“Jordache,” Rudolph said.
“So we appreciate the ones who know their manners.” She sipped at her sherry. Looking at her, Rudolph decided that Mr. Fairweather was a lucky man.
“His mother is worried about him,” Rudolph said.
“Is she?” The response was too quick. Gretchen wasn’t the only one who had noticed something.
“She got a letter from him this week. She said—well, of course, mothers are prone to exaggeration—but she said it sounded as though Billy is in despair.” There was no sense in not revealing to this obviously level-headed and well-meaning woman what his errand was. “The word seems a little strong to me,” he said, “but I’ve come to see what can be done. His mother’s in California. And …” He was a little embarrassed now. “She remarried.”
“That’s not so uncommon around here,” Mrs. Fairweather said. She laughed. “I don’t mean about parents living in California. I mean the remarried.”
“Her husband died several months ago,” Rudolph said.
“Oh,” Mrs. Fairweather said. “I’m so sorry. Perhaps that’s why Billy—” She left the sentence unfinished.
“Have you observed anything in particular?” Rudolph asked.
The woman pushed at her short hair uncomfortably. “I’d prefer it if you talked to my husband. It’s really his department.”
“I’m certain you wouldn’t say anything that your husband wouldn’t agree to,” Rudolph said. Without meeting the husband, he was sure that the wife would be less guarded, less defensive about the school, if indeed the school was at fault.
“Your glass is empty,” Mrs. Fairweather said. She took it from him and refilled it.
“Is it his marks?” Rudolph asked. “Are any of the boys bullying him for some reason?”
“No.” Mrs. Fairweather handed him the tiny glass of sherry. “His marks are fine and he doesn’t seem to have any trouble keeping up. And we don’t allow any bullying here.” She shrugged. “He’s a puzzling boy. I’ve talked it over several times with my husband and we’ve tried to sound him out. Without success. He—he’s remote. He doesn’t seem to connect with anybody. Not with any of the other boys. Or any of his teachers. His roommate has asked to be transferred to another house …”
“Do they fight?”
She shook her head. “No. The roommate says Billy just doesn’t talk to him. Ever. About anything. He does his share of housekeeping neatly, he studies at the proper hours, he doesn’t complain, but he barely answers yes or no when he’s spoken to. Physically he’s a strong boy, but he doesn’t join in any of the games. He doesn’t even throw a football around and during this season there’re always dozens of boys playing pickup touch tackle games or just passing the ball back and forth in front of the house. And on Saturdays when we play other schools and the whole school is in the stands, he stays in his room and reads.” As she spoke, her voice sounded just as troubled as Gretchen’s when she had spoken over the phone about Billy.
“If he were a grown man, Mr. Jordache,” Mrs. Fairweather said, “I’d be inclined to say he was suffering from melancholy. I know that’s not very helpful …” She smiled apologetically. “It’s a description, not a diagnosis. But it’s the best my husband and I have been able to come up with. If you can find out anything specific, anything the school can do, we’ll be most grateful.”
The bells of the chapel were ringing far away across the campus and Rudolph could see the first boys crossing from the chapel porch.
“I wonder if you could tell me where Billy’s room is,” Rudolph said. “I’ll wait for him there.” Perhaps there would be some clues there that would prepare him for his meeting with the boy.
“It’s on the third floor,” Mrs. Fairweather said. “All the way down the corridor, the last door to the left.”
Rudolph thanked her and left her with the two children and the setter. What a nice woman, he thought as he mounted the steps. There certainly had been nobody as good as that connected with his education. If she was worried about Billy, there was something to be worried about.
The door, like most of the doors along the corridor, was open. The room seemed to be divided by an invisible curtain. On one side the bed was rumpled and strewn with phonograph records. Books were piled on the floor beside the bed and there were pennants and pictures of girls and athletes torn from magazines pinned to the wall. On the other side, the bed was tightly made and there were no decorations on the wall. The only photographs on that side were on the neatly ordered small desk. They were separate ones of Gretchen and Burke. Gretchen was sitting in a deck chair in the garden of the house in California. The portrait of Burke was one that had been published in a magazine. There was no picture of Willie Abbott.
One book, open and face down, lay on the bed. Rudolph leaned over to see what it was. The Plague, by Camus. Peculiar reading for a fourteen-year-old boy and hardly designed to rescue him from melancholy.
If excessive neatness was a symptom of adolescent neurosis, Billy was neurotic. But Rudolph remembered how neat he had been at the same age and no one had considered him abnormal.
Somehow, though, the room oppressed him, and he didn’t want to have to meet Billy’s roommate, so he went downstairs and waited in front of the door. The sun was stronger now, and with the groups of boys, all shined up for chapel, advancing across the campus, the place no longer seemed prisonlike. Most of the boys were tall, much taller than the boys Rudolph had gone to school with. Increasing America. Everybody took it for granted that it was a good thing. But was it? The better to look down upon you, my dear.
He saw Billy at a distance. He was the only boy walking alone. He walked slowly, naturally, with his head up, nothing hangdog about him. Rudolph remembered how he had practiced walking himself at that age, keeping his shoulders still, trying to glide, making himself seem older, more graceful than his comrades. He still walked that way, but out of habit, not thinking about it.
“Hello, Rudy,” Billy said, without smiling, as he came up to the front of the building. “Thanks for coming to visit me.”
They shook hands. Billy had a strong, quick grasp. He still didn’t have to shave, but his face was not babyish and his voice had already changed.
“I have to be up in Whitby this evening,” Rudolph said, “and since I was going to be on the road anyway, I thought I’d drop in and have lunch with you. It’s only a couple of hours out of the way. Not even that.”
Billy eyed him levelly and Rudolph was sure that the boy knew that the visit wasn’t as off-hand as all that.
“Is there a good restaurant around here?” Rudolph asked, quickly. “I’m starving.”
“My father took me to lunch at a place that wasn’t too bad,” Billy said, “when he was up here the last time.”
“When was that?”
“A month ago. He was going to come up last week, but he wrote that the man who was going to lend him the car had to go out of town at the last minute.”
Rudolph wondered if originally Willie Abbott’s picture had been on the neat desk, next to the photographs of Gretchen and Colin Burke and had been put away after that last letter.
“Do you have to do anything in your room or tell anybody you’re going out to lunch with your uncle?”
“I have nothing to do,” Billy said. “And I don’t have to tell anybody anything.”
Rudolph suddenly became conscious as they stood there, with boys passing them in a steady stream, laughing and fooling around and talking loudly, that Billy hadn’t said hello to a single one of them and that no one had come up to him. It’s as bad as Gretchen feared, he thought. Or worse.
He put his arm briefly around Billy’s shoulder. There was no reaction. “Let’s be off,” he said. “You show me the road.”