The Carlton Club (16 page)

“We’ll be seeing each other at cardiology meetings for years to come, won’t we?”

“So where are you applying? They’d make a spot for you here I’m sure.”

“I need to leave,” Mark said flatly. They had offered to find a position for him, to create a place for him in their highly competitive cardiology program. “Peter Bent Brigham has an unexpected opening as the
New England Journal of
Medicine
ads say. How about you?”

“Stanford’s my first choice at the moment.”

“You’ll get in wherever you want.”

So will you, she thought. But how about English graduate school, she wondered, looking at the volumes of Shakespeare, Faulkner, Joyce and Shaw beside his bed.

Leslie’s pager sounded. She glanced at her watch. Eight-fifteen.

“Quarter past eight, Leslie. It’s probably Hal wondering why you’re late for rounds.”

“I’m not late for rounds.”

“You’re not?” Morning rounds were always at eight.

“No,” she said quietly. “We start at eight-thirty on nights after we’ve been on call.”

“So Hal can catch a few extra winks?”

“So Hal can have a leisurely second cup of coffee.”

“To wake himself up after the long night’s sleep he gets because his resident had been up all night keeping watch?” Mark teased.

“Something like that. Really, Mark, Hal has improved dramatically. I’m whipping him into shape. In my own way. Anyway,” Leslie said frowning at the digits on her pager, “it’s the Department of Medicine office. May I use your phone?”

Leslie dialed the number without curiosity. Calls from the Department of Medicine office were common.

“Oh, yes, I do have a message for you,” the secretary said. “Here it is. Ready?”

Leslie took a three by five inch index card and a pen from the left breast pocket of her white coat.

“Go ahead.”

Leslie prepared to write but as she heard the message, her hand froze with the pen poised above the paper.

“He will be in his office all day,” the secretary finished.

“I’m sorry. Could you repeat the number?” Leslie asked, her mind reeling.

James Stevenson would be in his office, an office with a local telephone number, all day. Would Dr. Adams please call?

“Huh,” Leslie said after she hung up.

“What?” Mark asked.

“Oh. A voice from the distant, distant past. From high school. An old boy—an old friend,” Leslie said, distractedly, before leaving to find Hal for rounds.

Friend. Boyfriend. What was James?

What
had
he been?

PART TWO

Seattle
, Washington
. . . September,
1969

Roosevelt
High School
drew its student body from two junior high schools, Nathan Eckstein and Jane Addams. The merger of the students from the two junior high schools was not a blend. It was the creation of a stratified, two class society: the haves and the have nots; the intellectuals and the hoodlums; the virgins and the hussies; those who would succeed and those who were destined to fail.

There were no railroad tracks separating the neighborhood whose teenagers attended Eckstein from the neighborhood that sent its students to Addams, but there might as well have been. The separation was that distinct. The students who attended Jane Addams Junior High lived on the wrong side of the imaginary tracks.

The main distinction between the two student bodies was environmental. Environment, not genes, segregated the two groups. The parents of Eckstein students were university faculty, lawyers, doctors, bankers and college graduates. They raised their children on expectations of excellence, confidence in the child’s ability, praise for success and reward for accomplishment. They provided their children with an environment that encouraged talent, intellectual creativity and realization of potential.

The parents of the Addams students were no less intelligent than the parents of the Eckstein students, but their goals were different: enough money to pay rent and buy food and clothes. They worked hard to survive, struggling to make ends meet. Their principal goal for their children was that the child graduate from high school without getting arrested, pregnant, addicted or killed. Their only hope was that the child would survive, relatively unscathed, to age eighteen, to adulthood, to the age of self-sufficiency.

The Eckstein students were not intrinsically prejudiced against the Addams students. They were simply realistic. Likes attracted likes. Everyone was most comfortable, especially given the pressure of teenage society toward conformity, to be with his or her own kind.

But crossovers did occur. The faculty child, rebelling against his achievement oriented parents, sought and found new friends in the beer-drinking, motorcycle-riding gangs from Addams. Occasionally a serious, thoughtful, academically motivated student from Addams would appear in the honors classes. He or she was welcome, a curiosity but a kindred spirit nonetheless, to join the Eckstein group.

If the goals meshed, crossovers were permissible, even encouraged. The new blood in the group added interest and sometimes a new romance.

In this clearly stratified two-class system, James Stevenson found himself in No Man’s Land. He had attended Addams, but because of his scores on the pre-entrance placement tests, James was assigned to the honors classes. Those classes were populated almost exclusively by the very best of the Eckstein graduates. James did not share the goals of those students, but he did as well as they did, better even, on tests. James was as smart as the faculty kids, as smart as the kids with environmental privilege.

As smart as Leslie Adams and her friends.

They would have welcomed James instantly into their group, except that it wasn’t clear that he wanted to be with them. James looked different, with his old faded jeans, his threadbare madras shirts and his black leather jacket.

James smoked. And drank. And swore. James rode a motorcycle. There was even a rumor that he had a girlfriend, a fourteen year old still at Addams, whom he
slept
with!

“He is a hoodlum,” Leslie’s girlfriends hissed.

“Not really,” the boys in her group countered. “James set the curve on the last math exam and helped a lot with food drive.”

Part hoodlum. Although the actual proof was lacking. There was no evidence that James had ever broken the law—no real laws. He did smoke and drink and perhaps even had sex with a minor, but he didn’t steal hubcaps or stereo equipment. He apparently was not involved with the rash of typewriter thefts from the school’s third-floor typing class.

Part do-gooder. James joined in the altruistic efforts of the Eckstein group. With them, James donated his time to community service. He helped raise money for charity through car washes and food, bottle, and newspaper drives. He also tutored other students and did volunteer work in hospitals and nursing homes.

Unlike any student before, James apparently belonged to both groups. He was never committed, not totally, not uniquely, not in three years, to either group, and despite the divided allegiance, neither group sought to expel him.

James’s friends from Addams had been friends since grade school. Most had known him since the day, at age five, when he changed his name from Jimmy to James. It had been James ever since. He insisted on it. As they got older, they called themselves the James Gang. They were secretly pleased that James, one of
them
, had successfully infiltrated the most elite faction of the Eckstein group.

The boys from Eckstein, the boys he met in the honors classes, were intrigued by James. They had to admire his brains—a critical factor—but they also admired his wildness, his lack of concern for authority, his nonchalance about drinking and smoking. And his sexual success. They were all at the age when they needed to experiment, to see how far the rules would stretch before they snapped.

James didn’t worry about the rules, and he set the curves on the math exams.

James didn’t seem to worry about very much.

Unlike the boys who accepted James on his terms, the girls, except for Leslie, rejected him.

“He’s coarse,” Leslie’s friends said, wrinkling their noses. “And he’s so strange-looking. He gives me the creeps!”

“I think he’s interesting,” Leslie said thoughtfully.

“
Leslie!
You
have
to be kidding!”

“No, I really think he is interesting.”

Leslie also thought that James was very handsome, but she didn’t dare tell them that. It was a matter of taste, anyway. There was nothing classically handsome about James. Nothing terribly aristocratic. No sign of privilege, environmental or otherwise.

James looked, Leslie decided, like a cougar. His dark green eyes were cold, appraising, watchful. His cheekbones were high and prominent above the hollow of his cheeks. His lips were thin, set in neutral, occasionally curling into a half smile. The inevitable cigarette dangled casually, erotically, from his lips, moving when he spoke as if a part of him.

A cougar. Wild. Free. Untamed. And untamable.

James’s thick black hair fell into his eyes and curled sensually over his ears and down his neck.

At first James made Leslie nervous. He would watch her, the green eyes with the long black lashes calmly observing, squinting slightly as the smoke from his cigarette drifted into them. James never looked pleasant like the other boys. They were all full of smiles and winks and flirtations, trying to look sexy and provocative. James didn’t try to look sexy.

James didn’t have to try. The look was natural.

After a while James began to speak to her. They didn’t have conversations. They just had brief and unexpected communications. Usually there was a message, indirect, a little hidden.

“That new band, Easy Chair, is playing at the dance this Saturday,” James would say. It was an announcement, not an invitation, but Leslie learned it meant that he would be at the dance. And that he wanted her to be? She didn’t know.

She would go with her friends, and he would be there, wandering between the James gang and the Eckstein group, watching her from the corner of his cougarlike eyes. He wouldn’t dance. Not until the end. The last dance. Then he would ask her to dance. The slow dance.

“Rosemaiden?”
he whispered one day as he passed her in the hallway. Rosemaiden was the award given to the girl voted Most Inspirational by the female student body. It was a yearly award. Leslie won all three years. It was an unprecedented accomplishment.

“Yes,” she said weakly to his back as he continued down the hall.

James was entirely unpredictable. He appeared at some Eckstein group parties and not at others. He usually arrived late and left early. He always arrived by himself and left alone. At the parties, James talked and joked with the boys, and he taunted the girls, Leslie’s friends, because he knew they disliked him.

James always said something to Leslie. He never taunted her. Sometimes he teased, but he never taunted.

By senior year, Leslie had had four relationships with boys from her group. Boring, groping, silly relationships that weren’t love or sex or anything but chaste attempts at growing up.

And, by senior year, Leslie had danced ten slow dances with James, had spent an entire quarter of a football game standing beside him—he had found her—saying nothing, had washed cars with him at a charity car wash, had seen him daily in honors classes at school and, in small cryptic pieces, had exchanged about two hours of dialogue with him.

But she thought about him constantly. She always felt his presence. The feeling made her anxious and uncertain. And eager.

One day in September of senior year, James caught up with her after class. It was Friday afternoon.

“Done much deer hunting with bows and arrows?” he asked.

“No!” Then, curious, not wanting that to be the end of another unfinished, uninterpretable exchange, she asked, “Why?”

“Perfect weather for it. I’m going tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Oh?

“So, do you want to?”

“Yes,” Leslie breathed, not certain about what he was asking or what she had agreed to.

“I’ll pick you up at nine in the morning. I know where you live.”

A date? With James? To hunt deer with bows and arrows?

Leslie and her parents waited for James to arrive. They waited in anxious silence, each preoccupied with specific worries about the date. Matthew Adams opposed hunting for sport. Period. It was not a debatable issue.

Susan Adams’s finely tuned journalistic eyes and ears had deduced a great deal about the mysterious James. Over the past two years she had heard words like “wild” and “scary” and “uncivilized” uttered contemptuously by Leslie’s dearest friends. She had also heard her daughter’s quiet protestations. Susan and Leslie were best friends. It was a friendship that had survived even the teenage “Oh Mother!” years.

Leslie had not told Susan about James. Not really. Susan had to guess, and she guessed that Leslie was intrigued with James because he was so different and that Leslie didn’t, or couldn’t, discuss her attraction because she herself didn’t understand it.

Susan waited. A little worried. But mostly curious.

Leslie waited, too, her heart pounding, her mouth dry, rehearsing dialogue, planning topics. There weren’t many topics. There wouldn’t be much dialogue because James didn’t talk. All she could think of quickly reduced to silly soliloquies on topics that wouldn’t interest James. It was that or silence.

Maybe he wouldn’t come after all.

At five minutes before nine they heard James arrive, his actual appearance heralded by the roar of his motorcycle.

Matthew Adams breathed a momentary sigh of relief. His original worries were allayed, but they were promptly replaced by much greater ones. They weren’t really going hunting. Even though he noticed a single wooden bow, unstrung, carefully secured to the motorcycle, it was obvious the expedition was not serious. Hunters drove large station wagons, vans, trucks even. Large enough to carry the prey. Hunters did not go hunting with bows and arrows on motorcycles.

Motorcycles. The magnitude of the new worry rapidly surpassed the old one. Matthew did not want his daughter, his only child, riding on a motorcycle. It wasn’t a rule. They had never even discussed it. There had been no need. None of Leslie’s friends had motorcycles. They wouldn’t.

Susan and Matthew prided themselves on being liberal, rational parents. Their relationship with Leslie was close and open. They both realized in the instant James arrived that all the previous parenting had been easy. Because Leslie had made no demands. She hadn’t fallen in love, wanted to make love, wanted to stay out all night, wanted to drink or try drugs. Leslie hadn’t wanted to do anything the least bit worrisome.

Susan and Matthew had discussed this day in the abstract. What they, as well-educated, intelligent, reasonable parents would do when their daughter began to explore, experiment, question. They would lie in bed at night calmly discussing what they would do. Issue by issue.

“What if she wants to try marijuana? Or LSD?”

“We discuss it with her. If she’s really determined, we insist that she do it at home, so she’s safe.”

“What if she likes it?”

“Leslie is not an addict personality,” Matthew said firmly.

“What about sex? Lots of teenagers have sex now. It’s almost standard.”

“Not with Leslie’s group.”

“Still . . .”

“If she did want to, which she won’t, we’d talk to her about love and sex, and if she was determined, we’d make sure she knew how not to get pregnant.”

“She knows that.”

“What if she wants to live with someone?”

“In high school?”