“It was a joke, Mom, that’s all. I was just kidding you.”
“Oh.” A little mollified, my mother regained her composure. “Well, that’s very silly.”
We were talking in that strangely lowered tone in which families conduct conversations in restaurants, as if every other word was “cancer.” The effort was exhausting me.
“Look,” I said, in a normal voice that sounded like a bellow after what had gone before. “I have to stay here. There’s only a few more weeks in the semester.”
My father looked up from his newspaper. “Some sense in that, Mary.”
“It’s not like I’m running a fever or anything. If I forget stuff, Steve will remind me.”
My father frowned. “Who is this Steve Burns?” he asked. “I don’t recall you mentioning him before.”
“Well, if not Steve, then Scott or Ronnie or Todd . . . any of the guys.”
“Todd Williams is a very nice young man,” my mother said. “You remember his sister, Emily? You used to go to dances with her when the Williamses lived in Bridgeport.”
“Right. Sure. Nice people. Scott will look after me.”
“Well, it’s up to you, of course,” my father said. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “If I know those government people, they will still be interested in you.”
“Are you saying they didn’t believe me?”
“Don’t be foolish. I’m just saying, son, that they check things out. Every detail. They’re very thorough. Once a file is open it stays open. So just remember not to talk to anybody about all this and stay out of trouble.”
I nodded. “Anybody want that last muffin?”
C
I made my way back through campus feeling completely alone in Princeton for the first time. I didn’t know where Steve lived, where his dorm was, the places he frequented or how I could set about finding out. It occurred to me that Steve must have been so frightened by the events of last night that from now on he would do his best to steer clear of me. It looked like I would have to do what had to be done all by my lonesome.
I had seen my parents off from the Peacock Inn with a cheerful wave and in my pocket crinkled five hundred dollars in crisp new bills.
“See, I can’t remember the number I have to punch in to get cash out of the wall,” I had explained to my father. “It’s just clean gone from my head.”
He had disgorged with surprising ease. Perhaps we were rich . . . maybe it wouldn’t be so bad living in this America of Peacock Inns and wealthy fathers and dogs called Bella.
There was something though . . . some
thing in the air here that I didn’t like. Partly it was what they had said about Steve, partly that I had a sense, almost from the beginning, that something was missing here. It wasn’t just that rock and roll seemed to have passed the place by. Things were “neat” and “peachy,” there were no “dudes” and nothing was “cool.” There was a lot of “gee” and “gosh” and “darn,” which didn’t square with what I knew about the States from movies. There again, maybe that was just Ivy League talk. Princeton, I supposed, was hardly representative. Yet there was something else too . . . something wrong.
I heard a motor behind me and stepped aside to let a lawn tractor drive past. The elderly driver saluted his thanks and stepped down to load a length of hose onto the trailer.
“Hey there, Mikey!” A hand fell on my shoulder.
“Oh, hi,” I said. It was Scott. Or possibly Todd. Or Ronnie even. One of the three.
“How’s the limey?”
“Hey, I’m doing fine,” I said. “Just fine. Everything’s getting much better. Back to my old American self.”
“Oh yeah? You’re still talking like the King of England.”
“Yeah, I know,” I sighed. “But things are coming back. Doc Ballinger did say it would take a few days.”
“So we’re not gonna see you on the mound?”
“Excuse me? Oh, the mound. No, I think baseball is out for the moment.” I shuddered at the prospect. “Bummer, I know, but there you go.”
“Darn it, Mikey. You picked one heck of a time . . . hey, watch it!” Scott, or Todd, or whoever he was, leaped aside as the lawn tractor chugged past us. It didn’t seem to me that there was any danger of his being hit, but he was furious all the same. “Hey, you,” he called out.
The driver stopped the tractor and looked fearfully at Todd/Scott/Ronnie over his shoulder. “Me, sir?”
“Yes, you, boy! Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I thought there was plenty room.”
“Well next time, you keep your negro eyes open, boy, you hear?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
I watched, pulverized with shock. At once I knew what it was that had been missing from this place and felt foolish and guilty for not having noticed straight away.
All the students I had seen were white. Every one of them. As white as shame.
The tractor drove away.
“Coons!” Scott/Ronnie/Todd spat on the pathway. “Ain’t got no respect.”
“You’re full of it,” I said.
“Say what?”
“Respect,” I said. “You’re full of respect.”
“Oh sure,” he nodded. “Sure, I have respect. So, Mikey, what you up to today?”
“Oh, I got work to catch up on,” I said, my throat dry. “I’ll see you later, maybe.”
“Sure thing. So long, bud.”
“Oh, by the way,” I called after him, knowing now that I needed Steve again, badly, whether Steve liked it or not. “I’ve clean forgot where Steve’s dorm is.”
“Burns? He’s in Dickinson.”
“Dickinson, right. Of course.”
“But you wanna watch out for him, Mikey. You know the rumors.” Scott/Todd/Ronnie dropped his wrist and threw back his head into the pose of drooping lily.
“Oh that’s a load of crap,” I said. “He’s been seeing Jo-Beth. You know, the waitress at PJ’s?”
“That a fact? Hot dang, and she’s a peach. Pip-pip, old chap, old bean.”
It took a lot to make me dislike someone. But Ronnie/Todd/Scott, I decided, was a bastard through and through.
Maybe, though. Maybe, I thought, as I followed three different sets of directions I had been given for Dickinson Hall, maybe I was the bastard. If America hadn’t been facing off against Europe all these years, maybe Todd/Ronnie/Scott would be a different person. I had done that to him.
What was I saying? It was genes. It was genes, genes and nothing but genes. I mean, look at Leo’s father, Dietrich Bauer. A son of a bitch who goes to Auschwitz to help wipe out Jews in one world, and a son of a bitch who goes to Auschwitz to help wipe out Jews in another. And his son, a decent man in both worlds, but a little inclined to take his guilt very personally.
Yet this was predetermination either way you sliced it. The will of history or the will of DNA. What happened to the will of man? Maybe I would find philosophy notes in my rooms in Henry Hall that could help me through that particular maze. Meanwhile, here was Dickinson.
A red-headed student hugging a pile of books was just emerging.
“Burns? Just along the hall. 105. On the left there.”
“Woah, muchos gracias, dude.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, “just an expression of thanks from another era.”
“Oh. Sure. You’re welcome.”
Steve opened his door and rubbed sleep from his eyes.
“Well?” I said. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Christ,” he said, letting me past him. “I was hoping it was all a dream.”
Steve’s walls were covered in posters. A portrait of Duke Ellington—so he survived the riptide of history, I thought with pleasure, that was something—and lots of pictures of girls. Big, busty, blond, Pamela Anderson types with cold half-closed eyes and enough blusher to paint the White House brick red.
“Mm,” I said, inspecting them. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
“Look, Mike,” said Steve, tightening the belt of his dressing gown, “let’s get one thing straight right now. Cut out all that stuff, okay? I’m in enough trouble as it is.”
“Trouble? What do you mean trouble?”
He shook his head.
“What did they say to you last night?”
“Nothing.” He shuffled to a coffee machine. “They didn’t say anything. They just dropped hints is all. They heard I had ‘psychological problems’ and formed ‘strange friendships.’ It was their idea of a friendly warning, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to drag you into this mess. I had no idea . . . no idea America was like this.”
“Yeah, well it is. The world is. You want coffee?”
“Thanks. You know,” I said, “where I come from there’s this thing called political correctness.”
“We got that here too.”
“No, but it means you get into trouble if you don’t give equal rights to women, disabled people, people from all ethnic backgrounds, black, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, whatever, and of course gays. That is, lesbians and . . . you know, fruits, or whatever you call them here. If they so much as suspect you of being offensive, or bigoted or even faintly patronizing to any of those groups you can get fired from your job, sued in court . . . you’re an outcast.”
“You’re putting me on, right?”
“No, no. Really. Homosexuals are called gays and they have parades and Gay Pride marches and Mardi Gras festivals and whole streets and quarters in the cities are given over to gay shops and gay bars and gay restaurants and gay banks and gay insurance brokers, gay everything. Only it’s a bit more complicated because they’ve started to use the word ‘queer’ again, just as blacks call themselves ‘niggers’ . . . it’s called ‘reclaiming,’ something like that. In Hawaii gay people can even get married. There’s a right-wing backlash of course. The liberals think there’s still a lot of discrimination, the Bible-thumpers think it’s all gone too far and that political correctness is an un-American contamination.”
“You’re an angel come down from heaven, right? You’re talking about paradise here.”
“Paradise, no.” I considered crime and AIDS and race hatred and terrorism and road rage and drive-by shootings and militias and fundamentalists and oil spills and infan
t crack addicts and the whole package. “I’m just talking about the world I know. It’s not paradise, believe me.”
“Look, Mikey, I’ll make you coffee and then you’d better drink it and go. I got work to do. My life is here in this real America. The one that exists. I finish school, I find myself a wife and a job and I live my life, okay? That’s how it works.”
“That’s what you want?”
“It’s not a question of what I want, Mike, that’s the way it is.”
“Are you saying everyone lives like that? Standard nuclear families?”
“Oh sure, there’s freaks and weirdos and liberals and Communists and perverts in the ghettos living like pigs. You think I want that for myself?”
“Steve. Do you think you can trust me?”
He looked at me through eyes that were fighting back tears. “Trust you? Hell, I don’t even know you.”
“No, but you knew me before. When I was American and we were friends. I’m still the same person you knew then.”
“But I didn’t know you then, Mikey. I barely knew you at all. That is, you barely knew me at all.”
“What are you talking about? We were friends.”
Steve shook his head. “I lied about that. We were never friends. That night in the A and B, that was the first night I’d ever spent any time with you. I’d seen you around. I used to follow you all over campus without you ever knowing. I hate baseball, but every time you pitched, I was there, watching. That night, I had overheard you tell someone that you were going to the Clio to watch the debate, so I went along too. Sat behind you. And then you and Todd and Scott and your jock buddies got bored and headed for the A and B, so I followed. I sat close while you all got drunk and I found myself part of the group.”