The Secret History

By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: 'Gorgeous necktie,' he'd say, 'that's a Hermes, isn't it?' – and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie's humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: 'Richard, old man, why don't you keep any pictures of your folks around?'

It was just the sort of detail he would seize upon. His own room was filled with an array of flawless family memorabilia, all of them perfect as a series of advertisements: Bu

'What?' he'd ask with mock i

Or can't you have your friends seeing Mom in polyester pants suits? Where'd your parents go to school anyway?' he'd say, interrupting before I could interject. 'Are they Ivy League material? Or did they go to some kind of a State U?'

It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty. My lies about my family were adequate, I suppose, but they could not stand up under these glaring attacks. Neither of my parents had finished high school; my mother did wear pants suits, which she purchased at a factory outlet. In the only photograph I had of her, a snapshot, she squinted blurrily at the camera, one hand on the Cyclone fence and the other on my father's new riding lawn mower. This, ostensibly, was the reason that the photo had been sent me, my mother having some notion that I would be interested in the new acquisition; I'd kept it because it was the only picture I had of her, kept it tucked inside a Webster's dictionary (under M for Mother) on my desk. But one night I rose from my bed, suddenly consumed with fear that Bu

They were unpleasant enough, these private inquisitions, but I ca

A few days earlier, Bu

Francis had gone to any number of wildly exclusive schools in England and Switzerland, and Henry had been at correspondingly exclusive American ones before he dropped out entirely in the eleventh grade; but the twins had only gone to a little country day school in Roanoke, and even Bu

My own school was not particularly shameful in this context, yet I evaded the question long as I could till finally, cornered and desperate, I had told him I'd gone to Renfrew Hall, which is a te

'So you were at Renfrew,' he said chummily, turning to me and popping a handful of pistachios in his mouth.

'Yes.'

'When'd ya graduate?'

I offered the date of my real high school graduation.

'Ah,' he said, chomping busily on his nuts. 'So you were there with Von Raumer.'

'What?'

'Alec. Alec Von Raumer. From San Fran. Friend of Cloke's.

He was in the room the other day and we got talking. Lots of old Renfrew boys at Hampden, he says,' I said nothing, hoping he'd leave it at that.

'So you know Alec and all.'

'Uh, slightly,' I said.

'Fu

'It's a big school.'

He cleared his throat. Think so?'

'Yes.'

'Von Raumer said it was tiny. Only about two hundred people.'

He paused and threw another handful of pistachios into his mouth, and chewed as he talked. 'What dormitory did you say you were in?'

'You wouldn't know it.'

'Von Raumer told me to make a point of asking you.'

'What difference does it make?'

'Oh, it's nothing, nothing at all, old horse,' said Bu

'Just that it's pretty damn peculiar, n'est-ce pas'? You and Alec being there together for four years, in a tiny place like Renfrew, and he never laid eyes on you even once?'

'I was only there for two years.'

'How come you're not in the yearbook?'

'I am in the yearbook.'

'No you're not.'

The twins looked stricken. Henry had his back turned, pre248 tending not to listen. Now he said, quite suddenly and without turning around: 'I low do you know if lie was in the yearbook or not?'

'I don't think I've ever been in a yearbook in my life,' said Francis nervously. 'I can't stand to have my picture taken. Whenever I try to '

Bu

'Come on,' he said to me. Till give you five dollars if you can tell me the name of the dorm you lived in.'

His eyes were riveted on mine; they were bright with a horrible relish. I said something incoherent and then in consternation got up and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Leaning on the sink, I held the glass to my temple; from the living room, Francis whispered something indistinct but angry, and then Bu

How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bu

What did he imagine was to be gained from this slow and potentially explosive kind of torture, had it, in his mind, some purpose, some goal? Or were his own actions as inexplicable to him as they were to us?

Or perhaps they weren't so inexplicable as that. Because the worst thing about all of this, as Camilla once remarked, was not that Bu