by Robert Stone
“Why did you come to this campus?” she asked the man before her.
“To visit Maud Stack. And to address her spiritual adviser. Someone needs to tell her that sometimes what we do when we’re adolescents haunts us the rest of our lives. She may pay for it.”
“Is that a threat, Father?”
He said nothing.
“In about half a minute,” Jo said, “I’m going to call security. There’s a surveillance camera in the hall outside.”
“The least you could have done was raise objections. For the kid’s own good. The thing she put in your newspaper! The blasphemy of it, Jo. So clever and so naive.”
“I call that a threat,” Jo said, but she made no move. She thought all at once of the raptor snake fixing its prey with a stare.
He treated her to his world-embracing smile. The smile that must have frozen the hearts of peasants when he arrived with his messages from the army of the people. The inquisitor of the proletariat come to show its suspected enemies the instruments. Quiet-spoken, with his educated diction and gentle clerical manner, he must have left the designated criminal element paralyzed with fear. And with remorse as well, overcome with repentance for whatever it was they were supposed to have done, ready to confess all night long to anyone ready to listen. Sometimes it took even longer before they could be made to comprehend what guilt was. In the end, everyone learned.
“Are you afraid of me, Jo?”
“I don’t know why you came here. I need you to leave this office.”
“I came to bear witness to murder and the mockery of Almighty God. To remind you of your duty.”
“And I’m reminding you that you’re trespassing here. You have no legitimate business on this campus and I’m letting our security know that you’re threatening our students and staff.”
“I’m not threatening anyone.”
“Threatening our students and staff,” Jo repeated. “I don’t believe I caught your name. Father, is it?” She looked over the desk at him, pencil poised on a memo sheet.
“Just call me one of the mourners.”
When she dialed campus security, he left quickly. The security chief was a middle-aged former national park policeman named Philip Polhemus. He arrived five minutes later accompanied by one of the young female officers. The college’s police people wore military-style uniforms again after a decade or so of affecting comfortably academic blazers.
“We’re keeping an eye open for him, Dr. Carr,” Polhemus told her. “We’ll make the city police aware of him. No clerical garb, right?”
“No clerical garb. He’s shabby but clean-shaven.”
“Let us know if you see him again and we’ll escort him off campus. If he comes back we’ll arrest him. Can you give us a description?”
“I’m sending you guys a memo,” Jo told him. “He wouldn’t give me a name.”
In the memo to Polhemus she included his calling himself a mourner. It troubled her to invoke the words.
15
“GOOD LORD!” SHELBY SAID when she opened the dorm room door to Maud. “I can’t believe you came back. How did you get here? Are you all right?”
“I walked from the station.”
Shell took a step back and watched Maud drag her duffel in and collapse on their peeling leather couch.
“I got to tell you, baby, y’all look kind of drekko. I mean to say you’re looking tired,” she added.
“Yes.”
“There’s a sort of to-do, you know. Like we’re getting death threats here. I mean,” Shell said, “just like ordinary death threats like people get sometimes, the world being what it is. But still—death threats. Threats of death.”
“I believe you, Shell. I don’t think I give a shit.”
“You know what? Miss Carr in the counseling office asked me to call her when you got back. If you got back. Or when, rather.”
“The hell with her.”
Shell folded her arms and looked at the door Maud had come through.
“I’m gonna call her. I’ll take you to see her.”
“Screw her,” Maud shouted. “Fuck her. She’s just gonna bitch about the thing.”
“No, no. We need help. We need somebody to help us and she knows the scene. Like whether you should stay or go. What we should do.”
“No!”
“Who do you want to talk to, sweetheart? Cops or deans or somebody? She’s a smart, practical person, hear? You want to call her!”
It was after six in the evening when Jo got back to her office following Shell’s call. On her desk she spread out the photographs that Maud had selected to accompany her article, the ones the Gazette had prudently declined to run. It took great effort to get past Maud’s cruelty and folly in choosing them. The girl’s mother had died before she had gone off to college. Her father had been called to the 9/11 scene. But the pictures Maud had proposed to impose on her enemies were so distressing—the gargoyle-faced, doomed little things described in medical Greek that sounded like science fiction. Welcomed to the breathing world like things under the spell of a bad fairy at the conception. The only consolation was that the worst of them soon died. Years before, in a school taught by nuns, Jo had heard a story about deformed creatures whose humanity was in question. It was an object of disputation whether these humanoid beings had souls. In case they did, it was said, Mother Church covered that angle, engaging an order of sisters to administer unimaginable measures of care to them. It was foolish, Jo thought, for people to expend their ignorant moralizing babble on this obscene and ugly quarter of theodicy.
But in fact Jo sympathized with Maud’s calling the fanatics on their iconography. It was particularly strong-minded to pay them back in kind with the very sort of photos they liked to flourish. Not resisting the mockery had been the mistake. It took these privileged kids forever to see that not everyone inhabited the space they did. Hearing Shelby and Maud at the street door, Jo swept up the pictures and put them in a drawer.
Maud was wearing a plastic anorak against the intermittent rain. When Maud swept the hood off, Jo saw that her hair was unwashed, which was unusual. Her eyes were swollen, she looked generally untended, and she had alcohol on her breath.
“Want me to wait?” Shelby asked them.
Jo thought about it for a moment and sent Shell home.
“You’re a good girl, Miss Magoffin. A good friend. Go home and go to sleep.”
“You got us something of a perfect storm,” Jo told Maud when Shelby was gone. “Where have you been hiding?”
“I didn’t ask to see you. Shell said you wanted me here.”
Maud sat down in the armchair in front of Jo’s desk and wiped her face with one of the always available tissues on it.
“Would you not stare at me?” she said.
“Sorry. I bet you’ve been drinking a whole lot. Would you see a doctor up the hill for me?”
“I’m all right.”
“Let’s go up anyway. I’ll drive you.”
Maud shrugged.
Jo was friendly with a resident named Jeff Margolis, who she thought might be on duty that night. She called, and he was.
“Jeff, you very busy? It’s Jo. I want to bring someone up to see you. I was hoping you could check her out and we could do the paperwork later. She’s not injured that I can see but she’s been drinking—probably a lot. She’s well known around here.”
Margolis asked Jo if it was Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan. He pretended to believe that both were students at the college.
“I get ’em all mixed up,” he said.
“I want to rest here a minute,” Maud said to Jo.
“Promise you’ll come with me?”
Maud nodded.
“Does your father know where you are?”
Another shrug.
“Can I call him?”
“Sure,” Maud said. She let Jo trouble to look up the number. The man who answered sounded ill, and older than Jo would have expected. Jo told him where his daughter wa
s and that she seemed all right.
Without further comment or perceptible emotion, the man thanked Jo for calling. Neither Maud nor her father chose to speak to each other on the phone.
Maud seemed steady as they walked up the block to the space where Jo had parked her Taurus. Jo brought the tissues along and put the box on the car seat between them.
“Why did you want to see me?” Maud asked as they drove. “Shell said you did.”
“I thought because we got to know one another a few years ago we might have something to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“Like how are you? Like what’s going on with you?”
“Is this free? Like do I have to pay for you to do this?”
“I think it’s covered, Maud.”
“Did you want to talk about the thing I wrote?”
Jo laughed a little. “It was very forthright.”
“I wanted it to be forthright.”
“It made a lot of people very angry, of course.”
“They don’t know what they’re angry about. They’re tools.”
“They’re angry at having their faith ridiculed.”
Maud turned to face her.
“There’s not much wrong with the world that doesn’t come from it having too many people in it.”
“But Maud, the world is people.”
“I thought it was mostly water.”
“You’re a wise guy,” Jo said after a moment. “You’re very angry yourself, right?”
Maud said nothing.
“When I was your age, I was very angry too.”
“You were?” Maud said. “Hey, really? That’s interesting.”
“If you want to persuade people—I presume that’s what you want—don’t tell them they’re fools.”
“So who are they to put out all this intimidation? They’re just looking for other people to push around.”
“I have no beef with your opinion,” Jo told her. “I basically share it. Did you think I was going to scold you for what you thought?”
“Isn’t this what you’re doing? Why are we having this conversation?”
“Two reasons, Maud. I want to see if you’re all right, for one.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah? I don’t think so.”
“So mind your business.”
“Look,” Jo said. “People who think they have all the answers will always think they have a right to hurt people who don’t believe them. That’s the world, Maud. That’s human nature.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because you don’t have to be quite so mean. You have a responsibility. Because you’re smarter than most people. You go to a fancy school. Learn a little compassion.”
“They have none,” Maud said.
“May I ask you something, Maud? Did you ever have that procedure done?”
“I never had to. It didn’t come up with me. Are you telling me I should shut up and let fanatics and heartless politicians take our rights away?”
“I’m not saying that,” Jo said. It occurred to her, however, that arguably she was saying just that.
“I remember,” Jo said, “when most women didn’t have the choice to get it done right. My mom’s generation.” She turned to look at Maud’s exhausted face. “Look, you pay a price for everything. Politicians don’t give a damn and neither does the media. They make a living by keeping people muddle-headed and angry. You can’t walk into this stuff without knowing what you’re up against.”
“I know that,” Maud said.
“While you’ve been hiding out, there have been many threats against your life. You’re in danger. You’ve got nuts after you. I mean,” Jo said, “I’m not trying to scare you. Just be careful. Maybe—I don’t know—you might take a semester off. Lie low.”
“Fuck ’em.”
“Whatever you want to do, Maud. Just be careful.”
When they got to the hospital driveway, an orderly with a wheelchair was standing beside the admissions desk.
“I’ll wait for you,” Jo told Maud, and took a seat on a bench in the emergency department’s waiting area. It was uncrowded. Sitting nearby was a student with a canvas leg cast that appeared to be causing her pain. It looked like a ski injury.
Less than twenty minutes after Maud had left her side, Jo saw Jeff Margolis, a thin-faced, goateed young man, coming toward her.
“Your Lindsay Lohan person flew the coop, Jo. She took off.”
Jo stayed for a while on the bench pondering her next move, wondering if she had one. Finally she concluded there was nothing for her to do that night except drive home. She parked in her lot and got to her apartment just as it started to snow. She put herself to bed.
16
“SO,” ELLIE SAID. “This kid’s a little genius, eh?”
Brookman saw that she had found the Gazette and read Maud’s article. He had not been hiding it from her, nor had he brought it to her attention. However, he had left it in a downstairs drawer, thinking to keep it from Sophia. He assumed that someone on campus would contrive to mention it in Ellie’s presence.
“Angry in all directions.”
“Is she?” Ellie went to the window and looked at the street. Dusk was coming down. Outside, people had started to walk toward the ice rink where the college was about to play its opener against UConn. Prospects for the home team were not good. “Get over it, I say.”
“It was immoderate. But she had a right.”
“Oh, sure, she had lots of rights. In all directions.” Ellie lowered the blinds against the passersby on the street just below and the strengthening reflection of the room they stood in. “Why did you let her publish it? She was your advisee, I understand.”
“My advisee, yes. I hadn’t read it.”
“You didn’t? Of course that’s none of my business.”
The words chilled him but he had no answer. From an intellectual perspective, even from an emotional one, he would have been interested in her comments.
“Pretty little thing,” his wife said, observing the front page of the Gazette. “Beautiful, actually. Coltish. Sort of an uncontained animal spirit. Ah, youth, eh?”
She rolled up the college paper briskly, omitting to mention what she thought he might do with it. Whereupon she went upstairs. Brookman started to follow but stopped when he heard the bathroom door slam. Sophia was in her room reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret before bed. He began to drink. He read several chapters of a book about the decline of the Spanish Habsburgs and then reread some items from the previous day’s Times sports section. One article described a Patriots-Broncos game that Denver lost. A Pats-loving colleague would have won fifty dollars from Brookman had the man not been off winter camping, out of cell phone range.
The liquor brought him no peace, only more anxiety and confusion. Finally he turned the television on and watched a sizable chunk of Red River. He realized that in the numerous times he had seen it, he had never figured out whether John Wayne shot John Ireland to death in their final encounter, nor had he ever remotely believed in the heroine’s cool reaction to taking a Comanche arrow in the shoulder, despite Joanne Dru’s feisty performance beside Montgomery Clift.
From the sidewalk outside he could hear the slightly intoxicated sounds of hockey fans coming from the rink. Amid the stomping, grunting and laughter there came a shout he recognized.
“Hey, Steve! Hey, Professor Brookman!”
He looked out and saw layers of snow gathering on the chestnut tree branches overhanging the curb. The heavy flakes whirled, driven by wind off the river a few miles away. At the foot of the tree stood Maud. She had on a bright plastic anorak that had lowered to her shoulders, and newly fallen snow was in her hair, as he had seen it weeks before. Her eyes reflected the light from his house.
A quarter mile away at the far end of his block, the doors of the hockey rink were open and spectators streamed out, most of them turning left as they exited, making for the main camp
us. A few dozen, in couples and small groups, were using Brookman’s street as a shortcut. Maud clutched the sky-blue plastic cloth around herself and screamed at him, standing with her face to the weather, toward his house.
“Hey, Prof! Hey, Brookman! Steve!”
Ellie had come downstairs.
“What did you do,” Ellie asked him, “give her a bad grade? Who is she?”
“She’s one of the kids who drinks. Good student. Pain in the ass.”
“Hey, Brookman!” Maud called from the street. “Who you talking to? Is that Mrs. Brookman? Hi, Mrs. Brookman.” They heard what might have been a snowball or a piece of ice against the door. “Hi, Elsa! Congratulations there!”
Ellie turned to her husband.
“I know who she is,” she said quietly.
“She’ll wake up Sophia,” said Brookman. Then, at a loss, he said, “Do you want me to call the police?” As he said it, he knew it had been a lame, stupid thing to ask her.
“The police,” she repeated after him in a monotone. “I think not.”
“Hi, folks,” Maud yelled. “God bless your happy home.”
He opened the front door and went outside, leaving it slightly ajar behind him. “Maud! What are you doing?”
She leaned the length of her arm against the tree trunk, turning to face him in the doorway.
“What am I doing? What am I doing, you son of a bitch?”
“You need to be sober, kid.”
“Oh, Stevie, I am sober. I don’t need anything. I am as sober as you’ve ever seen me, you dirty-hearted son of a bitch. You! Brookman!”
Cars maneuvered their way through the crowded street, sounding their horns, getting razzed and pounded on by the hockey crowd that was slow to yield the right of way. The street was normally closed on game nights. As the fans came abreast of Maud and Brookman, a few paused to look at the two of them, slowing the progress of those behind them.
Someone called Maud by name. A couple of passing boys tried to grab her arm and made as though to carry her off, laughing. “Hey, come with us!”
