The Transcendental Murder

by Jane Langton

  Roland Granville-Galsworthy was going away, too. (Be grateful for small blessings.) He caught Mary out of doors at lunchtime, and said so. Then he wrestled her behind a bush and gave her a hard time. “Oi want a little kiss,” he said. Mary was still too much in a state of shock to put up much resistance. The rest of the day she found herself breaking out into convulsive shaking. It would be an enormous satisfaction never to see him again. He claimed to be going back to Oxford to the chair of American Literature. A liar to the end.

  Jimmy Flower’s men were there part of the day. The District Attorney himself came out, and stood around looking glum, with Miss O’Toole hovering beside him. Homer came in with them, but he hardly spoke to Mary. He merely gave her a moody look and handed her some of the morning newspapers. The headlines were very bad. One of them practically called the District Attorney a murderer of old women. Here was a clever one—LOUISA MAY ALCOTT SLAYS LIBRARIAN.

  Mary had had enough of the whole thing. She felt tired and ill. Stiffly she reached up to the shelf labelled Summer Reading and started to take out the books on the High School reading list for the fall. Harden over, that will stop the shaking. Tighten up. Her fingers picked tensely at the books. She dropped one. It was The Poems of Emily Dickinson. That belonged on the list. She picked it up and put it on the cart. Then she took it off the cart again and looked at it. It was the new copy of Volume I, to replace the copy Elizabeth Goss had stolen from the library. What was the page that had been torn out? Page 123, wasn’t it? Mary found the page and glanced at the poem printed on it. “If the foolish, call them ‘flowers’ …” For once Emily’s private language and crabbed mannerisms irritated her. She flipped the page over and began reading the poem on the other side—

  In Ebon Box, when years have flown

  To reverently peer,

  Wiping away the velvet dust

  Summers have sprinkled there!

  To hold a letter to the light—

  Grown Tawny now, with time—

  To con the faded syllables

  That quickened us like Wine!

  Perhaps a Flower’s shrivelled cheek

  Among its stores to find—

  Plucked far away, some morning—

  By gallant—mouldering hand!

  A curl, perhaps, from foreheads

  Our Constancy forgot—

  Perhaps, an Antique trinket—

  In vanished fashions set!

  And then to lay them quiet back—

  And go about its care—

  As if the little Ebon Box

  Were none of our affair!

  Suddenly Mary could bear no more. She didn’t want to think about Elizabeth Goss, who had gone mad, or about Ernest Goss, who had been shot to death, or about Charley Goss, who was under arrest, or about Alice Herpitude, who had been——No, no, don’t think about it at all! Mary shook herself, snapped the book shut and thrust it back on the cart. Then she walked stiffly to Alice’s office, shut the door softly and burst into tears.

  Chapter 50

  Essential Oils are wrung—

  The Attar from the Rose

  Is not expressed by Suns—alone—

  It is the gift of Screws—

  EMILY DICKINSON

  Because of the violent nature of her death, Alice Herpitude’s funeral was a little delayed. Mary didn’t want to go to it. She didn’t know how she could go through with it. If she hadn’t had to sing the Ave Verum with the rest of the choir she might have begged off. But she had to. So she sat in the balcony of the big white church, facing sideways to the pulpit behind one of the tenors, twisting her handkerchief in her hands. Shrinking back behind the tenor, she looked past the wooden box that held the body of Alice Herpitude to the tiny face of the minister, perched on the tip of the tenor’s large nose. Mr. Patterson’s words flowed like honey, filling up the empty interstices of her mind, blocking and dulling her awareness. But they must not. Prick up, prick up like thorns the hairs of your attention! Mary glanced over the congregation and remembered the Sunday morning when she had looked down and seen for the first time the look of terror on Alice’s face. She had seen it there often after that. Of what had Alice been afraid? The choirmistress lifted her hand, and the choir rose.

  “Ave, ave verum Corpus …”

  In the rainbow coma at the edge of Mary’s swimming vision the heads of the mourning friends of Alice Herpitude were distributed in rows like round balls strung on a string, shimmering like decorations from a Christmas tree, glistening with bright glorious lights.

  The ceremony at the graveside was over. She stumbled over the dry grass, turning away with the others. She shook her head at Gwen and Tom, and straggled off by herself. But there was someone standing beside her car. It was Homer Kelly. He motioned at the car door. “Get in,” he said.

  He was saying goodby, too. He would be assisting the County Prosecutor and the District Attorney in the preparation of the case against Charley Goss, working out of the County Court House in East Cambridge, living in his own rooms off Brattle Street. Then, he said, maybe he could get back to his book on Henry Thoreau. Homer stirred uneasily behind the wheel and glanced sideways at Mary. “Concord is too rich for my blood, anyway,” he said. “I can’t seem to think sensibly about Thoreau or Emerson or any of the rest of them unless I’m far away from here, in Kalamazoo or somewhere.”

  “You mean you’ve lost your critical viewpoint? You surely weren’t getting fond of them?”

  “What do you mean, fond? I don’t believe in being fond of the subject of a biography. You lose your objectivity. You’ve got to be strictly impersonal, strictly impersonal. And all the stuff I’ve written while I’ve been here seems to have lost something I used to have. I don’t know …”

  “That cutting edge, perhaps?”

  Homer frowned and was silent. He drove out Barrett’s Mill Road to her house and slowed down. Then he speeded up again. “Come on. Let’s go rent a canoe at the South Bridge Boat House.”

  Mary wondered dully where Rowena was, but she tried to cooperate. Jump, Mary—jump just a little longer. “Shall we have another fight?” she said.

  Homer smiled at her. There was a funny expression on his craggy face. “You know I like to fight with you.”

  It was a heavy, humid day. Over the river the trees piled up like thunderheads. The duckweed lay in a light green scum along the shore. There were tall spikes of cardinal flower and loosestrife along the edges of the water. They drifted silently. Mary leaned her head back and folded her arms, trying to let her mind go blank. Just listen to the birds, don’t think about anything. She turned her head and looked in the pickerel weed for the two that were singing, splitting hairs.

  Homer looked at her and started to speak. Then he stopped, cleared his throat and started again. “Charley Goss means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”

  “Charley? Of course he does.”

  “I mean—what I means is, how much?”

  “Well, he’s a friend of mine in a whole lot of trouble, that’s how much.”

  Homer digested this, and seemed satisfied. “What about this Ghoolsworthy fellow? How long have you known him?”

  “Just since this spring.”

  There was a pause. “He seems to think a lot of you,” said Homer, looking carefully along his paddle blade. He dipped it clumsily in the water and pulled hard.

  “Oh, that’s just me,” said Mary. “I always seem to attract the goofy, adam’s-appley ones.”

  There was another pause. “I guess they think you’re nice,” said Homer. His voice was thick.

  “Well, I’m not,” said Mary. “Not to them. After a while I start snapping at them and saying waspish things. But they just droop their tongues out and look pathetic and hangdog around again. He left today, thank heavens, to go back home.”

  There was another silence. Then Homer changed the subject. He looked around happily. “Look at that muskrat going along over there,” he said. “Look at all those ducks!”

  By th
e time they got back to Mary’s house it was dark. At the door Homer pulled her back and started talking huskily, quoting Emerson. “Mary, Mary,” he said, “a link was wanting between two craving parts of Nature. Oh, Mary, come on. Aw, Mary …”

  Mary had been kissed before, but mostly by men shorter than she was. It made her feel maternal. (Run along to bed now, there’s a good boy.) Being kissed by Charley or Philip was a nose-to-nose affair, like confronted elephants whose long proboscises were always in the way. But this, now, this was different—Mary struggled against it, then gave in, dissolving altogether. Then she struggled again and broke away. The crazy dope was engaged to Rowena Goss. “Oh, go on home,” said Mary unsteadily. She pulled at the knob of the screen door. It stuck and she had to kick at it. It wobbled open, and Mary went inside and slammed it, and spoke through the bulge of the screen. “You give me a great big enormous pain in the neck,” she said. What a stupid thing to say.

  Homer stood in the dusk, his white shirt heaving up and down. His necktie was the one that glowed in the dark. “You’re like the rest of them,” he said bitterly. “Like your precious Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Witherspoon and all the rest. Cold as ice. Well, go ahead. Wear a white dress, why don’t you, and hide in your room and write poetry. Go ahead. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m going to find me a girl with some blood in her veins.” He turned on his heel and started walking down the road, breathing hard, his white shirt bobbing up and down. Mary went upstairs, lay down on her bed and cried hard. Then she suddenly remembered that they had come home in her car. “Oh, damn,” she said. She got up and went downstairs and out of doors, climbed into her car and drove after him. She leaned over and opened the door on his side. “Here,” she said.

  He looked at her stiffly, then climbed in. “Holy smoke, turn on your lights,” he said. Mary said nothing, struggling to control herself. When she drew up beside his car, he got out. “Thanks,” he said.

  “It’s quite all right. Good night,” said Mary. She sobbed all the way home.

  Chapter 51

  Can’t you extract any advantage out of that depression of spirits you refer to? It suggests to me cider-mills, wine-presses, Qc., Qd. All kinds of pressure or power should be used and made to turn some kind of machinery.

  HENRYTHOREAU

  Next day Homer was gone. Charley Goss was held in custody for the preliminary hearing in the Concord District Court. The judge found probable cause to bind him over for the Grand Jury, and he was moved to the jail in Charlestown. Mary forced herself to go and see him. Charley was calm, resolutely cheerful. He had been assigned a lawyer. He felt himself the victim of large forces. “I’ve always been unlucky, that’s all. Some people are bom lucky, some aren’t.”

  “But, Charley, you might as well believe in original sin.”

  “Like Jonathan Edwards? Newborn babies hanging over the fiery pit? Well, maybe some of us are.”

  He didn’t particularly want to talk about his plight. So Mary went back and forth now and then, and passed the time of day. Edith came, too, but her visits irritated her brother, her tongue was so loose and foolish. Rowena stayed home. She was struggling to maintain the dignity and glamor of her position as one of Boston’s most ravishing young engaged debutantes. It was difficult, but if anyone could do it with her brother in jail for murdering her father, Rowena could. Mary had discovered with mixed feelings that Rowena’s fiancé was not Homer Kelly but Peter Coopering, scion of another of Concord’s ancient families, an attractive fellow who could be trusted to keep a well-balanced portfolio, play a good game of tennis and wear sensible, conservative ties. Thinking it over, Mary decided that Homer’s love-making the other night had been just the result of his being on the rebound from Rowena. She was wrong, but her whole thinking apparatus was upset and running in strange grooves. She was a little bit crazy that fall, there was no getting away from it. Gwen worried about her. “She was out in the orchard last night, wandering around in her pajamas with her bathrobe on inside out and her hair every-which-way, singing.”

  “Singing?” said Tom.

  “Yes, that Mozart thing they sang at Alice’s funeral.”

  “Look,” said Tom, “I can only worry about one of the Morgan girls at a time, and you’re the one I’ve got my eye on. How do you feel, honey?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be ridiculous. I’m fine. But I don’t want my lovely Mary to go getting spinsterish and eccentric. Another thing. Isabelle Flower told me that she saw Mary on the subway the other day, you know, the day she went to the dentist, and after the train started up Mary started to laugh, and after a minute she was doubled up, she was laughing so hard, and everybody was looking at her. Isabelle went up to her and asked her what was funny, and she said she was on the wrong train.”

  “What’s the matter with that? Struck her funny.”

  “Well, it’s just part of the whole picture. I think she needs a vacation. She’s at the library all day trying to do everything Alice used to do and everything she used to do, too, and then at night and Saturday and Sunday she’s working on those lady Transcendentalists of hers. Sometimes I hear her typewriter thudding away up there in the middle of the night. And when she’s not doing any of those things, she’s off to East Cambridge to cheer up Charley. And that’s guaranteed to bring on the glooms.”

  “Look, stop brooding. I’m going to get the cider press going and surprise John. He’s been nagging at me all summer. Do you feel up to washing some bottles?”

  “Don’t be silly, of course I do. Grandmaw’ll help me after she and Freddy are through with their naps. Where’s that long bristly brush we used to have?”

  Gwen loved the look of the roadside stand in the fall. There was bittersweet hanging from the top of it, and on the counter there were chrysanthemums in a blue granite kettle and purple eggplants, green acorn squash, white and purple turnips, half-bushel baskets of Tom’s apples, so far just the Cortlands and the Macs. Much of the produce was grown by Harvey Finn, but not the apples, of course, nor the cider. The squash and pumpkins were Harvey Finn’s, piled up along the road—the Hubbard squash, so graceless in its shape, so delicate in color, like the lichen on the stone walls that bordered Tom’s fields, and next to it the humble screaming orange of the pimpled squash and the mellow yellow color of the pumpkins.

  Gwen scrubbed out the old washing machine that stood outside the cider shed, and got it ready to wash the burlap cloths. Then she ran the hose over the cheese-frames that would separate the layers of ground-up apple pomace. Tom unloaded the boxes of drops he had brought down from Harvard and carted them into the shed. He dumped some of them into the feeder bin. Then he connected up the hose that ran to the big wooden keg, and adjusted the belts on the little motor that pumped the squeezings into the keg. He oiled the grater-motor. He looked around for the 18-ton truck-jack that was supposed to go between the top cheese-frame and the press, and finally found it in the back of the pickup. It was rusty and dusty, so he blew on it, and wiped it off. Gwen trundled John’s old metal wagon across the road with two cartons of clean gallon bottles on it, unloaded them and picked up some dusty ones. “All set?” said Gwen.

  “Yup,” said Tom. He turned on the switch of the pump, then flipped the toggle on the grater and turned to dump a box of apples in the feeder. There was a most tremendous terrible noise.

  “Jesus X. Christ,” said Tom, and he grabbed at the switch on the grater. The racket ceased.

  “Some of those dern kids must have put rocks in it,” said Tom. He stepped up on the edge of the press where the words American Harrow Company were painted on and looked into the grater.

  “Oh, fer …” He stepped down again.

  “Well, what is it?” said Gwen, standing still with the handle of the wagon in her hand.

  Tom, as though he couldn’t believe what he had seen, climbed back up again. Then he got down again and turned to Gwen. “I’m sick and tired of it,” he said. “I’m just plain sick and tired of having muskets
and pistols and machine guns and various odd pieces of artillery showing up on this place and stripping the gears of my machinery. Next thing you know we’ll find a howitzer in the raspberry patch and it’ll blow us all to blue blazes. I hope it does. I’m sick and tired of it. Those blades have got big bites taken out of ’em. Look at ’em.”

  He helped his wife up and she looked into the grater. “For goodness’ sake, Tom, it’s another old gun.”

  “That’s what I said, didn’t I? I said it’s another old gun.”

  “But they looked around in here, the police, they looked all over.”

  “Yes, but don’t forget they were looking for a gun about the size of a canoe. They never would have thought of looking in the grater. It’s only eight or nine inches across.”

  “Tom!” Remember I told you Freddy saw someone on a horse, he called it a funny lady, someone who broke his balloon—that day, April 19th? Well, suppose it was the murderer, the way we thought—”

  “Suppose it was? We kept our mouths shut to keep Freddy out of it.”

  “Yes. but the point is, he was right here, right outside the cider shed. And he broke Freddy’s balloon. It’s almost as though he wanted to draw attention to his being there—because of the gun—so that the gun would be found right away.” Gwen climbed up on the press again and looked at the gun. “Look how big the hole is. That’s plenty big enough to have fired a musket ball. Oh, golly, Tom, I’ll bet that’s the gun that killed Mr. Goss, not the other one. And the murderer wanted it found. Why?”

  “Say,” said Tom, “remember those boxes of apples that turned up in the spring, way last May or June? I’ll bet somebody brought them to get us to make cider so we’d find the gun right away.” He brooded darkly. “Unless somebody’s just plain got it in for this farm and all my blankety blank machinery.”