Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The Bauers were Catholic—Brendan’s mother’s family was of solidly Irish Catholic stock—thus the priesthood was a better idea, or seemed so. In any case, in the priesthood, weakness and “femininity” were elevated to a higher, more respectable plane. Wasn’t there something invulnerable in the dark-clad figure of a Roman Catholic priest, something of dignity, of secrecy and power? Christian love had little to do with it, for the priests most respected were stern no-nonsense authoritarian personalities, masculine yet stubbornly sexless, neutered. Yet no sooner had Mr. and Mrs. Bauer adjusted to the astonishment of their youngest son, Brendan (the “odd” one), studying to be a priest at the Precious Blood Seminary in St. Louis, no sooner had they fallen into the innocent custom of bragging of him, than he’d decided to quit: decided he hadn’t a vocation after all, decided he couldn’t bear a life so deprived. (There were health problems too, “nervous” problems, of which no one cared to speak and which were not indicated on any of Brendan Bauer’s records or applications.)

  And so it was back to music.

  “Music must be my salvation.”

  Brendan was thinking of these things when at last, at a quarter to midnight, the Forest Park police arrived.

  He was thinking of these things while listening to the Bach toccata and fugue for the third, perhaps the fourth, consecutive time, stiffly seated in one of his beige vinyl-covered chairs (his little apartment came furnished: he had two such chairs), waiting. To a neutral observer he might have appeared drugged or catatonic: a long-boned boyish young man with large, startled, yet sleepy-looking eyes, unruly hair, twitchy mannerisms. One of the shaving cuts had bled anew and had dribbled down over his chin. His Adam’s apple protruded painfully over his tight shirt collar and the lumpy knot of his woolen necktie. The waterfall brilliance of the Bach piece so transfixed him he might not have remembered where he was, or why. For was not Bach a prayer—a secular prayer—a fierce declaration of a world of logic, sunlight, and sanity, however remote from this world?

  Though he’d been awaiting the knock on the door for so many hours, Brendan seemed not to hear it when it came; so it was repeated, louder, and louder still.

  Police! Open up! Police! Open up!

  Like a sleepwalker, Brendan went to the door and opened it, fumbling with the lock. “Y-yes? Wh-wh-what do you w-want?” he asked. His pose of innocent surprise laced with terror must have assured the police officers (there were three of them—why three?) that he was of no possible danger; thus they were courteous with him and did not lay a hand on him.

  In a nightmare trance Brendan Bauer was taken to police headquarters in the village of Forest Park for questioning regarding the death of Rolfe Christensen. He was not arrested—he was not, seemingly, under suspicion—but they had questions to put to him. Many questions.

  13

  This much was known generally within forty-eight hours of Rolfe Christensen’s death: the composer had died as a consequence of having eaten a chocolate-covered truffle injected (apparently with a syringe) with a powerful dose of the poisonous compound sodium cyanide; each of the twelve candies in the box he had received on the day of his death had been similarly injected, and the candy itself had been traced to a gourmet chocolate shop in Manhattan—where, fortuitously, a sales clerk claimed to remember the purchaser and was able to supply police with a detailed description of the woman.

  A second gift box of chocolates, bought at the same time as the truffles, had been sent to one of Christensen’s colleagues at the Conservatory, the pianist Maggie Blackburn, but these chocolates had not, evidently, been poisoned.

  It was the first known instance of homicide in the ninety-year history of the Forest Park Conservatory of Music. Indeed, acts of homicide—or aggravated assault, rape, armed robbery, suicide—were rarities in the residential community of Forest Park, where the local weekly, the Forest Park Packet, headlined perennial debates over tax assessments, zoning, sewer and road repairs, and the like. The jarring bold-black headlines POLICE INVESTIGATE CYANIDE DEATH OF COMPOSER ROLFE CHRISTENSEN and HOMICIDE BELIEVED CAUSE OF DEATH OF FAMED CONSERVATORY PROFESSOR seemed incongruous with the newspaper’s genteel format.

  The story was picked up by other newspapers, of course, and sent out over the country by way of the AP and UP wire services. Maggie Blackburn, who had so recently, and so unhappily, received telephone calls and notes from far-flung friends, concerning her involvement in a scandal precipitated by Rolfe Christensen, now received more calls and notes, most of them from the same far-flung friends. What on earth is happening there? You must have some idea who killed R.C.—don’t you?

  When a photograph accompanied one of the news stories about Christensen’s death, it was likely to be an old photograph, showing the composer as a stolid but handsome man of youthful middle age, regarding the camera with a small measured smile of lapidary dignity or derision; the caption beneath was invariable: Rolfe Christensen, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer. Christensen was revealed as one of those contemporary American artists of whom there are legions, minor celebrities of a kind whose work is wholly unknown to most Americans even as their names have a teasingly familiar ring.

  No one more famous than Rolfe Christensen had died on December 8, 1988, so The New York Times featured Christensen’s obituary on their obituary page on the morning of December 9, with the attractive photograph, and the caption, and two columns of respectful print. Reading this obituary numerous times as if unable to comprehend it, the inexorable bedrock of reality of which these words were but the emanation, Bill Queller, Christensen’s friend and colleague of years, was, as he told friends subsequently, so shaken and confused that he found himself half thinking that Rolfe would be pleased with the piece since it was, over all, a decent, perceptive notice, and the Times’s music critic had sometimes been a bit bitchy about his work, and the photograph was flattering. “Then I realized that Rolfe would never see the piece, to be pleased, or possibly offended, you know how he is—was—how vain and unpredictable and easily wounded; and the fact of it, the horror of it, washed over me: Rolfe is dead, and dead in such a terrible way.”

  Unquestionably, the cellist William Queller was the most upset of Christensen’s circle of acquaintances at the Conservatory in the week following the composer’s death; after it was revealed by Christensen’s attorney that Nicholas Reickmann, and not Queller (as everyone, including Queller, had been led to believe), was to be Christensen’s literary executor, he was no less upset, but the nature of his upset took a decidedly different turn.

  “How could he betray me—me? When I did so much for him?”

  Maggie Blackburn had never seemed to herself an obsessive person, except for brief, intense periods in regard to piano performances and some preparations for teaching, yet in the days and weeks following Rolfe Christensen’s murder (though “murder” was not an expression Maggie used, “mysterious death” was her preference) she found herself caught up in the near-ceaseless community speculation: uncharacteristically opinionated; almost, at times, quarrelsome. And, alone, even when at the piano or listening to music closely, she found that her concentration shifted free of its ostensible object and that she was thinking of Christensen’s death.

  The man had been Maggie’s enemy, her adversary: she was reasonably certain he had wished her ill, and would have done her harm, at least professional harm, had he had the opportunity. (Though very likely he would not have gone out of his way to do her harm—it was said of Christensen that he was too lazy, or too indifferent, to be actively troublesome.) At the same time, Maggie did not really want to believe such things and told herself, with an impatient gesture of both hands as if she were silencing some heedlessly outspoken person, that she was being foolish, small-minded, and paranoid.

  “Paranoid”: an ugly clinical word, a cliché of contemporary usage.

  “I have got to think of Rolfe Christensen’s death as nothing more and nothing less than it is, with no reference to me,” Maggie instructed herself, her eyes fill
ing with tears of dismay. “It’s just that, until the mystery is solved, I don’t know what it is.”

  Surely she was exaggerating to consider Rolfe Christensen her enemy—even her adversary? Surely it was more rational to think of him as a colleague with whom she’d had some difficulty getting along, as others at the Conservatory, no less congenial and fair-minded, had had difficulty getting along with him?

  Fritzie Krill said half seriously, or was it half jokingly, one evening at the Spaldings’, “I wonder: Do any of the rest of you feel the kind of guilty relief, the almost pleasurable remorse, the … childish gloating and vindication … that I feel? Because he’s dead, and he seems to have deserved it? But a strange kind of sorrow too, a sense of fright, and loss … since, though I disliked the man intensely, I won’t ever see him again even to dislike him?”

  Others murmured vague embarrassed assents, but Maggie shivered, and laughed nervously, and said not a word. The pupils of her eyes seemed to have shrunk to mere pinpricks, as if a powerful beam of light were being shown into them, and her pale lips were set hard. I must not incriminate myself, she thought. Even here, among friends.

  For what if, by a careless word of Maggie Blackburn’s, Brendan Bauer were drawn into it?

  Night following night, as Christmas approached in that dark uncharted December of 1988, the most turbulent winter solstice of Maggie Blackburn’s psychic life, she lay sleepless in her bed listening to the utter silence of her house, her empty house, her house vacant and dead of even remembered music, and she thought of Calvin Gould, who would never love her and whom, in time, most likely, she would cease to love; she thought of her father, who had looked through her, not recognizing her, as if no one, daughter or stranger, had stood in her place; she thought of that man … a lover of a kind … who had in fact looked at her and uttered the most damning of judgments: “In my opinion, Maggie, you’re hardly a woman at all.”

  Quickly, almost stealthily, Maggie ran her hands over her body, the soft contours of her body, the sharp-defined bones of pelvis, ribs, shoulders that separated these contours, and could think of no defense. If breasts and female genitalia constituted “woman” Maggie was a woman, but if something more, something rather more mysterious and hidden, were involved, then perhaps she was not a woman and had no words for what, in the world’s or her own imagination, she might be.

  Intermittently through her adult life, men had told her she was beautiful. She had felt the force of their fleshly desire for her—she’d shared in desire, at least to a degree—but, apart from their sexual feeling, apart from their physicality altogether, she seemed to lapse to something other. She had no doubt it must be something lesser.

  There was a tangible absence in her. But can one be defined in terms of absence? She thought of her canary Rex, who had sung so urgently, for weeks, for the return of his dead mate, Sweetpea. Or was Rex simply a male bird singing for a female, any female; then, as time passed, simply a living creature singing out of creaturely loneliness and isolation, for any sort of company at all? Then, abruptly, he’d stopped singing altogether and died a few days later.

  For which no one could possibly blame Rolfe Christensen: the very idea was absurd.

  Maggie wondered, however, at the baffling connection between her and Christensen, about which the Forest Park police had asked her; the fact that whoever had poisoned the chocolates meant for him had sent a box of chocolates from the same store to her a few days earlier. But why? Did people think of the two as somehow linked? Was it because of Brendan Bauer?

  But Maggie had done all she could to detach herself publicly from the dispute. So far as she knew, only a few people were aware that Brendan had come to her first.

  Vividly she recalled the luxurious red-satin box of expensive chocolates. The velvety fragrance as the cover was lifted. Something very nearly erotic … illicit … in the mere fact of such rich candies: the smell, the appearance, the texture, the overpoweringly sweet chocolate taste in the mouth.

  For some reason, as Maggie had opened the mysterious package, she’d seemed to know that the chocolates were not exactly for her.

  You must take it home, it’s for you … it wasn’t sent to strangers.

  She recalled with eidetic precision the outward appearance of the package. The meticulous hand-printed name and address (and the small error in the zip code, which she’d remembered to mention to the police—the error was repeated on Christensen’s package); the crisscrossing lengths of tape and string; the exaggerated way Mrs. Moyer and the secretaries had fussed over the gift, and over Maggie Blackburn, laughing in girlish delight, congratulating her, as if suspecting that the “romantic” gift must be quite an event in Maggie’s life.

  And so it was, indeed. But it had not been a romantic gift after all.

  How alarming, after the fact, to think that she had passed the box around the office, offering the chocolates to anyone who happened by, with never a thought (for why would she have had such a thought?) that the chocolates might have been tampered with. And how trusting people were, over all.

  Alarming too how carelessly she had assumed the gift was from her former student Jennifer Lehman, on the slender evidence of the initial J. (When Maggie more closely examined the card afterward, she’d thought the J might have easily have been an I.)

  A long time ago when she’d been a girl still in her teens and her father was a youthful and vigorous and, it was said, ambitious assistant district attorney on Long Island, he’d told her in a rare moment of expansiveness that the human mind works to draw quick conclusions from virtually no evidence at all—calculating recklessly, yet persuasively, with the aim of making sense out of senselessness.

  Out of a flood of inchoate material, selecting randomly, yet persuasively, to create a narrative with a quality of self-justification.

  As an assistant prosecutor, Mr. Blackburn had been, at least at a remove or two, a kind of police investigator: he’d enjoyed cases, the more puzzling the better, for the solving of puzzles gave him a distinct pleasure. Maggie wondered how he would have dealt with the mystery of Christensen’s death, in his prime.

  Though of course the police probably had evidence—leads—of which Maggie knew nothing.

  To her horror—but it was impossible for her to prevent this, since Mrs. Moyer had been immediately questioned by police, and had naturally, unthinkingly, provided them with Jennifer Lehman’s name—the Lehman family had actually been contacted. Jennifer was still in London; even had the young woman wanted to send the fatal chocolates she could not have done so. Maggie apologized to the Lehmans, and she apologized to the police, for her misleading assumption. Her manner following the poisoning, the mysterious death, was oddly apologetic, as perhaps others noticed; she felt somehow (but how?) involved; it had been so careless of her to pass her gift box of chocolates about … hadn’t it?

  “It was a wrong idea of mine. I … I was wrong.”

  So Maggie had told the investigating detective for the Forest Park police department when, on the afternoon of December 10, he’d come to speak with her in her office at the Conservatory. The man’s name was Miles; his rank was detective sergeant; he was in his forties, perhaps, or younger—his hair thin, gray, his manner courteous but brisk, even clerical. Maggie found herself relating to him as, half consciously, she had always, through her life, related to figures of authority, no matter their actual power or significance in the world. She tried to answer his questions as truthfully and as succinctly as possible, but there was an undercurrent of anxiety to her words and her eyes continually misted over. For the previous two nights she’d slept miserably; since the shock of Christensen’s death and her not very coherent telephone call to Brendan Bauer. From her look of wan distress Detective Sergeant David Miles—as he formally introduced himself—might have thought Maggie Blackburn a close friend of the murdered man or one of his devoted admirers.

  Miles asked Maggie questions of a kind he had surely been asking others, and Maggie answered as, she sup
posed, others had answered. She told him of her mistaken idea that she’d known who had sent her the gift box of chocolates—“It was a wrong idea of mine.” When he asked who she thought might have sent it, and the box of poisoned chocolates, she hesitated for what seemed a very long time, gripping her hands together, almost wringing them … thinking, in the interstices of more urgent thought, of how poor Schumann had tried a finger-stretching machine and ruined his fingers for the keyboard forever. Her own reach was just a little longer than one might have expected: an octave plus one in the left hand, an octave plus two in the right. Faintly she said, “I … I have no idea.”

  Maggie knew well that Brendan’s name was known to the police and that they had already questioned him, perhaps even interrogated him, at length. (She did not want to think which of her colleagues or which Conservatory administrator had provided police with his name.) Yet, with Detective Sergeant Miles staring at her and taking notes on a little pad, with everything seeming so very crucial and so weighted, Maggie could not bring herself to utter Brendan’s name even to state that, in her opinion, the young man could not possibly have sent poisoned chocolates to Rolfe Christensen. She did not want to utter his name in this man’s presence at all.

  More emphatically, she said, “I have no idea. I can’t believe it’s anyone I know, or anyone connected with the Conservatory.”

  Miles asked, “And why do you think, Miss Blackburn, you were sent a box of chocolates three days before the victim received his?”

  The victim! Maggie had not heard this term before, in reference to Rolfe Christensen, and was struck by it. She wiped at her eyes with her fingertips.

  The answer to the detective’s question seemed to Maggie self-evident: the murderer had hoped to make people believe that the poisoned chocolates Rolfe Christensen was to receive would be as harmless, as delicious, as Maggie Blackburn’s had been. But she was not sure whether she wanted to say this. Did she want Detective Sergeant Miles to be impressed with her intelligence (if, indeed, he would be impressed), or did she want him to have no particular impression at all of her? Which was wiser, more expedient? She said, “I—I’m not sure.”