We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

They heard Jane shout up the stairwell. “Don, could you turn off my typewriter?” Jane, trying to make Lee believe he had caught her in the middle of studying, was going to the trouble to pretend she had left her machine running. She is putting on quite a show for Lee, Jill thought.

  Jill peered out of her doorway and caught a glimpse of Lee and Jane in the hallway. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she noticed that Lee was all dressed up.

  Eventually, Jane came back to the Mitchells’ place. Alone. She had managed to convince Lee to go away, but Jill wanted to look out the window to be sure.

  “Don’t do that,” Don said. “He’ll see you looking out.” Jill stepped away.

  The Cape Lifts

  MY BAGS WERE PACKED. I had finished my last week at The New Yorker, and the next day, I’d be five thousand miles away, on the start of my big West Coast trip. In the safety of that knowledge, I did something that up until that point I’d only dreamed about. I called Karl.

  Though Karl had stepped out of Jane’s story as little more than a symbol of a villain, he was still an important person in her narrative. And, I had to admit, now that I was satisfied that he was innocent, I was even more intrigued by him as a character. What kind of man can survive this kind of rumor?

  I had run through this moment so many times before in my mind. In some versions, we talked for hours about Tepe Yahya, and I waited to see if he brought up Jane. In others, I would tell him the rumors I had heard about him and he’d exclaim, I’ve just been waiting for someone to ask! And then he would give me that last clue that I needed to solve it. In most versions, he hung up on me immediately. But now that the moment was finally here, I felt like there was only one way to begin. If I wanted Karl to be as up front with me as possible, I needed him to feel like I was being direct with him, too.

  I told him in the first minute that I was writing about Jane Britton, and I began to explain, “who was found murdered in her off-campus apart—”

  “Oh I know,” he said, his voice now gravelly. But it wasn’t the I know of someone wishing I’d shut up or go away. It was the weary I know of someone who had carried this story for decades. “And you’re doing a story on her?”

  Exactly.

  “Oh,” he sighed, and let out a puff of air as he readied his next thought. “You know, many, many years ago I got a call from Truman Capote’s agent.” Karl told me that Capote was intrigued by the murder, the mystery, the excavations, the university setting, and wanted to write about Jane. As I listened, I felt the tug of the storyteller who pulls you into his orbit. I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t tell if he was just feeding me what I wanted to hear, letting me cast myself in my fantasy.

  We spoke for the next two and a half hours. Though I was the one asking questions, I let Karl direct the conversation, assuming that he would talk his way into revealing himself. He described Jane as “very vivacious” and a “very able young lady.” He was open, candid. He portrayed himself as someone hurt, confused, left in the dark about the investigation. He said he’d had a hard time distinguishing how much of what the police told him was real. They said that there was blood in the ashtray, and that the person who killed Jane must have put the cigarette out in the blood. They said there was a bloody fingerprint on the kitchen window. They said that it must have been somebody she knew because the stacks of books on the floor next to her were undisturbed. They said that Jane, in her diaries, fantasized about having sex with him. It all felt so exaggerated, he wasn’t even sure how much of what he’d heard about how she died was true. “I mean, I frankly didn’t believe some of it until they showed me photographs of Jane.”

  The closest we got to talking about the fact that people suspected Karl was that he said he understood why people scrutinized the Tepe Yahya group. “It really is a kind of an Agatha Christie construct.” But he wanted me to understand that they had all gotten along. He highlighted the fact that he had been essentially the same age as everyone else on the dig; there wasn’t a hierarchical divide to precipitate a rift.

  We took that off-ramp into a discussion of what brought him to archaeology in the first place. He hadn’t studied it in college. Karl’s uncle, who oversaw his education, had made it very clear that the pre-medical track was the only acceptable course. And even when Karl chose to follow his own path by entering graduate school, not medical school, it was for biological anthropology, not archaeology. It was only by chance that Karl found his way into the field: Robert Dyson, a professor in his department at UPenn, realized Karl didn’t have any plans for the summer after his second year and invited him on excavation.

  The news was received by his uncle “with absolute horror.” What’s the point of school, his uncle wanted to know. “Certainly the point of it is not to spend all of this time, effort, and money to do something quite as useless as archaeology.”

  But Karl was immediately impressed by the scientific rigor of the excavation and analysis. And he was even more enthralled by the fact that the data were only as good as the context he gave it. “I realized that the analysis of material things is meaningless unless” you can articulate the science in “a believable, meaningful story.”

  “Do you find that the storytelling aspect of it comes naturally to you?” I asked.

  “In a certain way, yes.”

  It felt like the right time to bring up a theory that I had heard from one of Jane’s undergraduate mentors. That person had said that people became archaeologists for one of two reasons: either, as a child, they lost something and spent their whole lives trying to find it again, or, as a child, they found something, and spent their lives looking for more. “Does that ring true for you?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” Karl said. He said the former categorization—the kid who lost something—was more “instructive” for him.

  When I asked if he knew what he was trying to recover, he said slowly, as if weighing each word: “I could probably say that I had a not-the-most-pleasant childhood.”

  Carefully, we waded into the story of his youth. His voice wavered. “My upbringing was very, very nomadic.” When the war “broke everything up” in Europe, Karl was two years old. He moved to the States with his grandmother. Karl’s father, still in Austria, became a political dissident. He published opposition essays in the London Times and took a public stance against the acquiescence of the regime to the Nazis. “I am not myself Jewish,” Karl told me, “but my father was killed in Auschwitz.”

  After the war, Karl and his grandmother returned to Europe, and his family tried to establish new roots “somehow, somewhere. Not always with great success.” Karl started to say he moved back to the States in 1952, but he corrected himself: “I didn’t move. I was moved by the powers that be.” He was given no choice but to live with his uncle and aunt in Connecticut who, until that point, might as well have been strangers. His mother, who by then had moved to New York, lived in Scarsdale with her new husband and remained in the background.

  Karl continued to feel like he had very little control over his life—“Dependency requires you to do things that you don’t necessarily want to do”—which instilled in him two fierce desires. One, the hunger for something stable to ground his liminal existence. And the other, the need to master his own destiny.

  In Martha Veale, whom he married a few months after his college graduation, Karl found the answer to the former. Together, they could set their own path. “My wife and I worked hard to achieve what and where we were going.” Karl told me that he’s stayed with the same woman for fifty-six years. In the background of the call I heard the murmur of a woman’s voice. “Fifty-seven years, she corrects me,” Karl said. “Fifty-seven years.” I hadn’t realized I was having a conversation with them both.

  His archaeological career was the answer to the second. But none of Karl’s accolades seemed to matter to his uncle, except one: “The first time he said anything pleasant was when I told him that I was invited to become an assistant professor at Harvard.” But that
was it.

  “I guess it might have been difficult for him to accept the fact that I made my own way,” Karl continued. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I can tell you that it was not exactly the most thrilling sort of experience for me.”

  I watched as the vampire’s cape of legend lifted. He was just a man wearing a nice suit. Yes, Karl was a descendant of the Austrian elite, but here was also a boy who never got the support he needed. A boy who felt like he was moved around by powers out of his control. And a college student, perhaps, who signed and re-signed his name because he was filled with the senses of doubt and insecurity we all have at that age. Was his flash and tempestuousness simply him casting about for affirmation and identity? None of this excused his alleged behavior, but it humanized him.

  “You know,” he segued, “I’ll tell you one of the things that I think might be true. The person who experienced in many ways the worst of the element of Jane’s death is Jim Humphries.”

  After Jim’s visit to Karl’s house on the night of the murder, they never discussed Jane’s death again—and their relationship permanently changed. “Not that it was a negative relationship. Not that it was a positive relationship. It was neutral. There was no time for banter.” Karl said that Jim came back to Tepe Yahya for a few more seasons but “I don’t think that his heart was in it.”

  “Because he was still grieving?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Karl said. “I don’t know the privacy of his grief.”

  And then, because we were near the end of the conversation, and because we had come so far, I had to ask. “It wasn’t because he had somehow gotten some suspicion that you were involved?”

  “No. No, never. Never. Not that I know of.”

  The Dead. The Near-dead.

  The Just-dead.

  IN THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS of Tuesday, January 7, 1969, Jill Mitchell woke up suddenly. She felt like she was in a foreign hotel room. “It was like the furniture was rearranged. Some feeling that things weren’t right,” she later told police. Don woke up, too––whether because of Jill or because of whatever had woken her up, he never knew––and looked at the luminous face of his watch. It was three o’clock.

  Jill got out of bed. I just had to go to the bathroom, that’s all, she told herself. She felt all right again. But as she moved around the apartment, the funny feeling came back.

  There was a strange, greenish light in the hallway. She had never noticed it before. It was a steady light that didn’t flicker, and it seemed to be coming from the bathroom. She followed it to the window, where she saw that the lights of the Boston public transit station were on. Jill reasoned with herself that the window shade in the bathroom was white and the walls were green, so the light probably always looked that color—she had just never noticed.

  Jill heard no noise from outside the building, or from inside her apartment. This is probably completely crazy, she told herself. She’d just been having bad dreams.

  * * *

  Don was woken for good that morning by a phone call. It was just before 9 a.m., when Jane’s exams were scheduled to start. Don picked up as quickly as he could, hoping that the ring hadn’t stirred Jill, who had finally fallen back asleep. It was a friend of Don’s in the department, who was having trouble with his photo equipment and wanted Don’s advice. After the call, as Don walked to the bathroom, he heard footsteps in the hall, followed by the unmistakable sound of someone knocking on Jane’s door.

  Well, Jane’s done it again, Don thought to himself. She’s overslept this exam. He didn’t hear her door open before he went into the bathroom and got into the shower. He hoped that it would work out all right.

  * * *

  Later that day, Jill heard footsteps in the apartment stairwell. It was about 12:30 p.m., and she had been listening out, waiting for Jane to come home after her exams. But as those footsteps reached the landing and got closer to her door, Jill knew that it wasn’t Jane. The tread was too masculine. She thought maybe it was the electrician coming to see the Pressers, the only other fourth-floor residents, or perhaps it was Jim Humphries, and Jill had just missed hearing Jane coming home.

  The stranger knocked on Jane’s door. It didn’t open. Then she heard the muffled noises of two men talking.

  Don had come home from his errands shortly before noon and had started packing for their upcoming expedition to the Solomon Islands. As he rustled around the room, putting stuff in boxes, a large mounting board kept falling off the wall. He was lugging it out into the hall when he saw Jim in the corridor. Don walked past him and set the heavy board down.

  “Have you seen Jane?” Jim asked.

  No, Don said.

  “Well, she didn’t take her quiz.” Don was struck by the phrasing. He’d never call it a quiz. Maybe it was a Canadian thing.

  Don waited outside as Jim and then Jill walked into Jane’s apartment. As she retreated to her bedroom to recover from the shock, Jill told Don to call the health service because “there’s something terribly wrong.”

  Don took over from this point. He told Jim to call the police, but no one could remember the Cambridge Police’s number (9-1-1 didn’t yet exist in Cambridge). They fumbled around the Mitchells’ apartment looking for the phone book, and when they finally located it, Jim was too flustered to find the listing. Don took the book from him, thumbed to the right page, and dialed the police.

  While they were waiting for cops to arrive, Don tried to reach Jane’s family. The Radcliffe line was busy. Nobody answered at their home in Needham. He tried the Radcliffe line again, and this time got Mr. Britton’s secretary. Don asked the secretary to tell him to come to his daughter’s apartment. Jill assumed the secretary must have given Don a hard time, because after a while, he finally resorted to saying, “She’s dead.”

  Jim kept repeating, “You should call the health service. Call the health service.” Jill agreed with him: “Maybe we should take her pulse. Maybe she’s not dead.” Don began to doubt himself since he hadn’t in fact touched Jane to be sure, so he went back into her apartment. He couldn’t see her arm, so he felt the back of her knee. There was no pulse. It was completely cold. There was no uncertainty after that.

  And so the three of them waited in the Mitchells’ apartment in a state of shock. They walked around, and looked out the window, wondering when the police were going to show up. It was a quiet panic. Don thought about how alive Jane had been the last time he saw her. He thought about the stupid errands he had run a few hours ago, how normal and banal they were, and now his friend was dead. He struggled to come to grips with the reality that this thing had happened, but then he struggled to know exactly what thing he meant.

  Don’s memory of Jim Humphries dropped out after this point. In fact, other than crossing paths at the funeral and the grand jury hearing, he didn’t remember talking to him again until a chance encounter with a mutual friend in 1984.

  The police arrived, and Don pointed to Jane’s apartment. A few minutes later, Don heard noises in the stairwell. Two sets of footsteps. They belonged to Jane’s parents. Don would later write a prose poem about this moment—immortalizing the kind of weeping that is so total, they were literally loosed with sorrow.

  I heard groans and heaves from grief, shock, and not my own. I heard gaspings, breath-catchings, eructations.

  I called them forth, I the messenger, called her mother from her pleasant lunch, called her father from his office, saying only, come quickly, something bad has happened. I made them climb four flights of stairs, I made them listen to my tale, telling, tolling: she’s dead in there. You can’t go in. They belched, they farted, they wept.

  The dead are still but the near-dead aren’t nor are the just-dead nor those who loudly grieve.

  * * *

  That night, after a long interrogation session with the police, Don and Jill lay in bed. There were no racking sobs. No yelling. No loud eruptions of grief. Instead, the silent struggle that had consumed them that afternoon while waiting f
or the police returned: a disquieting inability to reconcile a reality that no longer made sense. Don turned to Jill. For the first, and he thinks, only time, he told his wife that he loved her.

  Hawaii

  DON MITCHELL AND I SAT on opposite corners of the couch in the living room of the house that he grew up in. Blue jade and orchid sprays and fragrant hibiscus and grass so green it looked like it was colored with a neon highlighter pressed in on us from the windows. Don’s black-and-white prints of people from the island of Malaita, taken during one of his South Pacific expeditions, hung on the walls. I put my tape recorder on the coffee table and hoped that I would be able to hear him above the trilling birds.

  The animal soundtrack reminded me of trying to fall asleep amid the swell of coquí frogs the night before. Just before 8 p.m., my plane had taxied into Hilo airport. It was less than twenty-four hours after I had gotten off the phone with Karl. I was the last one off the plane. The humidity on the tarmac hit me instantly. Don had asked if he and his partner, Ruth, could greet me at the airport—Hawaiian hospitality, they had told me. It would feel weird not to, he’d said. He had sent me a recent picture of himself in front of his house so I’d know how to pick him out, like on a blind date.

  I stepped onto the escalators, and, just as Don had said, there were people waiting at the mouth of the stairs. I scanned the crowd. Near the banner that said WELCOME HOME, there was Don in a burgundy Hawaiian shirt—I recognized the gleaming bald head and white beard first—and Ruth standing next to him. They were each holding a lei.

  Don adjusted his glasses, as if theatrically miming the act of recognizing me. I waved and walked over, my steps skimming the floor. We were all smiling, giddy almost. Ruth, one hand in a cast, reached over my head to put on her lei—a green-and-white one, with what looked like spiky pineapple tops. I stooped to help her. Then Don lifted his lei, a string of purple orchids, over my head. Ruth hugged me and Don kissed me on the cheek. It felt, strangely, like a homecoming, even as a part of me tried to hold on to my reservations. “We knew what you looked like, but we didn’t know how tall you were going to be” was the first thing that Don said to me.