The Transcendental Murder

by Jane Langton

  The Transcendental Murder

  Jane Langton

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  For Grace Brown Gillson and Joseph Lincoln Gillson

  Ruth Wheeler of Fairhaven Bay is in no way responsible for the wild idea behind this book, but her knowledge of Henry Thoreau in Concord was a great help in the writing of The Transcendental Murder.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Homer Kelly … celebrated Emersonian scholar. (In his opinion Concord was a polite little suburban pest-hole, living on its picayune history. It made him sick.)

  Mary Morgan … Concord? Mary would never have said as much out loud, but she felt herself walking on holy ground. (Looking at her, Homer found himself mumbling a phrase by Thoreau, “The eye is the jewel of the body.”)

  Arthur Furry … Honor Scout. (Practically a witness to the murder at the North Bridge on the anniversary of the celebrated Battle of April 19th, 1775.)

  Alice Herpitude … Head Librarian, Concord Public Library. (Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.)

  Teddy Staples … stone mason, bird-watcher, modest reincarnation of Henry Thoreau.

  Ernest Goss … owner of the letters that were “transcendental dynamite,” father of Charley, Philip, Rowena and Edith.

  Elizabeth Goss … wife of Ernest. (No real tears, no true laughter.)

  Charley Goss … impersonator of Dr. Samuel Prescott, Concord hero of 1775 who sped Paul Revere’s news to Concord and rallied the Minute Men. Charley’s feet, alas, were clay.

  Philip Goss … by contrast with his brother’s, Philip’s feet were of some noble material, surely, and set on rising ground.

  Rowena Goss … beautiful sister of Charley and Philip. (Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel.…)

  Edith Goss … ugly sister of Charley and Philip.

  Thomas Hand … farmer, chairman of April 19th celebrations.

  Gwen Hand … wife of Tom, mother of Annie, John, Freddie, expectant mother of a fourth child. (But surely not now, as the wind rises?)

  Mrs. Florence Hand … with her son, Tom, real “Old Concord,” true squeezings from the Concord grape.

  Howard Swan … chairman of the Alcott Association, Moderator of Town Meetings. (Nobly bald, like Bronson Alcott.)

  Mrs. Bewley … maid-of-all-work. (“WHAT’S THAT YOU’VE GOT THERE, MRS. BEWLEY?” “MESSAGES FROM JESUS! TAKE THEM! TAKE THEM!”)

  Roland Granville-Galsworthy … self-styled, Oxford don.

  The Concord Independent Battery … good fellows all, guardians of the two historic cannon fired at the North Bridge.

  James Flower … Chief of Concord Police. (Nine inches under the required minimum height, a failing counterbalanced by competence, personality and a special dispensation of the Legislature.)

  The District Attorney of Middlesex County … (Frightened of cows.)

  The Governor of Massachusetts … (Fond of Longfellow.)

  … and not to be forgotten—the august wraiths of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson.…

  Chapter 1

  Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

  HENRY THOREAU

  There was a big man sitting at the other end of the table in the reference room of the Concord Library when Mary came in and put down her file. He had a safety pin on one side of his glasses and adhesive tape on the other. His necktie was allover butterflies. He glanced up at her briefly. He had to look way up, because Mary was six feet tall. For a minute as she settled down with her book she thought about the sharp look of his small eye and the sawn piece of brown hair hanging across the top of his face. Then she got to work.

  Memoirs of the Social Circle in Concord, 1895–1909. Read the memoir on Sam Staples, who locked up Henry Thoreau in 1846 for not paying any poll tax to a government that countenanced the Fugitive Slave Law and war with Mexico. Read it and stop playing around. Look at Sam’s chin-whiskery face. Look for references to your ladies. Did Sam know Elizabeth Hoar, Margaret Fuller, Lidian Emerson? Of course there was no hope that any of them knew Emily Dickinson, glorifying Amherst only one hundred miles away. Sam must have known Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. (Peabody. Was the accent on the first syllable or should you come down hard on the penult, too? If a bag of salted penults costs five cents, how much for a bag of antepenults?)

  Mary closed her book with a bang. Come now. It’s just this sort of thing that keeps you from getting anything done. Concentrate. What about those female Norcross cousins that Emily Dickinson had in Concord? Did she ever come to visit them? Did the Norcross sisters have any male relatives in the Social Circle? Mary ran her finger down the list. No Norcrosses here. Try another volume. She got up and looked through Volumes I and II. No luck. Vaguely she looked around for Volume III.

  “Here,” said the man at the table, “what name are you looking for?”

  Mary stared at him. He had it. “Norcross,” she mumbled.

  His big thumb flipped the book open at the list of memoirs in the front. “Not here,” he said. Then he snapped the book shut and went back to his notes.

  Well. That was that. Mary would have liked to look for herself. But she said, “Thank you,” and turned to something else. She found Edward Emerson’s book about his father and spent her morning on it. Her beautiful free morning. Even with her eyes on the page she was conscious of the way the stranger at the other end of the table used his books. It was a subject on which she was a connoisseur. All the other days of the week Mary stood behind the charging desk, a guardian of the books in the library rather than a reader. And so she knew them all—the magazine leafer, the morning-paper reader, the homework doer, the author of a talk on Concord gardens of yesteryear. This man knew what he was looking for, where to find it and how to take it away. He made notes in a rapid scrawl on a pad of lined paper. He hauled a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase, ran swiftly through them, extracted one and scribbled across the top. Once he snorted to himself. Something was funny.

  Edward Emerson wasn’t. He was reverent. No one who had known Ralph Waldo Emerson was ever anything else. Usually Mary felt reverent, too. But now she would have loved a breath of Emersonian scandal. She hung her feet in their big tennis shoes on the rung of her chair, and hunched her shoulders over her book. The man pushed back his chair and got up. He rose and rose and blotted out the window. Mary looked up in spite of herself. Tall enough, she thought, then checked herself savagely, and glared back at Edward Emerson. The man went out.

  Mary got up, too, after a while, and left the reference room. She crossed the main room with its check-out desk, its balconies, its white busts of Henry Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott and Bronson Alcott and Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar and its great seated statue of Emerson and went into her own office to eat her paperbag lunch. She left the door open and looked out at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s naked classical collarbone. For Mary the Concord Public Library was a pleasure dome and palace of delight. The high dusty ceiling might have been a sultan’s canopy, the stern Carrara Transcendentalists so many dancing girls. Mary had caught the transcendental fever long ago, and she planned never to recover. She was writing a book now about the women, taking her time, still reading at random. She had happy thoughts and rattled them out on her typewriter. Everything she wrote was covered over with a film of sweetness, and whenever she read it she licked the sugar. Later it would not be so. She knew how the sugary bits would not fit in, and the grandiose ideas would turn insubstantial. But now it was all sugar, sweet sugar. Mary stared at the wall, put down her sandwich, and turned to her typewriter—

  Thoreau made glori
ous stabs at verse, near-misses. It took an Emily Dickinson to transfix the Transcendental Idea with the hard small shot of her poetry. But how alike are some of their images! Compare Emily’s

  Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music—

  Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—

  with Henry Thoreau’s

  The air over these fields is a foundry full of moulds

  for casting bluebirds’ warbles.

  Mary jumped. “What?” Someone was standing behind her. It was the big man from the reference room. Had he been reading over her shoulder? What was the big idea?

  He stuck out a drawer from the card catalogue and pointed to a card. Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, by Channing. “Where is it?”

  He might have said please. Mary gave him her big kindly smile and pointed him in the right direction.

  A moment later he was back. “Not there.”

  “Perhaps Miss Herpitude can help you,” said Mary, wishing he would go away. Then she repented. How could he know it was her day off? “Do you know Jetsom’s new book?” she said.

  “Jetsom? Which Jetsom?”

  Which Jetsom? Why didn’t he look it up? Mary looked at her typewriter. “F.A. Jetsom,” she said carefully.

  He went out, but a moment later he was back, looking at her suspiciously. “You mean R.F. Jetsom, don’t you? Ralph Framingham Jetsom, Thoreau at Harvard?”

  “No,” said Mary. “I mean that other Jetsom. F for Flotsam, A for And.” She banged out a sentence of gibberish on her typewriter, then looked up to find him still there. She put her glasses on. “It’s my day off,” she said humbly.

  She was like a big untidy flower, the man decided, one of those red and white striped carnations named after Mrs. Jocelyn Pope Hopewell or Mrs. Eisenhower Roosevelt Jones, or a sort of bouquet with a couple of fringed gentians in the middle, whatever a fringed gentian looked like, but probably like those black eyelashes hanging down like tassels over those blue eyes. “The eye is the jewel of the body,” he murmured to himself, quoting Henry Thoreau.

  “What’s that?” said Mary. Some insult, no doubt.

  “I said, all right for you.” He turned on his heel and went out of the room.

  Mary took the pickle out of her lunchbag and took a bite. She was surprised to find that what was shaping up in her mind was that tiresome triumphal arch again. It was part of the baggage that followed her around. There it was, with all its gear, the colossal cornice and the coffered barrel vaults and the channeled pilasters and the gesturing statuary and the streaked marble columns. And through the opening that same tedious procession was passing, splendid with banners and horns and horsemen in red and blue and gold. What was it for? Who were they? Where were they going? The man on the biggest horse, the one who was looking at her, had a face now, the face of the man with the basso profundo voice. Hey, get out of there. That’s my private triumphal arch, my private horses and horns and my red and blue outfits. Go away.

  Chapter 2

  I have travelled a good deal in Concord.

  HENRY THOREAU

  Outside it was March. Mary stood on the steps of the library looking up. A noisy flock of grackles had filled the elm trees like a convention of Shriners using up all the available hotels. The sky was blowing away like a silk scarf caught in the branches. High up in the blue air there was another flock of grackles, hovering over the shining ragged Y of the junction of the swollen rivers and over Walden Pond and over the hills named by the Indians—Punkatasset, Nashawtuc, Annursnac—and over the glistening dotted swamps and over the brown haze of elms and maples and buttonwoods that obscured the veering arrowheads of Concord’s streets. The flock opened out, then collapsed and thickened and began to descend, wheeling over the bronze Minuteman at the North Bridge, flapping down on the rooftops of the Milldam stores that were slung sway-backed between their chimneys, screeching at each other from the gigantic white Woolworth false-front with its pseudo-Colonial urns, fluttering to the sidewalk momentarily between the Greek columns of the old bank building, then tossed up again like a blanket shaken out by a housewife to circle around the white belltower of the First Parish Church, banking sharply in alarm at the cracking of the tall-masted flag on the traffic island, and coming to rest at last for a screaming committee meeting on the Old Hill Burying Ground at the end of the street. Below the graveyard lay the Milldam with its stores, and Monument Square with its Civil War Memorial obelisk and its little temples devoted to Christian Science, the Knights of Columbus, the Masons and the Middlesex Fire Insurance Company. Running away out of sight were the tree-lined streets with their old wooden houses—to the southeast the simple ones with the small windows, and Emerson’s place and the Alcotts’ Orchard House and Hawthorne’s Wayside and the Antiquarian Museum, and to the west beyond the Milldam on Main Street the bigger, finer houses with their broad flat pilasters and imposing doorways and their back yards sloping down to the river.

  Mary walked down the library steps and started home, thinking about the movies. In the movies, when there was something energetic going on, the background music was “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Or if there was something sad, they played sad music, exalting the action into poetry, so that you turned with tear-filled eyes to your neighbor, whispering, beautiful, isn’t it. That was what living in Concord was like—the movies. Only instead of music you had historical association, or something pungent that Waldo or Henry had said. And if you were cursed with a photographic memory you couldn’t even walk down the street without the drums and fifes starting up, or the transcendental jukebox. Here was the Milldam. In Thoreau’s day the mill had already been long gone, replaced by a row of stores. Henry had called it Concord’s Rialto. There by the bank had been one of the blockhouses during King Philip’s War. Beside the bus stop was the place where old Simon Willard and Peter Bulkeley had bought the original six miles square from Squaw Sachem and the Indians of Musketaquid in an atmosphere of peace and concord in 1636. You couldn’t cross the square without remembering that Emerson never crossed it without feeling a wild poetic delight, you couldn’t look at the Catholic church without thinking of its start in life as a home for the Universalists, and of the handsome invitation they had issued to everybody in favor of the universal salvation of all mankind to meet at Bigelow’s tavern to choose officers. You couldn’t even glance down Monument Street without thinking of the red backs of the British Regulars filing down it on their way to the North Bridge and the beginning of all that important trouble in 1775. That April day had been the first occasion when history had shone her spotlight on Concord, when a scattering of balls from a few fowling pieces and Brown Bess muskets had left a hole in the fabric of things-as-they-were that wasn’t to be sewn up again. Then in the forties and fifties history had aimed her burning glass at Concord again, and in simple houses noble as Doric temples there had flamed up a kind of rural American Athens, with Margaret Fuller for a visiting oracle, Emerson and Thoreau and Alcott for philosophers and Nathaniel Hawthorne for a weird kind of Sophocles. And so important to the general blaze of utterance had been each particular pond or wood lot or boulder field that Emerson had make a joke, once, about the poor blockheads who were not born in Concord, but had to do the best they could, considering they had never seen Bateman’s Pond or Nine Acre Corner or Becky Stow’s swamp.

  The next generation had sugared down into a Louisa May Alcott, no Transcendentalist, and after that Concord had been content to live in the shadow. But it was still a lively and ravishing suburban town. Mary would never have said as much out loud, but she felt herself walking on holy ground.

  Muddy ground. Wherever the grass was thin, spring was trying to exhale itself through the frozen earth, and there were glutinous footprints everywhere from yesterday’s wallowing galoshes. Mary picked her way carefully. In the shadow of the curb, under the metallic platelike masses of ice, dirty with sand and gravel, below the hardened drifts yellowed by dogs, there ran a stream of clear water. If you could live through March, the old tr
ick would happen again, and March would be transmogrified into April and May.

  “Mary!” It was Charley Goss, pulling up to give her a ride. Mary got into his car and accepted a jocular kiss. It was only half-jocular, she knew, because Charley was sweet on her. So was his older brother Philip. A year ago they had taken turns proposing to her. No, she had said—no. But it hadn’t seemed to stick, and they were both still working on it. Mary had begun to feel like a sort of giant prize panda in a ring-the-bottle game. Charley and Philip took her out alternately. She was an official friend of the family. Part of the official position seemed to be that it was all right to maul her a bit, and Mary, apologetic for being hard-to-get, went along in a friendly spirit, but wished they wouldn’t. Sometimes she wondered how long she could hold out.

  “How are Emily and Margaret and Henry today? Still frustrated?” said Charley, getting a rise. Mary always took the bait.

  “Don’t forget, they lived before Freud and so they didn’t know they were, if they were.”

  “Well, I sometimes wonder if they didn’t have their fun after all. Did it ever strike you as kind of funny that Henry Thoreau kept the home fires burning for Lidian Emerson while Waldo was away? And what about old Waldo and little Margie Fuller?”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll believe it, but there was a time when men and women could be friends with each other.”

  “Listen, girly, men and women have only one kind of relation to each other, and that’s all they’ve ever had or ever will have. Don’t kid yourself.”

  “Any luck in finding a job yet?” (Change the subject.)

  “Why, certainly, certainly. Lots of them. Did you hear about my spin with the Acme Cement Company? I was supposed to straighten out their accounts. Perfectly simple, nothing to it, I was going great. But then they got a big contract with the highway department and all of a sudden they didn’t want their accounts straightened out any more. Well, that was all right with me because I walked right into a jim-dandy job at Madame LaZarga’s Superfluous Hair Removal Salon. And I was doing fine there, too, getting in on the ground floor with all kinds of opportunities for advancement and a glorious future, and Madame LaZarga had turned out to be a really great woman, truly noble. But then my father got wind of it and that was the end of that. He just couldn’t see the dignity in the removal of superfluous hair. The whole world panting for it, too. Think of it—millions of hairy people with whiskers sprouting out all over, and idealistic Madame LaZarga devoting her life to them. I don’t understand why, but my father couldn’t see it at all.”