The Book of Skulls

  Quite a foursome. I doubt that I’ll ever forget the first (and probably only) time all of our parents got together, in the spring of our junior year, at the big Carnival weekend. Up till then I don’t think any of the parents had visualized their son’s roommates in any clear way. I had Oliver home to meet my father a couple of Christmases, but not Ned or Eli, and I hadn’t seen their folks either. So here we all were. No family for Oliver, of course. And Ned’s father was dead. His mother was a gaunt hollow-eyed bony woman nearly six feet tall, in black clothes, speaking with a brogue. I couldn’t connect her with Ned at all. Eli’s mother was plump, short, a waddler, very much overdressed; his father was almost invisible, a tiny sad-faced man who sighed a lot. They both looked much older than Eli. They must have had him when they were thirty-five or forty. Then there was my father, who looks the way I imagine I’ll look twenty-five years from now—smooth pink cheeks, thick hair shading from blond to gray, a moneyed look about the eyes. A big man, a handsome man, the board-of-directors type. With him was Saybrook, his wife, who I guess is thirty-eight and could pass for ten years younger, tall, well-scrubbed, long straight yellow hair, big-boned athletic body, very much the fox-and-hounds sort of woman. Imagine this group sitting under a parasol at a table in the quadrangle, trying to make conversation. Mrs. Steinfeld trying to mother Oliver, the poor dear orphan. Mr. Steinfeld eyeing my father’s $450 Italian silk suit in horror. Ned’s mother completely out of it, understanding neither her son, her son’s friends, their parents, nor any other aspect of the twentieth century. Saybrook coming on all hearty and horsey, talking blithely about charity teas and her stepdaughter’s imminent debut. (“Is she an actress?” Mrs. Steinfeld asked, baffled. “I mean her coming-out party,” said Saybrook, just as baffled.) My father studying his fingernails a lot, staring hard at the Steinfelds and at Eli, not wanting to believe any of this. Mr. Steinfeld, to make conversation, talking about the stock market to my father. Mr. Steinfeld doesn’t have investments but he reads the Times very carefully. My father knows nothing about the market; so long as the dividends come on time, he’s happy; besides, it’s part of his religion never to talk about money. He flashes a signal to Saybrook, who deftly changes the subject, starts telling us about how she’s chairman of a committee to raise funds for Palestinian Arab refugees, you know, she says, the ones who were driven out by the Jews when Israel got started. Mrs. Steinfeld gasps. Such a thing to say in front of a Hadassah member! My father then points across the quadrangle to a particularly long-haired classmate who had just turned around and says, “I could have sworn that fellow was a girl, until he looked this way.” Oliver, who has let his hair grow to his shoulders, I suppose to show what he thinks of Kansas, gives my father his coldest, coldest smile. Undaunted, or unnoticing, my father continues, “Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I can’t help suspecting that many of those young men with flowing locks are, you know, a trifle homosexual.” Ned laughs out loud at this. Ned’s mother turns red and coughs—not because she knows her boy is gay (she doesn’t—the idea would be incredible to her) but because that fine-looking Mr. Winchester has said a nasty word at the table. The Steinfelds, who are quick on the uptake, look at Ned, then at Eli, then at each other—a very complex bit of reaction. Is their boy safe with such a roommate? My father can’t comprehend what his casual remark has started and doesn’t know who to apologize to for what. He frowns and Saybrook whispers something to him—tsk, Saybrook, whispering in public, what would Emily Post say?—and he responds with a magnificent blush extending far into the infrared. “Perhaps we can order some wine,” he says, loudly, to cover his confusion, and imperiously summons a student-waiter. “Do you have Chassagne-Montrachet ’69?” he asks. “Sir?” the waiter replies blankly. An ice bucket is fetched, containing a bottle of three-buck Liebfraumilch, the best they can offer, and my father pays for it with a brand-new fifty. Ned’s mother stares at the bill in disbelief; the Steinfelds scowl at my father, thinking he’s trying to put them down. A beautiful, beautiful episode, this whole lunch. Afterward Saybrook draws me aside and says, “Your father feels very embarrassed. If he had known Eli was, well, attracted to other boys, he would never have made that remark.”

  “Not Eli,” I said. “Eli’s straight. Ned.”

  Saybrook is flustered. She thinks I may be putting her on. She wants to say that she and my father hope I’m not fucking around with either of them, whichever one may be queer, but she’s much too well bred to tell me that. Instead she slides into neutral chitchat for the prescribed three minutes, gracefully breaks free, goes back to explain to my father the latest twist. I see the Steinfelds conferring in anguish with Eli, no doubt giving him hell for rooming with a snotty Gentile and warning him sternly to keep away from that little faygeleh, too, if it isn’t (oy! veh!) already too late. Ned and his mother are generation-gapping also, not far away. I pick up stray phrases: “The sisters are praying for you…transfer to Holy Cross…novena…rosary…your angel father…novitiate…Jesuit…Jesuit…Jesuit…” To one side, alone, is Oliver. Watching. Smiling his Venusian smile. Just a visitor on Earth, he is, is Oliver, the man from the flying saucer.

  I’d rate Oliver as the deepest mind of the group. He doesn’t know as much as Eli, he doesn’t give the same appearance of brilliance, but he has a more powerful intelligence, I’m sure. He’s also the strangest of us, because on the surface he appears so wholesome and normal, and he really isn’t. Eli has the quickest wits among us, and he’s also the most tormented, the most troubled. Ned poses as our weakling, our fairy, but don’t underestimate him: he knows what he wants all the time, and he sees that he gets it. And me? What’s there to say about me? Good old Joe College. The right family connections, the right fraternity, the right clubs. In June I graduate and begin to live happily ever after. An Air Force commission, yes, but no combat duty—it’s all arranged, our genes are deemed too good to waste—and then I find an appropriate Episcopalian debutante, certified virgin and belonging to one of the Hundred Families, and settle down to be a gentleman. Jesus! Thank God Eli’s Book of Skulls is nothing but superstitious crap. If I had to live forever I’d bore myself to death in twenty years.

  fifteen

  oliver

  When I was sixteen I gave a great deal of thought to killing myself. Honestly. It wasn’t a pretense, a romantic adolescent drama, an expression of what Eli would call a willed persona. It was a genuine philosophical position, if I can use so impressive-sounding a term, which I arrived at logically and rigorously.

  What led me to the contemplation of suicide was, above all, my father’s dying at thirty-six. That seemed like such an unbearable tragedy to me. Not that my father was in any way a special human being, except to me. He was just a Kansas farmer, after all. Up at five in the morning, in bed by nine at night. No education to speak of. All he read was the county newspaper, and sometimes the Bible, though most of that was over his head. But he worked hard all his short life. He was a good man, a dedicated man. It was his father’s land first, and my father worked it from the age of ten, with a few years out for the army; he brought in his crops, he retired his debt, he made a living, more or less, he even was able to buy forty acres more and think of expanding beyond that. Meanwhile he married, he gave pleasure to a woman, he sired children. He was a simple man—he would never have understood anything that’s happened in this country in the ten years since he died—but he was a decent man, in his way, and he had earned the right to a happy old age. Sitting on the porch, puffing his pipe, going hunting in the fall, letting his sons do the really back-breaking work, watching his grandchildren grow up. He didn’t get a happy old age. He didn’t even get a middle age. Cancer sprouted in his guts and he died fast, he died in agony but fast.

  That started me thinking. If you can be cut off like that, if you must live under a sentence of death all your days and never know when it will be carried out, why live at all? Why give Death the satisfaction of coming to claim you when you’re least ready for it? Get out, get ou
t early. Avoid the irony of being chopped down as punishment for having made something of your life.

  My father’s goal in life, as I understood it, was to keep to the way of the Lord and pay off the mortgage on his land. He succeeded with the first and came pretty close with the second. My goal was more ambitious: to get an education, to rise above the dirt of the fields, to become a doctor, a scientist. Doesn’t that sound grand? The Nobel Prize in Medicine to Dr. Oliver Marshall, who climbed out of the tobacco-chewing ignorance of the Corn Belt to become an inspiration for us all. But did my goal differ in anything but degree from my father’s? What it boiled down to, for both of us, was a life of hard work, honest toil.

  I couldn’t face it. Saving money, taking tests, applying for the scholarship, learning Latin and German, anatomy, physics, chemistry, biology, breaking my skull with labors tougher than anything my father had known—and then to die? To die at forty-five, or fifty-five, or sixty-five, or maybe, like my father, at thirty-six? Just when you’re ready to start to live, it’s time to go. Why bother to make the effort? Why submit to the irony? Look at President Kennedy: all that outlay of energy and skill to get himself into the White House, and then the bullet in his skull. Life is a waste. The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die. Me, with my ambitions, my drives, I was only setting myself up for a bigger downfall than most. Inasmuch as I would have to die eventually, I resolved to cheat Death by doing away with myself before I began forcing myself toward the inevitable sick joke that was waiting for me.

  So I told myself, age sixteen. I made lists of possible ways to bug out. Cut my wrist? Turn on the gas? Plastic bag over my head? Rack up my car? Look for thin ice in January? I had fifty different plans. I arranged them in order of desirability. I rearranged them. I balanced quick painful deaths against slow easy ones. For half a year, maybe, I studied suicide the way Eli studies irregular verbs. Two of my grandparents died in those six months. My dog died. My older brother was killed in the war. My mother had her first bad heart attack, and the doctor privately told me she wouldn’t last another year, which was correct. All this should have reinforced my decision: get out, Oliver, get out, get out now, before life’s tragedies come even closer to you! You’ve got to die, just like the others, so why stall for time? Die now. Die now. Save yourself a load of trouble. Curiously, though, my interest in suicide rapidly waned, even though my philosophy didn’t really change. I stopped making lists of ways to kill myself. I started planning ahead, instead of assuming that I’d be gone within the next few months. I decided I would fight Death rather than surrender to him. I would go to college, I would become a scientist, I would learn all I could, and perhaps I’d push the border of Death’s country back a little. Now I know that I’ll never kill myself. I’m just not going to do it, ever. I’ll go on fighting to the end, and if Death comes to laugh in my face, why, I’ll laugh in his. And, after all, suppose the Book of Skulls is authentic! Suppose an escape from him really exists! The joke would have been on me, then, if I’d cut my wrists five years ago.

  I must have driven four hundred miles already today, and it isn’t even noon yet. The roads here are great—wide, straight, empty. Amarillo is just ahead. And then Albuquerque. And then Phoenix. And then, at last, we start to find out a lot of things.

  sixteen

  eli

  How strange the world looks here. Texas; New Mexico. A lunar landscape. Why did anyone ever want to settle in this kind of country? The broad brown plateaus, no grass, only twisted scrubby greasy gray-green plants. The bare purple mountains, jagged, sharp, rimming the harsh blue horizon like eroded teeth. I thought the mountains out west were bigger than these. Timothy, who’s been everywhere, says that the really big mountains are in Colorado, Utah, California; these are just hills, five or six thousand feet high. I was shaken by that. The biggest mountain east of the Mississippi is Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, something like sixty-seven hundred feet. I lost a bet about that when I was ten and never forgot it. The biggest mountain I had ever seen before this trip was Mount Washington, sixty-three hundred feet or so, New Hampshire, where my parents took me the one year we didn’t go to the Catskills. (I was betting on Mount Washington. I was wrong.) And here all around me are mountains the size of those, and they’re just hills. They probably don’t even have names. Mount Washington hung in the sky like a giant tree, about to fall and crush me. Of course, here the view is broader, the landscape is wide open; even a mountain is dwarfed by the immense perspective.

  The air is crisp and cold. The sky is improbably blue and clear. This is apocalyptic country: I keep expecting to hear the crack of trumpet calls resounding out of the “hills.” Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth, through earth’s sepulchres it ringeth, all before the throne it bringeth. Yes. And death will be stupefied. We go thirty, forty miles between towns, seeing only jackrabbits, deer, squirrels. The towns themselves seem new: filling stations, a row of motels, small square aluminum houses that look as though they can be attached to an automobile and driven off to some other place. (Probably they can be.) On the other hand, we have passed two pueblos, six or seven hundred years old, and there will be more. The idea that there are actually Indians, live Indians, walking around all over the place, blows my Manhattanized mind. There were Indians galore in the technicolor movies I saw every Saturday afternoon for years on Seventy-third Street and Broadway, but I was never taken in, I knew with my cool small-boy wisdom that they were just Puerto Ricans or maybe Mexicans togged out in fancy feathers. Real Indians were nineteenth-century stuff, they had died out long ago, none of them left except on the nickel with the buffalo on the other side, and when did you last see one of those? (When did you last see a buffalo?) Indians were archaic, Indians were extinct, Indians, to me, were in a class with the mastodon, the tyrannosaurus, the Sumerians, the Carthaginians. But no, here I am in the Wild West for the first time in my life, and the flat-faced, leather-colored man who sold us our lunchtime beer in the grocery store was an Indian, and the roly-poly kid who filled our gas tank was an Indian, and those mud huts on the far side of the Rio Grande there are inhabited by Indians, even though I can see a forest of television aerials rising above the adobe rooftops. See the Indians, Dick! See the giant cactus plants! Look, Jane, look, the Indian drives a Volkswagen! Watch Ned cut the Indian off! Listen to the Indian honk his horn!

  I think our commitment to this adventure has deepened since we reached the desert’s edge. Certainly mine has. That terrible day of doubt, while we were driving across Missouri, now seems as far in the past as the dinosaurs. I know now (how do I know? how can I say?) that what I have read in the Book of Skulls is real, and what we have come to find in the wastes of Arizona is real, and that if we persevere we will be granted that which we seek. Oliver knows it, too. A weird freaky intensity has surfaced in him these last few days. Oh, it was always there, that tendency toward monomania, but he did a better job of concealing it. Now, sitting behind the wheel ten or twelve hours a day, needing virtually to be forced to stop driving, he makes it altogether clear that nothing is more urgent for him than to reach our destination and submit himself to the disciplines of the Keepers of the Skulls. Even our two unbelievers are catching the faith. Ned oscillates between absolute acceptance and absolute rejection, as ever, and often holds both positions simultaneously; he mocks us, he needles us, and yet he studies maps and mileage charts as though he, too, is seized by impatience. Ned is the only man I know capable of attending a mass at sunrise and a black mass at midnight, all the while feeling no sense of incongruity, devoting himself with equal fervor to each rite. Timothy still remains aloof, a genial scoffer, protesting that he’s merely humoring his far-out roommates by undertaking this pilgrimage—but how much of that is just a front, a show of proper aristocratic coolness? More than a little, I suspect. Timothy has less reason than the rest of us to hunger after metaphysical life-extensions, because his own life as presently constituted offers him such an infinity of possib
ilities—his financial resources being what they are. But money isn’t everything, and you can do only so much in the standard threescore and ten, even if you’ve inherited Fort Knox. He’s tempted by the vision of the skullhouse, I believe. He’s tempted.