Through the Hidden Door (3 page)

“Easy, Martin. The boy’s right about the rug. His father’s an antiques dealer. Mail order world wide. Pennimen even does the drawings for his father’s catalogue. Get some newspaper from that table,” said Finney gently, emptying his pipe into an ashtray and then spilling the ashtray on the floor. “Put it over the mess. We’ll clean it up later.” He looked at me.

“Mr. Finney, how’s the dog?” I asked.

Finney sat back in his chair and looked at me quizzically, tapping his pipe stem on his front teeth. “Good for you, Pennimen,” he answered at last. “The dog is fine, or will be. You just saved your neck, by the way.”

“How?”

“By asking ‘How’s the dog?’ rather than ‘What will my punishment be?’ An unfeeling boy would have looked after himself first.”

I didn’t react to this slight ray of sunshine. Finney went on. “The dog had jammed a bone between two of her teeth and couldn’t get it out. As for the stoning, she has some cuts that will heal. Her trachea, that’s the windpipe, was badly bruised. She’ll have a plastic tube in it for three days, until she can swallow and breathe properly again. She’ll be home Thursday. As for her future attitude toward boys, I can’t say. This brings me to what happens to you.”

“Yes?” I swallowed hard, wishing the plastic tube were in me instead.

Silks picked up the telephone and ordered somebody at the other end of the line to round up Rudy and the rest. I only prayed that I would be long out of the headmaster’s office by the time they showed up.

Over Silks’s voice Finney went on. “You acted stupidly and shamefully, Pennimen, but you were not craven or savage like the other boys. You certainly weren’t brave like Clarence Cobb.”

“I know, Mr. Finney. I am sorry from the bottom of my heart ... I can’t say anything else.”

Finney passed a tobacco-smelling handkerchief across to me. “I’m glad you are sorry. I hope you mean it. I hope you’re sorry for all the other things you’ve done too.”

“I promise never—”

“We’ll see. You have been extremely stupid. You’re lucky to be alive after eating a bunch of toadstools. Despite your good grades you so far have a record at Winchester of being a total idiot as far as I’m concerned. And dishonest. But I have never wrecked a boy’s life when he tells the truth. So ... Saturday detention for you until Christmas. All honors canceled. All privileges and free weekends canceled until semester’s end. Up in the morning at five thirty for kitchen duty for the next six weeks. None of it on your permanent record if you have a clean sheet from now on. I will not destroy your future at Hotchkiss just because you’ve been a block-headed ass.”

Silks had been wiggling to say something. He slammed down the phone. I didn’t allow him to catch my eyes with his. I stared instead at the leather tassels on his loafers. “All right, Pennimen,” he began, “I want you to learn something about suffering.”

“Yes, Mr. Silks.”

“You go to the library. I don’t want to see you outside that library for the next month.”

“Yes, Mr. Silks.”

“I want you to write me a hundred pages on the ten worst disasters in history. I want the black plague, the wipeout of Mexico City. I want tidal waves, famines, floods, and avalanches. Got it? Now get out of here and start writing.”

There was a slow, grudging knock on the office door.

“That’ll be Rudy Sader and friends,” said Silks.

I thought I would dissolve, like a germ in a dish of penicillin.

“Go out this way, Pennimen,” said Finney, and grinning, he pushed open a window to the outside.

S
ADER AND DAMASCUS WERE
in my room when I got back from the library at ten. Finney had expelled all five untouchables from Winchester.

“I didn’t open my mouth, guys! Finney’s old lady saw us. Dr. Dorothy saw us,” I told them over and over. When that didn’t work, I lied more colorfully. “Silks put my fingers in a finger vise and got it out of me.”

“Yeah?” said Danny. “Let’s see your hands.”

Oh, why hadn’t I prepared myself? Lying effectively means good groundwork, like preparing for an exam. I could have roughed up my knuckles a little. Dragged them through the driveway.

“Not a mark on his hands!” said Danny. “The turd is lying. How about I show you what I can do to your hands, huh, creep? I’ll break each finger for you four ways.”

Rudy put out a restraining hand. “We can’t touch him now.” He smiled broadly at me. “Not yet,” he added. “But we want you to know fear, Blossom. We want you to stink of fear. Got that? Because some day, some way, I’m gonna get you, and then Danny’s gonna get you, and after that your own mom won’t recognize you.”

“My mom’s dead,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, how would you like to pay her a visit?” said Danny sweetly.

During the next three days I might have been on the dark side of the moon. No one in my class talked to me and I talked to practically no one. The five boys had left the campus. I spent almost all my time in the library, taking notes on the bubonic plague of 1348. At night, I was exhausted from morning kitchen duty, which got me up long before sunrise.

Then suddenly, Saturday morning at breakfast, mimeographed slips were on everyone’s plate. They explained that Mr. Finney had resigned because of a sudden illness. Mr. Silks was to take his place as headmaster and had taken the oath of office that very morning, so to speak. By noon Rudy and Danny and the three others were back. They played first string against North Hampton Prep that afternoon, with Rudy at quarterback.

At four o’clock, when I left the library, I noticed orange-topped stakes in the ground in one of the empty meadows near the school. I went over to have a look. On the seat of the pickup truck that was parked along the road was a clipboard. The top paper on it was an invoice reading, Karlo V. Damascus Memorial Swimming Pool, Winchester Acad.

That night the school was heaving with rumors. None of them was true but one. Rudy, Danny, Shawn, Brett, and Matt had been granted full pardons for whatever it was they had done. Not many people seemed to know exactly what that was.

Next morning I went right to Mr. Silks. The headmaster’s office had been transformed overnight. Gone were the rug and the leather chairs and the Indian art. No calfskin-bound volumes lined the walls. The bookshelves themselves had been taken down. The office was painted avocado and harvest gold. The furniture was grisly Danish modern.

“I know why you’re here, Pennimen,” said Silks. “Your punishment stands.”

“But the others!” I pleaded. “They got off scot-free.”

“That was a decision of the board of trustees,” said Silks. “You were given a punishment by the former headmaster. I see no reason to lift it.”

I knew that arguing would probably get me a bath in the septic tank. Still I said, “But, Mr. Silks it isn’t fair.”

“You’ll find one thing changed here, Pennimen,” said Silks.

“Yes, Mr. Silks?”

“We don’t like whiners, tattletales, toadies, or stool pigeons here at Winchester.”

“Yes, Mr. Silks.”

“You put liquor in your housemaster’s vaporizer, Pennimen. Possession of liquor is grounds for expulsion here at Winchester, not to mention all the other tricks you’ve pulled.”

“But they did them too. All of us did those things. This whole mess started because of the collie, and I didn’t do anything to the collie.”

“I believe that, Pennimen, like I believe the moon is made of green cheese. You were in it as much as they were. All you did was wiggle off the hook and point the finger at the other boys. I make it a policy never to believe a boy who rats on his friends. If I’d been headmaster last Monday, I’d have thrown you out of this school so fast you wouldn’t have seen the door slam in your face. If you don’t like your punishment, go to the board of trustees.”

I shifted my feet and stared at the floor. I didn’t know the board of trustees from the Chicago White Sox.

“While you’re in the library, Pennimen, look up Kipling’s poem ‘If.’ The one we read first term to cure your speech defect. Memorize it by Monday. Every morning before class I want you to come in this office and recite it to me. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. Silks.”

“If I can train a boy not to lisp, I can train him out of other bad habits. Now get out of here. You make me sick.”

The next week and the week after I closeted myself in the Herbert J. Vanderbilt Library when I wasn’t in class, on kitchen duty, or washing walls. No one in school talked to me by then. Rudy and the gang spread it far and wide that I had squealed on them. The whole school now called me traitor.

Vanderbilt Library was the pride of the school. It had more Corinthian columns, books, and microfilm, I reckoned, than the whole state of Colorado. I wondered if, at some distant time in the past, Herbert J. Vanderbilt’s son or grandson had been kicked out of Winchester and miraculously brought back in by means of this wonderful library.

Different boys came and went, researching papers and looking things up, but one boy was always there. It was Snowy Cobb, elflike, his skin bronze and his hair white blond. School rumor said that his mother was a famous Greek opera singer and his father a Norwegian fisherman. Or maybe his father was a Greek fisherman and his mother a Swedish opera singer. The name Cobb was a mystery. At any rate, he sat off in a corner. He consulted only a set of ancient blue reference books and used a magnifier to see what was on the pages. He took no notes. On his desk, at all times, he kept a small grayish object.

By the third Saturday in November I was up to my third disaster, India, a famine that killed three million. No one but Snowy and I were in the library that afternoon. The whole school had gone thirty miles away to cheer the team on as they faced Our Lady of Perpetual Help Middle School in Amherst. I prayed that Our Lady herself was watching the game and would personally see to it that Rudy got sacked painfully ten times and that Danny ran into a goalpost.

During the hours I’d spent in the stacks Snowy had not once raised his eyes to me or said a single word. Frequently I’d found myself staring at him, unblinking, as if I were gazing at a fire in a hearth. I decided that either Snowy was afraid of me, or he plain hated me.

But what was he looking up so feverishly? What was the little gray thing that he kept putting down on the pages? I would never have found out and everything that followed would never have happened except for a slow-flying hornet that started buzzing over Snowy’s head. He swatted at it, and his magnifier fell and smashed on the floor.

Snowy bit his lip. Then he knelt and began picking up the bits of glass. He swore softly. I cleared my throat. “Bad luck,” I said. “When’s your paper due?”

He glanced at me coldly from under his soft corn-silk hair. I figured he couldn’t weigh more than sixty pounds. After a little he decided to answer. “It isn’t a paper,” he grumbled.

“What is it, then?” I got up from my desk and ambled over to him.

“Research,” he snapped.

“On what?” I worked my way over to his desk.

“None of your business.” The little gray object on his desk was a bone. Tiny and all scratched up. It was no bigger than a joint on one of his fingers. The reference book was opened to a skeleton of a rhesus monkey. The text was in Latin.

“You read Latin?” I asked. He couldn’t have had much more than two months of Latin IA.

“Go away,” said Snowy. “Go away and be with your friends.”

“Snowy, they’re not my friends anymore. They’ve threatened to kill me because I ratted on them. That’s why I spend my afternoons in the library instead of checking books out. I’m scared to be anywhere on campus alone.”

Snowy closed the book with a slam. He began tracing the foil-stamped design on its cover with an index finger. The big hand on the library clock clucked the passing minutes several times before he opened his mouth. Finally he muttered, “You have a reputation of being thoroughly rotten. Mr. Silks said in assembly that certain boys were thoroughly rotten, and everybody knows who he means.”

“I am thoroughly rotten,” I said miserably. “But I’m trying to be better. My life isn’t over yet. At least I hope it’s not.”

Snowy opened the book again and flattened the spine. “That’s not the page you were on before,” I said. “This is a lemur. You were on rhesus monkey.”

“This is the rhesus monkey.”

“No, it isn’t. Can’t you see ... I stopped myself. Of course he couldn’t see. His magnifier was gone. “Would you like some help?” I asked. “I can read this pretty well.”

He shifted in his chair. “I guess so,” he answered.

“What are you looking for?”

“See this bone?” He held it up. “It’s a leg bone from something.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“It was in Mr. Finney’s collie’s mouth. I went with Dr. Dorothy to the vet when we got the dog untangled. The vet pried it out from between two of the dog’s teeth. It took him a good fifteen minutes to get it out. When the bone fell out, it dropped on the floor. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.”

“And now you’re trying to find out what it’s from?”

“Well, yes. You see, it looked strange to me. The next day I showed it to Mrs. Glickman, in science class. She told me to go to the library and find out what it was. I haven’t found it yet, but at least I’m safe here from Sader and Damascus. They’re after me too, you know. I keep looking. This is my two-hundredth skeleton. The bone doesn’t match with anything.”

“How do you know it’s a leg bone?”

“It’s just a guess. It looks just like the femur, the upper leg bone in the human skeleton.”

I shrugged. “Then it’s got to be a monkey of some kind.”

“Yes, but all the monkey leg bones are curved and thin.” He pointed to one of the drawings in the book. “This is a straight bone, and thick.”

Again I shrugged. “How old do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.”

I picked the bone up off his desk. From what I’d seen of museums of natural history and a few science books, it did look like a leg bone. It had scratches and grooves up the shaft to the knob, which was cracked and half gone. “Can’t be very old. There were never great apes or missing links a zillion years ago in Massachusetts, I don’t think. It
must
be from a monkey.” I ransacked my feeble store of knowledge. “But this wasn’t ever, you know, a jungle or anything. I’m sure no monkeys ever lived here. It must have come from somewhere else. But how could a monkey get here? In the middle of Greenfield, Massachusetts?”