The James Joyce Murder

by Amanda Cross

  “You must be mad.”

  “Leo, who after all has been undergoing rather a rigid schedule, deserves a treat. Emmet will come with us because he likes new experiences on which to try his wit. William will come because you will expect him to accompany Leo, and Lina will come because William is going. Whether Grace comes or not is up to her; we need not urge her, if she doesn’t mind staying home alone.”

  “Are you suggesting we all go in one car? It won’t be a drive-in, it will be a squeeze-in.”

  “I’ll drive, with Leo next to me, and William next to him; in the back seat will be Emmet and Lina and you. Of course, Lina too may decide not to go, but I doubt it. Needless to say, we will again take your long-suffering brother’s car.”

  “I’d like to know what’s long-suffering about my brother. He’s in Europe, the lucky bastard.”

  “My language was inexact. I should have said, your brother’s long-suffering car. Remember, you think the idea of a drive-in is too exciting for words.”

  “Reed, I hope you know what you’re doing; it seems to me the sad deterioration of a first-rate mind. What’s playing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Don’t you think my enthusiasm might be a little more convincing if I knew what the picture was?”

  “Certainly not. The chances are ten to one it will be something you would never dream of seeing, like Elvis Presley. Your line is that you’ve been overcome with a need to experience American culture, regardless of the movie.”

  “Reed, I will not see Elvis Presley.”

  “Yes you will. Be good, Kate, and do as I say. I’ll buy you popcorn at the drive-in, if you behave.”

  To Kate’s astonishment, her suggestion of visiting the drive-in after dinner, which sounded to her ears about as convincing as a recommendation that they all play a fast game of touch football, was met with enthusiasm and a burst of high spirits. Leo, of course, was largely responsible for this. Once the possibility of such an adventure had been mentioned, it became inevitable. Emmet so amazed Kate with his eagerness to see a movie from a car that she suspected him of having had too much to drink. William showed signs of wavering, but Leo’s “Ah, come on, William,” was enough for persuasion. Lina said that she too would come, partly perhaps to be with William, but mainly, Kate thought, because she was the sort who would always rather do things than not.

  Grace flatly refused to consider the whole thing, even if Reed offered to take his Volkswagen to make more room for her. “Preposterous idea,” she said. “Looking at a movie through a windshield. I can’t think how such an idea ever caught on.”

  “The boys at camp say you go there to love someone up,” Leo announced.

  “Leo!” came out in so emphatic a chorus from Kate and William that they could only laugh. “What,” Emmet asked, “would Mr. Artifoni say if he heard you?”

  “We don’t let him hear us all the time.”

  “If you want to know the truth,” Emmet said, “I read somewhere that drive-in movies are attended mainly by families; the children come in their pajamas and fall asleep as the evening goes on. The parents drop them into bed when they get home. No need for baby-sitters, and the drive-ins provide bottle warmers and everything else needed for the care and feeding of the human young.”

  “The things you pick up,” Kate said.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind staying here alone?” Kate asked Grace, when they were preparing to depart.

  “Absolutely certain,” she said. “Mrs. Monzoni will be here for a while, but in any case I’m not the sort to worry. Mr. Bradford is just down the road, should I need assistance in I can’t imagine what contingency.”

  “Well,” Emmet said, “I for one am selfishly glad you’re staying. Pussens hasn’t been feeling well”—Emmet picked up the cat, stroking it—“and I feel much better knowing she won’t be all lonely-byes. I hope you don’t loathe cats, Professor Knole.”

  “Not at all,” said Grace. “In fact, I welcome the chance to make the closer acquaintance of one. I’m thinking of acquiring a cat and a canary.”

  Emmet had been quite right about the drive-in. In all the cars Kate could see were families with incredible numbers of pajamaed children. Kate began to have the direst forebodings about a generation brought up on late nights in cars, receiving, as it were, movies subliminally. The movie was called “Moon-something”—Kate had already forgotten what—and had been produced by Walt Disney, thus confirming Kate’s worst fears, since she had never really believed Reed would expose her to Elvis Presley. At least the movie wouldn’t be too wildly inappropriate for Leo, which was a load off her mind. “I can’t wait to see Hayley Mills get her first kiss,” one popcorn-laden girl said to another, passing by. Kate sank deeper into the seat of her brother’s luxurious car and groaned.

  The movie turned out to be a not greatly edifying example of the sort of story she and Grace had been discussing: much derring-do and some mystery, all of it revolving (literally in the case of one windmill scene) around the most extraordinary adventures. The lovers—doubtless one should call them the ingenues—were very young. “It is necessary,” Kate reminded herself, “to remember that fifty-seven percent of the population of the United States is under twenty-five.” That Kate and her contemporaries found the throes of first love agonizingly boring as not likely to be of the smallest interest to Walt Disney, who knew well what he was about.

  The picture, having achieved at least fourteen climaxes, seemed, by the sheer necessities of time, to be drawing to a close: at least the heroine was confronting a woman who kept a pet leopard when Emmet, perhaps driven by an association of ideas, mumbled something about finding out how his pussens was. He left the car—a departure to which no one but Kate paid the smallest attention. It seemed to Kate that no great amount of time had passed when he returned, clearly the bearer of great tidings: “My god,” he said, “troubles never come singly. First his wife and now his barn. Thank heaven there were no animals in it, except a few calves, which he rescued. Grace says it started with a little cloud of smoke, but now the flames are probably visible five miles away—a barn packed to the rafters with hay.”

  Emmet had spoken in a strong whisper to Kate, and the others wrenched their attention from the movie only slowly. “You mean his whole hayloft’s burning?” Leo said. “Emmet, William, Reed, Aunt Kate—” he appealed to them all, leaving the young heroine to be eaten by the leopard should it choose. “Let’s go back and watch it burn.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Reed. “We’d only be in the way, and a danger to the fire department.

  “Of course,” Emmet said, “we should stay right here. Grace said they have the road cordoned off. They’re just trying to keep the house from catching—it’s all they can do. All that hay, it’s hopeless. Thousands of bales of hay . . .”

  “We’ve got to go, you fool,” William shrieked, punching Reed as though to awaken him. “Drive. We’ve got to get back. They’ve got to put out the fire—the hay can’t burn, do you hear, it can’t burn, it can’t burn.” By this time his screams were so loud they attracted attention from the other cars. There were stares, and shouts for quiet. “Drive! Drive!” William shrieked. “They have to save the hay. Merciful God.” He leaped from the car and started racing across the gravel, shrieking.

  “Come on, Emmet,” Reed said. “Kate. Drive Leo home. Now. Lina, stay with her.”

  But Lina had dashed from the car after William. As Kate moved into the driver’s seat and began to maneuver the car out, she saw Emmet and Reed catch up with William. One of the attendants was already running toward him, and as she pulled past, quickly, so that Leo might not see much, she heard the scream of sirens coming toward them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Painful Case

  “You may say what you want about Mr. Artifoni’s camp,” Kate said, “but if it were not for those sessions with first aid and baske
tball, I would hardly know what to do with Leo these days.”

  “The entire point of camps,” Emmet said. “My objections were not to Mr. Artifoni, but to his maxims, so banal, and so oft-quoted. Ah, Reed at last.”

  “Will Cunningham defend him?” Kate asked.

  “Let me at least get him a drink,” Emmet said. “Have you left Lina there?”

  “She hoped they might let her visit him. They’ve sent for a priest too, someone for whom William has a lot of respect—a friend really, I gather. Thank you. I need this. Cunningham will defend him, though whether the charge will be different, or the defense much changed—nothing has been decided.”

  “They won’t—they can’t execute him, can they?”

  “No. Cunningham will certainly not allow that it was premeditated murder. That’s going to be tricky, since of course he did get hold of the bullet, but Cunningham’s going to maintain he found it more or less at the last minute—I gather that’s somewhere near the truth, or as near as we’re likely to get. Cunningham says thirty years, as an absolute maximum.”

  “Thirty years!”

  “Twenty, more likely; eight, with parole and time off for good behavior. And Cunningham hopes to get him psychiatric help—there may actually be a possible insanity plea, though, as the law reads, that’s almost hopeless. It’s ghastly, I know, but look at the bright side. William will be helped, and Emmet and Mr. Mulligan and Mr. Bradford and his children, not to mention Mr. Artifoni and the Monzonis and the Pasquales, will be cleared of all suspicion. And of course, Kate.”

  “Surely no one really suspected me?”

  “Not especially. But it is just as well, if one has any sort of highly responsible position, not to have even a suspicion of murder hanging about one.”

  Kate glared at Grace, who continued to listen to Reed with an air of unshatterable innocence.

  “I,” Emmet said, “will forever have the shadow of vile deception hanging about me, as far as Leo is concerned.”

  “He simply could not believe the barn wasn’t burning. He kept running hopefully to the window—really, small boys are ghouls.”

  “What would you have done,” Grace asked, “if William hadn’t reacted?”

  “If our plot hadn’t worked, you mean?” Reed asked. “Emmet was taking that chance.”

  “Suppose I’d gone to the movie,” Grace said, “and Emmet couldn’t have pretended to call me?”

  “He would have pretended to reach Mrs. Monzoni, still held to the house by the fire.”

  “Go on, Reed,” Kate said. “Sum it up. You know how to begin: ‘The case as I first saw it seemed a simple matter of accident; but that was only as I first saw it.’ ”

  Reed got up to refill his glass.

  “You might have let me in on it,” Kate said.

  “It was bad enough counting on Emmet’s histrionic powers; I didn’t want to count on anyone else’s. Not that I underestimate Emmet’s talents for drawing-room comedy, but melodrama seemed rather out of his line.”

  “Besides,” Emmet said, “any risk, even so small a risk as of appearing an ass, was mine to take. In a sense, it was my fault.”

  “It was all our faults,” Kate said. “Lead us not into temptation, as Grace said. I ought to have thought more.”

  “The only real sinner,” Reed said, “though doubtless we are all too thoughtless of one another, was the woman he killed. It at least provides me with some satisfaction to know that it was not the innocent who suffered for Mary Bradford’s sins.”

  “Did you think from the beginning it was William?” Grace asked. “The obvious man to the police, I think you said.”

  “Not from the beginning, but soon after. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that only a maniac would have taken the chance of leaving a loaded gun lying about. And for all the reports of that early morning target practice, would anyone really count on that as a way to murder the woman? Even if they thought the chance worth taking, the threat to the boy, to all of us, was preposterously great. It was the judge’s horror of the gunplay at William’s arraignment that made me realize that. And then, it was always Leo who shot the gun. Why not this time, if indeed there had been a plant by someone else of which William knew nothing? However terrible a deed William did, he did not let Leo shoot that gun. He was incapable of that, of letting Leo commit the murder, however innocently. Yet it was the fact that Leo did not shoot the gun which convicted William in my eyes.”

  “That’s why I wondered about it so myself,” Grace said.

  “I know. The difficulty was, of course, while I’d decided William had loaded the gun as well as fired it, there wasn’t a ghost of a motive. The woman may have been a monster—I think we all agree that she was—but William had never laid eyes on her before. How could he hate her enough for murder? Reluctantly, I began to look about elsewhere for my suspect—and for a time lit, as Professor Knole did, I think, on Mr. Mulligan. Upon investigation, however, Mr. Mulligan’s innocence seemed assured, almost absolutely.”

  “Shall we ever know about that?” Grace asked.

  “Forgive me for being mysterious. I shall have to ask for amnesty there. However, when I returned from New York and had two conversations, one with Emmet and one with Kate, the whole thing suddenly seemed to fall into place. I ought to mention, incidentally, that it has only been my recent association with Kate, my nearness to her in the same house, that apparently allowed me to learn from her the leap of mind necessary to, for me, so uncharacteristic a construction of events. To my honor, I was beginning to think like a professor of English.”

  “Most gallantly put, dear sir. But though pleased with the compliments, I am still bewildered by your conclusions.”

  “Emmet had discovered something missing, something that a letter from Joyce to Lingerwell had mentioned. There was always the chance that Emmet had taken it himself—though again, it is to Kate’s credit that she was a good enough judge of character to think that unlikely.” Emmet glanced at Kate, who flushed. I have grown not one whit better at accepting compliments, she thought. Damn.

  “It was Emmet who did most of the guessing here, but of course, being a literary-type chap, he was used to letting his ideas leap about illogically.”

  “It begins to come naturally, after you’ve read Joyce awhile. It’s more an association of ideas than a logical sequence.”

  “Sounds like Tristram Shandy,” Grace said.

  “Is like, in a way.”

  “Tell them how your mind went,” Reed said. “I don’t think I could do it justice.”

  “First of all, I’d been thinking about Dubliners. That’s why I gave our funny policeman ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ to read. You know, he saw right off the solution was in those letters, and when I told him I’d been working on Joyce, he wanted to know about Joyce. He wasn’t at all slow, for a policeman whose mind in no way resembled the White Queen’s. Then there was a sentence of Harry Levin’s, I don’t know what the grounds for it were—here, I better quote exactly: ‘Mr. Bloom’s day first occurred to Joyce as the subject for another short story.’ Add this sentence to the fact of the lost document, and—well—it suddenly seemed possible to me that Ulysses had started as a short story for Dubliners, and that Joyce, who of course waited so many years for publication of his stories, meanwhile decided that Ulysses would be his masterpiece, and withdrew the story from Dubliners before publication. He kept it though, as he kept Stephen Hero, an earlier form of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it was this manuscript, or so I believed, which he sent as a gift, the most valuable thing he had to bestow, to Lingerwell. But he wanted it kept from the public. Why? That’s still anybody’s guess. Maybe he wanted Ulysses read in its own right—Lord knows, that hope succeeded beyond even his wildest dreams, I’m sure of that.

  “This, as Reed or any of you would have pointed out, was only the wildest supposi
tion. I hadn’t a breath of proof for any of it. But I began to wonder, suppose there was such a story, suppose William had stolen it, hoping later to be able to claim he had found it, where would he have hidden the story? Not, I was reasonably certain, in this house. Of course, I searched. But if the story were found in this house, little of the credit would be William’s. Lingerwell’s daughter would dispose of it as she would dispose of all the other papers. But if he could find it in a dramatic way, a way similar to many of the literary discoveries of recent years, he might be allowed to bring it out; at the very least, his name would be connected with it. But where could it be hidden?

  “As you can see, I wasn’t a bit closer to a solution, but I was beginning to think like William; suppose, I thought, I walked the fields as he did with Leo, would the hiding place strike me as it struck him? I thought at first he might have taken Mary Bradford into the plan and then have had to kill her, but that seemed too wildly improbable. There was absolutely no questioning William’s loathing for Mary Bradford. Anyway, though I actually tramped over the fields, I didn’t think of anything. But I did talk to Reed about the missing story and tell him my theory.”

  “Before you spoke to me?” Kate asked.

  “Yes. I felt he was likelier than you to call me a fool. And I couldn’t let you live with the possibility of such a theft unless I really believed in it. Ultimately I did tell you, though not that I suspected William. After that,” Emmet said, shrugging his shoulders, “it’s Reed’s story.”

  “I grabbed the stick, so to speak, from Emmet’s faltering hand. Not a bad image, really, for my purposes. I came to it fresh, a new runner. He was already tired. In the end, however, I too nearly dropped with fatigue until I started recapitulating my whole visit here—one of the most wonderful and dreadful visits I have ever paid—and I remembered my first morning, being instructed in and bounced mercilessly about on Mr. Bradford’s baler. I remembered also that Mary Bradford had seen me out there. Remembering all this, I again walked across the fields, and as I was watching that machine forming a bale, it came to me suddenly how even a good-sized manuscript could be neatly hidden in one of those bales, if one merely dropped it into the machinery when Bradford was looking the other way.