Mystery. Part 2

His world was dominated by physical pain and the necessity of controlling that pain. Every three hours a nurse holding a small square tray marched quickly across his room and lifted a tiny white paper cup from among the other similar cups on the tray even before she reached his bedside, so that by the time she reached him she was in position to extend the cup to his waiting lips. Then there was an agonizing period in which the sweet, oily stuff in the cup temporarily failed to work. Sometimes during this period, the nurse, if she were Nancy Vetiver or Hattie Bas...o...b.., would hold his hand or stroke his hair.

These small coins of affection soothed him.

In a minute or two the pain that had come up out of his body's deepest places began to settle like a large animal going to sleep, and all the sharp smaller pains would turn fuzzy and slow.

One day during Tom's third week in the hospital Dr. Milton entered his room while he was having a conversation with Nancy Vetiver, one of his two favorite nurses. She was a slim young blond woman of twenty-six with close-set brown eyes and harsh lines at the sides of her mouth. Nancy had his hand in hers and was telling him a story about her first year at Shady Mount-the raucous dormitory she had lived in, the food that had made her feel half-sick. Tom was hoping to get her to tell him something about the night nurse, Hattie Bas...o...b.., whom he considered a wondrous and slightly fearsome character, but Nancy glanced over her shoulder as the doctor came in, squeezed his hand, and looked impa.s.sively at the doctor.

Tom saw Dr. Milton frown at their joined hands as he approached the bed. Nancy gently took her hand from his, and then stood up.

Dr. Milton tucked in his ample chin and frowned at her a moment before turning to Tom.

"Nurse Vetiver, isn't it?" he asked.

Nancy was wearing a name tag, and Tom knew that the doctor must have encountered her many times before.

"It is," she said.

"Aren't there some essential aspects of your job that you ought to be seeing to?"

"This is an essential aspect of my job, Dr. Milton," Nancy said.

"You feel-let me be sure I state this correctly-it medically beneficial to complain to this boy, who is of a good family, in fact a very good family"-here he glanced over at Tom with what was supposed to be a look of rea.s.surance-"about the mutton served in the nurses' residence?"

"That's exactly what I feel, Doctor."

For a moment the nurse and the doctor merely stared at each other. Tom saw Dr. Milton decide that it was not worth his while to debate hospital etiquette with this underling. He sighed. "I'll want you to think about what you owe to this inst.i.tution," he said in a weary voice that suggested that he had said similar things many times before. "But we do have a patient, and an important one"-another curdled smile for Tom-"to deal with at the moment, Nurse Vetiver. This young man's grandfather, my good friend Glen Upshaw, is still on the board of this hospital. Perhaps you might be good enough to let me conduct an examination?"

Nancy stepped back, and Dr. Milton leaned down to peer at Tom's face.

"Feeling better, are we?"

"I guess," Tom said.

"How's the pain?"

"Pretty bad at times."

"You'll be back on your feet in no time," the doctor said. "Nature is a great healer. I suppose we could increase your medication ...?" He straightened up and turned his head to glance at Nancy. "Suppose we think about increasing his medication, shall we?"

"We'll think about it," she said. "Yes, sir."

"Very good, then." He vaguely patted Tom's cast. "I thought it might be useful for me to pop in and have a chat with the boy, and now I see that it was. Yes, very useful. Everything going all right, nurse?"

Nancy smiled at the doctor with a face subtly changed, older, tougher, more cynical. She looked less beautiful to Tom, but more impressive. "Of course," she said. She glanced at Tom, and when Tom met her eyes he understood: nothing said by Dr. Milton was of any importance at all.

"I'll just add a note on his chart, then," the doctor said, and busied himself with his pen for a moment.

He hooked the chart back on the bottom of his bed, gave Nancy a glance full of meaning Tom did not know how to interpret, and said, "I'll tell your grandfather you're doing splendidly, good mental att.i.tude, all that sort of thing. He'll be pleased." He looked at his watch. "Well. You're eating well, I a.s.sume? No mutton here, is there, Nurse? You must eat, you know-that's nature's way. Sometimes good solid food is the best medicine you can have." Another glance at his watch. "Important appointment, I'm afraid. Glad we could get that little matter straightened out, Nurse Vetiver."

"It's a great relief to us all," Nancy said.

Dr. Bonaventure Milton cast Nancy a lazy glance, nearly smiled with the same indifferent laziness, and after nodding to Tom, wandered out of the room. "Yes, sir," sir," Nancy said, as if to herself. So Tom understood everything he would ever have to understand about his doctor. Nancy said, as if to herself. So Tom understood everything he would ever have to understand about his doctor.

Later there was a "complication" with his leg, which had begun to feel as if helium were being pumped into it, making it so light that it threatened to shatter its cast and sail away into the air. Tom had ignored this feeling for as long as he could, but within a week it became a part of the pain that threatened to devour the whole of the world, and he had to confess it to someone. Nancy Vetiver said to tell Dr. Milton, really tell tell him; Hattie Bas...o...b.., speaking from the darkness in the middle of the night, said, "You save up your knife from your supper, and when old Boney starts pattin' your cast and tellin' you that you just imaginin' that feeling, you take that knife and stick it in his old fat fish-colored hand." Tom thought that Hattie Bas...o...b.. was the other side of Nancy Vetiver, and then thought that every object and person must have its other, opposite side-the side that belonged to night. him; Hattie Bas...o...b.., speaking from the darkness in the middle of the night, said, "You save up your knife from your supper, and when old Boney starts pattin' your cast and tellin' you that you just imaginin' that feeling, you take that knife and stick it in his old fat fish-colored hand." Tom thought that Hattie Bas...o...b.. was the other side of Nancy Vetiver, and then thought that every object and person must have its other, opposite side-the side that belonged to night.

As Hattie predicted, Dr. Milton scoffed at his story of a "light" pain, an "airy" pain, and even his parents did not believe in it. They did not want to believe that their doctor, the distinguished Bonaventure Milton, could be in error (nor did the surgeon, a Dr. Bostwick, an otherwise blameless man), and above all they did not want to believe that Tom would need yet another operation. Nor did Tom-he just wanted them to cut open the cast and let the air out. Of course that was no solution, the doctors would not do that. And so the abscess within his leg grew and grew, and by the time Nancy and Hattie got Dr. Bostwick to examine this "imaginary" complaint, Tom was found to need a new operation, which would not only remove the abscess but reset his leg. Which meant that first they would have to break it again-it was precisely as though he were to be propped up on Calle Burleigh and run over again.

Hattie Bas...o...b.. leaned toward him out of the night and said, "You're a scholar, and this here is your school. Your lessons are hard-hard-but you gotta learn 'em. Most people don't learn what you bein' taught until they a lot older. Nothing is safe, that's what you been learnin'. Nothing is whole, not for too d.a.m.ned long. The world is half night. Don't matter who your granddaddy is."

The world is half night-that was what he knew.

Tom spent the entire summer in Shady Mount Hospital. His parents visited him with the irregularity he came to expect of them, for he knew that they saw their visits as disruptive and upsetting, in some way harmful to his recovery: they sent books and toys, and while most of the toys came to pieces in his hands or were useless to one confined to bed, the books were always perfect, every one. When his parents appeared in his room, they seemed quieter and older than he remembered them, survivors of another life, and what they spoke of was the saga of what they had endured on the day of his accident.

The one time his grandfather came to the hospital, he stood beside the bed leaning on the umbrella he used as a cane, with something tight and hard in his face that doubted Tom, wondered about him. This, Tom suddenly remembered, was overwhelmingly familiar-the sensation that his grandfather disliked him.

Had he been running away?

No, of course not, why would he run away?

He didn't have any friends out there, did he? Had he maybe been going to Elm Cove? Two boys in his old cla.s.s at Brooks-Lowood lived in Elm Cove, maybe he had taken it into his head to go all the way out there and see them?

His cla.s.s was now his old cla.s.s because he would miss a year of school.

Maybe, he said. I don't remember. I just don't remember. He could vaguely remember the day of his accident, could remember the milk cart and the NO Pa.s.sENGERS ALLOWED NO Pa.s.sENGERS ALLOWED sign and the driver asking him about girlfriends. sign and the driver asking him about girlfriends.

Well, which one had he been going to see?

His memory turned to sludge, to pure resistance. His grandfather's insistent questions felt like blows.

Why had his accident happened on Calle Burleigh, eight miles east of Elm Cove? Had he been hitchhiking?

"Why are you asking me all these questions?" questions?" Tom blurted, and burst into tears. Tom blurted, and burst into tears.

There came a muted shocked exhalation from the door, and Tom knew that some of the hospital staff were lingering there to get a look at his grandfather.

"You'd better stick to your own part of town," his grandfather said, and the young doctors and lounging orderlies gave almost inaudible noises of approval.

At the end of August, during the last thirty minutes of visiting hours, a girl named Sarah Spence walked into his room. Tom put down his book and looked at her in astonishment. Sarah, too, seemed astonished to find herself in a hospital room, and looked around at everything in a wondering, wide-eyed way before she came across the room to his bed. For a moment Tom thought that yes, it was astonis.h.i.+ng that he should be here, and that she should see him like this. In that moment he was the old Tom Pasmore, and when he saw how Sarah shyly inspected his ma.s.sive cast with a smile of dismay, it seemed to him ridiculous that he should have been so unhappy.

Sarah Spence had been a friend of his since their earliest days at school, and when she met his eyes he felt restored to his life. He saw at once that her shyness had left her, and that unlike the boys from their cla.s.s who had come to visit his room, she was not intimidated by the evidences of his injuries. By now his head wound had healed, and his right arm was out of its bandages and cast, so he looked far more like his old self than he had during most of July.

As they took each other in for a moment before speaking, Tom realized that Sarah's face was no longer that of a little girl, but almost a woman's, and her taller body was beginning to be a woman's too. He saw that Sarah was very much aware of the difference in her face and body.

"Oh, my G.o.d," she said. "Would you look at that cast?"

"I look at it a lot, actually," he said.

She smiled, and raised her eyes to meet his. "Oh, Tom," she said, and for a moment there hovered between them the possibility that Sarah Spence would hold his hand, or touch his cheek, or kiss him, or burst into tears and do all three-Tom almost went dizzy with his desire for her touch, and Sarah herself scarcely knew what she wished to do, or how to express the wave of tenderness and grief that had pa.s.sed through her with his joke. She took a step nearer to him, and was on the verge of reaching out to touch him when she saw how pale his skin was, ashy just beneath the golden surface, and that his hair looked lank and matted. For just a moment her fifth-grade friend Tom Pasmore looked like a stranger. He seemed shrunken, and his bones were prominent, and even though this familiar stranger before her was a little boy-a little boy-he had ugly dark smudges under his eyes like an old man. Then Tom's face seemed to settle into well-known lines, and he was not a little boy with an old man's eyes but on the verge of adolescence again, the boy she liked best in her cla.s.s, the friend who had spent hours every day talking and playing with her in summers and weekends past-but by then she had unconsciously taken a half-step backwards, and was folding her hands together at her waist.

They were suddenly awkward with each other.

To say something, anything at all, lest she run out of the room, Tom said, "Do you know how long I've been here?" And immediately regretted it, for it sounded to him as if he was accusing her of having ignored him.

And then it seemed to him that he was trying to tell Sarah Spence in one sentence about all the changes that had taken place in him. So he said, "I've been here forever."

"I heard yesterday," Sarah said. "We just got back from up north."

"Up north," a phrase Tom understood as well as Sarah, did not refer to the northern end of the island, but to the northern tier of states in continental North America. Sarah's parents, like many far east end residents (though not the Pasmores), owned property in northern Wisconsin, and spent much of June, July, and August in a pine lodge beside a freshwater lake. At the end of June the Redwing clan, Mill Walk's most important family, moved virtually as a single organism to a separate compound on Eagle Lake. "Mom found out from Mrs. Jacobs, when she was talking to her at Ostend's Market." She paused. "You got hit by a car?" a phrase Tom understood as well as Sarah, did not refer to the northern end of the island, but to the northern tier of states in continental North America. Sarah's parents, like many far east end residents (though not the Pasmores), owned property in northern Wisconsin, and spent much of June, July, and August in a pine lodge beside a freshwater lake. At the end of June the Redwing clan, Mill Walk's most important family, moved virtually as a single organism to a separate compound on Eagle Lake. "Mom found out from Mrs. Jacobs, when she was talking to her at Ostend's Market." She paused. "You got hit by a car?"

Tom nodded. She, too, he could see, had questions she could not ask: How did it feel? Can you remember it? Did it hurt a lot? How did it feel? Can you remember it? Did it hurt a lot?

"How did that happen?" she asked. "You just walked in front of a car?"

"I guess I was way out on Calle Burleigh, and it was rush hour, and..." Unable to say any more, because all he could remember now of that day was how the car had looked just before it struck him, he shrugged.

"How dumb can you get?" she said. "What are you going to do next? Dive into an empty pool?"

"I think my next death-defying act is going to be trying to get out of this bed."

"And when do you do that? When do you get to go home?"

"I don't know."

Unsettlingly adult exasperation showed on her face. "Well, how are you going to go to school if you don't go home?" When he did not answer, the exasperation was replaced by a moment of pure confusion, and then by something like disbelief. "You're not coming back to school?"

"I can't," he said. "I'm going to be out a whole year. It's true," he added in the face of her growing incredulity. His depression had begun to return. "I can't even get out of bed for another eight weeks-that's what they told me anyhow. When I finally do get home, they're putting me in a hospital bed in the living room. How can I go to school, Sarah? I can't even get out of bed!" He was appalled to hear himself making terrible ragged noises as his pains began to announce themselves again. Tom thought that Sarah Spence looked as if she were sorry to have come to the hospital-and she was right, she did not belong here. In some way he had never quite realized, she had been his best and most important friend, and now a vast abyss lay between them.

Sarah did not run out of the room, but for Tom it was almost worse that she watched him dry his face and blow his nose as she uttered meaningless phrases about how everything would be all right. He saw her retreat into the world of ignorant daylight, backing away in polite horror from his fear and pain and anger. In any case, she did not know the worst thing-that he had been castrated and had nothing between his legs but a tube, a fact so terrible that Tom himself could not hold it clearly in his mind for more than a few seconds at a time. Now, without being aware of what he was doing, his left hand crept to the smooth groin of his body cast.

"You must itch a lot," Sarah said.

He pulled his hand away as if the cast were red hot. She remained until visiting hours were over, talking to him about a new puppy named Bingo and what she had done "up north," and how Fritz Redwing's cousin Buddy had taken one of his family's motorboats out into the middle of Eagle Lake and tried to dynamite the fish, and her voice went on and on, full of kindness and restraint and sympathy, as well as other feelings he could not or would not identify, until Nancy Vetiver came in to tell her that she had to leave.

"I didn't know you had such a pretty girlfriend," Nancy said. "I think I'm jealous."

Sarah's entire face turned pink, and she reached for her bag, promising to be back soon. When she left she sent no more than a glancing smile toward Tom, and did not speak or look at Nancy. She never came to the hospital again.

Two days later his door opened just before the end of visiting hours, and Tom looked up with his heart beating, expecting to see Sarah Spence. Lamont von Heilitz smiled flickeringly from the doorway, and somehow appeared to understand everything at once. "Ah, you've been waiting for someone else. But it's just your cranky old neighbor, I'm afraid. Shall I leave you alone?"

"Please don't, please come in," Tom said, more pleased than he would have thought possible at the sight of the old man. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing a dark blue suit with a double-breasted vest, a dark red rose in his b.u.t.tonhole, and gloves of the same red as the rose. He looked silly and beautiful at once, Tom thought, and was visited by what seemed the odd desire that he might look a great deal like this when he was as old as Mr. von Heilitz. Then his mind snagged and caught on a buried memory, and he goggled at the old man, who smiled back at him, as if again he had understood everything before Tom had to say a word.

"You came to see me," Tom said. "A long time ago."

"Yes," the old man said.

"You said-you said to remember your visit."

"And so you did," said Mr. von Heilitz. "And now I have come again. I understand that you will be coming home soon, but thought that you might enjoy reading a few books I had around the place. It's all right if you don't. But you might give them a try, anyhow." And from nowhere, it seemed, he produced two slim books-The Speckled Band and and The Murders in the Rue Morgue The Murders in the Rue Morgue-and handed them over to Tom. "I hope you will be good enough to pay me a call sometime when you are out of the hospital and fully recovered."

Tom nodded, dumbfounded, and soon after Mr. von Heilitz glided out of the room.

"Who the h.e.l.l was that?" Nancy asked him. "Dracula?"

Tom himself left the hospital on the last day of August, and was installed in the bed set up in the living room. The big cast had been replaced by one that encased him only from ankle to thigh. It seemed that he had not been castrated after all. Nancy Vetiver visited him after he had been home a few days, and at first seemed to bring into the house with her the whole noisy, well-regulated atmosphere of the hospital-for a moment it seemed that his lost world would be restored. She told him stories of the other nurses and the patients he had known, which involved him as Sarah Spence's tales of northern Wisconsin had not, and told him that Hattie Bas...o...b.. had said that she would put a hex on him if he didn't come visit her. But then his mother, who was having one of her good days and had left them alone to order groceries from Ostend's, came back in and was chillingly polite to the nurse, and Tom saw Nancy become increasingly uncomfortable under Gloria Pasmore's questions about her parents and her education. For the first time Tom noticed that Nancy's grammar was uncertain-she said "she don't" and "they was"-and that she sometimes laughed at things that weren't funny. A few minutes later, Tom's mother showed her to the door, thanking her with elaborate insincerity for all she had done.

When Gloria came back into the living room, she said, "I don't think nurses expect to be tipped, do you? I don't think they should."

"Oh, Mom," Tom said, knowing that this concealed a negative verdict.

"That young woman looked very hard to me," said his mother. "Very hard indeed. People as hard as that frighten frighten me." me."

PART THREE.

HATRED.

AND SALVATION.

Later in his life, when Tom Pasmore remembered the year he had spent alone at home, he could not summon up the faces of the practical nurses who came, were fired, and went away, nor of the tutors who tried to get him to stop reading for long enough for them to teach him something. Neither was he ever able to remember spending any length of time with his parents.

What he could remember without any difficulty at all was being alone and reading. His year at home divided itself into three sections-the eras of bed, wheelchair, and crutches-and during these, he read nearly every one of the books in his parents' house and virtually all of the books his father carried home, six at a time, from the public library. He read with nothing but appet.i.te-without discrimination or judgment, sometimes without understanding. Tom reread all of his old children's books, read his father's Zane Grey, Eric Ambler, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his mother's S. S. Van Dine, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Michael Arlen, Edgar Wallace, and The Search for Bridey Murphy The Search for Bridey Murphy. He read Sax Rohmer, H. P. Lovecraft, and Bulfinch's Bulfinch's Mythology Mythology. He read the dog novels of Albert Payson Terhune, and the horse novels of Will James, and Call of the Wild, Black Beauty Call of the Wild, Black Beauty, and Frog Frog by Colonel S. P. Meeker. He read a novel by a Hungarian about Galileo. He read hotrod novels by Henry Gregor Felsen, especially by Colonel S. P. Meeker. He read a novel by a Hungarian about Galileo. He read hotrod novels by Henry Gregor Felsen, especially Street Rod Street Rod, in which a boy was killed in an automobile accident. When his father began taking books from the library, he raced through everything they had by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Das.h.i.+ell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. He read Murder, Incorporated Murder, Incorporated, about the careers of Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Abe "Kid Twist" Reles. Once an irritated Victor Pasmore came into the living room holding a bagful of hardback Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout that Lamont von Heilitz had pressed into his hands with instructions to give them to Tom, and Tom read them all in a row, one after the other. He read approximately one-third of the Bible and one-half of a collection of Shakespeare's plays that he found propping up a goldfish bowl. He went through Sherlock Holmes and Richard Hannay and Lord Peter Wimsey. He read Jurgen Jurgen and and Topper Topper and and Slan Slan. He read novels in which young governesses went to ancient family estates in France and fell in love with young n.o.blemen who might have been smugglers, but were not. He read Dracula Dracula and and Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights and and Bleak House Bleak House. After that he was launched into d.i.c.kens, and read Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Our Mutual Friend, A Tale of Two Cities Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Our Mutual Friend, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield David Copperfield. On the recommendation of the puzzled librarian, he went from d.i.c.kens to Wilkie Collins, and lapped up The Moonstone, No Name, Armadale The Moonstone, No Name, Armadale, and The Woman in White The Woman in White. He failed with Edith Wharton, another of the librarian's recommendations, but struck gold again with Mark Twain, Richard Henry Dana, and Edgar Allan Poe. Then he stumbled upon The Castle of Otranto, The Monk The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, and Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Mr. von Heilitz once again intercepted his father on the street, and pa.s.sed along The House of the Arrow The House of the Arrow and and Trent's Last Case Trent's Last Case and and Brat Farrar Brat Farrar.

Before his accident, books had meant the safety of escape; for a long time afterwards, what they meant was life itself. Very rarely, a few of the boys who had been his friends would stop in and stay half an hour or more, and during these visits he learned that the world did not stop at his front door-Buddy Redwing had been given a Corvette for his sixteenth birthday, and Jamie Thielman had been expelled from Brooks-Lowood for smoking behind the curtains on the school stage, the football team had won eight games in a row, and the basketball team, which played in a league with only four other teams, had an unbroken string of losses-but the boys seldom visited and soon left, and Tom, who really did hunger for information about what the big unknown world beyond his door, beyond Eastern Sh.o.r.e Road, beyond even Mill Walk was like, could forget while he read that he was crippled and alone. Through the transparent medium of books, he left behind his body and his useless anger and roamed through forests and cities in close company with men and women who plotted for money, love, and revenge, who murdered and stole and saved England from foreign conspiracies, who embarked on great journeys and followed their doubles like shadows through foggy nineteenth-century London. He hated his body and his wheelchair, though his arms and shoulders grew as muscular as a weightlifters's, and when he was put on his crutches, he loathed their awkwardness and the hobbled imitation of walking they represented: real life, his real life, was between the covers of several hundred novels. Everything else was horror and monstrosity-falling down, moving like an insect with his six limbs, screaming at his irritated tutors, dreaming at night of seas of blood, of a smashed and mutilated body.

A year after his accident, Tom set down his crutches and learned to walk again. By then he was in a great many ways a different person from the boy who had jumped down from the milk cart.

Both the elder Pasmores and their son would have pointed to Tom's immersion in books as the real cause of the changes in him. To Tom's parents, it seemed that the far more distant, now oddly unknowable boy holding on to tables and chairs as he tottered around the house on legs as unreliable as those of an eighteen-month-old child had taken a voluntary sidestep away from life-when not inexplicably enraged, he seemed to have chosen shadows, pa.s.sivity, unreality.

Tom's own ideas were almost directly opposed to these. It seemed to him that he had stepped into the real stream of life: that all of his reading not only had saved him from the immediate insanity of rage and the slow insanity of boredom, but given him a rapid and seductive overview of adult life-he had been an invisible partic.i.p.ant in hundreds of dramas, but even more important, had overheard thousands of conversations, witnessed as many acts of discrimination and judgment, and seen stupidity, cruelty, hyprocrisy, bad manners, and duplicity condemned in almost equal measure. The melody of the English language and a sense of its resources, an idea of eloquence as mysteriously good and moral in itself, had pa.s.sed into his mind forever, as had the beginning of an understanding of human motives. Far more than anything provided by his tutors, the books Tom read were his education. At times, deep in a book, he felt his body begin to glow: an invisible but potent glory seemed to hover just behind the characters, and it seemed that they were on the verge of making some great discovery that would also be his-the discovery of a vast realm of radiant meaning that lay hidden just within the world of ordinary appearances.

By his junior year in Brooks-Lowood's Upper School, he could make half of his cla.s.s convulse with laughter with a remark the other half would either resent or fail to understand; he jumped at loud noises and retreated into himself for long periods that were known as his "trances"; he had a reputation for being "nervous," for he had no physical repose and could not remain still longer than a few seconds without moving or twitching or rubbing his face or chattering to anybody who happened to be near. He was plagued with nightmares and he walked in his sleep. If he had been as good in school as his apt.i.tude tests indicated he should, much of this behavior would have been put down to his being a "brain," a brilliant academic future would have been predicted for him, and the guidance counselor would have spoken to him about medical school-there was a perennial shortage of doctors on Mill Walk. As it was, his conduct merely made him odd, and the counselor handed him brochures for third-rate colleges in the southern states.

The nine months he had spent in a wheelchair had left him with large shoulders and well-developed biceps that remained even while the rest of his body lengthened to a height of six feet, four inches. The basketball coach, who was desperate after a long string of losing seasons, arranged a meeting of Tom and Victor Pasmore, himself, and the headmaster, who had long ago mentally convicted Tom Pasmore of malingering. Tom politely refused to have anything to do with the school's teams. "It's just an accident that I'm so tall," he said to the three stony-faced men in the headmaster's beautiful office. "Why don't you imagine me being a foot shorter?"

He meant that if they did so they would be closer to the truth, but the coach felt as though Tom were laughing at him, the headmaster felt insulted, and Victor Pasmore was enraged.

"Will you please talk to these people like a human being?" Victor bellowed. "You have to take part in things! You can't sit on your duff all day long anymore!"

"Sounds like basketball has just become a compulsory subject," Tom said, as if to himself.

"It just has-for you!" shouted his father.