In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “None of the above. I give up. What’s the answer?”

  “Beats me. All I know is mine, which is pathetically simplistic. Balance the scales best as you can, but not with more of the same. Bring the one who unbalanced them to justice, then go home, play good music, drink good wine, be kind to the kitty, and try to readjust the imbalance by adding to the world supply of love, instead of hate.”

  “Somehow, I think I’m being led back to that unfulfilled fantasy of yours.”

  “Now that you mention it, wasn’t there somethin’ about Johns Hopkins makin’ a university out of two people sittin’ on a log and talkin’? A great schoolteacher can make a classroom out of anyplace she finds herself willing to teach,” he said solemnly.

  “Right now, she finds herself in a quandary.”

  “A great schoolteacher could make a classroom of a quandary, too. Or a foundry or a laundry or—”

  “A quarry? A…?”

  “Tannery?”

  “That doesn’t work, poet-man. Breaks the meter. A great schoolteacher wouldn’t dare do that.” I felt as sexy as lint. But Mackenzie deserved points for getting me to think, at least for a moment, about something besides the world’s rottenness. Along the way, I even remembered how to drive.

  *

  I had given the police Woody’s last name. I had his phone number home in my roll book, so I’d told them how to reach Maurice Havermeyer, who could actually extract information from Helga. At least, he was authorized to do so, and I thought she might let him.

  “We should be at the hospital,” I said once we were in my house.

  “It’d be intrusive on his parents,” Mackenzie said. “They need privacy at a time like this.”

  “His father,” I said. “I don’t think his mother’s alive, or at least not around.” His father existed, I knew, because it was he who would have killed him for being with April. I had no idea how close or estranged father and son had been, but I hoped Woody had communicated something of what he feared to someone. “Maybe we should call the hospital.”

  “How ’bout we give them a few minutes to reach a decision about his condition before we ask them for it?” he said mildly.

  Macavity rubbed my ankle. He considered our return a bonus day, necessitating another feeding. I let him purr and seduce me for a while—made the kitty foreplay last, as it were, then I gave in. “Only a snack,” I told the cat.

  “Machine’s blinkin’,” Mackenzie said while I pulled back the tab on a can of food. “Want to play your messages back?”

  “I have no secrets. Go ahead.”

  I was immediately sorry. I should have secrets, and one of them should be my mother. There was her voice, still heavy on the Philadelphia accent despite years in Florida. Her “A-man-da” has a metallic edge like no other’s. Luckily.

  “Amanda,” she said, “I was hoping to catch you, but maybe you’re out at one of your meetings?” Overlong pause while she must have wondered whether she was happy or upset about my not being there if it meant I was following her advice.

  I wished I had listened. An AA meeting surely beat finding a student nailed up in the gym.

  “Well,” she said, “when you have a chance, let me know how the meetings—how you are. I certainly hope you’re more comfortable than we’ve been. The air-conditioning conked out yesterday, and I could just about breathe. But it’s back on again, thank heavens.”

  Macavity purred like a buzz saw and wrapped himself around my ankle. I reluctantly put a portion of the can in his dish, and with one grateful look for getting what he wanted—wham, bam, he was through with me, just another conquest, like Mom had warned.

  “I spoke with your sister,” she went on. I’d have to change my machine so that it cut people off sooner.

  “Baby Alexander has two new teeth. Oh, and how could I forget? Daddy hit a hole in one yesterday. It’s made him impossible to live with. The phone didn’t stop ringing last night. I thought maybe we hadn’t heard from you because you were trying to call during all those congratulatory calls.”

  I wondered why my mother pushed marriage so resolutely when she made it sound excruciatingly dull. “She makes me want to drink. Maybe that’s part of her plan to get me to AA,” I said when her message finally ended. Mackenzie nodded, and I poured us both wine. I would have poured something stronger if I’d had it in the house. I was functioning on the surface, but when I lifted my wineglass, my hand shook.

  “Any theories?” Mackenzie asked.

  I shook my head. I was beyond exhaustion, and I still had to go through the day’s papers so that I could coherently continue the lessons tomorrow. I unsnapped my briefcase and dumped its contents onto the kitchen counter, then stared at it blankly. I couldn’t. Simply could not do another thing that involved thought.

  “What about that Lowell person—the one that left the building just before we got there?” Mackenzie said.

  I was ready to object—he was such a nerd, such a noodle—but on second thought, Lowell with his conspiracy theories, with evil under every stone… Lowell, who protested too much…

  “He didn’t turn around when I called. Odd time to be leaving school, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe he’d had an assignation with his very own Mrs. Taubman up in his classroom.”

  “An’ there was that woman complained about the lights.”

  “That was hours earlier.”

  “Door wasn’t locked when we arrived, how do you know where anybody was in between? Includin’ your friend Flora and her doggie.”

  I shook my head. “It’s physically impossible. No one person could have held somebody as big as Woody down, or up, and done that to him at the same time. Certainly not Aldis, Flora, or Lowell.”

  “Any of ’em could give directions,” he said softly. “Be part of a group.”

  “I don’t think Flora—” But I did think. I thought about Flora’s grim determination to not take anything from anybody anymore. I thought about her having been in the basement this afternoon when the vandals hit my car and me. Had I been a diversionary tactic? Was it possible that she’d determined that Woody had been the one to trash her room or terrorize her at home, and she’d arranged revenge?

  And I thought about Aldis, who reminded me of central casting’s concentration camp guard, female variety. Aldis, with her rigid assurance that whatever she believed was a truism. Had she felt the need to teach Woody a lesson? Punish him?

  But why? Why him? For what?

  Why any of it? The past weeks had been like an experiment in disorientation. One thing happens, and just as you adjust to it and prepare against its recurrence, another, completely different but not unrelated event takes its place, until the subject loses her handle on reality.

  “These things have to be connected,” I said. “Vandalism, nasty phone calls, cryptic notes, the mud, the paint, Woody. All ugly. And April, somehow, because she connects to Woody. And maybe even Vo Van, because he connects to April. And out of school—the cemetery and the church. And things I don’t even know about that have the same mean spirit behind them.” I felt as if I’d seen the ends of a creature, the tips of its tentacles only, but the creature itself was hidden, unknowable.

  Despite everything, I had to teach again the next day, and had to get myself at least somewhat organized. I sorted through papers, separating must-do’s from should-do’s from who-cares-if-I-ever-do’s. I had been derailed by the yellow warning note this morning and had never finished going through my mail. I passed the threatening note to Mackenzie. “Maybe it’s students who did that to Woody. Who are doing everything. I hate to think about Miles, but all the same, he seems to know more than he’s saying… This came in my mail this morning. I forgot, after the spray paint. Meant to show you then. The letters were cut out of old school newspapers.”

  He sighed. “I don’ like this.”

  “I’m not overfond of it, either.”

  “You’ll give it to the police?”

  “I just did.”


  “I wish…”

  “I know.” He wished I’d confine my interests to academics and pedagogy and him. He wished I’d make my life—and by extension, his—easier.

  He knew that I knew. No need to spell things out. No need to explain that I had no more desire to box in my curiosity, ethics, or intelligence than he did.

  I thumbed through the day’s flyers, nervous, but sure that one piece of hate mail per daily delivery sufficed. And it seemed to have. I found one of Helga’s incessant memos, this one entitled “Official Grade Entry Methodology and Spitting Regulations.” There was notice of a fire drill scheduled for the next afternoon. I wondered if it would be canceled as redundant, thanks to me. Notice also of a woman’s sports watch that had been found in the girls’ room. A glossy ad from an encyclopedia that was now available on CD-ROM. “Hey,” I asked. “Have any relatives named Rom?”

  “Got a Ron and a Rhonda. Wait—there’s a Romulus somewhere.”

  “This is a last name.”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, there’s a C.D. Rom here, I thought might be related. Named after the same C, perhaps.”

  “I will not honor that with even a groan.”

  I tossed an announcement of a glorious, new, fully illustrated nonsexist collection of scientific essays I assumed had been put into my mailbox by mistake. A gobbledygook notice from Havermeyer about “maximal” security efforts being implemented in response to the lamentable “defacing” and—I nearly choked—“desanitization” of the computer room and the consequent “non-operational condition” of valuable school equipment. He also earnestly requested “immediate notification” by staff at the first sign of further “vandalistic impulses.” His notices made me want to chain him to a heating pipe until he swore to foresake all words of more than one syllable.

  And what were those maximal security efforts, anyway? On the day the gibberish went out, my car and I were spray-painted, and a few hours later the school’s back lights were systematically smashed and the door left unlocked. And there was surely no evidence or sense of security in that gym. Havermeyer couldn’t distinguish between larded-with-jargon promises and reality.

  And that was it, except for another paper folded in thirds. I swallowed hard. It wasn’t yellow or stapled, but it still produced an extra pulse beat or two. I forced myself to open it.

  It was laughably unthreatening. A quote from Shakespeare, printed in Gothic letters. Somebody had a splendid graphics program.

  “O Woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!

  Most lamentable day! most woeful day,

  That ever, ever, I did yet behold!

  O day! O day! O day! O hateful day!

  Never was seen so black a day as this:

  O woeful day, O woeful day!”

  I passed this page, too, to Mackenzie.

  “This about what happened to Woody?” he asked.

  “What else could it be?”

  “Should be ‘O woeful evening.’ Or woeful night.”

  “Guess Will Shakespeare didn’t plan ahead for all possible woe schedulings.” I shook my head and got my brains closer in place. “But it was in my cubby this morning.”

  “How come you didn’t mention it?”

  “I didn’t read it till now.” I felt chilled. “Oh, God, was this a warning of what was going to happen?” A competent teacher—an Aldis sort of woman—would have read all her notices immediately, no matter what threat was tossed in with them.

  Mackenzie shrugged. “If it was meant as a warning, then it was a singularly stupid one, like somebody wagging a finger and saying ‘something bad’ll happen at some point.’ Like the daily horoscope. ‘Don’ do anything stupid today.’ Big deal. It’s too vague to mean anythin’.”

  I excused myself for a quick run up to the third floor, site of my home office, attic storage, guest room, and library. All of which were contained in one small sloped-ceilinged room. The air conditioner wasn’t on up here, and the cubicle throbbed with heat. I grabbed the paperback edition of Romeo and Juliet from the corner of my desk and descended to the living room’s relative comfort.

  “Are there opposing groups at your school? Members of rival gangs?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve noticed that the black and white kids don’t hang out together this summer, but that doesn’t mean all that much.” Maybe they just plain didn’t like each other.

  “How about Woody?” Mackenzie asked. “Does he have black friends?”

  I shrugged. “I never saw him with X or Lawrence or Warwick, all of whom are in his class. But I never noticed any particular tension between them, either. And all of that means less than nothing. There are obviously lots of things I never saw or suspected.”

  “I can’t figure who would have done that to the kid. In the school, too, like a taunt, but for what purpose?” Mackenzie said.

  I thumbed through the play looking for the event that had triggered those “woe is me’s.” A tragedy, it was chockablock full of woe producers. Mercutio’s death? Tybalt’s death? Romeo’s banishment? Ah… Juliet’s supposed death.

  The cat, having eaten excessively, now resolutely ignored me and switched to his cop-groupie self, sidling up to and draping himself over Mackenzie’s neck like a feline boa. I am not such a petty soul that I could be jealous of where a cat placed his no-good wandering sluttish affections, even though I am the one who feeds him and performs his unaesthetic custodial services. The only thing I can figure is that the Macavitys and the Mackenzies go way back, maybe even share a tartan in the Old Country.

  Besides, I had found the quote. “The nurse,” I said. “She’s the one with all the woes are me.”

  “So what? What’s it mean? That we should wring our hands and gnash our teeth?”

  “The nurse is carrying on because she found Juliet dead.”

  Mackenzie raised a single eyebrow. “That’s less than astoundin’. Most folk would express similar sentiments when findin’ a dead girl, particly one in her charge.”

  “That word is supposed to have five syllables. There’s no such word as partic-ly.”

  “All the same, what is particularly remarkable about that quote?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not the one who printed this out. Only there’s all this lamentation—and Juliet isn’t really dead at this point.” The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that had to be the message. “Juliet isn’t dead. The young girl isn’t dead. The charge isn’t dead, she just seems that way.” I stood up and paced my small first floor, sure with each step that a solid idea was only one more step away, which meant I circled my downstairs a dozen times before I said, “It’s about April.”

  “It’s about Juliet. How are you making the leap?”

  “Of all the quotes in the play, it’s one of the least memorable, so why put it in my mailbox? It has to be a message, and in context, it must be saying that our girl isn’t in the trouble she appears to be.”

  “Be careful. It says, ‘Oh, woe is me,’ and you’re sayin’ all the rest.”

  “No, no, I’m sure. Somebody who’s afraid to speak up directly is trying to tell me something.”

  “Woody?”

  “I don’t think so. Not this message. He’s sure she’s dead and he’s somehow to blame for it.”

  “Then what are you sayin’? That April’s alive and she nailed Woody up?”

  I sat back down. The cat blinked at me warily from around Mackenzie’s neck. “April didn’t hurt Woody. Of course not. But she talked an awful lot about whether Juliet had done the right thing by deceiving her parents. She seemed intensely, personally, involved in Juliet’s story because it obviously paralleled her life. Woody told me his father would kill him for consorting with a Vietnamese, and that her parents—her brother, actually, and Vanny, like Tybalt in the play, her kin in this sense, were just as rabid about her being with a white boy. In the play, Tybalt is so enraged by Romeo’s being with Juliet that he fights with Romeo’s friend and kills h
im, and then Romeo kills Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, in return and sets off the whole chain of events.”

  He put a hand up, like a traffic cop at an intersection. “Are you saying that Romeo Woody shot Tybalt Vanny? You’re gettin’ carried away with the analogy. Who are you in all this? The nurse?”

  “I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation with each plot turn, but…” I was still working through the possible meaning of the note, but no matter how I twisted or detoured, I kept falling into potholes.

  “But what?” Mackenzie finally said.

  “What if April Truong wasn’t kidnapped, just the way Juliet wasn’t really poisoned? What if the bad thing that supposedly happened to her just plain didn’t? What if she planned it as a deliberate attempt to get herself away, and if she’s Juliet, then it had to do with Romeo—Woody—and saving the two of them.”

  “Whoa! We’ve leaped from Shakespeare to Woody. Why ascribe so much to that quote? For that matter, why do people keep sendin’ you cryptic poems?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That test? The thing with April’s name at the end?”

  I stopped all pacing and stared. “You’re right. It ended with her name.”

  “You’re maybe missin’ the point of what I’m sayin’.”

  “He said to look at the part that wasn’t about April.” I excused myself again. Up to the desk where my copy of Miles’s paper still awaited a decision as to grade. I read it again, and realized I’d been right. Slow, but right. I ran downstairs and slapped it down in front of Mackenzie. The cat deigned to leave his love’s shoulder in order to sit on the poem, but we gentled him off.

  “Okay,” Mackenzie said. “What?”

  “Look at the initials at the beginning. All the initials.”

  Who’s supposed to say whether present guilt lies with