The Secret History - Donna Tartt [200]
“Lisa, you shouldn’t let him hang all over you like that,” said the first Lisa, glancing at her watch.
“Please, Brandon. Mother’s got to go now.”
“He’s too big to act like that. You know he is. If I were you, I would just take him in the bathroom and tear him up.”
Mrs. Corcoran came down about twenty minutes later, in black crepe de chine, riffling through a quilted-leather clutch. “Where is everybody?” she said when she saw only Camilla, Sophie Dearbold and me loafing by the trophy case.
When no one answered her, she paused on the stair, annoyed. “Well?” she said. “Has everybody left? Where’s Francis?”
“I think he’s dressing,” I said, glad she’d asked something I could answer without having to lie. From where she stood on the stairs she could not see what the rest of us saw, quite clearly, through the glass doors of the living room: Cloke and Bram and Rooney, Charles with them, all of them standing around under the sheltered part of the terrace getting stoned. It was odd to see Charles of all people smoking pot and the only reason I could think why he was doing it was because he thought it would brace him up, the way a stiff drink might. If so, I felt certain he was in for a nasty surprise. When I was twelve and thirteen I used to get high at school every day—not because I liked it, it broke me out in cold sweats and panic—but because in the lower grades it was such a fabulous prestige to be thought a pothead, also because I was so expert at hiding the paranoiac flulike symptoms it gave me.
Mrs. Corcoran was looking at me as if I’d uttered some Nazi oath. “Dressing?” she said.
“I think so.”
“Isn’t he even dressed by now? What’s everybody been doing all morning?”
I didn’t know what to say. She was drifting down the stairs a step at a time, and now that her head was free of the balustrade, she had an unimpeded view of the patio doors—rain-splashed glass, oblivious smokers beyond—if she chose to look that way. We were all transfixed with suspense. Sometimes mothers didn’t know what pot was when they saw it, but Mrs. Corcoran looked like she would know, all right.
She snapped the clutch bag shut and looked around with a sweeping, raptor-like gaze—the only thing about her, surely, that could remind me of my father, and it did.
“Well?” she said. “Would somebody tell him to hurry up?”
Camilla jumped up. “I’ll get him, Mrs. Corcoran,” she said, but once she was around the corner she scooted over to the terrace door.
“Thank you, dear,” said Mrs. Corcoran. She had found what she wanted—her sunglasses—and she put them on. “I don’t know what it is with you young people,” she said. “I don’t mean you in particular, but this is a very difficult time and we’re all under a great deal of stress and we must try to make things go as smoothly as they possibly can.”
Cloke looked up, bloodshot and uncomprehending, at Camilla’s soft rap on the glass. Then he looked past her into the living room, and all of a sudden his face changed. Shit, I saw him say, noiselessly, and a cloud of smoke escaped from his mouth.
Charles saw, too, and almost choked. Cloke snatched the joint from Bram and pinched it out with thumb and forefinger.
Mrs. Corcoran, in big black sunglasses, remained thankfully unaware of this drama unfolding behind her back. “The church is a bit of a drive, you know,” she said as Camilla circled behind her and went to fetch Francis. “Mack and I will go ahead in the station wagon, and you people can follow either us or the boys. I think you’ll have to go in three cars, though maybe you can squeeze into two—Don’t run in Grandmother’s house,” she snapped at Brandon and his cousin Neale, who’d darted past her on the stairs and clattered into the living room. They wore little blue suits with snap-on bow ties, and their Sunday shoes made a terrific racket on the floor.
Brandon, panting, dodged behind the sofa. “He hit me, Grandma.”
“He called me a booty wipe.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“Boys,” she