Henry tried to keep his voice uncommitted. “Your mother wanted the books to be donated to Boston University to create—"
Arthur Johnson waved the other hand in the air now. “That's all wishful thinking of the past. This is the present. The money is needed elsewhere."
Henry asked, “What about her will?"
Johnson jerked back in an unintentional mime of a blow. Henry had never seen a man react that way, as if he were physically struck by words before. He spoke back at Henry even before he had gained his feet again.
"What do you know about that? You mean my father's will. That left everything to Mother, for me—"
Henry said, “Morgan's will."
Johnson straightened his back and stepped forward again, his face too close to Henry's, twisted in a distortion of disbelief.
"She didn't—Mr. Downes never witnessed a will. Have you ever seen one?"
Henry took a breath without giving ground. It was a guess. It was a terrible guess to make. He only knew it was actually true when the words were spoken aloud.
"She wanted the books to be donated to Boston University. She wanted Peter to have the proceeds from the house on the Cape. She wanted you to have the sale of the condominium."
Arthur moved closer, spittle white at the corners of his mouth, his eyes squinting painfully into the glare of the sun.
"How do you know that?"
"She told me—most of it."
"She told you there was a will?"
"That's what I understood."
"Then where is it?"
"I can't tell you."
"You won't tell me?"
"I can't. I don't know."
Arthur turned his body around in a near pirouette. Both arms clapped repeatedly at his sides.
"Shit. High holy shit. God damn fucking shit. Why can't anything go right? Have you told Mr. Downes this?"
Mr. Downes had still not returned any of several calls to his office.
Henry answered, “I've never spoken with him."
"Oh ...” Arthur's voice lowered to a strained whisper. “He doesn't know about this? Then it doesn't exist. That bow-tied Yankee bum-kisser may be milking his job for everything he can get, but he's not about to hold out a piece of information like that. It doesn't exist. There's no will. She just said it to you. That's all. There is no will!"
Henry was suddenly calmed by the thought. “I think you're wrong."
Johnson's arms flapped upward. A bird without feathers. “Where is it, then?"
Henry thought he knew. Anyone could guess. That was the problem.
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Chapter Sixteen
Within the near silence, there was the false sound of memory. Often, only a voice. Not always in the simple quiet of the night, but more often in the sudden still of time after dawn when the sun briefly entered the space of his room in a flat and angled geometry of light. The early noises of the city were easily overcome there between these old walls. He restrained his own movement to listen.
The voices he heard this morning were crisp and close and given to incomplete sentences and single words.
"Why?"
Morgan's voice—he did not answer. He wondered instead if this was the source of the human belief in ghosts.
"Why?” she insisted.
He had not been paying attention, having turned his thoughts to the cause of things. She had often told him he needed to discipline his mind, when he questioned her quickness.
What did he know the “why” of? What else might be the cause of her question?
"My Elwin would never ask why,” another voice advised. “He never wanted to know the why of things. He took them as they were and did what he could to deal with them. Lawyers are like that, you know. Too much knowledge can fog their way."
When had Mrs. Prowder ever said those words? It must have been—he could not recall.
"Why?” Morgan's word was a plea now, more than a question. She might have asked that of the one who killed her. She would. She would have known what he was there to do. She had always anticipated things that way. It was in the way she moved—her grace. It was in the way she drove her car....
Henry spoke aloud. “Why?"
The sound of his own voice was a shock, an invisible intruder in the room, and made him sit upright in his chair.
Why had she chosen him? What good was he to her, then? Or now?
In the halted time of the room, he found it difficult to grasp all the pieces in his mind.
The letter from the lawyer who was buying the building had come. Mrs. Prowder had always declared her building as a private residence with guests. There were no legal apartments. Henry would soon be moving.
The day before, Mary Prowder had warned him of the situation. She'd been sitting on a box in the empty room by the door when Henry came home. She had been crying, and the pink around her eyes did not match the red of her hair.
"I was hoping you'd come. I wanted to tell you that the sale has gone through."
Henry nodded. Saying thank you did not seem appropriate.
He said, “It's a weight off your shoulders. You should be happy."
There was no happiness in her eyes.
"I suppose—you know. The problem is, there's no one to be happy with. After a while it gets a little boring being happy all by yourself."
Henry looked down at the floor, wishing he was smart enough to avoid feeling some personal attachment where there was nothing he could do.
He said, “Is your brother happy?"
She answered, “I couldn't tell.... “Her voice trailing to a whisper.
Old Mrs. Prowder had never spoken of her son, and Henry could not imagine him.
"Tell me. It's none of my business, I know, but tell me if you can. Why didn't your brother ever care as much about your mother as—"
She cut Henry off as if the thought had already been spoken.
"It was because of Dad.... Richard is gay. Dad reacted so badly to it. He just could not accept the idea that his only son was gay. Mom couldn't really, either, but for once in her life, she never said anything. But Dad always had a solution for everything. He kept trying to talk Richard out of it. Things were different then. You know. Dad loved him so much. I can't explain it. They used to spend so much time together. And then—it was like he died."
Henry said, “I'm sorry."
Tears came back to her eyes. “Rich didn't help. He was always so political. Always arguing his points. Always aggressive. Always the lawyer.... But even when he was a kid, he used to run away and hide in the attic. He would put on a big show of being angry and then just disappear.” She swallowed a breath. “I'm sorry."
She was crying over a past that was lost to her now. Henry understood that futility too well.
Another thought occurred to Henry then.
"It's all right. Cry if you can. I've never been good at that myself. But, look—I probably won't be seeing you again, and I wanted to mention something.... And, there's no good way to go about this right now...."
He had gotten too much of her attention. She appeared frozen in place. How was he going to explain this foolishness?
"But I have a friend..."
Henry had not been prepared. He should have put together a script for this in advance, but it had not been on his mind. She blinked.
She nodded. “It's good to have friends. I don't have enough friends myself."
Her voice was suddenly flat with sarcasm. Henry felt stupid. “That's not exactly what I mean. I have a friend. A good friend. He's single."
Her eyes rolled. “Oh, Christ. Are you trying to get your friend a date?"
Henry shrugged with his embarrassed smile. “He likes redheads."
Her sarcasm increased. “Is that the only criteria?"
How could he make this work now? He tried to explain. “He's too damn shy, but he's a good guy."
She stepped back. “You're single. Are you shy, too?"
He had no ready an
swer. “No. I don't think so. I'm just ...” He had no finish to the statement that he wanted to say aloud.
She said, “Either you don't like redheads or you already have someone you're serious about."
That was an obvious-enough excuse and only partly a lie.
"Yes. No. Yes ... I'm kind of involved right now."
She stared at him with a straight face, waiting for him to add something before she spoke again. “So what's your friend's name?"
"Tim."
She said, “Does Tim have false teeth? The last guy I dated had false teeth. Bad breath."
"He's bald."
"He's old?"
"No. About my age. He's just bald."
"Bald is okay. What does he do for a living?"
"A bartender."
She tilted her head. “An honorable profession."
Henry gave her Tim's number, figuring this was about as much as he could do at the time.
The lawyer who had bought the house was overly solicitous of Henry's welfare and offered to help find him temporary quarters so that the work on the building could begin. Henry assumed his status as Mrs. Prowder's “guest” might be a worry and a source of legal problems. Eliot had even popped his head out to ask how much money the lawyer had offered Henry to move. Henry just shook his head.
Henry wondered that none of this seemed important to him now. Only the past held his attention in the early light of the morning.
"Why?” Morgan insisted again, bringing him to the present.
He could not imagine why. He had not imagined why. He had made a list. That was all. Imagination could not be contained in a list. Knowing was something more than the facts placed and numbered on a page.
Just as he had known where to look for the will.
* * * *
Detective O'Connor had been reluctant. Oddly, Henry had been forced to persuade him first that Morgan's will might matter—might be evidence in the investigation of her murder. Odd. Wasn't that obvious? Or was Henry's insistence about going back to the apartment somehow alarming? Perhaps they thought he was up to something else. Imagine. Henry had been the last person they knew of to see Morgan alive. Was he still a suspect?
O'Connor asked, “Why wouldn't she have left the will with her lawyer?"
Henry knew that as well. “She didn't want the lawyer to know what it said. She was being careful, but she did not want to upset her son unless it became necessary."
Henry offered this answer without explanation. O'Connor accepted it.
Two officers accompanied them to the building, as if Henry were under guard.
The stale air of the apartment hit him with a wave of nausea. Not the amount of odor, but the peculiar smell of the place. When the detective opened the door from the elevator, it struck Henry as suddenly as the knowledge of what it was. Books. Just books. As if they inhabited the rooms with their own body odor and cooking smells. The grasp of the sun each day, heating the rooms despite the curtains, and the cooling of the night, became the giving and taking of breath.
He had always enjoyed the smell of books. More. He had craved it. He looked forward to it. Never had it made him sick.
"Where's it at?” O'Connor said, as if irritated by some inconvenience.
The rooms were half-dark within the shield of the curtains, but Henry needed no light to find the book. His worry, the one that had wormed its way through his mind for more than a day, was that the book would be gone—or worse, that the will would have been removed.
But it was there, still beside the old Britannica. Though a beautiful copy of the book, he did not pause to look at the Rackham illustrations but cupped the spine in one hand and turned the pages to the last, where the words were set apart: “Here lies Arthur, the once and future King."
The will, a single page written by hand, was folded there.
To my Arthur, I leave all that I can, my final home on Marlborough Street, and my love. To my husband's son, Peter, I leave the small house Heber and I bought in Wellfleet the year we were married. Our small treasure of books, all but this one, I leave to Boston University, according to the terms discussed in August, 2003. This book, Le Morte D'Arthur, Heber's favorite, I leave to my own Arthur, that he may remember his father's love, and pass it on to his own children. Most of our savings having been spent long ago, little remains but this. All the paintings, furniture, and additional contents of the apartment should be sold at auction and added to the sum in my account at the State Street Bank in Boston to cover the inevitable taxes. Any additional taxes or fees must come from the sale of our Boston home. If, in the unlikely event, anything else remains, it should go to Arthur.
Her signature at the bottom of the page was notarized by a State Street Bank officer and dated October 13.
Why had Arthur been so reluctant to believe there was a will? Money? Was everything reduced to that? Why would Arthur be so sure there was no will? Because the lawyer, Downes, worked for him now. With Morgan dead, Arthur was his client. Perhaps Arthur had been his client even before Morgan's death. The thought that she had kept her will secret, even from her own lawyer, made sense that way.
Arthur was Morgan's son. How could she have raised someone so lacking in the virtues she had displayed so easily herself? Arthur was his father's son as well—as much in body as soul, perhaps.
But then, how could Morgan have ever loved a man so much, whose soul was bought? Was Heber Johnson ever worth her care? The man Henry knew now from pictures was broadly built, once muscular, and perhaps not actually as tall as she. A large head, handsome perhaps but jowly in his last years, and balding, with yellowing skin spotted from sun and age. An old book.
The man Henry had once imagined in her words, when Morgan spoke of him, had been a scholar, a connoisseur, an authority, a confidant of accomplished people, a master of negotiation, a mannered gentleman of the world. That man was now only in the memory of others and beyond the grasp of Henry's imagination.
Human “being” was ephemeral, of greater weight than the sum of bone and blood and flesh. The being of a person had no time or geography. It was a passage of hope conjured by a single mind, one instant upon another, without math or calculation. Henry had never known Heber Johnson and thus would never know him except in the evidence left of what he had done. Heber had made Morgan love him, and that was enough to know, and for Henry to judge. And Henry had known Morgan.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter Seventeen
The early dark had turned cold with a moist wind by the time Henry crossed the elevated walkway from Charles Street station and descended to the pavement. He did not quicken his pace against the chill. He liked this street, especially in the night, when the phony “antique” store signs approved by the historical commission were faded by shadow, and the yellow light from the windows of the small shops made it easier to imagine the way it might have been a hundred years before. Now Christmas lights softened the glare of fluorescent and halogen. The old gaslights on their cast-iron lampposts, following the curb at either side, gave a steady border of definition to the chaos of illumination and glare.
Stopping momentarily to look upward at the Pinckney Street crossing, he noted the rise of those gaslights hovering in the air all the way to the top of Beacon Hill, their black iron posts invisible in the night. The stern faces of the nineteenth-century brick row houses looked unhappily from behind a barrier of cars parked end to end.
On Charles Street, the sidewalks narrowed around the congestion of parking meters and wastebaskets and black metal rails guarding steps down to lower-level shops, causing him to repeatedly halt his pace to let someone else slip by from the other direction. The street bent here as it turned, as if sagging with the accumulated weight of the brick houses which scaled the modest heights of Beacon Hill above. At Mt. Vernon, the street crossing was clogged by a taxi which had decided to let go a fare. Horns pressed the air. It reminded Henry to pick up a new bottle of aspirin at Finnian's Drug Store on the corner.
At that moment, a movement of her left hand caught the light in a small diamond on her finger. Henry paid for the aspirin and shoved the package in his coat pocket as he left. “You snooze, you lose.” That was one of Albert's expressions.
But the color of her hair was important. It was the color of the hair in his dream.
Chestnut Street was quiet, as usual, and he took the incline with larger strides to be home sooner. He did not take special notice of the absence of light in his own doorway or see the figure on the steps until the miscalculated swing of a fist just barely caught him on the side of the head.
The guttural rasp of a voice followed the sting. “Son of a bitch. You cost me more than you'll make in a hundred years."
A left hand came at Henry's face in a downward arc and missed his nose only because his body was still reeling backward from the first blow. Henry tried to catch himself on the tilt of the brick sidewalk, but his right foot had not moved far enough, quickly enough, and he fell.
The voiced rasped with an alcoholic slur, “You're gonna need some teeth when I fuckin’ finish with you."
Falling, Henry's arm had doubled beneath him with his own weight, his elbow reaching the brick too hard and jolting him with a shock of pain. The sole of a shoe scraped Henry's cheek as it missed his face. Henry rolled. The wheel of a parked car stopped his escape. Another shoe caught him in the ribs, the padding of his coat taking much of the impact. Henry rolled back beneath his attacker, his free arm numb from the shoulder down, and brought what he hoped were the knuckles of his right hand up into the man's crotch. A short gasp was the answer. Henry rolled away again and gained his feet.
"Fuckin’ son of a bitch,” came the voice.
The face above the stooped body coming at him again was now clearly Arthur's. Henry kicked upward at the white of it, caught a grasping hand instead. He twisted away. Arthur followed Henry's retreat without a pause. Henry turned as if to run and turned again full circle to bring his left fist at the mouth of the man. The mouth was opened as if to speak again, but the words were lost in Henry's fist. Arthur fell backward to the steps. Henry's knuckles blazed with the cut of Arthur's teeth.
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