by Amanda Cross
“He is, or was, her brother. They were incredibly close all their lives, or so I gathered from Nellie. It quite amazed me, because I have a sister and we are distantly polite with wholly different interests. Why?”
“I’d like to talk to him. Do you know where he lives?”
“Hold on. I have to think. He’s a poet, and gives courses in various universities—that’s how he supports himself. But I seem to remember he had a more or less permanent position teaching somewhere in the Midwest. Damn.”
“Was his name Rosenbusch, too?”
“Yes. And I can’t come up with his first name either. I’ll ask myself tonight when going to sleep, and the answer may be there when I wake up. That sometimes happens. I’ll let you know when it comes to me, but if you know any poets, they may be more help than I can be.”
“Thanks, Blair.”
“You know, Kate, she may not have been more than distracted when she went under that truck. I don’t think the brother ought to be—”
“Trust me for that,” Kate said. If I ever find him, she reminded herself, hanging up the phone.
Blair’s nighttime directions to his unconscious proved disappointing. Kate had been to graduate school with a couple of male poets, men who had persevered in their craft, not trying to mount the academic ladder but picking up what teaching jobs they could here and there. She called them in the hope that one of them might have heard of poet Rosenbusch. It was, of course, not easy to locate her poet friends, whose lives were peripatetic by definition, and it was some days before she tracked one of them down. He, however, was unexpectedly helpful.
“Of course I know Rosie,” he bellowed happily over the phone, after he and Kate had exchanged the usual questions and answers. “Good poet. He lives in New Hampshire. I’ll try to dig up his address and get back to you. If it’s poetry you want, can’t I help?”
“If it were, you could,” Kate said. “Do try to find the address or the phone number, will you? It’s rather important.”
“I’m off now on the search,” he said. “I suppose you have one of those beastly machines on which I can leave a message?”
“I have.” She gave him the number.
“When I next come to New York, I expect to be given a lavish dinner at one of those snooty restaurants.”
“For you, anything,” Kate promised. “Even a snooty restaurant.”
Later that day Kate’s machine recorded poet Rosenbusch’s address but not his phone number. “I tried information,” the machine repeated, “but it’s unlisted. Smart fellow. I hope you have some powerful pull with the phone company. Is there a restaurant called Luchese?”
Neither the phone company nor Reed, when she recruited him to help, could wrest the phone number of poet Rosenbusch (whose first name was Charles) from the telephone company. Kate was hot on the trail, for no reason she could have logically explained, but even she refused to fabricate a family emergency in order to get his number. He had had enough of a family emergency already.
“I’ll have to go to see him and hope he’s home,” Kate said.
Reed groaned. “He probably won’t be there, and if he is, he probably won’t want to talk to you. I wouldn’t want to talk to you if my sister had recently died that way, if I had a sister.”
“You might,” Kate said. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger about your feelings and troubles.”
“That is a cliché I have always considered spurious,” Reed said.
“Anyway,” Kate said. “I’m going. I’ll fly to Boston and rent a car. New Hampshire, at least his part, is quite near. I will get a sense of accomplishment even if I accomplish nothing.”
“I hope your battery dies, you get caught in a snowdrift, and are only rescued on the point of starvation,” Reed said.
“No, you don’t,” Kate said. “You hope I find him, because you know I want to, however irrational the desire.”
“Okay, then, but be careful,” Reed said when she left that weekend for the airport.
Who owns him? she wondered helplessly.
Who writes his lines and gives him his directions?
—JOHN LE CARRÉ
THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL
Six
CHARLES Rosenbusch lived in a small house that faced on the square of a small New Hampshire village. There was a church, a graveyard, a common, and one or two other houses. Kate knocked at the door of the wrong house before having the right one pointed out to her. Rosenbusch did not respond to a knock on his front door, and Kate finally trailed around to the back to find him, or at least a man, clearing bushes at the edge of his back field.
“I’m looking for Charles Rosenbusch,” Kate called out, after her hello had made him raise his head. He turned back to his bushes. “It’s about your sister, Nellie,” Kate added. She began to feel that she was making a fool of herself, and had come on a mindless excursion; if she had had a rational reason, it seemed to be escaping her now. Really, she should listen to Reed when contemplating this sort of idiocy.
But Rosenbusch had dropped the tools with which he had been attacking the undergrowth, and walked toward her.
“You knew Nellie?” he asked.
“I’m grappling with her memory and her death,” Kate said. “Could I take a moment to explain?”
“You didn’t know her.” It was a statement.
“Give me ten minutes to explain,” Kate said. “Standing right here. We’ll synchronize our watches. If in ten minutes you say go, I’ll go.”
He took her at her word, literally, glancing at his watch as she glanced at hers. There was no need to synchronize them; ten minutes is ten minutes. I’ve seen too many war movies, Kate told herself. They stood, perhaps three feet apart, his defensive stance daring her to interest him.
“I am teaching at Schuyler Law School this semester; I’m a professor of literature, on leave from my regular job, teaching a course on law and literature with Blair Whitson. He was a friend of Nellie’s. Blair and I have questions about Nellie’s death. There is little chance of proving anything, one way or the other, but we would like to know more about Nellie, for our own sakes, and because something she knew may help us to bring those who tormented her—and she was tormented—to justice, if not for her murder, at least for something. You are the only person who may be able to tell us something about her. I want to know if you saw her in the months before her death, and if she told you anything that might be of use to us in learning what was on her mind toward the end of her life.”
“Did you talk to our parents? Is that how you heard of me?”
“No. I found a picture of you and Nellie among her belongings. They are in a storeroom, since apparently neither you nor your parents wanted them. Blair knew it was you in the picture. I found out your address from a poet friend of mine.” And Kate named him.
Kate paused, though her ten minutes were not even half used up. Rosenbusch seemed to make up his mind.
“You better come in,” he said. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Kate Fansler.”
“Okay, Kate. Let’s talk awhile. My name’s Charles, but these days everybody calls me Rosie.”
He led the way into the house through the back door; past the mud room, they entered a large sunny kitchen, made to seem even sunnier by the yellow floor and chintz chairs before the fireplace opposite the kitchen’s business end.
I am destined to talk in kitchens, Kate thought.
He sat down in one chair and pointed her to a chair opposite. “How can I help?” he said. Kate remembered that he had been smiling in the picture, laughing even, with his arm around Nellie. Now he seemed somber enough to make that laughter implausible.
“Tell me what Nellie talked about during the time she was at Schuyler Law; anything connected with the school or its inhabitants. Anything, no matter how inconsequential it seems to you.”
“We talked of everything; we always did. I might as well give you the picture of our relationship, our love. I’m
glad to see you don’t cringe at the word love between a brother and a sister. We’re not talking Wagner here, or youthful familial passions. We simply liked and loved each other. I’ve often thought,” he added, growing pensive—his eyes had never been directly on Kate—“that the brother-and-sister bond has been ignored by psychologists and novelists and others of that ilk. Freud got them so caught up in the damned Oedipus complex that no other attachment seemed equally compelling. Stupid, really.”
“Were you twins?”
“I told you, no Wagner. I was eighteen months older; eighteen months in which I sometimes think I was waiting for her, waiting for her to be my friend and my companion against the parents. Oh, don’t get any idea that they were cruel or mean or other than perfectly good middle-class parents. They were just dull, and full of conventional ideas, and wanting for us what, as they often said, any parents want for their boy and girl. The boy to make a nice living, the girl to marry a nice man. They argued with each other, of course, in a folie à deux that is probably emblematic of most marriages. Nellie and I simply had a different life.”
“Did she call you Rosie?” Kate asked after a longish pause, for something to say.
“She called me Charles. I called her Nellie because the parents called her Elinor, her name. Someone told her that Nellie was short for Elinor, and we latched on to that. So,” he added after a moment, “if you want to know did we talk of everything together, the answer is yes, we did, to the very end.”
Kate waited. He would get to Schuyler. Her mouth was dry, but no drink seemed in the offing. She would have rather liked a cup of tea or, lacking that, a drink of water. But she feared to interrupt his speech and his memories.
“She was happy when she got the job at Schuyler,” he said. “She knew it wasn’t a great law school, or even a good one, but she liked the fact that some of the students, particularly the women, were older and serious and putting a lot on the line to be there, unlike most of the kids at the fancier places. Also, she wanted to be in New York, something I never understood. She wasn’t into isolation, the way I am; she wasn’t solitary by nature. We met often—she’d come here for the weekend, or we’d meet somewhere outside New York; I hate the city—and we talked on the telephone a lot. I always sent her my poems.”
“I tried to buy them,” Kate said. “In the end I found them in the library. If you know where I could get a copy, I’d be grateful. I like your poems.”
“What do you like about them?” he asked, suspicious.
“You have a voice,” she said. “I like to hear the poet’s voice in poems. Is that old-fashioned?”
“Not by me. Nellie said that—you have a voice. Funny; and you never knew her.”
“No. Yet when Blair speaks of her, I get a sense of what she was like, of what she was after.”
“Blair was nice to her. At first I thought he was just another man she was carrying on with, but he really did seem to understand what she was up against. He did support her; of course, there wasn’t anybody else except the students, and she was there for them, not them for her. What was it you wanted to know about exactly?”
“Anything about Schuyler, about her time there—her impressions, her suspicions, her reactions, her plans. Anything at all that was connected to the law school.”
“She was appalled at first, and then angry. I don’t think she had really faced what men like those in the faculty were like. Nellie really believed that if you treated people with honor, they recognized that and honored you in return. It may sound naive, but nothing in her life up to then had dislodged that faith. Of course she had met some shits, but if she was working with people anywhere, they always seemed to recognize her—well, her sincerity, I guess, and her integrity. That sounds a fancy way to put it, but that’s what she had and that’s what she thought would be perceived. Not at Schuyler, not a chance. I pointed out that people without integrity couldn’t recognize it; liars can never trust anyone, that stands to reason. By the time she saw what they were like, the men on that faculty, she became unhappy, and then angry. I told her to get out, but she stayed through her tenure fight, Blair was great about that, and then I really thought she might leave, she had some feelers out.” He paused, as though making up his mind. “It was then,” he finally said, “that she began to suspect they were not only reactionaries, but mean reactionaries.”
“Isn’t that a tautology?”
“Not necessarily. I don’t suppose reactionaries are any meaner to their nearest and dearest than anyone else. It’s the way they treat people who are out of the loop that marks them as mean. And Nellie was certainly out of the loop.”
“Far enough out to be killed?” Kate asked. He seemed a man who didn’t mind direct speech, and he certainly seemed a man who wasn’t likely to want to sit around chatting all day.
“You mean, did they push her under that truck? Is that what you suspect?”
“It seems to be a possible suspicion, at least to those who knew and liked her. And to the police, who went so far as to check alibis, which were, incidentally, notably lacking.”
“That was before they found out about her health. I had to tell them. Look, Kate, I know you came up here to do what you could for Nellie, now that she’s dead. And you came to the right person; your instincts can’t be faulted. I’ve lost the person who meant the most to me, who always meant the most to me, and I’m hoping that solitude, hard physical work, and poems that let me speak of my mourning will see me out of this. I’d love to pin her death on those bastards, but the fact is she just blacked out and fell in front of that truck. I pity the poor driver, I really do.”
“Blacked out?”
“Need we go into the medical details? She had an affliction, an illness, it got worse rather than better, but she handled it with medication and determination. Its most dangerous symptom was that she would black out, lose consciousness, and, inevitably, fall. She’d got that symptom under control, or the doctors had, but there’s no doubt she blacked out and fell in front of that truck. I’m damn sure the stress those men caused her led to an intensification of her illness and thus to her death, but I don’t think we can call it murder, if that’s what you’re after.”
“I see,” Kate said, feeling a fool, rushing off in all directions like Nancy Drew to prove murder, when all she could prove there was what was equally evident in New York: the faculty of Schuyler Law were, on the whole, an unattractive bunch—well, a bunch of mediocre shits, she thought, taking refuge in strong language. So he’s here trying to put his life together, and I’m asking fool questions.
He seemed to sense her mood. “Don’t feel bad about coming here,” he said. “I’m glad for a chance to talk about Nellie. I know I’ve got to find some center for my life, but at the moment I just try to keep the terrors at bay. And thank you for not asking if I was married, or living here alone, or what Are you married?”
“Yes,” Kate said.
“You don’t wear a ring. Nellie always said she wouldn’t wear a ring either, if she married.”
“I don’t wear a ring, use his name, or depend upon him financially. He’s a lawyer, by the way, but not a neoconservative, and this semester he’s actually doing a clinic for Schuyler Law, where I teach law and literature with Blair.”
“What kind of clinic? Nellie said they didn’t have clinics at Schuyler.”
“They didn’t have real clinics, so to speak. They had synthetic clinics, which are useful, but don’t help people or plunge the students into actual legal situations. Reed’s clinic is working with prisoners who want to contest their cases, or who are being held in prison improperly, or are being mistreated there.”
“Nellie worried about someone in prison, the wife of one of the law professors. She’d met her only once, I think, but said her case should be retried because the lawyer she had at the time hadn’t known of some syndrome.”
“The battered woman syndrome. One of the law professors mentioned her to me at their semiannual reception; his view w
as that she’d murdered his colleague and friend, and deserved to be in jail, if not on death row.”
“That’s the woman, I guess. What’s the battered woman syndrome, or don’t I want to know?”
“As I understand it, which doesn’t say much for my defining it properly, it has to do with the fact that self-defense can be considered a justification for murder if the murderer felt her life in danger at the moment she struck. You pull a gun on me and I, faster on the draw, shoot you before you shoot me.”
“I see you spent your youth watching Western movies,” he said. Kate smiled. It was the first remotely relaxed comment he had made.
“With battered women, however,” she continued, “they wait until the batterer is asleep or watching television or chatting with someone at a bar. Then they kill him. To defend such a woman against a charge of outright murder, the law has tried to explain that a battered woman doesn’t dare protect herself at the moment she is being battered; if she has the courage at all to protect herself, she will wait until the man is at his least dangerous.”
“I get it. Well, Nellie hoped someone could reopen this woman’s case, so maybe if you can get your husband’s clinic to do that, you won’t have dragged yourself all the way to New Hampshire in vain.”
Kate understood that the conversation was over. She rose, and he rose with her.
“Thank you for talking to me,” she said.
“Thank you for caring about Nellie even though you never met her, for coming all this way, and for talking to me straight without either questions or advice. I’m sorry you didn’t know Nellie; you would have liked each other.”
As they moved toward the door, the front door this time, he said, “Wait a minute,” and vanished into a room. He reappeared with a book. “My poems. Thank you for going to some trouble to read them.”
“Thank you,” Kate said, meaning it.
