Read Through the Hidden Door for Free Online

in jeans and an old poncho. I took a horse out and rode in the mountains. I had been far from Colorado for a long time and wasn’t completely at home there anymore.
    Boarding school is where your center is, and once you’re part of it, you can only get halfway home again. Home is still where your family is. Home is still where your bedroom is. But that bedroom is changed once you leave. I’ve seen it in my house and in other boys’ houses when I’ve spent weekends. Things in our rooms are thrown away the minute we leave home. There are no month-old septic Pepsi cans lying on the desk. Piles of mildewed underwear vanish like spring snow. What our parents think are disgusting and violent posters are removed from the wall. Beds are freshly made and tucked in, and a permanent month-of-March smell pervades everything, just the way it does in a guest room. Home becomes school and school becomes home.
    As I sunk my teeth into a leftover drumstick Saturday night I knew I would go back to Winchester.
    Dad sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire. He lit a cheroot. “You won’t consider Monterey?” he asked.
    I shook my head and gnawed on the turkey leg. “Monterey’s for rich basket cases who couldn’t pull a D average at Winchester,” I said. “I looked it up in the town library in Peterson’s Secondary School Guide.”
    “So does Peterson’s tell you flat out it’s for rich basket cases?”
    “No, but it lists the SSAT scores for Winchester boys. Average is high six hundreds. Monterey’s average is low three hundreds. Monterey goes through grade twelve. They got only one kid out of two-hundred-and-fifty graduates into an Ivy League school last year. It’s the pits, Dad. They don’t offer Latin, and they give credits for surfing and bird watching. It’s all there in black and white, Dad. In Monterey you major in braiding lanyards.”
    “God, Barney, what a snob you’ve become!”
    I shrugged, selected a turkey wing, and muttered, “Once you get on the roller coaster, you stay for the whole ride, I guess.”
    “It’s my stupid fault, Barney,” my dad said. “I’ve brought you up to think you have to go to Winchester, Hotchkiss, Harvard. Just because I did. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. Maybe you’ll want to be a beach bum someday. Or a carpenter. Or even work, God forbid, nine to five for IBM.”
    “I want to go back East.”
    “Only because I’ve drummed it into your head for thirteen years.”
    I finished the turkey wing. I found myself looking at it critically. It made me think of the little leg bone back in Massachusetts, sitting in Snowy’s locker. “Yup,” I answered him. “But it’s too late now, Dad. I’m a twenty-four-carat Yankee prep. Ice water in my veins and I sleep in button-down Oxford-cloth pajamas from L.L. Bean.”
    “Those boys might try to break your kneecaps, Barney. I’m serious. I’m afraid they may kill you. These things happen.”
    “I like Winchester,” I said.
    “Then you’re as nutty as a fruitcake.” Dad stood. “C’mon,” he said, and led the way to his huge studio at the back of the house, where he kept and catalogued his finds.
    He showed me a pair of elephant tusks that had once framed the doorway of a raja’s palace in India. There was a gold pocket watch inscribed to King Edward VII from Queen Alexandra on their wedding day in 1863. On his latest trip Dad had picked up a number of Malaga cabinets, over three hundred years old, from Spain, which he was just unpacking and inspecting. But the best he saved for last.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “It’s what they used to call a lady’s pistol,” he told me. He put it in my hand. The butt was no bigger than my palm, and the barrel did not reach beyond my index finger. “Sterling silver veneer,” Dad added. “Found it in a collection of Victorian hats, of all things. It was sitting in the bottom of a hatbox. Got it for three pounds. Worth about eight hundred.”
    The