We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  “Look, I just thought I’d tell you that you’re being chased,” Jane said.

  “Oh, by whom?”

  “Well, Christ. It should be obvious you’re being followed by Irwin.”

  Jim leaned back and gave her one of his looks, wry and confident. “Well, you know, doesn’t your telling me this constitute chasing on your part?”

  “Damn straight,” Jane said. She turned around and walked out.

  Radcliffe Memories

  ELISABETH HANDLER DIDN’T PROVE HARD to find. Her LinkedIn page came up easily enough. A tasteful chin-length cut had replaced the mass of curls of her Freshman Register photo, but she had the same round face and mischievous smile. I found her email on the website of her PR company in California, and wrote to her, with the anodyne subject line “Radcliffe Memories.”

  As I waited to hear back, I set my aims on tracking down the writer of the original Harvard Crimson article about the murder. I wanted to know if there was any truth to Morgan’s story about the Crimson being forced to change its report.

  The byline on the article belonged to someone named Anne de Saint Phalle. I found Anne in the Harvard Alumni Directory, but the listing offered no contact information, and it showed that she changed her name to Anne Khalsa. Eventually, via a French genealogy website and a New York Times obituary, I learned she now went by “Sat Siri Khalsa,” and she was a part-time Vedic astrologer and part-time financial trader in New Mexico. She was eager to help, but when she heard what I was writing about, she said she remembered nothing about the Jane Britton case.

  I emailed her a link to her Crimson article to see if it jogged any memories.

  Nothing, she replied. “Very strange. Even as if I didn’t write it.”

  Real Estate

  “DOES IT TAKE A MURDER to make Harvard obey the law?” Jessie Gill, the University Road tenant union leader, asked at the Cambridge City Council meeting following Jane’s murder.

  Harvard was the landlord of Jane’s University Road apartment building. It had bought the place in 1967 with the plan to convert it into a new university-related building. But residents had complained. They didn’t want to lose their rent-stabilized apartment for yet another Harvard building. Not wanting to inflame tension with the town of Cambridge, the university had acquiesced. But it made clear that the compromise also meant that residents should not expect renovations or repairs. In exchange for getting to stay and having rents kept low, residents would have to make do with the building, as is.

  Jessie Gill accused Harvard of deliberate negligence. She alleged that they had been aware for two years that the building lacked functioning locks on its main doors—a violation of Cambridge building code—and faulted Harvard for putting the bottom line above the safety of its residents. “We tried to request the locks from Henry H. Cutler, Harvard’s manager for taxes, insurance, and real estate, but he told me with a smirk that ‘we can’t make improvements if we don’t get more money out of you people.’”

  Jane’s murder cast an unwelcome spotlight on Harvard’s real estate policies, and it was coming at a time when Harvard was in the middle of a $48.7 million fundraising drive. The faulty locks were threatening to turn into a scandal. At a news conference, a young reporter pressed Harvard’s then president Nathan Pusey to answer for Harvard’s negligence at the University Road building. Pusey was so outraged by this line of questioning that he had his top aide call the Globe management to lodge a complaint about its obnoxious reporter.

  Councilwoman Barbara Ackermann said, “With all the problems that Harvard brings to this community, it is the least they can do to be law-abiding landlords. A girl is dead, and I do not say she would be alive today if there had been a lock on her door, but there is strong reason to believe that.”

  In the swirl of this press, University Road residents received a note from the real estate company that managed the property for Harvard: “Due to the recent happenings at 6 University Rd., the City of Cambridge has required us to install automatic locking devices on all vestibule doors, and remove all debris from the front and back halls and basement areas, and remove motorcycles from the basement.”

  On the day of Jane’s funeral—while all eyes were on Needham—the real estate management company, on behalf of Harvard, began quietly installing locks on the doors at University Road. It had been done in such haste that no one had thought to give residents the keys to the new locks.

  The Daily News’s Joe Modzelewski was left with the impression that neither Harvard’s administration nor the police seemed too interested in finding Jane’s killer. “They just wanted it to die down, bury her, and move along with life as usual at Harvard.”

  * * *

  At almost exactly the same time, six miles away from Harvard Square, the gravediggers in Needham Cemetery were working hard to dig a hole for Jane’s casket in the frozen winter soil. A cloudless sky hung over the small group of friends and family members who soon gathered around the Reverend Harold Chase as he performed a brief graveside ceremony. Jim stood near the back.

  The Brittons were exceptionally private, and this day was no exception. The only time Jane’s father showed emotion was when a photographer came close to the grave. Jane’s brother Boyd rushed over to keep him from doing anything rash. A Needham Police officer also noticed and ran the photographer off.

  Jane’s coffin was slowly lowered into the sloping hill. Friends and family moved off the plot, and the two workmen got to work on closing her grave.

  Family and close friends gather during Jane’s burial service. Jane’s parents and her brother, Boyd, are on the right.

  Elisabeth

  AT THE TWO-WEEK MARK of emailing Elisabeth under the guise of trying to plumb “Radcliffe Memories,” I dared myself to call her. It was a Thursday, and I reached her at work. I introduced myself. “Yes, I know who you are. I’ve been ducking you,” she said. I apologized for having been so persistent. She laughed and invited me to call her back on Saturday.

  When she picked up the phone two days later, Elisabeth’s voice was warm and buoyant. For almost half an hour we talked about her experience at Radcliffe without any mention of Jane. Elisabeth, the daughter of a New York Times foreign correspondent, had grown up abroad. When she got to Radcliffe, “I was a complete alien who nobody knew was an alien. I spoke the language, enough. And I didn’t let on.”

  Blend in, she scolded herself. But it didn’t help the isolation. Radcliffe felt more like living in a hotel than in a community. “It was just so demeaning to me if you compared the women’s housing to the men’s.” The girls had curfews and “parietal” rules like “three feet on the ground at all times” when men were over. Class was a fifteen-minute walk to campus in mandatory skirts and stockings that were barely a shield against the cold. It wasn’t until 1973, after the houses went co-ed and men started living in the Radcliffe quad, that Harvard committed to the shuttle service that I knew.

  But I recognized more of my experience than I expected. The ambition and grit of the undergraduates. The true nature of a Harvard education: learning how to get around red tape, excelling at the game of opportunity-making, deciphering academic double-speak. And most of all, the sink-or-swim nature of its advising: “You can’t cry at Harvard,” Elisabeth was told her freshman year, after a Kafkaesque battle over paperwork had kept her shuttling back and forth between administrative offices. At least, Elisabeth said, she enjoyed the food at Radcliffe. The food at her British boarding school had been “the liver of ancient cows that died of scurvy; cabbage boiled down to a puddle.”

  But before I could ask about Jane, Elisabeth brought up her roommate: a young woman from Washington State who, she said, “was a perfectly nice person, but we didn’t really have a lot in common.”

  As sure as I was that Jane was from Massachusetts, I was more sure that no one would dare describe her as “perfectly nice.” I worried Susan Talbot had gotten everything mixed up.

  Elisabeth continued: “My best friend was a couple of d
oors down. She had been from early teens interested in anthropology.” This girl, Elisabeth explained, encouraged her to attend her first anthro class. “She got me smoking. She was the one who encouraged me to drink. All the wonderful gateways were opened by her.” Compared to her roommate, “Jane—the girl I became good friends with—was very much more worldly and also a hoot.”

  Jane.

  “To be totally honest with you,” I said, “one of my main interests in this era, is…” I stumbled. “I heard about what happened to her—” I trailed off.

  “Yeah,” Elisabeth said, which gave me just enough courage to continue.

  “—Or the rumors of what happened,” I said, “and I’m interested in finding out what exactly did.”

  Her voice didn’t falter. “Boy, I would be happy to help you with that,” she said. I could feel relief pour through me like a tourniquet had been removed. “It was just horrifying.”

  Jane at Radcliffe

  THAT FIRST WEEK OF FRESHMAN year, 1963, everyone in Cabot House moved as one. It wasn’t just that they all ate together. All forty-five girls, it seemed to Elisabeth Handler, were under the impression they could fit at the same round table.

  At one of those group lunches, Elisabeth looked around the room. Compared with her, the other girls carried themselves like they had been groomed for Radcliffe since preschool. Julie Spring, her roommate, was the daughter of a Unitarian minister. She wore wraparound skirts and round-collared blouses. Julie’s biggest worry about coming to college was whether she could learn to shave in the shower rather than in the tub. Elisabeth wasn’t sure if she had ever been so young.

  But she also felt bad for being annoyed by Julie’s enthusiasm. To be at Radcliffe really was something to celebrate. It was the most prestigious of all the women’s colleges, and, at a quarter the size of Harvard, it was the more difficult of the two to get into. “I didn’t want to be the one bad apple in the bunch, where everybody else has this wonderful experience, and then this little grump in the corner is bitter about an education most people would kill for,” Elisabeth would later remember.

  Just then another first-year came bounding into the dining hall. “I did it!” she announced to the room. “I got into a graduate seminar!”

  Elisabeth didn’t even know what a graduate seminar was. How did an eighteen-year-old manage to weasel her way into—

  “I need to do that!” Julie gasped. Elisabeth tried not to roll her eyes.

  “OH FUCK,” a voice said, across the table.

  Elisabeth looked up. The girl was striking. Her eyes were green and widely spaced. Her skin was a pale ivory. Her hair was so black it was almost blue.

  * * *

  Jane was “a kick in the pants,” Elisabeth remembered. “She was sort of like a combination of Groucho Marx and Dorothy Parker. Just without the mustache.” Jane wasn’t conventionally beautiful—she liked to say she was built like a brick shithouse—but she was magnetic. She smoked and eschewed hair-sprayed updos. She had a low voice and a deep laugh that erupted spontaneously, and when she was being particularly wicked, she would cock her thin eyebrows like a bow ready to spring. Jane’s room, it turned out, was right down the hall from Elisabeth’s, and the two quickly became inseparable.

  Life in Cabot took some getting used to for both of them. First there were the spartan rooms with two wooden dressers, two small desks with a wooden chair each, and bunk beds. Jane slept on the lower bunk. There were no lamps, no curtains, no rugs. Jane’s room, at least, had a window that looked out onto the quad.

  The girls shared a communal bathroom, and each floor came with its own ironing board and iron. In the basement, there were laundry machines (twenty-five cents per load) and hair dryers (ten cents per fifteen minutes). Telephones were shared one for every twenty-five, but the incoming calls were routed through the student on bell desk duty, which meant their social lives were on display. Everyone could tell how popular a girl was by the thickness of her stack of pink slips of missed calls. The sign-out books—in which girls wrote where they were headed and with whom—were open for all to see.

  Then there were the rules. Radcliffe distributed a handbook that the girls were expected to memorize. They were required to do five hours a week of housework: bell duty, waiting on the cafeteria tables, and light pantry work. The handbook asked that students “be discreet when sunbathing” and specified that “good taste demands that discretion shall be shown in displays of affection on Radcliffe property and in all public places.” Smoking was allowed everywhere (except in bed), but alcohol was forbidden. Occasional exceptions were made for sherry.

  And there were the social rules: as freshmen, they were allowed to sign out until 11:15 any night and were allotted thirty 1 a.m. sign outs per semester. But men weren’t allowed except during parietal hours, the time when members of the opposite sex could be in the dorm. All men needed to be signed in and out by their hostesses, and the girl was expected to shout “Man on!” to alert people in the hall.

  * * *

  Radcliffe had started as the Harvard Annex in 1879, but women had only been allowed into Harvard classes since 1943. And that milestone was less about equality than convenience: Professors resented having to give the same class twice when their Harvard classes were empty because of the war. On the ten-year anniversary of joint instruction, the Crimson published an article about the Harvard instructors’ experience of teaching co-ed classes. One instructor said the women in his class wore curlers and no makeup so “it was something of a shock to see a girl in your section at a House dance and discover she actually had a face after all.” Another instructor said he liked dating Radcliffe students because “Wellesley girls are prettier, but that Radcliffe is more convenient.” Elliott Perkins, a history lecturer and the master of Lowell House, was nostalgic for the old days. Though he “really [couldn’t] tell the difference intellectually,” he felt that “the Yard looked better before, with just Harvard men.”

  By the time Jane and Elisabeth were freshmen, Radcliffe girls were judged side by side with Harvard students: the same classes, the same professors, the same exams. Radcliffe diplomas had started also saying Harvard on them the June before Jane arrived. Nevertheless, they felt like second-class citizens. Cliffies didn’t have access to the same scholarship money and financial aid. They weren’t allowed to enter Lamont, the undergraduate library. They were required to have escorts walk them home from extracurriculars if they were to be out past 11 p.m. There were only nine women’s bathrooms on campus, and finding somewhere to eat in the Yard to avoid trekking all the way back to the Quad between classes wasn’t much easier. A freshman boy could invite a girl to eat in the all-male Freshman Union, but it was widely known that it was tradition for the men to clink their glasses with their forks when a girl walked into the dining hall—the evident goal being to make the women as uncomfortable as possible.

  When classes started a week later, Jane convinced Elisabeth to try Anthropology 1a with her. The class met three times a week at 10 a.m. and was taught by Professors William Howells and Stephen Williams. Jane and Elisabeth sat together near the back of class. They would always giggle when the same boy screeched into class late and nearly fell into his seat.

  They were entranced almost immediately by the world of anthropology. “I mean, hello,” Elisabeth would later say. At Radcliffe, “I might as well have been popped out in the middle of the deepest Amazon. So this idea of ‘here we will study culture, we will pick out things that will make it interesting and different, and we will not interfere, we will blend into the background with our notebook and pith helmet and everybody will be that much wiser about the subject?’ It makes perfect sense that that’s what I gravitated to.” There was an old joke that people who went into psychiatry were unhappy with themselves. Psychologists were unhappy with society. And anthropologists were people who were unhappy with their culture.

  Early that semester, one of the teaching fellows for Anthro 1a threw a party at his house and invited some me
mbers of the class. Elisabeth went, and the boy who was always late to class was there, too. Elisabeth introduced herself. She confessed that she and Jane had in fact been sticking their legs out to trip him and apologized. The boy just laughed. He said he was so tired that he didn’t realize he was stumbling over anything but his own feet.

  “Peter Panchy,” the boy said.

  Elisabeth and Peter kept talking and drinking the punch—red wine with cloves floating in it. By the end of the party, Elisabeth was drunk for the first time in her life. She threw up on Peter’s shoes. He didn’t mind.

  Soon, Jane, Elisabeth, and Peter became a pack. They would do silly things in the back of the classroom. Sometimes Ingrid Kirsch would join them. Sometimes one or the other of them would be depressed, and Peter would bring some hideous alcohol, and they would sit out on the steps of the school across the street from the Radcliffe dorms, in the Cambridge winter, and get hammered. They bonded over the fact that they each felt alien: Elisabeth because of where she grew up; Jane because she always felt on the outside of things; and Peter because he wasn’t born into the same privilege as so many of his classmates. Peter’s father was an Albanian immigrant who had to quit Harvard halfway through because his family’s grocery store was on the verge of bankruptcy. “Just because you’ve been invited, doesn’t mean you belong,” Peter would later remember about his time at Harvard.

  * * *

  The class of 1967 felt caught between the 1950s and ’60s. There was a mandatory abstinence lecture in Cabot House for these freshmen. The girls gathered in their nightgowns and bathrobes and PJs to listen to an older student fall apart in front of them. She told them that she had been in love with an upperclassman, had dated him for two years, had a “full sexual affair” with him, and then he left her for somebody else. Susan Talbot recalled, “She was weeping and telling us to go ahead and do our dating, but don’t lose your virginity to a man who’s going to walk out.”