But, he reminded himself, it could be nothing serious.
“I vote for a holiday here,” said Warden. “Start our own traditions. Atlanta is too far. Harold could come visit us.”
“Dad doesn’t leave the farm.”
“Not for ordinary events like our wedding. But maybe he’d come if we invited him for Christmas.” Maybe, he thought, if Harold knew his daughter was dying. Harold had raised Cynthia on his horse farm single-handedly since the divorce almost two decades ago. Cynthia’s mother had bred dogs. Upon discovering that she liked dogs better than babies, Mrs. Cunningham had moved away when Cynthia was three, taking all the dogs and leaving her only child. Cynthia had stopped hearing from her mother after her sixteenth birthday.
“Dad’s been trying, Ben,” said Cynthia. “It’s just taking him a long time to get used to having his daughter married, that’s all.”
“To having his daughter married to a freak,” said Warden. He touched his birthmark.
“A poet.”
“An imperfect foal.”
“Go to, sirrah,” she said. “He invited us for Christmas. That’s progress.”
He said he would go if she wanted, would do whatever she liked. “Tomorrow I’m going to wake up and this whole thing is going to be a dream. It’s going to be last week again, and we won’t have had Thanksgiving yet, and I won’t have gone to New York, and you won’t have gotten sick.”
“We’re not going to advertise this trip to the hospital,” Cynthia said. She looked so beautiful with her head laid back on the sofa, with her blond hair loose and fanning behind her face. It was like the hair of Ophelia in Holman Hunt’s painting Warden had seen in the Tate Gallery. A painting of double death: Ophelia died before the play was over; Hunt’s model for the painting, his lover, caught a cold from lying in water to pose and also died.
Warden reminded her that the Somervilles knew already, and that the inevitable rumor machine at Montpelier would undoubtedly circulate the news.
“I was thinking of family,” said Cynthia. “People who aren’t here. My dad. Your brother. They don’t need to be worried unnecessarily.”
Warden agreed.
Cynthia held his hand in her lap palm up, as though she were reading it. “I’m only twenty-three years old,” she said. “That’s too young to be seriously ill.”
“Of course it is.”
“Only it’s hard to deny this sense of free-fall.” She pulled his hand up to her face. “It helps to know you’re falling with me.”
Warden encircled her with an arm and held her to him. “We are not accomplishing anything except to tire you out,” he said. He accused her of suffering a classic case of psychological denial; she had insisted upon dining with the boys tonight.
Cynthia said he was right, that she’d been unwise. “I just want life to be exactly the way it had been before,” she said.
But how is that, thought Warden. No day is like the previous one. The earth is slowing down, the sun is burning out, the universe itself is expanding so quickly that eventually it must tear itself down the middle like a patch of putty.
They had gone to the dining hall early, at 6:15 for the 6:30 dinner, so that the boys would not see Cynthia limping to the table. They had remained at the table afterward until the room was clear.
“I start feeling so sorry for myself,” said Cynthia, “and then I look around at your advisees, and I wonder what kinds of trouble they’re suffering. You know how awful life is when you’re that age.”
“My advisees are privileged little preppies. The worst trouble they have is getting through Great Expectations without using Cliff’s Notes.”
Cynthia said he was wrong. “Tonight I was watching Thomas Boatwright,” she said. “Did you notice him before we ate? He stared at Chuck Heilman the whole time Chuck was saying the blessing. He was oblivious.”
“And why did you not have your own eyes closed during the blessing?”
“Because I was watching Thomas Boatwright,” she said.
“And what was so fascinating about Thomas Boatwright?” said Warden. He accused her of mental philandering.
“What was so fascinating,” she said, “to anyone who happened to notice, was that Thomas Boatwright was obviously troubled. Once in a while you should open your eyes yourself.”
He let it go. He could not tell her all his reasons for being preoccupied. He needed to work them out.
“Maybe I should go check on young Boatwright tonight,” said Warden.
“Do you have to go out?”
“I have to get some papers graded by tomorrow,” he said. “I left them over in my classroom.”
But the papers were upstairs in his briefcase.
SCENE 10
It was 7:35 P.M. and Thomas Boatwright was supposed to be studying in his dormitory room. Quiet hours were from 7:30 to 9:30, and unless you were really dumb or your advisor hated your guts, you could work in your room. Otherwise you were assigned a seat in the supervised evening study hall. Thomas was not dumb, and his advisor, Mr. Warden, was a nice guy, and so Thomas was allowed to study in his room on Middle Stringfellow, which was the dorm on the middle floor of Stringfellow Hall. But Thomas was in Richard Blackburn’s room all the way over on Stratford House, where he sat on the bright patchwork quilt that covered Ralph Musgrove’s bed and talked with Richard, who sprawled on his own bed, and with Ralph, who sat at his desk with a book open in case somebody came into the room.
“I can promise you it wasn’t me,” said Richard. “You really think somebody got drunk before dinner? That would be suicide.”
“He was walking like a drunk would on television,” said Thomas. “You know, lurching around, having a hard time keeping upright.”
“Maybe it was somebody from off campus,” said Ralph. “Some townie.”
“That’s not as weird as what you told us about Farnham,” said Richard. He leaned back on the bed and propped himself up with his skinny, pointed elbows. The
