“All right, I will, Mr. Rojack, of course I will … and listen, Mr. Rojack …”
“Yes.”
“The girls here all want to say that they feel with you in your tragic loss.”
“Oh, thank you, Gloria, it’s good of you to say that.”
Was this how the French had felt when the Nazis invaded the Maginot Line from the rear, that they must lift their guns from their concrete emplacement and turn them around? I had a knowledge I must not stop making telephone calls until I was ready to leave.
I dialed the head of my Department. “Dr. Tharchman,” I began.
“Stephen,” he said, “I’m awfully glad to hear from you. I’ve been so worried. I can’t imagine a more heinous occasion for any of us, poor man.”
“It’s been difficult, Frederick. As you know, Deborah and I have not been very close for a while, but it’s been an earthquake, yes.”
“Just Godawful, I’m sure.”
There was a silence between us.
“I suppose the university has been bombarded by the newspapers.”
“They’re termites,” Frederick said. “I really believe they’re termites eating at the very substance of Western civilization.”
The second silence was definitely lame.
“It’s good of you to call, Stephen. I appreciate your consideration.”
“Actually, I wanted to. I don’t mind being on the phone.”
“Stephen, as you know, I’m not a very religious man, but I went to chapel this morning. I wanted to say a prayer for Deborah.”
I could seen his thin gray Presbyterian conscience taking him through the morning rain. He had met Deborah just once at a faculty dinner, but she had charmed him utterly as a demonstration of what she could do for me.
“Well, Deborah was religious, as you know,” I said now, “and perhaps she heard the prayer.”
Now we were both embarrassed. I could feel him smarting to reply, “Good God, I hope not.”
“Dr. Tharchman, I know we have to talk about practical matters, and I think under the circumstances, I’m the one who must bring it up.”
“Thank you, Stephen, we do have to talk. You see, it would help if the university could give just one simple statement to those damnable termites. What I’m afraid of is they’ll start to talk to the professors and, God help us, the worst of the graduate students. You know how reporters are. They look for the married men with the beards.” He searched his throat for clearance. “I won’t pretend, Stephen, that I’ve been enraptured with the pure tenor of your ideas, but what you quite properly have not been aware of is the particular protection I’ve tried to set up about you. I hate to think of the way you could be presented. One professor called this morning, I won’t tell you his name, he insisted that one of his doctoral candidates who had taken the Voodoo seminar with you had the idea—I’m afraid I have to tell you this—that you had been administering voodoo rites to Deborah. For some time.”
“Good God.”
“It’s enough to depress one about the nature of a faculty. High scholarship, innocence, and an absolute fever.”
“I never knew I was talked about that way.”
“Stephen, you’re a living legend.” The dry little voice stuck an instant over the last two words—discipline, envy, and decency were the separate protagonists of his character. I was liking Frederick for the first time. He had come in some years ago from the outside (from the Midwest) to be made head of the Department, and he was considered pedestrian, good for keeping the Ph.D. mill a Ph.D. mill. Nonetheless, it must not have been easy for him to grind out his decent portions of salt and meal for each of us. Good old Protestant center of a mad nation. I could hear his fingers drumming on his desk.
“Well, Fred, what do you suggest?”
“The first question is whether you feel up to taking your classes immediately. I should think you don’t.” His voice closed that gate all but perfectly.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I need a week to think.”
“Right there is the difficulty. We must say one thing or another to the papers right away. Mass communication breeds in a vacuum.”
“But, Frederick, I can’t decide today.”
“Well, I don’t see how you can.”
“But I think work may be what I want.”
“That’s what I don’t know. I’ve thought about it all morning. If you were teaching organic chemistry or statistics, I’d say, ‘Plunge in. Work to the exclusion of all else.’ But your courses are personal. You have to use yourself.”
“Nonsense, Fred, I’ve been teaching for years.”
“Nonsense—no. Magic, dread, and death as the center of motivation—it’s not the sort of subject to give you peace. I should think there’d be an awful strain in the classroom. You might break under it.”
“You mean some angel of the Corporation is afraid I might bring a bottle to school?”
“Don’t you agree we take as good a stand toward the trustees as any university you could name. But we can’t despise them altogether, can we?”
“Fred, do you realize what a conversation this is?”
“I don’t know if I’ve had one like it before.”
“Really,” I said, “what could you lose?”
“It’s not measurable. A university can absorb scandal upon scandal. Then, one too many, and it’s incalculable what could happen.” He coughed. “Steve, this is academic. I can’t believe you want to go back to work right away.”
“But if I do? Fred, what if I insist? What will you do?”
“Oh, if you insist, I’ll be forced to go the president, and tell him it’s your right to work.”
“And what will he do?”
“He will overrule me.” Church humor. I heard a delicate little flutter in Frederick’s throat.
“Since I have tenure, I suppose I might be forced to go so far as to sue the university.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t do that,” Frederick said. “The case would be disagreeable in the extreme.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I don’t want to talk about it any further. Your wife’s death is sufficiently tragic without beginning to mention the unhappy … the dreadful … the ambiguous aspects of it all.”
“Oh, no!”
“Steve, this is the most unendurable conversation I’ve had with anyone in years. We’ll never forgive each other for this one.”
“We won’t.”
“I’ve managed it abominably. Accept the reality, accept the reality. See it from the university’s point of view. Perhaps we feel we’ve done our honorable best to pay the indefinable price and, yes, perhaps gain the even more indefinable benefit of having a creative intelligence in the Department who inspires most respectable people with a deep-seated sense of uneasiness. Consider that not every university would have put up with that television program of yours. Steve, can’t we just leave it that this is a bastard of a day for everybody?”
Silence.
“All right, Fred. What do you want?”
“Take a leave till the beginning of the fall semester. We’ll announce your bereavement and retirement from active teaching duties for an indefinite period. Then we’ll see.”
“Fred, somehow you’ve won this one.”
“I haven’t, believe me.” Then he said quickly, “Steve?”
He was in a hurry to move on. His voice faltered for the first time. “Steve, I can’t imagine anything more inappropriate, but I must ask you this. Perhaps you don’t know it, but my wife is a religious cultist.”
“I didn’t know.” But I should have guessed. I could see Gladys Tharchman up in Vermont for the summer, a purple dress, silver-rimmed eyeglasses, white hair, and her dowager’s hump over a thin body.
“She subscribes to some of your ideas.”
“What?”
“Oh, with sex extracted, of course.” He gave a chuckle; we were coming back on course. “You see, she believes that the last meal a person eats before
they die determines the migration of their soul.”
“You mean if you die with a belly full of cereal you migrate to the wheat fields!”
“In her mind, it’s somewhat more complicated than that. Has to do with omens and lots and portents and whether one’s a meat soul or fish soul, and of course it’s not divorced from the phases of the moon and the horoscope.”
“Demeter and Persephone. You poor bastard, Tharchman.”
“She’s a marvelous woman, my wife, and this may be a small cross to bear. But I can tell you she’ll give me no quarter if I don’t ask. Because, you see, in all good intention, she wishes to reach Deborah—Deborah made a vast impression on her—and for that she needs to know—”
“What Deborah ate?”
“Dear God yes, Steve. Hecate has to know.” Now a skinny little sense of hilarity, as if he were a skinny boy in the blissful discomfort of asking an athlete the last line of a dirty joke, came into his voice. “Yes, Steve, what was in her tummy at the end?”
I could not resist. “Why, Fred, I’ll tell you,” I said.
“Yes.”
“It was rum. A bottle of rum, just about.” And hung up.
In ten seconds the phone rang again. It was Tharchman. He was angry now. “You shouldn’t have disconnected, Stephen,” he said, “because there was one thing more.”
“Yes?”
His voice had a Midwestern twang, a sort of “Don’t kid with me, boy.” He clicked his tongue once. “I think you ought to know,” he said, “I’ve been formally questioned about you today.”
“By police?”
“No. Somebody much more hush-hush. What in Hell have you and Deborah been up to?” And then he hung up.
Next moment the phone rang again. My perspiration flowed.
“Hello, Stephen?” came a breathless voice.
“Speaking.”
“Stephen, I have to whisper.”
“Who is it?”
“Chookey-bah.”
“Who?”
“Chookey-bah lamb. Gigot!”
“Gigot, how are you?”
“Chookey-bah, I’m just chookey-bah.”
“Well, crash!”
It was idiotic to have said this, but I was in a kind of exhilaration by now. There was a curious exhilaration as if we were all the subjects of a nation which had just declared war. So I said, “Crash,” said it again.
“Well, no,” said Gigot, “I’m not chookey-bah really. I have to whisper. Blake’s in the next room, and he doesn’t want to speak to you. But I must.”
“Speak to me.” She was one of Deborah’s ten best friends, which is to say that she was Deborah’s best friend for one month in every ten. She was also huge. She was five feet eleven and must have weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. She had a fortune of blonde hair which hung down to her waist or piled like a palisade six inches above her brow. She had the voice of a tiny little blonde five years old.
“Blake thinks I’m bound for the crazy house again. I told him I would ask Minot to shoot him if he committed me, and he said, ‘Your brother Minot can’t even shoot a hole in his own pants.’ Blake was obscene. I think he’s crazy. He never talks like that. Besides he knows Minot is sexy. I told him so.”
“That brought peace.”
“Blake thinks I’m cockaloo over Deborah. I’m not. I told her to jump last year. I said, ‘Honey, you better go jump and squash yourself. You’re getting fat.’ And Deborah just gave that little pig laugh of hers, oink, oink, you know, and she said, ‘Bettina, your advice is exquisite, but if you don’t stop, I’m going to call Blake and tell him it’s time to have you cooped again,’ and she’d do it. She did it to me once. I told her I knew she’d been up to something with her Daddy-O, and she called my family, and had me in the hatch six hours later, in Paris, just the two of us, she was my roommate.”
“When, Gigot?”
“Oh, years ago, I don’t know, some fearful time past. I never forgave her. French mental hospitals are unspeakable. I almost didn’t get out. I had to threaten my family that I would marry the resident there, a funny little old dark French Jewish doctor who smelled like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I swear he did, and my family sprung me. They weren’t going to have some ratty little French Jew slurping up their soup and telling them how to go on a wild boar hunt, you know the French, they tell you everything whether they know it or not. God, I hate the French.”
“Honey, I wonder if you don’t have a tidbit for me.”
“I do. But I can’t tell you now. My scalp is itching and that means Blake is going to come right back in this room.”
“Well, before he does.”
“Oh. I can’t remember. Yes, now I do. Listen, when I said to Deborah that she ought to jump, she gave that bitchy smile of hers and poured me a glass of sherry, no, it was hundred-and-fifty-year-old Madeira, I remember, she said, ‘Let’s finish off Steve’s Madeira, it gets him so frantic if there is none,’ and then she said, ‘Pet, I’m not going to jump, I’m going to be murdered.’ ”
“What?”
“Yes. She said that. She said it was in her horoscope. She said it was going to be terrifically catastrophic because Venus was together with Saturn and Uranus was in Aquarius. It was even worse than that. Every single planet was bad for her kind of Scorpio.”
“You mean she said she was going to be killed last night?”
“I think she did.”
“She killed herself. Gigot, you forget.”
She sighed audibly. “Steve, you didn’t do it, did you?”
“I didn’t,” I said softly.
“Steve, I’m glad I called you. I thought I ought to call the police. Blake said he’d break my nose if I called them and got my picture in the papers. And he would break my nose, too. He hates my gift of smell—I once caught the teeniest whiff of perfume on him even though he’d gone to a sauna bath afterward and tried to come back smelling like birch twigs. But I could smell the perfume and I could even smell the hands of the coon who’d been giving him a massage. How do you like that?”
“Phenomenal.”
“Steve, you are telling me the truth. I know you like me.”
“Well, Gigot, if I had done it, could I tell you the truth, could I?”
“But you didn’t?”
“Well, maybe I did. You seem to think so.”
“Oh, I guess she could have committed suicide. She was very upset about Deirdre, you know. She didn’t know what to tell her about her father.”
“Pamphli?”
“How do we know Pamphli was the father? We don’t, do we, sheik?” said Gigot.
“I never had any reason to doubt it,” I said.
“Well, a man never has anything but empty space between his certainties,” Gigot said. “Oh, darling Steve, I know it wasn’t suicide. Deborah knew she was going to be murdered. She was never wrong about that sort of thing. Steve, maybe somebody gave her poison that sent a message to her brain to make her jump. You know, some new hallucinatory drug or something. All the doctors are flippo now. They spend their time cooking up things like that. I mean maybe the maid slipped it into her rum.”
“Come on, love bucket.”
“No, the maid was in cahoots.”
“Angel Bettina …”
“I know something you don’t know. Deborah never told you anything. You know why I was her best friend? Because no matter what she told me, nobody ever believed it. And besides, I know something about that maid.”
“What?”
“Promise to believe me?”
“Promise.”
“That maid is Barney Kelly’s mistress. You know the kind a man his age has. They always have those thin lips which can go anywhere.”
“Now why would Barney Kelly be so interested in what Deborah was doing that he would give up such a mistress?”
“All I know is the maid came as a condition of Deborah’s allowance.”
“She didn’t have one.”
“Kelly gave Deborah
five hundred dollars a week. Did you think you were supporting her by yourself, Horatio Alger?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Somebody killed her.”
“I really doubt it, Gigot.”
“She was done in.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know.”
“Then go to the police.”
“I’m afraid to.”
“Why?”
“Because I think there are repercussions to this.” Bettina spoke in a whisper which was quite inside her normal whisper. “Deborah was a spy.”
“Bettina, you are mad.”
“Better believe me, handsome.”
“Why in the name of heaven would Deborah be a spy?”
“Steve, she was bored. She was always bored. She’d do anything to avoid being bored.”
“Who was she a spy for?”
“Well, I don’t know. She was capable of anything. I once accused her of being CIA and she laughed. ‘Those idiots,’ she said. ‘They’re all college professors or gorillas wearing paratroop boots.’ Anyway, I know she used to be M.I.6.”
“When?”
“When we were in the convent in London. That’s how she would get a pass to get out. She had a boy friend who was M.I.6, anyway.”
“Gigot, you’re really a very silly little girl.”
“And you’re a fathead. Blake’s a fathead and you’re a fathead.”
“Chookey-bah, I do adore you.”
“You better.”
An American Dream Page 15
