Mystery

“I’ll get maudlin for you,” Buzz said. “I have only another week of lying around on decks and getting tan before I have to go back to St. Mary Nieves.”

Tom stayed another half hour. He learned that the Christopher who had said the wicked thing to Roddy Deepdale was Christopher Isherwood, and then had a surprisingly good time while they all talked about Mr. Norris Changes Trains

and Goodbye to Berlin and their author, whom Roddy and Buzz considered a cherished friend. It was the first time in his life he had had such a conversation with any adults, and the first proof he’d ever had that literate conversation was a possibility at Eagle Lake, but he left bothered by the feeling that he had missed something crucial, or failed to ask some important question, during his talk with Kate Redwing.

When he got back inside his grandfather’s lodge, he tried to write another letter to Lamont von Heilitz, but soon ran dry—he did not really have anything new to tell him, except that he wondered if he should not just go back to Mill Walk and start thinking seriously about becoming an engineer after all. He wondered how his mother was getting on, and if he could do anything to help her if he were at home. Home, just now, did not seem much more homelike than Glendenning Upshaw’s lodge.

He took a shower, wrapped a towel around himself, and instead of going immediately back into his bedroom to get dressed, walked past the staircase to Barbara Deane’s room. He opened her door and stepped inside the threshold.

It was a neat, almost stripped-down room, two or three times the size of his, with a double bed and a view of the lake through a large window. A half-open door revealed a tiled bathroom floor and the edge of a white tub with claw feet and a drawn shower curtain. The closet doors were shut. A bare desk stood against one wall, and a framed photograph hung above it like an icon. Tom took three steps closer and saw that it was an enlarged photograph of his grandfather, young, his hair slicked back, giving the camera a thousand-candlepower smile that the expression in his eyes made forced and unnatural. He was holding Gloria, four or five years old, in his arms—the chubby, ringleted Gloria Tom had seen in a newspaper photograph. She was smiling as if ordered to smile, and what Tom thought he saw in her face was fear. He stepped nearer and looked more closely, feeling his own vague sorrow tighten itself around him, and saw that it was not fear, but terror so habitual and familiar that even the photographer who had just shouted “Smile!” had not seen it.

Marcello led Tom to the table near the bandstand, dropped the menu in his lap as if he were radioactive, and spun around on his heel to inquire after the Redwings. Buddy scowled, Kip Carson blinked at him through a fog of Baby Dollies, and Ralph and Katinka never saw him at all. Aunt Kate’s back was to him, and Sarah Spence sat a mile away, at one of the tables closest to the bar. Mrs. Spence gave him one obsidian glance, then ostentatiously ignored him and spoke in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to show what a good time she was having. Occasional words floated to Tom: trout, water skis, relaxed. Sarah turned on her chair to send him a fellow-prisoner look, but her mother snapped her back with a sharp word. Neil Langenheim barely nodded at Tom—he sat upright on his chair, tucked in his chin, and despite the red raw skin on his nose and forehead, looked as rigid and contained as he did on Mill Walk. Only Roddy and Buzz were friendly, but they talked without a pause, in a way that suggested that this night’s conversation was one segment of a lifelong dialogue that both of them found amusing and engrossing. They were the best couple in the room. Tom sat at his table and read, wondering how he would get through the rest of the summer.

The Langenheims left; the Spences bustled Sarah away; Roddy and Buzz left. Ralph Redwing glanced sideways at Tom, frozen-faced. Tom closed the Agatha Christie book, signed the check the elderly waiter slid on a corner of the table, and walked out of the dining room with the back of his neck tingling.

Huge clouds scudded across the moon.