Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  “Their health?” Amused, Homer followed her past the stuffed gray seal and the vast miscellaneous bones of Cetiosaurus oxoniensis, as the funeral procession vanished out the door.

  Helen struggled to keep her tone jocular and light. “Oh, you must know about Darwin’s continual gastric distress. He was troubled by it all his life. And Isaac Newton was obsessed with his own physical problems, like the incontinence of his bladder. I imagine some interesting exchanges.”

  Homer laughed, and pulled up a chair beside the pedestal of Newton. It was apparent that the nineteenth-century sculptor responsible for creating the likeness of the distinguished scientist, the author of The Principia, had been inadequate to his task. Newton looked small and childlike. He held a finger to his chin as if pondering some cloudy thought.

  They sat down, and Helen got to the point at once, leaning forward, looking at Homer intently. “I know I should tell this to the police. In fact I should have called them last night. Would it have made a difference? Would Bobby still be alive?” Helen stared at Homer as if he knew the answer to the question, as if he could banish her tortured self-condemnation.

  Homer tried to sound easygoing and comforting. “Look, why don’t you just tell me what happened?”

  Helen took a trembling breath. “I was working late in my office. It’s the Zoology Office, right up there”—she pointed to the gallery above—“but then I … took a break, and went downstairs and walked around in the courtyard.”

  “You often stay late, Dr. Farfrae?”

  “Yes, sometimes I stay late.”

  Homer looked at the fiberglass coelacanth in its glass case, and his mind wandered. How strange that the coelacanth’s fate was so different from that of the dodo! Everyone had thought it was extinct, just like the dodo, but then it turned up alive and well off the coast of Africa.

  Abruptly he turned away from the coelacanth and probed a little further. “Too much to accomplish during the day, Dr. Farfrae?”

  “Oh, that isn’t it.” Helen bit her lip, having said too much. She hurried on. “Anyway, while I was walking about down here, I heard someone come in.” She went on to tell Homer about the footsteps on the stairs, the coming and going, the returning, the arrival of Bobby Fenwick, the chase up the stairs.

  Homer interrupted her. “How did you know it was Fenwick?”

  “By his voice. He shouted, and I recognized his voice. Everybody around here knows Bobby Fenwick. Of course he wasn’t here every night. There isn’t any night watchman just for the museum. Bobby took care of night security for this part of the university.” Helen pointed this way and that. “Geology and Mineralogy, Atmospheric Physics, Biochemistry, Genetics—there must be twelve or fifteen science buildings around here. The night watchman goes from one to the other, looking in at random. I was often the only one in the building when Bobby came in.”

  “Did you see anything else, Dr. Farfrae? What happened after they went up into the tower?”

  Helen put her head back and stared up at the glass roof. “The trouble is, you won’t believe me.” Homer opened his mouth to protest, but she hurried on. “I followed them up the tower stairs—oh, I know it was a stupid thing to do—and I looked out the door where the ladder goes down to the roof, and I saw—” Helen shook her head. “Wait.”

  On the other side of the courtyard, children were flowing into the museum. It was the first school visitation of the day. At once the murmuration of voices filled the courtyard, the corridor around it, the upstairs gallery and the peaked spaces under the glass roof. Helen’s whisper blended with the murmur. “It was impossible. You won’t believe it, and I don’t believe it either.”

  “What was impossible? What did you see, Dr. Farfrae?”

  “I saw someone on the glass tiles. He was bounding up that impossible slope. But I couldn’t have seen it. How could anyone climb such a steep roof?”

  “Nobody can. He fell and broke his neck. Did you see him fall?”

  Helen shook her head and twisted her hands in her lap, while the children flooded out of the corridor into the courtyard and flopped down on the floor with their sketchbooks to draw the iguanodon.

  “Did you see who it was?”

  “No, I just saw it in silhouette.”

  “It? Did you say you saw it?”

  “Well, yes, I did say that, didn’t I? Because it wasn’t a human thing to do—racing uphill like that, like a monkey in a tree, or a spider on a wall.”

  For a moment Homer was carried away by the fantastic imagery of her story, but then he chastised himself for imagining that some animal might really have been roving around the Oxford University Museum in the middle of the night. He wondered if Dr. Farfrae was a New Age believer in astrological influences, like some aging hippie in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But when she looked at him, her hazel eyes showed no wild glints, only flecks of the sunlight pouring down from above.

  “Did you go down the ladder?”

  “No. I didn’t have the courage.” Helen turned in her chair to look at the children sprawled on the floor around the iguanodon, as if to reassure herself that the world was still a place of lunchboxes and schoolrooms and children with dirty knees. “I was frightened. I went back downstairs and put on my coat and locked the office door and drove home.”

  “You did not call the police.”

  “No.”

  Homer could think of nothing more to ask. He stared at Isaac Newton’s apple, which looked like a breakfast bun, and thought of Newton’s law of gravitation. Beyond Newton stood the golden statue of Galileo, holding in his hands two objects, as though he were about to drop them from the Leaning Tower to demonstrate his law of falling bodies. Poor Bobby Fenwick had obeyed both Newton and Galileo with absolute precision. He had slipped down the roof, the mass of his body attracted by gravity toward the center of the earth, accelerating in obedience to the law of inverse squares. His neck had broken at the bottom because of Newton’s Third Law, To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Snap! How satisfying.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m pleased that you spoke to me, but I’m not the one you should be talking to. You’ve got to go to the police. Detective Inspector Mukerji, he’d be the one to see.”

  “Of course,” said Helen, sounding desperate, “yes, yes, of course. But”—impulsively she stood up—“it’s my husband. He’d be so upset. He wouldn’t like it at all. He was—distressed already. I mean about my being here so late last night. I wish—”

  It was obvious to Homer that distressed was a euphemism for angry. He stood up too. “I should think Mukerji would just want to hear what you have to say. I don’t see why your husband should come into it at all.”

  “I see,” said Helen humbly. “Thank you, Dr. Kelly.”

  Together they started back across the courtyard. But on the way to the corridor entrance between Aristotle and Roger Bacon, Helen stopped in surprise. “Good heavens, look at poor James Watt. Someone dropped a box over his head.”

  “Poor fella’s in the dark.” Homer reached up and removed the box, and they walked back across the courtyard with the schoolchildren flocking in front of them, crowding around the sales desk to spend their pocket money on plastic pterodactyls and butterfly coloring books and balloons in the shape of Tyrannosaurus rex.

  CHAPTER 11

  It is no doubt the chief work of my life.

  Charles Darwin, Autobiography

  It was a warm October. Some of the seeds that had been transported on the muddy feet of the wigeon from the north began germinating in the damp soil of the ditch beside the carrental place on the Botley Road. Their pale stolons groped in all directions underground, sending eager stems into the air. Unfortunately, none of the Motorworld salesmen ever looked down at the ditch as they got in and out of the shiny cars in the parking lot. They never noticed the presence of the intruder, never cried, Oh, my God, never snatched up spades to dig it up. Unseen and unchecked, the new little shoots continued to thrive.

  Homer K
elly was flabbergasted by The Origin of Species. Of course the state of being flabbergasted was normal for Homer. He had been an astonished baby and a dumbfounded child, and now he was a thunderstruck adult. He was always being wowed by one thing or another, and then something else would come along that out-wowed all the rest.

  His conversation with Helen Farfrae yesterday had been staggering enough. This morning Homer supposed he should check up and make sure she had told her story to Mukerji. But overnight his confidence in her sanity had waned. He forgot her now, in his enthusiasm for Charles Darwin.

  “Mary, listen to this,” he said as they headed for the chapel. His head was down, his eyes were on the book. “He’s talking about the Creator, but you know what he means by the Creator?”

  “No, what?”

  “Natural selection.” Homer read a sentence aloud. “There is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching. How do you like that! Always intently watching!”

  “But he doesn’t mean”—Mary took Homer’s arm as he blundered onto the grass—“surely he doesn’t mean some huge natural force, out there somewhere, looking on at everything?”

  “No, no, but to him natural law was, well, it was godlike. He revered it with the same devotion his contemporaries felt for God. What he meant was—”

  “Homer, take your nose out of that book. We have to climb these stairs.”

  Homer glanced at the broad stone stairs to the chapel and put one foot on the bottom step. “He meant that the natural selection of slight favorable variations was a precise instrument for improving any smallest part of an organism. As though it were being guided through a maze of choices.”

  “But that’s like God.”

  “It’s not like God, because the guiding happens by itself, and there isn’t any goal. All those creatures weren’t working their way toward Homo sapiens.”

  “Well, I think it’s depressing.”

  They entered the chapel. Homer closed The Origin of Species and looked around at the enormous space that had encouraged the piety of those nineteenth-century gentlemen wishing to live economically. It was fully supplied with all the elements of the Gothic revival—pointed arches and ribbed vaults, clustered piers and quatrefoils, colored glass and patterned floors. Homer was comfortably reminded of Memorial Hall, back home in Cambridge. Once again he was surrounded by thick amber air embedded with splendid bugs from an earlier time. In this case the insects were Edward Pusey and John Keble, black-robed and red-robed like some of the glorious beetles in the museum across the street.

  “Guano,” muttered Homer, as they edged into a pew at the back.

  “What?”

  “Guano,” he repeated loudly. “That’s what built this place.”

  Homer’s old friend and sponsor Joseph Jamison, the director of the museum, was there ahead of them, moving aside to make room. “That’s right,” he said excitedly. “Guano built this chapel. Indeed it did.”

  A string of undergraduates sidled along the pew in front of them. They stared at Joe and Homer as they sat down. Mary nodded and smiled at Joe. “What do you mean, guano built it?”

  “The donor,” said Joe, “was a devout importer of guano from the Pacific. All this”—he waved his hand at the lofty walls of brick, the elaborate fixtures behind the altar—“it comes from hawk droppings, mockingbird droppings, finch droppings, every kind of bird droppings. They shipped it here and there for fertilizer, made a fortune”—Joe quoted a famous verse—“selling turds of foreign birds.”

  “This big British importer,” Homer explained to Mary, “he just scooped it off the rocks of the Galápagos and shipped it home.”

  “Homer, for heaven’s sake,” said Mary, “you’re insulting our kind hosts.”

  But one of the girls in front of them turned around and asked brightly, “What about cormorant shit? Did he scoop that up too?”

  “Why, of course,” said Homer.

  “He wasn’t particular,” said Joe.

  Homer turned to Mary, who was red-faced and grinning. “It’s inspiring, really, when you think of it, because maybe he scooped up some of it while Charles Darwin was in the Galápagos, because they had a guano industry there at the same time, did you know that?” Homer nodded his head solemnly at the student in the front pew. “Inspiring, truly inspiring.”

  After the service they set off for a tour of the Bodleian Library, which was high on Mary’s list of wonders.

  It was a misty morning, with a barely perceptible rain. Mary opened her umbrella as they ambled along Catte Street. “Homer, did you tell the police what Helen Farfrae told you yesterday? You did tell them, didn’t you?”

  “I told her to tell them. I don’t know what the hell Mukerji will do with a simian creature dancing up the side of a glass pyramid. But it’s up to them now. I’m not going to get into it.”

  The Bodleian Library was closed on Sunday, but they could see through the gate into the Old Schools Quad.

  “Look, Homer,” said Mary, pointing with her umbrella at one of the famous doors. There was a band of writing above it, SCHOLA METAPHYSICAE. Another door pronounced itself the entrance to the SCHOLA PHILOSOPHIA. They were two of the old schools, which had subdivided all learning among them.

  Homer peered at them through the ironwork of the gate. Something ached inside him. He couldn’t help thinking of his own pitiful education at the cheapest night school in Boston. Everything he knew about Philosophia and Metaphysica had been grubbed up afterward by himself out of books. Here the great harvest would simply pour over you its golden sheaves. Well, of course that probably wasn’t really true. But here in the Old Schools Quad it looked as though all you had to do was turn the key and walk into one of these ancient doors, and be blessed with learning forever.

  Homer found himself wondering about Helen Farfrae. She was a graduate of Oxford, she had told him so. She had a doctor’s degree from St. Hilda’s. Presumably she had been handed a great basket of these golden sheaves. How strange that a woman so blessed, so liberated by learning, should become a submissive wife. Homer had thought marriages like that were extinct, as dead as the dodo in the glass case. But here they were, Mr. and Mrs. Farfrae, alive and well like the coelacanth, right here in the city of Oxford. Perhaps they should be stuffed and exhibited as natural wonders in the Oxford University Museum.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

  “No, I give it up, “Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  On Monday morning Homer had a summons from Detective Inspector Gopal Mukerji.

  Edward Pound beckoned to him as he entered the museum. He was holding a telephone.

  “For me?” said Homer, pointing at his chest in surprise.

  He picked up the phone and said hello.

  “Good morning, Dr. Kelly.” Mukerji’s speech had the crisp syllabic distinctness of a highly educated Bengali Brahmin. “I wonder if by any chance you are free to come to the station right now?”

  For an instant Homer felt puffed up. Obviously Detective Inspector Mukerji remembered his standing as an ex–lieutenant detective. He was calling on him to act as a colleague. “Well!” said Homer, beaming. “Certainly, Inspector. How can I help you?”

  “I have tried to reach Dr. Jamison, but Mr. Pound informs me he is in London. Mr. Pound himself cannot leave his post as porter. No other responsible person seems to be around. We need someone to identify a picture. We’ve just had a call from a postgraduate at Christ Church informing us that a painting has turned up in their Graduate Common Room. We assume it is the museum’s missing picture.”

  “Oho, is it a dodo?”

  “I have not seen it myself.” Mukerji’s chuckle was a high cackle. “But the postgrad referred to it as a dodo. Perhaps if you were to take a look?”


  Homer sighed. He was not, after all, a famous investigator from the United States, he was merely a random bystander. “Where shall I meet you, Inspector? Christ Church is one of the colleges, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll wait for you in the porter’s lodge in Tom Tower. It’s just up the street from my office. Could you be there by eleven o’clock? Do you know the way?”

  “I have a map.”

  Homer hung up and stared blankly at Edward Pound.

  “Have you seen this, Dr. Kelly?” Pound had a copy of the Oxford Mail. “It’s full of Bobby Fenwick’s death and the theft of the dodo painting and Dr. Farfrae’s story about the intruder. They happened the same night, and the paper’s keen on the idea that they’re all related.”

  “Dr. Farfrae’s story? Oh, God, she’ll be unhappy about that. I told her it wouldn’t come out. Her husband—well, never mind.” Homer went back to Keble for his map, then set off for Christ Church.

  It was in a part of Oxford he had not yet explored. Mary had marched up Cornmarket Street to St. Aldate’s, changing traveler’s checks at Lloyd’s and buying stamps at the post office, but to Homer it was unfamiliar territory. He had expected a charming old lane with red-cheeked farmers in Wellington boots selling fruits and vegetables from the backs of wagons. It was not. The closer he came to Cornmarket along Broad Street, the thicker were the crowds. The crossing was a locked grid—little Park and Ride buses running north and south, massive long-distance buses, and a double-decker bus with a tour guide shouting through a megaphone, “THREE TOWERS DOMINATE THIS STREET, THE CHURCH OF ST. MICHAEL AT THE NORTH GATE IMMEDIATELY TO YOUR LEFT, CARFAX TOWER TO THE RIGHT AT THE NEXT CORNER, AND TOM TOWER, WHICH YOU WILL SEE IN THE DISTANCE, THE WORK OF—MADAM, WOULD YOU KINDLY RESTRAIN YOUR CHILD?”

  This was town, not gown. Thick streams of local folk clotted the streets and sidewalks. Mothers pushed babies in strollers, grandmothers hurried along the sidewalks with a rocking British gait, their arms sagging with plastic bags from Marks and Spencer. There were long lines at the bus stops. People flooded in and out of Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, boys on skateboards rattled past the stalled buses and leaped around in hundred-and-eighty-degree turns. Crowds of teenagers leaned against the windows of the Jean Factory, spread themselves over the sidewalk, smoked, guffawed. They were dressed to appall. Hate us. Go ahead, hate us.