Shadowland

    'Mine,' Nightingale uttered. He looked like a drown­ing mouse in Ridpath's grip.

    'Well, I'm . . . ' The teacher jerked harder on the boy's collar and looked around the room in angry dis­ belief. 'I can't understand this. You. Flanagan. Explain.'

    'He was going to show me a new card trick, sir.'

    'A. New. Card. Trick.' He tightened his grip on the mouse's collar, twisting it so that Nightingale's necktie slid up toward his ear. 'A new card trick.' Then he released both the Bicycle cards and the boy. When the pack struck the table, he slammed his hand down over it. 'I'll dispose of these. Mrs. Olinger?'

    She strode down between the tables, Ridpath lifted his hand, she walked back up to her desk. The metal wastebasket rang. She had never even glanced at the deck.

    'You jokers,' Mr. Ridpath said. 'First day. You get away with it this time.' He was leaning on the table, glaring at each boy in turn. 'But no more. This is the last time we see cards in any room in this school. Hear me?' Nightingale and Flanagan nodded. 'Jokers. You'd better stop wasting your time and start memorizing what's on those sheets. You'll need to know it, or you'll be doing card tricks, all right.' He had one final threat. 'Your Upper School career is getting off to a bad start, Flanagan.' He returned to the teacher's table and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

    'Pass the registration forms to the ends of your rows, boys,' said Mr. Fitz-Hallan. I saw that little olive- skinned Nightingale's face was gray with shock.

    A few minutes later we were snaking down the dark hall toward a small wooden staircase, on our way to our first glimpse of Laker Broome. The headmaster's office was at the bottom of the original manor, at the heart of the old building. Mrs. Olinger went before, illuminating her way down the black staircase with her big flashlight. She was mumbling to herself. The other teachers followed her, followed in turn by Mr. Whipple with a wavering candle for the boys' benefit. Whipple's candle was momentarily paled by the light from a window in a door on a small square landing. The light endured until another right-angled bend in the staircase, and after that we followed Whipple's bobbing candle down into an antechamber.

    Not a true antechamber, it was formed by the end of the black corridor housing the school offices, from which Mrs. Olinger had first appeared. At that end, a curved wooden arch created the illusion that we were in a room. An oriental carpet lay on the floor. An antique table held a library lamp and a Persian bowl. Opposite the arch was a vast wooden door like the entrance to a medieval church, cross-braced with long iron flanges.

    We stood silent in the flickering light of the candle. Mr. Fitz-Hallan knocked once at the big door. Mrs. Olinger said, 'Farewell, boys,' and took off down the corridor with her characteristic air of irritated urgency, lighting her way with the flashlight. Fitz-Hallan swung open the door, and we jostled into Mr. Broome's office.

Sudden brightness and the smell of wax: on every surface sat at least two candles. The sense of being in a church was much stronger. The headmaster sat behind his desk, his coat off and his hands laced together behind his head. His elbows were sharply pointed triangular wings. He was smiling. 'Well,' he said. 'Step forward, boys. Let me get a good look at you.'

    When we were ranked in two rough rows before the desk, he lowered his arms and stood up. 'Whatever you do, don't knock over a candle. They're pretty, but dangerous.' He laughed, a short thin man with gray hair cut down to a bristly cap. Deep grooves beside his mouth cut into the flesh. 'Even when school is not in session, the headmaster must slave away at his desk. This means that you will almost always find me here. My name is Mr. Broome. Don't be shy. If you have a problem you want to discuss with me, just make an appointment with Mrs. Olinger.' He stepped backward and leaned against a dark wooden bookshelf, his arms crossed over his chest. The headmaster wore horn-rimmed glasses the color of a marmalade cat. His shirt was very crisp. I see now that he was perfect — the 'final detail in his whole paneled, orien­tal-carpeted, book-filled office, the detail around which the delicate, deliberate, old-fashioned good taste of the office cohered.

    'Of course,' he said, 'it is rather more likely that your visits here will be in the service of a less pleasant function.'

    His mouth twitched.

    'But that should concern only a small portion of you. Our boys are generally worked pretty hard, and they don't have the time to find trouble. One word of warning. Those who do find it don't last long here. If you want to enjoy the benefits of being a student at this school, work hard, be obedient and respectful, and play hard. Consid­ ering the advantages, it is not too much to ask.' Again, his taut, measured replica of a smile. 'Just what we have the right, not to mention the duty, to ask of you, I should say. It is my intention, it is the school's intention, to leave our mark upon you. Wherever you go in later life, people will be able to say, 'There is a Carson man.' Well.'

    He looked over our heads at the teachers; most of us too swiveled our heads to look back. Mr. Whipple was leafing through the forms we had filled out. Mr. Ridpath stood at a sort of soldierly ease, his feet spread and his hands behind his back. The other two stared at the floor, as if putting themselves at a private distance from the headmaster.

    'You have them, Mr. Whipple? Then please bring them here.'

    Whipple moved quickly around us to the desk and laid the pile of forms immediately before the headmaster's leather chair. 'The two on top, sir,' he muttered, and vanished backward..

    'Ah? Yes, I see.' He uncoiled, the frames of his glasses glowed red for a moment as he passed before a stand of candles, and he lifted the top two forms. 'Messrs. Nightingale and Sherman will stay behind a moment. The rest of you may return to the library to pick up your textbooks and schedule cards. Lead them away, Mr. Ridpath.'

Fifteen minutes later Nightingale and Sherman appeared in the door of the library and moved aimlessly toward the now book-covered tables. Sherman's cheekbones were very red.

    'Well,' I whispered to him, 'What'd he say?' Sherman tried to grin. 'He's a frosty old shit, isn't he?' We compared our schedule cards before our lockers in the second-floor front corridor of the modern addition, where the inner walls were tall panes of glass looking out onto a gravel-filled court with a single lime tree.

I heard weeks later from Tom Flanagan why Bob Sher­man and Del Nightingale had been kept behind by Mr. Broome. Nightingale had not filled in the blanks for parents' names. He had not done so because his parents were dead. Nightingale lived with his godparents, who had just moved from Boston into a house on Sunset Lane, four or five long blocks from the school. Sherman had been dressed down.

4

New York, August, 1969: Bob Sherman

'Why am I here?' Sherman asked. 'Can you answer that? What the fuck am I doing here when I could be out on the Island sipping a Coors and looking at the ocean?' We were in his office, and he was speaking loudly to be heard over the rock music pumping put of the stereo system. The office was a suite of rooms in the old German embassy, and all of the rooms had twelve-foot ceilings decorated with plaster molding. Leather couches sat before his long desk and against the wall. A big green Boston fern beside the Bose speakers looked as though it had just taken a vitamin pill. Records were stacked carelessly on the floor, flattening out the deep pile of the carpet.

    'You usually have an answer. Why am I in this shithole? You're here because I'm here, but why am I here? It's just another one of those eternal questions. Do you want to take that record off? I'm sick of it.'

    His telephone rang for the sixth time since I had been in his office. He said, 'Christ,' picked up the phone, and said 'Yeah,' and motioned me to put the new record on the turntable.

    I tuned out and relaxed into the couch. Sherman ranted. He was a very skillful ranter. He had a law degree. Also he had an ulcer, the nerves of a neurotic cat, and what I assumed was the highest income of anyone from our class. In these days his wardrobe was always very studied, and today he wore a tan bush jacket, aviator glasses tinted yellow, and soft knee-high yellow boots. He clamped the phone under his chin, crossed his arms over his chest, leaned against the window, and gave me a sour grin.

    'I'll tell you something,' he said when he had put the phone down. 'Fielding should bless his soul that he never decided to go into the music business. And he had more talent than most of these bozos we manage. Is he still trying to get his Ph.D.?'

    I nodded. 'This will sound funny, but when you were leaning against the window like that just now, you reminded me of Lake the Snake.'

    'Now I really wish I was out on the Island. Lake the Snake.' He laughed out loud. 'Laker Broome. I better clean up my act. What made you think of that?'

    'Just the way you were standing.'