Hare in March Page 12

  Hagerman waited it out patiently. Then he got Thorpe into the car, and he drove him down Route 9W to a Mobil station. He steered him into the rest room, where Thorpe got sick again.

  “Clean yourself up,” said Hagerman. “I’ll wait outside.”

  There was just enough time for Hagerman to step into the phone booth and pay the dime and hear Matilda Holt’s hello.

  Said Hagerman, “Yeeeeeeeeowwwwwwwwwww!”

  Then he went inside and bought a ginger ale from the vending machine, and handed it to Thorpe, when Thorpe came out of the men’s.

  “Soothe your tum-tum,” he said, handing it to Thorpe, smiling.

  • • •

  Bud Burroughs said to his mother, “You make the best mashed potatoes in the world!”

  “I don’t use mixes. You want another helping, dear?”

  “Thanks … It’s more than not using mixes. We don’t use mixes at the house, but ours don’t taste like this.”

  “I put a little sour cream in. And lots of butter.”

  “They sure are good.”

  “Then you should come home more often, Buddy.”

  “Oh, Mom, you know how that would look. Running home to my mother. Anyway, I have to pay for the meal whether I’m there or not; I might as well get my money’s worth. Or Dad’s money’s worth.”

  “I wonder where your father is? He went off duty two hours ago. It’s almost ten o’clock.”

  “He’s probably out collecting graft from the local bars.” “Buddy, I don’t like that talk.” “I’m only kidding.”

  “There’s not a policeman in this state as honest as your father.”

  “Hopkins would be pleased to hear that.”

  “Dick Hopkins is honest, too. I don’t know any who aren’t.”

  “Mom, I was only kidding.”

  “You’re always saying things like that, though; they aren’t funny, Buddy. There’s nothing funny about them.” “Okay, I won’t say them anymore.”

  “I think it’s that roommate of yours, that Hagerman. I think he puts ideas in your head.” “You’ve never even met him.”

  “I wish you’d bring him home. I’d like to meet him.”

  “Mom, I told you — he’s not an average guy. You’d be uncomfortable, and he’d be uncomfortable…. He’s sort of cynical. You know?”

  “I just have to listen to you to know.”

  “But he’s a nice guy. Take tonight. You know, it’s Hell Night at the frat. Well, Peter knows I’m not good at that kind of stuff; you know, ordering the pledges to do these crazy stunts. He lets me skip it. All the other actives have to do it — that’s why there’s no dinner at the house tonight. But Peter lets me off.”

  “I thought Hell Night was against the college rules.”

  “Oh, Mom!”

  “Isn’t Hell Night against the college rules?” “Mom, can’t you ever forget about rules and laws; is that all you worry about, rules and laws?” “I respect rules and laws, Buddy.”

  “I respect your fine, rich, thick, country-style brown gravy. May I have some more?” “Oh, you!”

  She laughed, and picked up the gravy bowl, and carried it into the kitchen.

  Then Arnold Burroughs came in the front door and called out, “It’s me!” as he did every night of his life, and Bud’s mother called back, “Is that you, dear?” as she did every night, and Arnold Burroughs answered, “I’m home.”

  Bud Burroughs said, “How do you two ever remember all that?”

  “Hi, Buddy! All what?”

  “You know. It’s me. Is that you, dear? I’m home.”

  His father mussed Bud’s hair playfully and said, “It took twenty-three years of practice. Who let you out of prison?”

  “It’s Hell Night. I’m too much of an angel to participate.”

  “What do you mean it’s Hell Night?” His father’s smile vanished, and he stood there without removing his coat, waiting for an answer.

  “Now don’t you start, Dad. You know darn well the frats still take their pledges out for fun and games. It’s really just one night. Just one night.”

  “Like tonight?”

  “Yeah. You going to arrest them or something? Take your coat off.”

  Arnold Burroughs took off his coat, but he didn’t walk to the closet with it; he pulled up a chair next to Bud and sat down. He said, “Is tonight the night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe there is something to it.” “Something to what?”

  “We thought we had a psycho on our hands, but maybe there is something to it.” “To what?”

  “Are the eggheads in this fraternity you belong to against the war in Vietnam?”

  “Some of them are, I suppose.” “Anyone in particular?” “I didn’t take a poll.”

  “Bud, don’t give me any of your wise-guy answers; we’ve got a serious situation on our hands.” “What is it?”

  Then Burroughs’ father told him about Matilda Holt, and her drunken visitor, and the subsequent obscene phone calls that were continuing even as Arnold Burroughs had left the station.

  Ida Burroughs had joined them around the dinner table, and she was shaking her head and exclaiming “Oh, no!” at intervals, and when her husband had finished, she looked across at Bud and said, “You see?”

  “Do I see what?”

  “What we were talking about earlier. About respect for rules and laws.”

  “Mom, for Pete’s sake! Nobody from Pi Pi would do a thing like this! For Pete’s sake!”

  “If it is someone from that fraternity of yours, mister, you’ve spent your last day there!” said Arnold Burroughs. “But it isn’t!”

  “Well, I don’t like to think it is. But you tell me it’s fun-and-games night, and this happens the same night. And the boy told Mrs. Holt that he was from the college.”

  Bud Burroughs gave an exasperated sigh. “Do you think that someone from the college would say he was from the college?”

  “Well, I didn’t think so when I heard it, but I didn’t know this was some sort of special Halloween at your place, either.”

  “Dad!”

  “And the boy was drunk. Mrs. Holt said he could hardly walk. He might not have known what he was saying.”

  “It’s nobody from Pi Pi, I can tell you that.”

  “We haven’t had any other complaints; where are your Pi Pis?”

  “They’re not running wild in the streets ringing Mrs. Holt’s doorbell.”

  “This boy was in a car.”

  “Did she get the license number?”

  “She was too upset. She didn’t even know what color the car was.”

  “Everything that goes wrong in this town gets hung on the college.”

  “We give you kids a lot of leeway, Bud.”

  “Anyway,” said Ida Burroughs, “I’m glad Buddy isn’t involved. He was here all night, and I can swear to that.”

  “Mother, no one from the fraternity or the college was involved! How about the high school kids in this town? I did some pretty wild things when I was in high school.”

  “High school kids aren’t driving around in cars after six at night.”

  “Oh, that’s really using your head, Dad. If they’re drunk, why aren’t they driving around after six? You mean, because it’d be breaking the law?”

  Arnold Burroughs slammed his fist down on the table, rattling the plates and silverware, sloshing the milk in Bud’s glass over the side. He said, “Look, Bud, I’ve had enough of your sarcasm! I didn’t work overtime, trying to help some woman who’s frightened out of her wits to come home to a fresh kid who thinks the Far Point police are a bunch of fatheads! That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “No, Dad.”

  Ida Burroughs said, “You see, Buddy? You go too far.” “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Well, you put this in your pipe and smoke it, Buddy! If this has got anything to do with the monkeyshines those Little Lord Fauntleroys you live with classify as fun-and-games, you’re
going to be classified as a dropout quicker than you can say Pi Pi! You’re going to college to get an education; you’re privileged to live in a fraternity where you can learn to be a gentleman, but you’re not privileged to be a Vietnik, or a beatnik, or any other nutnik! Do you understand, Bud?”

  Ida Burroughs said, “He didn’t do anything, Arnie. He was here with me all night.”

  “Do you understand, Bud?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t want to hear about you or anyone you know causing harm to anyone. If I hear you or anyone you know caused harm to anyone, I’ll put you down on the assembly line at F.P.B…. And that goes for tonight, a year from tonight, or four years from tonight!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The whole damn lot of you ought to live through one hour of what our boys live through every day in Vietnam; then you’d really know something about hell!”

  Ida Burroughs said, “Now, Arnie, you don’t mean that.”

  “I mean it all right, and Bud knows I mean it!”

  “Yes,” Burroughs said, “I know you mean it.”

  That night when Bud Burroughs returned to the Pi Pi house, before he did anything else he went up to his room and got Peter’s keys to the refrigerator and Peter’s medicine case. He was not surprised to find the four sugar cubes in the case, where Peter had promised to put them, but he was relieved by his decision to destroy them. So much for the likelihood of his causing anyone any harm; so much for his experiment. No one would be any the worse for it now…. Nor would anyone have been any the worse for what Bud flushed down the Pi Pi toilet. Four ordinary Dominoes couldn’t hurt a fly.

  Twelve

  Earlier that evening, the blinking blue light above the telephone in Clinton Shepley’s laboratory signaled that someone was on the line. Shepley glanced up, annoyed. Before the interruption, his thin six-foot frame had been hunched over a breeding case, his dark eyes fixed on two praying mantes. As Shepley picked up the arm of the phone, the female decapitated the male, while the male continued to hold his amorous posture on her.

  “Shepley speaking.”

  “Shepley speaking,” said the voice.

  “Charles!”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the reception desk. May I come up?” “Of course!” “I’ll be right up.”

  Clinton Shepley put down the receiver and glanced at his wristwatch; it was ten minutes to seven.

  He made a note of the number of males the female mantis had devoured, and then switched off the show lights in the breeding case. He fished in the pocket of his lab coat for a cigarette, scratched a match against a wooden bench, and walked to the window, sucking in the smoke.

  He had been with the institute for twenty-five years, counting those years when he was on leave of absence during World War II. He had had several opportunities, before Billy’s accident, to leave the institute for more remunerative positions, but there had always been the extra money from his father’s estate. Now, with the expense of Billy’s illness eating that up, Clinton Shepley’s income was barely adequate. There was compensation in the knowledge that, given two or three more years he hoped to have the most definitive information ever collected concerning the mating habits of invertebrates; there was even more recompense in the fact he was doing the work he did best, and the Richmond Institute was the only place where he could accomplish it.

  But he was not a bachelor, like old Stanchfield in Reptiles, who was going into his eleventh year of a study on venomous tree snakes, nor was Natalie very much like Wendt’s wife, who followed him into the sea in pursuit of information about the nest structures of Poikilotherms.

  If he had married anyone but a woman like Natalie, Billy’s illness might have seemed a tragedy which they could, thank God, afford, but instead, it was a tragedy which deprived them of the things Natalie had counted on in their marriage, and every day Clinton Shepley was reminded of this fact.

  “You want to hear my nightmare, Clint?” she had said that morning at breakfast, before the call from Charles. “All right.”

  “You and I were out at dinner and it was a very fancy restaurant, and you ordered dinner for us. Remember that time we went to Le Provençal?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Vaguely? On East Sixty-second Street, remember? I was all gussied up and we sat at a little table in the back. Billy must have been about thirteen, because I remember he was old enough to sit with Charles, so we didn’t have a sitter, and it was winter, I remember, because it was snowing.”

  “What has that got to do with your nightmare, Natalie?”

  “In my nightmare, we were in the same kind of restaurant. I mean, it might even have been Le Provençal. It probably was. You ordered dinner. I remember that part, except I don’t remember what we had for a main course. The entrée. That part I don’t recall. I recall that we started with Quiche Lorraine. Guess what we drank.”

  “What did we drink?”

  “Taittinger Blanc de Blancs 1959. That was right in my nightmare.”

  “Why was it a nightmare?”

  “I’m getting to that, Clint! We started with Quiche Lorraine and Taittinger Blanc de Blancs 1959, and we finished with soufflé Grand Marnier, accompanied by those enormous strawberries with cream on them. They were as big as plums. And the wine steward brought us Moët et Chandon Dom Perignon 1959. That was right in my nightmare, the year and everything … Well, my teeth fell out.”

  “I see.”

  “It may not sound like much, but they began falling out when the waiter put down the Quiche Lorraine, and I kept putting them one by one into my handkerchief, and by the time the strawberries came, ‘I didn’t have a tooth in my mouth. Can you imagine how I felt?”

  “What did you do, gum your strawberries?”

  “I know it sounds funny, Clint, but I woke up with goose bumps all over my body. I had to turn on Long John to quiet me down, and his whole program was about the Jet Set. Well, I guess the only Jet Set we qualify for anymore is the Jim Dooley Jet Set.”

  “Were we in the Jet Set? I hadn’t realized.”

  “We went to Paris.”

  “What’s the Jim Dooley Jet Set?”

  “New York to Miami. Come on down! Hi, Brooklyn! Hello, Five forty-two Lexington! Haven’t you ever seen him on television?”

  “I’m sorry you had a nightmare.”

  “When Billy’s. better, I want to go to Acapulco; that’s the ‘in’ place now.”

  “Well. When Billy’s better, it might not be the ‘in’ place anymore. By then, the moon might be the ‘in’ place, Natalie.”

  “If I didn’t believe Billy was going to get well, I wouldn’t be able to keep on living like this, Clint.”

  • • •

  The institute overlooked the East River, with its Pearl-Wick Hampers and Pepsi-Cola signs, and the tugs that glided past, and in the distance the smoke from the factories of Queens, the beginnings of Long Island, the lights of the bridge and traffic stealing back and forth across it. Clinton Shepley liked the view, even the advertisements amused him; he liked the whole neighborhood of the institute, and he was glad when his financial circumstances forced the move here from Riverside Drive.

  Natalie was always harping on the fact that the outdoor phone booths on East End Avenue were broken into nearly every night, and that the dope addicts who were involved in the Janice Wylie murder case had lived only two blocks away from their apartment, but the neighborhood held many good memories for Clinton Shepley, not the least of which were memories of his walks with Charles along the promenade by the East River.

  When Charles was a youngster, he was always dropping in at the institute after school and on Saturdays. Billy had rarely shown any interest in the place; he showed up only when he wanted to borrow a few dollars. But Charles had genuinely loved watching the experiments; he used to sit for hours with Clinton Shepley waiting for a Callinecte to attract a female, or for a gray Sepia to come up from the mud and change
its color to purple-black stripes for the female, or for a wolf spider to complete his dance around his mate.

  During their walks along the promenade, Charles would talk of his ambition to be a zoologist, and what branch of the science he wanted to concentrate on, and what college he thought offered the most. But the conversation was not limited to that; in Charles, Clinton Shepley found what he missed with Natalie, the easy rapport which lent itself to discussions of people — Charles telling of this boy in his class, or that teacher — Clinton Shepley regaling Charles with stories of Stanchfield’s habit of favoring certain snakes by allowing them to sleep nights in his bathroom, and of Wendt’s wife climbing a tree to sketch the foam nest of a Poly-pedates rheinwartii, only to come hysterically upon a bag of bats…. They were boon companions, Clinton Shepley and his younger son.

  But a change had come over Charles after Billy’s accident; it showed first in his grades, and ultimately in his estrangement from his father. He was polite, but distant; attentive when Clinton Shepley discussed things with him, but unenthusiastic. Around this period, too, he picked up this knack for imitating people; he was very good at it. Even his face seemed to take on the features of the person he was mimicking. It became very hard to find Charles beneath them all.

  While Clinton Shepley waited for his son to come up to the laboratory, he felt the same apprehension he had after his telephone conversation that morning. He should not have lied to Charles; he probably wouldn’t have told the old Charles a lie; he might have been able to make that Charles see some humor in Natalie Shepley’s pathetic maneuver, or at least help him see how pathetic it was. But now he was so out of touch with his son; and the knowledge of the promise of silverware had come as a shock to Clinton Shepley, as well.

  Of course it was the reason for Charles’s visit; in minutes, there would be the confrontation, and what was he to tell the boy?

  He might begin by saying, “You see, Charles, it wasn’t so much your mother’s fear for you — that’s only the superficial motivation, but go deeper. She projects her fears onto me and you and even onto Billy. Charles,” chuckling? “she even sent away to one of those mail order houses for a phony family coat of arms to hang in Billy’s room to impress the nuns with his lineage.”