It was just past ten when she dropped him off at the lodge, and she told him to call her if he wanted her to begin staying at the lodge. “I know I’ll see Tim Truehart on the street one day,” she said, “and he’ll order me to start taking better care of you!”
“Oh, you do pretty well,” he said, and she drove away.
The next day, Tom wrote another long letter to Lamont von Heilitz and carried it up the hill to wait for Joe Truehart. When the mailman appeared, he came out of the trees and gave the letter to him.
Truehart said, “I hear you think my mom’s gone into the burglary business.”
“I hear she’s pretty good at it,” Tom said, and Truehart laughed and turned his van around and drove off.
Tom realized that he had never opened his grandfather’s mailbox—if Joe Truehart had anything for him, he would have given it to him when Tom gave him the thick envelopes for von Heilitz. He did not even know which aluminum box belonged to his grandfather, and had to go down the length of them, reading the names. Finally he came to Upshaw. He tugged at the catch and opened the box. It was jammed with folded pieces of white paper. There were dozens of messages inside the box. He scooped them out and unfolded the top sheet.
In large flowing black letters that virtually yelled with frustration, it read DON’T YOU EVER LOOK IN YOUR MAILBOX? The word Friday had been scrawled above this sentence, and the name Sarah had been written beneath, in such haste or irritation that it was only a straight line between the large S and the almost embryonic h.
Tom read through the stack of notes on the way back to his lodge. Then he read them all over again. He felt almost dizzy with joy.
Inside the lodge, he spread them all out on the desk and read them in order, from My parents ordered me not to see you anymore, but I can’t get you out of my mind, to DON’T YOU EVER LOOK IN YOUR MAILBOX? There was one for every day since the day she had taken him into the compound. Some of them were love letters, outright and frank, the most passionate and personal statements that had ever been uttered to him; some of them burned with resentment against her parents and detailed the events of days filled with almost deathly boredom. One, written the day she had heard about the shooting, was filled with alarm and worry. One of them said only I need you.
One was a long extended metaphor comparing his penis to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Washington Monument, and the Eiffel Tower, all of which she had seen between the ages of eight and twelve.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No, I hardly think so, since you’re not very much like a summer’s day, but you do remind me a bit of European travel.…
He called her lodge, and Mrs. Spence hung up as soon as he gave his name. He called back, and said, “Mrs. Spence, I’m sorry, but this is very important. Would you please let me speak to Sarah?”
“No one in this family has anything at all to say to you,” she said, and hung up.
The third time he called, Mr. Spence answered, asked if he wanted a broken arm as bad as all that, and slammed down the phone.
He changed into his bathing suit and resolutely swam back and forth past their dock, but neither Sarah nor anyone else came through their back door.
For the rest of the afternoon, Tom tried to concentrate on the pages he had written about the murder, but his attention returned again and again to Sarah’s wonderful letters—she had suggested meetings, made assignations, waited for him on the highway behind Lamont von Heilitz’s lodge, tried to beam into his brain messages about looking at his mailbox.
He went to the club early that evening and waited at Roddy and Buzz’s end of the bar. He ordered a club soda and ate a handful of goldfish crackers. He nervously downed a second glass of club soda, and ordered a Kir Royale. The first sip made him feel dizzy and light-headed. The Langenheims came up the stairs, nodded at him glumly, and went straight to their table.
Then Marcello’s resonant voice came up the stairs, and Tom heard footsteps, and Ralph and Katinka Redwing appeared beside him—Ralph gave him a look of utter indifference, and Katinka did not see him at all. Behind them came the Spences. Mr. Spence looked happy and expansive, and Mrs. Spence was saying, “Oh, Ralph! Ralph!” Both Spences saw Tom at the same instant, and their faces went dead. Behind her parents came Sarah, walking upstairs with Buddy Redwing. Buddy said a sentence of which Tom heard only the word “toad,” and Sarah’s eyes flew to Tom’s face, and locked with his own eyes. He felt all of his inner gravity alter, and he nodded three, four, five times, vehemently. Sarah rolled her eyes upward, closed them, opened them, and gave him a small, tucked-in smile of pure satisfaction.
“I don’t think we’ll go to the bar tonight,” Ralph Redwing told Marcello, “it’s a little crowded, just take us to our table.”
Sarah was placed next to Buddy with her back to Tom.
In a loud voice from the head of the table, Ralph Redwing said, “Let’s have two bottles of the Roederer Cristal to begin with tonight, Marcello, we have something to celebrate. These children have just become engaged to be engaged, and we’re all tremendously happy with their decision.”
Mrs. Spence looked at Tom with narrowed eyes and a gloating smile. He raised his glass to her in a mock toast, and her smile tightened.
When the old waiter came around to take his order, Tom asked if he could take his meal home and eat it there—despite his bravado, he could not ignore what was going on at the long table, and did not have the stomach to watch it.
He carried his meal home in a brown paper bag, set it out on the table, looked at it, then scraped it into the garbage and ate the pie that Barbara Deane had given him.
The next day, Tom heard voices coming from down the avenue of trees in front of the lodges, and went outside to see who it was. He walked down the track, and the voices got louder. Jerry Hasek was unloading trunks and suitcases from the back of the Cadillac, and shambling from side to side as he passed into the compound behind his parents, his white hair blazing in the sunlight. Behind him was the answer to Tom’s problem, Fritz Redwing, come to Eagle Lake for another endless party with his cousin.
Tom paced around the sitting room, fidgeted with pens and papers at the desk, stared out of every window on the ground floor of the lodge, reread Sarah’s letters, looked at his watch. Every minute that went by increased the likelihood that Fritz would not call him. Tom imagined Fritz in his family’s lodge, his suitcases opened on the bed, jeans and chinos and shorts strewn across the floor, interrupting a conversation between his parents and his aunt and uncle about the jet and Ted Mornay with the comment that he sort of thought, you know, that he’d see what good old Tom Pasmore was up to. Uncle Ralph would make sure that he didn’t see what good old Tom Pasmore was up to, and when Fritz saw Tom in the dining room he would shrug and shake his head and generally try to communicate that all conversation would have to wait until their senior year started, tough luck, and what did you do anyway, man?
When the telephone rang, Tom scrambled for it from the sitting room, and picked it up on the third ring.
Fritz’s first words told him that all his worry had been pointless. “Tom! We’re both here! Isn’t that great?”
It sure was, Tom said, genuinely happy to hear Fritz’s voice.
“Boy, I never thought this would really happen,” Fritz said. “We’re going to have such a great time. I guess Buddy had some real wild friends up here, I bet they got outrageous and outa sight, so tell me what you were doing—but please please don’t tell me you just moped around reading books and acting like Mr. Handley. I’m fed up with Mr. Handley, he never makes any sense!”