014218182X (26 page)

There were eleven kids seated in a semicircle and Dr. Hawthorne was up at the blackboard, drawing several lines indicating the northern boundary of the Roman Empire in what was now Austria, Hungary, and Romania. He had gotten chalk on his jacket but he didn’t seem to care. He was talking about the Second Marcomannic War between
AD
169 and 175, when Marcus Aurelius and his legions fought the German tribes—the Iazyges, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Sarmatians—defeating them and pushing them north into the Carpathian Mountains. For these victories a triumphal column was raised to Marcus Aurelius that still stood in Rome’s Piazza Colonna.

It was last period on Monday and getting dark. All afternoon Scott had been thinking about Mr. Evings’s office being wrecked. While not exactly exciting, it was more interesting than most of the stuff at Bishop’s Hill. Scott had caught a glimpse of the room before he got shooed away: a great pile of busted books. And Scott had seen the police arrive in two different cars. A little later Dr. Hawthorne had taken the cops into his office. Scott felt frustrated because he knew nothing about who might have done it, nor did he know who might be suspected. Usually he knew stuff, but today he hadn’t heard anything and nobody looked guilty. Scott looked forward to prowling around the dorms after dinner to see if he could learn anything. He was sure some kids had done it, or almost sure. On the other hand, if kids weren’t to blame, then Scott couldn’t figure it out, unless it was evil spirits. He liked the idea of evil spirits. Or maybe it had been gay bashers from off campus. Scott had never talked to Mr. Evings, though he knew Mr. Newland. When Scott had entered seventh grade some kids had told him to watch out for Evings, that he would try to grab your pecker, but Scott didn’t know if that was true or just a story. Anyway, he hadn’t tried to find out.

As for history, Scott enjoyed the battles best and Mr. Campbell had made them exciting. The Greek and Persian wars had been absolutely great. Dr. Hawthorne wasn’t as good at battles as Mr. Campbell. And Scott didn’t really get stuff like Stoicism. “Everything that happens, happens justly.” What kind of sense did that make? “For a thrown stone there is no more evil in falling than there is good in rising.” Not only did Scott not understand it, he didn’t care about the riddle it posed except to stay friendly with Dr. Hawthorne. “The business of the healthy eye is to see everything that is visible.” Now, that made sense, because Scott prided himself on trying to see everything there was to be seen. Secret agents had to be on the alert.

Dr. Hawthorne spoke of Marcus Aurelius in his tent by the River Gran writing his meditations at night while during the day he and his legions fought the German tribesmen, who, Marcus believed, would someday break through the frontier and conquer Rome. All Marcus was doing was giving his people a respite, a breathing space before they were beaten. When the class had studied the Celts, Scott had learned that they’d attacked the Romans naked, just ripping off their clothes and jumping up and down and shouting. He couldn’t imagine it, though in his history book there was a picture of the
Dying Gaul
and he was pretty naked as well. Scott had asked Dr. Hawthorne whether the German tribesman had fought naked. “Get your mind outta the gutter,” Jimmy Lucas had told him.

“‘As a spider is proud of catching a fly, so is one man of trapping a hare, or another of netting a herring, or a third of capturing boars or bears or Sarmatians. If you investigate the question of principles, are these anything but thieves one and all?’”

Dr. Hawthorne explained that the Sarmatians were one of the tribes along the Danube that Marcus was fighting. Then he asked what Marcus meant by saying that the spider capturing the fly was no better than a thief. What was he saying about human behavior? Scott had no idea, so he kept his head down. He wanted Dr. Hawthorne to get past Marcus Aurelius and talk about his son Commodus, who was a real butcher and once killed a hundred tigers with a hundred arrows. Surely that was more interesting. From the corner of his eye he watched Dr. Hawthorne walk back and forth at the front of the room.

“Maybe he likes flies better than spiders,” said Jimmy Lucas.

“All right, we’ll try another one,” said Dr. Hawthorne, walking over toward Scott.

“‘When men are inhuman, take care not to feel toward them as they do toward other humans.’ Can anyone tell me what that means?” Nobody answered. Dr. Hawthorne tapped Scott on the shoulder and he snorted, pretending to be asleep. “All right, Scott, we’ll start with you. And don’t mumble into your armpit, if you please.”

Six

K
a
te Sandler and Jim Hawthorne stood in the bell tower on the roof of Emerson Hall, looking out across the playing fields to the north. It was the Thursday afternoon following Krueger’s visit and Kate had a free period after lunch. The sky had cleared in the night, but a few clouds still lay far to the east over the mountains, where the treetops were dusted with snow. The bark of the leafless birches gleamed in the sunlight. The only greens were the pines scattered on the hillside. In the distance a red-tailed hawk rode the air currents in wide circles above the trees.

Kate and Hawthorne had just made the climb up the circular staircase that rose from the building’s fourth-floor attic. As they leaned their elbows on the wall, their breath made cottony shapes in the cold air. Both wore coats. The supports holding the roof formed an open square window, actually four joined windows facing in four directions. A dozen feet below was the wooden scaffolding where workmen were repairing the slate on the dormers, though no workmen had been seen for several days. Two fat gray pigeons paraded across the weathered lumber and cooed impatiently. All around was a vastness—to the north and east spread the national forest, and more forest lay to the west; to the south lay the tree-lined road to Brewster, and farther on—just a smoky blur on the horizon—was the small city of Plymouth.

Hawthorne turned to take in the entire panorama, stepping around the bell, which hung from a double chain. From the brace supporting the bell, a rope descended through a hole in the floor. “Incredible,” he said. Sunlight glittered on the lenses of his glasses.

“Too bad you weren’t up here during the height of color,” said Kate. “I felt like a smudge on a painter’s palette.” She wore a blue scarf with her red mackinaw and her black hair was gathered in a ponytail.

A white laundry truck with red lettering made its way up the driveway to the school. Dead leaves blew across the lawns. Three miniature students were throwing a football over by the gymnasium. Then, from far in the distance, Hawthorne began to make out the faint barking of dogs—a high chatter off to the west. They both looked.

“They’re over there in the woods,” said Kate, pointing. At first they saw only the empty playing fields and distant trees.

The barking got closer, a blended yapping that gradually began to separate itself into individual sounds, a baying and shrill yelps. The barking had a breathlessness, almost a hysteria. Then Kate stretched out an arm. “Look there.”

A deer burst from the trees on the western side of the playing fields. Trailing after it were eight dogs—so small from this distance that it was impossible to identify their breed or even color. One dog after another kept leaping at the deer, jumping at its belly. The deer would swerve and the dog fall back. If there was blood, they were too far away to see it.

Neither Hawthorne nor Kate said anything. The deer and the dogs raced along the edge of the field, weaving between the sunlight and shadow, becoming bright, then dark again. Away from the trees, the deer was able to draw ahead, its shape becoming increasingly horizontal as it picked up speed. The dogs were falling back. Hawthorne could almost see their pink tongues lolling from the sides of their mouths. Then the deer plunged again into the trees with the dogs in pursuit. In a moment it was as if they had never been. The distant barking grew fainter.

“They catch the deer in the trees,” said Kate matter-of-factly.

“Does it ever get away?”

“Very rarely. At least that’s what George says. He was always eager to have me go hunting with him. Anyway, the dogs can keep it up longer. They try to rip the deer’s stomach and get its intestines. Sometimes twenty or thirty feet will be dragging behind the deer. Eventually it collapses. Often the dogs eat the intestines even before they kill the deer.”

“They show no mercy?” asked Hawthorne, half seriously.

Kate smiled. “It doesn’t exist in that world.”

Hawthorne continued to look at the spot where the deer and the dogs had disappeared into the trees. “Destructivity is the result of an unlived life,” he said, mostly to himself.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a quote from Erich Fromm. ‘Destructivity is the result of an unlived life.’ It’s applicable to human beings but not to dogs.”

“What does he mean by ‘unlived’?”

Hawthorne leaned back against the wall, facing south, as if he felt more comfortable looking in that direction. “Let’s say someone has experienced a violent trauma or betrayal: a child has been raped by a parent or has witnessed the destruction of someone he loves or has been so traumatized by the possibility of beatings and punishments that he’s afraid to act. If the trauma is great enough, that person’s life may become frozen, emotionally frozen, even though he still gets up in the morning, is busy all day, and goes to bed at night. But there’s this empty space that begins to fill with rage, rage toward everyone—the perpetrator, the people in the world who haven’t suffered, even toward himself. Then he just wants to destroy, hurt others the way he was hurt. The rape victim becomes a person who rapes, the victim becomes a brutalizer.”

“Do all rape victims become rapists?”

“Of course not, but in many cases it happens, especially if the victim’s young enough. It’s far more common with boys than girls. I know of a serial killer who killed at least fifteen young women. He was young, handsome, and intelligent. His mother had been a high-class specialty prostitute catering to sadists and masochists. Some of her clients paid extra to have her son witness the beatings and abuse that she gave and sometimes received. This didn’t turn the boy into a killer of young women, but it was an influence, a bias, that pushed him in that direction. The awfulness in his past created this vacancy, an unlived life, a space where nothing could exist except violence.”

“Do you think that might have been the reason for Chip’s violence?” Kate took off her blue scarf, folded it, and put it in the pocket of her mackinaw.

“I really know nothing about him. There are many reasons for violence. This is just something that sometimes happen. We’d see it in treatment centers—the child who’d suffered something awful. Even in the best recovery there’d be a fear that everything would fall apart and they’d become victims again. And their final loyalty was to themselves. They couldn’t be forced. They preferred to wreck everything, preferred self-destruction to surrender.”

Kate and Hawthorne stood side by side, leaning against the wall of the bell tower. “Was this true of the boy who started the fire?” asked Kate.

“Stanley Carpasso? I’m not sure. I was too close to him and I’ve probably lost all objectivity. But he’d been sexually abused repeatedly—some boyfriend of his mother’s. And such a trauma could have created that frozen space. Stanley actually saw his way out of it. I was to be his savior. He could be very loving, very affectionate, stopping by my office to ask if there was anything he could do for me. Sometimes he brought me flowers. Then he began to save food at mealtimes—cookies and fruit and cake, a drumstick. He’d wrap it up and leave it for me in a bag hanging on my doorknob. It was both gruesome and touching.”

“I think they mentioned that in one of those articles.”

“He got a lot of attention—boy victim, boy aggressor. One article tried to show him as evil and another as innocent. It seemed impossible to believe that he was neither, that he was simply a damaged human being. As I told you, he wanted me to adopt him. The only trouble was that I already had a family.”

“So he started the fire . . .” Kate buried her hands in her coat pockets.

“It was more cunning than that.” Far to the south a plume of smoke rose up from the trees. The smoke rose straight upward, then the wind caught it and blew it eastward. At that moment Hawthorne realized he was going to tell Kate more of the story, part of what he had left out during their walk earlier in the woods.

“Our apartment at Wyndham was on the second floor, above the offices,” he began. “It had a heavy oak door. Presumably so nobody could easily break through it. And there were grates on the windows. I had meant to take them off but several people who’d been at Wyndham longer than I had urged me to keep them. Kids used to break in before the grates went up. The apartment was a temptation. Certainly other windows had grates as well. So I kept the grates and the keys were in my office.

“One day I came back to the apartment after work and found these heavy rings screwed to the doorjamb. I asked Meg about them but she had been out as well and knew nothing. I called a few people but no one could tell me anything. And of course it was the end of the day and people were scattered. I assumed the rings were there for a good reason. It was something I meant to find out about the next morning. I mean, it didn’t seem terribly important at the time. Lily was asking me to help her with her homework. I remember she had just begun to study fractions . . .”

Hawthorne paused. Beneath them half a dozen students ran down the steps of the library and along the driveway toward Emerson Hall, their excited voices drifting upward. Hawthorne leaned back against the wall, unbuttoning the top of his blue overcoat.

“That evening,” he continued, “I had to meet with a psychologist who had flown in from Boston to give a lecture at UCSD—a young woman I had known before moving to San Diego. She’d been a student in several of my graduate classes at BU. We were going to have dinner. Meg had meant to come, but she said she was getting a sore throat and decided to stay home. We went to a restaurant downtown run by Jim Croce’s widow that has a jazz bar. We had dinner and talked about Boston. She told me about her lecture, which I hadn’t been able to attend, then about nine o’clock we decided to stay for the first set.”