The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  “Herbert,” Max went on, “was overcome with some impulse of fraternal feeling the other day. Perhaps you inspired it. We had dinner together at my club. He said how much he had enjoyed meeting you in Oxford, and how he had talked to you lately on the telephone. Oh, he didn’t tell me your questions, Herbert is too discreet for that, but it was clear enough you had not relented in your feverish interest in my birth. This seemed to indicate you’d got hold of some further information you wanted to ratify. Am I wrong?”

  “No. Quite right. Have you come, Max, because it gives you pleasure to dote on what a fool I’ve been, and how easily you manipulated me? I gave you every opportunity, of course. You couldn’t have managed any of it without my eager help. I’ve tried to think where I first went astray. It was the portrait. That portrait made Whitmore so much more central, even in that house, than Cecily, who had died and removed the spirit. Do you think that’s it?”

  “No doubt.”

  “And after that I served all your purposes, from the identification of the body to the discovery of what I thought to be your mean and sinister motive.”

  “But it was all so complete, Kate. You had your letters, it was all so neat and finished off, with binding all around the edges. How did it happen to unravel?”

  “Why should I tell you? My fatal desire to tell stories has done damage enough.”

  “Let’s say because this will be the last one you ever tell.”

  Kate looked at Max. He had lit another cigarette, but barely sipped his tea. Was he noticeably less controlled? She must, at any rate, keep talking. She drew a cigarette from her pocket. “I won’t light it yet,” she said, as Max rose to his feet. “I’m still trying to give it up, as I told you last time.” She held the pack of matches in her hand, playing with it.

  “A while ago,” she said, “just after you’d given me the letters, a student came to see me. At home. I often see my dissertation students in the summer if I’m around; it’s hard to deny them any consultation all during that time. Anyway, this young woman was one of those still searching around for a dissertation topic. She wasn’t anyone I had uppermost in my mind then. One tends to focus one’s attention on the students in one’s classes or preparing before one’s eyes for a crisis—an exam or essay.” Kate wove her story on, aware of the necessity of talking, of going on talking.

  “She had come to see me with her mind made up about a topic she wanted to propose. ‘I want to write on Dorothy Whitmore,’ she said. I expect I must have grimaced because she asked me if I had some objection to the topic. ‘None that is important,’ I said. ‘No doubt I shy away from the subject because Gerry Marston was working on it.’ She and Gerry had been together in a seminar of mine. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Gerry was writing on Cecily Hutchins. She’d gone absolutely clunkers about her. Always had adored that sort of crisp novel, but when she came upon Hutchins, she just raced through everything from start to finish. It was Gerry, though, who put me on to Whitmore at first. Whitmore was much more my style. Not so much upper-class attitudes and wit and the right wine with everything.’

  “I laughed, naturally, in that superior and maddening way professors have, and said I happened to know she was wrong. Gerry had definitely been working on Whitmore. Indeed, I could hardly be more certain of it.

  “The young woman stared at me in some astonishment. One does not flatly contradict a senior professor who may be the sponsor of your dissertation, even if she seems to have been going at it a bit hard and is manifesting the first signs of senility. Yet the young woman did continue to argue with me. The significance of that was slowly borne in upon me. If a student continues to argue with a professor, that student is pretty damn sure of her facts: I’d learned that early on.

  “I told her, therefore, that I had perhaps been mistaken. We discussed Whitmore for a bit, and I told her what background material I thought she should look at. When she’d gone, I tried to think where I had got the idea so firmly in my mind that Gerry was working on Whitmore. I went back to my files, which I had not looked at since Gerry’s death: all her letters to me, her proposal and outline and bibliography were there. No doubt whatever. Her dissertation had been Hutchins from beginning to end. The only mention of Whitmore came in a reference to Hutchins’s friends and literary relationships.

  “Don’t think that at this point I felt any more than mild confusion. Obviously, there had to be some reason for my assumption that Gerry’s passion had been for Whitmore. ‘After all,’ I thought to myself, ‘I direct a great many students; this was a simple, not impossible, not even unlikely mistake.’ But something had confirmed me in it. Not just the fascination of the portrait. Something else. Then, of course. Max, I remembered. It was that as yet unopened letter from Gerry at the Wallingford, proving Gerry was interested enough in Whitmore to have written Hutchins about her.”

  Kate paused. She lit her cigarette and made something of a business of looking for an ashtray. She discovered one and brought it back with her to her chair.

  “Why don’t you have a drink?” Max asked. “Are you still without anything but California wine?”

  “I don’t want a drink, thank you. Those unopened letters had rather troubled me the first time I saw them. It seemed such a loose end in an otherwise neatly handled estate. You must have kept them out to camouflage Gerry’s letter—the letter supposed to have been from Gerry. You wanted my attention focused on Whitmore. Once that was clear, I compared the typing on that letter with Gerry’s letters to me about her dissertation. The Wallingford letter had been typed on a different machine. That might not, in itself, have been court evidence, but it went a long way with me. You write other people’s letters well. Max. How neatly you caught the bland tone of a well-mannered child writing to a famous author. And you succeeded in drawing my attention to the portrait, to Whitmore, and away from Cecily. Clean away from Cecily.”

  “You know what Wilde said.” Max spoke now as though this were the sort of conversation dreamed about by aspirants to a world of style and high culture. “ ‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.’ A compliment to you, Kate.”

  “No, it’s not,” Kate said bluntly. “You thought you had one who was a fool. Clearly I did not appreciate you. But I admit the quotation as nicely chosen at this moment. You think all those who disagree with you are fools, Max.”

  “Do go on. Having compared the typeface according to the best rules of criminal investigation, what did you do next?”

  “My governess used to do my hems. When I think of her now, that is how I always remember her. Being a woman of great neatness and conservative tendencies, in the best sense of the word, she would try to get out in one piece the thread with which the original hem had been sewn. She would try to catch it, and often it would break off. But sometimes the thread would come out perfectly and whole. She would wind it onto a piece of cardboard, feeling triumphant. This thread, Max, began to unravel in exactly the same way. Which reminds me, I’ve always meant to ask someone knowledgeable and devoted to the proper use of language: what is the difference between ravel and unravel, as in Shakespeare and the ‘ravell’d sleave of care’?”

  “Go on with your story.”

  It was an enormous effort not to show her fear. In refusing this digression. Max had told her much. There could be no question of his state of mind. For a moment she considered refusing to talk, but her only chance was if talk would distract him.

  “What else is there to tell. Max? Nothing was left but the dissolution of my story. What an attractive story it was. And every piece of evidence, or what I chose to consider evidence, seemed to confirm it. Herbert was the one who showed me the folly of my ways. A few straight-forward questions and it became obvious that you were his real brother, not possibly adopted. He made clear, I blush to say, that adoption is a lega
l procedure and a matter of record. I asked if your mother might not have pretended to be pregnant: padding, travels, that sort of thing. It didn’t take Herbert long to explode that theory. Then I realized that Whitmore’s medical record would have mentioned if she’d had a child. It’s the sort of information doctors need.

  “Oh, Max, how I admired the quickness of your responses. With what relief you must have heard that tale of your sinister parentage here, in this cabin, and realized that I had provided you with something you could not yourself have dreamed up; a safe motive. One, moreover, romantic and far-fetched enough to become mincemeat in the hands of any good defense lawyer. You could trust Reed and me to know that.

  “I think of you, Max, those eight days at Raymond Brazen’s—were you really at Brazen’s, helping him with his book? That’s one of the many points I haven’t got around to checking.”

  “Oh, yes, I was there. I did help him with his book. But he is old and could only work a few hours a day. Moreover, bless the man, he is a keeper of inconsiderable trifles and always has been; one of those who can’t throw anything away. He had paper that must have been many years old—old enough not to look the least new. The watermark worried me a bit; it might have been traced as an American paper. I put a bit in one of Whitmore’s letters about her shortage of paper and her gratitude for the American paper Cecily had left on a visit.”

  “I think of you there, Max, writing those letters, copying that handwriting. You must have filched a few things from the Wallingford to copy from. Did you enjoy making those letters up? They were clever, Max. Damn clever. Except, as I realized later, Whitmore would never have wished for a boy that way or harped so on it. Women are not all as self-hating as you assume them to be; certainly not Whitmore.”

  “I was amused at how easy those letters were to write. I almost became Whitmore, dashing them off before rushing about, sticking her nose in where she wasn’t wanted.”

  “Like Gerry Marston.”

  “Exactly like Gerry Marston.”

  “Why did you kill her, Max? Do you mind telling me?”

  “Why should I mind?”

  Kate had sometimes wondered how brave she would be if actually faced with violence. One never knew. Either one would be able to draw upon resources of stamina or one would collapse. Apparently she would not collapse. Her mind, moreover, seemed to have been sharpened by fear, at least temporarily. What she doubted now was how long she could resist the debilitating effects of fear.

  “You realize that I shall kill you,” Max said. “I must do that. But you will seem to have killed yourself.” Kate noticed that even now he used “will” and “shall” correctly. We die, she thought, upon a fine point of grammar, and just avoided, almost too late, the tempting release of hysterical laughter.

  “I don’t in the least mind satisfying your curiosity,” he continued. “Curiosity is an overpowering human motive, more forceful often than sex or money; it has not only killed the cat. Yes, light your own cigarette. I am much stronger than you might suppose, but you are tall for a woman and not overweight. There is something too vulnerable about a man lighting a woman’s cigarette after he has threatened her life. Cecily and I quarreled. Before the wedding. She had asked me to come and see her not long before she left for England. She had always said that I would be her literary executor, that I would write her biography. It was an established fact. Everyone knew. I had long arranged my life to include it. It had been agreed upon. After all, we had the same background, more or less, the same attitudes. So I thought. But Cecily turned out, when I went up there, to have transformed herself into one of those wide-eyed liberals, the sort who thinks students should be allowed to rampage on campuses and interfere with the workings of government and business. It emerged that we no longer saw eye to eye on anything. I said that at least she had been a good wife to Ricardo. ‘Whatever do you think you mean by that. Max?’ she asked. ‘For many years I didn’t live my life, I lived his. I bought his ties, and arranged his sittings, and massaged his ego, and organized his exhibitions. Oh, I wrote, but only when Ricardo was elsewhere, attended to by other and younger women who gladly ran his errands and did his chores and were content to worship him. Perhaps I was a good wife, but only after I became, a good person, which was when we moved here permanently. Moved to the sea. After that, I didn’t care if Ricardo came or not and, perversely, he used more and more to come. Those were our happiest years, when I ceased caring if I was a wife at all, and was often alone. Max, how much of everything do you understand? Do you think writing my biography is going to redeem that conventional, conservative, lost world for you?’ ‘You were a friend of my mother’s,’ I answered. ‘I understand your life.’ ‘My God, Max,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you understand anything. You don’t even understand your mother.’

  “We talked about everything then. Such conversations go from one thing to another, becoming worse and worse. Vietnam, Watergate, integration, women’s rights—we covered it all. In the end she actually asked me to leave. Not then—it was late at night—but first thing in the morning. She said she was glad we’d had this talk before it was too late. ‘How often,’ she said, ‘those who have affection for one another take for granted that they agree on important and fundamental things. You’re wrong for me, as literary executor and certainly as biographer. I shall make that clear in my will. I’ll write old thingybottom’—which is what she always called her lawyer—‘the changes.’ And that was all. The next morning I actually begged her to reconsider. She said there wasn’t that much rush; plenty of time when she returned from the wedding.

  “As you know, she died in England. Her children were abroad with her. There was the chance she’d said something to them, but it was unlikely. Cecily’s charm had always been lost on her children. I think she had expended all there was in that way on Ricardo, whatever she chose to say later. I don’t know how much Cecily delighted in her children, although they were very successful: Thad and Roger are with excellent firms, and the daughter made a very good marriage. Dear me, I’m wandering. There was a chance no one knew she had changed her mind. Up to the house I went, renting a car at the Boston airport, in another name, of course, and driving. Yes, I learned to drive, long ago, but why tell anyone? The Hertz people make it beautifully easy, as they say in their advertisements. I called ahead, reserving a car for Mr. Browning, and it was there, I gave them cash; they gave me the keys. What could have been simpler? Before, I had stolen a driver’s license from a stranger.

  “Cecily had drafted a new section to her will dealing with her literary remains; she left it in the top drawer of her desk. It was the first thing you saw when you opened it. And I was not the only one who had opened it. Your Gerry Marston had opened it also. She swore she hadn’t, swore she hadn’t broken in, had found the back door opened, had only meant to peek and go to the bathroom, and somehow landed in Cecily’s study. I found her looking at the portrait. A likely story.”

  “Not unlikely,” Kate said. She herself had felt impelled to see Cecily’s house, hadn’t she? Hadn’t that been one of her reasons for going with Max in the first place?

  “Did you talk to her?” Kate asked.

  “Oh, yes, we talked. I didn’t accuse her of anything, or frighten her. I didn’t try to make her admit she’d looked in drawers. I quite charmed her, if you want to know. Told her I was Cecily’s literary executor and actually was interested in her theories and her work.”

  “What makes you think she read the draft of the will?”

  “Her surprise when I told her I was literary executor. Her—It was obvious. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to take a chance. And I couldn’t afford to trust her. I ought not to have been there; supposedly I was around the university, between classes. I had a class next day.”

  “All that about the horse was nonsense, then?”

  “Of course. My horsiness seemed to please you; it fit in nicely with Whitmore’s horsiness.”r />
  “It wasn’t hard, I suppose, to get her out on the rocks.”

  “Not particularly. Like you, she was longing to climb about on them. I joined her and pointed out something on the horizon. Then I hit her over the head with a rock. When she fell, I had to hold her head underwater. The tide was coming in, and did the rest. After that, I waited. The original will was prepared for probate. The lawyer informed me of what my duties would be. I knew then that it was all right. Except for the body.”

  Kate kept her eyes steadily on him. He needed no questions to continue.

  “I didn’t want a big brouhaha when the body was found. Nor did I want her to be missed, starting a big search from that end. In enticing you up there, my willing dear, to identify her, I took a chance. You might have been questioned anyway, once she was identified in that place, and this way I provided the groundwork for a perfectly natural explanation of her death. You didn’t like it, I could see that, but your fascination with the Whitmore portrait helped me. Oh, Kate, you tried so hard to trust me, but you didn’t. Not all my famous charm could change that. So when, finally, you came up with your wonderfully romantic story, quite worthy of the best in the Gothic novels, I was on to it like a shot. If Gerry Marston had been interested in Whitmore, as you so soon concluded, there was no way she could have possibly been a threat to me. You’ve seen that now. I quite enjoyed doing the letters, but I’ve told you that. I’ve told you everything, haven’t I? I’ve talked too long.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Kate said.

  “Do you? If this were one of the movies our crazed youth feed upon, I would watch you. But I don’t care for that sort of thing. The window in there is too small and high for you to climb through. Close the door and be quick, do.”