Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Francis, who knew this territory better than we did, had said there was an inn nearby but it was hard to believe there was anything habitable for fifty miles around. Then we rounded a bend and our headlights swept across a rusted metal sign pockmarked with shotgun pellets, that informed us that the Hoosatonic Inn, straight ahead, was the original birthplace of Pie a la Mode.

The building was ringed by a rickety porch – sagging rockers, peeling paint. Inside, the lobby was an intriguing jumble of mahogany and moth-eaten velvet, interspersed with deer heads, calendars from filling stations, and a large collection of I Bicentennial commemorative trivets, mounted and hung upon the wall. *

The dining room was empty except for a few country people A eating their dinners, all of whom looked up at us with innocent, || frank curiosity as we came in, at our dark suits and spectacles, at | Francis's monogrammed cufflinks and his Charvet tie, at Camilla f" with her boyish haircut and sleek little Astrakhan coat. I was a bit surprised at this collective openness of demeanor – neither stares nor disapproving looks – until it occurred to me that these ^ people probably didn't realize we were from the college. Closer» in, we would have been pegged instantly as rich kids from up on *, the hill, kids likely to make a lot of noise and leave a bad tip. But J6 here we were only strangers, in a place where strangers were rare.

No one even came by to take an order. Dinner appeared with „ instantaneous magic: pork roast, biscuits, turnips and corn and butternut squash, in thick china bowls that had pictures of the presidents (up to Nixon) around their rims.

The waiter, a red-faced boy with bitten nails, lingered for a moment. Finally he said, shyly: 'You folks from New York City?'

'No,' said Charles, taking the plate of biscuits from Henry.

'From here.'

'From Hoosatonic?'

'No. Vermont, I mean.'

'Not New York?'

'No,' said Francis cheerily, carving at the roast. 'I'm from Boston.'

'I went there,' said the boy, impressed.

Francis smiled absently and reached for a dish.

'You folks must like the Red Sox.'

'Actually I do,' said Francis. 'Quite a bit. But they never seem to win, do they?'

'Some of the time they do. I guess we'll never see 'em win the Series, though,' He was still loitering, trying to think of something else to say, when Henry glanced up at him.

'Sit down,' he said unexpectedly. 'Have some dinner, won't you?'

After a bit of awkward demurral, he pulled up a chair, though he refused to eat anything; the dining room closed at eight, he told us, and it wasn't likely that anyone else would come in.

'We're off the highway,' he said. 'Most folks go to bed pretty early around here.' His name, we discovered, was John Deacon; he was my age – twenty – and had graduated from Equinox High School, over in Hoosatonic proper, only two years before. Since graduation, he said, he'd been working on his uncle's farm; the waiter's job was a new thing, something to fill the winter hours.

'This is only my third week,' he said. 'I like it here, I reckon.

Food's good. And I get my meals free.'

Henry, who generally disliked and was disliked by hoi polloi a category which in his view expanded to include persons ranging from teenagers with boom boxes to the Dean of Studies of Hamp den, who was independently wealthy and had a degree in American Studies from Yale – nonetheless had a genuine knack with poor people, simple people, country folk; he was despised by the functionaries of Hampden but admiredby its janitors, its gardeners and cooks. Though he did not treat them as equals – he didn't treat anyone as an equal, exactly – neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy. 'I think we're much more hypocritical about illness, and poverty, than were people in former ages,' I remember Julian saying once. 'In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true. Does anyone remember Plato's definition of Justice in the Republic? Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it. A poor man who wishes to rise above his station is only making himself needlessly miserable. And the wise poor have always known this, the same as do the wise rich.'

I'm not entirely sure now that this is true – because if it is, where does that leave me? still wiping down windshields in Piano? – but there is no doubt that Henry was so confident of his own abilities and position in the world, and so comfortable with them, that he had the strange effect of making others (including myself) feel comfortable in their respective, lesser positions, whatever they might happen to be. Poor people for the most part were unimpressed by his manner, except in the most hazy and admiring fashion; and as a consequence they were able to see past it to the real Henry, the Henry I knew, taciturn, polite, in many respects as simple and straightforward as they themselves were. It was a knack he shared with Julian, who was greatly admired by the country people who lived around him, much as one likes to imagine that kindly Pliny was held in affection by the poor folk of Comum and Tifernum.

Through most of the meal, Henry and the boy talked in the most intimate and, to me, baffling terms, about the land around Hampden and Hoosatonic – zoning, developments, price per acre, uncleared land and titles and who owned what – as the rest of us ate our dinners and listened. It was a conversation one might overhear at any rural filling station or feed store; but hearing it made me feel curiously happy, and at ease with the world.

In retrospect, it is odd how little power the dead farmer exercised over an imagination as morbid and hysterical as my own. I can well imagine the extravagance of nightmares such a thing might provoke (opening the door to a dream-classroom, the flannel shirted figure without a face propped ghoulishly at a desk, or turning from its work at the blackboard to grin at me), but I suppose it is rather telling that I seldom thought of it at all and then only when I was reminded in some way. I believe the others were troubled by it as little as or less than I was, as evidenced by the fact that they all had carried on so normally and in such good humor for so long. Monstrous as it was, the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry's feet, to be discovered when the lights came up; the picture of it, staring and dumb in all its gore, never failed to provoke an anxious little frisson but still it seemed relatively harmless compared to the very real and persistent menace which I now saw that Bunny presented.

Bunny, for all his appearance of amiable, callous stability, was actually a wildly erratic character. There were any number of reasons for this, but primary among them was his complete inability to think about anything before he did it. He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum. But his instincts had failed him in the new set of circumstances presented by the murder. Now that the old trusted channel-markers had, so to speak, been rearranged in the dark, the automatic-pilot mechanism by which his psyche navigated was useless; decks awash, he floundered aimlessly, running on sandbars, veering off in all sorts of bizarre directions.

To the casual observer, I suppose, he seemed pretty much his jolly old self- slapping people on the back, eating Twinkies and Ho Hos in the reading room of the library and dropping crumbs all down in the bindings of his Greek books. But behind that bluff facade some distinct and rather ominous changes were taking place, changes of which I was already dimly aware but which made themselves more evident as time went on.