Night My Friend (42 page)

“What do you do now, Mark?” Gent asked.

“I’m on Wall Street. Investment banking. How about you fellows?”

“Insurance,” Gent mumbled. “Up in Vermont.”

Charlie Cottrell hesitated, then said, “I work on a little weekly newspaper near Boston. Doesn’t pay much, but I like the work. Relaxing. Only one deadline a week.”

“I guess you made it big,” Gent said to Wedmer. “Wall Street and all. Do you live in New York?”

“We have a duplex up near Central Park. Nice neighborhood. One of those co-ops, you know.”

An aging man, with bushy eyebrows partly compensating for his bald head, had appeared from somewhere to greet them. “You must be some of the old boys, up for homecoming,” he said. “Let’s see… I’m not too good at names after twenty-five years, so maybe you’d better identify yourselves. I’m Dean Adams.”

“Tom Gent.”

“Charlie Cottrell.”

“Mark Wedmer. We all remember you, sir. You haven’t changed at all.”

Dean Adams gave a low chuckle. “Looked just as old back in ’44, didn’t I? But tell me about yourselves. Were you all in the war? We lost so many boys in the war.”

They strolled and chatted for nearly an hour, while Dean Adams showed them the new gym and the recently completed dorm. “Big change from those little cottages we used to have—right? We’re a real Ivy League prep school now. Big time; more than a hundred already accepted for next year’s freshman class.”

By this time others had arrived, but their numbers were proving surprisingly slim. Of the thirty-five boys in the graduating class of 1944, it developed that twelve had died in World War II. Another three had died since that time, and two had dropped completely out of sight. That left eighteen who had been invited to the reunion, but of these only fourteen had come. They could hardly be noticed among the present student body and faculty.

Charlie Cottrell was first to recognize the last of the arrivals, a tall, handsome man with a touch of gray about his temples. “There’s Randy Maxwell, isn’t it?”

Mark Wedmer turned, startled at the words. He had been Randy’s roommate during their senior year, but it was obvious he’d seen little of the man in the intervening years.

“Randy! Randy, old boy! How the hell are you!”

Randy Maxwell had been president of the senior class and easily its most popular member. Tom Gent remembered hearing somewhere that he had stayed in the army for some time after the war. Now, though he still had his handsome features and ready smile, there was a certain weatherbeaten vagueness about his face, as if he’d been out in the rain just a little too long.

“Well,” he said, “all the old buggers back again. I haven’t seen some of your faces since graduation!”

“What you been doing with yourself, Randy?” Cottrell asked. “Probably got a wife and ten kids, huh?”

“Three wives and no kids,” Randy answered with a chuckle. “I know how to live.”

“How was the army, Randy?” someone else asked.

“Like any army, any time. Lots of loving and not much fighting. I get a pension from them now; not much, but enough so I can bum around when I want.”

Mark Wedmer stepped in close. “Didn’t make it big like you were always going to, huh?”

“Who…” Then he seemed to recognize the round face and chubby body. “I’ll be damned! It’s Wedmer! I thought you’d probably curled up and blown away by this time.”

Tom Gent, remembering it all now, wondered how he could ever have forgotten. There were four of them—a loose-knit inner circle of schoolboys, smoking in the gym, sneaking out after hours, doing all the things that schoolboys did back in 1944; four of them—Cottrell and Gent and Maxwell and… Yes, Franklin, but he’d died somewhere along the road to Paris, in 1944. The four of them; and Mark Wedmer had been Randy’s bunkmate, a natural object of ridicule and jokes. No wonder Mark was now gloating at his own success.

They spent the early hours being received by the faculty, sitting in on classes, watching a soccer game, all the usual things. The president was new, and so were many of the teachers. Only Dean Adams and a few others were remembered from the old days.

“Yours was an unlucky class,” the Dean told them as they strolled in groups along the shaded walk that led out to the riding stables. “You’d all come from good homes, all expected to leave Aldon and go to college. It didn’t work out that way, of course, because the war came along. Mark, you were lucky in a way. A few minor infirmities kept you out of the army and you completed your education. For the rest, well, you all know how many of your class died over there, in North Africa or France or the Pacific. Of course some of you went back to college, and you managed to make out pretty well. You probably married and raised a family and achieved almost all of the goals you set for yourself back here at Aldon. Almost… I sometimes think that is the saddest word in the entire English language.”

They reached the stables, and Tom Gent remembered how it had been, riding on a Saturday afternoon along the trails that took them at one point high above the shoreline of Narragansett Bay, although the area was flat for the most part. He remembered other Saturdays; the bus excursion to Gilbert Stuart’s birthplace; the boat trip to the Newport Naval War College.

He remembered the Saturday that Mark Wedmer had tagged along with the four of them, and how they’d made his horse buck and throw him. They were always doing things like that to Mark, tormenting him with the casual sadism of the very young. Funny now that he had come through it all and made something of himself, while they—the rest of them—were only successful failures living out their middle-aged lives.

“Remember that tree?” Charlie Cottrell asked, pointing to the old dead oak that still stood beyond the stables. “It was a great one for climbing when nobody caught you. Remember it, Mark? The time we threw your pants up there and you had to climb up after them?”

“I remember,” Mark Wedmer said quietly. He was staring at Randy Maxwell, perhaps remembering that he had always been the ringleader in those scenes of childhood torment.

“Of course the stables are new since your time,” Dean Adams was saying. “One of our 1945 graduates donated them. He’s quite a successful oilman now.”

Randy took the lead going back, keeping them laughing with a string of jokes about traveling salesmen and sailors’ girls. It was much like the old days. They might never have left Aldon, except that now they were twenty-five years older and their steps were a little heavier along the path.

Dinner was a rousing affair, with the entire student body rising in a singing tribute to the old grads. The president gave a proper speech, and then Dean Adams took the microphone.

“We have the old boys back every year,” he began, “and I suppose by now I should be over the emotions of the event. But I’ll tell you it still moves me, still almost brings a tear to my eye. I like to think that we at Aldon have done something quietly great, that we’ve helped supply the leaders of this great land of ours. Not every class can be made up of one hundred percent winners, but every class has its share. The class of ’44 graduated at a difficult time in life, for our country and for yourselves. There aren’t many of you still alive, but those who are tell us that even at the brink of war Aldon could still turn out boys—and men—to excite our pride.

“This evening I’m especially pleased to be able to announce a memorial to your class, and to its brave members who died in battle. Your classmate Mark Wedmer has advised me of his intention to donate $100,000 to Aldon over the period of the next three years, to be used for a new science wing, something we’ve needed for far too long. I know you’ll join me in offering heartfelt thanks for the generous gift, on behalf of the class of 1944.”

There was a round of applause from the student body, and from the old boys, though Gent noticed that Randy Maxwell kept his hands in his lap. The old days were not so far gone after all. Perhaps Randy realized that this gesture was only Mark’s way of revenging himself for all those afternoons of teenage cruelty so very long ago.

After the speeches there were more songs, and then a basketball game in the new gym. Gent realized as the evening wore on that he’d fallen into an easy companionship with Cottrell and Maxwell, almost as if they were back in those golden pre-war days. They cheered together at every basket, and at the end of the game they clustered around the bench, talking with the boys and the coach. It was like old times.

Oddly, Mark Wedmer had joined them. He did not hang back as had been his habit in those earlier days, but instead seemed almost to be leading the conversations. He addressed many of his remarks to Randy, something he’d never ventured to do when they were classmates. “What do you think, Randy? They’re surely taller boys than in our day.”

“Yeah,” Randy agreed uncomfortably. “Sure are.”

Charlie Cottrell put his arm on Mark’s shoulder. “That was quite a thing, donating a hundred grand! I don’t see that much in ten years on the newspaper.”

“It was nothing,” Mark said. “Just making up for the old days.”

There was a strained silence, and Tom Gent leaped into it. “Randy, you haven’t seen the new swimming pool, have you? It’s right at the other end of this building.

The three of them strolled off in that direction, with Mark Wedmer bringing up the rear. It was obvious they were not to be rid of him that easily. They passed through a ceiling-high folding partition that separated the gym from the pool, and Gent began filling the awkward void with words. “Here it is, Randy. Great thing, isn’t it? Dean Adams says it’s NCAA regulation, just like all the colleges have.”

They stood at the edge of the pool, watching the gentle movement of the water from some unseen source. The odor of chlorine was heavy in the still air of the building.

“Diving and everything!” Charlie Cottrell observed. “They never had anything like this in our day. If they had, I’d probably have been a swimming champ in college.”

“You didn’t go to college, remember?” Randy reminded him.

“I did for a year, until I was drafted. I was doing good, too. I was really doing good.” He looked down at his hands. “I wonder where I’d have been today if the war hadn’t come along.”

Randy Maxwell gripped the tubular ladder that led into the pool at one end. “Probably you’d have been an investment banker, like Mark here. Right, Mark?”

“Maybe. Then again, maybe not.” Randy moved over closer to him. “Remember the time we tied you to the bed and gave you a hotfoot? Remember when we dumped the pail of water on you from the window?”

“I remember,” Mark Wedmer answered, tight-lipped.

“Those were the days. Things you can remember all your life.”

Cottrell joined in, chuckling. “There was the time we sneaked into town and left you to take the blame. Remember that, Mark?”

“I remember,” he repeated.

The crowd from the basketball game had departed now, and there was only silence from behind the big folding partition. The water, blue, clear, continued to ripple ever so slightly. Randy Maxwell chuckled too, and even Tom Gent joined in. They all remembered.

“But now we’re just old boys,” Randy said. “That was long ago.”

Mark turned as if to walk away from them, and Randy pushed him, hard. Mark staggered to keep his balance on the edge of the tile pool, but then slipped and toppled in. The water splashed the others as they stood laughing on the edge.

“I can’t swim,” Mark shouted. “Help me!”

Randy Maxwell stood with legs spread and hands on hips, looking down at the struggling figure in the water. “There’s the ladder, fatso. Grab hold of it.”

Somehow, gasping and snorting for breath, Mark managed to fling out a hand and catch the metal ladder. “I… help me…”

They stood there a moment longer, watching Mark struggle, and then Charlie Cottrell stepped forward. He brought his foot down hard on the grasping fingers that clung to the ladder. “Swim around a bit longer, Mark,” he said. “Swim around a bit.”

“I… help me… I can’t swim… Please…”

He tried to reach the edge of the pool one more time, but now they were all three on him. Gent grabbed Mark’s hair and forced his head under the surface, holding it down.

Mark broke free and pushed out to the middle, away from his tormentors. He gave one last terrified cry against the clear blue water, and then went under.

For a long time the three men stood there at the pool’s edge in silence, and Randy Maxwell slowly smoked a cigarette. He waited until the water again was perfectly smooth, with only the slight ripple they’d noticed before.

Then, finally, he turned to the others and said, “We’d better get some help for him. After all, he’s one of the old boys, like us.”

“Twilight Thunder” (
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,
January 1962). Copyright © 1961 H.S.D. Publications, Inc.; renewal copyright © 1989 Edward D. Hoch.

“The Night My Friend” (
The Saint Mystery Magazine,
British edition, July 1962). Copyright © 1962, 1990 Edward D. Hoch.

“The Suitcase” (
The Saint Mystery Magazine,
September 1962, as by Pat McMahon). Copyright © 1962 Fiction Publishing Co.; renewal copyright © 1990 Edward D. Hoch.

“The Picnic People” (
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,
March 1963). Copyright © 1963 H.S.D. Publications, Inc.; renewal copyright © 1991 Edward D. Hoch.

“Day for a Picnic” (
The Saint Mystery Magazine,
November 1963, as by Pat McMahon). Copyright © 1963 Fiction Publishing Co.; renewal copyright © 1991 Edward D. Hoch.

“Shattered Rainbow” (
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
, January 1964). Copyright © 1963 H.S.D. Publications, Inc.; renewal copyright © 1991 Edward D. Hoch.

“The Patient Waiter” (
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,
May 1964). Copyright © 1964 H.S.D. Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.

“Too Long at the Fair” (
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,
October 1964). Copyright © 1964 H.S.D. Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.

“Winter Run” (
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,
January 1965). Copyright © 1964 H.S.D. Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.