“It was so nice of Miss Ellinghausen to give you to me. Or would you rather dance with Posy Tuttle?”
“Posy and I didn’t have much to say to each other.”
“Posy was scared stiff of you, couldn’t you tell?”
“What?”
“You’re so hulking, for one thing, with those enormous shoulders. Posy is used to looking down at boys, that’s why she has that terrible stoop. And I think she found your reputation forbidding. I mean your reputation as the school intellectual.”
“Is that what I am?” This was a little disingenuous.
“But Not For Me” came to an end, and “Cocktails For Two” began.
“Do you remember when I visited you in the hospital?”
“You talked about Buddy then too.”
“I was impressed with him, I will admit. It was interesting to—that he was a Redwing was interesting.”
“Boys,” Miss Ellinghausen said, “right hands on your partners’ spines. Fritz, stop daydreaming.”
When Tom said nothing, Sarah went on, “I mean, they’re so definite. So set apart.”
“What goes on at the compound?”
“They watch movies a lot. They talk about sports. The men get together and talk about business—I saw your grandfather a couple of times. He comes over to see Ralph Redwing. If it wasn’t them, it’d be kind of boring. And Buddy isn’t too boring.” She looked up at him with a flickering smile. “I always think of you when I see your grandfather.”
“I think of you too.” Tom’s depression had blown away as if it never existed.
“You’re not shaking anymore,” she said.
Miss Gonsalves began thumping out something that sounded like “Begin the Beguine.”
“I was so stupid, that day I saw you in the hospital. You know how you go over certain conversations after you had them, and feel terrible about the dumb things you said? That’s how I feel about that day.”
“I was just happy you came.”
“But you were—” She waited.
“You were so different. Grown up.”
“Well, you’ve caught up with me! We’re friends again, aren’t we? We wouldn’t have stopped being friends, if you hadn’t walked in front of a car.” She looked up at him with a face in which an idea was just being born. “Why don’t you come up to Eagle Lake this summer? Fritz could invite you. I could see you every day. We could sit around and talk while Buddy is blowing up fish and wrecking cars.”
Holding Sarah Spence in his arms, Tom felt himself claimed by the daily world, which had seemed so insubstantial in Lamont von Heilitz’s house. This extraordinarily pretty and self-possessed girl seemed to imply, with her long warm smile and stream of sentences that went straight into him like a series of shapely arrows, that everything could always be as it was at this moment. He could dance, he could talk, he could hold Sarah Spence’s surprisingly firm and solid body in his arms without shaking or stuttering. He was the school intellectual—the school something, anyhow. He was hulking, with his enormous shoulders.
“Aren’t you glad they got that madman who killed Marita Hasselgard?” Sarah asked him, her voice bright and careless.
The music stopped. Miss Gonsalves began murdering “Lover.” Miss Ellinghausen wandered past and nodded at him from behind Sarah Spence’s back. She actually gave him a thin dusty smile.
“We should be friends,” she said, and rested her head against his chest.
“Yes,” he said, clearing his throat and separating from her as Miss Ellinghausen tapped Sarah’s shoulder and tried to shrivel them with a betrayed, angry glance. “Yes, we really should.”
At the end of the class, Miss Ellinghausen clapped her hands together, and Miss Gonsalves lowered the upright’s polished lid. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are making excellent progress,” Miss Ellinghausen said. “Next week I shall introduce the tango, a dance which comes to us from the land of Argentina. Basic knowledge of the tango has become essential in smart society, and, considered in itself, the tango is a refined vehicle in which the strongest emotions may find expression in a delicate and controlled fashion. Some of you will see what I mean. Please give my best wishes to your parents.” She turned away to open the door to the hallway.
Sarah and Tom filed through the door and nodded to Miss Ellinghausen, who responded to each of the hasty nods given her by the students with an identical, machine-tooled dip of the head. For the first time since Tom had joined the class, the old lady interrupted her performance at the door long enough to ask a question. “Are the two of you satisfied with the new arrangement?”
“Yes,” Tom said.
“Very,” said Sarah.
“Fine,” said Miss Ellinghausen, “there’ll be no more nonsense, then,” and dipped her head in her perfect nod.
Tom followed Sarah out on the broad top step of the townhouse. Fritz Redwing stood at the bottom of the steps, rolling his eyes and gesturing toward the waiting cart.
“Well,” said Tom, wishing that he did not have to leave Sarah Spence, and wondering how she got home.
“Fritzie’s waiting for you,” Sarah said. “Next week we learn to express the strongest emotions in a delicate and controlled fashion.”
“We could use more of that around here,” he said.
Sarah smiled rather abstractly, looked down, then up over his shoulder. She moved sideways to make room for the students still coming through the door. To Tom, she seemed set apart from all of the others going up and down the stairs—she looked in some way like two people at once, and he thought that he had imagined the same thing once about someone else, but could not remember who it had been. She flicked her eyes at him, then went back to looking at empty space. Tom wished he could embrace or kiss or capture her. In the past fifty minutes he had held her, had spoken to her more than in the past five years, but now it seemed to him that he had missed everything and wasted every second of the time he had spent with her.
The last of the students who took the cart home stood in line on the sidewalk to jump up into the green shade of the cover. Fritz Redwing squirmed with impatience, looking as if he had to go to the bathroom.
“You’d better go,” Sarah said.
“See you next week,” he said, and started down the white stone steps.
She looked away, as if he had said something too obvious.
Tom moved down the white steps toward Fritz Redwing, and his contradictory feelings seemed to expand and declare war on him. He felt as if he had lost something of supreme value, and found himself overjoyed that the beautiful, necessary thing was gone forever. Some live object within him had broken free, and begun violently beating its wings.
Then for a moment the contradictory emotions coursing through him obliterated all the rest of the world, and then seemed to obliterate him. He was dimly aware of Fritz Redwing staring at him in childish agitation, and of an ornate carriage turning from Calle Berghofstrasse into the shaded street. The carriage looked familiar. Everything about Tom seemed to sigh, and his hand on the railing grew suddenly pale and grainy, and then Tom realized that he could see right through his hand to the railing.
Somewhere directly behind him, invisible but hugely present, occurred a great explosion—a flash of red light and a sound of tearing metal and breaking glass. He was vanishing, becoming nothing. His body continued to disappear as he moved down the stairs. In seconds his hands and feet, his whole body, was only a shimmer in the air, then only an outline. When he reached the bottom step, he had disappeared altogether. He was dead, he was free. The fused but contradictory feelings within him burned on, and the catastrophe just behind him kept on happening. All of this was complete and whole. He stepped across the sidewalk. Fritz’s mouth moved, but invisible words came out. On the side of the carriage rolling toward them, Tom saw a golden letter R so surrounded by scrolls and curls it resembled a golden snake in a golden nest. When he exhaled and moved toward the cart, he could hear Fritz Redwing complain about how slowly he was moving.