The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Lieutenant Tracy took a moment to record all this before asking me several probing questions about Cornelius Chard and just how “active” he was in promoting cannibalism.

  I began my response by trying to disabuse the officer of any correlation between what an academic advocates and what an academic practices. Wainscott, I said, abounds with the usual gaggle of tenured radicals for whom rhetoric of one sort or another constitutes a reality all its own. As perhaps it does. But I’m not sure I entirely convinced him that while Professor Chard might think it wise for some hypothetical population to eat its dead, he would probably never really consider the consumption of human flesh himself. I don’t know what it was, perhaps the lieutenant’s silence and the way he lifted one eyebrow, but I felt a shiver of suspicion myself about Corny Chard. The man has never seemed entirely stable. He’s certainly been known to test the limits of what might be called acceptable eccentricity.

  As the lieutenant scribbled diligently, I remarked, not entirely facetiously, that I thought he would make a good recording secretary. He didn’t seem to find it very complimentary. Indeed, at that point he turned noticeably officious and said he would like to have copies of all the correspondence between myself, Dean Fessing, and the Board of Governors. I said it would take some digging through my files but that I would send them over to him by tomorrow evening. I also said, deputizing myself, I suppose, that I would keep a sharp lookout for anything out of the ordinary.

  The lieutenant scarcely acknowledged my offer of assistance, and indeed the entire interview from that point on took a decidedly nasty turn. Did I know, he asked, what the late dean’s “sexual preferences” were? I replied that I believed Cranston Fessing to have been gay, as they say, but that he was the soul of discretion regarding his proclivities save for an incident with a graduate student some years ago that the university handled rather badly. (The student was, after all, well beyond the age of consent.) Did I know anyone the dean might have been having a “relationship” with at the time of his death? I repeated that the dean was most discreet, and that in any event I was not privy to his social life. The lieutenant glanced up sharply and asked me: “Mr. de Ratour, have you had or were you having any kind of relationship with Dean Fessing other than what related to your work at the museum?”

  At first I didn’t realize what the officer was insinuating. I said I had seen the dean at social functions, of course, and we were members of the Club, but he didn’t play tennis or attend any of the Club’s special activities, such as the annual New Year’s party. With an almost admirable lack of embarrassment, the officer asked me, “What I mean, Mr. de Ratour, is have you ever had or were you having a sexual relationship with Dean Fessing?”

  I shouldn’t, I suppose, have been so surprised, but I was in fact utterly dismayed. When I had regained some composure, I told the lieutenant that I had had no dealings with the late dean that were not in every sense professional. I continued that while my own orientation in such matters was, strictly speaking, my own business, I led, in fact, a celibate life. I tried not to sound defensive, but I know I did. This whole issue is a real sore point with me. When a man in my situation decides to live alone and not socialize with the fair sex, it is taken these days as prima facie evidence that he is heteroclitic. (I happen to know that Malachy Morin has made slurs about me to this effect on more than one occasion.) The problem is compounded by the fact that I have more than one friend who is more or less than what’s taken for normal, and by the fact that, however instinctively normal one’s own predispositions, one learns, over time, to be tolerant where the inclinations of others are concerned. (In this matter I have come to subscribe to the dictum of my good friend Izzy Landes, who contends that the only perversion is the neglect or abuse of children.) There is something else: to pronounce oneself orthodox in a convincingly enough way, one has do so with an emphasis that can be inferred as a denigration of what is heterodox while at the same time inviting, in nearly direct proportion to one’s vehemence, skepticism as to one’s own real stance. I felt, in short, that my freedom of speech, or more pointedly, my freedom of silence, had been violated. I certainly was not going to go into my failed romance with Elsbeth Merriman, which occurred so many years ago, although I can admit in the privacy of this journal that that deep and tender wound feels as fresh as ever.

  I could not determine whether or not I had convinced the officer of my noninvolvement with the dean, and I had by that time ceased to care. If he wanted ours to be an adversarial relation, I was quite prepared to accommodate him. He closed his notebook, signaling the end of what I realized had been a rather expert interrogation. He then took out his card, handed it to me across the desk, and said he would appreciate it if I would call him if I were planning to leave town. I nodded, took his card, and was holding it before me when it came to me with a nasty shock that I was a suspect.

  “Lieutenant,” I said, “surely you don’t suspect me of perpetrating this outrage?”

  It quite unnerved me the way he gazed impassively at me for a moment before saying, and I quote him verbatim: “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t suspect you, Mr. de Ratour?”

  Now I am familiar enough with the modes of detective fiction to know that to have protested my innocence too vehemently could have been taken as indicative of guilt. But I could not keep myself from telling him just how absurd was the notion that I had had anything whatsoever to do with Cranston Fessing’s death. “Really, Lieutenant,” I said, “I don’t even know how to cook, except for the toast and five-minute egg I have each morning with my coffee and grapefruit. And I would never knowingly eat another human being. In fact, I routinely eschew red meat, as Carlos, the waiter at the Club, will tell you. Most evenings I take the catch of the day, although very occasionally I will indulge myself in a well-done joint from the standing rib, but more to go with a good wine than anything else.”

  The officer listened with an expressionless face as, taking out his notebook again, he recorded what I had to say. He stood finally to put on his trench coat, which made him look every inch the detective. And while he didn’t shake hands, he left me with some slight assurance by asking me to let him know immediately should I see or hear or remember “anything to do with the case.”

  Still, I have yet to rid myself of the awful, soiling sensation of being a suspect in such a heinous crime. It somehow makes me, through the mere possibility of guilt, guilty. I certainly hope others don’t start suspecting me. It’s extraordinary how easily one can become a pariah in an academic community, where everyone is supposed to be so broad-minded.

  TUESDAY, APRIL 7

  The fog has rolled in, but the day started off beautifully, a brisk, chappy morning of juncos and jonquils, blue sky and white cloud. My matinal walk to work, which I do at a fitting cardiovascular pace, takes me through Thornton Arboretum, where, except during the most inclement weather, I go the long route, by the wooded side of Kettle Pond. There I stopped for a moment to look at the alders, their black-barked, still naked branches doubled in the sunstruck water, and there, from a certain angle, the oiled green heads of courting mallard drakes deliquesced into the brilliant reflections in a burst of shimmering motes that left me half blinded. In a calmer light, the narrow ring of white at the bottom of the drake’s neck has often put me in mind of Anglican clergy. As a youth I had thought at times of taking the cloth. I’m glad now that I didn’t as I have found that I have never been able to separate entirely the people I like from the people I love or must love.

  But enough of this. The phone started in almost immediately with more press calls about Dean Fessing. Most of them, thank God, I was able to refer to Cornelius Chard, who not only is a veritable fount of cannibal lore but appears to be enjoying his notoriety as a suspect. I do this in part to annoy the Wainscott public relations establishment, which both objects to Chard’s grandstanding and insists on referring media inquiries to the museum.

  At eleven I went to Dean Fessing’s memorial service in Swift Chape
l. On these occasions I have begun to suffer the illusion that I see exactly the same persons in attendance each time, less one, of course, and we sit and stand and murmur the responses as though waiting patiently for our turn. And in fact I again noticed that what Izzy Landes calls the usual suspects were present. I nodded to Izzy himself and his charming wife, Lotte, as well as to Marge Littlefield and her husband, Bill, whose law firm handles some of the university’s legal work. There was Thad Pilty, somewhat of a newcomer to this group; President George Twill, of course, along with a scattering of older deans and administrators; Joyce Earl, the editor of the Wainscott News, the university’s Pravda, as one wag called it. Father O’Gould is also a regular, but not usually in a pastoral role except when the departed is of the Roman faith and he dons a surplice and joins the Reverend Lopes on the altar.

  This morning, though, I noticed some new faces — quite aside from a gaggle of obvious sensation seekers, the kind of people who congregate at bad accidents to gawk at what has not happened to them. I mean, for instance, Malachy Morin was there, probably to show, I’m sure, that he and the late dean had no real differences regarding the finances of the MOM. I was astounded to see Damon Drex shuffle in wearing a jacket and tie. He was accompanied by the assistant he hired some months ago, a tall, ungainly young man who appears, perhaps because of pronounced upper teeth, to be constantly smirking. And I can’t imagine what Corny Chard was doing there, except, perhaps, to give yet another interview to one of the reporters who are still hanging around. Speaking of which, Amanda Feeney bustled in late, nothing being sacred to the press. Being in church I tried to restrain these and other uncharitable thoughts, but it was difficult.

  The Reverend Alfred Lopes certainly gave a stirring elegy. The Plumtree Professor of Christian Doctrine in the Divinity School and Minister to the Chapel, the Reverend Lopes, or Alfie, as I know him, is the first person of color to hold that position. He spoke most eloquently of Dean Fessing as a casualty in the war on ignorance. The dean’s murder and its grisly aftermath were a reminder, he said, that we should not take our civilized order for granted, that we are vulnerable to lapses into unimagined barbarism, as the history of our sad century makes only too clear. I must say it was good to hear the point made so forthrightly. The Reverend Lopes, being black (actually, he’s a rich shade of café au lait), has the freedom to be old-fashioned and even curmudgeonly in his views and practices: he forbids cameras and tourists in the chapel and holds a worship service each morning at eight during the school year. I daresay he would make attendance compulsory if he could get away with it. Without Alfie there’s no telling what kind of a circus the chapel would have been turned into by now, as a white man would have had to bend to every prevailing wind or be castigated as a racist, sexist, and so on.

  But as a matter of fact, the chapel remains much the same as it was more than thirty years ago, when I returned to Seaboard after Yale and a year at Oxford for my graduate studies at Wainscott. (I returned also to be with Mother, who had gone a bit batty after Father’s death.) Swift is quite a beautiful building — of Bulfinch Georgian graciousness with a double march of Palladian windows that lets in the enlightening sun without obviating the aura of a place concerned with more transcendent matters. I have often sat there mesmerized by the play of sunlight on the tablets of white marble ranged on the walls between the windows and incised with the names of Wainscott’s war dead. They go all the way back to the French and Indian War, to an Ezekiel Hosmer and his dog Zeus. Sometimes, starting with Ezekiel and Zeus, I feel compelled to read all the names from all the wars. I think of their faces, their voices, the heartache occasioned by their deaths. Otherwise, I think to myself, what’s the point in having their names there? Several were added who died during the Vietnam War, and there is, alas, plenty of room for more. Swift, in fact, is where I had always imagined that Elsbeth and I would be married, even though my tastes run to the high church edifications of Saint Cecilia’s in town, where I am a communicant. I had imagined a quiet ceremony followed by a tastefully modest reception at her parents’ home or at the Club and a honeymoon, perhaps in Tuscany. And even while I sometimes think it best we never married, I still rue a future that never was, an alternative life never lived.

  Ah, well, poor Fessing. He was a vague sort of fellow in baggy tweeds and mustache who came into meetings with a perpetual air of impending defeat. For all that he was an able administrator, a decent man, and I did say a prayer for him if only by trying to imagine what meaning his life and awful death might have in the larger scheme of things. If there is a larger scheme of things. I certainly hope that the person or persons responsible for what happened to him are quickly apprehended and brought to justice.

  Speaking of which, I experienced a curious, premonitory shudder when, at the end of the service, I turned and noticed Lieutenant Tracy by himself at the back of the church. He was standing and watching us all with the attentive circumspection of a Hercule Poirot.

  MONDAY, APRIL 13

  I have just gotten up and closed the window, even though it is one of those absolutely gorgeous nights when the air has its first vernal softness, which usually comes late in these latitudes. Those damned chimps. I have never felt particularly pongicidal, but tonight I swear I could walk into that place with a gun and … Well, I probably couldn’t. They are our cousins, after all, however distant. It’s simply that they don’t belong here, locked up and toyed with in the name of science. They belong back in their tropical glades, picking fruit off the trees and doing whatever it is they do to each other.

  Speaking of which, Damon Drex accosted me this afternoon as I was lingering in the Mesoamerican exhibit admiring some of the Aztec material, especially the array of knives and fonts which, wrought so wonderfully from chalcedony and obsidian, were used for human sacrifice. Anyway, the man seized my arm with a powerful grip and all but pinned me against the case. “I have large news, Norman,” he said, torturing the language in his strange, deep monotone, his dull, yellowish brown eyes animated with an excited glee. (He is, I believe, a refugee from some Balkan or Baltic hinterland. But then he also seems one of those unfortunate types who would be a displaced person no matter where he was.) “Really?” I responded, extricating my arm from his grasp. “Oh, yes, yes,” he went on. (I am quoting from memory, which, when it concerns words, is nearly photographic.) “Our experiment starts soon for interest of universe, Norman. It overtakes suspicious randomism with great jump forward for primate pedagogy.” Then he laughed his toothsome laugh. “You know, Norman, ha, ha, the chimpanzee and the man keep ninety-eight percent the same DNA, ha, ha. You know how that means, Norman. It means, ha, ha, God makes man by his image, then, ha, ha, ha, God must be chimpanzee! But you must not breathe words to souls, Norman, then time ripens.”

  I remained, of course, noncommittal, except to say out of ordinary politeness when he pressed me, that I would consider a visit to the pavilion to see the changes in the physical plant and to see what they were doing. There is something about the man. His large teeth, perhaps. I pictured him, for a horrifying moment, as a cannibal, feeding with fiendish glee on human flesh. He is certainly the most hirsute person I have ever seen. I mean, the hair of his forearms comes down well over his knuckles. He’s one of those men who shave from one hairline to another. Of course, in a jacket and bow tie at a departmental meeting, he doesn’t look all that different from his colleagues.

  As far as that goes, I don’t know of any credentials he has as a trained primate trainer. He began at the pavilion, if I remember correctly, as an assistant in charge of feeding the chimps and gorillas (we had several more of the latter in those days) and cleaning their cages. He has a knack, apparently, for teaching the animals various tricks, and through some highly publicized stunts (he taught an old female chimp how to knit — but not purl), he has parlayed an essentially janitorial job into something approaching academic respectability, whatever that means these days. He is now, believe it or not, the Ruddy and Phyllis Stein Keeper of G
reat Apes in the Museum of Man. I would have thought my own position as Recording Secretary warranted endowment before one that involves little more than animal training. But then, I have not sought publicity the way Damon Drex has; nor have I stooped to the kind of genteel beggary needed to shake money out of the sort of people who launder their reputations at places like the MOM. But I am being catty. Our benefactors include many wonderful and disinterested people.

  Still, as I stood there listening to him and watching his eyes, I could not rid myself of the notion that Damon Drex might be the culprit. The man certainly looks the part, and I’m sure Cranston Fessing made inquiries about the finances of the pavilion. But isn’t that the insidious thing about a murder like Fessing’s? After a while you start to suspect everyone — Corny Chard, Thad Pilty, Damon Drex, the poor apes themselves. I know a few people probably even think I did it. Just yesterday, Marge Littlefield, whom I have known forever, gave me a long, searching glance and then shook her head as though to say, Not him. I mean really.

  Well, enough of this. I certainly am not going out of my way to provide Mr. Drex with a forum for his chimp show, however cunning the stunts. And, to judge from the interviews Malachy Morin and I conducted this morning with candidates for press assistant, it seems I will be in that position for some time. What pathetic ignorance permeates the world today! One young man, the lobes of his ears arrayed with rings, his hair dyed orange, allowed how he really “grooved” on the idea of working for a “museum of anarchy.” When I corrected his misunderstanding, he nodded knowingly and said, “Yeah, man, I hear what you’re saying.” So Mr. Drex is going to have to put up with me for a while longer. More important, I’m afraid, is that I will not have the time to devote to working on the history of the museum. Strange, isn’t it, to feel that if I wait much longer it will be too late to write such a history.