“Michael was in way over his head,” Mark said carefully. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want you to promise that you will not tell Gregor Demarkian about the relationship between Michael and myself.”
“What if I already have?”
“Then there’s nothing I can do about it, is there? But I don’t think you have. I think if you had told him, I’d know about it already. The news would be out.”
“The news is going to be out one way or the other, sooner or later,” Mark said. “I’m not the only one who knows. Everybody knows.”
“Nobody else would tell.”
“And Michael’s mother is here. She’ll tell.”
“Michael didn’t tell his mother about us. I asked him not to, and he gave me his promise, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have broken it. You don’t understand that either, but we were so close, so perfectly in touch with each other, not only physically but in every other way—we were so perfectly matched. We trusted each other without reservation.”
“How very nice for both of you.”
“You ought to learn not to be envious of other people, Mark. It isn’t a very attractive trait in someone like you, someone who’s had all the advantages. It’s not as if you’ve done anything to deserve the things you’ve had. It’s all been handed to you. You ought to take it in good grace when other people sometimes get a few of the crumbs from your table.”
The head fuzz was more than back in force. It was completely out in the stratosphere. The only reason he wasn’t twitching anymore was that he’d willed himself not to. He kept seeing a vision of himself and his mother and his little brother, Geoff, in the cabin they had rented on Lake Candle-wood the year after his father had died, when they were all out of money and his mother wasn’t working, and the whole world seemed to have gone to hell, and his life seemed to be effectively over. He’d been ten years old at the time, and he could still see them sitting on chairs with their feet up because the cabin flooded with an inch of water in every bad rain. He could still see the Christmas with no tree and nostockings and nothing for presents but boxes of Russell Stover candy that his mother had managed to get hold of he never knew how. He did not mind those memories. His life had been much more complicated than Alice Makepeace would ever understand. He did mind Alice’s soft, sad, condescending smile.
“I have to go back to Hayes House,” he said again, again trying to get up.
Alice’s smile grew more pitying as she pushed him down yet again. “Please,” she said, “let me get you your coffee.”
Chapter Six
1
Gregor Demarkian found the note from Mark DeAvecca on his bed when he returned to his room, but he had expected that. He only read the note with enough attention to be sure that Mark had gone back to school, something he’d only half expected him to do. Mark was not the sort of boy who “hated” school and spent his time playing truant or hiding a Game Boy Advance behind the upraised back of his textbook in biology class. Gregor was willing to bet that, until this year, Mark hadn’t ever wanted to be somewhere else in the middle of a school day. He revised that. There were times when any sane human being wanted to be somewhere else in the middle of a school day. What he meant was that he had always thought, before this visit, that Mark DeAvecca was a lot like he himself had been at the same age—a boy who truly loved books, and whose mind was the most noticeable thing about him, but not a “bookish” boy. There is a difference, Gregor thought, between intelligence and scholarliness. He didn’t know if “scholarliness” was even a word. But there was a difference, and he had never been scholarly. He had loved to read, and he had read everything, from Popular Mechanics magazines to Jean-Paul Sartre novels that had been stupefying in their nihilism. He had loved school because in school, for at least some of thetime, he was out of the maelstrom that was Cavanaugh Street in the days before everybody had enough money to turn tenements into town houses. School and the public library were his two most distinct memories of growing up, but the background music for both was the sound of people arguing, men shouting, women crying, the crash of rickety wooden chairs and cheap crockery against the walls of apartments too thin to contain either the sound or the anger. He had read those articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer bent on “celebrating ethnic Philadelphia,” and he had wanted more than once to talk some sense into the writers who produced them. He would say:
Ethnic Philadelphia was like ethnic everywhere else. The people who came here were poor, and ignorant, and scared to death. They came from a world where women were not much better than cattle in the social scheme of things, and men expected to have authority whether they had earned it or not. They came to a world where men have authority only as the result of striving and achievement, and women sometimes have authority, too. The schoolteachers were women. The family court judges were women. They went back to their neighborhoods and their wives and their children after a day of working in the Anglo-Saxon world, and they were running on panic and rage.