Or at least that she avoid suffering.
The worst would be some lingering illness. Horace Somerville had spoken to Warden’s most private fears today when he had talked about the speed of his son Alfred’s death. To watch Cynthia gradually fade, to lose her beauty and her spark, that would be unbearable. Warden had been through that with both parents in the past decade—the months of increasing debilitation, the convulsions, the trips to the hospital, the remissions, the many false assumptions that, at last, it would be over this time, the final relief mingled with guilt and grief and emptiness.
Denial, anger, depression, bargaining.
What kind of bargain would he make to get her well? Sell his soul, like Faustus, to the devil? If only he believed in voodoo or black magic, then he could track down the shaman who was responsible for Cynthia’s illness and steal his magic. Instead, he had to rely on the local witch doctor.
Upstairs in Fleming Hall he sat at his desk and stared at the empty surface. What was he here for? Had he meant to come here, or was he going to the gym for his workout? He would remember in a moment. Right now he wanted to start a poem, something about superstitions and scapegoats.
Something religious: death in life, the dying god.
The death of one so that another might live?
SCENE 13
At 9:15, Thomas Boatwright finished Act I of Othello and should have started on his biology lab report. He and Greg had spent an uninterrupted hour studying. It had been a comfortable silence between them, and Thomas was ready for a break. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bag of corn chips.
“Less than an hour till I can call Hesta,” he said.
Greg put down his pen and took some chips. “She called you before study hall,” he said. “I meant to tell you earlier.”
The heart did the usual double-pump, and then the disappointment took over. Damn, if he’d been on dorm, he could have talked to her. “What’d she say?”
“Nothing. Said she’d call back.”
“Who’s on duty in this building tonight?” Thomas said.
“Nathan Somerville.”
That was a relief at least. The fifteen seniors on the honor council were dispersed among all the dormitories. They were almost like faculty members at times, making sure rooms stayed clean and rules were obeyed, but since they weren’t faculty members, they tended to go a little easier on you if they caught you breaking a rule. If you were on the phone during study hours, say, and somebody like Mr. Somerville was on duty, he would stick you with demerits for sure, but if it was his grandson, Nathan, you’d probably get by with just a warning. You were also supposed to consult with your councilman if you ran into any trouble on the dorm. It was the biggest honor at Montpelier to be a councilman—and also the biggest pain, since the faculty expected you to be a perfect citizen and the students expected you to cut them a break.
“You think I should ask Nathan for permission to call Hesta?”
“You won’t be able to get through at Mason anyway,” said Greg. “They got study hours, too.” He took more chips.
He was right. And if Coach McPhee came back through on his rounds and saw Thomas on the phone, he’d probably kill him on the spot.
“You know what Mr. McPhee was telling me before you came in?” said Greg. “He and his wife split up.”
“She’s not living here anymore?”
“That’s right.”
“What about Michael?”
“She took him, too.”
“When?”
Greg told him that it had happened over the Thanksgiving holidays. She’d taken off and gone back to Boston. She’d packed up all her clothes, too, and her books and her pictures and all her cameras, and she’d already found some work in Boston back at the photographer’s studio where she used to work before they got married.
“Why’d she leave?” asked Thomas.
“He wouldn’t say. He said he’d flown up to Boston over the weekend to try to talk her out of it.”
Thomas considered the implications. “I bet it was because of Michael,” he said. “I think Michael was really jealous of him. He didn’t like Coach McPhee much.”
“That boy was crazy. He had himself the perfect stepdad.” Everybody knew about McPhee: how he’d played college ball and then pro ball in Italy. He’d come back and gone to grad school at Georgetown and had started coaching basketball at Capital City Prep. Two years ago he had come to Montpelier, and everybody said he was a better basketball coach than Mr. Delaney. Just last summer he’d gotten married to a widow from Boston with a fifteen-year-old son, a guy nobody knew very well.
“Michael was weird,” said Thomas. “I asked him if he’d be going out for basketball one time. He said he’d deflated his basketball and thrown it away after he’d moved to Montpelier. Like this was some big statement.”
Greg agreed that the coach was much more likeable than the kid. “I talked to him once,” he said. “The guy complained because he didn’t have a dorm room. I’m talking like, boy, count your blessings. Can you imagine not wanting to live in that apartment? No phone restrictions, TV anytime?”
“They should have sent him to another school,” said Thomas. “We don’t need guys like that here.”
Then Thomas started to think: What if Hesta had been calling to tell him that she couldn’t come down this weekend after all? What if what had happened to Mr. McPhee and his wife were part of some epidemic or something, with all women breaking up with all men?
Greg brushed the chip crumbs off his fingers and began to unroll a blueprint on the desktop. Thomas asked him what it was for.
“Art,” said Greg. “This is my project. You recognize the building?”
Thomas couldn’t recognize anything. It seemed to be about five buildings, all the same shape, like a stretched-out, squared-off horseshoe. Then he realized that it was five stories of the same
