Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  By midwinter, I am sorry to say, newspapers throughout the Northeast had caught up, as it were, with their former hero: and, out of angry disappointment with his rumored “resignation” from the profession of detective, vied with one another to publish lurid, sensational, and altogether irresponsible accounts of his condition, for the titillation of their readers. In certain papers Xavier Kilgarvan was accused of “sordid and duplicitous dealings” with those very criminals he had sworn to combat; in others, of demanding such prohibitive fees for his services, he might stand accused as “a subtle species of blackmailer.” His penchant for alcohol, womanizing, gambling, and divers lowlife preoccupations was emblazoned in print for all to ponder; no less than his “physical and mental collapse,”—suffered, it was said, as a consequence of injuries dealt to him by Mr. Ellery Poindexter in his death throes. The Vanderpoel Sun published a two-part “confidential interview” with an anonymous person, doubtless a servant at the Pitt-Davies home, who spoke at length, and cruelly, of the detective’s ill-health, and his oft-reiterated despair in his profession: for, it was said, while caught up in alcoholic delirium, Xavier Kilgarvan was given to raving, and ranting, and vowing that, if he lived, he would repent of his ways,—“and never again lust after Evil.”

  Mr. Hearst’s popular papers,—including, by this time, the Winterthurn Gazette, which he had bought from the Goshawks to save from bankruptcy—were particularly censorious: for it was charged against Xavier Kilgarvan that he had frequently indulged in a perverted practice of penning lewd “anonymous” letters to ladies of high social rank—! (Of these, the only one reproduced was a crude copy of the mysterious letter received by the Misses Penistone, in the late autumn: albeit the young ladies were scandalized at its appearance, and swore that they had not released it; but that it must have been stolen by a servant.)

  Doubtless, in his demoralized state, Xavier Kilgarvan would have cared very little about such absurd public notices: but all effort was made to spare him shock and discomfort: and those few visitors allowed into his sickroom were cautioned, of course, against arousing his distress in any way, or asking him questions regarding crime, murder, mystery, and the like. (Amongst these visitors, the reader will be interested to learn, was the long-retired sheriff of Winterthurn County, Frank Shearwater, who, though well into his seventies by this time, was possessed of an enviable vigor and good humor: for, having withdrawn from that profession deemed “accursèd,” and taking up, albeit belatedly, the profession of farming, he had acquired a somewhat different perspective on life, as he phrased it: and heartily recommended to Xavier that he consider a like pathway. Yet another visitor of Xavier’s, no less unanticipated, was Mr. Lucas Kilgarvan himself, with whom, in early March, Xavier became reconciled after an estrangement of more than a dozen years. All credit for this reunion must go to Miss Thérèse Kilgarvan, who tirelessly sought out the reclusive old gentleman in his Wycombe Street quarters: refusing to be turned aside, or discouraged, by his rude claim that “he had no son in the world remaining to him, and no one to whom he might leave his savings,—nay, no family altogether”: and possessed of inordinate patience, in convincing him to glance in upon his youngest son, who had, it seemed, ventured perilously close to death.)

  Thus, Xavier Kilgarvan’s gradual recovery, under the watchful eye of his friend Murre: for he presented no difficulties of personality, but slipped with a surprising ease into the role of convalescent,—spending his time in reading matter of the lighter sort (albeit he soon came to rejoice in, and to laugh heartily at, the follies of the times,—primary amongst them the comical public squabble of President William Howard Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt); and in games of a resolutely cheery and uncomplicated sort (which is to say, gin rummy rather than poker, and checkers rather than chess); and in moderate exercise, close about the grounds of the Pitt-Davies estate, and along Jewett’s Lane, and, on good days, all the way around Jewett’s Pond,—on whose grassy banks it was oft-times his practice to stand and meditate, for long minutes at a time.

  Upon one curious occasion, accompanied by both Murre and Thérèse, Xavier drew from the pocket of his tweed jacket a pair of handsome cuff links,—of lapis lazuli, it appeared—and tossed them casually into the water, at a distance of about fifteen feet—! When queried by his surprised companions, as to why he had done so rash a thing, the pale-brow’d convalescent said simply: “The pond appears so perfect, and so inviolable, a mirrored surface,—I wanted to see if metal would sink in it.”

  WITH THE ADVENT of longer, sunnier, and, withal, more healthsome days, as the earth shifted in a felicitous wise upon its axis, Xavier Kilgarvan began to recover, by degrees, a modicum of his old resiliency; found food less nauseating than he had,—indeed, upon occasion, if he dined in the company of agreeable persons, did it not even afford a wondrous sort of pleasure? And, ah!—it was, at the very least, an intriguing phenomenon that he might stride to an opened window, and draw a luxuriant breath, with not the slightest temptation to throw himself thither, and to dash out his brains on the flagstone below—! (Nor did sashes, cords, neckties, belts, and “innocent” lengths of twine, which had slipped by the careful eye of Murre Pitt-Davies, put him invariably in mind of nooses; or butter knives and forks, in mind of a way in which, all surreptitiously, he might open his jugular vein.) By the time Jewett’s Pond had begun at last to thaw, after the extremities of the long winter, and the winds out of the northeast did not inevitably set his teeth to chattering, he was capable of walking at a brisk pace for upward of two miles at a stretch; and of rejoicing inwardly that he possessed, still, the legs to carry him thus. In a book from out the Pitt-Davies library, by the problematic Henry David Thoreau, Xavier had discovered, and took passionately to heart, these words:

  Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

  —which may well strike the civilized ear, as, I must confess, they strike mine, as rather too vehement, and verging upon the illogical.

  BY DEGREES, TOO, Xavier Kilgarvan regained his old powers of concentration, and, with commingled skepticism and zest, delved into those philosophers of ancient, medieval, and modern times, whose weighty speculations were to be found entomed in the Pitt-Davies library,—not excluding the several abstruse Treatises of Simon Esdras Kilgarvan himself. These volumes, long out of print, and rare, indeed, had been acquired by Murre many years before; though, as that plain-speaking gentleman readily confessed, he had lacked the “steam” to make his way through the first section of the first volume; and had never quite grasped whether Xavier’s uncle was a philosopher of rare genius, or a babbling madman. “Well,—is that not true for all the philosophers here at hand, ranged upon your library shelves?” Xavier artlessly rejoined. (In truth, Lucas Kilgarvan had happened to mention, with a dry chuckle, that his half-brother’s controversial theories of knowledge and semantics appeared to be enjoying a sort of “posthumous vogue” in philosophical circles: and that a venerable publishing firm in London, England, had written him but the other day, requesting the rights to reprint all the Treatises in a single volume, with a lengthy introduction by an Englishman named Bertrand Russell,—the royalties to go to Mr. Kilgarvan and his heirs, of course. “Thus we are forced to conclude,” Xavier’s father said in mirth, “that madness can scarcely be counted madness, if it pays.”)

  Many a serene hour, sequestered in his bed-chamber, Xavier lay with one or another of the Treatises at hand: perusing it, or idly turning its pages, or, more frequently, gazing sightless at the sky beyond his window: certain questions rising to his consciousness,—

  Who,—or what—am I?

  Who,—or what—am “I”?

  “Who,”—or what—am I?

  Who, or “what”—am I?

  —these queries defining themselves with no disagreeable urgency, but, rather, rising and f
alling and drifting about, weightless, lacking the power to terrify, like swan’s-down borne upon a summery breeze, or the glossy fluff from a ripened milkweed pod. Oft-times, the convalescent’s eyes moved to a mirror on the facing wall, and a mirrored image there which he knew to be his own: which is to say, his, yet not, it seemed, him.

  A mild, unemphatic state of well-being, shading almost into contentment, suffused him at such times: for he knew himself suspended, as it were, betwixt the past (which, it seemed, he remembered but haphazardly) and the future (which was no one’s responsibility, as it did not yet exist).

  ONE HAZILY WARM AFTERNOON in April, seeing his friend resting in this wise, Xavier’s gaze as grayly luminous, and as dreamy, as it had been in his youth, Murre Pitt-Davies ventured to ask him where his thoughts had drifted; and Xavier answered, with no hesitation, that they had drifted nowhere at all,—they dwelt within the length and breadth of his body, and were in perfect equilibrium. “As I have failed most conspicuously in my ‘chosen’ field, it seems that I will be spared the ignominy of failing in anything else,” Xavier said, with not the slightest air of self-pity, or discontent. “Thus it is, I know myself saved.”

  Murre stared at the pale-brow’d Xavier; and saw how thoroughly, and how purely, his hair had shaded to a lustrous silver; and protested, in a faint stammering voice, that Xavier Kilgarvan, of all persons, should not take so despairing and pessimistic an attitude, as to imagine that he had failed: still less, that he had failed completely. “Why, Kilgarvan has probably succeeded with more distinction than any detective native to these shores,” Murre said in an admonitory tone; whereupon Xavier smiled somewhat irritably, and murmured that such flattery,—whether based upon a modicum of truth, or no—was of no interest to him whatsoever.

  “Indeed, Murre, if you are my friend,” he said, “you must not humor me, for all the world knows, or should know by now, that I have failed: the proof of it being, I have lain helpless these many months beneath your roof, without a whit of shame. For no one can return to the art of crime detection who has once been broken, as I have been broken; and in this,—pray, Murre, do not interrupt—lies my salvation.”

  III

  It was hardly more than a fortnight later, on a surpassingly fair spring afternoon, that Mrs. Perdita Bunting, the rector’s young widow, reappeared of a sudden in Winterthurn,—and in a most unusual guise.

  Indeed, the bereaved woman aroused amazement in all who chanced to see her, by bicycling unescorted in a public thoroughfare, in unabashèd daylight: pedaling from the rectory at Grace Church to the Pitt-Davies estate at the far end of Jewett’s Lane, with no evident care in the world that she might be espied.

  Ah, Perdita!—oblivious to censorious eyes; and, it seemed, very much absorbed in the tricky mechanics of keeping her balance while, with measured motions of her feet, she essayed to propel herself steadily forward. Her bicycle, whether her own, or merely rented, was set somewhat high from the ground, as was her seat; the wheels were many-spoked; and the handlebars wide-set. Her costume,—a most idiosyncratic mourning costume, indeed—was fashioned of blue-brown velveteen, so dark as to pass, very nearly, for black: consisting of a snug-fitting bolero jacket embroidered in gold thread, with full leg-o’-mutton sleeves; and bloomers fetchingly “bunched” at the knees, to give an impression of childlike piquancy. An ascot scarf of pastel blue she had knotted about her slender neck; and a pert tam-o’-shanter, in matching hues of blue and blue-brown, had been firmly affixed to her glossy braided hair. Black cotton gloves, and black silk stockings, and black patent leather shoes, fashioned in the new low-cut déshabillé style (over which some controversy yet raged) completed this lady cyclist’s charming costume, which could not be faulted in any detail: even by her late husband’s parishioners, who thought it a scandalous fact that Perdita Bunting had recovered so quickly from her grief; and that she had recovered at all, from her shame.

  So it was, Miss Thérèse Kilgarvan herself chanced to espy her pretty sister, pedaling her bicycle along Jewett’s Lane, a grave little crease betwixt her brows, and her hands gripping the handlebars tight: for, emboldened as the minister’s young widow assuredly was, she had no wish to topple over while on her wheeled contraption, for all to observe. “Why, it is Perdita,—and she is returned already, without having sent word to me,” Thérèse inwardly exclaimed, not knowing if, in the exigency of the moment, she felt more wounded in her sisterly heart, or roused to simple anger at Perdita’s forgetfulness. (For, of course, Perdita would have meant nothing by such an oversight: and her stammered explanation would be, proffered with an air of guilty surprise, that she had intended to dash off a note to Thérèse, but had somehow,—in some mysterious wise—been distracted.)

  By happenstance, Thérèse was invited to the Pitt-Davies’ for tea: and arrived but a few minutes after her sister: albeit, when Thérèse was escorted inside, to the glassed-in Garden Room at the rear of the house, she did not see her sister amongst the small circle of guests,—and began to wonder whether Perdita was there at all. (For Xavier Kilgarvan too was missing,—alas, an absence Thérèse noted at once, in looking anxiously about the room. She had brought her cousin a copy of the handsome red-bound English edition of The Collected Poems of “Iphigenia,” which had already gone into its third printing; and had hoped, it scarcely needs be said, to deliver it to him in person.)

  Well,—it must be stoically borne that Xavier Kilgarvan had once again stayed away from a sociable tea, though he had known, surely, that she was to attend: and must have remembered that she was bringing him Georgina’s poems. Thus, the wounded Thérèse took care to make no special inquiries after him, when Murre and his aunt Elvira came forward to greet her: but put on a brave front,—nay, a most smiling and composed front—as she was wont to do, in her role of schoolmistress most particularly. (Nor did Thérèse make any reference to Perdita,—who was, it seemed, all oddly, not a guest at the tea—and halfway wondered whether the spectacle of her sister bicycling along Jewett’s Lane, in her tam-o’-shanter and bloomers, might not have been phantasmal—! “Perhaps she has died,” Thérèse bethought herself, most queerly, and, I am bound to say, most uncharacteristically, “perhaps she has died in Contracoeur, of a sudden, and that was naught but a spirit.”)

  Not five minutes later, however, Thérèse was disabused of this eccentric notion.

  All casually, she wandered off from the tea party, and outside, into the fragrant garden; and along a winding pink-graveled path; the volume of “Iphigenia’s” verse clutched in her gloved hand, that she might, after all, press it into her cousin’s hand, if she chanced to encounter him. For, ah!—she did feel some excitation, with the certainty that he was, very likely, somewhere near: somewhere very near: and that, if she hurried, she would find him,—she would find him first.

  Unfortunately, this was not to be: and the reader can well imagine the high-strung Thérèse’s commingled alarm and chagrin, and simple embarrassment, at witnessing, by accident, a shocking,—nay, a near-obscene—vision: the romantic reunion, as it were, of her cousin Xavier and her widowed sister, Perdita—! And this, in the bucolic depths of the Pitt-Davies’ English garden.

  Poor Thérèse happened upon the lovers in this way: having slipped from the quiet festivities in the house, she followed the curving path for some small distance, and turned a corner, to see, all unexpected, Xavier Kilgarvan himself seated on a stone bench, about fifteen feet away, an opened book on his knee: and, at that selfsame moment, Perdita, her cheeks flushed and her eyes unnaturally bright, stealing up noiselessly behind him.

  Obeying impulse rather than premeditation, Thérèse drew back; and hid her trembling frame behind an evergreen shrub.

  Ah, was there ever a more disconcerting sight, than this!—for the grave-browed Xavier was possessed of so melancholy and subdued an air, and appeared to be so intensely absorbed in his reading, Thérèse herself would have shrunk from disturbing him: yet the brazen Perdita stealthily approached him: and hesitated but for the sp
ace of a heartbeat, before,—alas, how shameless!—leaning rapturously forward to slide her arms about Xavier’s neck and shoulders, from behind; and to grip him hard, though he flinched in her embrace; and to bury her heated face in his hair.

  Thérèse felt a stab of rage in her heart: and the admonition rushed through her,—She has come for him, as it has been ordained: and neither he nor you can forestall it.

  For a tense moment, however, it seemed that Xavier Kilgarvan would resist: for he froze stock-still in this amazing embrace: and paid not the slightest heed, that his book had dropped to the grass, and that a looped braid of Perdita’s hair had fallen free, to brush, with sinuous grace, against his cheek.

  How long this frieze of Eros endured,—whether for a full minute, or, what is more likely, naught but a few seconds—the sickened Thérèse could not have said: for, despite her upbringing, and the intrinsic maidenly restraint of her nature, she stared, and stared,—and blinked, and stared—with as little compunction as if her mind had been blasted clean.

  Then, as Perdita’s clutching hands freed themselves, to greedily, and ah, how boldly!—caress her lover’s body, Xavier wrenched from her, saying: “How dare you touch me,—you!”

  Whereupon Perdita replied, in a low fierce voice, with scarcely a moment’s hesitation: “Yet who has earned the right, dear Xavier, if not I—?”

  Thus, for the space of a very long moment, the erstwhile lovers contemplated each other, trembling; until, of a sudden, to Thérèse’s dismay, Xavier appeared to surrender, and, springing to Perdita, crushed her in his arms,—with very little ceremony.

  At this, the hot-blushing Thérèse turned aside, for she dared be a witness to animal passion no longer.

  Nor could the young woman bring herself, after so untrammeled a scene, to return to the amiable confines of the tea; but thought it more pragmatical to flee the park, and to make her solitary way afoot to Berwick Avenue. There, she caught a trolley home: and, while yet on the clattering vehicle, her cheeks heated; and the vision of the outlaw lovers still fresh in her thoughts, Thérèse drew from her handbag a notebook and pencil, and, breathless, dashed off a draft of the tender message she would send, by messenger, to Murre that very evening: