The Transcendental Murder

by Jane Langton

  “Yes, and I paddled up close enough to use my glasses and see a lot of folks and a p-policeman standing around Ernie Goss, who was lying on the ground. And I knew I’d be better off out of sight, since I must have been the last one except the murderer to have seen him alive.”

  Teddy looked down at his bouquet of swamp nettle, and turned to Mary bashfully. “Here,” he said. “This is for you.”

  Homer decided reluctantly that he had better tell Teddy what the situation was, so he broke the news gently, and asked for his congratulations. Teddy looked a little crestfallen and stuttered badly trying to say something nice. But then Mary exclaimed over the swamp nettle, and Teddy got quite enthusiastic telling her its botanical name and how the Indians had used it to swat flies. After a while he left, looking cheerful. After all, he had all the flora in Concord to find and catalogue, and it might take him years.

  Mary smelled her flowers and wished she hadn’t. She made a face and laughed. “Did you notice? Teddy’s stuttering is better.”

  Homer looked at her sentimentally. “And your color’s coming back. You know what? Your cheeks are like red roses.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Homer …”

  “Look, if a person’s cheeks happen to be like red roses it’s merely a fact of scientific observation to point it out. I’ve tried a whole lot of other flowers from time to time, and none of them was right. It’s red roses they’re like.”

  Down by the river where the green grass grows,

  There sat——, as pretty as a rose.

  Along came——and kissed her on the cheek.

  How many kisses did she get that week?

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …

  Chapter 60

  He is moderate. I am impetuous. He is modest and humble. I am forward and arbitrary. He is poor but we both are industrious. Why may we not be happy?

  MRS. AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

  Tom, Homer and Grandmaw were colliding with each other in the kitchen, clearing away Sunday dinner. It was Mary’s first day home. Struggling awkwardly with her crutches she got the tablecloth off the table and stumped to the front door and shook it out. Then she stood and smelled the fresh air. The ragged leaves that were left on the old elm by the road were turning a rusty yellow. There were leaves growing even from the trunk and along the lower reaches of the limbs, like, hairs in an old man’s ears. Miraculously the storm had spared it, although it had taken nine young apple trees behind the house. Mary folded the tablecloth again and made her way laboriously to the kitchen to put it in the drawer.

  “If you ask me,” said old Mrs. Hand, “I could get along a whole lot better all by myself. What did you people all have to grow so big for? You’re all over the place. Why don’t you all get out of my way and go off somewhere?”

  “Can I come?” said Annie.

  “Me, too!” said John.

  “No, not you children. Freddy has to go to bed and I need the rest of you to wipe.”

  “Okay,” said Homer. “But don’t you let that John lick the dishes clean.”

  Tom, who didn’t want to sell his apples on a flooded market, went off to truck them up to the town of Harvard, where there was a big storage warehouse. Homer helped Mary out to his car and lifted her into the front seat. “We’ll take an old-fashioned Sunday afternoon buggy ride,” he said.

  First they drove down Fairhaven Road to Alice Herpitude’s house, and looked possessively out of the car window at its modest white clapboards. “Maybe Teddy will build us a nice birdbath for a wedding present,” said Homer.

  “He’ll make a charming neighbor, anyway,” said Mary.

  Then they headed back across Route 2 to the center of town, and up into Sleepy Hollow cemetery to Authors’ Ridge. “Do you think Henry would mind a couple of quiet neckers on a Sunday afternoon?” said Homer.

  “Not as long as they kept things pretty transcendental,” said Mary.

  “Don’t forget, if Howard Swan was right, Henry was no slouch himself when it came to romance.”

  “It’s a lovely story. It pleases me, somehow, that those two might have found each other. But, Homer, there are still some things I don’t understand. How could Howard Swan have killed Ernest Goss? He was supposed to have been in New York on the nineteenth——”

  “It’s Longfellow’s fault, that’s whose it is. That old cornball poem of his. What immortal lines does every man, woman and child in the country have engraved across his memory in letters of gold?

  Listen, my children, and you shall hear

  Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

  On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five …

  The eighteenth of April. Howard went to New York on the eighteenth, not the nineteenth, and then made a big point with his lunchtable companions about its being Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts. ‘You remember, boys, Paul Revere and all that kind of thing—on the eighteenth of April in ‘Seventy-five. They’re having a big parade back home today—’ It wasn’t until I discovered there in the Amherst library that Elizabeth Goss had once been engaged to Howard Swan, that Howard came back somewhat forcefully to my attention. And then I remembered an extremely small fact Jimmy had told me. He said that Howard’s business friends had all agreed Howard was with them on Patriot’s Day—remember?—‘just the way he said they would.’ Howard must have said to Jimmy, ‘Ask them where I was on Patriot’s Day,’ so Jimmy, the obedient little fellow, did just that. Well—by nearly asphyxiating myself in a phone booth for an hour and a half I got hold of all of them. And sure enough, one by one, they all told me that Patriot’s Day was the eighteenth of April. ‘Don’t you remember?’ they would say condescendingly, and I could hear the words coming out of the telephone in red, white and blue, ‘On the eighteenth of April in ‘Seventy-five?’ Then I would hang up and salute the flag. So you see what happened—Howard flew to New York on the eighteenth, got back in time for the dinner party, left early, then came back again when everyone was gone, to set things up. The only person still in the house would have been Mrs. Bewley, and he didn’t have to worry about her as long as he kept out of her sight. Now—the first thing he had to do was prepare the weapons. One of the duelling pistols was to be fixed up as the official ‘murder weapon.’ It was the one that Charley had handled, putting it away. The other pistol would be the true murder weapon, but it would be cleaned out afterwards, wiped off and returned to the drawer so that it would not seem to have been touched. At this point he never touched the musket, because it didn’t enter into his plans at all. The next thing was the manufacturing of the notes that were to lead Charley and Philip and Ernie to the right places at the right times the next day. For these he used Charley’s typewriter in Charley’s room, tracing your name for the notes that were to be sent to Charley and Philip from a letter of yours he found in a drawer. Then his preparations were about done. All he had to do was drive off somewhere far away from houses and fire the ‘official murder weapon’ into the woods so that it would be blackened inside. That was tricky because he didn’t want to disturb Charley’s prints. He must have used tools to do it with, clamps or something.”

  “But next morning he had to look as if he were going to New York.”

  “That’s right. He headed off toward Boston, then just circled around wide and came back the back way and parked in some inconspicuous place like, say, the little road that leads in to Annursnac Hill. Then he snuck over to the Goss place and just hung around there, ducking in when he could to leave his notes. He watched Charley come back from his ride on Dolly and enter the house in his Prescott outfit. Then he saw him come out again in his own clothes and head lickety-split for the gravel pit, hell-bent on high romance. So then Howard just went in the house, snatched up the outfit, took it to the barn, changed clothes, leaving his own behind the hay somewhere, and galloped off through the woods on Dolly, keeping away from the road. It was all right to be seen, in fact that was the whole point, but not up close. He galloped up to the bridge, killed Goss, gal
loped back, giving Arthur Furry a good rear view, deposited the ‘official murder weapon’ in the cider press, leaving behind him his horse’s hoofprints and a lost balloon to point the way, changed clothes in the barn and slunk into the house once more to leave the real murder weapon, all polished and cleaned up, back in the drawer. But then he struck his first snag.”

  “It had something to do with the flint, didn’t it?”

  “Good girl. That’s right. It was only then, I’m convinced, that Howard noticed that the flint had dropped out of his gun—the real one, the true murder weapon. Crisis. What to do? He didn’t dare now to go back and take the flint out of the gun he had deposited in the cider press. But this gun mustn’t be found without a flint. Because then its twin in the cider press would be betrayed as a put-up job. So he took the flint from the musket. Up until then he must have been working with gloves on, careful not to leave any prints. With his gloves still on he opened the door of the cabinet where the musket was kept, took it out, and then I’ll bet he took off his gloves to work the small screw that holds the flint in place. He took the flint out, transferred it to the murder weapon and put both guns away again, wiping everything off carefully. But he forgot one thing. While his glove was off he left a thumbprint on the inside of the cabinet door. Campbell saw it there, but there were so many others on the door anyway it didn’t help us much. Well, anyway, then he was all done. He just had to duck back to his car, swing around by back roads again, bide his time, and then drive home to Concord from Boston around five o’clock as though he had just come back from New York.”

  “All right. I understand all that. But now will you please explain what it was all for? Why did Howard Swan, of all the people in the world, think he had to kill Ernest Goss? And then why did he kill poor Alice? And why did he almost——”

  “Oh, God, don’t say it——”

  There was a car coming. It contained Rowena Goss, out for a spin with her fiancé. She started to slow down as she recognized Homer’s car, but when she saw how he was behaving with that Morgan girl she frowned and speeded up again, with a disapproving crescendo from her exhaust.

  “Well, where were we?” said Mary, sitting up and straightening her hair.

  The nosepiece of Homer’s glasses was resting on his ear. He put it back where it belonged. “You were asking about Howard’s motive. I suppose you want me to tell you what it is that will turn an apparently just, honest and respected citizen, scholar and gentleman into a murderer—right? Well, my darling, what are the usual reasons why people murder other people? Revenge? Self-defense? Jealousy, greed, lunacy, hatred, sudden passion?”

  “Oh, Homer, you know it wasn’t any of those. The only motive he could possibly have had was the suppression of those letters. But that just doesn’t seem a strong enough reason to me. Not for Howard.”

  “Just think about it.” Homer leaned back, put his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. “First, let’s go back a long way. A long, long way. All the way back to an engagement between a young Harvard senior named Howard Swan, who was majoring in literature, and a pretty young debutante at Miss Winsor’s school named Elizabeth Matthews. Now Elizabeth had something she felt she ought to confide to her husband-to-be—something that was a romantic family secret. She thought it was her duty to let him in on the story of her sublime origin, the royal bar-sinister in her ancestral past. So she did. She whispered it tenderly in his ear. Then Howard, to her astonishment, far from being merely suitably impressed, urged her not to keep it a secret any longer. He recognized it for the bombshell it was, and he yearned to be the agent for the explosion. But Elizabeth wouldn’t let him. No sir. I don’t know whether she felt protective about the reputations of her great-grandmother and grandfather or whether she just didn’t want her name bandied about as the descendant of any kind of illicit union, no matter how august. Anyway, my guess is that this was why they broke up. Elizabeth forbade Howard to use her secret and Howard was good and mad. ‘Oh,’ says Elizabeth, ‘you nasty, nosy man!’ ‘Why,’ says Howard, ‘you selfish little stupid bitch!’ So the engagement was off. And the next thing you knew the selfish little bitch had rushed into the arms of Howard’s classmate from Concord, Ernest Goss. And you can be sure of one thing—Elizabeth never mentioned her glorious ancestry to Ernie when she was confiding to him her intimate little girlish secrets. Okay, then—all right so far? Well then. Take another look at Howard. Here he was, left alone with his conscience and this tantalizing delicious tidbit of historical gravy. So what did he do? He did what any well-trained student would do. He began searching for evidence to back up Elizabeth’s bald statement of fact. Over the next twenty years he sought and studied and researched, poring over the journals and poems and letters of Thoreau and the letters and poems of Emily Dickinson, everything he could find that would give him a lead. It took him that long partly because he was thorough and partly because he didn’t have much spare time, what with all the committees he was on and the organizations he was chairman of. But he stuck to it. And what he finally came up with in those notebooks you found is pretty solid-sounding stuff. Howard was dam clever. And his theory took care of some of the Dickinson mysteries pretty neatly. For example—you know how everyone who has looked into Emily’s life agrees that somewhere around 1860 or ’61 or ’62 she must have gone through some sort of crisis of love and renunciation, and nobody is sure what it was …”

  “Yes, and it was supposed to have started her writing a flood of poetry and it was also supposed to have made her begin to withdraw from the world and shy away from visitors. What about the theory that it was that Reverend Wadsworth in Philadelphia that she was supposed to be in love with? That’s what most people say. And when he moved to California it was more than she could bear, it was almost like dying.”

  “But why? There she was in Amherst, and in those days Philadelphia would have seemed as far away as the moon already. What difference could it have made to her that Wadsworth left Philadelphia for California? Well, anyway—that’s the way Howard reasoned. Emily’s lover was not Wadsworth at all—it was Henry Thoreau. Of course, first of all he had to explain how they met. That was easy. Emily must have come to Concord to visit her cousins there, the Norcross girls, and she might very well have stayed in Henry’s mother’s boarding house, the way Ellen Sewall did, the girl he had loved before. And so, naturally, he took her out boating on the river, just the way he took Ellen, just the way he took Margaret Fuller.”

  “I love it. I can’t help it, I love it. Oh, Homer, just think of the two of them (Henry Thoreau and Emily Dickinson!) out in the sunshine on Fairhaven Bay, just like us. I’ll never look out from our front porch without seeing them there. And I’ve just thought of something else. Both of them were small. They were little people. Little homely people. Forgive me for saying it, but I think they must have made a charming pair.”

  “I know. It’s pretty, it’s all mighty pretty. There they were, the two of them, small in stature only, giants in every other way. And each of them beginning to recognize in the other an extraordinary and unique person, an opposite-sexed but true counterpart. After all, each of them was perhaps the one most worthy audience for the other then alive.”

  “So they fell in love. But do you think they could really have gone so far as to——”

  “Well, read what Howard says. He makes it sound pretty plausible. He goes on and on abou’t the powerful loving responses in Henry’s journal, his appeals of affection to his friends, the depth of his reaction to the natural world around him. And all of this convinces him that Henry had a nature capable of passionate attachment. In spite of the coldness his friends accuse him of.”

  “Oh, that,” said Mary scornfully. “That was just his New England mask for the strong feelings underneath.”

  “Listen. I wrote down some of it.” Homer took a small notebook out of his pocket and opened it up. “All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love,�
�to sing; and if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love …” Homer put the notebook back in his pocket. “And as for Emily, do you remember how she scandalized her sister-in-law, even after years of retirement, by being discovered in the arms of a man? It was probably that old judge who loved her at the end of her life. Oh, it’s reasonable, all right, the whole thing. And therefore, says Howard, the marriage of Henry Thoreau and Emily Dickinson in the flesh was a true marriage of the exalted spirit. Okay, let’s say we accept that. Afterwards Emily went home again, gushing poetry, her true poetic self aroused and awakened, writing a masterpiece a day from then on. So half of the Dickinson mystery is solved—the reason for the spout of poetry. But what about the other half? Why did she begin to act like a female hermit, retiring to her room, refusing to see anybody?”

  “Naturally,” said Mary softly, “it was to bear Henry’s child …”

  “To do what? My dear, you scandalize me. Squire Dickinson’s daughter? Bear an illegitimate child? Impossible! The affair must be hushed up. Emily must renounce her mysterious lover. The child must be carried in secret and delivered in secret and then turned over to the faithful stableman to be brought up as his own. And here’s where the Matthews family comes into the picture. Richard Matthews and his wife had sixteen kids. The addition of one more would hardly cause a stir. And the fact that the child grew up with a mop of auburn hair like its mother’s, and eyes, maybe, like ‘the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves’ wouldn’t have bothered anyone. I caught on myself, finally, there at Amherst, to what Elizabeth’s dark secret was. If you trace the Matthews name back far enough you come to the Richard Matthews who worked for Squire Dickinson and sired seventeen kids, one of whom, a son named (of all things) Henry, was bom only four months after his elder brother Frederick. Four months? There’s a precocious embryo for you. So I made a wild stab in the dark and guessed that Elizabeth Goss regarded herself as the great-granddaughter of Emily Dickinson, which explained why she was mooning around in McLean Hospital in a white gown and wouldn’t come out to see anybody. What I didn’t guess then was that she also had grandiose ideas about who her great-grandfather was.”