by Jane Langton
Ham closed his eyes again and dropped his head. He was thirsty, terribly thirsty. How long had he been drifting in and out of sleep? How many hours, or days, or weeks?
Something terrible had happened. That was apparent. But what? He couldn’t remember anything about it except for the stranger’s face. There had been a look of surprise on someone’s face, someone new to him, a stranger, he could remember that. But nothing more. Something colossal must have happened, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what.
Something was lying heavily on his back. With an effort Ham crawled out from under it. Then he rolled over and tried to sit up. But trembling seized him. He was overcome with nausea and dizziness. He dropped down again and closed his eyes. After all, they would find him sooner or later. They must be looking for him, searching everywhere. Surely they would be digging and shoveling at the outer edges of his darkness, right now. He could trust them to keep trying. They wouldn’t let him down. He would just drowse off and leave it up to them. They were his good Rats.
Chapter Eighteen
Vick hurried out of her Corelli seminar in Paine Hall and then stopped short at the west entrance and pressed her nose against one of the oval windows in the doors, studying the rain outside. It was coming down like pitchforks, like waterfalls and cataracts. Well, never mind, she didn’t have time to wait for it to stop pouring. Vick hunched her shoulders and ducked her head and clutched her books to her breast and ran down the steps. It was like going swimming with all her clothes on. Head down, she splashed in the direction of the Science Center, where she could take a shortcut to Memorial Hall. In the Science Center she took off her squelching shoes and padded barefoot along the brick corridor, shaking back her wet hair. The corridor was dry, but in the Science Center Vick couldn’t help thinking of her Chem 2 class, which met in the building twice a week, and she winced.
She had been an idiot to sign up for Chem 2. She should have known better. The Confidential Guide had given her fair warning. “Chem 2 is extremely competitive and covers almost all areas of chemistry in agonizing depth at withering speed.” And it was true. She was already way behind, less than a month into the term. And it was probably too late to drop the damned thing and sign up for that gut course her roommate was taking, Nat Sci 112, which was supposed to be just one big slide lecture on the history of science, Galileo and his telescope, and so on.
Well, she could probably slog through Chem 2 somehow or other. She had always been able to get a course together sooner or later. Victoria is highly motivated to succeed academically. But of course it wasn’t so much a matter of brains and motivation and success and all that claptrap. It was the way time presented itself to her every day as something to be carved up into pieces, like a pine board. Fiercely she hewed it into hours and minutes. It was a useful material, not to be wasted. Even the scraps could be whacked together into something. The vibration of the wheezing, jerking saw jiggled in every nerve in Vick’s thin body, swiveling her head in rapid darting glances as she hurried along the sidewalk, heading for Memorial Hall. Impatiently she leaned forward. staring eagerly through her wet eyelashes at the massive building that blocked out the whole sky.
She still wasn’t sure she could do it. When Mrs. Krapotkin and Professor Howard had told her to take over for Ham, she had said, “Oh, no, no, I can’t. I really can’t.” But they had been firm. They had insisted. Vick had walked out of Mrs. Krapotkin’s office in a dazzled terrified trance. She had run upstairs to the library in Paine Hall and snatched up everything she could find about Handel’s Messiah. Mrs. Krapotkin seemed to think Vick could just take over the whole thing because she had done so well in Ham’s conducting course last year, and he had entrusted her with some of the rehearsals for last year’s Christmas performance. But to take on the whole thing! To weld it all together! To nag the chorus until they could sing the long passages of sixteenth notes to perfection, to work with the soloists, to try to keep Mrs. Esterhazy calmed down, because she got so swoopy when she was excited, to take over the orchestra from Jonathan Pearlman, and on top of everything else, to give lessons to Miss Plankton! Oh, Miss Plankton, what to do about Miss Plankton! Jon Pearlman had thrown up his hands and sworn he wouldn’t put up with Miss Plankton. But Vick had persuaded him to let her stay. Miss Plankton was in. She was in for good. If Jane Plankton was good enough for Ham Dow, she was good enough for Jon Pearlman and Vick Van Horn. Vick had promised to give her private lessons, free of charge.
But of course it wasn’t just a matter of getting the parts right. The whole thing had to be not only note perfect, it had to be one whole, musically and meaningfully. Christ was bom and died for our sins and rose from the dead to prove that we too can be saved. That was what the music was about. It was an exalted statement of Christian belief, whether one agreed with it or not. But how could she get it all together, unskilled as she was, so that the music really said that, For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive? It had to be more than a collection of familiar tunes. Vick remembered Ham’s cautionary joke about the man who dreamt he was playing the violin in a performance of Handel’s Messiah, and woke up to find he really was. That was the trouble. Everybody took it for granted. They had to feel it, the whole chorus, the whole orchestra; they had to understand it and sing it and play it as if they did, as if they really cared, as if they saw the heavens open up before them to reveal the great God himself, the way Handel said he did.
She still had so much to learn. She had buried herself in the score. She had driven her roommate half crazy by playing the tape recording of last year’s performance over and over and over. She had drenched herself in Handel’s Messiah. She breathed it, ate it, drank it, dreamt it. She woke up at night with her teeth tapping the rhythm of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” There was no other piece of music in the world but Messiah. She couldn’t understand how her classmates in Paine Hall could be bothered with Corelli or anybody else but George Frederick Handel. She was temporarily insane, out of her head, a monomaniac, she knew that. But how was she ever going to get all the beat patterns straight, and the cues, and remember which arias were da capo, and master all the swift changes from one part to another? There was the place where the lilting allegro moderato of the chorus All we like sheep have gone astray turned into a ponderous adagio—And the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. The whole thing was full of tricky transitions like that. She had to know it all by heart.
Vick sloshed up the steps of the north entry of Memorial Hall and ran barefoot into Sanders, leaving a dripping trail from her heavy wet skirt on the marble floor of the memorial corridor.
The thing was, it was all for Ham. It was his concert. He was as alive as ever in Vick’s head. She would make him come alive for everybody else, just one more time.
Chapter Nineteen
Ham woke to a feverish thirst. He rolled over, hunched himself up on his hands and knees, and began crawling in the dark. He was dizzy, but instinctively he kept his eyes closed. His head pounded, but he hardly felt it. All he could think of was his thirst. He must find water.
The surface over which he was dragging himself forward was lumpy with gravel and rock, but he persevered, making a slow journey over small sharp hills and valleys, until he was brought up short. His head cracked against a barrier. Falling back on his heels, Ham opened his mouth in a soundless cry. Then his shoulders sagged and he breathed heavily, recovering from the blow. The air in his mouth tasted of plaster dust. He closed his mouth and breathed through his nose, and the darkness around him smelled dank and wet. Reaching out with his hands, he felt the barrier. It was a flat wall with a painted surface. Slowly he lurched forward again, keeping his left shoulder against the wall. Soon the dry grit under his hands and knees gave way to a bare floor, seamless and smooth like linoleum. One of his hands slipped. The floor was wet. Ham put his wet palm to his parched lips, and then, panting with eagerness, he lumbered forward, groping for the source of the moisture. His shoulder ran into something,
and he stopped and explored it with his hands.
The obstruction was a pipe, running up the wall over his head. His trembling fingers tried to follow it down to the floor, but the lower end of the pipe was broken. A slight trickle of moisture seeped from the broken rim.
It was water. Plain cold water. The wetness on Ham’s fingers tasted slightly metallic, but otherwise it had no taste. The trickle was hardly more than a drop or two coalescing on the metal rim, but it was continuous. Painfully Ham got down on his elbows and lapped at the end of the pipe. He lapped and lapped, then sat back to rest, then lapped again. Ham lapped up the water trickling from the broken pipe like a thirsty dog until the fiery need of his body was a little abated, and then he stretched out on the floor and put his aching head on his arm once again and went to sleep.
Chapter Twenty
Homer told himself it wasn’t inconsistent. It wasn’t a positive action on his part to call up Marley. It was just curiosity. There was no harm in finding out how things were going. “I just wondered what’s happening,” he said to Peter Marley.
And then Peter told him about Ham’s appointment book. It had turned up in Ham’s house. They had searched Ham’s house on Martin Street from top to bottom and found the appointment book. “And the appointment for eleven-thirty, October sixteenth, was in there. On the page for October sixteenth there’s an entry, ‘11:30, J.C.’”
“J.C.? Who did Ham know with the initials J.C.?”
“Lots of people. After all, half the people in the world are named John or Jack or Jean or Joan or Jim, or something like that, and you’d be surprised how many of them have surnames beginning with C. Of course, we looked for an address book too, to find out who he did know, but so far we haven’t turned up anybody at all likely.”
“I know somebody with the initials J.C.,” said Homer.
“Jesus Christ.”
“No. James Cheever.”
“President Cheever? Oh, wow.”
“Why don’t you take a look at Cheever’s appointment book for October sixteenth? Maybe it says, ‘11:30, Ham Dow.’”
“Oh, no. Not me.” There was a small silence. “Well, of course, Ham did know Cheever. They were classmates. I know that for a fact. Only I doubt they had much in common.”
“Except for Harvard. The welfare of this vast educational slaughterhouse, if you’ll forgive a scholarly quotation. I’ll tell you what. I’ll do it for you.” Homer could feel his big nose twitching with eagerness to violate Cheever’s sanctuary in Massachusetts Hall. “I’ll just barge in on Cheever and see what happens. All he can do is throw me out.”
“Good. Only leave me out of it. Whatever you do, don’t mention my name.”
OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
was written in white paint across the lintel of the door of Massachusetts Hall. Homer admired the small neat letters. They had been executed by a skillful hand. The O’s were round, the spacing ample. You didn’t need a big gold sign if you were the President of Harvard.
The receptionist wasn’t at all sure Mr. Cheever would be free to see Mr. Kelly. She passed him down the hall to Mrs. Herbert. Mrs. Herbert wasn’t at all sure either, but she said she’d find out. She knocked on the door at one side of her office and poked her head into the next room, while Homer stood modestly waiting, studying the patterns in Mrs. Herbert’s rug.
“Who is it, Mrs. Herbert?” said James Cheever. “Tinker and I still have a good deal to talk over this morning. I’m not at all sure—”
“It’s Professor Kelly. He’s teaching in the English Department. He says it’s urgent.”
“Oh, yes. Kelly.” Cheever made a gesture of impatience and glanced at Sloan Tinker. “He was the one who gave that report at the Overseers’ meeting the other day. What do you think?”
Tinker got up from the sofa and stood by the fireplace. “Better find out what the man is up to,” he said.
“Well, then, send him in. You’d think he would have the courtesy to make an appointment.” A sense of what was due to his dignity rose up in the breast of the President of Harvard, and when his visitor walked into the room, James Cheever did not offer him a chair. “How do you do, Professor Kelly,” he said, looking intently at the grumpy portrait of William Stoughton on the wall. “I think you know Mr. Tinker. Now, what exactly is it you want to see me about?”
The man was so thick-skinned he didn’t know he had transgressed in any way. He was grinning at Tinker, walking over to shake his hand, pulling up a chair on his own initiative and sitting down. The chair happened to be a particularly fine nineteenth-century chair with a needlepoint cushion. It had once belonged to President Pusey’s mother-in-law. Kelly was tipping it back on its rear legs. Next thing you knew, he would be putting his feet on the desk. The man was preposterous. Now look at the fool; he was jumping up and peering into the glass case at the Great Salt.
“Good heavens, what’s that thing? Some sort of silver spittoon? Haven’t you got it upside down?”
President Cheever shivered with loathing. “No, I haven’t got it upside down. Those prongs on top were meant to hold a napkin. It happens to be part of the Harvard silver collection, a rather precious seventeenth-century saltcellar.”
“Oh, right, right. I see how it works. The salt goes in that little hole in the top. Funniest-looking damn thing I ever saw.”
Homer sat down again, and smiled at the man on the other side of the table. All at once he saw him for what he was, and for the first time he felt a pang of sympathy for the President of Harvard. Cheever was a beleaguered scholar who had been promoted by the Peter Principle beyond the utmost reach of his capacity, when he should have been left to browse in the field of his own competency as a professor of fine arts, over there in the Fogg Museum on the other side of Quincy Street. He should never have been raised to a position of authority over living men and women who refused to stay poised like Homeric figures on a vase or icons from Byzantium in the perfection of eternity. Here he was, the poor fool, enthroned at a handsome old table upon which was dumped every day an untidy sack, tumbling and squirming with human problems. The poor man had to put his shrinking hand into it every single day and get his fingers bitten off. A good chap on the whole. A scholar. You had to have scholars. Homer was a scholar himself, after a fashion.
“I just wanted to talk to you about the death of Hamilton Dow,” said Homer. “And I’m glad Mr. Tinker is here. I’d like to get your perspective on the matter, see things from your two points of view. I mean, I understand, sir, you were one of Mr. Dow’s oldest acquaintances. I’m told you were members of the same class here at Harvard.”
“Yes, we were,” said James Cheever. “But, I must say, I hardly knew the man. I mean, we always moved in different spheres.”
“Would I be wrong in thinking that it was fundamentally a matter of educational philosophy?” said Homer, not having the least idea what he meant at all. “The two of you had rather different outlooks on the whole?”
He was blundering around in the dark, but to his amazement, his fumbling finger had touched a vital nerve at the first try.
“Radically different,” said President Cheever firmly.
“Different persuasions altogether.” Sloan Tinker moved away from the fireplace and sat down at the table that had been the desk of Harvard presidents since President Eliot’s day. “In fact, I think I can say frankly that it is no secret that President Cheever was responsible for denying academic tenure to Hamilton Dow.”
“Tenure? You denied him tenure?” Homer stared at Cheever. “But that’s the first time I’ve heard anything but enthusiasm for the man. He seems to have been so universally popular.”
“Popular,” said Tinker, with a dry laugh. “Oh, yes, he was popular.”
“He certainly was,” said President Cheever bitterly. “He was the kind of man who never went anywhere without his little band of disciples. I think he had some romantic notion of himself as a sort of beggar king, with a ragged band of lackeys, vassals, and cupbearers dr
agging along behind him like some sort of patchwork cloak.” The President of Harvard made an elaborate sweeping gesture in the air.
“The man had a messiah complex,” said Tinker. “It’s as simple as that.”
Homer studied the emptiness behind the President’s chair, where Cheever had been flapping his arm. It contained no disciples of any kind. “No one would ever accuse you, sir,” he said, “of being a messiah.”
Warmed by this compliment, Cheever expanded. “When I think of the influence for good the man might have been, with that mob of supporters he swept up from the streets of Cambridge. But instead—oh, I know one should not speak ill of the dead, but so much sheer foolishness has been spoken about Ham Dow, Mr. Kelly, it’s about time somebody revealed the truth. After all, facts are facts. Did you ever see the man in the flesh?”
Homer shook his head. He had lost his tongue. He was astounded. The two of them were letting themselves go. They were enjoying themselves, digging their spoons feverishly into a blood pudding. He sat back, trying not to let his jaw drop too far, and let the repast go on.
“Tell me, Mr. Kelly,” said James Cheever, “did you ever read Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man?”
Homer shook his head dumbly from side to side.
“Well, it’s simply the old universal chain of being again, only Pico was a child of the Renaissance, and he had an extraordinary view of the chain of being. Man alone of all created things, he said, has the power to move freely on the chain, to fall by his own free choice to the level of beasts or even to the condition of vegetable life, or to rise to the heights, to become an angel, or even to ascend to the very summit to become one with God himself. A noble view of the creation, I’ve always thought. Well, Dow was one of the beasts. Whenever I think of Pico’s great chain of being, I see Dow groveling at the bottom of the ladder of human possibility.”
