I tried my best to keep my eyes off Griffith, the closest thing this class had to Richard Cory. I was going to purge myself of my prejudices, and stop singling him out for scrutiny. I tried not to think about him, though it took entirely too much energy keeping a thought pushed back against the wall of the brain.
The discussion had roared along while I concentrated on my attempt to not think about Griffith. I tried to catch up. Stacy had just made the apt observation that nobody knew Richard Cory because—this showed she was reading the text closely—he was only described in terms of what he looked like and what he had. “Externally,” she said with a proud smile. “Nobody spoke to him or knew him.”
We were cruising around the question of how well anyone knows anyone else, when my attempts to not think about Griffith once again failed. But this time, I reconsidered him in the context of the poem. My assumptions about him made me a perfect example of the people of Tilbury Town. I’d watched him and judged him based on his externals—his wealth, his father’s celebrity, his smirk, his silence in class, his mediocre grades, his popularity. I did not know the boy at all.
Thank you, Edwin Arlington Robinson.
But I still wished that Griffith didn’t smirk. It would be so much easier to avoid prejudging him without that facial expression.
Of course, Griffith seldom spoke up in class, so waiting for him to explain himself would involve geologic increments of time. At the moment, he seemed unimpressed by the enthusiasm crackling around the room, and uninterested in joining the discussion. Instead, he slouched in his chair and watched his classmates impassively, almost as if he were enduring the session. There was nothing I could object to—not even a smirk now, and no open expression of boredom, or disagreement—and that in itself annoyed me.
“Maybe that’s enough—maybe not having anybody know you—or realize that they don’t know you—can drive a person to suicide,” an always-earnest girl named Lili said.
I loved how this poem generated passionate observations that would be declared trite and embarrassing in a few years, but now were new and heartfelt. Ideas that boiled down to money being unable to buy happiness, or the pain of loneliness, or never judging a book by its cover.
The important thing was that they were thinking and talking and using the poem as their reference point, so they were actually practicing backing up their opinions and interpreting text. I didn’t tell them that, either.
“We don’t know what was in his past, on his mind,” Jonesy Farmer said. “Maybe he had a secret driving him crazy.”
Jonesy. I had to remember to find out about his father, Jesse, who’d also dated Phoebe. Not an “M,” but maybe he’d know something more about her. Couldn’t hurt, and maybe could help a lot. I added it to my mental checklist.
“What he said.” Griffith had spoken. “That’s right. You never really know what’s going on with somebody. Even your good friends. Not really. He could be scared or something.”
I was so enjoying the general level of enthusiasm and engagement that it took a minute to register that reticent Griffith was making history by participating. The Griff had spoken, backed Jonesy up. Jonesy looked happily dazed. I was also dazed. Those two sentences added up to more words than Griffith had spoken in class since the semester began. They were a strong testimonial to the bond between the two juniors, no matter what tensions or bullying I’d mistakenly thought I’d seen between them in the hallway.
Jonesy continued his argument. “He could have committed a crime. It could have been eating him up for a long time. Maybe he got his money illegally.”
Griffith looked at his pal, frowned, then slouched even more dramatically and returned to impassivity. Even I could feel the temperature drop in the space between them. The joy and enthusiasm left Jonesy’s face.
But Stacy shook her head and blurted her opinion out before I could call on her. “I don’t think that’s what the poem suggests at all! I think he’s like a king—he’s born to the money and the position! He’s not a criminal!”
“But how would you know?” Jonesy asked. “If the point is that we don’t know anybody, how would you know?”
“Because—because we’re supposed to be looking at what Robinson said—”
“But he didn’t say why he shot himself,” a normally shy and silent boy added. He looked surprised by the fact that he’d spoken up.
“People who kill themselves are all crazy!” Dierdre said with passion. “And so was he. You have to be crazy to end your own life, and he had such a good life, anyway.”
“That’s the whole point!” somebody else said. “His life stunk. They just thought he had it all.”
“So do I,” Dierdre insisted. “He had looks and money and respect. What more can you want?”
“What isn’t there, though?” I asked. “What makes for a happy life?”
Nothing like tossing out an impossible question debated for the past several thousand years, but as they didn’t know enough to know that, they debated on.
I thought about happy and unhappy lives. I thought about my in-laws and all the hurricane victims, and knew their unhappiness was real, profound, perhaps permanent, but situational. It felt quantitatively different to be unhappy because unhappy things had happened to you versus being an inherently unhappy person, the way the imaginary but believable Richard Cory must have been, and Merilee was.
Even when life had been providing her with everything she wanted or needed, she always seemed vaguely discontented and ready to whine about whatever was still lacking or less than perfect, and that could range from a hangnail to a cataclysm. If a flood wiped out the entire Delaware Valley and swept most of its residents out to sea, Merilee would complain because it had spoiled a planned picnic.
I couldn’t keep my mind in one place. It skittered from classroom to Phoebe, to the individuals she’d known, to the still-dangling threads, and back to the classroom, where the discussion was degenerating into a back-and-forth about whether rich people were happier than poor people. The group seemed to be moving toward the consensus that indeed it was easier to be happy with resources than without. “Then, why did Richard Cory put a bullet through his head?” I asked, and they looked startled. They’d forgotten the original question.
They went back to the imponderables, looked at the text again for a clue to a dark secret in his past, a crime darkening his soul—Jonesy again—to having those theories pooh-poohed, and back to loneliness. Acute, perpetual loneliness.
“Then, he should have done something about it,” Stacy said in her usual emphatic style. As soon as she opened her mouth, exclamation points flashed in the air around her. “Nobody has to be lonely! He had all that money—why didn’t he do something with it? Help other people, get involved in their lives. Then he wouldn’t have been so lonely!”
I could almost see small lightbulbs flash over several heads in the class. Not Griffith’s. He looked baffled by what Stacy had said. I turned my eyes and mind away from him and counted at least five juniors who gave every appearance of honestly considering the idea of helping others as a way of enriching one’s own life. The little lightbulbs shimmered on. Thank you again, Edwin Arlington Robinson.
I hated to break the spell, but we didn’t have much time left. “For tomorrow,” I said, once I had them calmed down, “I’d like you to think about what you said and heard today, whether you agreed or disagreed, and write an essay—your opinion backed by whatever evidence you can or cannot find in the poem—as to why Richard Cory killed himself. There are no wrong answers. Simply defend your idea.”
I braced myself for a replay of this morning’s scene with the ninth graders. There were indeed groans and grumbles, but they were half-hearted. They were engaged with the idea, and as onerous as writing might be, they could see its point.
I hadn’t eradicated misuse of the pronoun “it,” but in a small way, for a few minutes at least, the poet, Stacy, and I, too, had done our bit for the future of humanity.
It s
ufficed.
Sixteen
* * *
* * *
Sasha’s condo is sui generis. I am willing to bet there’s no comparable place within the tristate area. Her father gave it to her during one of his divorces, and Sasha was wise enough never to probe the ethics or legality, or even to ask under what guise it had been economically advantageous—as surely it must have been—to get rid of the place that way and at that moment. If an opera were written about divorce court and accounting shenanigans, Sasha’s father’s life would provide the libretto.
He’d also left those furnishings he wasn’t in the mood to move: mostly expensive, uncomfortably stark geometric shapes, plus a few more-beautiful Asian tansus. Scattered among them were Sasha’s Goodwill “finds.” She’d re-covered a tufted ebony wood–edged love seat in fake leopard skin and pillowed a painfully carved wooden chair with red satin. But Sasha had also had a brief engagement with an Englishman. The marriage never happened, but the slipping apart was amicable, and when he divested himself of a castle or country house and shipped a container’s load of furniture to his daughter in the States, he earmarked some of it for Sasha. Hence chintz stuffed chairs squatted among the angled tubes and solemn carved and padded pieces. Add to that a few Spanish-influenced wooden chests and a heavy-handed sprinkle of baroque accents—gilded mirrors and picture frames—and you should have had a visual insult. But Sasha melted the clashing edges and styles with a scarf tossed here, a shawl there, and when necessary, by painting solemn pieces in bright clean colors. Only her darkroom, seldom used in these digital days, its door generally closed, symbolizing its separateness, was clinically efficient. Dark smooth surfaces, shelves, and sink. In that room, all her style went into her photographs. It stood, sealed beside the dining area like a secret.
Elsewhere, she lived in the design equivalent of International House where all were welcome. As if to demonstrate that, the landscape painting she’d brought home from Phoebe’s—a pallid, dull scene to my taste—now hung on the dining area wall, and despite a too-dark-too-much frame and washed-out canvas, it now also felt a natural part of the eclectic décor.
I noticed another new piece relocated from Phoebe’s, a gilded Roman warrior about two feet tall. Why Sasha had wanted it, I could not tell. The artist’s sense of proportion was off, and the warrior looked stringy and underweight, ineffectual.
“Phoebe loved that piece,” Sasha said when she saw me eyeing it. Chacun a son gout indeed. I looked at it again. Even Sasha had not yet been able to blend it into her mishmash décor. A scarf covering the entire thing would be my plan.
“So what have you got about Phoebe?” she asked.
I told her the crumbs we’d gathered so far. They weren’t enough to interest an ant, let alone make a case. But she was intrigued by the news about Dennis and Toy. “And,” I said, “Dennis did not go home to Chicago last week. He was using his credit card right here in Philly two, three days later.”
“Where is he? Why would he lie that way?”
“Good questions. Could he have lied just to get away from us? He didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be with people remembering his mother—fondly remembering her. So he lied. How’s that for a theory?”
“Bad,” she said. “Because he never worries about hurting people’s feelings. He is not Mr. Sensitivity. He’d have just cut and run. Or said, ‘I cannot stand you people. Adios.’ Instead, he planned to have the lunch first so that he could catch that plane.”
“He said.”
“But he could as easily have let the lunch be afterwards and deserted us then.” She shook her head. “His behavior has never made particular sense to me, but you could be right. It might have been about getting away from me. He tries to hide it, but it’s absolutely true that he hates me.”
“Why on earth? It’s not like you stole his mommy’s affections away from him.”
She shrugged. “He’s always begrudged my existence. I don’t think he liked it that I got along with his mother. Not that he wanted to be with her, but I weakened his case that she was impossible to endure. I endured and enjoyed her.”
We were both silent for a while.
“Do you think it was all about Toy?” I finally asked. “About getting rid of her?”
“That would be awful. He’d kill his mother as a setup for getting rid of a girlfriend?”
“Maybe not just that. But get rid of Mom and then make it a two-fer? Horrible but not impossible.”
“I never thought of him as vicious,” she said. “Annoying. Maybe even repugnant. Shady. Always on the fringe of what’s not quite legal. Sneaky. But more likely to move away from his mother than have an open conflict. The only time I heard him bad-mouth her in her presence was last Sunday, and as you recall, she was dead, cremated, and in a martini shaker.”
“He got awfully angry when you suggested that Phoebe might not have killed herself,” I said mildly.
“That he did.” She was quiet again, frowning slightly. “But even so…” She’d been holding Phoebe’s pocketbook all along, and now she looked at it as if suddenly remembering that it was hanging from her shoulder. “I have to tell you, this isn’t going to be nearly as interesting as the idea that Dennis has been secretly in town. Or that he and Toy…”
“Mackenzie’s checking it out and I bet he finds out where he was and is. It just takes longer if he’s been in a private home. However, that’s all speculation and the pocketbook is real, so give it here.”
“I looked in it.” Her expression was suddenly that of a young child expecting to be chastised. “Before you called about it. Was that wrong? I mean tampering with something that might be evidence? Important? Messing up fingerprints and all?”
“No, no,” I said. “Unless you got rid of its contents, which you did not.”
“Then, that’s the good news. But the bad news is that there is truly nothing interesting in it.”
Of course I was sure my semi-trained eye would spot what she’d missed. My non-credentials had gone to my head.
“In fact,” Sasha said, “I thought that was the only interesting thing about the bag—the fact that there wasn’t anything interesting, meaning personal, in her pocketbook.”
“You think somebody went through it before you? Took that mysterious something out—the interesting thing?”
Sasha shook her head and settled onto the leopard-print love seat. “That’s what I thought at first, but then I really looked at the contents and changed my mind. I think she’d just experienced a getting-organized attack, and she died too soon after it for the normal flotsam to collect in there again. Everything was in separate see-through zip-up bags by categories, see?” She pulled one out now, a silvery mesh that held lipstick, comb, mirror, and face powder. “Cosmetics.”
“Writing implements,” Sasha said, “credit cards,” pulling out two more bags, one orange, one green.
“Color coded, too,” I murmured.
“This makes it easier to switch purses quickly, and she had this awesome collection.” Sasha pulled out the little handheld version of the online calendar and address book. “I knew that anything on this would be on the computer, too, so that didn’t seem significant, and that was pretty much that.”
“No notebook or scraps of paper? What did she do with her random thoughts, shopping lists, memos to herself?”
“There’s this, but look at it. It’s got nothing interesting, either.” She handed over a tiny soft-sided notebook. The used pages were gone, ripped out on the small perforated line. All that was still in it said, “dz. eggs, lib, b-dy crds, tpe.” I tried to find subtle and meaningful coding there, but no matter how I looked at it, it seemed simply to be a list of chores. Phoebe had needed to buy eggs, birthday cards, and tape, and visit the library. Sasha was right. Hard to ascribe any significance to the list.
I shrugged. “Her money? A wallet?”
Sasha passed the entire pocketbook over to me. I understood why she’d appropriated it. It was a clever, c
razy quilt of lizard skins dyed purple and topaz, immediately desirable, especially to the skinless shivering lizards left in its wake. I reached inside and was pulling out a slender wallet when the doorbell rang.
I looked at Sasha, who put her hands out, palms up. “I have no idea,” she said. “It can’t be my client. He’s an impatient sort, but he gave me till tomorrow morning. If he…” She continued muttering to herself as she went to the door and looked through the peephole. “I don’t believe it,” she said, then turned and mouthed “Dennis.”
“No.”
She nodded vigorously.
Then there he was, walking—make that storming—through the door before Sasha had it fully opened.
“What the hell have you been telling people?” he demanded.
“Good afternoon to you, too, Dennis,” she said. “Isn’t this a surprise. I thought you were in Chicago.”
“Obviously I’m not. And don’t try to avoid the question.”
“Why not? You’re avoiding mine.”
They stood in belligerent positions facing each other. “Why don’t you both sit down?” I asked. I squashed Phoebe’s purse down beside me. I was pretty sure Dennis wouldn’t know this had been his mother’s pocketbook, or notice that I had another bag, my own, at my feet.
He nodded brusquely, and he and Sasha found seats as far apart from each other as possible in the room. He was barely into a sitting position before he started up again. “The police asked me all kinds of questions. The Bordentown police!”
“In Chicago?” I asked softly.
He glared at me. “Here.”
“Back so soon?” Sasha cooed.
He chose not to answer. He had questions of his own. “What did you tell them?” he demanded.
“Tell whom? About what?”
“The police! About me! You and your crazy ideas about my mother’s—about Phoebe’s death.”
All's Well That Ends Page 18
