Hare in March (9 page)

“Yeah.”

“I just saw his face when he came out of here, Shep.” “Uh-huh.”

“You’re pretty cool. Have you forgotten Osmond?” “Not at all.”

Shepley had insomnia most of the night, falling asleep only toward dawn, then jerking awake to remember his plan. First, to go to campus town, where he would call home and verify what he already knew: that Hagerman
had
been lying. Then, to stop in at the Co-op Book and Record Store, to see if the tape had taken…. Next on the agenda was the confrontation with Hagerman. For it had not been long last night until Charles Shepley realized that anything important enough for Hagerman to cancel an Inferno itinerary over also had a price, particularly when it was on record.

So Charles Shepley left the Unmuzzled Ox and set off for the Pi Delta Pi house, with the morning sun and this colossal piece of luck to warm him, ready to haggle with Hagerman.

• • •

Hagerman had not slept well either, despite a Compazine, a Librium, and two Doridens. His bedside table looked like the Valley of the Dolls. When he had managed to convince himself that he had nothing to worry about, that it was obvious Shepley believed he had invented the silverware story, and would be satisfied to drop the whole thing if he could get out of The Divine Comedy, Hagerman had drifted into sleep only to be blasted awake by Burroughs’ snoring. Then all the anxieties returned; then the sands of his security shifted back and he was adrift again, with palpitations and his insides twanging, and all the horrid remembrances of Len the Man and Peg Beauty parading across the screen of his mind, and the incubus of Blouter holding the power to deactivate Hagerman, and Shepley with the ammunition to trigger it.

He could just hear Peg Beauty:

“Peter, what did you do
this
time?”

And Len the Man:

“He didn’t do anything in particular. It’s never anything, in particular; it’s everything in general, starting with the fact he’s little and ugly and doesn’t know Number two has to try harder.”

Actually.

Len the Man had actually come out with that one when Peter had been sent home from Sunstone Military Academy.

Oh, he was smiling; you don’t use the toothpaste for people who can’t brush after every meal and
not
smile; you’re
always
on if you’re Len Lovely; if you have a headache, you don’t take it out on the kid, even if the kid is the reason you have the headache. Goldfinger smiles in the face of all obstacles and pushes on.

Hagerman had finally carried his pillow down to the Pi Pi living room. He had sat on the couch smoking cigarettes and waiting for his stomach to stop dancing, and he had picked up a copy of yesterday’s
Far Point Record
to take his mind off all of it. On the front page there was a picture of a Mrs. Matilda Holt from Valley Stream Road in Far Point; she was sitting in a chair with antimacassars on the arms, leaning into a GE radio with a dazed smile on her face, holding in her lap a huge photograph of a soldier with lieutenant’s bars on his shirt.

Hagerman had slapped the newspaper to the floor and ground out his cigarette. He had curled up on the couch and put the pillow in against his stomach where it ached, and then he had taken deep breaths, which sometimes helped his attacks of anxiety, and in a little while he felt the tension start to taper off…. Shepley believed him; Shepley was not going to make an ass of himself by going to Blouter. He had let things grow way out of proportion again, was all; weeping Jesus, Hagerman, don’t let every little thing grab you this way; steady, Hagerman; slow down, buster; soothing himself as he had often done when he was a kid, holding himself and whispering softly to himself in the dark, until he was fast sleep.

Then his ‘copter was disabled by ground fire, and he crash-landed in Victor Charlie territory, and in the night a white phosphorus mortar shell exploded, and the valley erupted in recoilless cannon and machine-gun fire and the flash of shells. He stuck it out, the green beret cocked jauntily over one eye; he braved the hail of fire to rescue the ‘copter’s pilot; he sprinted past a spray of bullets, while choppers and planes went after him. And when he woke up with the sun in his eyes, dive bombers were coming to the aid of the besieged band of men he led; he was safe and sure, and rubbing his eyes, Hagerman smiled.

The feeling the dream gave him lingered.

It was a warm, bright morning, a perfect morning for The Divine Comedy.

He showered and shaved and polished his loafers, was Mother Varner’s escort for breakfast, was high-spirited at the chapter meeting where he assigned actives to guide pledges on their Infernos, was snapping his fingers and singing up in his room, when Shepley appeared.

“Can we have a little private talk, Hagerman?”

“Now what do you want to get out of, Shepley?”

Shepley had smiled then, and then Shepley had given it to him: the shaft.

“Out of debt, Hagerman.”

Lois Faye had a dream.

It was to have her own apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street in New York.

It was to have an answering service and a garage for the car.

It was to have a Yorkie she would probably call Canapé and a canary she would probably call Peter Duchin.

Last summer Lois Faye had spent a week visiting Terry Swan. “Swanny” and Lois had gone to Briar Hall together; Swanny had graduated a year ahead of Lois, flunked out of a junior college in Vermont, and talked her parents into letting her take an apartment between Third and Lexington on East Fifty-seventh. She was supposed to be studying Speed-writing; she was supposed to be looking for a job in publishing. She subscribed to Telanserphone and kept her Mustang in the garage of the apartment house. She had a Yorkie named Truffle and a canary named Lester Lanin.

“I can remember when we had to go into a closet to smoke,” Lois had told her, “and now look at you! You have everything!”

“Oh, yes,” she told Lois in a Martin Luther King accent; “we on de move!”

And Lois Faye had burst out laughing, because that was her kind of humor; she didn’t have anything against Martin Luther King, but all of that was something else; she felt relieved when she was with someone like Swanny; Swanny’s place was just the kind of place Lois Faye would fix up — not a cutesy apartment with modern chairs that looked like dogs begging, and gimcracks from Serendipity and Greenbranch, no gum machines or Tiffany lamps, no café curtains, no travel posters or Toulouse-Lautrec Jane Avril reproductions, no unpainted furniture from Macy’s stained walnut, not any of that jazz, but a serious-looking scene: a Queen Anne settee, a Stiffel table lamp finished in old antique brass, a tambour desk from the Baker collection, a silver bonbon dish from Gorham; elegant, restrained, the sort of place a stockbroker would be comfortable in.

Swanny had not made a home for herself; she had fixed up a trap for the likes of Credit Card Carl, Wally Wallet, Chase Manhattan Marvin, and Bankers Trust Blum.

“For myself, I’d like all white,” she had told Lois; “white rugs, white furniture, I’d wear all white — I love white — but white is too hooker. The hookers ruined white and poodles. You have to look as though you wander into Parke-Bernet to browse at auctions; you have to look as though you usually go to the openings at Wildenstein. You don’t wear wool after five and you don’t wear mink in the daytime. White is out. Unless you want to marry some guy who wears green suits and owns a handkerchief factory.”

Listening to Swanny talk was like having a vision or hearing a prophet; it was the Word. It said it all. Lois Faye burned for more; she burned to go and live in New York. She crammed her handbag with matchbooks (which Swanny kept in a Steuben bowl) from the Plaza, the Ground Floor, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, the Top of the Six’s, and she went back to South Orange, New Jersey, and moped around and complained about having to attend F.P.C.

Her mother said, “I never had an education. You’re going to.”

“What for? I want to get married someday.” “All the more reason. Who’s going to marry you in New York?”

“There are lots of men there. Men, not boys. Men with money.”

“Your father doesn’t want you to marry a millionaire. He wants you to marry someone with something up here,” tapping her head.

“What about what I want?”

“You got your mink, didn’t you? You got your Thunderbird, didn’t you? Think of your father, for a change. Try college. Will it kill you to try?”

“I’ll be a dud-avocado. I’m a half-breed. You fixed me up good, marrying a Jew.”

“Do I hold it against you that you’re a Jew? Don’t hold it against me that I married one.”

“Very funny.”

“Try college. Rich boys get educated, too.” “Not at Far Point College.”

“You wouldn’t know one if you fell over one. They’re very subtle.”

• • •

Take Charles Shepley, for example; take the afternoon of the Inferno. “Charles?” “What?” “Are you rich?” “Sure.”

“Is that why you don’t have to be in the Inferno?”

“Not exactly.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, not really.”

“Yes it is. I know it is.”

“All right. It is.”

“You’re rich and that’s why you don’t want things.” “Umm-hmmm.”

“And you don’t propose, for you are trifling with me.”

“Propose? I have three more years of college.”

“But you don’t have to be anything, because you’re rich, so you don’t have to be graduated.”

“You have it all figured out … Watch for a red barn on the left.”

“Don’t order me around or I’ll get on my high horse!”

“Look. You want to go into New York, don’t you? You want to buy the Pucci, don’t you, and see your friend Swanny, and go to the Plaza, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then watch for a red barn on the left.” “I
hate
this sort of thing!” “Do you think I like it?”

“What’d we have to pack a hamper of sandwiches for? What do we have to act like we’re going on a picnic for?”
“You
didn’t have to pack anything.”

“It’s in my
car!”

“So there’s a hamper of sandwiches in your car; is that too much to ask of you?”

“It’s going to smell up this car.”

“We’ll throw them out, Lois, as soon as I’ve made the rendezvous with Hagerman.”

“The
rendezvous.
It sounds like bad James Bond.”

“Okay, okay. Just do what I tell you, and it’ll all be over very fast.”

“It’s for kids.”

“Most fraternity stuff is!”

“Did you have to join a fraternity to please your father who is a tycoon in his own right?” “You guessed it.”

“You don’t even smile. You
are
heavy!” “There it is! Stay to your left.” “Ho hum.”

“It isn’t my idea of an afternoon’s fun, either.” “What if Hagerman makes you stay here for hours?” “He won’t. I just had to look like I was setting off on an Inferno.”

“The stores close at six.”

“I know when the stores close. I
live
in New York, remember?”

“I’m just a taxi!”

“I’m sorry about it … Now turn off here.” “I don’t know why I had to come along on this secret rendezvous. Why couldn’t you have met me after?”

“Because I didn’t want to take a bus out here and back.” “Why can’t I meet this Hagerman?”

“Because you can’t. I don’t want him to know anyone’s around.”

“Is he rich, too?”

“We’re all millionaires. Okay?”

“What if he sees my car?”

“That’s why we’re here early, so he won’t see the car.” “I may just call out to him, ‘Hagerman, come and see the car!’ ”

“Do that. And kiss your Pucci goodbye.”

“I like a fun millionaire. You’re not a fun millionaire.”

“When this is over, I’ll be lots of fun.”

“Where will we go for dinner?”

“Longchamps. Okay?”

It would not surprise her if he were serious. On his own, Charles Shepley never suggested anything expensive to do. She forgave him the Bluebird of Happiness, because it was the only place near Far Point where students could go for that, but when they went to dinner, he never picked the Villa Arturo in Dobbs Ferry, or the Water Wheel Inn in Ardsley, or Le Gai Pinguin in White Plains;
she
had to suggest places like that, or they would wind up in some awful four-dollar student steak house.

He was never reluctant to go to the better places; it was just that, left to his own devices, he would not take her to them.

He was a little
too
subtle for Lois Faye.

Her mother was right, she would not have known Charles Shepley was rich if she had fallen over him.

Little things gave him away. He was certainly not in the millionaire class, Lois Faye didn’t
think,
but he had money. Her first inkling had come when he had actually ordered a bottle of champagne for them on the night she had met him. She was always telling boys she wanted champagne. Usually they asked the waiter for a couple of highballs; at best, a champagne cocktail, but Charles had ordered a full bottle without batting an eye. He had been to Europe with his family; he lived in the 500 block in the East Eighties, which meant East End Avenue, veddy chic; he paid for the room at the Bluebird, whether or not they used it; he could blow thirty dollars on dinner without so much as a frown when the waiter brought the check…. On the subject of money, Charles Shepley was a very cool character. And he gambled.

But he was a boy. Just as he did not whisk her off for continental cuisine in an elegant setting without a little prodding, neither did he surprise her with a string of real pearls, or a little gold bracelet; he needed a push, a diagram. He did not know how to do, and it was probably because he didn’t that Lois Faye found herself not the least intimidated by him, and consequently not in any way inhibited with him.

“What
is
it with you and me?” she would ask him sometimes in bed. “What’s what?”

“Why doesn’t it
hurt?
It’s supposed to hurt a girl.” “Not if she wants it.” “What do I
want
it for?” “Why don’t you just enjoy it?”

“I
do
… I hate it!”

“You’re probably in love with me.”

“No, I’m not!”

“We’re probably in love.”

“We are
not!”

“Then what is it with you and me?” “I don’t know. I hate it!”

She did hate it, too, because sometimes she could not stop herself.

“It’s chemistry,” Terry Swan had told her flatly, over a drink at the Drake, during Christmas vacation. “It’s not a good thing to happen the first time, darling.”

“Why?”

“You’ll imagine you’re in love with him.”

“Hunh-uh. He’s not my dish. Very unsophisticated.”

“Wait until you kiss Sidney Sophisticated. You’ll go scampering back to dear old Charlie. Chemistry is lethal. I’m glad it didn’t happen to me the first time. I’d be a dancing teacher’s wife. My chemistry lesson teaches the merengue to over-forties.”

“You didn’t marry
him?”

“I might’ve, if I’d been your age when I met him.” “Anyway, Charles never mentions marriage; we’re very cool.”

“What are you going to say if he asks you?”

“I’m going to tell him that I want to come to New York, that I don’t feel like settling down so soon.”

“If you’ve gotten that far in your fantasies, you want him to ask you.”

“No I don’t!”

“Sure you do, darling!”

“I do not. Not at all!”

But it did bother her that Charles Shepley took her for granted. No one ever really jokes; last night’s little trick of running out on him while he was in the bathroom at the Bluebird had made her laugh, but her sense of humor had not given her the sudden impulse to flee. Nor had it been all that easy to leave, after the session on the bed beforehand, nor had she rested very well back in bed at the dorm.

He had his hold on her; it had nothing to do with a Pucci blouse, but Charles Shepley was not going to know it.

She parked her car where he told her to, a half mile down from the red barn on the road to Pearl River, about fifteen miles from Far Point.

“Why can’t I come with you? I’ll hide behind the barn.” “Lois, will you just do this one little thing the way I want it done?”

“What’ll you buy me?” “The Pucci;
right?”

“That’s for coming out here,” she laughed, “not for sitting in the car while you go off on a mysterious rendezvous.” He said, “Just be good. You owe it to me after last night.” “I paid for the room.”

“Why don’t you just sit here in the car and make up a sign with ‘I Paid For The Room’ written on it? Okay?” “I may not be here when you come back.” “That wouldn’t surprise me, either.”

He got the hamper out of the back of the car, and trudged down the road with it, and Lois Faye snapped on the radio and lit a cigarette. She was on her sixth cigarette when she saw a red Corvair pull up to the barn in the distance.

The whole sorority-fraternity thing was too much.

Last night out in front of the Unmuzzled Ox, she had come upon a group of girls on their knees making Praise Allah gestures and singing: “I am so goddam glad that I am ma Ka-ap-pa, Ka-ap-pa, Ka-ap-pa, Gam-am-ah"; a tall redheaded girl standing over them while they sang had waited until they finished, and then commanded them to flush like toilets. They had all flattened out on their bellies in their heels and hose and pushed their bottoms up and down and made gurgling sounds, while a crowd gathered to laugh.

Try college.

I never had an education; you’re going to.

So for a while she kept on listening to the radio, and then she smoked her seventh cigarette, and then she got out of the car and stretched.

Secret rendezvous.

Hah!

She started walking toward the red barn in her yellow poor boy and her purple bell-bottoms and her white round-toed boots, giggling to think of Charles looking up in the midst of his rendezvous and seeing her off in the adjoining cornfield posed as a scarecrow.

But when she was halfway there, the Corvair zoomed away from the barn, kicking up a dust cloud behind it.

She found Charles on his knees near the barn door, picking up pieces of silverware which had fallen from the hamper.

“What happened?”

“Hagerman had a little temper fit. He kicked the hamper over.”

“Did you pay him off?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s all settled; as soon as I get this stuff picked up, we’ll take off.”

“I have to change my clothes.”

“Why can’t you go like you are? I’m not supposed to be seen in Far Point until the Inferno’s over.” “Will you be embarrassed if I’m like this?” “No … pick up that thermos, will you?” “Where’d
it
come from?”

“It belongs to the house. Hagerman brought it with him.”

“Why? What’s in it?”

“Ice. He was going to have a drink with me. Then he changed his mind.” “I
love
a mystery.”

“So do I. He came out here in a good mood, and left in his usual foul temper.” “What’d you do?”

“Nothing he didn’t count on … I pity Dan Thorpe.”

“I don’t pity any of you. You’re all silly!”