Second excerpt from "Before the Flood," my new novel (2023)
Thanksgiving break began after morning classes on that Wednesday. Most boys who lived close enough went home for the long weekend. My younger brother and I took one of the charter busses to Logan Airport in Boston and boarded the Eastern shuttle to Idlewild International Airport, then taxied to Midtown where my father had an “apartment.” He was on the boards of several major corporations that met quarterly in Manhattan, so when I say “apartment” I’m being slightly facetious. It was half the 29th floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where the building narrows, and its picture windows offered breathtaking views of Central Park below. I could stand there for hours mesmerized by the traffic and the horse-drawn carriages on 59th and Fifth, even more by the ice-skaters circling like colorful, drunken ants on Wollman Rink.
So his new wife Cynthia was determined to win us over with a charm offensive. Lavish spending, tickets to Broadway shows, dinners at expensive restaurants, even setting me up with the daughter of one of her close friends. Though her intentions were transparent, I was more than willing to be taken in. And she was quite a character, the polar opposite of our soft-hearted mom; a firecracker, as they say, aggressively funny, outspoken, even to the point of making merciless fun of our father, who was smitten with her to the point of humiliation. I had never seen this side of him before, and it made me queasy. The fact that she was trying to win us over was rather humorous: she didn’t realize that it made no difference to him; he was so distant from us that my brother and I always joked that his affections were reserved exclusively for his stable of racehorses. How I made it out of that family with only a minimum of devastating scars is a wonder I am constantly thankful for.
Even with the mix of emotions swirling around our stay in Manhattan, those five days were a welcome respite from the grueling world of Harkness. But it had to come to an end.
We met several of our schoolmates as we boarded the bus waiting for us at Logan, and I swapped exaggerated stories with Perce as we drove through the growing darkness back to campus. He of course claimed he’d gotten drunk at several fabulous parties in the Village, and I lied about how far I’d gotten with the beautiful girl I’d had a date with. When we arrived at Peabody—my brother had departed for the other end of campus—we were met with a strange silence that was markedly different from the usual frenetic atmosphere after a break. Perce and I trudged up the stairs to the third-floor landing, where we ran into Bill Vance, a droll North Carolinian with a noticeable accent, on his way downstairs.
“Vance. Where is everybody?” asked Perce.
“In their rooms, mostly. You just get back?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “It sounds kinda quiet.”
“Well, we got one less guy in the dorm now. You didn't hear?”
“Hear what?” asked Perce.
Vance looked away, as if he didn’t want to be the one who had to tell us the news.
“Merry's dead. They found him in the river yesterday.”
The statement was so shocking that I couldn’t assimilate it right away. I dropped my suitcase and leaned against the wall to stop from losing my balance. I barely registered anything that either boy said from that point on.
“...How?” Perce asked weakly.
“Nobody knows. There's a dorm meeting after dinner, supposedly they've got some information.”
I knew there was no way Merry would have jumped, or fallen, into that frigid water. He knew the river too well. He was maybe a little depressed—who wouldn’t be in his shoes?—but he was nowhere near suicidal. He had somehow been forced into the river. How, or by whom, I had no idea. But I was sure of it.