Read Online In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff - Free Book Online

I aced my opponents. He seemed hardly to notice me, gave no sign that he was competing except that twice he called shots out that appeared to me to be well short of the line. I might have been mistaken, though. After he won the second set he walked abruptly off the court and went back to where we had left our sweaters. I followed him.
    â€œGood game,” I said.
    He pulled impatiently at the sleeve of his sweater. “I can’t play on these lousy asphalt courts.”
    Â 
    Eugene made himself known around school. You did not wear belted jackets at Choate, or white buck shoes. Certainly you did not wear Alpine hats with feathers stuck in the brim. Eugene wore all three.
    Anyone who didn’t know who Eugene was found out by mid-November. Life magazine ran a series of interviews and pictures showing what it was like to be a student at a typical Eastern prep school. They had based their piece on research done at five schools, of which ours was one. Eugene had been interviewed and one of his remarks appeared in bold face beneath a photograph of students bent morosely over their books in evening studyhall. The quotation: “One thing, nobody at Choate ever seems to smile. They think you’re weird or something if you smile. You get dumped on all the time.”
    True enough. We were a joyless lot. Laughter was acceptable only in the sentimental parts of the movies we were shown on alternate Saturday nights. The one category in the yearbook to which everyone aspired was “Most Sarcastic.” The arena for these trials of wit was the dining room, and Eugene’s statements in Life did nothing to ease his load there.
    However conspicuous Eugene may have been, he was not unpopular. I never heard anything worse about him than that he was “weird.” He did well in his studies, and after the swimming team began to practice, the word went around that Eugene promised to put Choate in the running for the championship. So despite his hat and his eagerness and his determined grin, Eugene escaped the fate I had envisioned for him: the other students dumped on him but they didn’t cast him out.
    The night before school recessed for Christmas I went up to visit Talbot and found Eugene alone in the room, packing his bags. He made me sit down and poured out a glass of Hawaiian Punch which he laced with some murky substance from a prescription bottle. “Tab rustled up some codeine down at the infirmary,” he explained. “This’ll get the old Yule log burning.”
    The stuff tasted filthy but I took it, as I did all the other things that made the rounds at school and were supposed to get you off but never did, like aspirin and Coke, after-shave lotion, and Ben-Gay stuffed in the nostrils. “Where’s Talbot?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe over at the library.” He reached under his bed and pulled out a trunk-sized suitcase, made of cardboard but tricked up to look like leather, and began filling it with an assortment of pastel shirts with tab collars. Tab collars were another of Eugene’s flings at sartorial trailblazing at school. They made me think of what my mother always told my sister when she complained at having to wear Mother’s cast-off clothes: “Younever know, you might start a fashion.”
    â€œWhere are you going for Christmas?” Eugene asked.
    â€œBaltimore.”
    â€œBaltimore? What’s in Baltimore?”
    â€œMy aunt and uncle live there. How about you?”
    â€œI’m heading on up to Boston.”
    This surprised me. I had assumed he would return to Indiana for the holidays. “Who do you know in Boston?”
    â€œNobody. Just Tab is all.”
    â€œTalbot? You’re going to be staying with Talbot?”
    â€œYeah. And his family, of course.”
    â€œFor the whole vacation?”
    Eugene gave a sly grin and rolled his eyes from side to side and said in a confidential tone, almost a whisper: “Old