The Secret History Read Free Page B

indistinguishable from its landscape. Downstairs were lecture halls and classrooms, all of them empty, with clean blackboards and freshly waxed floors. I wandered around helplessly until finally I noticed the staircase—small and badly lit—in the far corner of the building.
    Once at the top I found myself in a long, deserted hallway. Enjoying the noise of my shoes on the linoleum, I walked along briskly, looking at the closed doors for numbers or names until I came to one that had a brass card holder and, within it, an engraved card that read JULIAN MORROW . I stood there for a moment and then I knocked, three short raps.
    A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me. It was a small, wise face, as alert and poised as a question; and though certain features of it were suggestive of youth—the elfin upsweep of the eyebrows, the deft lines of nose and jaw and mouth—it was by no means a young face, and the hair was snow white.
    I stood there for a moment as he blinked at me.
    “How may I help you?” The voice was reasonable and kind, in the way that pleasant adults sometimes have with children.
    “I—well, my name is Richard Papen—”
    He put his head to the side and blinked again, bright-eyed, amiable as a sparrow.
    “—and I want to take your class in ancient Greek.”
    His face fell. “Oh. I’m sorry.” His tone of voice, incredibly enough, seemed to suggest that he really was sorry, sorrier than I was. “I can’t think of anything I’d like better, but I’m afraid there isn’t any room. My class is already filled.”
    Something about this apparently sincere regret gave me courage. “Surely there must be some way,” I said. “One extra student—”
    “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Papen,” he said, almost as if he were consoling me on the death of a beloved friend, trying to make me understand that he was powerless to help me in any substantial way. “But I have limited myself to five students and I cannot even think of adding another.”
    “Five students is not very many.”
    He shook his head quickly, eyes shut, as if entreaty were more than he could bear.
    “Really, I’d love to have you, but I mustn’t even consider it,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry. Will you excuse me now? I have a student with me.”

    More than a week went by. I started my classes and got a job with a professor of psychology named Dr. Roland. (I was to assist him in some vague “research,” the nature of which I never discovered; he was an old, dazed, disordered-looking fellow, a behavioralist, who spent most of his time loitering in the teachers’ lounge.) And I made some friends, most of them freshmen who lived in my house.
Friends
is perhaps an inaccurate word to use. We ate our meals together, saw each other coming and going, but mainly were thrown together by the fact that none of us knew anybody—a situation which, at the time, did not seem necessarily unpleasant. Among the few people I had met who’d been at Hampden awhile, I asked what the story was with Julian Morrow.
    Nearly everyone had heard of him, and I was given all sorts of contradictory but fascinating information: that he was a brilliantman; that he was a fraud; that he had no college degree; that he had been a great intellectual in the forties, and a friend to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; that his family money had come from a partnership in a white-shoe banking firm or, conversely, from the purchase of foreclosed property during the Depression; that he had dodged the draft in some war (though chronologically this was difficult to compute); that he had ties with the Vatican; a deposed royal family in the Middle East; Franco’s Spain. The degree of truth in any of this was, of course, unknowable but the more I heard about him, the more interested I became, and I began to watch for him and his little group of pupils around campus. Four boys and a girl, they were nothing so unusual at a