“Of course. I told you I would.”

“What did you say to him?”

“What was agreed. I also mentioned the house, and said that we hoped he would not decide to sell it without inspecting it first. All of Edward’s things are still there, of course, including his tapes. If we haven’t had the heart to go through them, perhaps he will.”

They were standing apart from the other two, just inside the doorway to John Jaffrey’s living rooms. John and Lewis were seated in Victorian chairs in a corner of the nearest room, talking to the doctor’s housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, who sat on a stool before them, dangling a flowered tray which had held their drinks. Like Ricky’s wife, Milly resented being excluded from the meetings of the Chowder Society, unlike Stella Hawthorne, she perpetually hovered at the edges, popping in with bowls of ice cubes and sandwiches and cups of coffee. She irritated Sears to almost exactly the same extent as a summer fly bumping against the window. In many ways Milly was preferable to Stella Hawthorne—less demanding, less driven. And she certainly took care of John: Sears approved of the women who helped his friends. For Sears, it was an open question whether or not Stella had taken care of Ricky.

Now Sears looked down at the person fate had put closer to him than anyone else in the world, and knew that Ricky was thinking that he had weasel-worded his way out of the last question. Ricky’s sagacious little jowls were taut with impatience. “All right,” he said. “I told him that we weren’t satisfied with what we knew of his uncle’s death. I did not mention Miss Galli.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Ricky said, and walked across the room to join the others. Milly stood up, but Ricky smiled and waved her back to the stool. A born gentleman, Ricky had always been charming to women. An armchair stood not four feet away, but he would not sit until Milly asked him to.

Sears took his eyes off Ricky and looked around at the familiar upstairs sitting room. John Jaffrey had turned the whole ground floor of his house into his office—waiting rooms, consulting rooms, a drug cabinet. The other two small rooms on the ground floor were Milly’s apartment. John lived the rest of his life up here, where there had been only bedrooms in the old days. Sears had known the interior of John Jaffrey’s home for at least sixty years: during his childhood, he had lived two houses down, on the other side of the street. That is, the building he had always thought of as “the family house” was there, to be returned to from boarding school, to be returned to from Cambridge. In those days, Jaffrey’s house had been owned by a family named Frederickson, who had two children much younger than Sears. Mr. Frederickson had been a grain merchant, a crafty beer-swilling mountainous man with red hair and a redder face, sometimes mysteriously tinged blue; his wife had been the most desirable woman young Sears had ever seen. She was tall, with coiled long hair some color between brown and auburn, and had a kittenish exotic face and prominent breasts. It was with these that young Sears had been fascinated. Speaking to Viola Frederickson, he’d had to struggle to keep his eyes on her face.

In the summers, home from boarding school and between trips to the country, he was their babysitter. The Fredericksons could not afford a full-time nanny, though a girl from the Hollow lived in their house as cook and maid. Possibly it amused Frederickson to have Professor James’s son babysit for his boys. Sears had his own amusements. He liked the boys and enjoyed their hero worship, which was so much like that of the younger boys at the Hill School; and once the boys were asleep, he enjoyed prowling through the house and seeing what he could find. He saw his first French letter in Abel Frederickson’s dresser drawer. He had known he was doing wrong, entering the bedrooms where he now freely stood, but he could not keep himself from doing it. One night he had opened Viola Frederickson’s desk and found a photograph of her—she looked impossibly inviting, exotic and warm, an icon of the other, unknowable half of the species. He looked at the way her breasts pushed out the fabric of her blouse, and his mind filled with sensations of their weight, their density. He was so hard that his penis felt like the trunk of a tree: it was the first time that his sexuality had hit him with such force. Groaning, clutching his trousers, he had turned away from the photograph and seen one of her blouses folded on top of the dresser. He could not help himself; he caressed it. He could see where the blouse would bulge, carrying her within it, her flesh seemed to be present beneath his hands, and he unbuttoned his trousers and took out his member. He placed it on the blouse, thinking with the part of his mind that could still think that it was making him do it; it was making him push its distended tip down where her breasts would cushion it. He groaned, bent double over the blouse, a convulsion went through him, and he exploded. His balls felt as if they’d been caught in a vise. Immediately after, shame struck him like a fist. He rolled the blouse up into his satchel of books and, going a roundabout way home, wrapped the once-flawless thing around a stone and tossed it into the river. Nobody had ever mentioned the stolen blouse to him, but it was the last time he’d been invited to babysit.

Through the windows behind Ricky Hawthorne’s head, Sears could see a street lamp shining on the second floor of the house Eva Galli had bought when, on whatever whim or impulse, she had come to Milburn. Most of the time he could forget about Eva Galli and where she had lived: he supposed that he was conscious of it now—of her house shining at them through the window—because of some connection his mind made between her and the ridiculous scene he had just remembered.

Maybe I should have cleared out of Milburn when I could, he thought: the bedroom where Edward Wanderley had died exactly a year ago was just overhead. By unspoken common agreement, none of them had alluded to the coincidence of their meeting here again on the anniversary of their friend’s death. A fraction of Ricky Hawthorne’s sense of doom flickered in his mind, and then he thought: you old fool, you still feel guilty about that blouse. Hah!

You know what a schoolmaster’s duties were in those days. This was no urban school, and it was no Hill School either—God knows that was where I should have applied, but I had a number of elaborate ideas in those days. I fancied myself as a real country Socrates, bringing the light of reason into the wilderness. Wilderness! In those days, the country around Elmira was nearly that, as I remember, but now there isn’t even a suburb where the little town was. A freeway cloverleaf was put up right over the site of the school. The whole thing’s under concrete. It used to be called Four Forks, and it’s gone. But back then, during my sabbatical from Milburn, it was a typical little village, ten or twelve houses, a general store, a post office, a blacksmith, the schoolhouse. All of these buildings looked alike, in a general sort of way—they were all wooden, they hadn’t been painted in years so they all looked a bit gray and dismal. The schoolhouse was one room, of course, one room for all eight grades. When I came up for my interview I was told that I’d be boarding with the Mathers—they’d put in the lowest bid, and I soon found out why—and that my day would start at six. I had to chop the wood for the schoolhouse stove, get a good fire going, sweep the place out and get the books in place, pump up the water, clean the boards—wash the windows, too, when they needed it.

Then at seven-thirty the students would come. And my job was to teach all eight grades, reading, writing, arithmetic, music, geography, penmanship, history … the “works.” Now I’d run a mile from any such prospect, but then I was full of Abraham Lincoln on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other, and I was bursting to start. The whole idea simply enraptured me. I was besotted. I suppose even then the town was dying, but I couldn’t see it. What I saw was splendor— freedom and splendor. A little tarnished perhaps, but splendor all the same.

You see, I didn’t know. I couldn’t guess what most of my pupils would be like. I didn’t know that most country schoolteachers in these little hamlets were boys of about nineteen, with no more education than they’d be giving. I didn’t know how muddy and unpleasant a place like Four Forks would be most of the year. I didn’t know I’d be half-starved most of the time. Nor that it would be a condition of my job that I report for church every Sunday off in the next village, an eight-mile hike. I didn’t know how rough it would be.

I began to find out when I went over to the Mathers with my suitcase that first night. Charlie Mather used to be the postmaster in town, but when the Republicans got into office they made Howard Hummell the postmaster, and Charlie Mather never got over his resentment. He was permanently sour. When he took me up to the room I was to use, I saw that it was unfinished— the floor was plain unsanded wood, and the ceiling consisted of just the roofing joists and tiles. “Was makin’ this for our daughter,” Mather told me. “She died. One less mouth to feed.” The bed was a tired old mattress on the floor, with one old army blanket over it. In the winter, there wasn’t enough warmth for an Eskimo in that room. But I saw that it had a desk and a kerosene lamp, and I was still seeing stars, and I said fine, I’ll love it here, something to that effect. Mather grunted in disbelief, as well he might.

Supper that night was potatoes and creamed corn. “You’ll eat no meat here,” Mather said, “unless you save up and buy it yourself. I’m getting the allowance to keep you alive, not to fatten you up.” I don’t suppose I ate meat more than six times at the Mather table, and that was all at once, when somebody gave him a goose and we had goose every day until there was nothing left of it. Eventually some of my pupils began bringing me ham and beef sandwiches—their parents knew Mather was a mean-fisted man. Mather himself ate his big meal at noon, but he made it clear that it was my duty to spend the lunch hour in the schoolhouse— “offering extra help and giving punishments.”

Because up there they believed in the birch. I’d taught my first day when I found out about that. I say, taught, but really all I’d managed to do was keep them quiet for a few hours and write down their names and ask a few questions. It was astonishing. Only two of the older girls could read, simple addition and subtraction was as far as their math went, and not only had a few of them not heard of foreign countries, one of them didn’t even believe they existed. “Aw, there’s nothin’ like that,” one scrawny ten-year-old told me. “A place where people ain’t even American? Where they don’t even talk American?” But he couldn’t go further, he was laughing too hard at the absurdity of the idea, and I saw a mouthful of appalling, blackened teeth. “So what about the war, dopey?” another boy said. “Never heard tell of the Germans?” Before I could react, the first boy flew over the desk and started beating the second boy. It looked as though he was literally set on murdering him. I tried to separate the two boys—the girls were all shrieking—and I grabbed the assailant’s arm. “He’s right,” I said. “He shouldn’t have called you a name, but he is right. Germans are the people who live in Germany, and the world war …” I stopped short because the boy was growling at me. He was like a savage dog, and for the first time I realized that he was mentally disturbed, perhaps retarded. He was ready to bite me. “Now apologize to your friend,” I said.

“Ain’t no friend of mine.”

“Apologize.”

“He’s queer, sir,” the other boy said. His face was pale, and his eyes were frightened, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. “I shouldn’t never of said that to him.”

I asked the first boy what his name was. “Fenny Bate,” he managed to drool out. He was calming down. I sent the second boy back to his desk. “Fenny,” I said, “the trouble is that you were wrong. America isn’t the whole world, just as New York isn’t the whole United States.” This was too complicated, and I had lost him. So I brought him up to the front and made him sit down while I drew maps on the board. “Now this is the United States of America, and this is Mexico, and this is the Atlantic Ocean …”

Fenny was shaking his head darkly. “Lies,” he said. “All that’s lies. That stuff ain’t there. It AIN’T!” When he shouted he pushed at his desk and it went crashing over.

I asked him to pick up his desk, and when he just shook his head, starting to slobber again, I picked it up myself. Some of the children gasped. “So you’ve seen or heard of maps and other countries?” I asked.

He nodded. “But they’re lies.”

“Who told you that?”

He shook his head and refused to say. If he had shown any signs of embarrassment, I would have thought that he’d learned this misinformation from his parents; but he did not—he was just angry and sullen.

At noon all the children took their paper bags outside and ate their sandwiches in the lot around the school. It would be window-dressing to call it a playground, though there was a rickety set of swings in back of the school. I kept my eye on Fenny Bate. He was left alone by most of the other children. When he roused himself from his stupor and tried to join a group, the others pointedly walked away and left him standing alone, his hands in his pockets. From time to time a skinny girl with lank blond hair came up and spoke to him—she rather resembled him, and I imagined that she must have been his sister. I checked my lists: Constance Bate, in the fifth grade. She had been one of the quiet ones.

Then, when I looked back at Fenny, I saw an odd-looking man standing on the road outside the building, looking across the school grounds at him, just as I was doing. Fenny Bate was sitting unaware between us. For some reason, this man gave me a shock. It was not just that he was odd in appearance, though he was that, dressed in old disreputable working clothes, with wild black hair, ivory cheeks, a handsome face and extremely powerful looking arms and shoulders. It was the way he was looking at Fenny Bate. He looked feral. And with the wildness, there was a striking sort of freedom in the way he stood there, a freedom that went deeper than mere self-assurance. To me he seemed extremely dangerous; and it seemed that I had been transported into a region where men and boys were wild beasts in disguise. I looked away, almost frightened by the savagery in the man’s face, and when I looked back he was gone.

My notions of the place were confirmed that evening, when I had forgotten all about the man outside on the road. I had gone upstairs to my drafty room to try to work out my lessons for the second day. I would have to introduce the multiplication tables to the upper grades, they all could use some extremely elementary geography … things of this sort were going through my mind when Sophronia Mather entered my room. The first thing she did was to turn down the kerosene lamp I had been using. “That’s for full dark, not evening,” she said. “We can’t afford to have you using up all the kerosene. You’ll learn to read your books by the light God gives you.”

I was startled to see her in my room. During supper the previous evening she had been silent, and judging by her face, which was pinched and sallow and tight as a drumhead, you would say that silence was her natural mode. She made it very expressive, I can tell you. But I was to learn that apart from her husband, she had no fear of speech.

“I’ve come to quiz you, schoolteacher,” she said. “There’s been talk.”

“Already?” I asked.

“You make your ending in your manner of beginning, and how you begin is how you’ll go on. I’ve heard from Mariana Birdwood that you tolerate misbehavior in your classes.”

“I don’t believe I did,” I said.

“Her Ethel claims you did.”

I could not put a face to the name Ethel Birdwood, but I remembered calling it out—she was one of the older girls, the fifteen-year-olds, I thought. “And what does Ethel Birdwood claim I tolerated?”

“It’s that Fenny Bate. Didn’t he use fists on another boy? Right in front of your nose?”

“I spoke to him.”

“Spoke? Speakin’s no good. Why didn’t you use your ferule?”

“I don’t possess one,” I said.

Now she really was shocked. “But you must beat them,” she finally got out. “It’s the only way. You must ferule one or two every day. And Fenny Bate more than the rest.”

“Why particularly him?”

“Because he is bad.”

“I saw that he is troubled, slow, disturbed,” I said, “but I don’t think that I saw that he was bad.”

“He is. He is bad. And the other children expect him to be beaten. If your ideas are too uppity for us, then you’ll have to leave the school. It’s not only the children who expect you to use the ferule.” She turned as if to go out. “I thought I would do you the kindness of speaking to you before my husband hears that you have been neglecting your duties. Mind you, you’ll take my advice. There’s no teaching without beating.”

“But what makes Fenny Bate so notorious?” I asked, ignoring that horrific last remark. “It would be unjust to persecute a boy who needs help.”

“The ferule’s all the help he needs. He’s not bad, he’s badness itself. You should make him bleed and keep him quiet—keep him down. I’m only trying to help you, schoolmaster. We have use of the little extra money your allowance brings us.” With that she left me. I did not even have time to ask her about the peculiar man I had seen that afternoon.

Well, I had no intention of doing further damage to the town scapegoat.

(Milly Sheehan, her face puckered with distaste, set down the ashtray she had been pretending to polish, glanced at the window to make sure the drapes were closed and edged around the door. Sears, pausing in his story, saw that she had left it open a crack.)