Escher Twist

by Jane Langton

  She was not interested in the near landscape. Her eyes gathered in the entire horizon, the whole broad view of the city of Cambridge and the high-rise buildings of Boston. Far across the rooftops the white steeple of Harvard’s Memorial Church was a fragile spike beside the solid tower of Memorial Hall. To the south rose the pretty domes of the river houses, but the Charles itself was invisible, flowing between the two cities.

  Somewhere in the middle distance lay her own neighborhood. Yes, there was City Hall, and those blank glassy shapes must be Kendall Square, and beyond Kendall the squat dome of M. I. T. looked old-fashioned and snug among the high techno-rises. Was that glint of gold far away across the river the dome of the State House? Probably not, but the gleaming pillar standing all alone to the southeast was certainly the glassy shaft of the Hancock building, higher than anything else.

  Frieda smiled with delight. She had been right. She had walked into the print called Metamorphosis. This fat round tower was like the rook on Escher’s chessboard, the playing piece that was also a stronghold, a fortress belonging to his charming city.

  Kitty was exhausted. Her old bones balked, her feet staggered. The winding stone stairs were cruel. Again and again she stopped to rest, panting for breath, leaning against the curving wall. Again and again she pulled herself grimly together and carried on, because Frieda was there, she was up there on the topmost level of the tower, she was cornered. Kitty had seen her from far below staring straight out to the south, gazing at the view.

  Why was it so much harder than the last time? Kitty had not been quite so old the last time, when she had climbed these very stairs in the company of that wretched geologist, after luring him here with her lying letter, the one she had cobbled up so cleverly from a library book. Of course it was too bad the poor man had turned out to be the wrong Leonard, but was that her fault? It was not! The blame was entirely Frieda’s. Frieda’s again, Frieda’s again.

  This time, climbing these twisting stairs, she felt a hundred years old. But it wouldn’t take long, it would be over soon, it would be quick, very quick, and then she’d lie down. Only a moment, and she could lie down.

  At the top of the stairs Kitty waited in the open door, letting her anger restore her breath. There before her was Frieda, right there within easy reach, thin and small. Frieda’s back was turned, she was leaning against the railing, she was half over the edge already.

  An easy target! Quick, quick! A convulsion of bitterness spewed from a thousand pockets of sorrow, and Kitty lunged at Frieda, wrapped her arms around her and hitched her, hoisted her, heaved her up off the stone floor. Quick, quick, now, quick!

  She had the advantage of surprise. Frieda struggled and cried out, but her arms were pinned and when she struck backwards with her feet they battered against legs that were columns of brass. Overbalanced on the railing, Frieda screamed. She was staring straight down at the paved road.

  And then she wasn’t. She cried out in pain as she was scraped roughly backward and thrown down. Whimpering, she looked up to see Leonard Sheldrake drag Aunt Kitty back from the parapet. Kitty was shrieking and flailing and trying to wrench herself free. Frieda jumped up and caught at a kicking leg. Leonard lost his balance and fell backward.

  At once Kitty slithered sideways and sprang up on the parapet and lay down on its thick stone teeth. They were deliciously soft under her green coat.

  After all, what did it matter? Oh, sleep, she would sleep and sleep.

  There were shouts of warning. People looked up, they were crying out.

  Smiling, Kitty rolled over ever so gently and fell into empty air.

  60

  Jesus,” gasped the pilot of the blimp, looking down.

  “God almighty,” cried the copilot, “it’s happened again.”

  Leonard and Frieda leaned over the parapet and looked down. They could see only a circle of backs bending over Kitty. There were hushed exclamations of distress. A man stood up, took something from his pocket, tapped it, and held it to his ear.

  “The green coat,” said Leonard, stepping back, gripping Frieda’s arm and drawing her away from the railing. “It was hers, the other green coat.”

  “Yes, of course.” Frieda spoke in a dream. “Of course it was her green coat.” There were pounding footsteps on the stairs, and she was looking at him critically. “I remember now,” said Frieda. “When I tried to draw your face I forgot what your hair was like.”

  Leonard pawed at his hair, pleased to find it parted in the old way. And his watch had jumped from his left wrist to his right.

  People were bursting out on the platform. “Jesus God,” said the first one, gaping at Leonard and Frieda. A dozen more excited witnesses came pelting after him through the door.

  The last was the amateur photographer, lugging his tripod and satchel of cameras. It turned out to be his lucky day. That evening the Boston Globe paid for his picture of six people bending over the dead woman at the foot of the tower and they also paid for the crazy print of a couple of happy-looking witnesses at the top.

  “They kept laughing,” he said, accepting the check. “It was really strange.”

  The high spirits of Leonard and Frieda were indeed strange, but no one accused them of pushing the woman off the tower. To the people looking up from below, the poor lady’s intention had been clear. “Nobody pushed her. She climbed up on that parapet by herself. And then she just sort of rolled over.”

  61

  Leonard’s apartment was not a perfect refuge from the downpour that flailed at the windows and drummed on the roof. Some of the rain streamed from the hole in the ceiling and rattled into the bucket on the floor.

  They sat around the bucket in a circle—Leonard and Frieda on the edge of the bed, Homer on the stool at Leonard’s desk, Mary on the sagging upholstered chair.

  “She was a pusher,” said Homer. “Not drugs, of course. Pushers like Kitty Fell must be fairly common because it leaves no evidence. And it’s so easy.”

  Mary shoved at the air. “just a little nudge on the edge of a cliff.”

  “That’s right,” said Leonard. “You don’t need a handgun or poison or an explosive device. Not even a piece of string around the neck. All it takes is a little push.”

  “You know,” said Frieda slowly, “Tom fell too. My husband, he fell too.”

  “Your husband?” said Mary.

  Leonard put an arm around Frieda, but she jumped up and clenched her fists. “I know she did it. I knew it all the time. Tom fell off the platform at Harvard Square in front of a subway train. The woman who was driving the train thought he’d been pushed, but nobody else saw anything. Everybody crowded around while they picked him up, and Aunt Kitty must have hurried away up the stairs.”

  “Were you there?” said Mary doubtfully, “How can you be sure?”

  “Well, of course I can’t be sure. But she’d been so angry when I told her I’d married Tom. She shrieked at me about what I’d done to her, reminding me about Patrick, as though I could ever forget. And as though I could ever forget what she said to me then, that I’d never—she said I’d never have a child of my own.” Frieda clasped her hands in anguish. Leonard pulled her back down beside him and held her close, but she had something else to say. “So when this happened, I nearly went crazy. I screamed at her, Where were you?”

  “Well, where was she?” murmured Homer.

  “Oh, she had an alibi,” said Frieda bitterly. “She said she was visiting Uncle Edward in the nursing home. But when I called there, the head nurse said she was pretty sure he’d had no visitors that day.”

  There was a stunned silence. Then Homer said, “Hey, Leonard, watch it, the bucket.”

  It was full to the top. Leonard leaped up, Frieda ran to the cupboard and found a saucepan. Leonard slid the bucket sideways, Frieda shot the pan into place, Leonard dumped the bucket in the sink, Frieda slid the pan deftly out of the way and Leonard put back the bucket. The stream of water thinned. The rain had stopped.

 
Homer laughed. “Hey, talk about teamwork.”

  Mary clapped her hands and gushed, “Why don’t you two be little friends?”

  “Good idea,” said Frieda.

  “Brilliant,” said Leonard. “I never would have thought of it myself.” They sat down grinning, their arms around each other.

  “Let’s see now,” said Homer. “Where were we before this act of heroism?”

  Mary pulled herself up from the sunken cushion of her chair. “You know, Frieda, there’s something we’ve been confused about from the beginning, the names. We’ve had them all mixed up. Poor old lovesick Leonard didn’t even know your last name. It’s Field, right? Your husband was Tom Field? Good, then what about your maiden name? Was it Fell?”

  “No, no. My mother was Uncle Edward’s sister. She was Margaret Fell before she married my father, Henry Clover.” Frieda laughed ruefully. “Tom and I liked the way Clover went with Field. I was Frieda Clover Field.”

  “It’ll be Sheldrake, as of next week,” said Leonard, putting in a cheerful claim. “Scheldrachi in Uzbek. It’s a kind of duck.”

  “Quack,” said Frieda politely.

  “A duck, of course,” said Homer. “Quack, quack. But Frieda dear”—he hitched his stool forward—“would you mind telling us something about that creepy aunt of yours? She had all of us so completely baffled.”

  “Oh, of course we figured out some of it,” said Mary, “when we learned she’d changed her physical appearance. But it was really so mystifying, the way she claimed to be Edward’s niece instead of his wife. Well, we know now that she was your Aunt Kitty, but the name she gave at the nursing home was Eleanor Fell. What was her real name, Eleanor or Kitty?”

  Frieda sighed. “She was both. My aunt’s name was Eleanor Catherine Fell. The Kitty came from Catherine.”

  “Oh, of course.” Mary groaned. “And there was an O in there somewhere, wasn’t there? O for Oliphant, in honor of her glorious ancestors?”

  “Oh, it was so insane. The Oliphants were supposed to be descended from royalty. I forget which royalty. Dukes and duchesses anyway.”

  It was time to go, “There’s just one more thing I don’t understand,” said Homer, getting to his feet. “How did your Aunt Kitty get so rich? Where did that hundred thousand come from, the money she gave to the nursing home?”

  Frieda shrugged her shoulders. “I guess she inherited it from Uncle Edward. I think it was all tied up in trusts until he died.” Sadly Frieda whispered, “Poor old Uncle Edward.”

  Awkwardly Homer changed the subject. “Leonard, what’s going to happen to this great old house? I suppose Mrs. Winthrop’s executor will have to sell it?”

  “I wish we could afford to buy it,” said Mary.

  “It’s already on the market,” said Leonard. “Listen. You hear that?” There were bumping and crashing noises downstairs. He went to the window and looked out. “The moving van’s here.”

  “Hey, watch it,” said the guy at one end of Mrs. Winthrop’s sofa as they edged it through the front door. “I think a leg just fell off.”

  “I’ll pick it up later,” said the other guy. “Creeps, she sure had a lot of stuff.”

  “Now, listen to me, you people,” said a man in a tweed jacket, looking on with disapproval, “remember what I told you. You’re not to touch anything in the front hall. Not one single thing.”

  There was a vibrating crash as his butterfingered colleague dropped the hookah from Morocco, denting it for the second time. “Whoops,” said the colleague, glancing guiltily at his partner.

  The other anthropologist merely picked up the hookah and said comfortingly, “Who’s to know?” And then the two of them bowed inquisitively over the tamrong from Cambodia, while Zachariah Winthrop looked mildly down from the wall and made no complaint.

  The movers were nearly done when the burly manager of the moving company found an envelope on the dainty little desk in Mrs. Winthrop’s bedroom. The envelope was stamped and sealed and addressed to—

  Michael J. Rooney

  100 Court Street

  Boston Massachusetts

  02108

  “What the hell are we supposed to do with that?” said his assistant, looking over his boss’s shoulder.

  “Mail it of course,” said the manager. “It’s got a stamp, right?” He thrust the letter into his pocket, hoisted the desk and carried it out under his arm.

  Unlike other impossible and insane pieces of correspondence, this one was real. It was a letter from the grave.

  62

  Homer,” said Mary, slinging her bag over her shoulder and plunging down the porch steps, “I’m off to see Barbara.”

  Homer was standing on the bottom step, looking out at the water. “Barbara? Oh, right. In the nursing home.”

  “It’s such a hot day. I’m going to push her wheelchair around under the trees in the cemetery.”

  “Well, good for you. Listen, Mary.” Homer caught her by the sleeve. He had something important to say. “I don’t want to move to Cambridge.”

  Mary laughed. “You don’t want to move to Cambridge? Well, that’s settled then.” She brushed her hands together, sweeping away the dust of Cambridge. “We’ll stay put.”

  “A contractor,” said Homer happily, “I’ll hire a contractor to fix the driveway and lower the gradient. Going up and down will be easy as pie.”

  It was a decisive and singular moment. They were back where they started. Somehow they had safely negotiated the erratic twist celebrated by August Moebius, descendant of Martin Luther, author of De Computandis Occultationibus Fixarum per Planetas, an astronomer whose fame reached as far as the moon, where a crater bore his name.

  In Mount Auburn Cemetery Mary swooped Barbara’s wheelchair up and down the avenues and paths. They whisked along Halcyon Avenue past the round temple marking the grave of Mary Baker Eddy, and on Central Avenue they paused at the Harnden monument to admire the faithful dog. At the fork with Chapel Avenue they looked up at Nathaniel Bowditch, sitting so comfortably above them with his great book on his knee.

  The flush of summer flowers was over. At the junction of Pine and Cypress beside the sphinx a couple of groundskeepers were setting out chrysanthemums.

  It was cool in the leafy shade. Mary reminded Barbara that the trees in the cemetery had never been attacked by men with chainsaws. No one had ever lopped away branches to prevent interference with wires suspended between telephone poles, because there were no wires, there were no poles.

  They wandered this way and that among the clusters of memorials, admiring the way each gravestone was appropriate to the fashion of its time. There were obelisks, gothic steeples, classical temples, urns, boulders, columns, Celtic crosses and varieties of angels. Some of the angels blew silent horns, some held torches right-side-up, some upside-down. Most of the angels had wings, some didn’t.

  “They’re not angels, I’ll bet,” said Barbara, gazing at a marble lady who held one arm aloft, pointing skyward. “The ones without wings. They’re allegorical figures.”

  “Noble abstractions, I guess,” said Mary. “You know, like death or eternal life or grief. This one’s telling us that somebody named”—she squinted at the inscription—“John Tyler—is not down there under the ground, he’s up in heaven.”

  Then Mary whirled Barbara’s wheelchair around and rolled her briskly downhill, because it occurred to her with dismay that this mortuary perambulation might be hard on her crippled friend. Perhaps Barbara was thinking gloomily about her own death.

  She was relieved when Barbara said cheerfully, “It’s really nice here. Let’s come back.”

  They left by the Egyptian gate, while ninety-thousand voices murmured behind them from the stone memorials—from the polished sphere and the triangle and the octahedron and the balancing cube, from the obelisks and angels—

  We were like you. We were all of us just like you.

  The blocks give rise to a city on the sea-shore.

  The tower standing in
the water is at the same time

  A piece in a game of chess.…

  M. C. Escher

  63

  The city of Cambridge had survived a twist of its own. There had been a transit strike. There was popular indignation at the city council’s refusal to reduce taxes for the elderly. The head of the Cambridge Building Department had been hauled before the State Ethics Commission. Gentrification was creeping in all directions. There were lavish improvements to properties in Mrs. Winthrop’s neighborhood—Brattle and Lakeview, Sibley and Fayerweather, Appleton and Sparks.

  But not to Mrs. Winthrop’s property, because on a lovely September afternoon during the last week of her life Eloise had written a codicil to her will, properly witnessed by her cleaning woman and the man who came to read the meter.

  The consequence of her last act was that Leonard, checking on her mail one morning as he did every day, found a letter from her executor. It was not like the bills he had been forwarding to her accountant. It was addressed to Leonard himself.

  He read it three times before he understood the central paragraph—

  I leave my house and all its contents to Leonard Sheldrake, in gratitude for his kindness to me and his appreciation of the work of my husband Zachariah.

  Signed by: Witnessed by:

  Eloise Creech Winthrop Galatea Stokes

  Joseph P. Malone

  “Oh, Mrs. Winthrop,” whispered Leonard, “I don’t deserve it.” He unlocked the front door and stood gazing around the empty hall, which still spoke so eloquently of his gentle landlady. There was a dark patch on the faded grasscloth where Zachariah had once looked down so benevolently from the wall, and a light patch on the floor where the tigerskin rug had so recently bared its fangs. “I wasn’t kind to you at all, dear Mrs. Winthrop, I wasn’t nearly kind enough.”

  Burdened with a monstrous feeling of guilt, Leonard abandoned his plans for the afternoon and rocketed into Boston on the T. At the Park Street station he bounded up the stairs and dodged through the crowds on Tremont Street, arriving out of breath at the corner of Court Street, where he found his way at last to the office of the executor. Plunging past the secretary in the outer office, he apologized to the astonished executor and fiercely disclaimed any right to deprive Mrs. Winthrop’s heirs of their inheritance.