by Jane Langton
“We think it was Fell. But she may have used another name.”
After another pause, Dr. Rosebush asked uneasily, “Is this a police matter?”
“Well, sort of. Not exactly.” Mary had often wished that she had a little of her husband’s shameless audacity. For years Homer had been flashing an antique identification card, left over from the days when he had been a lieutenant detective in the office of the district attorney of Middlesex County. Recently Homer had enclosed the dogeared card in plastic, so that it looked as good as new. At moments of crisis he was apt to whisk it out of his pocket, flourish it for a second and pocket it again. Nearly always this little deceit worked, and Homer would then be granted permission to do forbidden things, enter forbidden places, consult forbidden files and interview forbidden people.
But Mary was not audacious, and she would have been mortified to be caught in any sort of chicanery. Therefore she was ready. She handed a piece of paper across the desk.
“What’s this?” said Doctor Rosebush.
“A court order.” It had taken Mary a week. Fortunately Homer knew exactly who to talk to in the Cambridge Courthouse, and at last his friend Ernie, after questioning Mary severely, had made out the necessary document.
“I see.” Doctor Rosebush read it through, and began at once to talk.
42
Leonard was spending the morning in Mount Auburn Cemetery, taking his turn at keeping watch. He had brought with him a heavy tome, The Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Congress of the International Union of Crystallography
He sat on the grass on the little bluff above the Fell family plot with the book open on his knees and tried to read. It may be remarked that analogous cases are sometimes met with in crystal chemistry.
The day was warm, the words blurred on the page.
Holding his place, he lay back on the grass. The Goodyear blimp was passing overhead, moving slowly in the direction of Fresh Pond.
Once again Leonard was reminded of an Escher invention, a lattice of blimplike fish going down and back forever. The blimp seemed as motionless as the fish.
A small plane was noisier. It whined across the sky, dragging a long banner with an illegible message. Leonard tried to ignore the blimp and the plane. Lying flat, he lifted the heavy book over his head. It may be remarked that analogous cases are sometimes met with in crystal chemistry.
Even in the dappled shade, the mid-June sun was hot. Below the looping curve of Willow Avenue he could hear the buzzing sound of a motorized trimmer shaving the grass around the mausoleums beside Auburn Lake. Another machine whizzed down Willow Avenue, its tiny front wheels backing and whirling in and out among the graves.
And someone else was coming. Leonard lifted his head. At once he was alarmed. Maybe he should warn that guy on the lawn mower not to run down the people who were climbing up from Auburn Lake and crossing Willow Avenue. But the lawn mower buzzed out of the way, and the procession moved relentlessly forward.
Leonard had seen the black-veiled woman twice before, and the mournful men with bowed heads who were carrying the small casket. He watched as they circled the Fell family plot and began to climb again, almost floating up the hill to the triangular monument of the Mountforts, then crossing the road and dropping down Oxalis Path.
When they came circling back up from Auburn Lake, Leonard was not surprised. It was merely that famous print come to life again, Escher’s little men going up and down forever on their strange and ever-returning staircase.
He sat up. They were gone.
Picking up his book, Leonard got to his feet. As he walked back to the great Egyptian gate he noticed something that gave him a shock of pleasure. It was his shadow, moving in front of him across the grass, across the path, across the paved surface of Beech Avenue.
It was two-dimensional! A shadow had length and breadth but no depth at all. The leaves that had been plastered to the road by last night’s rain were different. They had depth, and so did the thinnest piece of paper. But not a shadow. A shadow glided across the earth without any substance of its own. It was not a material object, it was merely the absence of something, a skim of nothingness thrown down by an obstacle blocking out the light.
And on his way home he remembered the mirrors in Frieda’s abandoned apartment, and saw at once that shadows were not the only two-dimensional things in the world. Reflections in a mirror were two-dimensional as well. They did not really exist. Like shadows they were illusions.
That night he lay in bed, thinking about the blimp that had passed over his head that afternoon, floating so dreamily in the sky above the trees. What a view it must have of Boston and Cambridge and the bridges over the Charles and the thousands of cars speeding along both sides of the river. What a privilege to overlook it all, to see Old Ironsides docked at Long Wharf and the tall cranes hoisting cargoes in and out of ships.
Without any sense of transition, Leonard found himself aloft. Yes, there was the cemetery, lovely and green, spotted with white shapes like a sheep pasture, already drifting out of sight. Now the blimp was floating over the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown and the pointed top of the obelisk was veering away to the east. Soon the suburbs spread out below him, shopping centers, neighborhoods, thousands of houses—Arlington, Belmont, Waltham, Lexington—and here was the town of Concord with its two winding rivers. And now he could see the bend where the Sudbury River opened out and turned south, and—yes, of course—there on the shore was the small house of Mary and Homer Kelly.
At the controls of his airy vessel Leonard understood at once that the Kellys’ house was smack at the corner of a geometric figure. It was a simple matter of triangulation, that ancient system for determining the shape, size and curvature of the earth. When one side and two angles of a triangle are known, the other two sides and the third angle can be determined.
Leonard whipped the blimp around and sent it back over the city of Cambridge. For a moment it poised over the intersection where Sibley Road ran into Brattle Street. The complicated roofs and chimneys of Mrs. Winthrop’s house were turning below him, and there was Mrs. Winthrop herself at a window, leaning out, looking up at him and waving.
His landlady was clearly the second point of his immensely elongated triangulation. What was the third? The third was Frieda, but where was she? Nowhere, nowhere.
He had one side of his geometric figure, but no angles, no angles at all.
Despairing, Leonard was not surprised to find the blimp transformed into one of Escher’s fish—not the fat blimplike shapes in the lattice called Depth, but one of the flat jolly fishes that wound around and around in a double spiral in the print called Whirlpools, each creature with its mad eyes fixed on the tail of the fish in front, all of them spinning deeper and deeper into an infinity of smallness, a dark and dangerous whirlpool.
43
I hit paydirt,” said Mary. “She told me everything.”
“She?” said Homer. “Who do you mean?”
“Doctor Rosebush. She was the actual identical specialist in high-risk pregnancy who attended Patrick’s mother through eight miscarriages. She remembered everything from all those years ago. Her patient seems to have left an indelible impression.”
“What sort of impression?”
Mary remembered the slight grimace that had accompanied Doctor Rosebush’s cool clinical account. “Not altogether favorable.”
“You mean she was the same doctor?” Homer was astonished. “From all those years ago? How old is she anyway?”
“Doctor Rosebush? Oh, I don’t know. Fifty?” Mary brushed the question aside. “Listen, Homer, she told me something amazing.”
“After her sixth miscarriage,” said Doctor Rosebush, her words coming out in a rush, “I wanted to urge her to stop trying, to give up and adopt a baby, because suffering through failure after failure is so hard on a woman’s body.”
“You wanted to, but you didn’t?”
“Of course not. I never tell a woman to stop trying. B
ut I did suggest that she see a therapist, or at least join a support group. There’s a really good support group for infertile women.”
“What did she say to that?”
“Oh, she’d have none of it. No, no, she had to try again. It turned out to be a matter of family pride. She had to have a child to carry on her bloodline, that’s what she said.” The doctor made a mock-heroic gesture. “Into the distant future.”
“You mean her husband’s bloodline?”
“No, no. Hers, hers. She said her husband’s forebears were nothing in particular.” Doctor Rosebush raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Whereas hers were something super-duper.”
Mary smiled. “Well, what was her glorious name? I mean her maiden name? Plantagenet?”
“She didn’t say. And I certainly didn’t give a damn.”
It was Oliphant, thought Mary, but it didn’t matter, and she returned to the subject of Mrs. Edward Fell’s obstetrical history. “She did at last have a successful birth, that little boy. You helped her through it?”
“Oh, she was a hard case. But after all those failures there was no choice. I made her stay in bed for nine months. Well, we’d been through the whole thing before—the blood-count check every two weeks, ultrasound once a month.”
“But then it was a successful delivery? She gave birth to a healthy little boy?”
“Oh, yes. But then—” Doctor Rosebush shook her head sadly.
“I know,” said Mary softly. “There was an accident. It must have been a horrible disappointment.”
“Of course, but the amazing thing is, she didn’t give up. She insisted on trying again. She was frightening, grim. Well, I tried the therapist idea again, but no, that wouldn’t do, I mean she was just insane. How could she give up when the genealogical future of her family was at stake? Well, of course I felt sorry for her, so I said well, all right, we’ll try again.”
“But, my God, wasn’t she getting too old by this time?”
“Apparently not. She managed to get pregnant.”
“So you put her to bed again?”
“Of course.” Doctor Rosebush looked tired. She flapped her hands. “But it was another failure.”
“Good lord. And that was the end of everything?”
“As far as I was concerned it was the end. When I discovered what she’d done, I washed my hands of her.”
“What had she done?”
Doctor Rosebush shoved back her chair, stood up and went back to the window to stare blindly at the racing traffic on Route 2. “She had cosmetic surgery.”
“Cosmetic—you mean a facelift?” Mary stared at the doctors back in disbelief.
“A facelift and breast implants, the whole thing.” Doctor Rosebush turned away from the window and looked angrily at Mary. “I could have strangled her. After that long history of failed pregnancies she did violence to one part of her body as though it would have no effect on something fragile and highly susceptible in another part.”
“Good God.”
Homer said it too, “Good God.”
Mary tried to rationalize it. “The woman must have had a colossal personal vanity, a real horror of old age. Well, I must say I don’t like it either.” Mary thrust violent fingers into her graying hair. “But for this wretched woman the horror of getting old was totally at war with her urge to reproduce.”
Homer shook his head and murmured, “Pitiful.”
Mary sighed. “Well, anyway, I’ll carry on. Doctor Rosebush gave me the cosmetic surgeon’s name. The trouble is—”
“I know,” said Homer. “You need another court order.”
Now the rhythm changes … hexagons make one think of the cells in a honeycomb, and so in every cell there appears a bee larva. The fully grown larvae turn into bees which fly off into space.
M. C. Escher
44
The cosmetic surgeon was even more wary than Doctor Rosebush.
Who was this woman with a court order? A malpractice attorney? Was he being sued by a dissatisfied patient, someone who had expected to look more ravishing than she had ever been before?
Doctor Faraday was a craftsman and humanitarian whose deepest concern was with burn victims and patients disfigured in accidents.
Many of these people had no means to pay, and therefore he depended for most of his income on the vanity of another kind of patient. All of the women whose drooping faces he tightened, whose sagging necks he reshaped, whose ugly noses he refined, whose breasts he ballooned, whose aging romantic expectations he revived, paid heavily for the privilege of drinking from his fountain of youth.
On both kinds of patients he lavished the same surgical skill and the same broad knowledge of the latest techniques. He was adept at replacing burned facial skin with flaps stretched up from the shoulder, still attached to the blood supply. He could fashion an ear, a nose or a chin with bone removed from other parts of the body. Doctor Faraday was an artist.
He welcomed Mary courteously, but with dread.
“Doctor Faraday,” said Mary, coming quickly to the point, “I’m told that you had a patient some years ago, a woman we’re trying to find. I’m not sure we have the right name, but I have a photograph that may show her before her surgery.” She reached in her pocket-book for the scrappy torn snapshot of the grey-haired woman standing in a doorway, but Dr. Faraday held up his hand.
“I’m sorry, but the privacy of my patients is absolute. It’s the law.” Then Doctor Faraday added nervously. “But I understand you have a court order?”
“Right.” Mary handed it to him with an authoritative gesture, but she wasn’t at all sure it would do the trick. This time the bureaucrats had given her a harder time.
“Just what, may I ask, is your interest in this matter?”
“No personal interest, I’m afraid.”
“Are you in law-enforcement?”
“No, sorry.”
“You mean you have not asked for the cooperation of the Cambridge Police and the Department of Missing Persons?”
“Well, no, not exactly.”
But good old Jerry Neville, that wise man and legal scholar, Homer’s clever friend, had suggested arguments she could repeat by rote. Mary had recited them like an automaton, and then, reluctantly, the chief bureaucrat had scrawled his signature on the new court order.
Now Doctor Faraday was satisfied. He put down the document and said softly, “What do you want to know?”
Mary handed him Leonard’s fragmentary snapshot. “Do you recognize this woman?”
He looked at it for a moment and then said, “Yes.” Swivelling in his chair he consulted the shelves of a bookcase, drew out a large binder and opened it on his desk. Mary watched him turn the pages. In a moment he stopped. “Here,” he said, turning the book around. “Before and after.”
Mary stared, and said, “Oh, my God.”
The woman in the photograph on the left was the gray-haired woman in the snapshot, haggard and hollow-eyed. The one on the right was Edward Fell’s so-called niece.
45
Mary collected her wits. “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”
“Pregnant! My God!” Dr. Faraday shot out of his chair. Sitting down again, he threw up his hands. “No, she did not. How do you know?”
“Her obstetrician told me. Dr. Rosebush.”
“Doctor Rosebush? Doctor Rosalind Rosebush? But she works with high-risk patients. You don’t mean—?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Doctor Faraday said, “My God,” again, then calmed down. “There’s something else. She came back.”
“She came back? You mean for more surgery?”
Doctor Faraday reached for another book, laid it on the table beside the first and turned the pages slowly. Then without a word, he turned the book around.
Mary looked back and forth between the two sets of photographs, the uncompromising records of two separate and individual transformations wrought by the surgeon’s skillful knife.
The
contrast in the second pair was not as dramatic as in the first. The once-rejuvenated face had sagged a little. Harsh lines had appeared between nose and mouth.
But twice-restored, it was another miracle of restored youthfulness. And yet, thought Mary, it was not a lovable face.
True, it looked young, and yet somehow old at the same time. The jawline was thinner, more bladelike. The eyes were slightly sunken in their sockets. And, therefore, it was even more like the face Mary had seen in the nursing home, the one belonging to the woman who had cooed over a visitor’s baby to the horror of the senile old man she had called Uncle Edward. It was the face of the so-called niece who had rushed him out of sight. It was the face of the murdering woman who had pushed his wheelchair down the stairs.
Mary tapped the last picture. “How old is she here?”
Silently Doctor Faraday pulled open a file drawer and extracted a folder. In a moment he looked up and said, “Fifty-nine. She’d be sixty-three now.”
“Amazing.” Mary couldn’t get over it. “She’s dyed her hair, so it’s no longer gray. She doesn’t suffer from osteoporosis, so she stands up straight. And her voice doesn’t sound cracked and old. And of course her face has been transformed. But still”—Mary put one finger on the first photograph and another on the last picture and looked up at Doctor Faraday—“isn’t she physically the same? Isn’t she still sixty-three years old inside?”
“Of course.”
Mary made a helpless gesture. “So isn’t there some way to know that she’s not what she seems? I mean, if you look at it one way—forgive me—it’s a devil’s bargain. Doesn’t the devil exact a price?”
Doctor Faraday stood up and said quietly, “Look at her hands.”
46
At Fair Haven Bay summer was in its full pride. The tall pines lining the ridge on the other side of the river flung out their ragged arms above a woodland in luxuriant green leaf. Fishermen put-putted past the Kellys’ little dock in the direction of Lee’s Bridge, where large-mouth bass were hovering. Homer and Mary sat over second cups of coffee while a tender breeze from the river fluttered the kitchen curtains.
