The Books of Fell (8 page)

The envelope Ping had sent it in was addressed to W. Thompson Pingree, Gardner School, Cottersville, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

There were two letters from my mother inside. Even she had to write to me in Switzerland, where Ping would forward her mail. Pingree had insisted.

There was also a note from Ping.

I was rereading my mail in Hull House on a Sunday morning in October, anxious to get a letter off to Delia before “my father” arrived. It was Pingree’s first visit. He was going to chapel with me.

“Just think,” Dib said behind me, “right now, in that luxurious clubhouse in the bottom of The Tower, there’s the aroma of rib roast cooking for the Sevens to enjoy after chapel! They’ll have rib roast, mashed potatoes. We’ll be lucky to have chicken again. They’ve got it made, haven’t they?”

“One thing I’m sick of,” I said, “is everyone’s obsession with the Sevens! God, who are they that everyone runs around in awe of them?”

“Wouldn’t you like to be one?”

“Only because of all their privileges.”

“And their meals.”

“That’s part of their privileges.”

“They’re like another race,” Dib said. “The Master Race.”

Dib was munching on some Black Crows. He was always eating. Eating stuff like Hostess Ding Dongs, M&M’s, Fruit Bars, and Sno-Caps. Dib was like most kids who’d rather eat Whoppers at Burger King than duckling à l’orange at the best French restaurant. He thought frozen Lean Cuisine was gourmet food, and a box of Sara Lee double chocolate layer cake was a better dessert than fresh-made key lime pie. It wasn’t just the food Sevens were privileged to have, that we weren’t that got to Dib. It was the whole aura of Sevens, and it got to everyone. Everyone at Gardner envied them, watched them, gossiped about them, and wished they were part of them.

The night before, Lasher had taken Dib out to Willing Wanda’s for Dib’s sexual initiation.

When he came back, Dib said, “Did you ever hear an old song called ‘Is That All There Is?’“

“Yes. Some woman named Peggy Lee made a record of it. My mom loved it.”

“In it, this kid sees a fire and says is that all there is to a fire?”

“Right.”

“That’s how I felt about what went on at Willing Wanda’s.”

“You’ll feel more when you’re in love.”

“I hope so. I’d rather eat a box of Mallomars or dig into a plate of Chicken McNuggets.”

“Chicken McNuggets,” I said, and I put two fingers down my throat and retched.

Dib was working on his paper for the New Boys Competition. There were always rumors about how one got tapped for Sevens, and one of them was that the N.B.C. had something to do with it. All new students were required to write a paper by the last day of October. The theme that year was “They All Chose America.” You could choose any group that’d immigrated. Dib was doing the Irish. I got the bright idea to do Japanese-Americans, and to call mine “Arizona Darkness.”

I had only the title and some books from the library about President Roosevelt’s executive order 9066, which sent 150,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps back in World War Two. They were given less than forty-eight hours to gather their possessions together for evacuation. Although there were three times as many Americans of Italian descent living on the West Coast, they weren’t affected. Neither were German Americans. Only Japanese.

I wanted to answer Delia’s letter before I worked on that.

Dib said, “Name some famous Irish-Americans.”

“How about the Kennedys?”

“I’ve got them.”

“I want to write a letter before my father gets here,” I said, “so don’t talk to me, okay?”

“Dear Delia,” Dib said, “how are things in Switzerland?”

He thought that’s where she was, and that was why I got mail from Switzerland. I let him think it.

I addressed the letter c/o The Worldwide Tours Group, Goodship Cruise, San Francisco, California, for forwarding. Then I put that letter into an envelope addressed to John Fell at L’Ecole la Coeur. Ping would mail it for me.

Just as I was finishing, the buzzer rang three short, one long, my signal.

“Your dad’s here,” said Dib.

I hadn’t seen or talked to Pingree since early September. I never called him, though I’d memorized his phone number in case of emergency. He didn’t even want me to write it in my address book. That was just one of his rules, along with others like no photographs of myself at Gardner ever. He said to take sick the day they scheduled class pictures for the yearbook. Avoid all cameras!

I wore the new tan gabardine suit he’d bought me. He had on a dark, vested, pin-striped one.

“What a day!” he said. It was warm and the sun was out. “I’m glad to see you, my boy! I’m glad you’re doing so well!”

I walked along beside him, down the path toward chapel.

“I haven’t gone below A since I’ve been here, so it must agree with me. I’m not repeating that much, either. It’s harder here than it was in public school.”

“Your monthly report was excellent, Fell! That paper you did for classics, what did you call it? The one you got an A+ on?”

“‘The Purple Carpet.’ Did they mention that?”

“Dr. Skinner reported that you have a flair for composition. I even showed it to Fern, because of the carpet business. That would be like Ping, you know. He was always intrigued by magic carpets.
The Arabian Nights.
It sounded like Ping.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with
The Arabian Nights,”
I said.

“It doesn’t matter. Fern thought it did. She said, ‘You see, I was right. He got past all that Tower business.’” Pingree chuckled. He clapped his arm around my shoulder, an inch of ash dropping off his cigarette. “It’s working out. You’re doing fine!”

“And Ping?”

“He loves it over there! When I spoke to him last night on the telephone, I said, ‘Complain a little more. You don’t sound like yourself.’“

In chapel, the Gardner choir sang:

Pingree wiped tears from his eyes.

• • •

After, Pingree said, “I can’t stay for Sunday dinner. I don’t want to get involved up here, anyway. But good Lord, it takes me back to walk around this place!”

“How are things in Seaville?”

“The same. Is your mother happy in Brooklyn?”

“They still can’t find a decent apartment. But she says it’s so good to be a subway ride from Macy’s again she doesn’t care.”

We both chuckled, and then he stopped as he saw The Tower.

“Ah! The Tower!”

“Do you want to walk over there?” I asked him. “My roommate says they’re cooking rib roast down in the Sevens’s clubhouse for Sunday dinner.”

“Yes, their Sunday dinners are always the envy of everyone. Steak Wednesday nights, so they say. The inside of that clubhouse is supposed to be very elegant! No, I’ll just admire it from a distance, as I always did.”

We started walking along again.

“What did you name your tree?” I asked him.

“My tree. I almost forgot about planting that tree.”

“That was one thing you didn’t warn me about.”

“I completely forgot. You plant it, you forget it. I named mine Sara. That was my first wife’s name.”

“You knew her way back then?”

“Oh yes. Way back then.” He lit another cigarette. “She went to Miss Tyler’s in Princeton. You would have liked her. She was always questioning what it all meant. What we were put on this earth for, all that sort of thing. She was a philosophy major. She was my first melancholy baby. Do you know that song?”

“No.”

“You don’t know ‘Melancholy Baby’?” “No, I don’t.”

“I can’t believe they don’t still sing it.”

“Maybe they do. I don’t know it. I guess Delia’s a melancholy baby, too. She doesn’t sound like she loves the trip she’s on.”

“Ah, yes. Delia.”

“We write,” I said.

“Well, good.”

“She’s going around the world. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did. Do you really love this Delia, Fell?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s good, that you don’t know.”

“Why is it good?”

“Love is such an interference. When it happens to you, you let your guard down. You should never let your guard down.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said. I don’t know what he was thinking of, but I was thinking of Keats, and how she’d treated me once she could take me for granted…. I still hadn’t written to Keats.

“You know, Fell — I should call you Thompson around here, or Tom — I’ve grown very fond of you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I like you, too.”

“I’m going to travel next month, and I got worried over the idea what if something happens to me? Where would that leave you? So I’ve already transferred the first ten thousand to a savings account for you. Here’s your book.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll skip out on you now that I have the money?” I laughed.

“No. I trust you. I know you won’t touch it until your year is over. Your allowance is sufficient, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and I have some extra from selling the Dodge.”

I took a look at the bank book. It was from the Union Trust Company in Brooklyn Heights. John T. Fell. The T. was for Theodore, my grandfather’s name. When I’d gone to the nursing home to tell him that I was going away to school in Switzerland, that I’d won a Brutt scholarship to go there, he’d said, “I was named after Theodore Roosevelt, Johnny. Did I ever tell you why?” I was in a hurry. I had to tell him yes, he’d told me why. I still felt lousy about that.

Pingree said, “I was going to put the money in trust for you, in your mother’s name.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. MasterCard would get their hands on it, or Visa, or some collection agency. My mother owes all over the place.”

“I realize that. And you’re a big boy. We have to trust each other, don’t we, Fell?”

“Yes, we do,” I agreed. “I’m working hard on the French, too. By Christmas I’ll
sound
like I’ve been going to L’Ecole la Coeur.”

“I’m not worried about you,” he said. He let the cigarette drop from his mouth, stepped on it, and said, “Walk me down to my car. I love this place, you know. I was happiest right here.”

November. I was out in front of Hull House one afternoon reading a letter from Keats. Even if it hadn’t been written to me, and wasn’t signed, I would have known it was Keats’s, right away.

Then from behind me someone shouted, “SEVENS!”

I whirled around. It was Lasher glaring down at me through those thick glasses. I thought of Ping’s glasses, and I thought of that suicide back in Brooklyn who my father said wasn’t a suicide, because his glasses were smashed beside his body.

I was supposed to answer with seven things that went together.

“Grammar,” I said, trying to remember all the seven sciences, “Logic, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy, and … and …”

“And?”
Lasher said. “Are you naming the seven medieval sciences?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what have you left out?” “I don’t know.”

“You left out Rhetoric, Thompson!”

Lasher had on an old tweed topcoat, with the collar up. He had his stubble beard with his stubble mustache. I wished my father’d lived to see stubble get to be an in thing. My father used to come home from all-night jobs unshaved, complaining that he looked like some bum.

“Okay,” I said. “The seven names of God. El, Elohim — ”

Lasher cut me off. “No second chances, Thompson!”

He came around to face me, his hands sunk in his pockets. The wind blew back his thick black hair. I could never see his eyes. The leaves were off the trees above us. It was a blustery, late-fall afternoon. I was cold in just a yellow turtleneck sweater and tan cords.

“I want you to go to The Tower after your dinner tonight,” said Lasher, “and place a lighted candle on every step. You’ll find the candles and their ceramic holders in a carton outside the Sevens clubhouse. Do you understand, Thompson?”

“What about study hall?”

“Just tell the proctor you’re on a Sevens assignment. Get your ass there by seven-thirty. Seven-thirty, sharp, scumbag!”

“All right.”

“You go all the way to the top. Then press the clubhouse bell so we can all come out and admire your handiwork before you blow them all out on your way back down.”

“All right.”

“Stupid!” Lasher growled as he walked away. “You left out Rhetoric!”

It was a Wednesday. We always had a test at the start of French on Thursday mornings. I usually studied hard on Wednesday nights. I wouldn’t that Wednesday night. Not after one hundred and twenty steps.

“He’s really a sadist,” Dib said. “I have a theory about why he is.” “Why is he?”

Dib was eating a Baby Ruth, getting ready for dinner. Our room in Hull House looked as if burglars had just left it. Dib never closed a door he opened, or picked up anything he took off. We never had room inspections. No one ever got on our backs about whether or not the beds were made. The only tyranny at Gardner was Sevens.

“He’s mean because God gave him that one flaw,” Dib said. “His eyesight. That’s the real snake in the grass.”

“He ought to get contact lenses. His eyes are real pretty.”

“He can’t wear them. He gets allergic to anything in his eyes. Creery says if Lasher didn’t have to wear those glasses you could shave him, put a dress on him, and ask him to go out on a date.”

“Except he wouldn’t go out with Creery,” I said. “Creery’s too much of a stonehead.”

“Creery says he’s mean because both his parents are shrinks, and shrinks’ kids are always messes. Sevens is his real family — that’s why he makes so much of it. He’s been in Sevens since he was fourteen.”

“Maybe he’s mean because his family shipped him out when he was so young.”

“Or maybe,” said Dib, “his family shipped him out when he was so young because he was mean.”

The dinner bell rang and we went downstairs and walked across the commons together.

“I’d be a little scared to go up in The Tower by myself after dark,” Dib said.

“I’m not looking forward to it.”

“You should have packed your gun.”

“I never carry it or load it.”

“Yeah. Guns scare the hell out of me, too.”

“I know a girl who got turned on by the sight of that gun.”

“Delia?”

“Yeah, Delia.”

“Why don’t you have a picture of her?” “We never took any.”

“Ask her for one. I’d like to see this Trembling Delia.”

“I’ve asked her and asked her.” In my last letter to her, I underlined my request in red. When she answered it, she wrote:
Oh, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how I look,

F

E

L

L

That was all. I shook the envelope to be sure she hadn’t put a photograph inside. She hadn’t. I sometimes thought if I hadn’t been assigned to Dib for a roommate, I’d walk everywhere alone at Gardner. I wasn’t good at making friends with kids whose smiles and clothes and walks shouted money, prep school, connections, tennis!

Dib and I were two of a kind that way. He didn’t make friends easily, either. His father wasn’t a captain of industry. His father was the great-grandson of one. He drank a lot and raised orchids and a brand of wrinkle-faced dogs called Chinese SharPeis. Dib’s brother had gone from Gardner to a seminary, to become a priest.

Dib said his mother was strange, too. She went to séances and hunted ducks they raised on their farm for her to hunt.

He’d asked me once if my family was strange. He’d said your father didn’t look it, in chapel. What you know about someone from looking at him is zilch, I’d said, but I’d played down my family. I’d just said they were both physicists. I’d said my mother painted.

On the way to dinner that night he asked me how come a physicist had a gun like that?

My one slip. The gun. I’d told Dib my father’d given it to me.

“He’s a collector,” I said.

“I hope you’re not from Mafia,” Dib said. “That gun looked like something the Godfather’d pack. Are you sure your real name isn’t Pingratti?”

I laughed hard and felt my knees go weak.

“No. My real name’s not Pingratti,” I said.

After dinner I told the proctor I had a Sevens assignment.

“In that case …” He shrugged. You could get away with anything at Gardner if Sevens said so.

I walked over to The Tower. The campus lights were on.

I could smell steak. We’d had Spanish rice and beets for dinner.

I could see inside the Sevens clubhouse, where the curtains fell apart in one window near the bottom of the steps.

I looked in.

It was like some kind of movie set in there. MGM filming King Arthur’s Court, only the knights were all in light-blue blazers and black top hats. It looked like a convention of chimney sweeps.

There were enough silver candelabras set out on the long dinner table to make Liberace look chintzy. There were four waiters running around in white jackets. I could see floor-to-ceiling bookcases all around the room, and a roaring fire inside a walk-in stone fireplace.

I could see Creery in there with a hand-painted palm tree tie around the neck of one of those formal shirts usually worn under tuxedo jackets. He looked like his old goofy self, the top hat covering his shaved head, two razor-blade earrings dangling from his left earlobe. I got to work.

I pulled over the carton near the stairs, and began my ascent. I had to drag the carton up with me. There were oven matches inside, and the ceramic holders were tall enough to keep the candles from blowing out in the wind.

I thought about Mom and Jazzy, wishing I could get to Brooklyn for Thanksgiving. I used to always make the stuffing, a corn-bread one with sausage and mushrooms. I longed to cook again. Mom had a job as a hostess in a restaurant down near the World Trade Center in New York City. She was looking for something in catering or fancy food. She’d written that she made just enough money to last the month, unless she bought something. She’d write
Ha! Ha!
after one of her jokes. She’d put it in parentheses. Sometimes she’d write
(Sob!)
… I
miss you (Sob!).
She said Jazzy was working on costumes for Georgette, since soon Georgette was going to discover her real parents were Rumanian royalty.
(She pronounces it “Woomanian.” She thinks they dress in furs and crowns.)

Sometimes in his sleep, Dib would whimper and cry, “Mommy? Are you there?” He’d get me thinking. Are you there, Mommy? Jazzy? Georgette?

I thought of Delia, too. Delia with the slow smile and long kisses, dancing on the wet grass to “Don’t go changing.”

I thought of Keats going to the Stiles Gallery, and I thought of a lot of orange seaweed in green water, called
Sara.

When I was at the top of The Tower, I looked down at all the candles, and I remembered once when the Stileses went out, we’d let the candles burn down in their living room, Delia and I, while we held each other on the long, beige sofa.

It was the first time I’d told her I loved her.

“Don’t make me say I love you, Fell.”

“Who said you had to say it?”

“I thought you’d expect it because you said it.”

“I did, but I’m not going to stay awake nights if you don’t say it.” I stayed awake a lot of nights because she didn’t say it. I knew I would when I said I wasn’t going to stay awake nights if she didn’t say it.

Just as I was about to go inside the room at the top of The Tower to ring the clubhouse bell, I heard Lasher’s voice behind me. I jumped. He held me with his hand around my neck.

“Thompson, look down there at the ground and tell me if it makes you want to jump.”

“No, I don’t want to jump.” My heart was racing. How’d he get up there?

“I named my tree Suicide, Thompson.”

“I heard you did. If you want to jump, let go of me first.” He held me near the edge of the wall, and I thought, He’s crazy. I’m up here by myself with this maniac.

Then Creery’s voice came like a sweet release. “Knock it
off,
Lasher!”

Lasher let go of me.

Creery had a lantern flashlight. He was shutting a gate in the little stone-walled room behind us. It was the first time I knew anything about an inside elevator in The Tower.

Creery pushed the clubhouse bell.

It rang out in the windy night. There was a moon overhead, with clouds passing through its face — now you see it, now you don’t. Below us, there were shouts as the Sevens poured out of their clubhouse.

Creery put the lantern on the table. He picked up a bullhorn and walked out to where we were.

I thought of sunny days in summer by the ocean when Daddy shouted through his bullhorn, “HELEN? I WANT YOU!”

“SEVENS!” Creery shouted.

Then the Sevens shouted up in thinner voices: “Wisdom! Understanding! Counsel! Power! Knowledge! Righteousness! Godly fear!”

Creery led the singing.

At the thought of The Hill …

While they sang the song, I remembered something my father’d once said, that anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung. But it was then that Lasher stopped singing and started talking while they sang, grabbing my shoulders with his hands; behind him, Creery’s razorblade earrings bobbed as he sang and shook his head up and down.

Lasher was calling me Pingree.

“You made Sevens, Pingree!”

Creery said, “Congratulations, Pingree!”

Lasher and Creery had turned me around so I stood looking down at the candles in the wind, with the moon shifting above us, the sounds of their singing, the lights of Gardner scattered over The Hill.

Below, with their top hats flying into the night, they shouted seven times: “PINGREE! PINGREE! PINGREE! PINGREE! PINGREE!

PINGREE! PINGREE!”

Then Creery said, “We’ll take the elevator down to our clubhouse, Pingree.”