The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

“This is a nice paper, Bun—,” Charles said cautiously. “Thanks, thanks.” “But don’t you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn’t that your assignment?” “Oh, Donne,” Bunny had said scoffingly. “I don’t want to drag him into this.” Henry refused to read it. “I’m sure it’s over my head, Bunny, really,” he said, glancing over the first page. “Say, what’s wrong with this type?” “Triple-spaced it,” said Bunny proudly. “These lines are about an inch apart.” “Looks kind of like free verse, doesn’t it?” Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. “Looks kind of like a menu,” he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence “And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.” We wondered if he would fail.

Amazingly, the hippie, whose name was Leo, was quite angry that I didn’t spend more time carving mandolin struts or warping boards or whatever it was I was supposed to be doing up there. “You’re taking advantage, man,” he would say threateningly whenever he happened to see me. He had some idea that I had studied instrument building and was in fact able to do all sorts of complex, technical work, though I had never told him any such thing. “Yes, you did,” he said, when I pled my ignorance. “You did. You said you lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains one summer and made dulcimers. In Kentucky.” I had nothing to say to this. I am not unused to being confronted with my own lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop. I could only deny it and say, quite honestly, that I didn’t even know what a dulcimer was. “Carve pegs,” he said insolently.

I began to wonder if perhaps he was even unaware of the hole in the roof; one day I made so bold as to mention it to him. “I thought that was one of the things you could fix around the place,” he said. It stands as a testimony to my misery that one Sunday I actually attempted to do this, with a few odd scraps of mandolin wood that I found around, and nearly lost my life in the attempt; the grade of the roof was wickedly sharp and I lost my balance and nearly fell into the dam, catching myself only at the last moment on a length of tin drainpipe which, mercifully, held. I managed with effort to save myself—my hands were cut on the rusted tin, and I had to get a tetanus shot—but Leo’s hammer and saw and the pieces of mandolin wood tumbled into the dam. The tools all sank and Leo probably does not know to this day that they are missing, but unfortunately the mandolin pieces floated and managed to lodge themselves in a cluster at the top of the spillway, right outside Leo’s bedroom window. Of course he had plenty to say about this, and about college kids who didn’t care about other people’s things, and everybody trying to rip him off all the time.

Christmas came and went without notice, except that with no work and everything closed there was no place to go to get warm except, for a few hours, to church. I came home afterwards and wrapped myself in my blanket and rocked back and forth, ice in my very bones, and thought of all the sunny Christmases of my childhood—oranges, bikes and Hula Hoops, green tinsel sparkling in the heat.

(Caesar Augustus was Bunny’s hero; he had embarrassed us all by cheering loudly at the mention of his name during the reading of the Bethlehem story from Luke 2 at the literature division’s Christmas party. “Well, what of it,” he said, when we tried to shush him. “All the world shoulda been taxed.”)

Once home, I wrapped myself in my dirty blankets and fell on the floor like a dead man. All my moments which were not consumed with efforts to escape the cold were absorbed with morbid Poe-like fancies. One night, in a dream, I saw my own corpse, hair stiff with ice and eyes wide open.

I was at Dr. Roland’s office every morning like clockwork. He, an alleged psychologist, noticed not one of the Ten Warning Signs of Nervous Collapse or whatever it was that he was educated to see, and qualified to teach.

When I walked home at night, things got white around the edges and it seemed I had no past, no memories, that I had been on this exact stretch of luminous, hissing road forever. I don’t know what exactly was wrong with me. The doctors said it was chronic hypothermia, with bad diet and a mild case of pneumonia on top of it; but I don’t know if that accounts for all the hallucinations and mental confusion. At the time I wasn’t even aware I was sick: any symptom, any fever or pain, was drowned by the clamor of my more immediate miseries.

With Camilla he was forced to assume a slightly more paternalistic stance, beaming down at her with the condescension of an old papa toward a dimwit child. To the rest of us he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship. We all found this pretty funny.

I knew this to be a prelude to some health-related inquiry. My one year of pre-med had provided scanty knowledge at best, but the others, who knew nothing at all of medicine and regarded the discipline per se as less a science than a kind of sympathetic magic, constantly solicited my opinion on their aches and pains as respectfully as savages consulting a witch doctor. Their ignorance ranged from the touching to the downright shocking; Henry, I suppose because he’d been ill so often, knew more than the rest of them but occasionally even he would startle one with a perfectly serious question about humors or spleen.

I stopped, looked at him, said that I was. To my astonishment, he punched me in the face, and I fell backwards in the snow with a thump that knocked me breathless. “Stay away from Mona!” he shouted at me. “If you go near her again, I’ll kill you. You understand me?” Too stunned to reply, I stared up at him. He kicked me in the ribs, hard, and then trudged sullenly away—footsteps crunching through the snow, a slamming door. I looked up at the stars. They seemed very far away.

“You know what it was they found in his room? It was, like, this mirror that belonged to Laura Stora. I bet everybody in Durbinstall has done coke off that thing. Really old, with little grooves carved in the side, Jack Teitelbaum used to call it the Snow Queen because you could always scrape up a line or two if you were desperate or something. And sure, I guess it’s technically her mirror, but really it’s kind of public property and she said she hadn’t even seen it in about a million years, somebody took it from a living room in one of the new houses in March. Bram Guernsey said that Cloke said it wasn’t in Bunny’s room when he was there before, that the Feds had planted it, but then Bram said that Cloke thought this whole thing was some kind of a setup. A frame. Like in ‘Mission: Impossible,’ he meant, or one of those paranoia books by Philip K. Dick. He told Bram he thought the Feebies had a hidden camera planted somewhere in Durbinstall, all this wild stuff. Bram says it’s because Cloke is afraid to go to sleep and been up on crystal meth for forty-eight hours. He sits around in his room with the door locked and does lines and listens to this song by the Buffalo Springfield, over and over…you know that one? ‘Something’s happening here…what it is ain’t exactly clear….’ It’s weird. People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind, when my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these S...

Hahahahahahaa a percfect ramble

Mr. Corcoran, startled, had lowered his eyebrows impressively and said, “Well, of course, haw, ahem,” but Mrs. Corcoran, sawing at her steak au poivre with subdued violence, launched without even looking up into a tart diatribe. Drug paraphernalia, as they chose to call it, was not drugs, and it was a pity the press chose to level accusations at persons not present to defend themselves, and she was having a hard enough time as it was without having strangers imply that her son was a drug kingpin. All of which was more or less reasonable and true, and which the Post reported dutifully the next day word for word, alongside an unflattering picture of Mrs. Corcoran with her mouth open and a headline which read: Mom sez: Not my kid.

It was this unreality of character, this cartoonishness if you will, which was the secret of his appeal and what finally made his death so sad. Like any great comedian, he colored his environment wherever he went; in order to marvel at his constancy you wanted to see him in all sorts of alien situations: Bunny riding a camel, Bunny babysitting, Bunny in space. Now, in death, this constancy crystallized and became something else entirely: he was an old familiar jokester cast—with surprising effect—in the tragic role.

The three of them smoked a lot, told long boring stories (“So, like, our plane just sat on the runway for five hours”) and talked about people I didn’t know. I, the absentminded bereaved, was free to stare peacefully out the window.

“Hi. I’m Sophie Dearbold.” “Well, you’re mighty pretty. Isn’t she pretty, boys. You look just like your aunt Jean, honey.” “What?” said Sophie, after a confused pause. “Why, your aunt, honey. Your daddy’s sister. That pretty Jean Lickfold that won the ladies’ golf tournament out at the club last year.” “No, sir. Dearbold.” “Dearfold. Well, isn’t that strange. I don’t know of any Dearfolds around here. Now, I used to know a fellow name of Breedlow, but that must have been, oh, twenty years ago. He was in business. They say he embezzled a cool five million from his partner.” “I’m not from around here.” He cocked an eyebrow at her, in a manner reminiscent of Bunny. “No?” he said. “No.” “Not from Shady Brook?” He said it as if he could hardly believe it. “No.” “Then where you from, honey? Greenwich?” “Detroit.” “Bless your heart then. To come all this way.” Sophie, smiling, shook her head and started to explain when, with absolutely no warning, Mr. Corcoran flung his arms around her and burst into tears. We were frozen with horror. Sophie’s eyes, over his heaving shoulder, were round and aghast as if he’d run her through with a knife. “Oh, darling,” he wailed, his face buried deep in her neck. “Honey, how are we going to get along without him?”

‘Dad, you ought to see this nut they gave me for a roommate.’ ‘Stick it out, son,’ I told him, ‘give it a chance’ and before you could spit it was Henry this, Henry that, he’s changing his major from whatever the hell it was to ancient Greek. Tearing off to Italy. Happy as a clam.” The tears were welling in his eyes. “Just goes to show,” he said, shaking Henry’s shoulder with a kind of rough affection. “Never judge a book by its cover. Old Henry here may look like he’s got a stick up his butt but there never breathed a finer fella. Why, just about the last time I spoke to the old Bunster he was all excited about taking off to France with this guy in the summer—” “Now, Mack,” said Mrs. Corcoran, but it was too late. He was crying again. It was not as bad as the first time but still it was bad. He threw his arms around Henry and sobbed in his lapel while Henry just stood there, gazing off into the distance with a haggard, stoic calm.

“Isn’t this wretched,” said Francis as soon as we were alone. “It’s just for tonight.” “I can’t sleep in rooms with lots of people. I’ll be up all night.” I sat down on a cot. The room had a damp, unused smell and the light from the lamp over the pool table was greenish and depressing. “It’s dusty, too,” said Francis. “I think we ought to just go check into a hotel.” Sniffing noisily, he complained about the dust as he searched for an ashtray but deadly radon could have been seeping into the room, it didn’t matter to me. All I wondered was how, in the name of Heaven and a merciful God, was I going to make it through the hours ahead. We had been there only twenty minutes and already I felt like shooting myself. He was still complaining and I was still sunk in despair when Camilla came down. She was wearing jet earrings, patent-leather shoes, a natty, closely cut black velvet suit. “Hello,” Francis said, handing her a cigarette. “Let’s go check into the Ramada Inn.” As she put the cigarette between her parched lips I realized how much I’d missed her for the last few days. “Oh, you don’t have it so bad,” she said. “Last night I had to sleep with Marion.” “Same room?” “Same bed.” Francis’s eyes widened with admiration and horror. “Oh, really? Oh, I say. That’s awful,” he said in a hushed, respectful voice. “Charles is upstairs with her now. She’s hysterical because somebody asked that poor girl who rode down with you.”

Dinner was set out at seven, an unappetizing combination of gourmet carry-out—orzo salad, duck in Campari, miniature foie gras tarts—and food the neighbors had made: tuna casseroles, gelatin molds in Tupperware, and a frightful dessert called a “wacky cake” that I am at a loss to even describe.

He rambled on with this fraudulent recollection while Henry, pale and ill, endured his prods and backslaps as a well-trained dog will tolerate the pummeling of a rough child.

Gasping, he lurched forward as with a sudden wrench the kid broke free of him and shot across the room like a cannonball. Evading his father’s tackle, he sidestepped Patrick’s block as well and, glancing back at his pursuers, slammed right into Henry’s abdomen. It was a hard blow. The kid began to cry. Henry’s jaw dropped and every ounce of blood drained from his face. For a moment I was sure he would fall, but somehow he drew himself upright, with the dignified, massive effort of a wounded elephant, while Mr. Corcoran threw back his head and laughed merrily at his distress.

I had not entirely believed Cloke about the drugs to be found upstairs, but when I went up with him again I saw he had told the truth. There was a tiny dressing room off the master bedroom, and a black lacquer vanity with lots of little compartments and a tiny key, and inside one of the compartments was a ballotin of Godiva chocolates and a neat, well-tended collection of candy-colored pills. The doctor who had prescribed them—E. G. Hart, M.D., and apparently a more reckless character than his prim initials would suggest—was a generous fellow, particularly with the amphetamines. Ladies of Mrs. Corcoran’s age usually went in pretty heavily for the Valium and so forth but she had enough speed to send a gang of Hell’s Angels on a cross-country rampage.

“I told you. I don’t know where he is. What do you want him for?” “I have something for him.” “What is it?” he said in Greek. “Drugs?” “Yes.” “Well, give me something, for God’s sake,” he said, swaying forward, pop-eyed. He was far too drunk for sleeping pills. I gave him an Excedrin. “Thanks,” he said, and swallowed it with a big sloppy drink of his whiskey. “I hope I die in the night.

Charles snored on his cot, his mouth open; Francis grumbled in his sleep. Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room—the pool table, the snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost’s, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.

Such beutiful writing

Henry, among us, was the only pallbearer—the other five being family friends or business associates of Mr. Corcoran’s. I wondered if the coffin was very heavy and, if so, how Henry would manage. Though he emitted a faint, ammoniac odor of sweat and Scotch he did not look at all drunk. The pills had sunk him into a glassy, fathomless calm. Threads of smoke floated up from a filterless cigarette whose coal burned dangerously near his fingertips. It was a state which might have seemed a suspiciously narcotic one except that it differed so little from his customary manner.

“Now, Brandon,” said Hugh’s wife weakly to her little son, who had run into the kitchen and was attempting to swing from his mother’s arms like an ape. “Please. You’re going to hurt Mother. Brandon.” “Lisa, you shouldn’t let him hang all over you like that,” said the first Lisa, glancing at her watch. “Please, Brandon. Mother’s got to go now.” “He’s too big to act like that. You know he is. If I were you, I would just take him in the bathroom and tear him up.”

Mrs. Corcoran was looking at me as if I’d uttered some Nazi oath. “Dressing?” she said. “I think so.” “Isn’t he even dressed by now? What’s everybody been doing all morning?” I didn’t know what to say. She was drifting down the stairs a step at a time, and now that her head was free of the balustrade, she had an unimpeded view of the patio doors—rain-splashed glass, oblivious smokers beyond—if she chose to look that way. We were all transfixed with suspense. Sometimes mothers didn’t know what pot was when they saw it, but Mrs. Corcoran looked like she would know, all right. She snapped the clutch bag shut and looked around with a sweeping, raptor-like gaze—the

Charles, who stuck close to Camilla, was plainly freaking out. The doomy horrorhouse atmosphere of the church was not helping at all and he stared at his surroundings with frank terror, while Camilla took his arm and tried to nudge him down the row.

It was a long service. The minister, who took his ecumenical and—some felt—slightly impersonal remarks from Saint Paul’s sermon on Love from First Corinthians, talked for about half an hour. (“Didn’t you feel that was a very inappropriate text?” said Julian, who had a pagan’s gloomy view of death coupled with a horror of the non-specific.) Next was Hugh Corcoran (“He was the best little brother a guy could have”); then Bunny’s old football coach, a dynamic Jaycee type who talked at length of Bunny’s team spirit, telling a rousing anecdote about how Bunny had once saved the day against a particularly tough team from “lower” Connecticut. (“That means black,” whispered Francis.)

No one paid much attention to the final speaker, Henry himself, who went to the podium and read, inaudibly and without comment, a short poem by A. E. Housman.

During the closing prayer (overly long) I felt myself swaying, so much so that the sides of my new shoes dug in the tender spot beneath my anklebones. The air was close; people were crying; there was an insistent buzz which came in close to my ear and then receded. For a moment I was afraid I would black out. Then I realized the buzz actually came from a large wasp flying in erratic darts and circles over our heads. Francis, by flailing at it uselessly with the memorial service bulletin, had succeeded in enraging it; it dove towards the weeping Sophie’s head but, finding her unresponsive, turned in midair and lit on the back of the pew to collect its wits. Stealthily Camilla leaned to one side and began to slip off her shoe, but before she could, Charles had killed it with a resounding thwack from The Book of Common Prayer. The pastor, at a key point in his prayer, started. He opened his eyes and his glance fell on Charles, still wielding the guilty prayerbook. “That they may not languish in unavailing grief,” he said in a slightly amplified voice, “nor sorrow as those who have no hope, but through their tears look always up to Thee….” Quickly I bowed my head. The wasp still clung with one black feeler to the edge of the pew. I stared down at it and thought of Bunny, poor old Bunny, expert killer of flying pests, stalking houseflies with a rolled-up copy of the Hampden Examiner.

People straggled to their cars, dresses billowing, holding hats to head. A few paces in front of me Camilla struggled on tiptoe to pull down her umbrella, which dragged her along in little skipping steps—Mary Poppins in her black funeral dress. I stepped up to help her, but before I got there the umbrella blew inside out. For a moment it had a horrible life of its own, squawking and flapping its spines like a pterodactyl; with a sudden sharp cry she let it go and immediately it sailed ten feet in the air, somersaulting once or twice before it caught in the high branches of an ash tree.

There were cigarette butts, a Twix wrapper, recognizable. This is stupid, I thought, with a sudden rush of panic. How did this happen? Traffic washed past up on the expressway. The grave was almost unspeakably horrible. I had never seen one before. It was a barbarous thing, a blind clayey hole with folding chairs for the family teetering on one side and raw dirt heaped on the other. My God, I thought. I was starting to see everything, all at once, with a blistering clarity. Why bother with the coffin, the awning or any of it if they were just going to dump him, shovel the dirt in, go home? Was this all there was to it? To get rid of him like a piece of garbage? Bun, I thought, oh, Bun, I’m sorry.

Slowly, slowly, with a drugged, fathomless calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged the hand across his chest, smearing mud upon his lapel, his tie, the starched immaculate white of his shirt. I stared at him. So did Julian, and Francis, and the twins, with a kind of shocked horror. He seemed not to realize he had done anything out of the ordinary. He stood there perfectly still, the wind ruffling his hair and the dull light glinting from the rims of his glasses.

At Francis’s apartment I found him dressed except for his shoes, lying on his bed. “Feel my pulse,” he said. I did, to humor him. It was quick and strong. He lay there limply, eyelids fluttering. “What do you think is wrong with me?” he said. “I don’t know,” I said. He was a bit flushed but he really didn’t look that bad. Still—though it would be insane, I knew, to mention it at that moment—it was possible that he had food poisoning or appendicitis or something.

But, of course, it did get away, catapulting into the front seat and nearly running Francis off the road. Then, after scrabbling around under the brake and gas pedal—Francis aghast, attempting simultaneously to avoid touching it and to kick it away from him—it settled on the floorboard by my feet, succumbing to an attack of diarrhea before falling into a glaring, prickle-haired trance.