Mystery

At the end of the class, Miss Ellinghausen clapped her hands together, and Miss Gonsalves lowered the upright’s polished lid. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are making excellent progress,” Miss Ellinghausen said. “Next week I shall introduce the tango, a dance which comes to us from the land of Argentina. Basic knowledge of the tango has become essential in smart society, and, considered in itself, the tango is a refined vehicle in which the strongest emotions may find expression in a delicate and controlled fashion. Some of you will see what I mean. Please give my best wishes to your parents.” She turned away to open the door to the hallway.

Sarah and Tom filed through the door and nodded to Miss Ellinghausen, who responded to each of the hasty nods given her by the students with an identical, machine-tooled dip of the head. For the first time since Tom had joined the class, the old lady interrupted her performance at the door long enough to ask a question. “Are the two of you satisfied with the new arrangement?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“Very,” said Sarah.

“Fine,” said Miss Ellinghausen, “there’ll be no more nonsense, then,” and dipped her head in her perfect nod.

Tom followed Sarah out on the broad top step of the townhouse. Fritz Redwing stood at the bottom of the steps, rolling his eyes and gesturing toward the waiting cart.

“Well,” said Tom, wishing that he did not have to leave Sarah Spence, and wondering how she got home.

“Fritzie’s waiting for you,” Sarah said. “Next week we learn to express the strongest emotions in a delicate and controlled fashion.”

“We could use more of that around here,” he said.

Sarah smiled rather abstractly, looked down, then up over his shoulder. She moved sideways to make room for the students still coming through the door. To Tom, she seemed set apart from all of the others going up and down the stairs—she looked in some way like two people at once, and he thought that he had imagined the same thing once about someone else, but could not remember who it had been. She flicked her eyes at him, then went back to looking at empty space. Tom wished he could embrace or kiss or capture her. In the past fifty minutes he had held her, had spoken to her more than in the past five years, but now it seemed to him that he had missed everything and wasted every second of the time he had spent with her.

The last of the students who took the cart home stood in line on the sidewalk to jump up into the green shade of the cover. Fritz Redwing squirmed with impatience, looking as if he had to go to the bathroom.

“You’d better go,” Sarah said.

“See you next week,” he said, and started down the white stone steps.

She looked away, as if he had said something too obvious.

Tom moved down the white steps toward Fritz Redwing, and his contradictory feelings seemed to expand and declare war on him. He felt as if he had lost something of supreme value, and found himself overjoyed that the beautiful, necessary thing was gone forever. Some live object within him had broken free, and begun violently beating its wings.

Then for a moment the contradictory emotions coursing through him obliterated all the rest of the world, and then seemed to obliterate him. He was dimly aware of Fritz Redwing staring at him in childish agitation, and of an ornate carriage turning from Calle Berghofstrasse into the shaded street. The carriage looked familiar. Everything about Tom seemed to sigh, and his hand on the railing grew suddenly pale and grainy, and then Tom realized that he could see right through his hand to the railing.

Somewhere directly behind him, invisible but hugely present, occurred a great explosion—a flash of red light and a sound of tearing metal and breaking glass. He was vanishing, becoming nothing. His body continued to disappear as he moved down the stairs. In seconds his hands and feet, his whole body, was only a shimmer in the air, then only an outline. When he reached the bottom step, he had disappeared altogether. He was dead, he was free. The fused but contradictory feelings within him burned on, and the catastrophe just behind him kept on happening. All of this was complete and whole. He stepped across the sidewalk. Fritz’s mouth moved, but invisible words came out. On the side of the carriage rolling toward them, Tom saw a golden letter R so surrounded by scrolls and curls it resembled a golden snake in a golden nest. When he exhaled and moved toward the cart, he could hear Fritz Redwing complain about how slowly he was moving.

Tom stepped up into the cart and sat down in the last row beside Fritz, who had never noticed that for three or four endless seconds he had been completely invisible. The driver snapped his reins, and the cart pulled forward behind Miss Ellinghausen’s slow-moving horses. Tom did not watch Sarah walk down the steps, but he heard the door of Ralph Redwing’s carriage click massively open.