“It’s Stringfellow,” he said. “Where’s our room?”
Greg pointed to a small square on the right-hand wing of the third horseshoe.
“There’s the bathroom,” said Greg. “And there’s the common room. You notice something funny here?” He pointed to a large open space at the end of the hall.
“Where’s Mr. Carella’s apartment?”
Greg said that was the point. These blueprints were from 1928, and Mr. Carella’s apartment hadn’t been carved out yet. “That was a reading room and a library,” said Greg. “Mr. Delaney told us about it today in class.”
That was pretty interesting, Thomas had to admit.
“So what’s your project?” he asked.
“Architecture,” said Greg. “I’m supposed to figure out from the plans of the buildings on campus where a secret escape tunnel might be built.”
“A secret escape tunnel?”
“Sure,” said Greg, “in case the Indians or the slaves or the Revenuers started getting too close to home.”
Thomas was starting to remember something. He didn’t reply.
Greg spoke in the same neutral tone. “Slaves, man. That was a joke.”
“Sorry. I was thinking about Revenuers.”
Greg said the tunnel was supposed to connect Stringfellow Hall with the Homestead.
“Under the Quad?” said Thomas.
“That’s what Delaney said.”
They looked at the blueprint for half a minute in silence.
“So,” said Greg. “There’s my art project. Why are you thinking about bootleg whiskey all of a sudden?”
He told Greg about the staggering figure leaving Bradley Hall this afternoon. “It looked like he was drunk. You don’t think Farnham was drinking, do you? A surly drunk?”
“Get real,” said Greg.
“It’s possible.”
“Somebody looked drunk?” said Greg. “Somebody not walking right?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“All bundled up in a bunch of clothes?”
“That’s him,” said Thomas. “You know who it was?”
“Yeah,” said Greg. “It’s not a him. It was Mrs. Warden. She got there at the end of rehearsal. Everybody else was gone. Farnham was talking to me about working on my character, but when she showed up, he sent me on home.”
“But why would Mrs. Warden be drunk?”
“She wasn’t drunk,” said Greg. “She just wasn’t walking right.”
“You think she hurt herself?” said Thomas.
“Maybe so.”
“Or,” said Thomas, “maybe she’d been down there earlier, and Farnham had blown up and had hit her with a board, and she was limping because of the injury.”
“Get real.”
“Well, it’s possible,” said Thomas.
“Maybe she told him something that got him mad,” said Greg. “Maybe she told him she didn’t want to be his lover anymore.”
“She’s not his lover,” said Thomas.
“It’s possible,” said Greg.
“She’s not his lover.”
“Okay,” said Greg. “Don’t get mad.”
Thomas had surprised himself with the vehemence of his response. “I guess we’ll never know,” he said. He pulled out his book of lab reports.
“Did you finish Act I?” Greg asked him.
“Yeah.”
Greg paused. “So when Iago says that stuff about ‘the beast with two backs,’ is he talking about, you know, doing it?”
“You got it,” said Thomas.
“I couldn’t believe Shakespeare would talk so much about sex,’’ said Greg. “I thought it meant something more serious.”
Thomas said he thought there was nothing more serious than sex.
“Tell me about this speech here,” said Greg, “where Desdemona is talking to her father.”
Thomas said he’d be glad to.
And he was pleased to realize that he meant it. Coach McPhee would be proud when he returned to check on them. He had asked Thomas to do his homework and to find out about Greg’s art project, and Thomas had followed his orders.
But Patrick McPhee did not return to speak to them that night. He got sidetracked by the death of Russell Phillips.
SCENE 14
My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty:
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you; you are the lord of duty;
I am hitherto your daughter: but here’s my husband,
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.
Warden was reading the lines to Cynthia in their bedroom. He was fully dressed in gray woolen trousers, white shirt, and tie, while she wore a blue flannel nightgown. He sat on the bed and leaned back on the headboard while he read; she lay supine beneath the covers. The bright, hard winter sunshine of Tuesday morning provided plenty of light for the reading.
“My noble father,” echoed Cynthia, “I do perceive here a double duty—”
“Divided duty,” said Warden.
“‘I do perceive here a divided duty,’” said Cynthia. “I should have known that from the meter. Da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum. Da. Iambic pentameter with a little extra syllable at the end.”
“Go on.”
“My life and education both do teach me—”
“Learn me,’’ said Warden.
“No wonder the neoclassicists rewrote Shakespeare,’’ said Cynthia. “His grammar was terrible.”
“Start again.”
She said the speech aloud and corrected those errors but committed two others.
“Not bad,” said Warden.
“She sounds like Cordelia,” said Cynthia.
“So she does.” This was Othello, and Cordelia was in Lear, but the principle was the same: a daughter who understood love better than her father did, and who was soon cursed by her father for her supposed disloyalty and ingratitude. And both died at the end of their plays. The canniness of his wife’s insight was what hurt Warden the most. She was so talented, so smart, so good; she should be finishing her doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare and publishing and acting and enjoying life till she was one hundred and fifty years old.
“How much time do we have?” Cynthia asked. The question startled him. Then he realized that she was asking about their departure.
It was 8:45 A.M. “Another forty-five minutes,” he said. Montpelier School was on a rolling schedule stretching over six days of the week, so that no class met at the same time each day. Warden’s first class on Tuesday did not meet until 9:30, when he would walk over to Fleming Hall, tell the students their assignment, and then drive Cynthia to the hospital.
“Did you finish grading your papers?” she said.
“Finally, this morning, yes,” he said. “I spent an hour looking around that classroom for them, and they were
