Shadowland (41 page)

 
   
'Hey!'
Tom said. He ran after her up the stairs. He could hear her moving frantically as a squirrel, trying to escape bun. When he reached the head of the stairs, he ran past the bedrooms and saw the hem of a black dress just vanishing around a corner at the end of the hall. To his side, through the glass and far away, lights burned deep in the forest and sent their reflections across the black lake.

 
   He reached the far end of the hall and realized that he had never been there before. The old woman had opened an outside door, one Tom had never seen, and was starting to descend an exterior staircase that curved back in toward the patio and the house. Tom got through the door before it closed and clapped a hand on the old woman's shoulder.

 
   She stopped as suddenly as a paralyzed hare. Then she looked up into his face with a compressed, dense mixture of expressions on her dry old face. A few white hairs grew from her upper lip. Her eyes were so brown as to look black, and her eyebrows were strongly, starkly black. He understood two things at once: she was foreign, and she was deeply ashamed that he had seen her.

 
   'I'm sorry,' he said.

 
   She jerked her shoulder away from his hand.

 
   'I just wanted to talk to you.'

 
   She shook her head. Her eyes were cold flat stones embedded in deep wrinkles.

 
   'Do you work here?'

 
   She made no movement at all, waiting for him to allow her to go.

 
   'Why weren't we supposed to see you?' Nothing. 'Do you know Del?' He caught a glimmer of recognition at the name. 'What's going on around here? I mean, how does all this stuff work? Why aren't we supposed to know you're here? Do you do the cooking? Do you make the beds?'

 
   No sign of anything but impatience to get away from him. He pantomimed breaking an egg into a pan, frying the egg. She nodded curtly. Inspired, he asked, 'Do you speak English?'

 
   
No:
a flat, denying movement of the head. She stabbed him with another black glance, and turned abruptly away and flew down the stairs.

 
   Tom lingered on the little balcony for a moment. From the bottom of the long hill, girdled by woods, the lake shone enigmatically up at him. He tried to find the spot where Coleman Collins had taken him in the sleigh, but could find no peak high enough — had all that really taken place only in his head? Far off in the distance he heard a man crying out in the woods.

 
His room had been prepared for the night. The bed was turned down, the bedside lamp shone on the Rex Stout paperback. That, and the clear-cut puzzles it contained, seemed very remote to him — he could not remember anything he had read the night before. The sliding doors between his room and Del's were shut.

 
   He went to the doors and gently knocked; no response. Where was Del? Probably he was out exploring — imitating Tom's actions of the night before. Probably that was what the 'warning' was about. Tom sighed. For the first time since getting on the train with Del, he thought of Jenny Oliver and Diane Darling, the two girls from the neighboring school; maybe it was Archie Goodwin and his strings of women that brought them to mind, but he wished he could talk to them, either of them. It had been a long time since he had talked to a girl: he remembered the girl in the window the magician had shown him — shown him as coolly as a grocer displays a shelf of canned beans.

 
   His room was barren and lonely. Its cleanliness, its straight angles and simple colors, excluded him. He hated being alone in it, he realized; but now he did not feel that he could go anywhere else. Loneliness assailed him. He missed Arizona and his mother. For a moment Tom felt utterly bereft: orphaned. He sat on the hard bed.and thought he was in jail. All of Vermont felt like a prison.

 
   Tom stood up and began to pace the room. Because he was fifteen and healthy, simple movement made him feel better. At that moment, in one of those peculiarly adult mental gestures which 1 see as characteristic of the young Tom Flanagan, he arrived at both a recognition and adecision. Shadowland, as much as he knew of it, was a test harder and more important than any he had ever taken at Carson; and he could not let Shadowland defeat him. He would use Collins' own maxim against him, if he had to, and discover how to do the impossible.

 
   He nodded, knowing that he was arming for a fight, and realized that he had lost the desire to cry which had come over him a moment before. Then he heard a noise from behind the sliding doors. It was a light, bubbling sound of laughter, muted, as if hidden behind a hand. Tom knocked again on the doors.

 
   The sound came again, even more clearly.

 
   'Del. . . you there?'

 
   'For God's sake, be quiet,' came Del's whisper.

 
   'What's going on?'

 
   'Keep your voice down. I'll be right there.'

 
   A moment later the left half of the door slid an inch back, and Del was scowling out at him. 'Where were
you
all day?' Del asked.

 
   'I want to talk to you. He made me think it was whiter — '

 
   'Hallucinatory terrain,' Del said. 'He's spending a lot of time with you, letting me knock around by myself . . . '

 
   'And I remember flying.' Tom felt his face assume some expression absolutely new to him, uttering this statement. He half — expected Del to deny it.

 
   'Okay,' Del said. 'You're having a whale of a time. I'm glad.'

 
   'And I met an old woman. She doesn't speak English. I had to practically tackle her to get her to stop running away. And your uncle . . . '

 
   His voice stopped. A girl had just walked into the tiny area of Del's room he could see. She wore one of Del's shirts over a black bathing suit. Her hair was wet and she had moth-colored eyes.

 
   Del glanced over his shoulder and then looked irritatedly back at Tom. 'Okay, now you've seen her. She was swimming in the lake just after dinner, and I asked her up here. I guess you might as well come in.'

 
   The girl backed away toward the slightly mussed bed, stepping like a faun on her bare legs. It was impossible for Tom riot to stare at her. He had no more idea then if shewere beautiful than he did if the moon were rock or powder: she looked nothing at all like the popular girls at Phipps-Burnwood. But he could not stop looking at her. The girl's eyes went down to her tanned bare legs, then back to him. She tugged Del's shirt close about her.

 
   'You probably guess already, but this is Rose Armstrong,' Del said.

 
   The girl sat down on the bed.

 
   'I'm Tom Armstrong,' he said. 'Oh, Jesus. Flanagan, I mean.'

 
THREE

 
The Goose Girl

 
Just looking at her had me so rattled — I saw right away what Del had meant about her looking 'hurt.' You couldn't miss it. That face looked like it had absorbed about a thousand insults and recovered from each one separately. But if she'd ever had them, she was recovering, all right. Honestly, I couldn't believe that Del had been seeing this amazing girl every summer; and watching her sit down on Del's bed with her knees together, I knew, knew, knew, that my whole relationship with Del had just changed.

 
1

 
Miami Beach, 1975

 
But before we can really look at Rose Armstrong through Tom Flanagan's eyes and travel with these three young people through their final convulsive months at Shadowland, I must introduce a seeming digression. Up to this point, this story has been haunted by two ghosts: of course one is Rose Armstrong, who in a black bathing suit and a boy's shirt has just now sat down on Del's suggestively mussed-up bed, badly 'rattling' Tom Flanagan. The other ghost is far more peripheral; certainly the reader has forgotten him by now. I mean Marcus Reilly, who was mentioned less than half a dozen times in the first part of this story — and perhaps Marcus Reilly is a persistent 'ghost' only to me. Yet suicide, especially at an early age, makes its perpetrator stick in the mind. It is also true that when I last saw Marcus Reilly, a few months before he killed himself, he said some things that later seemed to me to have a bearing on the story of Del Nightingale and Tom Flanagan; but this may be mere self-justification.

 
   At the beginning ot this story, I said that Reilly was the most baffling of my class's failures. As a Carson student, he had a great success, though not academically. He was a good athlete, and his closest friends were Pete Bayliss and Chip Hogan and Bobby Hollingsworth, who was on the same terms with everyone. A burly blond boy with a passing resemblance to the young Arnold Palmer, Marcus was bright but not reflective. His chief characteristic was that he took things as they came. His parents were rich — their house in Quantum Hills was more lavish than the Hillmans'. He could have been taken as one kind of model of the Carson student: someone who, though clearly he would never become a teacher, could be expected to have some slight trace of Fitz-Hallan about him always.

 
   After our odd, limping graduation, Reilly went off to a private college in the Southeast; I cannot remember which one. What I do remember is his delight in finding a place where suntans and a social life were taken to be as critical as grades. After college he went to a law school in the same state. I am sure that he graduated in the dead center of his class. In 1971 Chip Hogan told me that Reilly had taken a job in a Miami law firm, and I felt that small, almost aesthetic smack of satisfaction one gets when an expectation is fulfilled. It seemed the perfect job and place for him.

 
   Four years later a New York magazine commissioned me to do an article on a famous expatriate novelist wintering in Miami Beach. The famous novelist, with whom I spent two tedious days, was a self-important bore, turning out of his hotel onto sunny Collins Avenue in a flannel suit and trilby hat, with furled umbrella. He had consciously given two months of his life to Miami Beach in order to fuel his disdain for all things American. He pretended an ignorance of the American system of coinage. 'Is this one really called a quarter? Dear me, how
unimaginative.'
When I had sufficient notes for the article, I put the whole project into a mental locker and decided to look up Bobby Hollingsworth. I had not seen Bobby in at least ten years. He was living in Miami Beach, I knew from the alumni magazine, and owned a company that made plumbing fixtures. Once, in an Atlanta airport men's room, I had looked down into the bowl and seen stamped there 'hollingsworth vitreous.' I wanted to see what had become of him, and when I called him up he promptly invited me to his house.

 
   His house was a huge Spanish mansion facing Indian Creek and the row of hotels across it. Moored at his dock was a forty-foot boat that looked like it could make a pond of the Atlantic.