Mystery

The nine months he had spent in a wheelchair had left him with large shoulders and well-developed biceps that remained even while the rest of his body lengthened to a height of six feet, four inches. The basketball coach, who was desperate after a long string of losing seasons, arranged a meeting of Tom and Victor Pasmore, himself, and the headmaster, who had long ago mentally convicted Tom Pasmore of malingering. Tom politely refused to have anything to do with the school’s teams. “It’s just an accident that I’m so tall,” he said to the three stony-faced men in the headmaster’s beautiful office. “Why don’t you imagine me being a foot shorter?”

He meant that if they did so they would be closer to the truth, but the coach felt as though Tom were laughing at him, the headmaster felt insulted, and Victor Pasmore was enraged.

“Will you please talk to these people like a human being?” Victor bellowed. “You have to take part in things! You can’t sit on your duff all day long anymore!”

“Sounds like basketball has just become a compulsory subject,” Tom said, as if to himself.

“It just has—for you!” shouted his father.

And then Tom uttered a remark that turned the stomach of each of the three adult men in the room. “I don’t know anything about basketball except for what I learned from John Updike. Have any of you ever read Rabbit, Run?”

Of course none of them had—the coach thought that Tom was talking about an animal book.

Tom went to basketball practice for a month. The coach discovered that his new acquisition could not dribble or pass, was completely incapable of hitting the basket with the ball, and did not even know the names of the positions. Tom did get his friend Fritz Redwing, one of the guards, interested in Rabbit, Run by describing an act of oral sex that took place in the book, and Fritz became so engrossed in the copy he filched from the An Die Blumen drugstore (no Redwing Tom ever knew would pay good money for anything as ridiculous as a book) that he excited the suspicions of his parents, who after three days plucked the paperback from his fingers and in horror, disbelief, and embarrassment found themselves staring at the very passage Tom Pasmore had described to their son.

The elder Redwings would very likely have been more comfortable with the thought of their son actually performing some of the acts depicted on the page before them than with the fact of his reading about them. In a boy, sexual experimentation could be put down to high spirits, but reading about such things smacked of perversion. They were shocked, and though they did not quite perceive this, they felt their values betrayed. Fritz quickly confessed that Tom Pasmore had told him about the dreadful book. And because the Redwings were the richest, most powerful, and most respected family on Mill Walk, Tom’s reputation underwent a subtle darkening. He was perhaps not—perhaps not entirely reliable.

Tom’s response was that he preferred being not perhaps entirely reliable. Certainly he had no interest in being an imitation Redwing, though that was the goal of most of what passed for society on Mill Walk. Redwing reliability consisted of thoughtless, comfortable adherence to a set of habits and traits that were generally accepted more as the only possible manners than as simple good manners.