The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  “That is the sickening aspect of this whole affair, if you’ll permit me to ignore the reference to bean balls, which sounds exclusive and athletic. The criminal mind at its simplest and best, but now shared by everyone. Since my cause is right—whatever it may be, anything from the presidency of the United States to a business deal or the pressure that makes it excusable to go through a red light—whatever my cause, my disdain for the law is justified. Disdain for the law on the part of others, nonetheless, is an insult to America and must be prevented.” Reed swung back to face the piano, and began to accompany himself: “The words you are speaking you were speaking then, but I can’t remember where or when.”

  “Ricardo does have a point, however. He says if a Kennedy can get into Harvard because he’s a Kennedy, and some other moron because his father gave the money for the new hockey rink, why shouldn’t he use what pull he has, meaning Finlay taking the tests for him?”

  “I’m surprised at you, Kate. We are none of us born equal, however created. There is a difference between using the advantages one has because of one’s birth, and cheating to get honors one does not deserve by any standard. After all, even the Kennedys have paid, and continue to pay, a pretty stiff price for all their advantages. So does the rich kid whose father built the hockey rink. One might as well say Leo shouldn’t have got into college because he did well on the verbal SAT through living with a glib aunt of large and distinguished vocabulary. Anyway, I gather the Ricardo boy is very smooth—cool is Leo’s word—which doesn’t sound as though he’s particularly concerned with social justice as a principle.”

  “Do you think it possible the Ricardo boy could be at all like Max? Or do I mean Finlay? After all, neither is any real relation. Max called me today about the St. Anthony’s drama, by the way, so my two problems are merging. The dead girl who was honorable, and the live boy who was not.”

  “My advice,” Reed said, “is to have a nightcap, and try to concentrate on England, not on puzzles. Think of Phyllis, for a short time able to enjoy your company, no longer doomed to stroll alone and aimlessly down the High, or is it up?”

  Kate promised to think about England as ordered.

  The promise was more easily kept the next day, when she found on her desk a letter from Crackthorne.

  “Extraordinary to report,” he wrote, “I miss the basketball games and our lively, if unaudible, conversations. I am, however, writing you for selfish and grasping reasons which must not be camouflaged by sighs of regret. Rumor hath it that the Wallingford has the Cecily Hutchins papers, and that you are as near as any female can be to membership in that august body. Is there any chance that a mere dissertation writer, however given to male athletics, might have a look? She might have mentioned or corresponded with some of my chaps. I mean, there they all were, and maybe some who returned from or lived through the war spoke to her or, delicious hope, wrote to her.”

  Ah, Kate thought, two can play at this game. She dashed off a note to Crackthorne asking him to notice if Hutchins, Whitmore, or any of that generation of women turned up in the course of his research. She pleased herself considerably by announcing to him that she would be in Oxford one week hence, and giving him her address should he have learned anything worth communicating.

  She then opened her door to announce to those waiting outside the commencement of her office hour. It annoyed Kate to discover, sometime later, how to heart she had taken Reed’s advice to think about England, and all its ramifications. Especially its ramifications. Kate usually enjoyed her office hours, but today her thoughts kept slipping away to the Wallingford, and she would recall herself from a reverie to find she had missed at least two rambling paragraphs of a student’s problems. Eventually Kate gave it up and put in a call to Sparrow, begging to be allowed to come down for another look.

  “I won’t make a habit of it and take advantage of your generosity,” she promised. “But it turns out I shall soon be going to England, and I want to make some sense of it all. I suspect I merely want to commune,” she weakly concluded. The fact is, she told herself in a taxi on the way east, I envy Max. I would like to write the biography. My motives are impure to a degree. Drag the disgraceful fact out into the open and face it, Kate Fansler. However good Max may be, a woman ought to write that biography. A thoroughly sexist remark, she concluded, paying off the driver and greeting the dignified doorman as to the manner born.

  “We haven’t got a bit further with sorting,” Sparrow said, as they faced the boxes. “But commune away. When you’ve finished, root me out and let’s have a sherry—after the official closing, that is. You will put everything back?”

  “I’ll be good,” Kate said. “Trust me.” And indeed, he was good, too. She felt, however, a bit sneaky at not having rung up Max to say she was coming. Well, Cecily, she thought, here we are. What remains of a life?

  What chiefly remained stood between bookends on a table in the center of the room. Cecily’s books, the first edition of each bought by the Wallingford as part of the “papers.” There were twenty of them, a goodly number considering the care with which she wrote. She remembered Max long ago remarking of some extremely popular woman writer that she wrote more novels in a year than he read. Still, it was amazing what even so careful an artist as Cecily could produce by working steadily for a few hours every day. Kate turned resolutely from the novels. It had occurred to her during the night that the Bodleian was a depository, which meant that a copy of every book published in England was placed there. Since the library was noncirculating, it supposedly remained there, unlike the books in the library of Kate’s university, which circulated so steadily in ever-widening circles that one’s chances of finding any given book were fifty-fifty at best. Sitting in the Bodleian, between bouts of reviving Phyllis and the nostalgic rediscovery of the Oxford scene, she could read her way through the entire canon of Cecily and of Dorothy Whitmore if it came to that.

  Was there anything rational to be expected of the papers at this point? The boxes were marked with their contents, and one box was labeled “Unclassified.” These, Kate discovered, were the papers actually on Cecily’s desk at the time of her death, including, oddly enough, unopened letters. Supposedly these had accumulated at the post office during her absence in England, and had been returned to the house after her death. How odd, however, that they had not been opened. Suppose they had required an answer? But looking through them, Kate saw they were all personal letters from correspondents known or unknown; the bills and other business matters had been dealt with by the lawyer or the children. These, supposed to be literary, had, she gathered, been left for Max. Kate picked them up and shuffled through them idly; then she stopped. There was a letter from Gerry Marston. Typed, in a long white envelope, with Gerry’s return address (her room at the university) in the upper left-hand corner. The postmark was hard to read, the date unclear, as was more and more likely these days.

  Kate boldly carried the letter in to Sparrow. “I suppose there is no chance that we can open this?”

  Sparrow stared at it. “Yes,” he said. “I take it that is your student, whom Max mentioned died in Maine. Odd no one noticed it before now.”

  “No doubt it was shuffled in with all the other letters that looked as though they came from readers, individuals rather than firms.”

  “Well,” Sparrow said, “it does belong to the Wallingford. Still . . . what do you say if I call Max and ask if we can open it?”

  “A brilliant suggestion, if only he is there.”

  He was there. Apparently he was murmuring his apologies for leaving the letters this long, and said that of course Kate might open it. So Sparrow reported. Taking a long letter opener, he slit the envelope neatly across the top, drew out the typewritten sheet, and handed it to Kate. She, responding to his courtesy, read it aloud:

  “ ‘Dear Miss Hutchins: Thank you for your kind and prompt reply. I am disappointed to hear that you have nothing of
great importance in connection with my work on Dorothy Whitmore, but I am excited to hear of the portrait. You are kind to invite me to visit you and see it when you return from England, and I look forward greatly to hearing from you then. Thank you also for saying you will make a search for anything you might have on Whitmore, even if you are so certain there is nothing. Sincerely yours,’ and it’s signed ‘Geraldine Marston.’ ”

  “But supposedly she decided not to wait for Cecily’s return and went in for a little housebreaking?” Sparrow said, after a pause.

  “It must have been almost maddening to have to sit on her hands and do nothing. I doubt she went in for housebreaking. She probably decided it would do no harm to survey the landscape, so to speak, and the landscape unfortunately included those rocks. I don’t suppose I could make a copy of this letter?”

  “Of course no copy can be made,” Sparrow sternly said. “Those are the terms of the purchase. What you need,” he added, “is a glass of sherry. Excuse me while I get it.” And he walked from the room, stopping as he went to tap his fingers on some machine near the door. Some machine. It was—by God, it was a copying machine. Kate was used to them; who, in these benighted times, was not? They were almost as ubiquitous as the internal combustion engine. Within seconds Kate had a copy of the letter in her purse, the original was back on Sparrow’s desk, and she was staring vaguely from the window when he returned. Sparrow poured the sherry.

  “To your trip,” he said, raising his glass. “I envy you.”

  Chapter Nine

  An English writer, himself a graduate of Cambridge, remarked years ago in his autobiography that “every Oxonian has at least one book about Oxford inside him, and generally gets it out.” Nobody who has been to Cambridge, he claimed, feels compelled to write about it. This generally, while untrue, had, like so many generalities, enough truth about it to make it stick. Certainly Kate, standing in front of the Martyrs Memorial, was inclined to credit the assertion. Oxford seemed less her own memories than those of all the famous or merely accomplished people whose accounts of their time here, by themselves or others, she had read. (Not to mention the re-creations in fiction by those who had been unable to forget the dreaming spires.) Kate had, in her day, punted on the Cam, walked along the banks at Cambridge, and indulged, not always religiously, in reverence in Kings College Chapel. Certainly Cambridge’s beauty was great. But for her Oxford was the hub of the scholar’s universe, not least because, an industrial city, it was a place of secrets. Each of the colleges had courts and gardens unfolding, one from the other, known only to the initiated and often open only to the invited. Kate wondered what life in an American university would be like if each group of faculty had a beautiful “fellows” garden in which to converse and behold nature in the form of a carefully tended flower bed and an ancient tree. But if the flowers in the college gardens grew more beautifully than ever, the buildings and traffic beyond prevented any sense that Oxford was in a state of static preservation. Blackwell’s shipping building on Parkend Street, however ancient their store across from the Sheldonian, was all glass and air conditioning and looked as though it had been designed for downtown Detroit. At least, Kate comforted herself, enough sense had prevailed to prevent tall buildings; the spires still dominated the sky, including the atrocious one in Nuffield, built in 1958 to house a library, with no sense of either fitness or discretion.

  Kate walked round to retrieve her just-rented bicycle from the rack behind the monument. She had brought her detestation of the motorcar with her into a city likely to be choked by automobiles; she planned to pedal around Oxford in what she hoped was a properly eccentric manner. Kate, bearing to the left, signaled her intention to turn into St. Giles, thence into the Woodstock Road and past the entrance to Somerville, where Cecily and Dorothy Whitmore and Max’s mother were soon to begin their new friendship.

  In fact, Kate’s research had extended far enough* for her to know that in 1918 Somervillians were still being housed in the St. Mary Hall Quadrangle of Oriel College, the usual male inhabitants of these sacred precincts having gone to be slaughtered at Ypres and Neuve Chapelle. Somerville College, next to the Radcliffe Infirmary, had been commandeered for conversion into a military hospital, while, at St. Mary Hall, the connecting hall between the men’s living quarters and the women’s had been bricked up. According to Oxford legend, some intrepid souls from either side (or both) had removed the bricks, and until they could be replaced, the Principal of Somerville guarded her side of the gap, the Provost of Oriel his.

  Kate passed Somerville, not without a soulful look, which nearly cost her dearly as some truck lurched out from the Radcliffe Infirmary. By the time Somerville was again a college, in 1919, Whitmore and Hutchins were in their second year. Whitmore, who had served two years with the British Army, was the older. Pondering on this, Kate passed the Observatory, neatly missed turning down into Observatory Street—Phyllis had been very explicit about this—passed the small block of stores on the Woodstock Road—Kate ticked them off in her mind: a drugstore (chemists to the residents), a cleaners, a grocery, a shop that sold postcards and the like—and turned left into St. Bernard’s Road. Phyllis’s house was on the left, about a third of the way down, recognizable, Phyllis had said, by having the only uncut grass, front and back, on the street. “One is very frowned upon.” Kate set her bicycle against the railings, and locked it to them with the chain provided by the bicycle people. Had one always needed to lock bicycles in Oxford? She rang the bell.

  “What you need,” Phyllis said, “is a drink. Welcome to the shabbiest living room in Oxford, and that’s saying a good deal. No, don’t sit on that couch, you will sink through to the floor and end up in the lotus position. Whenever I look at that couch, I am reminded of that bit from Private Lives where the current wife announces that she is so shocked at Elyot’s running off with Amanda that she feels as though slimy things had been crawling all over her, and Elyot says: ‘Maybe they have, that’s a very old sofa.’ That chair is ugly, commodious, and surprisingly comfortable. Kate, I don’t remember when I’ve been so glad to see anyone. Now I shall stop burbling on and say how are you? How are you? Scotch all right? We have a refrigerator designed to hold one orchid for one social butterfly; there’s room for little else. But in joy at the thought of your arrival, I have managed the production of two ice cubes. After the first drink, you can sip your whisky warm, in the way that built and lost the empire. I’ll be right back. The kitchen, needless to say, is down a flight of steep stairs, which debouch directly into the privy.”

  Kate, happily sunk into the ugly and commodious chair, thought that if one could not have been at Oxford in 1920 with Whitmore for a friend, one was fairly lucky to be there over half a century later with Phyllis for a friend. Even in such a room as this. For its shabbiness was indeed of a magnificent degree, as though thousands of Leos had flung themselves against the springs and wiped their feet upon the slipcovers. Filling the fireplace was a gas heater whose efficiency must have been great to compensate for such atrocity of appearance. In the corner stood a television set. On the floor was a rag whose reason for existence must have been warmth; it could not have been aesthetic. Yet, Kate happily thought, it was a marvelous room for conversation, for its only furniture were two overstuffed couches and two overstuffed chairs, and one dim standing lamp in the corner. Since Phyllis was not poor, the house must have been chosen for reasons having nothing to do with its furniture.

  Her joy at Kate’s arrival in Oxford had been touching, however expected. Phyllis had once, she had told Kate on the phone, read a book by an American wife of a visiting professor to Oxford entitled These Ruins Are Inhabited, and, she had said, if the title hadn’t been used she would be prepared to write the book herself. Since she shared Kate’s besotted Anglophilia, they were, so to speak, ripe for the exchange of impressions.

  “Dieu que la vie est quotidienne,” Phyllis remarked, returning with two stiff drinks, one with ice. �
��Laforgue would have known what of he spoke if he’d ever been in Oxford in term time while unconnected with any aspect of the university. You can’t imagine. One trots to a series of little stores for one’s food, bread here, meat there, salad in a third place, everyone as pleasant as can be, of course, that’s what makes it possible, the English shopkeepers are so pleasant, not like those in New York, who seem to conclude you’ve entered the store for the express purpose of being insulted. Still, it does wear. Sometimes I go down to the Oxford market and wait on long, serpentine lines at Palme’s for really good cheese and bread, but mostly I go to Marks and Spencer and buy prepared shepherd’s pie. Hugh grumbles a bit, but he’s always being invited out to elegant meals in hall somewhere, and even he admits no one less domestic than a Victorian cook could function in that kitchen. The height of my week is the visit to the laundromat. One goes either at night, when one meets undergraduates, or during the day, when one meets the wives of young dons. The company is better at night. Those wives. I can’t imagine how England ever assimilated Germaine Greer; I’ve never seen a place where women are such slaves. Of course, the American wives who visit are little better; look at me. Well, you, dear Kate, are a marvelous change. You will, I know, be infinitely relieved to learn that I am taking you out to dinner. Now, what is this old history you’re digging up, and why, and how is Reed?”

  “Reed is fine. The other questions will take a little longer, and a bit more whisky. Phyllis, how in the world did you manage to acquire this extraordinary house?”

  Phyllis chuckled. “I respond like the Vassar girl who was asked how she ended up a prostitute: pure luck. It’s the bathrooms that did it, plus the incredible shortage of housing in Oxford in term time. Hugh, it goes without saying, didn’t make up his mind to spend a year at the Clarendon until we were practically on our way to the airport, and this came up for rent suddenly. Someone must have collapsed at simple contemplation of all the stairs. All knew about it was that it had three Johns and two bathrooms. The other house we might have had had a privy on the bottom floor minus one, so to speak, a bathroom-minus-privy on the third floor, and one slept, fitfully I’m sure, on the top. I’m just American enough to be unable to do without a bathroom to myself, though, as you can see, I do without most other amenities. I think the lady who owns this intended originally to have flats, which is why so many bathrooms. The English, I’ve decided, go in the morning when they get up and never again. You wouldn’t expect it with all that tea, but no doubt their bladders are trained from birth. Also, there’s a fairly good heating system, which is to say a glassful of water will not actually turn to ice if left in here overnight, and there’s plenty of hot water, which is grand, until one discovers that it’s produced by some incredible submersion heater that works with the noise of a jet engine and costs the earth to run. We’ve four floors, two rooms on a floor, which is convenient if one has guests; one can isolate them in layers. Hugh says it’s a vertical ranch house. Since I can’t resist the marvelous English beer in the marvelous pubs, it’s nice to know I take it all off puffing up stairs all day. And that’s why I’m here. Actually, this is a sort of interstitial street: dons began to live here when dons could marry, at the Woodstock end, that is. The working class lives at the Walton end. The new construction is housing for St. John’s, so no doubt St. Bernard’s Road is coming up in the world. Now, your turn. Produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.”