by Amanda Cross
“Professor Knole, I’m shocked,” Kate said.
“I too,” said Emmet.
“The trouble with you two,” Grace said, “is that like all young people, you wish to restrict the benefits of what I believe is called frank language to your own cohorts. I have often thought we who are more mature should let you hear how it sounds on the lips of another generation. More coffee, anyone?”
Chapter Ten
Eveline
The courthouse contingent returned just before dinner, sore-footed and world-weary, calling loudly for drink and sustenance.
“I thought perhaps you would bring John Cunningham back with you?” Kate said to Reed.
“Frankly,” Reed said, “we can’t afford it.”
“Doesn’t he have any nonbusiness hours he just gives away?”
“Not he. At least, not when he’s got any cases pending, and I guess that’s constantly, to all intents and purposes. Don’t be hard on him, Kate. He took a lot more time to turn up in court in Pittsfield today than he would have done for many clients paying double the fee. And a jolly good thing too. I’ve brought you a present, by the way.”
“Why was it a jolly good thing? You’re terrifying me.”
“I better have a martini on the rocks. Our only meal was a soggy sandwich and Coca-Cola, neither my favorite forms of food. I am either too old or too degenerate to get a lift from Coke. Thank you. Do serve Lina and William too; their need is greater than mine. Take my advice, dear girl, and don’t play around with guns. We had, of course, to pull a judge whose grandson had just shot off his own foot.”
“Reed, how frightful!”
“It’s not supposed to be anything else. Guns are the devil and all, I’ve always thought so. But poor William was feeling bad enough in all conscience, without having the judge lecture him at great length, holding up an already overcrowded court calendar into the bargain. I thought he would make William write a hundred times over I never again will touch a gun.’ ”
“It’s I who should write something over and over,” Kate said. “I’ve always loathed and detested guns. But I was afraid of impinging upon a masculine prerogative. Also, I’d read Hedda Gabler at perhaps too impressionable an age. Let’s face it, modern Freudian lingo has got us so frightened of appearing to be castrating women that we won’t even take a gun away from a boy. And I do not want to hear a chuckle out of you, Emmet Crawford.”
“I haven’t so much as uttered, dear lady. Proud enough am I to be drinking cocktails with the grown-ups.”
“Well, this is a special day.”
“May I have something with my tomato juice, Aunt Kate?” Leo asked, pleased at the break in routine which permitted William and Emmet and himself a place at the cocktail hour.
“I’ll give you something in your tomato juice you won’t like,” Kate viciously said.
“Mr. Artifoni says . . .”
“I don’t care if Mr. Artifoni forces gin down the throats of his gurgling charges, you cannot have anything in your tomato juice.”
“Aunt Kate! To eat, I meant. Mr. Artifoni says that no good athlete ever drinks or smokes or . . .” Leo interrupted himself to reach for a handful of nuts.
“Or what, for the sake of the blessed saints?” Emmet asked.
“Or stays up past ten o’clock,” Leo concluded. “Good athletes never see ‘The Late Late Show.’ ”
“What else happened in court?” Grace asked.
“I’ll spare you the technicalities and the long, dreary hours, the spirit-defeating atmosphere. William was arraigned and released on payment of bail.” Reed paused as Emmet, at a sign from Kate, led Leo from the room. William and Lina had already departed. “Let us pray,” Reed continued, “that William does not consider pulling a Lord Jim and fleeing his conscience all over the tropics, because riding on that lad is more money than I’d care to lose. I must say, Eveline was a great support in time of need. She even cheered me up, which was well beyond the call of duty.”
“What will happen if William is found guilty of murder in whatever degree it properly is?”
“Who knows? Perhaps a suspended sentence. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“The simple fact is,” Kate said, “we have to find the real murderer.”
“Kate,” Reed said. “I cannot bear to have you hatching some plot that would give the Hardy boys pause. Let’s face the fact that it’s almost impossible to find out who put the bullet in that gun. All we can do is stir up a peck of trouble and probably get the lot of us run out of the country. Not that I’d mind.”
“Reed, believe it or not, I haven’t a clue as to how to put a bullet in a gun. Maybe there are others with similar alibis, and by a process of elimination . . .”
“We’ll have no one left in Berkshire County who isn’t aiming a rifle at your head. Kate, I beg of you, behave.”
“Won’t the policemen do anything?”
“Everything, as is the dull lot of policemen. But what you’ve got to recognize is that, unless the police are absolutely overwhelmed with evidence to the contrary, they’re inclined to assume that the man who pulled the trigger is the murderer. They are certainly not going to run around like one of your favorite detectives proving by some esoteric mumbo jumbo that would never stand up in court—which is why the culprit always commits suicide—that so-and-so must have done it because the gun, by some miraculous idiosyncrasy known only to two people, will shoot a bullet only if the Lord’s Prayer is murmured over it in Sanskrit on three successive rainy nights. If you absolutely forced another martini on me, I might acquiesce with a fair grace. Speaking of grace, you never asked me what was the present I brought you.”
“I hope it’s a proper clue which will lead inevitably to the solution of all our problems.”
“That remains to be seen. What I brought you is the collected works, or at least as many as I could collect on short notice, of our Mr. Mulligan. It transpired, during one of those soggy-sandwich repasts about which I was wringing your withers a while back, that Pittsfield, bless its up-to-date little heart, has a community college and a bookstore. So while the court was recessed, Cunningham was on the phone, and William and Eveline seemed capable, under pressure, of getting along without me, I wandered round to the bookstore and discovered that many of Mr. Mulligan’s books are available in paperback. The clerk told me they were very popular with students, mainly, he intimated, because they were such good ‘cram stuff’—his phrase, not mine. Anyway, since you and Grace Knole keep saying you’re interested in Mr. Mulligan, I thought you might want to cast a professional eye on whatever it is has got him a promotion to full professor and all the rest of it. Considering, I mean, that he didn’t know what went ‘Pop’ in the committee room.”
“Who’s hatching plots now, my little Hardy boy?”
“That’s the thanks I get for bearing gifts. Another? I couldn’t possibly. Force it down my throat.”
“Dibs on Form and Function in Modern Fiction,” Grace said, looking over the package of books.
“By all means,” Kate said. “I shall confine myself to The Novel: Tension and Technique. Much more my cup of tea anyway.”
“Dinner, dinner, dinner,” Leo called, “Mrs. Monzoni said so.”
“And what of interest did Mr. Artifoni say today, my little man?” Emmet asked as they were seated at the table.
“Mr. Artifoni said that guard is the most important position in basketball, even if he doesn’t get to shoot baskets and it doesn’t seem so important at first. He said,” Leo went on, helping himself generously to mashed potatoes, “that the guard doesn’t talk of how many baskets he got, but of how many baskets his man got.”
“How many baskets did your man get?” Kate asked.
“He didn’t,” Leo said. “We never play basketball on Mondays. Please pass the pickles.”
William and Eveline, af
ter suitable apologies, had departed for supper in town, doubtless to consume the same sort of veal cutlets with which Kate had entertained Reed on his first night in the country. They returned at something after ten o’clock, apparently having undone whatever bonds of sympathy they had woven since the murder. William went upstairs to bed, pleading a fatigue which certainly was likely enough, while Lina threw herself in front of the fire and began guzzling brandy in an ominous manner. Reed, too, had retired. Emmet was at work, as ever, on the letters which were becoming something close to a passion with him, Grace Knole was upstairs, presumably settling down for the night, and Kate resigned herself to a discussion of the perils of womanhood.
“I expect you’re damn sick of the lot of us,” Lina said. “And small reward I am to you, for inviting me for a visit, or rather, permitting me to invite myself. I’d better take myself off in the morning. I cannot image,” she viciously added, “where the idea that men are the aggressors in sex ever arose from. Shrinking violets are nothing to it.”
“So Shaw always insisted. At the same time, there is Mr. Mulligan.”
“How horribly, hideously true. Can it be that men merely object to the entanglements of love, not to sex itself?”
“Dylan Thomas, as I remember, propounded some such theory. But then he was clearly not the best example of monogamous manhood, however good a poet.”
“William’s monogamous. He loves one only: himself.”
“What exactly is William’s problem? Sin?”
“I think so. And the fact that he thinks he can’t possibly marry, financially speaking. I don’t think he really minds that I have a Ph.D. and he doesn’t yet, but he does mind not being able to get to work on his dissertation, and finding it all grind when he does get down to it, and not very likely to be interesting in the end.”
“In the Victorian period, of course, when muscular Christianity was popular, people like Carlyle would recommend work and cold baths.”
“Exactly William’s theory, evidently. He keeps plodding at Hopkins’ inscapes, and takes long cold swims in the ocean when he’s home. I am not Victorian, thank the lord. My feeling is, if a man has so much energy he wants to swim halfway to Europe, why not put the energy to good use and go to bed with someone? What has he been doing here to sublimate, now he’s so far from the ocean, besides pretending to shoot guns?”
“He plays with Leo, climbs mountains, swims in the pool. He’s even been known to play tennis with me once or twice. Lina, is there some reason why it has to be William? Can’t you, according to the old bromide, be friends and find your love life somewhere else?”
“I could, of course. As you know, to my shame, I’ve even considered being seduced, if not actually attacked. But in the end, it’s always William, blast him. I mean, we seem to be right together about so many things. And in all the years I’ve known him, he’s never found anyone else either. And one thing about William, he sticks to his principles. I mean, he isn’t one of those with pure girls on one hand and loose women on the other, which is so often, I fear, supposed to be a failing of religious young men. I mean, he really believes in chastity.”
“If that’s so, then why not stop brooding and put your mind to something else—writing a book, perhaps, or taking a trip around the world, if you prefer that. You’re wonderfully free, you know. Does it frighten you to look at it in that light?”
“I’m not independent like you, Kate. I like doing things with people I know.”
“Then stop having fantasies about sleeping with people you don’t know—the masterful Italian, à la Mastroianni, met one dark night in Naples or on the Riviera.”
“That’s a low blow.”
“Look, Lina. Life isn’t replete with possibilities. For women who don’t just naturally move into a house in the suburbs with husband and children and community activities, there are only three possible lives. You can marry and continue to function professionally, even with children. The number of this sort increaseth. Or, you can not marry, seeing a clear choice and choosing to work. This sort belongs, usually, to an earlier generation, like Grace Knole. Their number decreaseth. Or you can be one of that third group, much less publicized, which requires and enjoys the love of men, usually more than one man in a lifetime, and scorns the role of homemaker. There used to be lots of Frenchwomen of that sort who pined away when forced to spend any time at their chateaux.”
“Like George Sand, you mean, or Madame de Staël?”
“If you insist on rather extreme examples. Or Madame du Châtelet—do you know Nancy Mitford’s book on her? Or in this century, Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette. As Doris Lessing put it in an interview, marriage is not one of the things she’s good at.”
“Are you in the third group?”
“It would appear so. Certainly running a house this summer has not improved my temper. The point, however, is that you are in one of the first two groups, probably the one who marries and continues with a profession. You wouldn’t be a virgin in your late twenties otherwise, frankly, but who knows. Now don’t open your little mouth to ask any questions about me, because I don’t intend to answer them. Why not forget dreams of William, on the one hand, and dreams of wild nights with unknown lovers of infinite experience on the other, and settle down to work? Meeting the man with whom you could spend your life is as much serendipity as anything: it usually happens when you’re worrying about something else. As to your taking yourself off in the morning, don’t. Now, before you become absolutely blotto on brandy, would you mind telling me, in all the details you can muster, what happened in court today?”
When, several hours later, Kate staggered upstairs with Lina in tow, and saw her headed in the general direction of bed and oblivion, she reached her own room with a sense of infinite relief, and a longing for solitude. But life appears to offer solitude only to those already burdened with too much of it. There was a knock on the door, and Grace Knole came in.
“You look exhausted,” Grace said. “I’ve only poked my nose in to say good night, and to tell you that Mr. Mulligan has all the literary mastery of a preengineering student. But we can talk about that tomorrow.”
“By all means. But do come in and tell me what that matter was you were hinting at so beguilingly at lunch.”
“I’m afraid that’s rather a long conversation, Kate. Tomorrow will do for that, too.”
“Oh, come in and sit down, for heaven’s sake. I told you all we do is talk—or were you telling me?—on the way to see the cows. Talk, talk and more talk, and some of it actually conversation. I do intersperse it, of course, with tennis and walks, and an occasional swim—but let’s face it, if you want to know what a man likes, watch what he does. I talk.”
“Interspersed also with a little lovemaking now and then?”
“Grace, I will not discuss sex with one other person this summer, and maybe not even next. What in God’s name has got into you? Lina I can excuse—she’s very twixt and tween, and simply brimful of indecisions. But what possible reason you can have . . .”
“Keep your shirt on. I do not intend to lay at your feet my personal burdens, if any. I merely wished to point out, somewhere along the way, that the president of Jay College probably wouldn’t be able to have a lover. A husband, yes. Don’t you think you smoke too much?”
“Certainly I smoke too much. I comfort myself with the thought that there’s nothing like knowing what kind of cancer you’re going to die from. Light up a cigarette and be sure. Grace, have you gone completely, ninety-nine point forty-four percent mad?”
“Very likely. Believe it or not, there’s a shortage of really competent women around, let alone women who aren’t married to men whose careers or egos foreclose any possibilities of their having a college president for a wife. Let’s face it. Bunting may be the most prominent woman president around, she was even on the Atomic Energy Commission, but if her husband hadn’t, most unhappi
ly, died, she’d still probably be tutoring in chemistry somewhere. As for the unmarrieds, those who can hold their own in the world of college and university administration—as I said, you’re probably too tired.”
“I’m certainly too tired to be president of Jay College for Women. This is the first indication I’ve ever had that your powers were failing. Or have you simply developed an odd sense of humor? Jay College may be one of the oldest women’s colleges in the country, and with a great reputation, but not even two hundred years of respectable history could survive me.”
“Rave on. Just think about it. The trustees are, I happen to know, prepared to make you an offer. They’ve done a lot of research on you, sat in on your classes, read your books . . .”
“You’re positively making me blush. I haven’t gone crimson like that . . .”
“Since the last person paid you a heartfelt compliment. You have many drawbacks, I don’t mind telling you, and your inability to accept a compliment is certainly one of them. Also, you’re somewhat less than a mountain of tact, you’re impatient with brainlessness and the throwing around of weight, and while you have the greatest respect for manners and courtesy, you have none at all for the proprieties as such.”
“I wonder you ever thought of me.”
“Well, you know what Henry James wrote to a young acquaintance who had just met Edith Wharton: ‘Ah my dear young man,’ he wrote, ‘you have made friends with Edith Wharton. I congratulate you; you may find her difficult, but you will never find her stupid, and you will never find her mean.’ ”
“That’s nice, Grace. But hardly the qualifications for a college president, which, incidentally, I definitely don’t want to be. Did you suggest me?”
“It might surprise you to know how many people suggested you. I’ve already given you the bit about the scarcity of capable women. I’m here this weekend, really, to sound you out—and to add to the soundings all the persuasions I can personally bring to bear which, as you know, I profoundly feel.”
