The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  Reed, whether because of the indolence of the life, or their remarkable closeness, or the tender, wandering, searching quality of their conversation—whatever the reason, he listened to the theory about Max without his usual acerbic response to Kate’s high-flown speculations.

  “You’ve found the one thing we never come across in actual criminal cases,” he remarked. “A subtle motive. Worthy of all you literary types. And very nineteenth-century, protecting the story of one’s humble origins. If his books are half as high and mighty and laying down the law of proper values as you suggest, I do suppose he’d do anything to whitewash the record of his meager beginnings. It’s a triple blow: not only was he adopted, which is not so terrible a thought in this day and age, not only does he know he was illegitimate, which has ceased to be a legal and mostly social blight; he actually knows who Mama and Papa were, or at least the sort they were, and he doesn’t like it a bit. That is, if the letters suggest what you so happily assume they do.”

  “And what to do, Reed?”

  “There is only one thing to do, my darling Kate. Forget about it all. We couldn’t prove a thing, not possibly. Oh, no doubt with ardent and systematic questioning we might establish that he was in Maine and not in the classroom in New York as he has claimed and we have too lightly accepted. Perhaps, pursuing with equal ardor investigations in Maine, we might find someone who saw him at what is called the operative moment. It wouldn’t hold up before a grand jury for a moment, let alone in court. You’d never get an indictment. And you’d ruin a perfectly good career, incidentally.”

  “I was thinking of blackmail,” Kate said.

  “Were you indeed? There is no morality left anywhere in the world. I remember when that was the worst crime on the books, the most reprehensible, morally speaking. Fictional detectives refused to pursue blackmailers, saying, with a wave of their elegant hands, ‘Let justice be done; I will not interfere.’ ”

  “Let’s call it judicious blackmail.”

  “Let’s call it crime and forget about it.”

  “How can I forget about it, Reed? I know it’s old-fashioned and sentimental and altogether not ‘today’ to talk of restitution, or making it up to Gerry Marston, or anything like that. But I did say to Leo, we both did, that one should do what one could. Not that I have to tell anyone anything. One can also be honorable by oneself, in secret.”

  “Only if one is God, or thinks one is.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Kate watched as a cardinal flashed across from tree to bush, his brightness making him more of a gift, somehow, than the birds of less glorious color. Yet he seemed unaware of it, and treated his duller-colored mate with a gallantry that would have done justice to Max. “If one begins something, one must carry it through. One simply does what one has to do at the time. ‘I think that must have been what Krishna meant.’ No, I’m becoming gaga in my middle years. You are right, you are absolutely right. We will forget the whole thing. I only wish, in a way, that you had seen her body, and known her.”

  “All right,” Reed said as he took her in his arms. “Max has found his way here before. Let him find it again. We’ll drive into town after a while and make a telephone call.”

  In the end, it was quite late that night before they drove in and spoke to Max.

  Their invitation had been brief and unadorned with explanation, but he had accepted. The next day Max, the only visitor known to the cabin, once again made his way across the uncut meadow. This time he did not pause to search for a path. He had, Kate thought, understood and accepted all the conditions this time.

  They sat around the table, Kate and Reed having decided that this was, on the whole, the best place for their conversation. They might have sprawled outside on the uncut grass, but apart from the difficulty of imagining Max sprawling, a slightly more formal and even enclosed ambiance seemed called for. Since there were only two straight chairs, Kate and Max sat facing each other across the table, and between them Reed balanced on the window sill, fiddling with his pipe and making his presence somehow indefinite, as though he might, if called upon, emerge from his state of abstraction, but he rather hoped not.

  “You probably wonder why we’ve asked you to come,” Kate weakly began. She was hoping, by this tender lead, to get Max talking, to make him begin and spill it all out so that she, finally, could say, ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’ and get down to issues. But Max was far too experienced a duelist for that. Kate had long since discovered that the majority of humanity, of whatever age and degree of education or position, would, given half a chance, talk on about themselves with little or no prodding. But Max had an orderly mind, a disciplined personality, and not even middle age had trapped him into the need for self-revelation. He responded to Kate’s idiotic sally only with a nod, and she was forced to begin again. She was careful not to catch Reed’s eye.

  “I’ve been at Oxford for two weeks,” she said. “Most of Dorothy Whitmore’s papers are at Somerville, where your mother beqeathed them. But the letters that Whitmore wrote to Cecily Hutchins after she came to America remained, of course, in the house in Maine. I rather expected,” she lamely concluded, “that they would be among the Hutchins papers at the Wallingford.”

  “No doubt Cecily destroyed them,” Max said. “Isn’t that what you would have done in her place?”

  “No,” Kate said. “Not if I had determined to keep the lot for posterity. Cecily was far too intelligent, that’s obvious, to have been one of those people like Swinburne’s sister, who print all the innocuous parts of the letters and burn the rest. I think those letters were there. Max, and what’s more, I think you know it. What’s furthermore,” she said, trying without success to keep all emotion from her voice, “is that you destroyed them.”

  “Perhaps that is why Cecily made me her literary executor, so that I would destroy what I judged best destroyed.”

  “That isn’t what you said on the way to Maine, or in New York either. You said the point was to protect the materials from exploitation, but also, there was the implication, from destruction. You were more qualified because more literary and scholarly than her children.”

  “I agree. It was foolish of me to suggest otherwise. Besides, as an art historian I have a profound sense of the importance of preserving materials. Destroying evidence is counter to everything I believe in, even in times of discretion, like this one. Forgive me for being unable to resist parrying with you. What are you suggesting, Kate?”

  “I’m suggesting,” Kate began, feeling that control of the conversation had passed to Max, and she could not seem to regain mastery of it. But after all, she told herself, I hold the cards. He’s bluffing. He’s trying to find out what’s in my hand. “I’m suggesting that those letters existed, that, somehow, Gerry Marston found them, and that . . . that you were forced to recover them from her.”

  Max leaned across the table as though the point of an anecdote had at last been achieved, and he didn’t wish to miss the punch line.

  “And what,” he asked, reaching his hand, palm up, across the table almost in a gesture of supplication, “was in the letters Miss Geraldine Marston found?”

  “I know, what was in them, Max.”

  “Do you, Kate? Tell me.”

  “The truth about your less than perfectly refined antecedents,” she said, getting up and beginning to walk about the cabin. “The fact that your father was not the younger son of the younger son of a duke, but a non-commissioned nobody whom Whitmore had met in the war in France and gone on to love, or perhaps only to pity, in London, and you were the result. All the letters must have discussed what would become of you, what Whitmore would do. There may even have been letters later, when Whitmore knew she was dying, about whether she would recognize you in her will. In the end, of course, she didn’t. You had an identity and an inheritance. You were a Reston, absolutely, the younger son of a younger son of a younger son.”<
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  She turned then to look at Max and saw that Reed’s eyes were on him also. He sat back in his chair, perfectly still, as though objectively considering the likelihood of his having done murder. One could almost hear the fine mind working, the possibilities being weighed. He crossed one elegantly shod leg over the other and removed a cigarette case from inside his jacket; he made quite a business of lighting the cigarette and returning the case and lighter to his pocket. “I take it I need not ask permission to smoke,” he said, “since Reed has anticipated me. Would you care for a cigarette?” he asked Kate, again reaching for his case.

  “No, thank you,” Kate said. “I’ve sworn off, more’s the pity.” She hadn’t. She didn’t, she realized with astonishment, want to smoke one of Max’s cigarettes from that perfect case. There is such a thing as being too civilized. I would even be grateful, Kate thought, if his socks were in puddles around his ankles.

  “Tell me more about my parents,” he said. “Do, Kate. You can hardly ask me, to discuss such a matter unless you are willing to tell me what you know. They may have hung dukes with a silken rope, but they didn’t ask them to weave it themselves.”

  So once again Kate told the story. “I realize it is all supposition,” she added when she had finished. “But I think it is also capable of proof; I’m willing to try.”

  “And there is, I assume a price for your not trying. Forgive me for putting it so crudely.”

  “Not at all. It’s a crude business. Damn crude. And part of the price,” she harshly said, “is to tell me what happened.”

  “Ah, I was afraid of that. I didn’t kill her, you know. I’d heard from the old lady on the road, who was a friend of Cecily’s, that she’d seen the girl about. She didn’t get particularly close, and didn’t know it was a girl. That’s the result of your marvelous unisex world,” he added, “with no taste left in dressing and everyone in trousers.” It was the first return of his old supercilious manner. But he soon dropped back into a steady tone. “I flew to Boston one day after my class, and from Boston to a small airport near Cecily’s village. My supposed horror of flying has been exaggerated—by me. All done with cash and no need for names, or not real names. When I got there I took a taxi to town and hired a horse. It was past the tourist season, and they were glad enough to rent one for cash down. I always knew how to ride, and I had changed my clothes to those of a roughneck so that I might escape notice in, so to speak, my proper being. On a horse it was easy enough to investigate the roads until I found the right one. I asked directions only once or twice, of children returning from school. Even if they remembered the occasion, or if someone asked them, all they could have described was a man on horseback in work clothes and a cap.

  “Your Miss Marston was there when I arrived. Inside the house. She may have been a lovely student, my dear, but she was a housebreaker and a thief. God knows how long she’d been there. She’d found the important papers, all right, thanks to Cecily’s orderly file cabinets. You didn’t need an ABD or even a Ph.D. to find anything in Cecily’s file cabinets.

  “Picture it for yourself. She had discovered what no one must ever know. Only she knew it, so far. Even if I managed to refuse her publication of the papers, that knowledge would spread from her into the wide world; such knowledge always does. Of course, I didn’t appear upset to her. I asked her what she thought we should do about it. In the end we agreed to walk about the place and talk it over. I put before her the criminal aspects of her behavior, and she promised that she would mention the matter to no one. Promises are easy, but I have learned that only those trained in a stable culture know the value of a word, and of trust. I couldn’t think what to do, if you want to know. And then we came to the sea, and below us were the rocks. I suggested we climb on them—it’s very tempting, as you yourself demonstrated that day in Maine.”

  “Yes,” Kate said, “I’ve appreciated that. You suggested seeing the rocks, but I begged to clamber about on them, all by myself. You didn’t even have to suggest it.”

  “Don’t be bitter, my dear. It shows something wonderful about your spirit, and Miss Marston’s—though yours, I trust, would not lead to housebreaking and the reading of other people’s mail, at least outside of libraries. She slipped on the rock; she was wearing some quite unsuitable shoes, despite the trousers, and didn’t realize what rocks are like, or the seaweed between. She slipped and hit her head; she fell face down into one of the pools. Even then I wasn’t a murderer. I tried to raise her. But she was no mean weight, and I couldn’t get a foothold. In the end, I left her where she lay.”

  “And contrived to lead me there, like an idiot child, to find the body and recognize her. It is loathsome to be manipulated.”

  “That is not true. I did quite simply want your company on that trip. But you will never believe that. And now, I suppose, this is all to come out. All about the letters.”

  “Not,” Kate said, “if I can have the letters.”

  “I see. I’m to give you the blackmail weapons into your hands, and you promise not to use them.”

  “Exactly. Surely my antecedents are refined enough for you to believe that.”

  “I deserved that comment and bow before it. And what will you do with the letters when you get them?”

  “Add them to the Wallingford collection, sealed until some future date. No one will know your terrible secret until their knowing can no longer matter to you.”

  “And to how many people have you told this story?”

  “Only two; Reed, whose discretion you can and will have to rely on, and a woman friend whom I trust and whom you will have to trust also.”

  “I see. You didn’t, I’m to gather, confront brother Herbert with it?”

  “No, Max, I’ve been decent. My questions to Herbert were not exactly palpitating with propriety, but he certainly had no idea what I was after; I’m sure he put it all down to a rather heated and American interest in English cultural history. Probably he’s been in America long enough to know that most Americans ask personal questions as a matter of course.”

  She returned to the table and sat down again in her chair. “You know. Max, I made a trip to London especially to visit the Tate and look at Whitmore’s portrait, which I first saw that day in Maine. She was like a goddess, blond and strong and courageous. Fair, like you.”

  “Really, my dear; my father—that is, Reston—was fair also. The English run to fairness, you may have noticed.”

  “How often you must have seen that portrait. Max, when you visited Cecily as a boy from England, and in all the visits after. Did it never occur to you to be proud of her as a mother?”

  “Never. Even had I known she was my mother, which, you must remember, I didn’t. Not till I saw those letters that day with your Miss Marston did I know. I never even suspected. And if I had, I would have banished the thought as absolutely as possible. Who would want for a mother, however goddesslike, a feminist, a freethinker, a socialist, and a pacifist? It’s everything I loathe. Nor am I reconstructed when it comes to women. I like them to be ladies, wives, and mothers, or at worst, eccentric and appealing old maids. If they write novels, as Cecily did, they should do it when their womanly duties have been fulfilled. It is better still if they do not write novels, as my mother, the woman I think of as my mother, did not. She merely spoke exquisite French and made her husband and children marvelously happy.”

  “It must have been a shock,” Kate said, playing for time. She looked up at Reed, but he evidently did not consider she was in need of rescue. He continued in his role of silent witness.

  “No more than this is,” Max said. “All right, Kate. You hold all the cards. Suppose I promise you those letters in a few weeks—they’ve been put away, and I simply can’t get off to fetch them much sooner, though I will try—and leave them to be preserved and sealed off by you. Have I your word and Reed’s, that no more will be heard of all this, ever again, no mat
ter what turns up?”

  “Why should it be I who give my word? I hold the cards, remember?”

  “Because I am here, instead of receiving a visit from the District Attorney’s office. Or would it be from the office of the chief investigator of Maine, whatever his title? Need we take it all one step at a time? You want the letters for posterity, though I don’t think this is a necessary way to get them. I want to know I will never be accused of murder. Is there some more complicated way to put it?”

  “Well,” Kate said, aware that she had not made a very good showing from beginning to end in this confrontation, “let’s leave it at that, then. I’ll arrange with Mr. Sparrow to deposit with him the sealed letters. Nor shall I approach you again for further payments. Mine is a one time blackmail only.”

  “No doubt many blackmailers have said that.”

  “No doubt. But I am unique. You will have to believe that, if you are to believe anything.”

  “So you are, Kate. So you are. You have my word the letters will be in your hands in a day or two. I have yours that they will be in no one else’s while I live.”

  “Agreed,” Kate said. But she did not accept his proffered hand. Slowly he withdrew it, flushing, and walked out, across the uncut meadow to his waiting car and chauffeur.

  “And what,” Kate said to Reed, “will he do now? Suppose he just destroys the letters and denies the whole thing? What’s become of my evidence?”