Escher Twist

by Jane Langton

  The police ambulance arrived, removed the body and quickly identified it as that of a young professor at Boston University. Neither his shocked colleagues nor his grieving wife could think why Leonard Underdown would wish to end his life.

  The woman who had tried to prevent the apparent suicide was questioned closely, but it was clear that Eleanor Fell had no connection whatever with the deceased. Her attempt to save his life had been the generous action of a perfect stranger.

  Eloise folded the newspaper, breathing a sigh of relief. It was all very sad, but thank heavens, it wasn’t her Leonard.

  The sun streaked agreeably through the trees, dappling the grass in yellow circles. At the edge of her vision Eloise was aware of a familiar dark shape. Turning, she saw the peacock stalk away in the direction of the splendid granite temple of the Lowells. She watched it eagerly, hoping that it would spread its magnificent tail.

  By now she had seen it many times. It was deeply satisfying that a peacock should be here among the graves in Mount Auburn Cemetery. She had looked up the word Peacock in one of Zach’s encyclopedias, and learned to her delight that it was a Christian symbol of everlasting life.

  The peacock wandered out of sight without making the slightest effort to dazzle her with a spreading display of its glorious feathered tail.

  Disappointed, she turned back to the obituary page and looked at the list of deaths. “Oh, Zach,” she said aloud, “a lot of people from Cambridge crossed the bridge today. Listen to this, there are five of them. One—Alexey, Frederick. Two—Buckley, Flora. Three—Myers, Matthew. Four—Schmidt, Effie Mae.”

  She read the last name on the list in perfect serenity, with no tremble in her voice at all, “Five—Underdown, Leonard.”

  Frieda did not see the obituary for Leonard Underdown. Therefore when her letter to him received no reply, it was a harsh blow to her pride.

  17

  When Mary and Homer Kelly turned the pages of the same edition of the Globe it was to look at the real estate ads, not the obituary page.

  “Two million five,” gasped Mary. “Remember that house we walked past on Berkeley Street? The one we liked? They want two million five!”

  “Well, what do you think this place on the river is worth?” grumbled Homer. “What price sublimity? Ten million in the eyes of God. I mean, compared with most of the fancy places in the real estate ads, you know, with all the usual desiderata of desirable real estate like indoor swimming pools and whirlpool baths. How about the desiderata of the sublime? That’s what we’ve got.”

  Mary ran her eyes down the page. “Oh, Homer, nobody’s going to pay big money for the desiderata of the sublime. They want splendid kitchens and big master bedrooms. You know the sort of thing. Unfortunately God isn’t employed by a real estate firm.”

  “Of course he isn’t, but the devil is. The devil and all his fellow fiends. Hades Estates, excellent neighborhood in the lowest pit of hell. Buy now.”

  “Hmmm, maybe we could afford something near Porter Square.”

  “Small down payment,” snarled Homer. “Your immortal soul.”

  Mary laughed and put down the paper. “Oh, Homer, you’re right, it is sickening. But, honestly, we’ve got to find out what our house is actually worth, I mean in crass commercial dollars and cents. I’ll call somebody. More coffee?”

  Glowering, Homer held out his cup. “You know what will happen to it, don’t you? Somebody will buy it just for the land, and then they’ll tear the house down and build a palace. Then everybody paddling on the river will curse us and we’ll find ourselves in hell anyway.”

  Mary sat down beside Homer and changed the subject. “I wonder what that baby’s grave has to do with Leonard’s missing girlfriend?”

  “Missing girlfriends,” growled Homer. “Another goofy guy with a missing girlfriend. Why do we always get mixed up with missing girlfriends?”

  Mary sat up, shocked. “Oh, Homer, you don’t mean Julia Smith? And I suppose you call Lucia Costanza a missing girlfriend? Homer, those women might still be missing if we hadn’t been there, or they’d probably be dead. Homer!”

  “Well, okay, but you have to admit this female really sounds like a kook.”

  “Oh, she does not. And anyway, Homer, don’t call women females. It’s insulting.”

  “Why? That’s what you are, aren’t you? Members of the female sex.”

  Mary closed her eyes and set her jaw. “The question is, what does that baby’s grave have to do with this mysterious woman, the one Leonard’s so eager to find? I know it’s idiotic, because he only met the girl once, but the poor guy is besotted, and now he can’t find her. Maybe those death records in City Hall will help. At least we might find out more about the baby. When is that appointment with the clerk in City Hall?”

  Gloomily Homer consulted his pocket calendar. “It’s tomorrow, but I doubt it will do any good. Who knows where that woman is? Leonard’s missing female is a needle in a haystack.”

  18

  But as it turned out, Leonard found the needle sticking straight and shining in the sunlight in the haystack of the neighborhoods below Huron Avenue.

  For two weeks he had been haunting the streets within walking distance of the gallery where he had met Frieda, looking for something, he didn’t know what. A sign, a signal, a dropped handkerchief with a monogram in the corner, “F” for Frieda.

  Did she live in the vicinity of Brattle Street like Mrs. Winthrop? Leonard explored the realms of light, the imposing houses on the classier reaches of Sparks, Appleton, Fayerweather, Sibley and Lakeview.

  On the other side of Huron Avenue the houses diminished in grandeur. In fact Leonard could have worked out a simple mathematical formula relating the decrease in real estate value to the distance from Brattle Street.

  Below Huron Av the values plummeted. But it was here on the lower part of Sibley Road that he found the needle in the haystack, the dropped handkerchief.

  It was a thin rag of fluttering paper caught in a chain-link fence. The rag looked very much like—could it possibly be?

  Leonard removed it carefully from the steel mesh of the fence, held it up and grinned with delight. It was a Moebius strip. At once he glanced up at the house behind the fence.

  Instantly the door burst open and a woman rushed out. It was not Frieda. The woman bounded down the stairs and strode along the cement walk, her clenched fists raised, her face livid with wrath.

  Leonard stood back politely as she sailed past him, and then he looked back up at the house.

  It was typical of the multifamily dwellings in this part of Cambridge, a big ark with two layers of wooden porches.

  A few of the other houses on the street were different. Upmarket realtors had been at work. New owners had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, or rather by their old firetraps. They had stripped the walls, rewired the electrical systems, replumbed the bathrooms and glorified the kitchens. The grounds had been replanted. Classy architects and landscape gardeners were doing their best to upgrade lower Sibley Road.

  Many of the working-class families who had once occupied these houses had moved away. They had peered out of their windows at new neighbors from another world—young fathers rushing down the porch steps and bouncing into SUVs, young mothers with briefcases hurrying off to work, mother-substitutes pushing babies along the sidewalk in imported prams.

  Leonard had noted with sardonic interest the surest sign of neighborhood gentrification. Among the heaps of newspapers on the floor of the neighborhood convenience store were many copies of the New York Times.

  The unrehabilitated house with the chain-link fence was number 87 Sibley Road. Was it Frieda’s real address, replacing the fanciful cathedral rising from the sea or the mill where the water went both up and down? Was she right here in this house, perhaps up there on the second floor behind those windows glittering with reflections of the morning sun?

  Leonard opened the chain-link gate, walked past a dead plant in a concrete urn and clim
bed the porch steps. There was a sign beside the doorbell—

  VACANCY

  APPLY LARKIN

  Leonard pushed the bell.

  At once the door was hurled open by a harrassed-looking man in a bathrobe. His gray hair rose in a frowze. His eyes were wild.

  “You an attorney?” he said. “Dolly’s attorney?”

  “An attorney? No, I just want—”

  “Well, thank God. My wife, Jesus God, she just walked out on me. First thing she’ll do, call her fucking attorney. Come in.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Larkin stepped back. As Leonard walked in, there was a high soprano titter and a woman looked out from a door marked LARKIN. She grinned at Leonard, raised a glass, ducked back into the apartment and slammed the door.

  Larkin closed his eyes, wiped his face with his hand and said, “God.”

  “I just want to ask,” said Leonard quickly, “whether you have a tenant named Frieda?”

  “God, I don’t know,” said Larkin. “What’s her last name?”

  Leonard tried another tack. “Might I see the empty apartment?”

  Larkin heaved a deep sigh. “Second floor.”

  He led the way, his feet heavy on the carpeted stairs. From the basement below the stairwell rose the smell of bleach and the tumbling hum of a clothes dryer. A portly young woman with a basket of folded laundry dodged past Larkin and hurried ahead of them up the stairs.

  There were two apartments on the second floor. Larkin unlocked the door on the right, and waved Leonard in, muttering an apology. “Haven’t cleaned it up yet. Artist, she prolly spilled ink on the floor.”

  Leonard looked around at the bleak little room. “She was an artist?” he said eagerly. “What was her name?”

  “Hell if I know. Only here a few weeks. Paid in cash. She told me her name, I guess. I don’t recall. My wife, she’d know, only—Christ.”

  “You mean you don’t have any written record? Well, how do you know—?” Leonard was staggered. “A lease? A deposit? She gave you a check? Did she get any letters?”

  “God, I don’t know. She probably wasn’t here long enough. Pain in the neck, her leaving so soon. Gotta rent the place all over again, advertise, big expense.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Well, Jesus, like I said, my wife would know. Listen, do you want the place or not?”

  “May I look around?”

  Larkin shrugged. “Be my guest.”

  Leonard took a deep breath as the landlord thumped down the stairs.

  The furniture was mismatched—a bed with a clean bare mattress, a table and two chairs, a desk with a chair and a lamp, and a couple of mirrors on the wall. A kitchen counter ran along one side. A door led to a bathroom.

  Looking into the bathroom, Leonard noted the traditional lattice of small octagonal white tiles on the floor. If they had been hexagonal, he told himself, they would have packed together neatly, but with octagons the pattern had to be filled out with squares.

  He went back to the main room, which had windows overlooking the street. At once he saw the letter on the table, and picked it up. The name MRS. LARKIN was neatly written on the envelope. It was not sealed, and he opened it boldly. It was full of cash. And there was a note—Next month’s rent. There was no signature.

  Was this Frieda’s apartment? It was probably foolish to think so. The little twisted strip of paper he had plucked from the fence might have blown here from miles away. And anybody could have made it. Cambridge was crawling with people who knew about Moebius strips. They were a commonplace intellectual toy.

  But Larkin had said the former tenant was an artist who had probably spilled ink on the floor. That at least was hopeful. Frieda had said she was an artist. She made drawings, she had said, portraits of people.

  There were no splashes of ink on the floor, only a few rubbishy scraps of paper from a tipped-over wastebasket. A breeze from the open window lifted the clutter of paper and slid it into the corner.

  Leonard stirred the clutter with his shoe. Might there be another twisted loop of paper? A letter with her forwarding address?

  No, at first he could see only advertising circulars, junk mail addressed to Occupant and a few snapshots snipped into pieces with scissors. With careful fingers he plucked out all the scraps and pocketed them. They were a puzzle to put together later.

  There was also a wadded piece of heavy paper. Leonard unfolded it carefully, then nearly let it slip from his fingers. On the crumpled sheet was a sketch of a man’s face. Below the face was a checkered scarf. The checks were playful. One lens of the glasses was blank, the other showed a staring eye.

  Was this a try at his own face—the big nose, the glasses, the scarf?

  Leonard smoothed the drawing, rolled it carefully and thrust it inside his sweater. The good things it might possibly mean were cancelled out by the bad things. If it was really a sketch of one Leonard Sheldrake, a portrait drawn from memory, she had crumpled it and thrown it away.

  With a last glance around, he took two steps across the room and then stopped short. Something outrageous was happening in the mirror beside the window. It contained a thousand Leonards.

  … I am working on a double spiral in woodcut … using a new printing technique based on a very amusing twofold-rotation system.

  M. C. Escher

  19

  It was like the water that might possibly be swirling down bathtub drains in two directions above and below the equator. It was like a famous print of Escher’s called Whirlpools, an endless double spiral of fish winding in and out of two infinitesimal centers of darkness.

  How the man had delighted in infinity! Leonard knew his words by heart—to approach infinity as purely and as closely as possible. Deep, deep infinity!

  And here it was, that miracle, enclosed in the two mirrors that faced each other on the walls of this ordinary apartment in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in the matter-of-fact city of Cambridge. A multitude of Leonards trailed back and back, shrinking and shrinking into an army of tiny Leonards receding in single file.

  At once he glanced at the mirror behind him, and it was the same. Another thousand Leonards shrank and diminished behind its silvered surface. The first was a direct reflection, the second an image of Leonard’s back that had flashed across the room to the other mirror. The third had made the journey twice across the room. With the speed of light the rushing Leonards fled past him.

  He put out his hand as if to touch the invisible rays of light. At once all the reflected Leonards obeyed, putting out their hands in the same gesture. Impulsively he hopped and capered, laughing as all the other Leonards hopped and capered in perfect imitation. There were regiments of dancing Leonards, dimming and shrinking farther and farther back, hopping and jumping and infinitely receding into the two tiny caves that were so tightly coiled in the farthest recesses of the two facing mirrors, two remote and undiscoverable wildernesses.

  “Oh, Leonard,” said Mrs. Winthrop, peeking out of her kitchen door as he put a foot on the bottom step of the back stairs, “have you seen this?” She had a newspaper in her hand. “It gave me such a turn.”

  Leonard was half-ashamed of the way he made a practice of avoiding his landlady. He stepped down and smiled at her and took the paper. “What is it?”

  “It’s you,” giggled Mrs. Winthrop. She pointed to the picture on the obituary page. “Doesn’t it look like you? And see? His name is Leonard.”

  Leonard stared at the photograph of Leonard Underdown. He recognized him at once, or thought he did. This poor guy was his mirror image, the near-twin he had seen on Huron Avenue last week.

  “A suicide,” he said, handing the paper back. “Too bad.”

  Mrs. Winthrop waggled her head, her face glowing with affection. “Do you see why I was so upset?” She tapped the picture. “Doesn’t he look like you?”

  Leonard inspected the picture again, and shook his head. “No, he’s not like me.” He made a grim
joke. “Look, his hair is parted on the other side.” Then, aware of her gentle kindness, he said, “Mrs. Winthrop, tell me, is there anything I can do for you? Would you like me to call a roofing company?”

  “A roofing company?”

  “The roof, it’s leaking,” explained Leonard. “It would be good to repair it before next winter.” He didn’t explain that he was tired of emptying the bucket.

  “Oh, my goodness.” Mrs. Winthrop put her fragile hand to her mouth. She had been about to say that she would have to ask Zach what to do, but of course she couldn’t say that. “Thank you, Leonard. I’m so grateful that you’re keeping an eye on things.”

  He had joked about his twin’s obituary, but for the rest of the day it haunted him. And that night he saw the other Leonard in a dream.

  It was the double mirror again, and once again it was full of Leonards. He himself, the Leonard who was having the dream, stood at one side, watching while the others capered and threw up their arms and kicked out with their legs. Then to his surprise the two who were first in line climbed out of their frames, stepped down into the room and walked across the floor, passing each other without a glance and climbing nimbly into the opposite frame. Then with their backs to him they marched away. The other multitudinous Leonards also turned about-face. The two endless columns grew smaller and smaller and farther and farther away, until at last he could see only a squirming blackness in the farthest depths, and then that too was gone.

  He woke up next morning exhausted and filled with dread. Getting out of bed and fumbling across the floor, he felt himself crouching, and tried to straighten up.

  The bathroom was a nineteen-twenties modernization of the original eighteen-nineties water closet. The bathtub had claw feet and the toilet worked with a pull chain, releasing a roaring waterfall from the overhead tank. During the tumultuous weeks when Jody had butted her way into Leonard’s life, she had been ecstatic. “God, they’re priceless! You could sell them for real money and replace them with cheap modern stuff. Your landlady would be delighted.”