Mystery

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 you!” 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.

The elder Redwings would very likely have been more comfortable with the thought of their son actually performing some of the acts depicted on the page before them than with the fact of his reading about them. In a boy, sexual experimentation could be put down to high spirits, but reading about such things smacked of perversion. They were shocked, and though they did not quite perceive this, they felt their values betrayed. Fritz quickly confessed that Tom Pasmore had told him about the dreadful book. And because the Redwings were the richest, most powerful, and most respected family on Mill Walk, Tom’s reputation underwent a subtle darkening. He was perhaps not—perhaps not entirely reliable.

Tom’s response was that he preferred being not perhaps entirely reliable. Certainly he had no interest in being an imitation Redwing, though that was the goal of most of what passed for society on Mill Walk. Redwing reliability consisted of thoughtless, comfortable adherence to a set of habits and traits that were generally accepted more as the only possible manners than as simple good manners.

One arrived at business appointments five minutes late, and half an hour late for social functions. One played tennis, polo, and golf as well as possible. One drank whiskey, gin, beer, and champagne—one did not really know much about other wines—and wore wool in the winter, cotton in summer. (Only certain brands and labels were acceptable, all others being either comically inappropriate or more or less invisible.) One smiled and told the latest jokes; one never publicly disapproved of anything, ever, nor too enthusiastically gave public approval, ever. One made money (or in the Redwings’ case, conserved it) but did not vulgarly discuss it. One owned art, but did not attach an unseemly importance to it: paintings, chiefly landscapes or portraits, were intended to decorate walls, increase in value, and testify to the splendor of their owners. (When the Redwings and members of their circle decided to donate their “art” to Mill Walk’s Museo del Kunst, they generally stipulated that the Museo construct facsimiles of their living rooms, so that the paintings could be seen in their proper context.) Similarly, novels told stories designed to be the summer entertainment of women; poetry was either prettily rhymed stuff for children or absurdly obscure and self-important; and “classical” music obligingly provided a set of familiar melodies as a background for being seen in public in one’s best clothes. One ignored as far as was possible any distasteful, uncomfortable, or irritating realities. One spent the summers in Europe, buying things, at South American resorts, buying other things, or “up north,” ideally at Eagle Lake, drinking, fishing, organizing lavish parties, and committing adultery. One spoke no foreign language, the idea was ridiculous, but a faulty and rudimentary knowledge of German, if assimilated at the knee of a grandparent who had once owned a great deal of eastern shore property and made a very good thing of it, was acceptable. One attended Brooks-Lowood and played in as many sports as possible, ignored and ridiculed the unattractive and unpopular, despised the poor and the natives, thought of any other part of the Western Hemisphere except Eagle Lake and its environs as unfortunate in exact relation to its dissimilarity to Mill Walk, went away to college to be polished but not corrupted by exposure to interesting but irrelevant points of view, and returned to marry and propagate oneself, to consolidate or create wealth. One never really looked worried, and one never said anything that had not been heard being said before. One belonged to the Mill Walk Founders Club, the Beach & Yacht Club, one or both of two country clubs, the alumni club of one’s college, the Episcopal Church, and in the case of young businessmen, the Kiwanis Club, so as not to appear snobbish.

Generally, one was taller than average, blond, blue-eyed. Generally one had perfect teeth. (The Redwings themselves, however, tended to be short, dark, and rather heavyset, and to have wide spaces between their teeth.)

One branch of the Redwing family attempted to install fox hunting—“riding to hounds”—as a regular part of island life, but due to the absence of native foxes and the unfailing ability of the native cats and ferrets to evade the panting, heat-stricken imported hounds, the custom swiftly degenerated to regular annual participation at the Hunt Ball, with the local males dressed in black boots and pink hacking jackets. As the nature of this attempt at an instant tradition might indicate, Mill Walk society was reflexively Anglophile in its tastes, drawn to chintz and floral patterns, conservative clothing, leather furniture, wood paneling, small dogs, formal dinners, the consumption of game birds, “eloquent” portraits of family pets, indifference to intellectual matters, cheerful philistinism, habitual assumption of moral superiority, and the like. Also Anglophile, perhaps, was the assumption that the civilized world—the world that mattered—by no means included all of Mill Walk, but only the far east end where the Redwings, their relatives, friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on lived, and, though this was debatable, Elm Cove, which lay to the western end of Glen Hollow Golf Club. Other outposts of the civilized world were: Bermuda, Mustique, Charleston, particular sections of Brazil and Venezuela—especially “Tranquility,” the Redwing hideaway there—certain areas of Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and London, Eagle Lake, the Scottish highlands, and the Redwing hunting lodge in Alaska. One might go anywhere in the world, certainly, but there was surely no real need to go anywhere but to these places, which between them made up the map of all that was desirable to a right-minded person.

To a reliable person, one could say.