by Jane Langton
The executor looked at him mildly. “As it happens, Mr. Sheldrake, there was only one previous heir, the Anthropological Society of America. I have already informed the president of the society that all Mrs. Winthrop’s furniture is to be removed from storage and returned to the house.”
In a daze, Leonard had the presence of mind to ask, “But what about the totem pole and the tamrong and the hookah? What about the picture of Professor Winthrop? Surely they don’t have to give all those things back?”
“Indeed they do,” said the executor primly. He did not unfold to Leonard the painful scenes of the last few days—the outrage of the anthropologists and his own courageous and adamantine resistance.
Leonard left the executor’s office in a state of dazzled confusion. In a telephone booth on Tremont Street he called Frieda and told her the staggering news.
“Oh, Leonard,” she said in horror, “think of the taxes, how will we ever manage?” Then before he could answer, she said wildly, “The attic! We’ll rent out the attic! We’ll take in lodgers! A whole houseful of lodgers!”
Mrs. Winthrop’s was not the only will that was a dumbfounding surprise to its legatee. Mrs. Kitty Fell left everything to a distant second cousin once removed, a woman she had never met, a retired school teacher who possessed the single virtue that she was not, never had been, nor ever would be a little bitch named Frieda.
Frieda neither knew nor cared. She and Leonard were too busy trying to settle down in their inherited real estate. It wasn’t easy. Mrs. Winthrop’s house was so large and complex, they sometimes lost touch with each other. Leonard would shout, “Where are you?” and Frieda would cry from somewhere far away. “I don’t know. Try heading north.”
Well, of course it was M. C. Escher all over again. It was his upside-down and inside-out staircases, his scrambled perspectives. But it was no longer one of his crystals. Leonard had given up on crystalline perfection in an attempt to adjust to the happy-go-lucky ways of his wife, who was a lot more into chaos than order. Leonard’s worktable was no longer a study in parallelograms and right angles. It was a comfortable shambles.
So was the back yard. To the owners of the house next door their overgrown garden was an offense. The neighbors had spent a fortune on a glass conservatory with an ogee roof like a cathedral—our premier model with the soaring elegance of a palm house—and another fortune on a fashionable landscape gardener. Therefore it was an affront to look over their clipped hedges at the careless wilderness next door, the back yard once so cheerfully neglected by Mrs. Winthrop.
Eloise herself was past caring about the neighbors. She had moved to another neighborhood entirely, more beautiful by far, where at last she could lie cozily beside her husband Zachariah.
Mary was glad about Frieda’s and Leonard’s good fortune. Sentimentally she said to Homer—once again bringing the end neatly back to the beginning—“Maybe love at first sight works out sometimes after all. Tell me, Homer, did you fall in love with me at first sight?”
Mary was just kidding, but Homer said flatly, “Yes, I did.”
“Oh, well, of course, so did I. Fall in love with you, I mean. You were the first man I’d ever met who was tall enough.” She laughed. “Think of it, all these years of ecstasy.”
“Ecstasy? Well, maybe.” Homer thought it over. “I’d call it more of an ecstatic interminable squabble.”
“Oh, of course.” Mary thought a minute. “An everlasting amorous wrangle.”
“A grouchy perpetual passion.” Homer snatched up the thesaurus.
“Oh, good,” said Mary. “Let’s try both categories.”
They spent the next half hour, true scholars that they were, trying to define the precise nature of their affection, combining Roget’s category 795, synonyms for DISACCORD, with 931, words signifying LOVE.
In this book the map of Cambridge has been stretched to include a fictional Sibley Road between Lakeview Avenue and Fayerweather Street. The gallery and the shops on Huron Avenue are inventions too, as is the burial plot of the Fell family at Mount Auburn Cemetery and the monument marking the resting place of Zachariah Winthrop. Other gravestones are genuine, including those of Joshua Stetson and Barnabas Bates. As of this writing the peacock is also a fact, an anonymous contribution to the wildlife of Mount Auburn.
Thanks are enthusiastically due to Meg Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections at Mount Auburn, to Janet Heywood, director of Interpretive Programs, and to David Barnett, Director of Operations and Horticulture. Of course they are not to blame for the fictional events set in their beautiful garden.
Others who helped the story along are geologist Gretchen Eckhardt, Cambridge residents Chris Weller, Maury Feld and Marian Parry, Attorney Judy Pickett of Littleton, Doctor Joel Feldman of Mount Auburn Hospital, John and Anna Miller of the Psychic Connection in Boston, Detective Sergeant Joseph McSweeney of the Cambridge Police Department and the other members of his team, Detectives Brian Branley, James Dwyer and John Fulkerson.
I’m also greatly indebted to Professor Arthur Loeb and his wife Lotje, who were friends of Maurits Escher in the Netherlands and also his hosts in Cambridge.
Most of all I’m grateful for a correspondence with my son Chris about mirror reflections, singly and doubly twisted Moebius strips, mysterious reversals, the stacking of cannon balls, topological twists and knots, crystal lattices and the dilemma of the chameleon in the mirrored box. A big help too has been the warm encouragement of his brothers Andrew and David, longtime fans of the prints of M. C. Escher.
I lis work teaches us that the most perfect surrealism is latent in reality …
—Albert Flocon
Turn the page to continue reading from the Homer Kelly Mysteries
PART I
THE TABLETS
The Memorial Hall of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theatre, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows … and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim, and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War.
—HENRY JAMES, THE BOSTONIANS
THE SHAME
Your great-great-grandfather did something shameful?” Homer couldn’t believe it. “But all you Morgans are so stalwart with Yankee integrity. Your ancestor couldn’t have done anything very bad.” Homer stared up at the names on the marble tablet. “He was in the class of 1860? Then he must have known all these men.”
“Well, I suppose so,” said Mary. “But then in the Civil War there was some sort of scandal. Nobody wanted to talk about it. I can remember my father shaking his head and keeping his mouth shut about Seth Morgan.”
“Gettysburg,” murmured Homer, still gazing at the tablet. “They all died in the Battle of Gettysburg.”
The pale inscribed stone was enshrined within a wooden frame. The pointed gothic arch was only one of many, each with its solemn tablet, lining the central corridor of the monumental building that towered above the city of Cambridge next to the firehouse. Above the tablets rose the wooden vaults, gleaming with new varnish, and the upper reaches of the walls glittered with heroic Latin remarks in gold.
But nobody any longer understood the quotations and hardly anyone paused to read the names of the 135 men who had walked so long ago in Harvard Yard and read the Iliad with Cornelius Felton and modern literature with James Russell Lowell and mathematics with Benjamin Peirce before going out to die for the Union cause in the bloody battles of the Civil War.
All those young men had lived and died so long ago. Widows no longer wept for their husbands, mothers no longer sorrowed for their sons. The Civil War was several wars back in time.
But Memorial Hall was still a familiar landmark in Cambridge, celebrated for its medieval immensity and for the polygonal tower that loomed above the university. It was especially famous for Sanders Theatre, the wooden chamber that rounded out one end of the building like the apse of a cat
hedral.
Otherwise, Mem Hall was useful for the enormous dining hall that projected like the nave of a church from the transept of the memorial corridor. Here the first-year students ate their meals in the colored light of stained-glass windows, never glancing at the marble busts of long-forgotten professors that lined the walls, never looking up at the painted portraits of Union soldiers. But the soldiers looked blandly down at them year after year, and the busts gazed out at them with their white stone eyes.
Until today, Homer and Mary Kelly had been as oblivious as everyone else to the tablets, the portraits and the marble busts. They had taught classes in the building for years, they had lectured in Sanders Theatre. Homer had even climbed the tower, where he had looked down on the wooden vaults from above, teetered along swaying catwalks, climbed shaky ladders and hurled himself across perilous chasms to witness something amazing. Gaping upward, he had seen a president of the university fall from the topmost rung of the topmost ladder and break his neck in one of the upside-down vaults.
Well, all of that had happened long ago. But Memorial Hall was still one of the spindles around which their lives were wound. Therefore it was odd that in all these years they had paid so little attention to the marble tablets in the memorial corridor.
But today a yellow ray from the colored window over the south door had fallen on one of the tablets like a pointing hand, and they had stopped, transfixed.
“Maybe you could find out what your great-great-grandfather did that was so shameful,” said Homer, glancing sideways at his wife.
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“I’ll bet there are records somewhere. If you looked up these men from his class you might learn something about—what was his name?”
“Seth. Seth Morgan.”
The yellow beam from the stained-glass window drifted away, and now the tablet was flushed with red.
“Good,” said Mary. She whipped out a notebook and wrote the names down. “I’ll ask about Seth, and then I’ll get to work on Mudge, Fox, Robeson and—who’s the other one?”
“Pike, Otis Mathias Pike.”
PART II
THE SECOND
MASSACHUSETTS
THE SECOND MASSACHUSETTS VOLUNTEER INFANTRY
The sons of the first gentlemen of New England generously vied with each other in seeking commissions therein.… From the first it was often spoken of as the model regiment in the army for its admirable drill; and so tenaciously has it preserved its early distinction, that in its last battle, when half its number of privates and eleven of its officers had fallen, it manoeuvred still under the severest fire with “every man in his place;”—a proud deed!
—BOSTON HERALD, JULY 1863
PRIVATE OTIS PIKE
OTIS MATHIAS PIKE
Class of 1860
Pvt. 2d Massachusetts Vols. (Infantry) 12 July, 1862. Killed at Gettysburg, Penn., 3 July, 1863.
—Harvard Memorial Biographies
Otis was sensible enough to recognize the error of his ways on several occasions in the past.
For one thing, he should never have loaned five dollars to a penniless classmate.
In the second place, he should never have accepted a bowie knife as collateral for the loan. What use did Otis have for a bowie knife? Nevertheless he had stuck it in his belt because it gave him a certain air.
In the third place, he should certainly have avoided the low tavern on the Boston waterfront where his pocket had been picked, last year in the summer of ’62.
In the fourth place, he should never have attacked the pickpocket with the bowie knife.
The fact was that if Otis Pike, the witty darling of his class, had not been kind enough in the first place to help out a friend, he would not have had to choose between a prison term and recruitment into the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
What kind of choice was that? The prison was an infamous black hole.
“You are fortunate, young man,” the judge had said, “that your classmates in a distinguished regiment have spoken up for you.”
Oh, that was all very well and good, but his dear old college classmates had entered the service as officers, whereas poor old Otis was only a private.
“But, Your Honor,” he had pleaded, “when I confronted that man, he attacked me. I could have been killed.”
“Whereas,” the judge had said sourly, “it was he who had the misfortune to be killed.”
“But it was self-defense, Your Honor, that’s all. Pure self-defense.”
Self-defense! For over a year now, self-defense had been Otis Pike’s watchword in all the battles in which the regiment had been called upon to fight.
In self-defense he had run from the carnage in Miller’s cornfield at Antietam. In self-defense he had fled the slaughter of Chancellorsville. Where now were some of his old comrades in the Second Massachusetts? Where were Wilder Dwight and Tom Spurr and George Batchelder? And Stephen Emerson and William Temple?
Dead at Antietam, dead at Chancellorsville.
“Watch your step, Otis,” his captain had warned him. “One more desertion and you’re a dead man.” The captain of Company E was Tom Robeson, fellow reveler and funny fellow.
“I warn you, Otis,” his colonel had said, “if you run again, we’ll have no choice.” The colonel of the entire Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was good old Charley Mudge, another comrade from the Hasty Pudding Club, comic gymnast and consummate artist of the banjo.
Otis had snapped a salute. “Yes, sir, Colonel, sir. But, hark! do I hear a mockingbird?” It was a passage from the Minstrels of the class of 1860, every line and note of which had been composed by Otis Pike.
But Charley Mudge had looked at him solemnly and said, “I mean it, Otis. It’s no joke.”
LIEUTENANT
COLONEL MUDGE
CHARLES REDINGTON MUDGE
Class of 1860
First Lt., 2d Mass. Vols., 28 May, 1861; Capt., 8 July, 1861; Major, 9 Nov., 1862; Lieut. Colonel, 6 June, 1863; killed at Gettysburg, Penn., 3 July, 1863.
… Straightway he gave the brief order, “Rise up,—over the breastworks,—forward, double-quick!” And up rose the men at the word of their dauntless commander.… He led them boldly and rapidly over the marsh straight into … thick, fast volleys of hostile bullets … in the middle of the marshy field a fatal ball struck him just below the throat.
—HARVARD MEMORIAL BIOGRAPHIES
They were resting at last in the small Pennsylvania crossroads of Two Taverns. The whole Twelfth Corps had marched all night. When the halt was called at last, eight thousand men lay down on their rubber blankets and went to sleep beside the Baltimore Pike, their heads pillowed on their haversacks. They were deaf to the creaking of the wagons moving past them, deaf to the thudding hooves of the six-mule teams hauling ammunition trains toward something that was about to happen up there farther to the north.
Or maybe it was already happening. They could all feel it, a sense of the gathering of forces, the massing of opposing armies. There was a rumor—thousands and thousands of men were flowing together from a dozen different directions. As the men of the Twelfth Corps lay down, they murmured to each other, “The ball’s about to open.”
Colonel Mudge was asleep with the rest of them when he was prodded awake at dawn.
It was a sergeant from the Tenth Maine, the regiment of provost guards. “Sorry, sir,” said the sergeant, “but the goddamn fool’s done it again.”
“Done what again?” Mudge pushed himself up on one elbow. When he saw what the sergeant was dumping on the ground, he said, “Oh no. Oh God, Otis, it’s not you again.”
Otis had fallen with his left arm twisted under him. “You’re in for it now,” said the sergeant, jerking him roughly to his feet.
Rubbing his shoulder, Otis looked at Mudge piteously and whimpered, “I was drunk, Charley, that’s all. I couldn’t help myself.”
“He’s Colonel Mudge to you,” said the sergeant, giving him
a shove. The sergeant nodded at the colonel. “He wasn’t just drunk, the dumb fool. He was skedaddling again, hightailing it for Baltimore.”
The morning of July first was already hot. Mudge had not slept well. He picked up his coat and stood up, trying to absorb the fact that this old friend had done something so fatally stupid as to desert for the third time.
Otis pulled out his best card. It had saved his neck twice before. “Come on, Charley,” he said, his voice shaking, “you wouldn’t shoot an old classmate? Not a fellow thespian from the good old days in Hasty Pudding, would you now, Charley? My God, Charley, who was it wrote that farce with the Female Smuggler? And all the songs? And all those hilarious playbills? Remember the whistling, Charley? Remember the stamping feet?”
“You promised me, Otis,” said Mudge in a low voice. “You swore you’d never do it again.”
“Oh, Charley, everybody was drunk, back there in Frederick.” Otis scrambled up from his knees with a winning smile. “I couldn’t help myself. God’s truth, Charley, I didn’t know where in the hell I was going. I was just trying to catch up, coming after you double-quick.” Otis made a comical pretense of trotting at high speed. “I wasn’t going to let my colonel down, not good old Charley Mudge, nor my captain neither, not good old Tom Robeson.”