“I guess my opinion is that it doesn’t make much difference one way or the other.”
“Not make much difference! A change that big?”
“I got out two weeks earlier, and that’s about it.”
“Really, Daniel, I don’t know what you can mean.”
“I mean I still don’t think it’s safe to express an honest opinion anywhere in the state of Iowa. And so far as I know, there’s no law that says I have to. And I’m not about to.”
First there was a silence. Then, led by Boadicea, a smattering of applause. Even with that unprecedented provocation, Mrs. Norberg did not take her eyes from Daniel. You could almost see the calculations going on behind that fixed stare: was his insolence defensible, in theory, as candor? Or might he be made to pay for it? Nothing less than expulsion would be worth a head-on contest, and at last, with evident reluctance, she decided not to risk it. There would always be another time.
After the class Boadicea lay in wait for Daniel at the entrance to the lunchroom.
“That was terrific,” she told him in a stage-whisper, as she slipped into place behind him in the cafeteria line. “A regular adventure movie.”
“It was a mistake.”
“Oh no! You were completely, universally right. The only way to deal with the Iceberg is silence. Let her talk to her eight echoes.”
He just smiled. Not the fleshy, unforgettable smile of the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse, but a smile that was all mind and meaning. She felt abashed, as though, by making no reply, he meant to show that he considered her one of the people it wasn’t safe to talk to. The smile faltered.
“Hey,” he said, “this is a dumb argument — you telling me I’m right, and me saying I’m wrong.”
“Well, you are right.”
“Maybe, but what’s right for me isn’t necessarily what’s right for you. If you stop sniping at her, what’ll there be for the rest of us to listen to?”
“You mean I can afford to be brave because I’m safe.”
“And I can’t afford it. Which wasn’t something I should have spelled out. That’s the mistake. One of the first things you learn in prison is that the guards like to think that you like them. Norberg’s no different.”
Boadicea wanted to wrap her arms around him, to leap up and cheer for him like some silly cheerleader, to buy him something terrifically expensive and appropriate, such was the enormity of her agreement and of her gratitude at having anyone to be agreeing with.
“School is a prison,” she agreed earnestly. “You know, I used to think I was the only person in the world who understood that. I was in Switzerland at this awful so-called finishing school, and I wrote a letter home, to my father, explaining all the ways it was a prison, and he wrote back saying, ‘Of course, my dear Bobo — school is a prison for the very good reason that all children are criminals.’”
“Uh-huh.”
They’d reached the food. Daniel took a dish of cole slaw onto his tray and pointed at the fishsticks.
“Actually,” she went on, “that isn’t exactly what he said. What he said was that teenagers aren’t fully civilized yet, and so they’re dangerous. Not here in Iowa, perhaps, but in the cities certainly. But one of the differences between here and the cities… oh, just soup for me, please… is the degree to which people here do live by the official code. That’s what my father says anyhow.”
Daniel gave his school credit card to the check-out girl. The machine fizzed with the prices of his lunch, and the girl handed him back his card. He picked up his tray.
“Daniel?”
He stopped and she asked, with her eyes, for him to wait till they were out of earshot of the check-out girl. When they were, she asked him, “Are you having lunch with anyone else today?”
“No.”
“Why not have lunch with me then? I know it’s not for me to ask, and you probably prefer to have the time to yourself, to think.” She paused to allow him to contradict her, but he just stood there with his devastating superior smile. His handsomeness was so dark, so exotic, almost as though he belonged to another race. “But me,” she persisted, “I’m different. I like to talk before I think.”
He laughed. “Say, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you have lunch with me?”
“Why how nice of you to ask, Daniel,” she minced, her parody of pert insouciance. Or possibly it was the genuine article, pert insouciance itself. “Or should I call you Mr. Weinreb?”
“Maybe something in between.”
“Very funny.” Making her voice comically deep.
“That’s what Susan McCarthy always says when she’s at a loss for words.”
“I know. I’m a close observer. Too.” But for all that it had stung — to be compared (and accurately) with the likes of a Susan McCarthy.
They’d found bench-space at a relatively quiet table. Instead of starting to eat, he just looked at her. Started to say something, and stopped. She felt tingly with excitement. She had caught his attention. It stopped short of liking or even, in any committed way, of interest, but the worst was over, and suddenly, incredibly, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She blushed. She smiled. And shook her head, with pert insouciance.
7
After the argument with her hateful — literally hateful — sister, Boadicea wrapped herself in her old school cape of green loden and went up to the roof, where the wind whipped her hair and walloped the cape with satisfying emphasis. The twit, she thought, concerning Alethea, the prig, the bitch; the sneak, the spy, the snob; the sly, mindless, soulless, self-regarding slut. The worst of it was that Boadicea could never, when it came to a showdown, translate her scorn into language that Alethea would admit to understanding, whereas Alethea had a monolithic confidence in her snobberies that gave even the most banal a kind of authority.
Even the roof wasn’t far enough. With grim elation Boadicea mounted the west wind pylon, pausing in the lee of the first vane to marvel, dispassionately, that there could be enough heat left in these wintry blasts to be converted into the steady whirling of the metal blades. Was it heat? or just the momentum of the molecules of gas? or was there any difference? In any case, science was wonderful.
So forget Alethea, she told herself. Rise above her. Consider the clouds, and determine the actual colors incorporated in their mottled, luminous, numinous gray. Arrange the world so that her intolerable sneering profile was not in the foreground, and then it would become, perhaps, a satisfactory sort of world, large and bright and full of admirable processes that a clear mind could learn to deal with, the way the pylons dealt with the wind, the way her father dealt with people, even such otherwise intractable people as Alethea and, occasionally, herself.
Higher she mounted, above the highest vanes, to the small eyrie of steel hoops at the top of the pylon. The winds buffeted. The platform swayed. But she felt no vertigo, only the steadying satisfaction of seeing the world spread out in so orderly a way. The great jumble of Worry became, from this height, as comprehensible as a set of blueprints: the fallow flowerbeds and quincunxes of small trees in the Whitings’ private gardens on the roof below; then, stepwise in terraces below these, on the more extensive rooftops of the wings, were the pools and playgrounds of the other residents of the complex; farthest down, bounded by a broad defensive crescent of garages, stables, and silos, were the kitchen gardens, poultry yards, and tennis courts. The few people in sight all seemed to be engaged in emblematic tasks, like figures in a Bruegheclass="underline" children skating, a woman scattering corn for chickens, two blue-jacketed mechanics bent over the idling engine of a limousine, a man walking a dog toward the trees that screened the western gate-house. To one who stood on the roof those trees would mark the limit of the horizon, but from this higher vantage one could see over them as far as the blue-gray zigzag of housetops that had once been — and not so long ago that Boadicea couldn’t remember it herself — the village of Unity. Most of the village’s former residents lived in Worry now. Their clapboard houses stood empty through most of the year, as many as still stood at all. It was saddening to think that a whole way of life, a century of traditions, had to come to an end for the new way to begin. But what was the alternative? To keep it going artificially, an instant Williamsburg? In effect that was what the summer people were doing now, at least with the better homes. The rest had been scavenged for their meat — siding, plumbing, curious bits of carpentry — and the bones left to weather into a more picturesque condition, at which point, doubtless, they would go to the auction block too. It was sad to see, but it was necessary — the result of forces too large to be withstood, though they might be channeled and shaped with more or less love and imagination. Worry, with its neo-Norman castellations, its out-lying parks and commons, and its innovative social engineering, surely represented the process of feudalization at its most humane and, so to speak, democratic. A Utopia of sorts. Whether, finally, it were a Utopia for the likes of Boadicea she could never decide. Ownership of so much land and wealth was problematical enough, but beyond this was the moral question of one’s relation with one’s tenants. There were over five hundred at last count. Though they would all have denied it — and could in fact be seen denying it in the movie Boadicea had made way back when — their condition was uncomfortably close to serfdom. But uncomfortable, it seemed, only for Boadicea, since the waiting list of qualified applicants who wanted to sign on and move in was ridiculously in excess of the foreseeable openings. Kids at school were always sounding her out about their chances of being moved to the top of the list; some had offered outright bribes if she would put in a word with her father. Once poor Serjeant had got into hot water for accepting such a bribe.