Escher Twist

by Jane Langton

  “What infractions? There aren’t any infractions. That is an insulting suggestion.”

  “Nonetheless, it’s true.”

  “All right then, I hope you’ll call your brother. Tell him he’s welcome to make a complete tour of inspection, any time at all, without warning. Tell him to bring along the mayor and the city council and the entire Massachusetts Board of Health. It will not be necessary to call ahead.”

  12

  The videocassette from the pocket in Frieda’s green coat began with a winter landscape of falling snow and leafless trees.

  Leonard watched intently as the camera moved unsteadily through an open wood. Twiggy branches wobbled near, then flew up. and out of sight.

  The view opened up. It was a cemetery. Headstones and monuments were scattered among the trees—blocky shapes, an obelisk.

  Whoops! Up and over. The camera gyrated wildly. Recovering its balance, it careened past a narrow tombstone with a steeple, a set of stone steps flanked by urns and a massive chunk of marble. Then, after swooping up and whirling among the treetops, it dropped with a sickening lurch to focus on a small headstone.

  The image wavered and steadied, but the inscription was indecipherable. Then a light appeared at one side—a flashlight—and raked across the words. Now they could be read—

  PATRICK

  1990–1991

  In grim concentration the camera stared at the inscription for one minute, two minutes. Leonard was forced to read it over and over—

  PATRICK

  1990–1991

  PATRICK

  1990–1991

  PATRICK

  1990–1991

  At last the screen went black. The show was over.

  To Leonard’s surprise his fists were clenched. He reached forward and touched the rewind button, but the words still hung in the air—

  PATRICK

  1990–1991

  Trying to get rid of them, he jumped out of his chair, threw open the door to the back stairs, thumped down two flights to the back door, plunged into the open air and walked around the block.

  It was a big block—Sibley to Huron, Huron to Fayerweather, Fayerweather to Brattle. Swinging around the corner from Brattle onto Sibley Road, he began to run, suddenly remembering something important—that afternoon last week in the Peabody Museum and the two tall strangers who had taken such an interest in the crystals. And the next day they had joined him in the gallery.

  Their name was Kelly. They were Homer and Mary Kelly from Concord. They’d be in the phone book. They were professors of something or other, but they were famous for another reason around Harvard Yard, because they had been mixed up in a number of criminal cases.

  It was too much to explain on the phone. “I wonder if you people could stop by my place, next time you’re in Cambridge. It’s 24 Sibley Road, the back door. I have something sort of strange to show you. I’d love to know what you people think.”

  “Well, fine,” said Homer. “Matter of fact, we could come tonight. We both have evening classes. Is ten o’clock too late? Good, we’ll be there.” Then, remembering the utter impossibility of parking anywhere in the city of Cambridge, he said, “Oh, God, where do we—?”

  “In the driveway. There’s plenty of parking space behind the house.”

  “He wants to show us something strange?” said Mary, gathering her notes and pulling on her coat. “It’s probably something about Escher.”

  “Or maybe,” said Homer brightly, “he’s got some really fascinating new crystal.”

  They were early, but Leonard saw their headlights as they turned into the driveway. He ran down to meet them at the back door, then led the way up to the attic.

  Sitting in her kitchen in her bathrobe and slippers, Mrs. Winthrop heard the heavy footsteps and thought, He’s having a party.

  It was not a party, nor was it a discovery about M. C. Escher, nor did Leonard have a charming new crystal on display.

  He wasted no time on chitchat. As soon as Homer and Mary were settled in a couple of his dingy chairs, he told them about meeting Frieda in her green coat at the gallery, and about his failure to find her afterwards.

  They listened attentively, waiting for the strange thing. Leonard grimaced. “So far it’s just a stupid infatuation, right?”

  “Not stupid,” murmured Mary.

  “Very stupid,” repeated Leonard. “But then I found this.”

  He went to the closet and brought out the green coat. “This was hers. I found it in that fancy second-hand clothing store on Huron Av, right next to the art gallery. And there was something in the pocket, a videocassette. Wait a sec, I’ll turn it on. Watch this.”

  It was the strange thing. In a moment Mary and Homer were caught up in the blundering progress of the camera through the cemetery and its staring concentration on a single grave—

  PATRICK

  1990–1991

  When the screen went black they sat stunned, and then Mary whispered, “A baby. A baby’s grave.”

  “Peculiar,” muttered Homer, “the feeling of menace in that last part, where it just looks and looks.”

  “Exactly.” Leonard was grim.

  Homer jumped up, his head just missing the low rafters. “You know, I can imagine wanting to record the burial place of someone you’ve lost. That’s not so surprising.”

  “Especially if it was a child,” said Mary.

  “Suppose the bereaved parents had a morbid desire to keep forever the memory of the grave, the flowers, the whole thing. I mean, some people are sentimental about wanting a pretty spot for a grave as though the dead body could see the view from six feet down.”

  “Or maybe,” said Mary, “they were about to move away and didn’t want to forget their baby’s grave. But somehow”—she looked soberly at Leonard—“this was different.”

  Homer shuddered. “It was different, all right. There was something ugly about it. No, that’s not it.” Thrashing around in his head, Homer pounced on the right word. “Vengeful. The whole thing was like some sort of vengeance, some kind of psychological torture.”

  Leonard asked an anguished question, “But why? And what does it have to do with Frieda? Why was it in her coat pocket?”

  “God knows.” Homer flapped his hands.

  “I’ll bet we could find out about the baby,” said Mary.

  Leonard looked doubtful. “Even without a last name?”

  “Sure,” said Homer. “There can’t be many babies named Patrick who died in a certain year. There must be death records. Surely nobody skips off the planet without some bureaucrat licking his pencil and jotting it down.”

  “City Hall,” said Mary wisely. “We’ll try Cambridge City Hall.”

  “Can’t do it this week,” said Homer. “Five hundred god-awful term papers washing in the door like Noah’s flood.”

  “Five hundred?” Leonard was amazed. “That’s funny. I’ve got three or four hundred myself. You’re not teaching freshmen?”

  “You bet we’re teaching freshmen.” Homer looked at Mary, and they laughed.

  Mary explained. “We like teaching freshmen. They’re so wonderfully uninformed. You’re writing on a blank slate, annihilating their pitiful ignorance, spreading out banquet tables of good stuff for the first time.”

  “Whereas,” said Homer loftily, “those cozy seminars of graduate students, they’re just turning over a few dry sticks.”

  “He doesn’t really mean that,” said Mary, picking up her coat. “Seminars are lovely. We’ve got some of those too.”

  They said goodbye and Homer began clumping down the stairs.

  Leonard caught at Mary’s sleeve. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You people must think I’m a nut case with a really dumb obsession.”

  “Well, it’s true,” said Mary comfortably, “I may think you’re a nut case, but don’t worry about Homer. His entire life has been a parade of nutty obsessions, one right after the other. Finding a fellow nut case is what he likes best.”
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br />   13

  Leonard’s interest in the mysterious woman he had met at the Escher exhibition was indeed foolish; in fact it was completely ridiculous, because there were a thousand things he didn’t know about her.

  One of the things he didn’t know was that Frieda’s open friendliness had not come easily. It was true that she had been a sparkling and funny little girl, but her happy childhood had been followed by an adolescence that was grimly sad. He was also unaware that their brief but intense encounter had fixed in her a resolve to move out of reach of the woman she knew as Cousin Kitty. Another unknown thing was her decision to relieve her strongly affected feelings by writing letters to a fictitious person.

  Dear Random Crystallographer, began the first—

  I now regard you as a long-suffering holy man with a hair shirt under your cassock, or perhaps hassock, a gaunt and saintly priest with burning eyes and wasted cheeks.

  I hope you will incline your head to the curtain when I approach your confessional. I’m eager to pour my girlish feelings into your ear.

  Yours, Frieda

  Impossible letters like hers—and of course also Leonard’s—called for an Impossible Post Office, a phantom bureaucracy already choked with Christmas letters to Santa Claus. Now in the celestial month of May it failed to deliver Frieda’s ephemeral correspondence. She went on writing anyway.

  Dear Random Crystallographer,

  If you’re not too busy, would you elope with me? Would you mini standing under the window while I climb out with my suitcase? I haven’t got a ladder, so I’ll have to jump, and you’ll have to catch me.

  Oh, yes, I know all about the force of the impact, the way it mounts up with the weight of the falling object and the distance, but I’ve been on a diet lately and I’ve packed only the filmiest of nighties. And there’s a bush out there you could stagger back into. What about one day next week?

  Frieda

  But now, suddenly, things had changed.

  She had been writing away for college catalogs, thinking seriously of going back to school. Boston University had sent her a thick volume listing their course of instruction. In the section devoted to Geological Sciences an interesting name appeared among the departmental faculty—Leonard Underdown. This semester Professor Underdown was teaching a course in Sedimentary Geology.

  Hadn’t Leonard said that he was a geologist as well as a crystallographer?

  At once Frieda sat down and wrote a real letter, one that could be put into her mailbox in the downstairs entry to be picked up by a flesh-and-blood mailman and sorted inside the premises of the post office on Mount Auburn Street and delivered to a real person named Leonard Underdown in the department of Geological Sciences at Boston University.

  This letter was not silly. It was discreet and modest, but it included her address and her last name.

  Of course this particular address would not be good for long, because in two weeks she’d be out of here.

  Moving would be easy because her shabby furniture belonged to the landlord. Frieda was glad to leave most of it behind, although she would miss the pair of mirrors that faced each other on the wall. Mrs. Larkin, her landlady, seemed to have a fixation on mirrors, because they were all over the place in the house at 87 Sibley Road, even in the back hall over the trash cans. The two in Frieda’s apartment sometimes produced astonishing visions.

  She certainly did not regret the loss of her green coat. Frieda had detested the green coat from the beginning because it was the gift of Cousin Kitty, who kept exulting in the grisly joke that their matching coats made them look like twins.

  Now, thank God, she was going where Kitty would never find her.

  But when Frieda brought her letter downstairs and stuck it in her letterbox, suddenly Kitty was there.

  “Writing a letter to someone, dear?”

  “Oh, it’s just—” Frieda shook her head. “Come on upstairs, Cousin Kitty.”

  “Well, well, what’s all this?” Kitty strode into the apartment and looked around. “Cardboard boxes? What’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing,” mumbled Frieda. “It’s just that I’ve got too much stuff. I’m selling all these books to the Bryn Mawr bookstore—you know, around the corner on Huron Av.” She waved at the heap of clothes on the bed. “Morgan Memorial. Sit down, Cousin Kitty.”

  Kitty was satisfied, but she couldn’t help asking a needling question. “I wonder, dear, if you’ve been in touch with that man Leonard?”

  “Leonard?”

  “The man you met at the gallery. Remember him?”

  Solemnly Frieda shook her head and said, “No, I haven’t heard from him.”

  Well, of course she hasn’t, thought Kitty. Poor thing, she’s plain as a mud fence.

  But just the same, when Kitty went downstairs she paused in the entry hall and gazed at Frieda’s mailbox. Through the metal lattice she could just make out an envelope.

  It was just—barely—within reach. Kitty urged it upward with her fingernails, grasped the edge and whisked it out.

  When she saw the name Leonard on the envelope she was dumbfounded. She had thought that the man at the gallery was of no interest to her unattractive niece.

  She had been wrong.

  14

  Soon another letter was romping through the mail, the real mail, the entirely possible mail.

  It was addressed to Leonard Underdown, research geologist at Boston University, student of natural surface and near-surface processes and of the erosion, transport and deposition of sediments.

  The letter surprised and pleased Professor Underdown. It was a highly interesting communication from a perfect stranger who introduced herself as Professor Myrtle Greenwood of the geology faculty at Dalhousie University in New Brunswick.

  This amazing woman wanted to consult him about the possible origin of the Boston Basin, because a whole new theory had occurred to her as she looked out from the tower of Mount Auburn Cemetery after attending the interment of a cousin.

  She explained that she was returning to New Brunswick for a few days, but would be back in Boston next week. Might he then give her his opinion in person? He was so renowned in his field! Perhaps he could tell her whether her idea made any sense at all.

  Professor Greenwood’s letter ended with the suggestion that they should meet at the tower on the following Friday, if that was entirely convenient. She would be arriving in Cambridge on Thursday, when she would call to confirm the appointment.

  In closing, Dr. Greenwood suggested discreetly that Professor Underdown should destroy her letter, and say nothing to anyone about this possible new theory. People are so apt to profit unfairly from the work of others.

  15

  The suicide was witnessed by the pilot and co-pilot of the Goodyear blimp as it floated serenely over the city of Cambridge, poising in the air like an enormous fish. Today there were no passengers in the gondola, only the two excited pilots. Instantly the pilot radioed the supervisor and passed along the horrifying news.

  “My God, we saw the whole thing from a thousand feet up. There we were, right over Fresh Pond Parkway and we saw everything. This woman, she was struggling with the man, like she was trying to keep him from jumping, and then we saw the guy fall. Jesus, Jimmy, quick, call the police.”

  “Not the police, for Christ’s sake,” cried the co-pilot, grabbing the mike, “an ambulance, call an ambulance. Maybe the poor guy’s not dead yet. Where? Mount Auburn Cemetery, the tower at Mount Auburn Cemetery. It just happened a minute ago. The poor guy jumped from the top of the tower, fell straight down, kablam.”

  “There was this woman,” shouted the pilot, “she just disappeared down the stairs. Now the whole thing’s out of sight. Oh, shit, it’ll take us five goddamned minutes to turn this thing around and get back over the fucking tower. Hang on.”

  16

  It was another beautiful day. Mrs. Winthrop settled herself comfortably beside Zach’s stone and opened the Boston Globe to the obituaries. At once she ga
ve a little cry of horror.

  There on the right-hand page was a picture of Leonard, the dear boy whowas her tenant! Beside the picture were terrible words.

  YOUNG SCIENTIST

  FALLS TO HIS DEATH.

  Tears welled up in Mrs. Winthrop’s eyes. She could hardly see to read. Oh, merciful God, it had happened right here. Poor Leonard had fallen from the tower right here in Mount Auburn Cemetery. If she stood on tiptoe the tower was visible through the trees, right up there at the top of the hill.

  Only when her eyes cleared did she see that the name of the young man who had fallen from the tower was not Leonard Sheldrake. It was another Leonard entirely. And now that she looked more closely at the picture, she could see that the poor young man’s face was not exactly like the face of her tenant. It had a different expression, a different sort of look.

  The story was quite sensational. It was reported in detail. There had been witnesses to the suicide, observers from above, pilots of a blimp passing overhead. The pilots had seen a woman struggling with the would-be suicide, trying to keep him from making his fatal jump.

  And there had also been witnesses below. A husband and wife had come running up to the dead man, and then they had tried to comfort the woman who came stumbling out of the doorway at the base of the tower.

  “I tried to stop him,” sobbed the woman, bending over the body in anguish. “I climbed the stairs and came out on the parapet, and there was this poor man climbing up on the railing.” There was another burst of tears. She couldn’t go on.

  “There, there, dear,” said the wife, embracing her.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said the husband. He gestured at the car parked on the encircling driveway. “Martha, you drive her down to the administration building and ask them to call the police. And I’ll bet there’s a room where she could lie down. I’ll stay here and wait for the ambulance.”