To Play the Fool

by Laurie R. King

  “Doctor Whitlaw?” Kate asked uncertainly.

  “Professor, actually. You’re Inspector Martinelli. Come in.”

  Kate stepped inside while the woman reached up to fasten the chain.

  “I was told that I must always bolt and chain the doors in this city. I live in a village, where a crime wave is the neighbor’s son stealing a handbag from the backseat of a car. I’m forever forgetting that I’ve put the chain on; I nearly took my nose off the other day. Come in here and sit down, and tell me what I can do for you. Will you take a cup of tea?”

  She had a lovely voice. On the phone it had sounded gruff, but in person it was only surprisingly deep, and the accent that had sounded English became something other than the posh tones of most actors and the occasional foreign correspondent on the news. Her accent had depth rather than smoothness, flavor rather than sophistication, and made her sound as if she could tell a sly joke, if the opportunity arose. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk tea, but she accepted.

  They sat at a round, claw-foot, polished oak table, between a cheerful pine kitchen and a living room bursting with gloriously happy plants, tropical-print fabrics, and African sculpture. Professor Whitlaw brought another cup from the kitchen (using a step stool to reach the cupboard) and poured from a dark brown teapot so new that it still had the price sticker on the handle. She added milk without asking, put a sugar bowl, spoon, and plate of boring-looking cookies in front of Kate, and sat back in her chair, her feet dangling.

  “This is a very pleasant place,” Kate offered.

  “Do you think so? It belongs to friends of my niece, two pediatricians who are away for the month, so I’m house-sitting. Actually, I am beginning to find its unremitting cheerfulness oppressive, particularly in the mornings. I come out in my dressing gown and expect to hear parrots and monkeys. Fortunately, I don’t have to care for the jungle. They have a sort of indoor gardener who comes twice a week to water and prune—a good thing, because if I was responsible, they would come back to a desert. You wish to talk about the Fools movement.”

  “Er, yes. Or about one particular fool, really.” Kate explained at length what she knew about Erasmus, his relationships with the homeless and the seminary, and his apparent unwillingness or inability to speak other than by way of quotations. She then gave a very general picture of the murder and investigation, ending up with: “So you see, the man must be treated as a suspect; he has no alibi, no identification, no past, no nothing. The only thing he has said about himself that sounds in the least bit personal is that he thinks of himself as a fool. Now, he could just be saying that, or he may be referring to this organization or movement or whatever it is. Dean Gardner thought there was a chance he might be, so he referred me to you.”

  “You are catching at straws.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And even if he is a remnant of the Fools movement, it may have nothing to do with the man’s death.”

  “That’s very possible.”

  “But you are hoping nonetheless to understand the differences between the cultivated lunacy of Foolishness and the inadvertent insanity of a murderer.”

  “Well, I guess. Actually, I was hoping that if he had been a member of this…movement, there might be records, or someone who might know who Erasmus is.”

  “The Fools movement was short-lived, and fairly comprehensively dispersed. It was also never the sort of thing to have any formalized membership—that would have been seen as oxymoronic. If you will pardon the pun.” She chuckled, and Kate smiled politely, not having the faintest idea what the woman was talking about. “What you require,” she continued, sounding every bit the academic, “is background information. However, as I told you over the telephone, my day is fairly full. I’m afraid that I’ve loaned out my only copies of the book I edited on the subject, but may I suggest that I give you a couple of papers and you come back and talk with me when you’ve had a chance to digest them? This evening or tomorrow, or whenever.”

  Without waiting for Kate to agree, she slid down from her chair and went out of the room and through a doorway on the other side of the hall. When Kate reached the door, she found Professor Whitlaw with her head in a filing cabinet. She laid three manila folders on the desk, opened the first two, and took out some papers, leaving a stapled sheaf of papers in each one. The third one, she hesitated over, then opened it and began to sift through the contents thoughtfully.

  The doorbell rang. Professor Whitlaw glanced at her wrist in surprise, thumbed through two or three more sheets of paper in the file, and then snapped it shut and handed it to Kate along with the other two folders.

  “I don’t have photocopies of the loose material,” she said, “and it would be very inconvenient if you lost it. But if one cannot trust a policewoman, whom can one trust? Give me a ring when you’ve had a chance to formulate some questions. The next two nights are good for me.”

  The professor remembered the chain this time. Kate changed places on the doorstep with an anemic young man wearing a skullcap and went to do her assignment.

  “What are you doing home?” demanded Jon. “Did you get fired?”

  “The teacher gave me homework. Ooh, love your outfit, Jonnie.” It was quite fetching—a lacy apron over his Balinese sarong and nothing else—as he leaned on the table, making a pie crust on the marble pastry board, the rolling pin in his hand and a smudge of flour on one cheekbone. It always surprised Kate to see how muscular Jon was, for all his languid act. She wiggled her fingers at him and went looking for Lee.

  Her voice answered Kate from upstairs, and Kate followed it to the room they used as a study. Lee was in her upstairs wheelchair at the computer terminal. A scattering of notepads and a long-dry coffee cup bore witness to a lengthy session.

  “Hi there,” Lee said. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

  “I’m obviously getting too predictable in my old age,” complained Kate. “You and Jon can plan your orgies around my absences. I had some reading to do and it’s too noisy at work,” she explained, waving the folders. “Look, I don’t know if you want to go on with your search. Dr. Whitlaw—Professor Whitlaw—is a real find, and if you’re getting tired…”

  “Oh, I’m not working on your stuff. This is something else.” Feeling both piqued and amused at her sensation of being abandoned, Kate went to look over Lee’s shoulder at the screen, which was displaying a graph.

  “What is it?”

  “I had an interesting visit this morning from a woman I worked with on a project two or three years ago; she said she’d seen you in Berkeley recently.”

  “Rosalyn something?” Kate tossed the folders onto a table and sat down.

  “Hall. She’s putting together a grant proposal for a mental-health program targeting homeless women, wondered if I might help with it. Remember that paper I gave at the Glide conference? She wants me to update it so she can use it as an appendix. I was just reviewing it, seeing how much I’d have to rewrite the thing. I don’t know, though; my brain seems to have forgotten how to think.”

  “You and me both, babe. It looks like you’ve been at it for quite a while.”

  Lee picked up on the question behind the statement. “I did most of this earlier. I had a long session with Petra; she thinks the tone in my right leg is improving. And then I had a rest, so I thought I’d work for a while longer.”

  They talked for a while about gluteus and abdominal and trapezius muscles, about spasms and recovery and tone, the things that until a month ago had formed their entire lives, until Lee had seemed to make a deliberate choice to push back all the necessary fixations and passions of her recovery in order to allow a small space for the life that had been hers a year ago. Kate respected Lee’s decision and tried hard not to push for every detail of a muscle gradually regained, a weight lifted, in the same way that she had respected Lee’s choice of a caregiver, Lee’s decision to come directly home from the hospital with full-time attendants rather than enter
a rehabilitation clinic, and Lee’s determination to keep some of the details of her care from her lover. Privacy is a precious commodity to anyone, but to a woman emerging from paraplegia, it was a gift of life.

  So all Kate said was, mildly, “Well, don’t overdo it.”

  “Of course not. What have you got?”

  “Couple of articles by the expert on Fools. I was looking at one of them on the way here, and I swear it isn’t written in English.”

  “Would you rather do my appendix to the grant application?”

  “Tempting, but I think there’s going to be a quiz on this.”

  Kate picked up the folder and Lee turned back to the terminal, and for the next hour the rusty gears of two minds independently ground and meshed. Kate looked over her two articles, decided to skip for the moment the one that used exegetical and synthesis in the first sentence, and began to read the other, a transcript of a talk given to some religious organization with an impressive name but an apparently generic audience.

  Holy Foolishness Reborn

  The modern Fools movement began, as far as can be determined, in 1969 in southern England. Its earliest manifestation was on a clear, warm morning in early June, when three Fools appeared (with an appreciation for paradox that was at the movement’s core from the very beginning) at the entrance to the Tower of London, that massive and anachronistic fortress which forms the symbolic heart of the British Empire. And, lest anyone miss the point, they arrived there from the morning service at St. Bartholemew-the-Great, a church founded by Rahere, Henry I’s jester.

  Had any of London’s natives been watching, the behaviour of the taxi driver would have alerted him to the extraordinary nature of what was arriving, for the cabby, unflappable son of a phlegmatic people, stared at his departing passengers with openmouthed befuddlement. Interviews with that driver and with the American tour which witnessed the appearance of Foolishness were more or less in agreement: One of the trio, the tallest, turned to pay the driver, adding as a tip a five-pound note and a red rosebud plucked from thin air. The three passengers walked a short distance away, dropped the small canvas bags they each carried, joined hands in a long moment of (apparently) prayer, and set about their performance. The cab driver shook himself like a setter emerging from a pond, put the taxi into gear, and drove off. The red rose he tucked into the side of his taximeter, where it gradually dried and blackened, remaining tightly furled but fragrant, until he plucked it off and threw it out the window over the Westminster Bridge nearly three weeks later.

  He did not see his three passengers again, although as the summer passed he saw others like them. The original three, having bowed their heads and muttered in unison some chant barely audible even to the women who emerged from the toilets ten feet away, turned to face the Tower (and its tourists) full-face.

  And an arresting trio of faces it was, too, glossy black on the right side, stark white on the left, hair sleeked back, and a row of earrings down the length of each left ear. Black trousers and shoes, white blouses and gloves, harlequin diamonds black and white on the waistcoats. The tall one alone had a spot of color: One of the diamonds on his waistcoat was purple.

  What followed was a busking act such as even London rarely saw, street performance as one of the high arts. Part magic show, part political satire, part sermon, it seemed more of a dance done for their own pleasure, or a meditation, than a performance aimed at the audience—though audience there was, and quickly. The act of the three Fools was peculiarly compelling, faintly disturbing, wistful and wild in turns, austere and scatological, the exhortations of gentle fanatics, anarchists with a sense of humour; three raucous saints who were immensely professional in their direct simplicity. The bobby who eventually moved them on had never seen anything quite like it. He had also never seen buskers who didn’t pass the hat.

  By the end of the summer, there were at least a dozen harlequin buskers in London, and others had appeared in Bath and Edinburgh. By Christmas, New York had its first pair, and the following summer they were to be found as far afield as Venice, Tokyo, and Sydney.

  Then, around the second Christmas, the first tattooed harlequins appeared: the black half of their faces no longer greasepaint, but one solid and spectacularly painful tattoo from a sharp line down the center of the face, from the hairline to the chest. These half-and-halfs were the extremists, the most radical of a radical group, and although they never numbered more than a dozen, they were visible, confrontational, frenetically active, and disturbing: frightening, even. The other Foolish brothers and sisters contented themselves with the small tattoo of a diamond beneath the left eye, like a tear, but the handful of tattooed harlequins inevitably garnered the attention of the press, and the police. There had been arrests before, for such things as unlawful assembly and public nudity, but now the Fools (as they were known to the public through the various newspaper articles) began to collect more severe misdemeanors, and eventually felonies. One half-and-half in New York was so caught up in his performance that he picked up a small child and ran off with her; the little girl was greatly amused, the mother was not, and he was arrested for attempted kidnapping (a charge that was later dropped). Another assaulted a police officer who was trying to move him out of a crowded downtown intersection in Dallas. Four months later, the same man, out on bail but now in Los Angeles, reached the climax of his performance by pulling a revolver from his motley and shooting a young woman dead.

  It was the death, too, of the Fools movement. The young man had a history of violence and severe mental disturbance, and the Fools were not to blame for providing him with an outlet, but they were all comprehensively tarred with the same brush of dangerous madness, and within a few months they had dispersed. Fools went back to the everyday life they had so often mocked: Fools bought clothes, bore children, voted in school board elections. And six teachers, two lawyers, a magistrate, two actors, four clergy of various denominations, and a junior congressional aide all wear the faint scar of a removed tattoo high on their left cheekbone.

  The modern Fools movement of the early seventies sprang from a soil similar to that which nourished earlier Fools movements: The Russian Yurodivi, the classical Medieval Fool, the buffoonery of the Zen master—all came into being as a warning personified, a concrete and living statement that the status quo was in grave danger of smothering the life out of the spirit of the individual and the community. A church which no longer hears its parishioners, a government which is operating with its head in the clouds, a people which have moved too far from its source: The Fool’s laughter serves to point out the shakiness of these foundations; the Fool seeks to save his community by appearing to threaten it. The essential ministry of a Fool is to undermine beliefs, to seed doubts, to shock people into seeing truth.

  However, I shall not trespass on the lectures of my colleagues by going any further into the larger themes of the Fool movement, and in addition, I see that we have run short of time. Perhaps we might take just two or three questions from the audience.

  The question-and-answer session that apparently followed was not recorded, and Kate turned to the next article with a sigh. This one was composed as a written, rather than oral, presentation, a reprint from a quarterly journal, and had so many footnotes that on some pages they took up more space than the text. Kate didn’t think she really needed to know all about “Fedotov’s analysis of this Russian manifestation of kenoticism,” “Via’s exploration of the kerygmatic nucleus of Gospel and the generative linguistic matrix of Greek comedy,” or even “Harvey Cox’s dated but valuable Feast of Fools.” The article was cluttered with names—Willeford and Welsford, Hyers and Eliade and Brown—and turgid with the concentrated essence of scholarship.

  She contented herself with skimming, picking up interesting tidbits, mostly from the footnotes. “Holy Foolishness” was an accepted form of ascetic life in Russia, with thirty-six canonized saints who were Fools. Extreme Foolishness was used as a means of triggering Zen enlightenment. The Cisterc
ian, the Ignatian, and the Franciscan orders of the Roman Catholic Church all had their roots firmly in Foolishness. (St. Ignatius Loyola regarded Holy Foolishness as the most perfect means of achieving humility, and St. Francis of Assisi was, as Lee had suggested, Foolishness personified.) There was an illiterate Irish laborer in the nineteenth century who lived the life of a Fool, and a tiny monastic order in the same country, founded about the time the tattooed harlequin in Los Angeles had murdered international Foolishness. The members of this Irish order, monks and nuns alike, wandered the roads like harmless lunatics, carrying on conversations with farm animals and then going home to pray.

  So why not Erasmus, in twentieth-century San Francisco? Kate mused, turning to the third folder.

  The loose papers it contained were a disparate lot, most of them handwritten, occasionally a mere scrap of paper, but mostly full sheets, though of a different size from standard American paper. The writing was in several hands, all ineffably foreign but for the most part legible. Some of the sheets were merely references, often with two or three shades of ink or pencil on the same page: titles and authors of books or, more often, articles. Kate glanced at these pages and left them in the file. Others had quotes and excerpts, with references, and yet others seemed to be Professor Whitlaw’s own writing, perhaps thoughts for the book outlined on one page, much scratched out and emended.

  A number of the pages were as unintelligible as the second article had been, one academic talking to others in a shared language. Others, however, were obviously meant for popular consumption, as the transcribed lecture had been. Kate picked up a few of these and read them:

  There is no place [professor Whitlaw wrote] for the Fool in the modern world of science and industry. The Fool speaks a language of symbols and of Divinity. We forget, however, those of us who live our lives conversant with computer terminals and clayfooted politicians, with scientists who gaze into invisible stars or manipulate the genetic building blocks of living matter, that there is an entire population living, as it were, on the edge, who feel as powerless as children and cling, therefore, to any sign of alternate possibilities. They believe in the possibility of magic, the reality of Saints, and would not be surprised at the existence of miracles. The Fool is their representative, their mediator, their friend.