Death at Charity's Point

by William G. Tapply

  “Marvelous.”

  Charles permitted himself a small smile of approval and rolled away.

  “I appreciate your calling me,” I said. “I hope you didn’t mind.”

  She looked down into her drink. “I am liberated, if that’s what you mean. I don’t mind calling a man. And if you hadn’t asked me out I probably would’ve asked you. I always get wigged out right before a performance, and all I can think is, if I don’t get the hell out of here I’m going to start throwing things. The idea of having a date—boy, that sounds old-fashioned, ‘date’—anyway, the idea of getting away from there and doing something reasonably civilized with somebody totally disconnected from dear old Ruggles kept me sane through the whole thing. You can’t believe how refreshing it is to talk with somebody other than another teacher or an adolescent. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.” She shrugged and grinned. “But to talk to somebody from the real world. All caps. THE REAL WORLD. Besides, I owed you an apology. And I did say I’d call.” She lifted her glass and downed the remainder of her Scotch. The ice cubes clinked against her teeth. She pursed her lips and sucked one into her mouth. “So I called,” she mumbled around the ice cube. “Okay?”

  She crunched the ice loudly.

  I smiled at her. “Yes. Okay.”

  “What was it you wanted to know about poor George?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “Why would he take his own life? Or did he really take his own life? How well did you know him?”

  “He was a friend. All of us there are friends.” Rina paused as Charles set our second round on the table and deftly filched our empty glasses. “Most of us, anyway, are friends. It’s a small school, we’re thrust together a lot. We live together. It’s like a family. There are the feuds, the jealousies, but also the dependencies. We’re like siblings. I mean, I know George liked oatmeal for breakfast with big chunks of brown sugar on it. But I don’t know a thing about his sex life. I know he detested television but secretly watched football on Monday nights. But I don’t know whether he squeezed his toothpaste from the end or the middle. I’d guess the end, though.”

  “Did his suicide surprise you?”

  She hesitated. “It surprised me, of course. If he’d had a heart attack or gotten hit by a car, that would have surprised me, too. Naturally. But—well, you think back on it, you try to figure it, and you say, ‘Yeah, he could have.’ You know? He was a melancholy person. No real joy in his life, at least none that any of us could see. We’ve all talked a lot about it. Jenny Wolcott, she’s taken it hard. I think she had a little thing for George. Father figure, maybe. He could be that way with women. Not a sexual bone in his body.” She squinted at me. “Is that mixing a metaphor?”

  “Sexual bone? Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Anyhow, I guess, yeah, he could have. Of the people I know, I’d say George was one who might kill himself.”

  “And the others feel that way?”

  She shrugged. “More or less.”

  “Binh too?”

  “Mr. Binh doesn’t tell us peasants what’s going on in his head. He’s too busy being inscrutable.”

  “Inscrutable?”

  “Aha! You caught me. Prejudice, right? Or at least, guilty of a cliché.” Rina frowned at me. “Don’t get me off on the subject of Alexander Binh. He walked all over George to get that Dean’s job. George should have had it. He deserved it. By seniority, if nothing else. But Binh played it cozy with the buffoon—Elliott, that is. Persuaded Elliott that if he, Alexander Binh, didn’t become the Dean, Ruggles would be guilty of racial discrimination. So Elliott gave the job to Binh. Which, it seems to me, itself is a clear case of racial discrimination. Don’t you agree?”

  I shrugged. “You’re not asking me for a legal opinion, I know. How did George feel about not getting the job?”

  “You had to know George to understand. He never uttered a word. No complaint. Sincere, hearty handshake and congratulations for Binh. But his feelings were hurt. Deeply hurt, I know. At the same time, I think George understood that Binh had simply outsmarted Elliott—not a particularly difficult feat, of course—and he didn’t blame our Headmaster for his folly. He was saddened by it, that’s all. But hurt, too. All of us learned by George’s example. Two lessons. One, don’t trust Elliott. He’s too dumb to trust. And, two, don’t trust Binh. He’s too smart.”

  Charles wheeled himself up to the table and slid our antipasto in front of us. Then he set the wine by my elbow. I poured a dash from the carafe into my glass and ceremoniously sniffed it, then sipped.

  “Ah, a brave little vintage,” I murmured. “Pert, but not gaudy. A touch of the grape for m’lady.” I poured Rina’s glass full.

  She inclined her head. “My thanks, good my lord. And God bless this our repast.”

  We touched glasses. Rina’s sharp, green eyes glittered as she drank.

  We attacked the antipasto. I dug around the anchovies and hunks of prosciutto and salami and concentrated on the tomatoes and cucumbers and bits of tuna. Rina aggressively monopolized the ripe olives. She crammed big leaves of lettuce into her mouth, so that the olive oil made a film around her mouth and on her chin. I caught her watching me, and after a calculating moment she gathered up the anchovies into a pile on her plate and attacked them methodically. When they were gone, she raised her wineglass and drained it. She set it down and arched her eyebrows at me.

  “Those little fish are salty,” she explained.

  I reached across the table and refilled her glass. She smiled broadly and took another deep draught. “Bring on the veal,” she said, dabbing her napkin at her mouth.

  As if he had been listening, Charles materialized. He slid a heaping plate before each of us. Big slabs of veal swam in a pungent sauce. Little buttons of mushrooms and chunky pieces of green pepper were piled on top. Rina leaned over and sniffed deeply.

  “Ahh,” she sighed. She broke a hunk of bread from the warm loaf and held it in her left hand. She took her fork in her right and laid siege on the scallopine two-fistedly. She ate with the enthusiasm of the Dallas Cowboys at their training table. Her concentration was absolute. Little beads of perspiration broke out on her forehead. And when her plate was empty, she grabbed another hunk of bread and sopped up the rich juices. She finished her wine and poured herself another glass, paused, and refilled my glass as well. Then she looked up. Her expression seemed to say, “Oh. I forgot you were there.”

  I was smiling abstractedly at her, and when her glance caught mine she seemed to open her eyes a little wider.

  “Like it?”

  She nodded, grinned, and burped into her napkin.

  “Excuse me,” she said, rolling her eyes in mock horror. Then she laughed. “Hey, that was fantastic. More wine?”

  “You just filled it,” I said.

  “Well, drink up, so I can fill it again.” She gulped from her own glass, then set it down and said, “Poor old George.”

  “Here’s to poor old George,” I said, lifting my glass. She lifted hers, and we touched glasses and drank to poor old George. “Query,” I announced.

  She frowned solemnly. “Of course,” she said.

  “Enlighten me, if you can, on two gentlemen not from Verona. To wit, one Master Harvey Willard, and another, the Captain Spender, both scholars at the Ruggles institution of learning.”

  She lifted the empty carafe, wiggled it in front of her face, and said, “If’t please my lord?”

  I swiveled around in my chair and caught Charles’s attention. He slid towards us. “More spirits, my man,” I said. “And forget the espresso and cheese.” He didn’t smile, but he did remove the empty carafe. Rina sat smiling and drumming her fingernails on her empty wineglass until Charles returned. I refilled both of our glasses.

  “Willard, Harvey,” said Rina. “First, a toast. To The Beast.”

  “The Beast,” I said. We both drank to The Beast. Rina topped off our glasses.

  “Pulling guard. Projected as a lineba
cker. A Nautilus major, minor in wind sprints. A gentle beast, is Harvey, except on the playing fields. An indifferent scholar, though ’tis said his WAIS hovers around 140, which, I understand, is several standard deviations to the right of average.” She stopped and frowned at me. “What’s Harvey Willard got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing, most likely. I don’t know. I found a paper of his in Gresham’s files. Something on radicals, antiwar groups. As a function of Vietnam, near as I could tell. It wasn’t a great paper. Gresham gave it a C. Yet, for some reason, he kept a copy of it. Evidently he was doing some studying on the subject himself. Had a big pile of books about that period on his desk.”

  “Which explains it.”

  “What—that George was studying that era?”

  “Sure. Don’t you think?”

  “Why keep a C paper, anyway?”

  She gave me a great, exaggerated shrug and took a sip of wine. “Well, anyway, that’s what I know about Mr. Willard. I’ve got him in a class. He gets a C there, too.”

  “Do you teach anything besides drama?”

  She nodded. “English. What we euphemistically call ‘College Prep English.’ Our curriculum is imaginatively sequenced this way: English Nine, English Ten, English Eleven, English Twelve. Subtitled, in each instance, College Preparatory.”

  “What about this Spender kid?”

  “A beast of a different color. This wine’s good, huh? And not a gentle beast at all. Harvey may be smart, but Cap Spender is a bona fide genius. Used to drive George bananas. Liked to set George up in class. Ask him leading questions. The kid was clever as hell. He’d do a Socratic number on George, lead him down the logical primrose path until he had George at the point of agreeing that Jews and blacks should be shipped out of the country, that mentally deficient people should be abandoned on ice floes, that they should require people to pass a Mensa test before they can be allowed to vote. The boy’s good at it, too. He’s done his homework. He’s read his Plato and Nietzsche and Spengler and Hegel. Elitism, nationalism, racism, all that stuff. And he’s got this magnetic way about him. The girls seem to love that shaven skull of his and that wimpy little goatee, and there’s a loyal cadre of boys who do his bidding. I suppose he makes them feel that they’re a part of some kind of elite themselves. Kids who doubt themselves—and most kids do, you know—latch onto someone with the kind of power that Spender has. He’s our own Reverend Moon, see?”

  “But not Harvey, I gather.”

  “Oh, certainly not Harvey Willard. Harvey’s got plenty of common sense. He told Spender one day—it was right in George’s class, right in the middle of one of Spender’s sly dialogues—Harvey said, ‘Hey, asshole. Cut the bullshit. Let’s get back to history.’ George loved that, of course, though he felt compelled to bawl Harvey out for the language. But he told us all about it afterwards. It was funny to hear George use those words. ‘Asshole’ and ‘bullshit.’ He didn’t talk that way himself, of course. You could practically see the quotation marks when he said them.”

  “Why do you tolerate a person like that? Doesn’t he disrupt the educational process?”

  “That’s from the Supreme Court, isn’t it? ‘Disrupt the educational process’? You sound like a lawyer.”

  I covered my mouth in mock dismay. “Fie on me. My gracious. I sounded like a lawyer. Yes. Tinker v. Des Moines, 1969, if you want to know. But doesn’t he?”

  “Sure. He’s disruptive as hell. Elliott has this philosophy about freedom, and kids needing to go through phases, as he calls them, and not forcing kids into more antisocial postures, and crap like that. George complained to Elliott all the time. He’d say, ‘I can’t control him. I’m appealing to you’—meaning Elliott—‘the administration. I admit it. I can’t control my class. If I can’t do that, I can’t teach. Take him out of my classroom. Get him off this campus. He’s evil. He’s corrupting these children.’ And Elliott would smile his benign, grandfatherly smile, and say, ‘They accused Socrates of corrupting the youth, George, and they exiled him.’ And George would go absolutely berserk. ‘You have the nerve to compare that maggot to Socrates?’ And Elliott would smile some more and mumble, ‘Freedom of Assembly. Freedom of Speech.’ And George would throw up his hands. They had these discussions all the time, George and our great Headmaster. Publicly, too. I’m sure Cap Spender heard of them and loved it.”

  Rina sat back in her chair and arched her back, lifting her chin so that she looked up at the ceiling. Her breasts pushed against her blouse. Then she looked at me. “Let’s finish up this wine and get out of here,” she said.

  I found Charles with my eyes and moved my hand in a way I hoped he would not find patronizing. He came with the check on a little silver tray, which he placed by my elbow. “Thank you, sir,” he rumbled. “I hope everything was all right.”

  “Great. Beautiful. Wonderful,” I said.

  I overtipped Charles outrageously, pushed my chair back, and stood up. I grabbed for the back of the chair. We had consumed a great deal of wine, I realized. It suddenly felt very warm in the restaurant.

  I picked my way carefully around the table and held the back of Rina’s chair for her. She stood, smiled, and fell against me for a second. “Oops,” she giggled. I held her arm above the elbow and steered her ahead of me gingerly among the maze of tables and chairs through the restaurant and out the door.

  The night air in the parking lot washed over me, cool, damp, and clean. I breathed deeply. Wisps of night fog drifted through the floodlights that were mounted under the eaves of the restaurant. Rina and I walked to where the cars were parked. I let my hand slide down her arm. She took my hand.

  We found ourselves standing beside my BMW. “Whither, sire?” she said softly.

  “Gee, I don’t know. I mean…”

  “You want me to go home now?”

  “Oh, no, I just…”

  “Good. I don’t want to go home.”

  “Well, the thing is, I didn’t plan…”

  Her laugh tinkled like wind chimes. “Of course you didn’t plan. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “Right. Well, where shall we go?”

  Rina hugged my arm against her body. I could feel the softness of her breast against my arm. Then she rested the side of her head against my shoulder and murmured, “Wherever you want, sire.”

  I cleared my throat. “I understand Charity’s Point is beautiful at night.”

  “So they say,” said Rina.

  “Can you show me how to get there?”

  “Sure can.”

  “Well, lead on, Macduff.”

  We drove in silence. Rina lay her head back on the seat. Her eyes were closed. On the car radio a medley from My Fair Lady was playing. Rina sang the words quietly, her voice low, sexy, and clear. “I always wanted to play Eliza,” she said dreamily when the medley ended. “Best I ever did was a spinster in an O’Neill play. Can’t even remember the title.”

  “Broadway?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Way, way off Broadway. Every girl’s dream. The stage. Boys want to be Mickey Mantle, girls want to be Eliza. See your name up in lights. I gave it three years. Supported myself modeling. Feet. Believe it? I sold a piece of my body in the Big Apple while I waited for the break that never came. You probably saw my feet in magazines. My feet were in great demand for a while there. I did sandals, pumps, sneakers. A national campaign for Dr. Scholl’s even. My perfect feet. Also did a corn-plaster ad which was pretty big. This agency had a photographer who I swear ejaculated into his britches when I took off my shoes. Anyway, I gave it up, got my degree, and joined the other failures at dear old Ruggles. Those who can’t, teach. You know?”

  “I thought teachers detested that adage,” I said.

  “Oh, sure we do. But we’re lying to ourselves. We’re all bitter and angry at the world which rejected our real talents. Misfits. Look at Warren Baker. Or Bartley Elliott, for Christ’s sake. Hey, look at me, directing a bunch of pimply kids through Shakespeare. Shit.�
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  She fell silent. My mind drifted. The car radio gave us soft strings. In the dark of the car, Rina suddenly said, “Oh, hell.” Her voice was soft, melancholy. She sounded like one of those bad drunks whose self-flagellating monologues break up parties early. “Those who can, do. Most of us can’t. ‘We’re lucky to teach.’ George always said that. ‘We’re lucky to have the chance to teach,’ he always said. Thing is—was, I should say—George could. He was just a poor old goddamn perfectionist, was his problem. Ah, screw it. He’s dead. The rest of us, I guess we’re only waiting around for it. Give the guy credit. He couldn’t wait. Always the perfectionist. Old George. Old G. G.”

  After a while Rina started humming tunelessly. We drove through the misty night along the two-lane road that paralleled the ocean; “Right up ahead,” she said suddenly, when I thought she was dozing. “You’ll see a big parking lot. Turn in there.”

  I turned onto a big, flat, empty expanse of hard-packed dirt. The fog thickened in the headlights as I drove slowly toward a row of rectangular shapes which, as I neared them, materialized into big, green trash barrels. Beyond the barrels, the ground began to rise gradually into the fog and dark.

  “You can park here,” said Rina, sitting up straight and stretching her neck.

  I extinguished the headlights and turned off the ignition, and then I could hear the muffled roar of the surf. It sounded very close, but the noise struggled through the heavy, moist air like the comings and goings of big trucks along a distant highway.

  “North Cove Beach, straight ahead,” announced Rina. “Just over the dunes.” She opened the car door. “Coming?”

  “This where…?”

  “Yes. Where George’s body was found, they say.” Rina shivered suddenly. “Look, you might as well take off your shoes. And do you have a blanket or something we can sit on?”

  “Sure. In the trunk. I’ll get it.”