The Secret History - Donna Tartt [104]
Francis, who knew this territory better than we did, had said there was an inn nearby but it was hard to believe there was anything habitable for fifty miles around. Then we rounded a bend and our headlights swept across a rusted metal sign pockmarked with shotgun pellets, that informed us that the Hoosatonic Inn, straight ahead, was the original birthplace of Pie à la Mode.
The building was ringed by a rickety porch—sagging rockers, peeling paint. Inside, the lobby was an intriguing jumble of mahogany and moth-eaten velvet, interspersed with deer heads, calendars from filling stations, and a large collection of Bicentennial commemorative trivets, mounted and hung upon the wall.
The dining room was empty except for a few country people eating their dinners, all of whom looked up at us with innocent, frank curiosity as we came in, at our dark suits and spectacles, at Francis’s monogrammed cufflinks and his Charvet tie, at Camilla with her boyish haircut and sleek little Astrakhan coat. I was a bit surprised at this collective openness of demeanor—neither stares nor disapproving looks—until it occurred to me that these people probably didn’t realize we were from the college. Closer in, we would have been pegged instantly as rich kids from up on the hill, kids likely to make a lot of noise and leave a bad tip. But here we were only strangers, in a place where strangers were rare.
No one even came by to take an order. Dinner appeared with instantaneous magic: pork roast, biscuits, turnips and corn and butternut squash, in thick china bowls that had pictures of the presidents (up to Nixon) around their rims.
The waiter, a red-faced boy with bitten nails, lingered for a moment. Finally he said, shyly: “You folks from New York City?”
“No,” said Charles, taking the plate of biscuits from Henry, “From here.”
“From Hoosatonic?”
“No. Vermont, I mean.”
“Not New York?”
“No,” said Francis cheerily, carving at the roast. “I’m from Boston.”
“I went there,” said the boy, impressed.
Francis smiled absently and reached for a dish.
“You folks must like the Red Sox.”
“Actually I do,” said Francis. “Quite a bit. But they never seem to win, do they?”
“Some of the time they do. I guess we’ll never see ’em win the Series, though.”
He was still loitering, trying to think of something else to say, when Henry glanced up at him.
“Sit down,” he said unexpectedly. “Have some dinner, won’t you?”
After a bit of awkward demurral, he pulled up a chair, though he refused to eat anything; the dining room closed at eight, he told us, and it wasn’t likely that anyone else would come in. “We’re off the highway,” he said. “Most folks go to bed pretty early around here.” His name, we discovered, was John Deacon; he was my age—twenty—and had graduated from Equinox High School, over in Hoosatonic proper, only two years before. Since graduation, he said, he’d been working on his uncle’s farm; the waiter’s job was a new thing, something to fill the winter hours. “This is only my third week,” he said. “I like it here, I reckon. Food’s good. And I get my meals free.”
Henry, who generally disliked and was disliked by hoi polloi—a category which in his view expanded to include persons ranging from teenagers with boom boxes to the Dean of Studies of Hampden, who was independently wealthy and had a degree in American Studies from Yale—nonetheless had a genuine knack with poor people, simple people, country folk; he was despised by the functionaries of Hampden but admired by its janitors, its gardeners and cooks. Though he did not treat them as equals—he didn’t treat anyone as an equal, exactly—neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy. “I think we’re much more hypocritical about illness, and poverty, than were people in former