𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐀𝐊𝐄𝐒 | henry winter

𝐯𝐢𝐢𝐢. heliophilia

❝if the heavens ever did speak

she's the last true mouthpiece❞

.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.

From the first moment I had set foot in Hampden, I had begun to dread the end of term, when I would have to go back to Plano, and flat land, and filling stations, and dust. As the term wore on, and the snow got deeper and the mornings blacker and every day brought me closer to the date on the smeared mimeograph ('December 17 - All final Papers Due') taped inside my closet door, my melancholy began to turn into something like alarm. I did not think I could stand Christmas at my parents' house, with a plastic tree and no snow and the TV going constantly. It was not as if my parents were so anxious to have me, either. In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. They had got my parents doing things like taking bus trips to factory outlets and playing a dice gam called 'bunko' and hanging around the piano bar at the Ramada Inn. These activities picked up considerably around the holidays and my presence, brief and irregular as it was, was a regarded as a hinderance and something of a reproach.

But the holidays were only half the trouble. Because Hampden was so far north, and because the buildings were old and expensive to heat, the school was closed during January and February. Already I could hear my father complaining beerily about me, Mr MacNatt slyly goading him on with remarks insinuating that I was spoiled and that he wouldn't allow any son of his to walk all over him, if he had one. This would drive my father into a fury; eventually he would come busting dramatically into my room and order me out, his forefinger trembling, rolling his eyes like Othello. He had dent his several times when I was in high school and in college in California, for no reason really except to display his authority in front of my mother and his co-workers. I was always welcomed back as soon as he tired of the attention and allowed my mother to 'talk some sense' into him, but what about now? I didn't even have a bedroom in California anymore; in October, my mother had written to me to say that she had sold the furniture and turned it into a sewing room.

Henry and Bunny were going to Italy over the Winter vacation, to Rome. I was surprised at this announcement, which Bunny had made at the beginning of December, especially since the two of them had been out of sorts for over a month, Henry in particular. Bunny, I knew, had been hitting him hard for money in the past weeks, but though Henry complained about this he seemed oddly incapable of refusing him. I also made the observation that Bunny's feelings, however misguided they seemed, for Lily had strengthened and he his advances became more obstinate as the term wore on. Lily had been kind to him, simply smiling and returning to the primary conversation at hand but Bunny seemed incapable of realising human boundaries and Henry clearly found this a practical sin as he would hover beside the girl until Bunny took the hint. This made the air between the two quite tense.

The trip was all Bunny talked about. He bought clothes, guidebooks, a record called Parliamo Italiano which promised to teach the listener Italian in two weeks or less ('Even to those who've never had luck with other language courses!' Boasted the jacket to which both Lily and Francis openly scoffed at) and a copy of Dorothy Sayers translation of Inferno. He knew I had nowhere to go for the winter vacation and enjoyed rubbing salt in my wounds. "I'll be thinking of you while drinking Campari and riding gondolas," he said winking at Henry who said little about the trip. As Bunny rattled on he would sit smoking with deep, resolute drags, pretending not to understand Bun's fallacious Italian, only cracking a smile when Lily, the only other one proficient in multiple languages would whisper something in Italian to him while Bunny would scramble through his Italian dictionary and attempt to decipher whatever she had said.