“Tomorrow night, if you like. We’ll have a wonderful holiday, won’t we?”
They barely beat the one o’clock deadline at the dorm, and the next night was wonderful and pleasing, as was the holiday altogether, but in the time that followed from Thanksgiving to Christmas they were sometimes almost in despair, partly because circumstances again made certain things difficult, if not impossible, and partly because it was a time leading inevitably to another period of time when they would be unable to see each other at all in any circumstances whatever. Henry’s despair increased as the dreaded Christmas holiday drew near, and then, a few days before it was to begin, something happened to Howie that reduced his own affairs to insignificance and made him feel that he had committed a hideous wrong in having been so excessively concerned with them.
The evening of the day it happened, Henry was in his room, trying to study but not being very successful at it, when Howie came in and sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor between his feet.
“I expect this will be my last semester here,” he said suddenly.
“Last semester?” Henry looked up from his book. “Why?”
“Well, I’m not doing so well. I’ve got behind in all my subjects. I’m sure to flunk at least three of my semester exams.”
“Exams aren’t until the middle of January. If you worked hard between now and then, you could catch up.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Anyhow, I won’t do it. I know that. For some reason or other, I can’t seem to get interested in anything. The old man will raise hell, but I guess it doesn’t make much difference. I’ve been thinking about not coming back after the holiday.”
“I hope you will.”
“Why? I’d only be dropped after exams.”
“Maybe not. Maybe you’re being too pessimistic about your chances.”
“No. There’s no chance at all of getting by unless I work like a dog between now and then, and there’s no use kidding myself that I’m going to do it. I just haven’t got it in me.”
“I don’t want you to leave school, Howie. I’d miss you if you did.”
“Oh, balls. You wouldn’t miss me as long as Mandy’s around.”
“Yes, I would. Mandy would miss you too.”
“Cut it out. She hardly ever sees me as it is, and she isn’t very happy about it when she does. You’ve heard the way she talks to me.”
“Well, you invite it, Howie. You know you do.”
“I suppose so. I’m an unpleasant son of a bitch. I don’t really want to be, though. It’s because I’m afraid of being disliked or something, and so I deliberately try to make everyone dislike me. It gives me a kind of excuse. You’ve probably figured out for yourself by this time that I’m a goddamn phony.”
“You’re nothing of the sort, and I’ve never thought so.”
“Well, thanks. I guess maybe you haven’t. You’ve been a good friend.”
Suddenly Howie made a fist with one hand and began to beat it with a slow and desperate cadence into the palm of the other. Standing, he walked out of the room without another word, and it was not more than fifteen minutes later when Henry heard him scream. The scream was repeated and repeated in almost the same cadence with which the fist had pounded the palm, and the screams were accompanied by the sounds of objects crashing and breaking and overturning in what seemed a systematic plan of demolition. After recovering from the first paralysis of shock, Henry hurried into the hall and down to Howie’s closed door. The student who lived in the room across the hall was already there, staring at the door with an expression of incredulous horror.
“What in God’s name’s the matter with him?” he said. “Why the hell don’t you open the door and find out?”
“I tried to, but it’s locked.”
“Help me break it down.”
They threw themselves against the door together, and the flimsy lock snapped at once. The room beyond was in shambles. Curtains and blinds had been ripped from the windows, mattress and covers torn from the bed, chairs and tables overturned, lamps smashed, books and papers scattered everywhere. In the middle of the shambles, facing the door, was Howie. His shirt was ripped, and his face was bleeding in several places where he had clawed himself. He looked at Henry and saw no one and continued his terrible, cadenced screaming.
“Jesus, Jesus,” the student said. “He’s gone completely crazy.”
“Go call the infirmary,” Henry said. “Tell them to send an ambulance.”
The student left, and Henry waited by the door. He spoke to Howie once, but he got no response, no slight sign of recognition, and with a kind of instinctive feeling for what was right, he made no effort to force himself upon his berserk friend. He only waited and watched to see that Howie inflicted no more damage on himself, and after a while the student returned, and a longer while after that the ambulance came with a doctor and two attendants from the infirmary. As soon as he was touched, Howie, who had become quiet, was immediately violent again, screaming and cursing and fighting with incredible strength. It required both attendants and the doctor to subdue him and administer an injection of some kind of sedative. When they had taken Howie away at last, Henry went into the bathroom and was sick.
He did not see Mandy again until the night before the day the Christmas holiday was to begin. They met in the sitting room of the dorm and walked from there across the campus to the Museum of Natural History and along a path behind the museum to a campanile on a high point of ground above a hollow with a small lake in it. A wind was blowing, and it was cold there, but they sat for a while in the cold wind on a stone bench, and the cold was like a punishment inflicted, a penance borne. He could feel her shivering and heard for a moment the chattering of her teeth, but when he lifted his arm to put it around her for warmth, she drew away from him a little on the bench.
“No,” she said. “Don’t touch me tonight.”
“All right. I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
“Please don’t be offended.”
“I’m not. I think I understand.”
“I should have been kinder to him. It wouldn’t have hurt me to be a little kinder, and it might have helped.”
“You musn’t blame yourself for anything. It was something more than you or I or anyone else ever said or did or failed to say or do.”
“You’re right, I suppose. It must have been something in himself that couldn’t be helped.”
“Maybe now it can be helped.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I only wish that I had been a little kinder. He was in love with me, you know. Last year, before you came, he wanted me to run away and marry him.”
“I didn’t know. He never said anything.”
“I couldn’t do it, of course. I never even liked him very well, to tell the truth, but it wouldn’t have hurt me to be a little kinder.”
“Don’t say that again. Please don’t say it. You couldn’t be expected to know how he was or what would eventually happen to him.”
“Do you think he will be all right?”
“After a while. Someone will help him now.”
“I hope he’s all right. I hope he will be helped by someone who is kinder than I.”
She stood up, shivering and drawing her coat around her. They walked back along the path to the museum and on to the dorm, stopping in the shadow of the leafless hedge.
“Good-by, Henry,” she said.
“Good-by,” he said. “Will I see you after Christmas?”
“Yes,” she said. “After Christmas...”
Chapter 6
...Christmas.
And now, he thought, it was almost another one, and between then and now, that Christmas and this, a great deal had happened and he had been many places, but all that had happened and all the places he had been seemed in retrospect to be more remote in his life than the things and people and places of longer ago. Something had somehow ended with the end of Mandy, a quality of intensity, an impressionability, something that was his that she took away. She had left the university at the end of the next year, and afterward he received several letters from her at longer and longer intervals, and finally the one, which was the last, in which she explained that she was getting married to someone she had known for a long time, long before their time, and in the last paragraph of the letter she said, with a kind of gaiety and bravado that must have been intended as a tear and a kiss and a flip of the hand, that she was so happy she had been able to please him, and good luck, and to think of her, please, sometimes.