The Secret History: Chapter 8–Epilogue

The Corcorans were thoughtless but this was unconscionable; those monsters, I thought, those imbeciles, they just went off and left it here all by itself.

I bent down to see if it was okay but as I did I heard, very near, the wry, ostentatious clearing of a throat.

He had also bought a gift for Henry: a corpus of Mycenaean inscriptions from Knossos.

To people like Jud and Frank, who were there every time the doors opened, it was the nexus of the universe.

They were there now, at the center of an enthusiastic table of toadies and hangers-on, playing, with froth-mouthed relish, some game which apparently involved their trying to stab each other in the hand with a piece of broken glass.

There were classes in dervish dancing and the Kabbalah.

He was wearing an old seersucker suit which hung very loosely on him—he, too, had lost some weight—and a frayed old Sulka tie.

It wasn’t until I’d dropped Henry off and was being driven, at a rapid clip, towards the dark center of town, that I realized how poorly I had been apprised of the situation I was heading into. Henry hadn’t told me a thing.

So tired I was almost dreaming, I walked back to the square—past the post office, past the hardware store, past the movie theater with its dead marquee: plate glass, cracked sidewalks, stars.

Mountain cats in bas-relief prowled the friezes of the public library.

Though I had thought of various ways to phrase this question, it seemed, in the interests of clarity, most expedient to come to the point.

I’d attributed this to my own mental perversity, some degenerate vagary of thought, a projection of my own desire—because he was her brother, and they did look an awful lot alike, and the thought of them together brought, along with the predictable twinges of envy, scruple, surprise, another very much sharper one of excitement.

“I can’t tell you. I remember hardly anything that happened that night, which isn’t to say the tenor of it isn’t clear enough...”

Despite the archness of his tone—which normally would have irritated me—there was a melancholy undernote in his voice.

“You're mad, aren’t you?” he said anxiously.
“No.”
“Yes you are.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. These sudden, panicky attempts at conciliation annoyed me more than his insults.

In the waiting room, while I looked through magazines I’d seen before, he sat without moving, staring at a faded color photograph from the 1960s which hung opposite, of a nurse who had a white-nailed finger pressed to a white-lipsticked, vaguely pornographic mouth, in a sexy injunction to hospital silence.

I didn’t know what it was—I had heard, variously, that it was a stage set, a sculpture, a Stonehenge-type monument to the Grateful Dead—but the first time I had looked out my window, dazed with Fiorinal, and seen the upright support posts rising stark from the lawn, I was flooded with black, irrational terror: gibbets, I thought, they’re putting up gibbets, they’re having a hanging on Commons lawn.

I was jarred—a little spooked, as well—at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms.

All of us enjoyed hearing about these little forays of his into the twentieth century, so Francis and I pressed him to tell us what now had happened.

It was unsigned, but there were several clear references which made it plain that Bunny Corcoran, or someone purporting to be him, was the author.

The Albemarle had been built in the nineteenth century, as a retreat for rich convalescents.

The innkeeper glanced from his paper and gave us a supercilious up-and-down look.

He was one of those prissy retirees one sees frequently in New England, the sort who subscribe to antique magazines and carry those canvas tote bags they give as gift premiums on public TV.

The doors were blank and foreboding, but this was no time to hesitate.

It was a beautiful room—oak wainscoting, fireplace, only one bed, I noticed, in the room beyond, bedclothes tangled at the foot.

As is true of most incipient bad things in life, I had not really prepared myself for this possibility.

It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.

It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies.

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.”

In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly—basically to falsify him—in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.

‘I can’t bear that dreadful woman accosting me every time I happen to walk by.’

The thing is, however, I’m far from certain that Literature and Languages will be hiring another Classics teacher. There is so little interest in the subject, and the general consensus seems to be that it should be phased out, especially now that we’re attempting to get the new Semiotics department off the ground.

“Hackett has extensive offerings in the field of Classics. I contacted the headmaster this morning and he said he would be happy to send a master over twice a week to supervise you. Though this might seem the best option from your perspective, it would by no means be ideal, relying, as it does, upon the auspices of the—”

He was the chaplain at Hackett and his Greek, which he had mostly learned at seminary, was crude and inferior even by my standards.

The twins were in Virginia, sequestered at their grandmother’s, incommunicado.

Around the time I graduated, there was a sporadic renewal of communications.

His companions on that day were a spy, a pickpocket, and a “bawdy serving-man.”

When I was writing my dissertation, on Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, I received the following letter from Francis.

Cloke Rayburn, amazingly, ended up going to law school. He is now an associate in mergers and acquisitions at Milbank Tweed in New York, where, interestingly, Hugh Corcoran was just made partner. Word is Hugh got him the job. This might or might not be true, but I tend to think it is, as Cloke almost certainly did not distinguish himself wherever it was that he happened to matriculate.

Georges Laforgue is still on the Literature and Languages faculty at Hampden, where his enemies have still not managed to supplant him.