by Peter Straub
They were suddenly awkward with each other.
To say something, anything at all, lest she run out of the room, Tom said, “Do you know how long I’ve been here?” And immediately regretted it, for it sounded to him as if he was accusing her of having ignored him.
And then it seemed to him that he was trying to tell Sarah Spence in one sentence about all the changes that had taken place in him. So he said, “I’ve been here forever.”
“I heard yesterday,” Sarah said. “We just got back from up north.”
“Up north,” a phrase Tom understood as well as Sarah, did not refer to the northern end of the island, but to the northern tier of states in continental North America. Sarah’s parents, like many far east end residents (though not the Pasmores), owned property in northern Wisconsin, and spent much of June, July, and August in a pine lodge beside a freshwater lake. At the end of June the Redwing clan, Mill Walk’s most important family, moved virtually as a single organism to a separate compound on Eagle Lake. “Mom found out from Mrs. Jacobs, when she was talking to her at Ostend’s Market.” She paused. “You got hit by a car?”
Tom nodded. She, too, he could see, had questions she could not ask: How did it feel? Can you remember it? Did it hurt a lot?
“How did that happen?” she asked. “You just walked in front of a car?”
“I guess I was way out on Calle Burleigh, and it was rush hour, and …” Unable to say any more, because all he could remember now of that day was how the car had looked just before it struck him, he shrugged.
“How dumb can you get?” she said. “What are you going to do next? Dive into an empty pool?”
“I think my next death-defying act is going to be trying to get out of this bed.”
“And when do you do that? When do you get to go home?”
“I don’t know.”
Unsettlingly adult exasperation showed on her face. “Well, how are you going to go to school if you don’t go home?” When he did not answer, the exasperation was replaced by a moment of pure confusion, and then by something like disbelief. “You’re not coming back to school?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m going to be out a whole year. It’s true,” he added in the face of her growing incredulity. His depression had begun to return. “I can’t even get out of bed for another eight weeks—that’s what they told me anyhow. When I finally do get home, they’re putting me in a hospital bed in the living room. How can I go to school, Sarah? I can’t even get out of bed!” He was appalled to hear himself making terrible ragged noises as his pains began to announce themselves again. Tom thought that Sarah Spence looked as if she were sorry to have come to the hospital—and she was right, she did not belong here. In some way he had never quite realized, she had been his best and most important friend, and now a vast abyss lay between them.
Sarah did not run out of the room, but for Tom it was almost worse that she watched him dry his face and blow his nose as she uttered meaningless phrases about how everything would be all right. He saw her retreat into the world of ignorant daylight, backing away in polite horror from his fear and pain and anger. In any case, she did not know the worst thing—that he had been castrated and had nothing between his legs but a tube, a fact so terrible that Tom himself could not hold it clearly in his mind for more than a few seconds at a time. Now, without being aware of what he was doing, his left hand crept to the smooth groin of his body cast.
“You must itch a lot,” Sarah said.
He pulled his hand away as if the cast were red hot. She remained until visiting hours were over, talking to him about a new puppy named Bingo and what she had done “up north,” and how Fritz Redwing’s cousin Buddy had taken one of his family’s motorboats out into the middle of Eagle Lake and tried to dynamite the fish, and her voice went on and on, full of kindness and restraint and sympathy, as well as other feelings he could not or would not identify, until Nancy Vetiver came in to tell her that she had to leave.
“I didn’t know you had such a pretty girlfriend,” Nancy said. “I think I’m jealous.”
Sarah’s entire face turned pink, and she reached for her bag, promising to be back soon. When she left she sent no more than a glancing smile toward Tom, and did not speak or look at Nancy. She never came to the hospital again.
Two days later his door opened just before the end of visiting hours, and Tom looked up with his heart beating, expecting to see Sarah Spence. Lamont von Heilitz smiled flickeringly from the doorway, and somehow appeared to understand everything at once. “Ah, you’ve been waiting for someone else. But it’s just your cranky old neighbor, I’m afraid. Shall I leave you alone?”
“Please don’t, please come in,” Tom said, more pleased than he would have thought possible at the sight of the old man. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing a dark blue suit with a double-breasted vest, a dark red rose in his buttonhole, and gloves of the same red as the rose. He looked silly and beautiful at once, Tom thought, and was visited by what seemed the odd desire that he might look a great deal like this when he was as old as Mr. von Heilitz. Then his mind snagged and caught on a buried memory, and he goggled at the old man, who smiled back at him, as if again he had understood everything before Tom had to say a word.
“You came to see me,” Tom said. “A long time ago.”
“Yes,” the old man said.
“You said—you said to remember your visit.”
“And so you did,” said Mr. von Heilitz. “And now I have come again. I understand that you will be coming home soon, but thought that you might enjoy reading a few books I had around the place. It’s all right if you don’t. But you might give them a try, anyhow.” And from nowhere, it seemed, he produced two slim books—The Speckled Band and The Murders in the Rue Morgue—and handed them over to Tom. “I hope you will be good enough to pay me a call sometime when you are out of the hospital and fully recovered.”
Tom nodded, dumbfounded, and soon after Mr. von Heilitz glided out of the room.
“Who the hell was that?” Nancy asked him. “Dracula?”
Tom himself left the hospital on the last day of August, and was installed in the bed set up in the living room. The big cast had been replaced by one that encased him only from ankle to thigh. It seemed that he had not been castrated after all. Nancy Vetiver visited him after he had been home a few days, and at first seemed to bring into the house with her the whole noisy, well-regulated atmosphere of the hospital—for a moment it seemed that his lost world would be restored. She told him stories of the other nurses and the patients he had known, which involved him as Sarah Spence’s tales of northern Wisconsin had not, and told him that Hattie Bascombe had said that she would put a hex on him if he didn’t come visit her. But then his mother, who was having one of her good days and had left them alone to order groceries from Ostend’s, came back in and was chillingly polite to the nurse, and Tom saw Nancy become increasingly uncomfortable under Gloria Pasmore’s questions about her parents and her education. For the first time Tom noticed that Nancy’s grammar was uncertain—she said “she don’t” and “they was”—and that she sometimes laughed at things that weren’t funny. A few minutes later, Tom’s mother showed her to the door, thanking her with elaborate insincerity for all she had done.
When Gloria came back into the living room, she said, “I don’t think nurses expect to be tipped, do you? I don’t think they should.”
“Oh, Mom,” Tom said, knowing that this concealed a negative verdict.
“That young woman looked very hard to me,” said his mother. “Very hard indeed. People as hard as that frighten me.”
PART THREE
HATRED
AND SALVATION
Later in his life, when Tom Pasmore remembered the year he had spent alone at home, he could not summon up the faces of the practical nurses who came, were fired, and went away, nor of the tutors who tried to get him to stop reading for long enough for them to teach him something. Neither was he ever able to remember spending
any length of time with his parents.
What he could remember without any difficulty at all was being alone and reading. His year at home divided itself into three sections—the eras of bed, wheelchair, and crutches—and during these, he read nearly every one of the books in his parents’ house and virtually all of the books his father carried home, six at a time, from the public library. He read with nothing but appetite—without discrimination or judgment, sometimes without understanding. Tom reread all of his old children’s books, read his father’s Zane Grey, Eric Ambler, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his mother’s S. S. Van Dine, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Michael Arlen, Edgar Wallace, and The Search for Bridey Murphy. He read Sax Rohmer, H. P. Lovecraft, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. He read the dog novels of Albert Payson Terhune, and the horse novels of Will James, and Call of the Wild, Black Beauty, and Frog by Colonel S. P. Meeker. He read a novel by a Hungarian about Galileo. He read hotrod novels by Henry Gregor Felsen, especially Street Rod, in which a boy was killed in an automobile accident. When his father began taking books from the library, he raced through everything they had by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. He read Murder, Incorporated, about the careers of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. Once an irritated Victor Pasmore came into the living room holding a bagful of hardback Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout that Lamont von Heilitz had pressed into his hands with instructions to give them to Tom, and Tom read them all in a row, one after the other. He read approximately one-third of the Bible and one-half of a collection of Shakespeare’s plays that he found propping up a goldfish bowl. He went through Sherlock Holmes and Richard Hannay and Lord Peter Wimsey. He read Jurgen and Topper and Slan. He read novels in which young governesses went to ancient family estates in France and fell in love with young noblemen who might have been smugglers, but were not. He read Dracula and Wuthering Heights and Bleak House. After that he was launched into Dickens, and read Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Our Mutual Friend, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield. On the recommendation of the puzzled librarian, he went from Dickens to Wilkie Collins, and lapped up The Moonstone, No Name, Armadale, and The Woman in White. He failed with Edith Wharton, another of the librarian’s recommendations, but struck gold again with Mark Twain, Richard Henry Dana, and Edgar Allan Poe. Then he stumbled upon The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, and Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Mr. von Heilitz once again intercepted his father on the street, and passed along The House of the Arrow and Trent’s Last Case and Brat Farrar.
Before his accident, books had meant the safety of escape; for a long time afterwards, what they meant was life itself. Very rarely, a few of the boys who had been his friends would stop in and stay half an hour or more, and during these visits he learned that the world did not stop at his front door—Buddy Redwing had been given a Corvette for his sixteenth birthday, and Jamie Thielman had been expelled from Brooks-Lowood for smoking behind the curtains on the school stage, the football team had won eight games in a row, and the basketball team, which played in a league with only four other teams, had an unbroken string of losses—but the boys seldom visited and soon left, and Tom, who really did hunger for information about what the big unknown world beyond his door, beyond Eastern Shore Road, beyond even Mill Walk was like, could forget while he read that he was crippled and alone. Through the transparent medium of books, he left behind his body and his useless anger and roamed through forests and cities in close company with men and women who plotted for money, love, and revenge, who murdered and stole and saved England from foreign conspiracies, who embarked on great journeys and followed their doubles like shadows through foggy nineteenth-century London. He hated his body and his wheelchair, though his arms and shoulders grew as muscular as a weightlifters’s, and when he was put on his crutches, he loathed their awkwardness and the hobbled imitation of walking they represented: real life, his real life, was between the covers of several hundred novels. Everything else was horror and monstrosity—falling down, moving like an insect with his six limbs, screaming at his irritated tutors, dreaming at night of seas of blood, of a smashed and mutilated body.
A year after his accident, Tom set down his crutches and learned to walk again. By then he was in a great many ways a different person from the boy who had jumped down from the milk cart.
Both the elder Pasmores and their son would have pointed to Tom’s immersion in books as the real cause of the changes in him. To Tom’s parents, it seemed that the far more distant, now oddly unknowable boy holding on to tables and chairs as he tottered around the house on legs as unreliable as those of an eighteen-month-old child had taken a voluntary sidestep away from life—when not inexplicably enraged, he seemed to have chosen shadows, passivity, unreality.
Tom’s own ideas were almost directly opposed to these. It seemed to him that he had stepped into the real stream of life: that all of his reading not only had saved him from the immediate insanity of rage and the slow insanity of boredom, but given him a rapid and seductive overview of adult life—he had been an invisible participant in hundreds of dramas, but even more important, had overheard thousands of conversations, witnessed as many acts of discrimination and judgment, and seen stupidity, cruelty, hyprocrisy, bad manners, and duplicity condemned in almost equal measure. The melody of the English language and a sense of its resources, an idea of eloquence as mysteriously good and moral in itself, had passed into his mind forever, as had the beginning of an understanding of human motives. Far more than anything provided by his tutors, the books Tom read were his education. At times, deep in a book, he felt his body begin to glow: an invisible but potent glory seemed to hover just behind the characters, and it seemed that they were on the verge of making some great discovery that would also be his—the discovery of a vast realm of radiant meaning that lay hidden just within the world of ordinary appearances.
By his junior year in Brooks-Lowood’s Upper School, he could make half of his class convulse with laughter with a remark the other half would either resent or fail to understand; he jumped at loud noises and retreated into himself for long periods that were known as his “trances”; he had a reputation for being “nervous,” for he had no physical repose and could not remain still longer than a few seconds without moving or twitching or rubbing his face or chattering to anybody who happened to be near. He was plagued with nightmares and he walked in his sleep. If he had been as good in school as his aptitude tests indicated he should, much of this behavior would have been put down to his being a “brain,” a brilliant academic future would have been predicted for him, and the guidance counselor would have spoken to him about medical school—there was a perennial shortage of doctors on Mill Walk. As it was, his conduct merely made him odd, and the counselor handed him brochures for third-rate colleges in the southern states.
The nine months he had spent in a wheelchair had left him with large shoulders and well-developed biceps that remained even while the rest of his body lengthened to a height of six feet, four inches. The basketball coach, who was desperate after a long string of losing seasons, arranged a meeting of Tom and Victor Pasmore, himself, and the headmaster, who had long ago mentally convicted Tom Pasmore of malingering. Tom politely refused to have anything to do with the school’s teams. “It’s just an accident that I’m so tall,” he said to the three stony-faced men in the headmaster’s beautiful office. “Why don’t you imagine me being a foot shorter?”
He meant that if they did so they would be closer to the truth, but the coach felt as though Tom were laughing at him, the headmaster felt insulted, and Victor Pasmore was enraged.
“Will you please talk to these people like a human being?” Victor bellowed. “You have to take part in things! You can’t sit on your duff all day long anymore!”
“Sounds like basketball has just become a compulsory subject,” Tom said, as if to himself.
“It just has—for y
ou!” shouted his father.
And then Tom uttered a remark that turned the stomach of each of the three adult men in the room. “I don’t know anything about basketball except for what I learned from John Updike. Have any of you ever read Rabbit, Run?”
Of course none of them had—the coach thought that Tom was talking about an animal book.
Tom went to basketball practice for a month. The coach discovered that his new acquisition could not dribble or pass, was completely incapable of hitting the basket with the ball, and did not even know the names of the positions. Tom did get his friend Fritz Redwing, one of the guards, interested in Rabbit, Run by describing an act of oral sex that took place in the book, and Fritz became so engrossed in the copy he filched from the An Die Blumen drugstore (no Redwing Tom ever knew would pay good money for anything as ridiculous as a book) that he excited the suspicions of his parents, who after three days plucked the paperback from his fingers and in horror, disbelief, and embarrassment found themselves staring at the very passage Tom Pasmore had described to their son.