The Book of Marie: A Novel by Terry Kay

Author:Terry Kay [Kay, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Published: 2015-09-03T22:00:00+00:00

I liked Wade Hart, liked the give-and-take of our talks, always sharp-bladed and quick, like fencers twirling foils or epees or sabers in ballet steps that made poetry out of slaughter. It was the language of clever college show-offs of the early 1960s, and it fit us perfectly. Wade was a history major and a superb athlete. He was on the Upton University tennis team and played intramural basketball with both fury and finesse. There was a rumor he had rejected an offer to play baseball at Georgia Tech, a rumor Wade would not discuss. He believed that superb athletes did not need to promote themselves—a far cry from the athlete of today. He said only that baseball bored him. Too much standing around, waiting to do something.

In 1962, Wade was in his senior year of undergraduate study at Upton and I was in my final year of the Masters program. We had become friends because we both had apartments in a private boarding facility called Morrow House near the university. Wade was the scion of a prominent and wealthy Atlanta family—his father a doctor, his mother a bank official—and I thought of him as a reluctant blueblood. There was nothing pretentious about him. He was tall and handsome in the fair German way of blonde hair and blue eyes and chiseled chin. He did not own a car, did not want one. He wore neat, but conservative clothing. His room was spare and uninviting. The only thing to suggest that Wade Hart had access to money was an expensive record player and an astonishing collection of records. He favored folk music, loved the Kingston Trio.

Wade also loved argument. It was in his disposition, in his fierce sense of discipline, in his passion to learn. Argument had fashioned our friendship, and always there was a pitying remark about my background. As I believed Wade was a reluctant blueblood, Wade believed I was a dreamer trying to pull myself from the mire of rural poverty.

Our argument over one-hundred point basketball games had begun with a casual conversation of Wilt Chamberlain’s hundred-point game earlier that year.

“My favorite one-hundred point man was Bevo Francis,” I had said casually. “I like that man’s name.”

“Who?” he had asked.

“Bevo Francis.”

“Okay, Cole, I’ll bite,” he had said. “Where did you dig up Bevo Francis? And, for God’s sake, don’t tell me it’s out of Shakespeare. Not even Shakespeare would come up with a name like that.”

“Bevo Francis was a basketball player for Rio Grande College,” I had explained.

“Wait a minute, let me guess,” he had countered. “Zane Grey. You got him out of Zane Grey. He was one of those cowboys that massacred Indians and slept with horny horses out on the lonesome trail.” He had paused, cocked his head, furrowed his brow in thought. “Or, maybe not. No, I’d say Hemingway. Sounds like Hemingway to me. Bevo. That’s the kind of name Hemingway would love, and unless I’ve misread you, you’ve been wandering around Paris in

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