Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  But the confrontation was forestalled. The phone rang again. Owen turned his head courageously to meet Peter’s faltering gaze, then picked up the receiver, expecting still another photographic revelation.

  But this time it was his cousin, Harvey Kloop.

  Harvey’s voice sounded strange and unnatural. It was high and thin and spasmodic, as though his teeth were chattering. “Listen, Owen, I called Eunice Jane, only—she’s in the—library, I guess. She always goes to the—library about—this time of day. Listen, Owen, I want you to—tell me something. Do you think—there are, like, holes in the—universe?”

  “Holes in the universe? Harvey, what’s the matter? You sound queer. Are you all right?”

  “Well, no, as a matter of fact, I’m not. I ran my boat—into a rock. But that’s not—what’s the matter.” “Harvey, tell me, where are you?”

  “And I busted my leg. But that’s not it either.”

  “You broke your leg? Harvey, where are you?”

  “And the boat sank, and I had to swim with my—broken leg, and I nearly drowned. But that’s not what I’m—worried about—at all.”

  “Harvey, Harvey, I’m coming! Just tell me where to find you!”

  Harvey’s teeth were chattering uncontrollably. “It’s the u-u-universe, you see, Owen, that’s where the trouble is. Tell me, O-Owen, do you think sometimes the whole entire universe has sort of cr-cr-cracks in it, where the system as we know it breaks down? Dead people coming back to life, church bells under water, stu-stu-stuff like that? You know, maybe in retribution? For violating your Hippo-something oath? You know, times like that?”

  “For God’s sake, Harvey, I’ll be glad to discuss the universe with you later on. Just tell me where you are right now so I can come for you, and then we’ll discuss the whole thing.”

  “It’s the boat dock. You know, at Qua-Quabbin, Gate Forty-three. You go out Route Nine, then turn left at Ware, and then you just keep going up Greenwich Road. There’s this sign, Gate Forty-three.”

  “Oh, right you are. Just stay right there. I’ll come right along.”

  Owen hung up and turned to Peter, putting out of his mind the nasty little problem of the multiple photographs and Peter’s unfortunate new status as a dead duck. “It’s my cousin,” said Owen, running an anxious hand through his hair. “Harvey Kloop. I’ve got to go get him and bring him home.”

  “Harvey Kloop?” repeated Peter dully. His voice echoed meaninglessly in his own ears.

  “He’s a doctor. The medical examiner. My cousin. He’s in some crazy kind of mental state. And he’s broken his leg, so he can’t drive. I’ve got to borrow a car.”

  “Borrow a car?”

  “All I’ve got is a bicycle.”

  Then Peter spoke up in a dream. It was a nightmare, of course, not a dream, one of those nightmares where everything that happens is obviously insane, and yet at the same time intensely logical. “I’ll drive you there,” said Peter. In his personal crisis he Had only one impulse left, to cling to the man who knew he had planted a forgery in Tilly Porch’s attic. Owen’s knowledge of Peter’s dishonesty was like a bond of blood between them, a kind of open wound from which vital juices would flow, unless Peter pressed his hand over it, both his hands, unless he pressed up against it with all the strength in his body. Somehow he must keep the blood from leaking out and drenching everything. Owen must not tell.

  “Thank you,” said Owen, and then his face lit up with a happy thought. “We’ll ask Dr. Oak to come along. Poor Harvey sounded as though he might be in a state of shock, with nobody there to take care of him.”

  But Harvey Kloop was not alone at the boat landing. The dock attendant had taken charge. He had heard the cry for help, he had seen Harvey struggling in the water, he had rescued him in one of the rental boats, he had helped him hop up the beach to the shack, he had sat him down and covered him with his own jacket, and then he had dialed the telephone for Harvey.

  But Harvey had forgotten to tell Owen something. “Oh, damn,” he said, reaching for the phone again with a trembling arm. “Gimme it again, Jimmy. I forgot—to tell him turn right. Somebody took the—bars down, across the road the other way. He won’t know—which way to go. If he doesn’t know any better, he’ll end up—at Shaft Twelve. What’s that phone number again?”

  This time there was no answer.

  “He’s already on his way, I guess,” said Harvey, huddling down under Jimmy’s jacket again, trying to control his shivering. “Say, Jimmy, listen here. You know the—way we get used to having everything happen according to physical principles? You know, atoms and—molecules obeying the laws of nature? Well, here’s what I wonder. I mean, do you think those principles ever go wrong? I mean, do you think sometimes these really qu-queer things happen as if there were these really huge systems—of truth, only they kind of—collide with each other”—Harvey made a feeble whamming gesture in the air—“and cracks appear, and you get glimpses of, you know, another universe? Like black—holes or something? Come on, Jimmy, tell me what you think.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Jimmy, tipping his cap forward and scratching his head. “My grandmother had this really weird experience in a haunted house once. Did I tell you about that? Like she heard music? And there wasn’t anybody there? Spooky!”

  35

  It is a truth—of Blood …

  Homer and Mary Kelly walked up the stairs from the subterranean police station in the Town Hall and stared at the Common on the other side of Boltwood Avenue.

  A fair had appeared out of nowhere. Pieces of Ferris wheel were debouching from giant trucks. Somewhere a calliope wheezed and merry-go-round cymbals clashed. Down the street a fraternity house throbbed with recorded sound. The afternoon had grown still warmer. On Main Street and South Pleasant the students were thick on the sidewalk. They milled around the Common as the tents jerked up with a windy flapping of awnings. In the parking lot a guy on a motorcycle blatted out onto the street, leaning sideways.

  Mary had to shout in Homer’s ear. “That man you were talking to—was that Archie Gripp? What did he say?”

  “That was Archie,” rumbled Homer. “Come on, I’ll tell you all about it in the car.” Homer began loping along the sidewalk, moving into the shade of the giant katsura tree and out again, hurrying in the direction of Spring Street. “I want to go to Ware and talk to Mr. and Mrs. Gaw.”

  Mary was scandalized. She ran after Homer and grabbed at his arm. “Mr. and Mrs. Gaw? Oh, Homer, don’t you think that’s ghoulish, probing into people’s misery like that?”

  “Well, I gather Winnie’s father is more angry than grief-stricken. You know, he’s really foaming with rage. Jesse Gaw, his name is. Works for the Quabbin Reservoir, runs some sort of garage on the side. His wife works in a knitting mill. He was just here, Archie says. Came over to identify the body before they took it away.”

  “Winnie’s father owns a garage?”

  “That’s right. He’s got some sort of car-repair business. Archie thought it was kind of interesting. ‘Take a look around,’ he said.”

  “What for? What does he expect you to find in Winnie’s father’s garage?”

  “Well, Archie’s just sort of interested in places like that, ever since the fire in Coolidge Hall. He’s been working on it, interviewing people who might have had some nutty reason for trying to burn the place down. Fat women, for instance. Kids who work in gas stations where they do paint jobs on cars, spray jobs with cans of lacquer. Body shops. Well, it may not mean a thing, but this time we’ve got a fat woman and a car-repair outfit in one fist, so to speak.”

  On Spring Street a big chartered bus was parked beside the Lord Jeffery Inn. In a chattering, orderly mob, the Japanese Poetry Society was climbing on board, laden with luggage and thousands of miles of exposed film. Through one of the big tinted windows Professor Nogobuchi beamed and waved at Homer. Homer grinned and waved back.

  Mary was still trying to understand the Gaws. “You say Winnie�
�s father is mad instead of sad? Who is he mad at? Does he know who swung that axe at Winnie?”

  “No, I gather he’s just mad at the whole world. You know, a mean sort of cuss, Archie says. It was his own axe, did you know that?”

  “It was? Winnie’s father’s own axe?”

  “That’s right. It was Jesse Gaw’s own personal axe. He claimed somebody must have stolen it from his garage.” Homer waved again and shouted good-bye to the wood-burning-stove man, who was striding along the sidewalk, going the other way, heading for North Pleasant Street and a hitch to Lake Winnipesaukee.

  “Bitter, he was,” murmured Homer.

  “What did you say?” said Mary. The hurdy-gurdy noise of the fair was still tweedling and thumping, making a racket all the way down Spring Street. “Bitter? Who was bitter?”

  “Jesse Gaw. That’s what Archie said. Bitter at the whole damned world. Rancid bitter. You know the kind of guy.”

  “Well, maybe he had good reason to be bitter.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. And you know what? Bitterness interests me. It goes back a long way in a person, that kind of ingrown, self-destructive, all-consuming grudge.”

  36

  A Chill came up as from a shaft …

  For Peter Wiggins the expedition to rescue Harvey Kloop at Gate 43 was a surrealistic journey. Plunging along Greenwich Road at the wheel of his rented Datsun, Peter was alert to every nuance in the conversation between Ellen Oak and Owen Kraznik. Without taking any interest in it at all, he was aware that something was seeping into the car, something large and warm and formless. It did not mix with the clammy air surrounding Peter. Coldly he sat beside Ellen in his envelope of isolation, adjusting his touch on the wheel with frozen fingers. The car obeyed his least command, but Peter felt out of control. Overhead the trees whizzed by in a blur of branches and sky. With them swept the dark eyes of the woman in his photograph, gazing tragically down at him. His year of work in her behalf had gone for nothing. In a moment of carelessness, in a single instant of failed caution, he had lost it all.

  What was left for Peter now? Home and family? Trying to think of Angie, Peter could hear only the dull whine of her voice. His children’s faces were blank blobs of pink.

  The parking lot at Gate 43 was full of cars. The gate was open. Peter turned in and drove straight ahead, sparing only a glance for the road that branched off to the right. But his enhanced consciousness took note of every leaf on every tree and every uncurling fiddlehead fern. What the hell was going to happen now?

  The road came to an end.

  “That’s funny,” said Owen. “This doesn’t look like a boat dock.” There was no pier beside the water, no boats drawn up on shore. There was nothing but a solemn little building of gray stone. Owen stared at it. “Do you suppose Harvey’s there inside?”

  “The door’s open,” said Ellen. “Somebody must be in there.”

  Peter followed them up the steps, nearly treading on Owen’s heels, clinging to Owen Kraznik like a wad of suffocating cloth, plugged into him like a bung in a barrel, a stopper, a cork. How long could he keep it up? The day would end at last, would turn into other days. Tomorrow Peter would have to remove himself, and then the oozing leakage would begin. Sooner or later Owen would let it be known that the word of Professor Peter Wiggins—as a scholar, as a teacher, as an instructor of young men and women—was not to be trusted. The news would go everywhere, to every college in the East, even to the University of Central Arizona in the West. The eager hope with which Peter had come to Massachusetts had been crushed. The Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium had looked like the beginning of a new career, but instead it had become the end of everything.

  “There’s no one here,” said Owen. His voice reverberated against the cement floor, the stone walls, the lofty ceiling. “We must have taken a wrong turn. This must be part of the waterworks. I’ll bet the aqueduct is down there under those trapdoors. This must be the beginning of the tunnel that carries the water to Boston.”

  Ellen gripped his arm and pointed. A shoe lay on the floor, a woman’s white sandal. “Alison Grove was wearing white sandals,” she said gravely.

  “Good God,” said Owen. Together they turned to look at the trapdoors. One of them had been pulled aside. It was only half-covering the opening underneath.

  Fearful of what they might see, they walked across the floor and peered down into the shaft.

  But they saw only the dark knobs of their own heads, reflected in the still water, ten or twelve feet down. Owen knelt on the trapdoor, trying to see below the surface into the depths. Ellen went to the window and stared out at the wind-driven ripples on the reservoir, half expecting to see Alison Grove in the water, drifting along with water lilies in her hair like the Lady of Shalott.

  Peter Wiggins was not interested in the fate of Alison Grove. His only concern was with the man who was kneeling on the trapdoor. Coming up behind Owen, Peter stared at him with wide-open eyes, observing as with a hand lens every rib of corduroy in Owen’s trousers, every pore in the sponge-rubber spies of Owen’s shoes, every wiry strand of Owen’s hair.

  Then, shifting his glance to his own right shoe, Peter was astonished to discover that it had grown very large. And the foot inside it was quivering with eager strength. Cautiously, Peter lifted his foot until the toe of his shoe nudged the edge of the trapdoor. Then with a swift motion he kicked upward. The door dropped into the shaft, and Owen dropped with it, cracking his head on the edge of the floor as he fell. The room reverberated with the echo of Peter’s shout, and the rumble of the trapdoor, and the splash of Owen’s slight body in the dark water of the shaft.

  “He hit his head,” jabbered Peter as Ellen turned swiftly and threw herself down beside the hole in the floor.

  Owen was nowhere to be seen. The water had closed over him. Ellen snatched off her shoes. “Go for help,” she said quickly. “The boat dock must be right here somewhere.” Putting her legs over the edge of the opening in the floor, she dropped into the shaft. Her narrow body made only a light splash, and then it too disappeared. The water slopped for a moment in widening rings, and flattened out again.

  Peter was alone. For a moment he stared down at the still water, and then he turned and stumbled out of the building. Panting in shallow gasps, he hurried to his car. Clever notions were boiling in his head.

  With shaking fingers he lifted the hood of the Datsun and jerked out the distributor wire. Then he got into the driver’s seat and went through the motions of trying to start the car. Arahaha, arahaka, arahaha, whined the engine, failing to turn over. Let them hear it, if they could, there in that watery hole! It was no use. It wasn’t Peter’s fault if his car wouldn’t start, if he had to go for help on foot.

  Abandoning the car, leaving the hood cocked up, he moved off slowly into the woods. Which way was the boat dock? Maybe it was this way. Maybe it was that way. Maybe it was some other way. Deliberately, Peter set out to lose himself in the wilderness.

  Staggering in the ferny undergrowth, dodging between the trunks of trees, he headed away from the water. Help for Owen and Ellen would never come, not if Peter could help it. Not until too late, not until much too late. Lost he would be, for certain, wandering in a circle in the woods. Lost, and yet in some delirious way, once more in control of his life. Somehow or other, Peter Wiggins had once again taken a trembling hold.

  37

  Cool us to Shafts of Granite …

  The car was Homer’s old red Volvo, but Mary was doing the driving while Homer consulted the map. He looked up as she turned off Route 9 into a side road. “Hey,” he said. “What’s this?”

  “Quabbin Cemetery,” said Mary. “I’m just curious. It’s the place where they reburied the coffins from all the cemeteries in the Swift River Valley before they filled the valley with water. Thirty-four cemeteries had to be dug up! Did you know that?”

  Homer looked around curiously at the headstones as the Volvo meandered slowly along the loops and byways of t
he winding drive. “It must have been hard on the living relatives, picking up their great-grandparents’ bones, losing the places where their ancestors had lived, never being able to go back. Nothing but water rolling over the acres they planted and plowed.” Homer read aloud the names on the tombstones—“Doubleday, Conkey, Wheeler, Goodale. Hey, look at that! What do you know? There’s a Gaw.”

  Mary stopped the car, and together they stared at the names engraved on the polished marble.

  JOHN GAW 1875–1937

  EMMA GAW 1880–1930

  “I’ll bet they’re Winnie’s grandparents,” said Mary. “Jesse Gaw’s mother and father. Maybe his bitterness begins right here.”

  “Any more Gaws?” said Homer. “What’s that one with the lady on top? Gaws? No, Smiths. ‘We shall meet on that beautiful shore, Mother!’ Well, poor souls, I hope they’re all up there right now, somewhere in heaven, all those Smiths, frolicking on the sand. But I suspect this shore right here is all they’re going to get, this high ground around the reservoir. Hey, look, what’s that wooden temple?”

  Getting out of the car, Homer and Mary walked up the steps of the little columned house and inspected the memorial tablets on the porch. There were a great many names on the tablets. They were honor rolls of the war dead from the lost towns of Greenwich, Prescott, Dana, and Enfield. One tablet bore only a single name—

  To the memory of RICHARD GROVE,1896–1936,

  Civil Engineer for the Metropolitan District Commission,