The Secret History

The dog was fond of Bu

Bu

Bu

('She likes to be with her girlfriends a lot,' Bu

From time to time I would see her at a distance in the playground of the Early Childhood Center as I walked to class. It was some branch of the Elementary Education department at Hampden; kids from the town went to nursery school and kindergarten there, and there she would be with them, in her monogrammed sweaters, blowing a whistle and trying to make them all shut up and get in line.

No one would talk about it much, but I gathered that earlier, abortive attempts to include Marion in the activities of the group had ended in disaster. She liked Charles, who was generally polite to everyone and had the unflagging capacity to carry on conversations with anyone from little kids to the ladies who worked in the cafeteria; and she regarded Henry, as did most I everyone who knew him. with a kind of fearful respect; but she hated Camilla, and between her and Francis there had been some m catastrophic incident which was so frightful that no one would even talk about it. She and Bu

Sometimes he would knock on my door late at night, looking haggard and wild-eyed and more rumpled than usual, mumbling, 'Lemme in, old man, you gotta help me, Marion's on the warpath…' Minutes later, there would be a neat report of sharp knocks at the door: rat-a-tat-tat. It would be Marion, her little mouth tight, looking like a small, angry doll.

'Is Bu

'He's not here.'

'Are you sure?'

'He's not here, Marion.'

'Bu

No answer.

'Bu

And then, to my acute embarrassment, Bu

Bu

'Well, I think we need to talk.'

'I'm busy now, honey.'

'Well' – she would look at her tasteful little Cartier watch 'I'm going home now. I'll be up for about thirty minutes and then I'm going to sleep.'

Tine.'

'I'll see you in about twenty minutes, then.'

'Hey, wait just a second there. I never said I was going to '

'See you in a little while,' she would say, and leave.

'I'm not going,' Bu

'No, I wouldn't.'

'I mean, who does she think she is.'

'Don't go.'

'I mean, gotta teach her a lesson sometime. I'm a busy man.

On the move. My time's my own.'

'Exactly.'

An uneasy silence would fall. Finally Bu

'Guess I better go.'

'All right, Bun.'

'I mean, I'm not go

'Of course not.'

'Yes, yes,' Bu

The next day, he and Marion would be having lunch together or walking down by the playground. 'So you and Marion got everything straightened out, huh?' one of us would ask when next we saw him alone.

'Oh, yeah,' Bu

The weekends at Francis's house were the happiest times. The trees turned early that fall but the days stayed warm well into October, and in the country we spent most of our time outside.

Apart from the occasional, half-hearted game of te

Now that I think about it, it seems while we were out there we drank almost constantly – never very much at once, but the I thin liicklc of spirits which began with the Bloody Marys at ^ breakfast would last until bedtime, and that, more than anything ™ else, was probably responsible for our torpor. Bringing a book outside to read, I would fall asleep almost immediately in my chair; when I took the boat out I soon tired of rowing and allowed myself to drift all afternoon. (That boat! Sometimes, even now, when I have trouble sleeping, I try to imagine that I am lying in that rowboat, my head pillowed on the cross-slats of the stern, water lapping hollow through the wood and yellow birch leaves floating down to brush my face.) Occasionally, we would attempt something a little more ambitious. Once, when Francis found a Beretta and ammunition in his aunt's night table, we went through a brief spate of target practice (the greyhound, jumpy from years of the starting gun, had to be secluded in the cellar), shooting at mason jars that were lined on a wicker tea-table we'd dragged into the yard. But that came to a quick end when Henry, who was very nearsighted, shot and killed a duck by mistake. He was quite shaken by it and we put the pistol away.

The others liked croquet, but Bu

It was always a tremendous occasion if Julian accepted an invitation to di

I don't know why we insisted on making such a production of these di