The Secret History - Donna Tartt [188]
Dear Richard—How very unhappy I am this morning, as I know I will be for many mornings to come. The news of our friend’s death has saddened me greatly. I do not know if you have tried to reach me, I have been away, I have not been well, I doubt if I shall return to Hampden until after the funeral–
How sad it is to think that Wednesday will be the last time that we shall all be together. I hope this letter finds you well. It brings love.
At the bottom were his initials.
Henry’s letter, from Connecticut, was as stilted as a cryptogram from the western front.
Dear Richard,
I hope you are well. For several days I have been at the Corcorans’ house. Although I feel I am less comfort to them than they, in their bereavement, can recognize, they have allowed me to be of help to them in many small household matters.
Mr. Corcoran has asked me to write to Bunny’s friends at school and extend an invitation to spend the night before the funeral at his house. I understand you will be put up in the basement. If you do not plan to attend, please telephone Mrs. Corcoran and let her know.
I look forward to seeing you at the funeral if not, as I hope, before.
There was no signature, but instead a tag from the Iliad, in Greek. It was from the eleventh book, when Odysseus, cut off from his friends, finds himself alone and on enemy territory:
Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.
I rode down to Connecticut with Francis. Though I’d expected the twins to come with us, instead they went a day earlier with Cloke—who, to everyone’s surprise, had received a personal invitation from Mrs. Corcoran herself. We had thought he would not be invited at all. After Sciola and Davenport caught him trying to leave town, Mrs. Corcoran had refused to even speak to him. (“She’s saving face,” said Francis.) At any rate, he’d got the personal invitation, and there had also been invitations—relayed through Henry—for Cloke’s friends Rooney Wynne and Bram Guernsey.
Actually, the Corcorans had invited quite a few people from Hampden—dorm acquaintances, people I didn’t know Bunny even knew. A girl named Sophie Dearbold, whom I knew slightly from French class, was to ride down with Francis and me.
“How did Bunny know her?” I asked Francis on the way to her dorm.
“I don’t think he did, not well. He did have a crush on her, though, freshman year. I’m sure Marion won’t like it a bit that they’ve asked her.”
Though I’d feared that the ride down might be awkward, in fact it was a wonderful relief to be around a stranger. We almost had fun, with the radio going and Sophie (brown-eyed, gravel-voiced) leaning on folded arms over the front seat talking to us, and Francis in a better mood than I’d seen him in in ages. “You look like Audrey Hepburn,” he told her, “you know that?” She gave us Kools and cinnamon gumballs, told funny stories. I laughed and looked out the window and prayed we’d miss our turn. I had never been to Connecticut in my life. I had never been to a funeral, either.
Shady Brook was on a narrow road that veered off sharply from the highway and twisted along for many miles, over bridges, past farmland and horse pastures and fields. After a time the rolling meadows segued into a golf course. SHADY BROOK COUNTRY CLUB, said the wood-burned sign that swung in front of the mock-Tudor clubhouse. The houses began after that–large, handsome, widely spaced, each set on its own six or seven acres of land.
The place was like a maze. Frances looked for numbers on the mailboxes, nosing into one false trail after another and backing out again, cursing, grinding the gears. There were no signs and no apparent logic to the house numbers, and after we’d poked around blind for about half an hour, I began to hope that we would never find it at all, that we could just turn around and have a jolly ride back to Hampden.
But of course we did find it. At the end of its own cul-de-sac, it was a large modern house of the “architectural” sort, bleached cedar, its split levels and asymmetrical terraces self-consciously