“I don’t know,” Franny whispered, and went on crying. One of her arms lolled down Junior’s side and I took her hand; she squeezed; I squeezed back. Harold Swallow, darting through the trees, guiding us like a hush up the path, found the infirmary and opened the door.
“What’s all this?” said the night nurse, Mrs. Butler.
“I’m Franny Berry,” said my sister, “and I’ve been beaten up.”
“Beaten up” would remain Franny’s euphemism for it, although everyone knew she had been raped. “Beaten up” was all Franny would admit to, although no one missed the point; this way it would never be a legal point, however.
“She means she was raped,” Junior Jones told Mrs. Butler. But Franny kept shaking her head. I think that her way of interpreting Junior’s kindness to her, and his version of how the her in her had not been touched, was to convert her sexual abuse into the terms of a mere fight she had lost. She whispered to him—he still held her against his chest and in his arms—and then he put her down on her feet and said to Mrs. Butler, “Okay, she was beaten up.” Mrs. Butler knew what was meant.
“She was beaten up and raped,” said Harold Swallow, who couldn’t stand still, but Junior Jones cooled him down with a look and said to him, “Why don’t you fly away, Harold? Why don’t you fly off and find Mr. Dove?” That put the gleam back in Harold’s eye, and he flew away.
I called Father, before I remembered there was no working phone in the Hotel New Hampshire. Then I called Campus Security and asked them to give Father the message: Franny and I were at the Dairy School Infirmary; Franny had been “beaten up.”
“It’s just another Halloween, kid,” Franny said, holding my hand.
“The worst one, Franny,” I said to her.
The worst one so far,” she said.
Mrs. Butler took Franny off, to fix her—among other things—a bath, and Junior Jones explained to me that if Franny cleaned herself there would be no evidence that she was raped, and I went after Mrs. Butler to explain it to her, but Mrs. Butler had already explained this to Franny, who wanted to let it go. “I’ve been beaten up,” she said, although she would listen to Mrs. Butler’s advice about checking, later, to see if she was pregnant (she wasn’t)—or infected with a venereal disease (someone had passed on a little something, which was eventually cured).
When Father arrived at the infirmary, Junior Jones had gone to lend his assistance to the delivery of Lenny Metz to the Dean, Harold Swallow was combing the campus, like a hawk, looking for a dove—and I was sitting in an all-white hospital room with Franny, fresh from her bath, her hair in a towel, an ice pack on her left cheekbone, her right ring finger bandaged (she’d torn out a nail); she wore a white hospital smock and was sitting up in bed. “I want to go home,” she told Father. “Tell Mother I just need some clean clothes.”
“What did they do to you, darling?” Father asked her, and sat beside her on the bed.
“They beat me up,” Franny said.
“Where were you?” Father asked me.
“He got help,” Franny said.
“Did you see what happened?” Father asked me.
“He didn’t see anything,” Franny said.
I saw the Third Act, I wanted to tell Father, but although we all knew what “beaten up” meant, I would remain faithful to Franny’s term for it.
“I just want to go home,” Franny said, although the Hotel New Hampshire seemed, to me, to be a large and unfamiliar place to curl up in. Father went to get her clothes.
It was a pity he missed seeing Lenny Metz trussed up on the lacrosse stick and carried through the campus to the Dean like a poorly prepared piece of meat on a spit. And a pity Father didn’t witness the precociousness of Harold Swallow searching for Dove, gliding up to every dorm room like a shadow. Until Harold ascertained that Chipper Dove could only be in the girls” dorm. After that, he thought, it would be just a matter of time until he found whose room Dove was hiding in.
The Dean of Men, covering Chester Pulaski with his wife’s camel’s-hair coat—it was the nearest thing handy—cried out, “Chester, Chester, my boy! Why? Only a week before the Exeter game!”
“The woods are full of niggers,” Chester Pulaski said, mournfully. “They’re taking over. Run for your life.”
The Dean of Women had locked herself in the bathroom, and when the second set of clawing sounds, and banging, reached her ears, she cried to her husband. “You can answer the goddamned door this time!”
“It’s the niggers, don’t let them in!” Chester Pulaski cried, clutching the Dean of Women’s coat around him. The Dean of Men bravely opened the door; for some time he’d had an arrangement with Junior Jones’s secret police, which was Dairy’s highly underground and very good arm of the law.
“For God’s sake, Junior,” the Dean said. “This is going too far.”
“Who is it?” cried the Dean of Women from the bathroom, as Lenny Metz was brought into the Deans’ living room and stretched out on the hearth before the fireplace; his broken collarbone was killing him, and when he saw the fire he must have thought it was meant for him.
“I confess!” he cried.
“You bet you do,” said Junior Jones.
“I did it!” cried Lenny Metz.
“You sure did,” said Junior Jones.
“I did it, too!” cried Chester Pulaski.
“And who did it first?” asked Junior Jones.
“Chipper Dove!” sang the boys in the backfield. “Dove did it first!”
“There you have it,” said Junior Jones to the Dean of Men. “You got the picture?”
“What did they do—and to whom?” the Dean asked.
They gang-banged Franny Berry,” said Junior Jones, just as the Dean of Women emerged from the bathroom; she saw the black athletes swaying in the doorway, like a choral society from an African country, and she screamed again; she shut herself back up in the bathroom.
“Now we’ll bring you Dove,” said Junior Jones.
“Gently, Junior!” cried the Dean. “For God’s sake, gently!”
I stayed with Franny; Mother and Father came to the infirmary with her clothes. Coach Bob was left to babysit with Lilly and Egg—like the old days, I thought. But where was Frank?
Frank was out on a “mission,” Father said mysteriously. When Father had heard that Franny was “beaten up,” he’d never doubted the worst. And he knew that Sorrow would be the first thing she’d ask for when she was home in her own bed. “I want to go home,” she would say; and then she’d say, “I want Sorrow to sleep with me.”
“Maybe it’s not too late,” Father had said; he’d left Sorrow at the vet’s before the football game. If it had been a busy day for the vet, perhaps the old farter was still alive in some cage. Frank had undertaken the mission to go and see.
But it was like the rescue mission of Junior Jones; Frank arrived too late. He woke up the vet with his pounding on the door. “I hate Halloween,” the vet probably said, but his wife told him it was one of the Berry boys asking about Sorrow. “Oh-oh,” the vet said. “I’m sorry, son,” the vet told Frank, “but your dog passed away this afternoon.”
“I want to see him,” Frank said.
“Oh-oh,” the vet said. “The dog is dead, son.”
“Have you buried him?” Frank asked.
“It’s so sweet,” the vet’s wife told her husband. “Let the boy bury his own dog, if that’s what he wants.”