In The Shadow of The Cypress by Thomas Steinbeck

Author:Thomas Steinbeck
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

AND THE SEA SHALL

GIVE UP ITS DEAD

“Wisdom is not a birthright, it is a treasured inheritance.”

—CHINESE PROVERB

NINETEEN NINETY-EIGHT WAS A TROUBLING year for young Charles Lucas, known as Luke to his family and friends. He had shown himself to be an indifferent C student for the first two years of high school, and his lack of application had troubled his parents exceedingly. Luke’s parents had both been honors graduates of Stanford University, and they felt they had somehow failed their son. More so since Luke had always tested in the top five percent of every intelligence test he had ever taken. There were even those who believed, once upon a time, that Luke would most likely be inducted into Mensa by the age of fifteen. But such was not to be, for an ironbound, teenage streak of rebellion set in like a Siberian winter, and he refused to be influenced by any reasoning not his own. As if to pour acid on his poor parents’ wounds, he developed a full-blown obsession with surfing that seemed to occupy almost all of his time, attention, and money.

Unfortunately, Luke, being a normal teenage boy, possessed little or no abiding sense of personal direction whatsoever. He floundered at everything remotely academic, which only made matters worse for his long-suffering parents. Their daughter, Beth, five years older than Luke and thriving with honors back east at Princeton, had never been a real problem. At least that was how they liked to remember her.

Luke thought his sister was a thoroughgoing cow, a shameless suck-up, and a bullying snitch. He was subsequently transported on the wings of heavenly delight the day she moved east. Beth departed with tears in her eyes, a low-mileage BMW station wagon, and a stack of credit cards that could choke a goat. Luke was almost giddy as he hugged his sister good-bye and snickered at her departing tailpipe. It was all he could do to keep from jumping madly into the air, arms arched upward in triumph, while screaming at the top of his lungs, “Eat my shorts, Spooky!” Luke delighted in calling his older sister “Spooky” because she hated it so much.

Luke’s limited curiosity about academic matters continued to hobble along in a halting fashion, while his parents tore out their hair. Then suddenly, just in the middle of his sophomore year, his biology teacher, a brilliant educator with the improbable name of Mrs. Tallulah Entwhistle, took Luke in hand. With skills his parents could not possibly invoke or duplicate, Mrs. Entwhistle somehow turned her rebellious pupil completely around. It didn’t hurt that she looked like an Italian movie star, but that didn’t disguise the fact that she was a hard-core polymath, and possessed an encyclopedic mind and a memory only rivaled by her laptop. Luke was once quoted as saying that “the Intrepid Tallu” could spot sham work and BS through a brick wall and, like she did her dead frogs, publicly dissect the offending student in moments. Nothing got by Mrs.

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