a child on me now."
"No? I can't be a child on you?"
"No. Uh-uh. You go and wash and go home to dinner and Mr. Rockwell." She moved across the bed and sat beside him and took his face in her hands and kissed him. "Or I'll have to send you away and you'll never come back and that will be that. Get me?" She nudged him hard in the ribs. "Get me, pal. Eh?"
"That hurts."
"Ooh," she cooed in mock solicitude, "poor
bébé.
Tough shit."
He went into her bathroom, preparing for his shower. Could he have lived without what had just happened? Done without her? The answer was yes, he could have done without her fine. He might so easily, now in retrospect, have been a person of principle and never let it happen. Too late now. He stood under the force of the water. Washing, washing, washing all day long. Baptized into pleasure, he thought. Free again.
She drove him back to campus to pick up his car. All the drive home, he pictured Kristin's suspicion and anger at his being late. It was nearly eight, too late for supper with the others, too late to help Paul with his homework.
When he had parked the car, the first thing he saw was Paul's vaguely worried face at the kitchen window. It had started to snow. When he went inside to the lingering savor of the night's meal, he realized how fiercely hungry he was.
"I put a few slices of lamb in the lower section of the oven," Kristin said when she walked in. "They'll be pretty dried out."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I got involved in the Phyllis Strom committee." The academic career of Phyllis Strom had its thorny aspect as an alibi.
"Really?" Kristin asked. "How's life on the Phyllis Strom committee?"
"Never a dull moment," Michael told her.
4
I N THE snow-sealed silence of his carrel, Michael read the reflections of one Keith Michneicki on Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage.
Keith was a twenty-year-old from the apple orchards of the lake country. He was a hockey star, also a perceptive, thoughtful reader.
Maybe alone in the class, Keith had recognized the vitalism on which
Red Badge
turned, the priesthood of the life force, the riddle of blood and sacrifice. Like any good, clean-living American boy, he had pretended not to know what he was looking at, and faked it sloppily.
"Henry realizes," Keith had written, "that we have within us the wherewithal to cope with each of life's challenges."
There was no excuse for it, even if down on the lake, in apple-knocker country, enough people still believed that this was the kind of lesson boys went off to college to learn.
"Read the book!" he wrote on Michneicki's paper. "Is it propaganda? Truth or illusion?"
Then he put the papers aside and turned to his computer. Encouraged by Norm Cevic, he had been spending a great deal of time trying to track his new friend Lara on the Internet.
He found her ex-husband first, a Frenchman named Laurent Corvus, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Geneva, assistant in Africa to the late Desmond Jenkins, a left-wing European expert on colonialism. He had begun as a secondary school teacher and then worked for the Red Cross and for the UNRRA in the Middle East. His listing was posted by a site dedicated to foreign affairs and security matters. He had occupied a few vice chancellorships and assistant directorates at some African universities. It was hard to imagine what would bring him to Fort Salines.
Lara herself, under her maiden name of Purcell, appeared on a few other sites. She was a graduate of Swiss schools and had an advanced degree from the Sorbonne. Her area of study was the Caribbean and the former colonial world in general. She had worked with her husband and also as an assistant to Desmond Jenkins.
Marie-Claire Purcell grew up in St. Trinity, a poor island on the elbow of the Windwards; her listing contained a pocket history of the place. St. Trinity was a British sugar island that supported an exotic culture of exile. In 1804, at the end of the Haitian
"No? I can't be a child on you?"
"No. Uh-uh. You go and wash and go home to dinner and Mr. Rockwell." She moved across the bed and sat beside him and took his face in her hands and kissed him. "Or I'll have to send you away and you'll never come back and that will be that. Get me?" She nudged him hard in the ribs. "Get me, pal. Eh?"
"That hurts."
"Ooh," she cooed in mock solicitude, "poor
bébé.
Tough shit."
He went into her bathroom, preparing for his shower. Could he have lived without what had just happened? Done without her? The answer was yes, he could have done without her fine. He might so easily, now in retrospect, have been a person of principle and never let it happen. Too late now. He stood under the force of the water. Washing, washing, washing all day long. Baptized into pleasure, he thought. Free again.
She drove him back to campus to pick up his car. All the drive home, he pictured Kristin's suspicion and anger at his being late. It was nearly eight, too late for supper with the others, too late to help Paul with his homework.
When he had parked the car, the first thing he saw was Paul's vaguely worried face at the kitchen window. It had started to snow. When he went inside to the lingering savor of the night's meal, he realized how fiercely hungry he was.
"I put a few slices of lamb in the lower section of the oven," Kristin said when she walked in. "They'll be pretty dried out."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I got involved in the Phyllis Strom committee." The academic career of Phyllis Strom had its thorny aspect as an alibi.
"Really?" Kristin asked. "How's life on the Phyllis Strom committee?"
"Never a dull moment," Michael told her.
4
I N THE snow-sealed silence of his carrel, Michael read the reflections of one Keith Michneicki on Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage.
Keith was a twenty-year-old from the apple orchards of the lake country. He was a hockey star, also a perceptive, thoughtful reader.
Maybe alone in the class, Keith had recognized the vitalism on which
Red Badge
turned, the priesthood of the life force, the riddle of blood and sacrifice. Like any good, clean-living American boy, he had pretended not to know what he was looking at, and faked it sloppily.
"Henry realizes," Keith had written, "that we have within us the wherewithal to cope with each of life's challenges."
There was no excuse for it, even if down on the lake, in apple-knocker country, enough people still believed that this was the kind of lesson boys went off to college to learn.
"Read the book!" he wrote on Michneicki's paper. "Is it propaganda? Truth or illusion?"
Then he put the papers aside and turned to his computer. Encouraged by Norm Cevic, he had been spending a great deal of time trying to track his new friend Lara on the Internet.
He found her ex-husband first, a Frenchman named Laurent Corvus, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Geneva, assistant in Africa to the late Desmond Jenkins, a left-wing European expert on colonialism. He had begun as a secondary school teacher and then worked for the Red Cross and for the UNRRA in the Middle East. His listing was posted by a site dedicated to foreign affairs and security matters. He had occupied a few vice chancellorships and assistant directorates at some African universities. It was hard to imagine what would bring him to Fort Salines.
Lara herself, under her maiden name of Purcell, appeared on a few other sites. She was a graduate of Swiss schools and had an advanced degree from the Sorbonne. Her area of study was the Caribbean and the former colonial world in general. She had worked with her husband and also as an assistant to Desmond Jenkins.
Marie-Claire Purcell grew up in St. Trinity, a poor island on the elbow of the Windwards; her listing contained a pocket history of the place. St. Trinity was a British sugar island that supported an exotic culture of exile. In 1804, at the end of the Haitian
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