A Season in Purgatory Read Online Free PDF Page A

entertained the bridge-playing group in his rooms each night after dinner and before study hall. I was not part of that set. I disliked Mr. Fanning, who seemed to cater to all the rich boys.
    It was Mr. Fanning who came to me one night in study hall.
    “Harrison,” he said. “The headmaster wants to see you in his office. Immediately.”
    My heart quickened. I wondered what I had done wrong. Mr. Fanning, usually dismissive of me, was looking at me with concern.
    “Is something the matter?” I asked.
    “You must get to the headmaster’s office,” he said firmly.
    There, in Dr. Shugrue’s office, where I had only been once before, when my father entered me in Milford, I was told that my mother and father had been murdered. I did not cry, although I sank into a chair in front of his desk while he told me the facts of the horrible event.
    “Mrs. Shugrue is making up our guest room for you to stay the night. It will be better than going back to the dorm,” he said.
    By the time I returned to study hall to pick up my books and papers, word had gone round of my shocking news. Everyone stared at me. In the silence, Constant Bradley, solicitous, helped me gather up my things. The next morning Aunt Gert came to take me home. Leaving the school, aware that boys were watching out the window, I wished that she had brought my father’s Oldsmobile, black with whitewall tires, rather than her Chevrolet, four years old and badly in need of a wash.
    After Detective Stein, who was investigating the case, visited me at school one day, to report only that there were no leads in the double murder, Constant sought me out. The celebrity of the case never really exceeded the limits of the city in which it occurred, but everyone at Milford knew, and Dr. Shugrue, the headmaster, had exhorted the boys not to question me on my return, an exhortation ignored by Constant. At first, his interest in me was no more than blunt curiosity. He asked me the kind of questions no one else, for propriety’s sake, dared to ask. If they had come from anyone other than Constant, I would have ignored the questions, or walked away, but I was entranced with his attention, and replied, discovering that I was eager to have a friend in whom to confide. When he asked me to sneak into the village one afternoon, which was forbidden, to see a film he particularly wanted to see, I was thrilled to be his accomplice, although I was the type who never broke the rules. Soon we becameinseparable. He had the most elaborate and expensive stereo equipment of any boy in the school, and each week all the latest cassettes arrived from a record store in New York. He knew the lyrics to every James Taylor song. We smoked pot and drank beer, risking expulsion. For me, it was thrilling. I didn’t mind telling him the answers to test questions; I even took it as an honor. Sometimes, between confession on Saturday afternoon and Communion on Sunday morning, he succumbed to powerful sexual urges and masturbated. “I beat my meat,” he said to me. In those days he beat his meat a great deal, especially after the new issue of
Playboy
came out each month. Occasionally, not always, I accompanied him in the masturbation experience, such acts were certainly not uncommon to boys in boarding school, but my eyes were on him, not on
Playboy
. The next morning, fearing the headmaster’s wrath if he did not go to Communion, he more than once paraded up the center aisle to the Communion rail, where, fearing also God’s wrath, with its attendant promises of eternal damnation and the pains of hell if he received the Blessed Sacrament while in a state of mortal sin, he became lost in the crowd of communicants, and then returned to his pew, head bowed in pious post-Communion prayer, without having received the Sacrament, although no one but I was aware of his ruse.
    There was someone called Diego Suarez in our class. A rich South American boy, the son of a fashionable diplomat in Washington, whom