At the Henderson School, there were very tough rules against alcohol, marijuana, or any other kind of drug. For smoking pot, shooting dope, or popping pills, you could get kicked out in a minute. The school tended to look the other way when it came to whiskey or beer, but you could still be put on Intermediate Discipline for as long as two whole months if some dance proctor happened to smell booze on your breath, or if — God forbid — you came back to the dorm one night after pizza in town and couldn’t pronounce the house mother’s demanded “Presbyterian Episcopalian,” a test devised by the Dean of Women, who taught romance languages. When Lissie mentioned the test to her father, he told her that during World War II, the G.I. password in the South Pacific had been “Lallapalooza,” which the Japs apparently couldn’t pronounce. But every kid at Henderson could say “Presbyterian Episcopalian” backward and forward, and Lissie knew at least two girls who’d gone back to their dorm pissed to the ears one night, barely able to walk a straight line, but able to repeat “Presbyterian Episcopalian” flawlessly till dawn.
Like most of the other kids in Rutledge, Rusty went to school at Lafayette in nearby Clayton, an industrial city of some 60,000 people, most of whom were Irish, Italian, black or Puerto Rican — what all the Rutledge kids called greasers. Rusty was a straight-A student (“It doesn’t take much to be an A-student at Lafayette High,” Lissie’s mother often proclaimed in her Vassar Speech and Dramatics Major voice) and, despite her aversion to jocks, was the best cheerleader on the high school’s squad. During Lissie’s long (long, ha!) Thanksgiving Day weekend this year, she’d gone to watch the football game between Lafayette and Norwalk High, and Rusty had been the cutest thing imaginable in her white pleated skirt and sweater, the school’s orange L plastered on her chest (God, how Lissie envied girls who had breasts!), the letter echoing her curly red-orange hair, her bright blue eyes sparkling as she led the “Lafayette, we are here!” cheer. After the game, she’d introduced Lissie to the McGruder twins, two gigantic boys with black hair and brown eyes and teeth Rusty swore had been capped, her father being an orthodontist and all.
The McGruder twins provided the surprise for Lissie’s party that night. David McGruder played electric piano, and his brother Danny played bass guitar, and together with a drummer and a lead guitarist they had formed a group called Turtle Bay, so-named for no reason other than that the twins lived on Turtle Pond which was really no reason at all. Turtle Bay, all four of them, arrived at ten minutes past nine, some forty minutes after the scheduled start of the party, the drummer and lead guitarist bracketed by the bookend twins, and promptly began setting up what Jamie later described as $75,000 worth of electronic equipment, another of his wild rock-and-roll estimates. Lissie was totally surprised; Rusty hadn’t given her the slightest clue that the twins were in a group, or that the group would be performing here tonight — live.
Live, they certainly were.
They turned the volume on their speakers up full, and shook the house to the attic rafters as they bellowed songs of their own composition. Jamie, in the sanctuary of the master bedroom, shouted to Connie that the difference between his generation and the present one was that when he was a kid they danced to music, whereas nowadays they listened to music, though he couldn’t understand how they could possibly hear anything with the volume turned up so loud. The band played nonstop for almost an hour, and then — miraculously — the house went still.
“What do you suppose they’re doing down there?” Jamie asked suspiciously.
What they were doing down there was talking.
Of the fourteen girls at the party — all of them ranging in age from seventeen to nineteen — only two of them were no longer virgins, and they’d been going steady with the same boys since the eighth grade. Both Sally Landers and Carolyn Pierce considered themselves as good as engaged; their boyfriends were both graduating seniors who expected to be drafted early in 1969, perhaps to have their asses blown away in Vietnam; their rationale, if any was needed, was as old as time: Kiss me, my sweet, for tomorrow I die. But despite the virginal reality of the remaining dozen girls (and at least seven of the boys gathered there in the photograph-hung living room), the conversation centered largely on young Linda Moore, who had committed the unimaginable error of getting herself pregnant.
Linda wasn’t what anyone there would have even remotely considered a slut. She was, in fact, the only daughter of a man named Alex Moore, an actor who played a physician on a continuing daytime soap. Linda was fifteen years old, a bright-eyed little thing who’d scarcely outgrown her baby fat. The culprit who’d knocked her up was a boy named Ralph Yancy, son of the town’s postmaster, and the kids were speculating now on whether or not they’d been stoned when they’d slipped. “Slipped” was a euphemism Lissie had never heard used in this context before. She listened wide-eyed as Beth Jackson painstakingly tried to reconstruct the events leading to Linda’s abortion in Puerto Rico.
“It must’ve been right after the Soph Hop,” she said. “She went with Yancy, didn’t she? And that was in September, the first big dance of the year, and she ran down to Puerto Rico in November, right, so that...”
“Just before Thanksgiving,” Judy Lipscombe said.
“Right, so that makes it... September, October, November,” Beth said, ticking the months off on her fingers, “that’s three months, that’d be about right. It had to be after the Soph Hop.”
“Yancy was stoned that night,” David McGruder said, nodding. “I saw Owen Clarke handing him a joint in the toilet.”
“And they disappeared right after the dance, didn’t they?” Roger Bridges said. His father was an attorney in nearby Talmadge, a man named Matthew Bridges. Roger was the drummer in Turtle Bay and — at nineteen — the oldest person in the room. Lissie thought he played loud and lousy, but she wasn’t an expert on drummers. Whenever her father played his scratchy recording of “Sing, Sing, Sing” for her, she was at a loss to comprehend what was so spectacular about Gene Trooper’s drumming.
“Driving his old man’s Benz,” Jimmy Lewis said.
“Have to be a contortionist to do it on the front seat of a 280 SL,” Danny McGruder said, and all the boys laughed, and some of the girls giggled.
“Who paid for the abortion?” Rusty asked.
“Well, that’s just it,” Beth said. “Apparently, Yancy went to his father...”
“His father!” David said.
“Yeah, and Mr. Yancy called Mr. Moore to explain the situation to him, and to tell him he thought it inadvisable for the pair of them to get married so early in their—”
“Inadvisable! Jesus!” Roger said.
“Yeah, inadvisable,” Beth said, grinning, “and offered to pay for an abortion if Linda’d go down to Puerto Rico for it.”
“So did he pay?” Rusty asked.
“No, they split the bill and the air fare.”