The Secret History: Chapters 6–7

Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency.

Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency. “Basically I am a very good person.”

A few months ago, in an airport bookstore, I picked up the autobiography of a notorious thrill killer and was disheartened to find it entirely bereft of lurid detail.

He was a cautious driver, and riding in the car with Henry, even in the most propitious of circumstances, made him nervous.

“Come on,” she said coquettishly.

The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realized I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.
I was trying to think of some way to vocalize this epiphany when Judy came back with the drinks.

I blinked, and struggled gamely to bring her into focus.

I couldn’t make out what she was saying, though the timbre of her voice was clear even over the noise: cheerful, raucous, oddly pleasant.

That was the way most of my classmates lived—talking rather self-consciously at breakfast about their liaisons of the previous night, as if this harmless, homey little vice, which fell somewhere below drink and above gluttony in the catalogue of sins, was somehow the abyss of depravity and dissipation.

“No,” said Charles tersely.

“...Do you mind?”
“No.”
“I know this is an imposition on a school night, but I really don’t think it’s wise for any of the rest of us to go back again...”

Both movies were rather plotless and I had a hard time communicating the gist of them.

Every cruel or fatuous thing I’d ever said came back to me with an amplified clarity, no matter how I talked to myself or jerked my head to shake the thoughts away: old insults and guilts and embarrassments stretching clear back to childhood—the crippled boy I’d made fun of, the Easter chick I’d squeezed to death—paraded before me one by one, in vivid and mordant splendor.

I was explaining the denouement when Cloke Rayburn abruptly shouldered through the crowd.

“Dear me, you are being truthful today,” he said, with remarkable perspicuity.

I can’t imagine him doing anything of the sort and besides, young people who take drugs are always so bovine and prosaic.

It was a vice he practiced in secret, but at the same time he had felt no compunction about quite openly carrying away objects of greater value which he found unattended.

The taxi driver—a florid man named Junior who’d driven Bunny and me into town that first fall afternoon, and who in three days would be driving Bunny back to Connecticut for the last time, this time in a hearse—looked back at us in the rear-view mirror as we pulled out onto College Drive.

He was not in a mood to talk—ebullient sometimes, he could also be as mute and sulky as a child—and he drank steadily, with both his elbows on the bar and his hair falling down in his face.

Quite understandably, she did not wish to run into a search party while on her outing. Therefore she decided to take Milo out behind the tennis courts to the ravine, since it had been canvassed days before and was, besides, a spot of which the dog was especially fond.

But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances. No one had seemed very torn up by his disappearance...

I really could go on for pages about all the public histrionics in the days after Bunny’s death. The flag flew at half-mast. The psychological counselors were on call twenty-four hours a day. A few oddballs from the Political Science department wore black armbands. There was an agitated flurry of tree plantings, memorial services, fund-raisers and concerts.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion.

Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him.

Commons lawn stretched out wide and desolate like some Napoleonic battlefield: churned, sordid, roiled with footprints.

She had also had a nervous breakdown or two, and sometimes, in repose, she got a kind of walleyed look that made me nervous.

She was pretty and Jewish, with a dazzling smile and a penchant for Mary Tyler Moore mannerisms like hugging herself or twirling around with her arms outstretched.

Early articles, which had depicted her as “well-dressed,” “striking,” the family “perfect,” had given way to snide and vaguely accusatory ones of the ilk of MOM SEZ: NOT MY KID.

But in college folklore he is remembered as a stumbling teen inebriate; his beery ghost is still evoked in darkened rooms, for freshmen, along with the car-crash decapitees and the bobby soxer who hanged herself in Putnam attic and all the rest of the shadowy ranks of the Hampden dead.

The light was behind them, I couldn’t see either of them very well but they were laughing and talking and, oh, God, what a bright sudden stab in my heart at the echo of Bunny which rang—harsh, derisive, vibrant—through their laughter.

She was wearing jet earrings, patent-leather shoes, a natty, closely cut black velvet suit.

The rain drummed on the high windows, and the floodlights, shining through the glass, cast a pattern on the walls as if dark rivulets of water were streaming down them from ceiling to floor.

Henry, among us, was the only pallbearer—the other five being family friends or business associates of Mr. Corcoran’s. I wondered if the coffin was very heavy and, if so, how Henry would manage.

“The pallbearers are supposed to meet in the vestibule at ten-fifteen.”

The minister, who took his ecumenical and—some felt—slightly impersonal remarks from Saint Paul’s sermon on Love from First Corinthians, talked for about half an hour.

This august personage, who loomed large in the collective unconscious of the Corcorans, was the head of a charitable foundation—endowed by his even more august grandpapa—which happened to own a controlling interest in the stock of Mr. Corcoran’s bank.

This entailed board meetings, and occasional social functions, and the Corcorans had an endless store of “delightful” anecdotes about Paul Vanderfeller, of how European he was, what a celebrated “wit,” and though the witticisms they found frequent occasion to repeat seemed poor things to me (the guards up at the security booth at Hampden were cleverer) they made the Corcorans rock with urbane and apparently quite sincere laughter.

Maybe it was because the Corcorans were Irish, maybe it was that Mr. Corcoran was born in Boston, but the whole family seemed to feel, somehow, that it had a mysterious affinity with the Kennedys. It was a resemblance they tried to cultivate—especially Mrs. Corcoran, with her hairdo and faux-Jackie glasses...

The wind was blowing hard, and garish petals shook loose and tumbled back among the cars, sticking to the damp windshields like bits of confetti.

O Lord we beseech you, that while we lament the departure of our brother Edmund Grayden Corcoran your servant out of this life, we bear in mind that we are most certainly ready to follow him. Give us grace to make ready for that last hour, and protect us against a sudden and unprovided death.