The Secret History - Donna Tartt [51]
Francis said he’d be happy to have me to Christmas in Boston and then travel on with him to New York; the twins phoned their grandmother in Virginia and she said she’d be glad to have me there, too, for the entire winter break. But there was the question of money. For the months until school began I would have to have a job. I needed money if I wanted to come back in the spring, and I couldn’t very well work if I was gallivanting around with Francis. The twins would be clerking, as they always did during holidays, with their uncle the lawyer, but they had quite a time stretching the job to fit the two of them, Charles driving Uncle Orman to the occasional estate sale and to the package store, Camilla sitting around the office waiting to answer a phone that never rang. I am sure it never occurred to them that I might want a job, too—all my tales of Californian richesse had hit the mark harder than I’d thought. “What’ll I do while you’re at work?” I asked them, hoping they would get my drift, but of course they didn’t. “I’m afraid there’s not much to do,” said Charles apologetically. “Read, talk to Nana, play with the dogs.”
My only choice, it seemed, was to stay in Hampden town. Dr. Roland was willing to keep me on, though at a salary that wouldn’t cover a decent rent. Charles and Camilla were subletting their apartment and Francis had a teenaged cousin staying in his; Henry’s, for all I knew, was standing empty, but he didn’t offer its use and I was too proud to ask. The house in the country was empty, too, but it was an hour from Hampden and I didn’t have a car. Then I heard about an old hippie, an ex–Hampden student, who ran a musical-instrument workshop in an abandoned warehouse. He would let you live in the warehouse for free if you carved pegs or sanded a few mandolins now and again.
Partly because I did not wish to be burdened with anyone’s pity or contempt, I concealed the true circumstances of my stay. Unwanted during the holidays by my glamorous, good-for-nothing parents, I had decided to stay alone in Hampden (at an unspecified location) and work on my Greek, spurning, in my pride, their craven offers of financial help.
This stoicism, this Henrylike dedication to my studies and general contempt for the things of this world, won me admiration from all sides, particularly from Henry himself. “I wouldn’t mind being here myself this winter,” he said to me one bleak night late in November as we were walking home from Charles and Camilla’s, our shoes sunk to the ankles in the sodden leaves that covered the path. “The school is boarded up and the stores in town close by three in the afternoon. Everything’s white and empty and there’s no noise but the wind. In the old days the snow would drift up to the eaves of the roofs, and people would be trapped in their houses and starve to death. They wouldn’t be found until spring.” His voice was dreamy, quiet, but I was filled with uncertainty; in the winters where I lived it did not even snow.
The last week of school was a flurry of packing, typing, plane reservations and phone calls home, for everybody but me. I had no need to finish my papers early because I had nowhere to go; I could pack at my leisure, after the dorms were empty. Bunny was the first to leave. For three weeks he had been in a panic over a paper he had to write for his fourth course, something called Masterworks of English Literature. The assignment was twenty-five pages on John Donne. We’d all wondered how he was going to do it, because he was not much of a writer; though his dyslexia was the convenient culprit the real problem was not that but his attention span, which was as short as a child’s. He seldom read the required texts or supplemental books for any course. Instead, his knowledge of any given subject tended to be a hodgepodge of confused facts, often strikingly irrelevant or out of context, that he happened to remember from classroom discussions or believed himself to have read somewhere. When it was time to write a paper he would