The Secret History

The dining room was empty except for a few country people A eating their di

No one even came by to take an order. Di

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 di

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 Hamp den, 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 admiredby 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 ages,' I remember Julian saying once. 'In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true. Does anyone remember Plato's definition of Justice in the Republic? Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it. A poor man who wishes to rise above his station is only making himself needlessly miserable. And the wise poor have always known this, the same as do the wise rich.'

I'm not entirely sure now that this is true – because if it is, where does that leave me? still wiping down windshields in Piano? – but there is no doubt that Henry was so confident of his own abilities and position in the world, and so comfortable with them, that he had the strange effect of making others (including myself) feel comfortable in their respective, lesser positions, whatever they might happen to be. Poor people for the most part were unimpressed by his ma

Through most of the meal, Henry and the boy talked in the most intimate and, to me, baffling terms, about the land around Hampden and Hoosatonic – zoning, developments, price per acre, uncleared land and titles and who owned what – as the rest of us ate our di

In retrospect, it is odd how little power the dead farmer exercised over an imagination as morbid and hysterical as my own. I can well imagine the extravagance of nightmares such a thing might provoke (opening the door to a dream-classroom, the fla

Bu

To the casual observer, I suppose, he seemed pretty much his jolly old self- slapping people on the back, eating Twinkies and Ho Hos in the reading room of the library and dropping crumbs all down in the bindings of his Greek books. But behind that bluff facade some distinct and rather ominous changes were taking place, changes of which I was already dimly aware but which made themselves more evident as time went on.

In some respects, it was as if nothing had happened at all. We went to our classes, did our Greek, and generally managed to pretend among one another and everybody else that things were all right. At the time it heartened me that Bu