Owl to Susan Sto Helit (closed RP for Susan and Charles Macaulay)
((Backdated to just after Henry Winter and Camilla Macaulay's wedding.))
( Just before our love got lost you told me, 'I am as constant as the northern star.' / And I said, 'Constantly in the darkness? Where's that at? / If you want me I'll be in the bar.' )
( Just before our love got lost you told me, 'I am as constant as the northern star.' / And I said, 'Constantly in the darkness? Where's that at? / If you want me I'll be in the bar.' )
Of course she was curious. Everyone had always been curious. There had always been rumors. Charles would have to be careful what he said and didn't say; but he was used to that, too.
All of you, she said. He had to restrain a wince. All of you properly included Bunny Corcoran, and she'd seen him at the wedding reception being disruptive. A late and ineffective disruption, damn it (though Charles had since realized that it had been a desperate and foolish hope Bunny could really put off the wedding anyway. Delayed it, maybe, that would have been the best he could hope for).
"If they don't volunteer information that's probably because there isn't much worth telling," he lied straight-faced. "Or because what they remember isn't something they feel like sharing. They were closer than I knew at the time." There, that might be a nice spot of misdirection. If Susan suspected something hidden and secret in their collective Hampden past, he'd offer up something she already knew about, leaving the subject of Bunny entirely untouched.
"I don't really see how it would sound interesting. I guess it looked glamorous from the outside -- to people like Richard. That's just because they're fooled by the surface of things. Francis likes to dress up, and Henry looks like an undertaker, and Camilla's ... Camilla. So it's picturesque." Notably he left himself out of this description, though he was as much a part of the picture as the rest of them: the handsomest of the lot, the golden boy, carelessly debonair in his white tennis sweaters, like something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. "But that's all surface. Just like I was telling you earlier -- it makes people feel provincial but it's all show. There wasn't anything special about us. We were just a little clique like any other clique of kids. Our classes were fascinating to us, but let's face it, Julian Morrow wasn't exactly Richmond Lattimore. He hardly published at all. I doubt he was particularly well known in the international academic community. The only one of us who went on to grad school was Richard, and he did his PhD in English lit, nothing to do with the classes we took together at all."
Charles shrugged. "It was college, that's all. I bet that's what really interests you about it -- the general framework of it, because it's different from school where you come from. There's lots of novels and stuff about the American college experience. Maybe you should read some of those."
Reply
Leave a comment