Mystery

Before his accident, books had meant the safety of escape; for a long time afterwards, what they meant was life itself. Very rarely, a few of the boys who had been his friends would stop in and stay half an hour or more, and during these visits he learned that the world did not stop at his front door—Buddy Redwing had been given a Corvette for his sixteenth birthday, and Jamie Thielman had been expelled from Brooks-Lowood for smoking behind the curtains on the school stage, the football team had won eight games in a row, and the basketball team, which played in a league with only four other teams, had an unbroken string of losses—but the boys seldom visited and soon left, and Tom, who really did hunger for information about what the big unknown world beyond his door, beyond Eastern Shore Road, beyond even Mill Walk was like, could forget while he read that he was crippled and alone. Through the transparent medium of books, he left behind his body and his useless anger and roamed through forests and cities in close company with men and women who plotted for money, love, and revenge, who murdered and stole and saved England from foreign conspiracies, who embarked on great journeys and followed their doubles like shadows through foggy nineteenth-century London. He hated his body and his wheelchair, though his arms and shoulders grew as muscular as a weightlifters’s, and when he was put on his crutches, he loathed their awkwardness and the hobbled imitation of walking they represented: real life, his real life, was between the covers of several hundred novels. Everything else was horror and monstrosity—falling down, moving like an insect with his six limbs, screaming at his irritated tutors, dreaming at night of seas of blood, of a smashed and mutilated body.

A year after his accident, Tom set down his crutches and learned to walk again. By then he was in a great many ways a different person from the boy who had jumped down from the milk cart.

Both the elder Pasmores and their son would have pointed to Tom’s immersion in books as the real cause of the changes in him. To Tom’s parents, it seemed that the far more distant, now oddly unknowable boy holding on to tables and chairs as he tottered around the house on legs as unreliable as those of an eighteen-month-old child had taken a voluntary sidestep away from life—when not inexplicably enraged, he seemed to have chosen shadows, passivity, unreality.

Tom’s own ideas were almost directly opposed to these. It seemed to him that he had stepped into the real stream of life: that all of his reading not only had saved him from the immediate insanity of rage and the slow insanity of boredom, but given him a rapid and seductive overview of adult life—he had been an invisible participant in hundreds of dramas, but even more important, had overheard thousands of conversations, witnessed as many acts of discrimination and judgment, and seen stupidity, cruelty, hyprocrisy, bad manners, and duplicity condemned in almost equal measure. The melody of the English language and a sense of its resources, an idea of eloquence as mysteriously good and moral in itself, had passed into his mind forever, as had the beginning of an understanding of human motives. Far more than anything provided by his tutors, the books Tom read were his education. At times, deep in a book, he felt his body begin to glow: an invisible but potent glory seemed to hover just behind the characters, and it seemed that they were on the verge of making some great discovery that would also be his—the discovery of a vast realm of radiant meaning that lay hidden just within the world of ordinary appearances.

By his junior year in Brooks-Lowood’s Upper School, he could make half of his class convulse with laughter with a remark the other half would either resent or fail to understand; he jumped at loud noises and retreated into himself for long periods that were known as his “trances”; he had a reputation for being “nervous,” for he had no physical repose and could not remain still longer than a few seconds without moving or twitching or rubbing his face or chattering to anybody who happened to be near. He was plagued with nightmares and he walked in his sleep. If he had been as good in school as his aptitude tests indicated he should, much of this behavior would have been put down to his being a “brain,” a brilliant academic future would have been predicted for him, and the guidance counselor would have spoken to him about medical school—there was a perennial shortage of doctors on Mill Walk. As it was, his conduct merely made him odd, and the counselor handed him brochures for third-rate colleges in the southern states.