“Possibly. In which case I would find it a little sad, perhaps, but nothing to condemn. For don’t you see, Lieutenant Marks, it would mean that that was the person he most wanted to be. And to me it was an entirely admirable person.”
seventeen
MATHER LANDED AT O’HARE Airport shortly before ten o’clock Chicago time. He rented a car and headed northeast over a complex of tollways entirely strange to him. The highways familiar to his youth were long since obsolete. Only the sky was familiar, the vast openness of prairie still unbroken. Homecoming. For him, the original Wasteland. The little soil he cherished here was mingled round his grandmother’s bones. Having the car, he thought he might visit her grave that afternoon … and not far from it, the graves of two people he had never known: his parents had been killed in an accident when he was two years old. He glanced at his watch and realized that in New York at that very hour, the memorial service for Peter Bradley was taking place. Tears and eulogy …
“Mr. Mather, would you read ‘Adonais’ aloud to us?” How brutally close to the mark his students had come in that estimate of him, thinking they would flatter him into wiling away the class exhibiting himself before an imaginary bier. He set his mind to following the road only; no more revisiting of past ignominies. And yet he was driving pell-mell toward the greatest of them all.
Albion had changed. The village which had taken its name from the preparatory school built in what was then near-wilderness had become a common town within commuting distance of the city. A giant new post office stood in the center of what had been a village square. The tearoom, once the refuge of sweet-starved youngsters who could get their fill of neither food nor love within the campus grounds, had been turned into a tavern. He parked in front of it. How often he had trooped a half-dozen teen-aged boys inside, crowded them into a red-upholstered booth and watched them stuff their pimpled faces. He could see them now counting out their money in small change and looking in jealous awe at the amount he always added to the waitress’s tip. It was in this shop, in a noisy, crowded booth that he had first become aware of the boy—his large, eloquent eyes full of articulateness while he stammered out the lonely boy’s story: a watcher at his mother’s wedding feast. But he spoke of the opposite of loneliness that day: he got the attention he sought by painting a picture of the hilarious good time he’d had, the champagne he’d got drunk on, the friend of his mother’s who had cornered him in the bedroom … Mather could see the boy still, the veins standing out on his splendid forehead. The others had fallen silent, eager for the sex detail, then raucous with scorn when the boy suddenly covered his face with his hands and wept.
The palms of Mather’s hands were wet. They left a mist on the chrome of the steering wheel which he watched through its slow evaporation.
He went into the tavern, ordered a drink, and waiting for it, went to the phone booth: he needed now to hold one continuity by starting another in its midst. He called the Albion School and asked for the headmaster’s office.
It was the headmaster himself who answered: “Rossiter speaking.” The clipped voice had retained its Olympian resonance.
“Eric Mather here, Clem.” Even now he found himself fashioning his speech delivery to the master’s pattern. “I’m driving up your way this afternoon. Could I drop in for half an hour?”
“By all means, Eric. I’ll see what I can set aside. Where are you now?”
Mather was about to lie, to say that he was in Chicago. But he had come for the sake of truth. “In the village,” he said.
“Then come along and I’ll have lunch sent up.”
Rossiter had been his friend. True, he had been saving himself and the school from scandal, but even so he had extended himself in the subsequent recommendations. If he had hoped by giving them to need never hear the name of Eric Mather again, no indication of it came through now in his voice. It was as cordial, he was sure, as Rossiter could be to any man who hadn’t a son to give to Albion.
The headmaster met him on the steps. He looked to have changed no more than had the gray stone of Albion. A little settling weight at the girth, but nobly cloaked. His hair was still sandy and his hand, extended slowly, was still moist and soft to the touch as a plucked pigeon.
They walked along a pebbled path, past the dining-hall windows. The clamor inside was intense.
“Boys don’t change much,” Mather said, “one generation to the next.”
“Nor does the menu, I’m afraid, at Albion. You weren’t fond of it then. Now I suppose you’re a gourmet—though I can’t say it shows.”
Mather was already aware of his own leanness, striding alongside the master. They reached the side door entering directly onto the master’s office. Rossiter performed his ritual of selecting the key from numerous others attached on a ring at one end of a chain that crossed his vest to his watch pocket.
The office still smelled of sweet pipe tobacco and Old Spice shaving lotion.
“I’ve got a tutors’ meeting at one thirty. That gives us a little time. None of that nonsense at the University, what—tutors and all that? You like it, Eric?”
“Yes, I like it.” He took the leather-backed chair Rossiter indicated at the side of the window and watched the master pull up his rocker and take his binoculars from the bookshelf. He was a bird watcher. The boys of Mather’s day, and no doubt still, thought the hobby a ruse behind which the master could spy on them.
“Then why are you here?”
Mather met the small gray eyes full on. It was Rossiter that looked away. “Because I think my offense at Albion has caught up with me.”
“Oh, dear me,” Rossiter murmured and busied himself with the adjustment of his binoculars.
The curious thing about being with Rossiter in Mather’s days at Albion was that he had never felt so much a man as in the master’s presence. Rossiter then, and presumably now, had a wife who, Mather suspected, had come with his appointment to the headmastership. She lived in what the boys called The Castle, on the bluff at the campus’s edge overlooking Lake Michigan. The master, a turret if not a tower of authority throughout the day, ambled home to her in the dusk, burdened with books and a small brown leather bag in which he kept a change of linen, measuring the path before him as might a peddler who had to sell something of which he was not especially proud.
“I must know now everything that happened afterwards,” Mather said, “and who knew about it.”
“There were not many sources,” Rossiter said, fussing still with the glasses. “You know, we have an oriole this spring. See that tamarack, the second one, next to the maple sapling? They dangle their nests like ladies’ handbags. She’s found a bit of Christmas tinsel and woven it into the nest.” He put the glasses to his eyes. “I suppose you’ve been discreet yourself? Psychiatry and all that, too?”
“I’m in love with a woman, Clem,” he said. He had not meant to say that. It evaded within himself the truth he was seeking. And Janet was worthy of more honor than it paid her, in his position. “But that has nothing to do with it,” he added.
Rossiter looked at him. “Oh, I should think it might. I should think it might.”
“I want to know who exactly knew.”
“At the time?” Rossiter put the binoculars away. “She ought to have built a window in that nest if she meant to hold my interest,” he said, obviously of the oriole. “Well, there was myself, the boy and his father—fortunately there was no mother—for you, that is, and our lawyer. He’s still our lawyer by the way, Wes Graham. A good friend to Albion, but he did not send his sons here.” Rossiter did not attempt to disguise the reproach implicit in the last sentence. “Still, I shouldn’t think there would have been any … leak, shall I say, from that source. And surely not from the boy involved: they would have fervently wished to forget the incident. I mean two people were involved, weren’t they? You would not say the boy was entirely innocent now, looking back, would you?”
“I would not say,” Mather said quietly.
> “No, you wouldn’t,” Rossiter said dryly. “I recall it was I at the time who silenced his father by that suggestion.”
“‘At the time’—you said that before, just a minute ago. Has anyone talked about it since? Have you talked about it, Clem?”
“I resent it very much, Eric, your challenging me this way. No man could have had a more understanding friend than I was to you then. I virtually perjured myself, recommending you without qualification—to St. Monica’s, was it—that girls’ school in the East?”
“I have never been ungrateful. Nor have I given you reason to regret it.”
“You have done something, Eric, whether you were aware of it or not. At some recent time you have joined an organization—applied for a fellowship or some such activity that a discreet man, knowing his own record, would not have done.”
Mather was wracked with sudden trembling. He could hardly trust himself to speak. “Why do you say that?”
“For what other reason would you have been investigated by the F.B.I.?”
He moistened his lips. “I didn’t know that I was.”
“Now that I tell you it is so, can you think of any reason?”
The fear was sickening him, striking in the way it had when the police had driven up to him outside his house—fear, mostly of the unknown, fear now that his complicity in what had led to Peter’s death was better understood by others than by himself. Until now he had thought that there still was time, that he still had the chance to master himself and possibly in the end, what was to become of him. Deep in his own thoughts, he had lost the trend of Rossiter’s question. “Any reason for what?”
Rossiter made a gesture of impatience. “For the F.B.I. to be interested in that particular aspect of your career?”
“When did they come to see you?”
“Early February. During term examinations.”
“And they told you specifically what they wanted to know?”
“Directly,” Rossiter said. “Those boys don’t beat about the bush. They wanted to know if there were any incidents of perversion in your record.”
Mather flinched at the word. But having heard it spoken, he was better able to think, to get outside himself and look about. Early February: that was before Jerry had spoken to him in the park. Why at that time would the F.B.I. have been seeking information on him? “Didn’t they tell you why, give some reason for being interested in me?”
“My dear Mather, they never do. They ask all the questions, and completely ignore any you might ask of them.”
“You told them the truth?”
Rossiter spread his pudgy hands. “I had to. They implied knowledge of a more recent incident.”
“That’s not so!” Mather cried, and then because he remembered something he had thought of small significance at the time, so quickly and, he then believed, effectively had he repulsed the boy, he added now: “Oh, dear God.”
“You see,” Rossiter said, almost smugly, “Big Brother’s always watching you.”
“But it was nothing, Clem! One of my students—I struck him.”
“Oh, a splendid show of manhood! In a public place, no doubt?”
“I tell you, there was no one about. And it was over in a minute. He apologized and that was the end of it.”
“Obviously,” Rossiter said. “And all this took place in the classroom?”
“In the park,” Mather said, and saying it he saw Rossiter’s “Big Brother” image as a sinister reality. It was in the park after all that Jerry had approached him.
“The university park there—it’s rather notorious, isn’t it? I shouldn’t think with your background you would go near it.”
“God damn my background,” Mather cried, a helpless blast. Rossiter’s capacity for niggling provocation had remained unimpaired through the years. Yet he was to be thanked now. One squirmed being made his pivot, but one saw. One had to see.
Mather got up and wandered the room. A row of clocks of many styles sat on top of a glass-enclosed bookcase. They told the varying times throughout the world. Rossiter liked to say: “In Paris now …” They all ticked quietly at differing tempos, but told their times meticulously. Mather, his mind breaking off from his immediate problem, remembered that moment of stillness while Janet turned the pages of her book. It was that moment truly—to which he had had no right—in which he had begun to live. Or to die?
Rossiter, his chair eased round to where he watched the younger man, folded his hands across his belly and said: “You’re still a handsome bastard, Eric.”
Mather turned and glowered at him. He had scarcely heard the words, much less comprehended their content until Rossiter added, a little mocking smile at his soft red mouth, “I suppose if I were to get up, you would strike me also?”
Mather wanted to laugh: the master’s mystique revealed. He shrugged and moved back to the leather chair, standing beside it. He looked down at the man rocking himself round again to the window, and felt for him a pitying contempt of the sort usually reserved for himself. The experience had drained off his fear. Rossiter reached up for the binoculars again. With or without them, a voyeur.
“The F.B.I. agents, Clem—what do you remember of them? What did they say? Spare yourself the trouble of finding delicate words for it. I just want to know. What were they like?”
“What were they like? One was tall and blond and silent—the all-American. The other—I remember his name, Edward N. Fleming. But take away the Edward, leave just the initials, and what have you? E. N. Fleming. Life mocking fiction, what? Or as the boys would say, how corny can you get?”
Mather felt the drumbeat of his quickened pulse. “What did he look like, this character called Fleming?”
“Heavy-set, a bulbous face, eyebrows like shoebrushes …”
Mather interrupted. “They showed credentials of course?”
“Identification.” Rossiter looked at him. “Are you suggesting impersonation?”
“I am. How could we find out? There must be a way to check on them—to find out if there actually is an agent by that name.”
Rossiter eased himself out of the chair. “I should think Wes Graham could find out for us—if he’s in the office, that is. I’d rather not call them directly. But really, Eric—it is too fantastic.”
“Please call Graham,” Mather said. Rossiter did not know Tom and Jerry. Or having met the chameleons, he knew them only for what they said they were. He had no doubts how himself. They had had to know their customer in him, and they had come to the best source.
Rossiter, reaching the lawyer on the phone, voiced his skepticism. “It’s nothing really, Wes, but I just want to be sure. They were checking on one of our old instructors. The agent’s name struck me as odd: Fleming, E. N. Fleming …” He paused, listening, and then said: “Is that a fact?”
After hanging up he explained to Mather: “Wes knows of an agent by the name of Spillane. So! The bard said it all, didn’t he—what’s in a name? Shall I ring for lunch? He’ll call us back within the hour.”
They had reached a lumpy dessert which would not have had taste for Mather under any circumstances when the attorney reported on his inquiry to the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No agent by that name had operated out of the district in the past five years.
Rossiter, on the phone, passed it off as lightly as he could. “I might have got the name wrong. In any case there was nothing damaging in my man’s history.” He lied with a practiced grace. “Thank you, Wes. Come up for golf first chance you have, what? The greens were never better.”
Nothing damaging, Mather thought. Lord God in heaven!
“Well, there you have it, Eric, make what you will of it. I had no way of knowing.”
“Of course you hadn’t. The blame is mine all through. But it’s what I had to know.”
Rossiter scraped the last bit of custard from his plate. He washed it down with coffee. “Eric, are you being blackmailed? If you are, take some very ancient advice a
nd go to the police. You can get the villains, you know. Impersonating law officials is a serious offense. And Eric … if there is no other way, I shall testify.”
“Thank you, Clem, but I’ll find another way.”
eighteen
RETURNING TO THE CITY mid-afternoon, Marks stopped at his parents’ house for something to eat. His mother had gone to a recital at Carnegie Hall, but Willie Lou, who had worked for the Markses since he was a boy and called him “David” still, was prepared at any hour to sit him down to a good meal. “No fussing, just a little fixing,” she said as always. “You go wash up.”
Marks went into his father’s study and called the precinct house. The only important message was the answer to his inquiry to the F.B.I.: re Eric John Mather no record of investigation. To be sure the language meant what it seemed to mean, Marks called James Anderson, the F.B.I. liaison man on the case. “Could it mean that Mather was investigated, but that you turned up nothing on him?”
Anderson laughed. “We generally turn up something, no matter what it comes to in evaluation. No, it means just what it says, Lieutenant, the Bureau has not initiated any such investigation.”
So, Marks thought, Sally Nobakoff Kelly had told him yet another lie. But why? Why not say she had never shown the record? Why the garnish? She had used the story to justify her own curiosity, and, Marks realized, if she had worked in the Records Office for any length of time, she was bound to have become familiar with F.B.I. investigators. Professors, especially at Central University, had a way of participating in Causes …
Marks found himself staring up at a faded print on the wall alongside his father’s desk: an allegory of the tree of good and evil. She was a great plucker of apples, our Sally, he thought, she was ever ready to hand them out to any damn-fool Adam gullible enough to try one.
“You can come now, David,” Willie Lou said from the door. “Your mother didn’t want much to go today. Now she’s going to be spitting mad, not seeing you.”
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