Mystery

Gloria followed him out of the entry and turned in the opposite direction into a wide hallway. Long rugs woven with a mandala-like native design lay over red tiles, and a suit of Spanish armor the size and shape of a small potbellied boy stood guard over a refectory table. They went past the table and turned into a long narrow room with tall windows that looked down half a mile of perfect sand to the Founders Club beach. A few old men sat on beach chairs ogling girls in bikinis who ran in and out of the surf without ever getting their hair wet. A waiter dressed like Kingsley, but wearing a long white apron instead of the morning coat, passed among the men, offering drinks from a shining tray.

Tom turned from the windows and faced the room. His mother, already seated on a stiff brocaded couch, looked up at him as if she expected him to tip over a vase. Despite the high windows facing the scroll of beach and length of bright water, the parlor was dark as a cave. A dark green fern foamed over the top of a seven-foot grand piano no one played, and glass-fronted bookshelves covered the back wall with row upon row of unjacketed books that blurred into a brownish haze. These books had titles like Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society, Vol. LVI and Selected Sermons and Essays of Sydney Smith

. There was a little more furniture than the room could easily accommodate.

Gloria coughed into her fist, and when he looked at her she pointed fiercely at an overstuffed chair at right angles to the brocaded couch. She wanted him to sit so that he could stand up when her father walked into the room. He sat down on the overstuffed chair and looked at the hands folded in his lap. They were reassuringly solid.

His recurring dream had begun the night after the dancing class, and he supposed that the dream must be related to what had happened to him on the Academy steps. He could not see any connection, but … In the dream smoke and the smell of gunpowder filled the air. Off to his right, random small fires burned into the choking air, to his left was an ice-blue lake. The lake steamed or smoked, he could not tell which. It was a world of pure loss—loss and death. Some terrible thing had happened, and Tom wandered through its reverberating aftermath. The landscape looked like hell, but was not—the real hell was inside him. He experienced emptiness and despair so great that he realized it was himself he was looking at—this dead, ruined place was Tom Pasmore. He stumbled a few paces before noticing a corpse of a woman with tangled blond hair lying on the shore. Her blue dress had been shredded against the rocks, and lay about her in a shapeless puddle. In the dream Tom sank down and pulled the cold heavy body into his arms. The thought came to him that he knew who the dead woman was, but under another name, and this thought rocketed through his body and jolted him awake, groaning.

The world was half night

, Hattie Bascombe said.

“What’s wrong with you?” his mother whispered.

Tom shook his head.

“He’s coming.”

They both straightened up and smiled as the door opened.

Kingsley entered and held the door. A moment later Tom’s grandfather stumped into the room in his black suit. He brought with him, as always, the aura of secret decisions and secret powers, of Cuban cigars and midnight meetings. Tom and his mother stood up. “Gloria,” he said, and, “Tom.” He did not smile back at them. Dr. Milton came in just behind him, talking from the moment he came through the door as if to fill up the silence.

“What a treat, two of my favorite people.” Dr. Milton beamed at Gloria as he advanced toward her, but Gloria kept her eyes on her father, who drifted ponderously around past the bookcases. Then the doctor was directly in front of her.

“Doctor.” She leaned forward for a kiss.

“My dear.” He looked at her professionally for a moment, then turned to shake Tom’s hand. “Young man. I remember delivering you. Doesn’t seem it could have been seventeen years ago.”

Tom had heard variations of this speech many times and said nothing as he shook the doctor’s plump hand.

“Hello, Daddy,” Gloria said, and kissed her father, who had now come all the way around the room to bend down to kiss her.

Dr. Milton patted Tom’s head and moved sideways. Glendenning Upshaw broke away from Gloria to stand before him. Tom leaned forward to kiss his grandfather’s deeply lined, leathery cheek. It felt oddly cold to his lips, and his grandfather instantly broke away. “Boy,” the old man said, and bothered to look directly at him. As always when this happened, Tom felt that his grandfather was looking straight into him and did not care for what he saw. This time, however, he noticed nearly with disbelief that he was looking down at the old man’s broad, powerful face—he was an inch or two taller than his grandfather.