Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Bill Queller said, sighing, “I suppose that was the case, yes. But I felt sorry for Bauer, and I don’t regret telling Rolfe what I did. There is a point beyond which even genius must be held to account.”

  Nicholas Reickmann said quickly, “Oh, yes. I agree. But I thought, you know, it might be more politic simply to tell the young man.”

  15

  I am here, Maggie. So that you’ll be less lonely.

  These words sounded out of the very air, calm, impersonal, yet consoling, in a dream of wintry chill; and Maggie Blackburn, the dreamer, glanced hopefully upward—to see, of all people, Calvin Gould. The man stood above her, a step or two above her, but smiling; he lifted her to him and kissed her lightly on the lips and, almost at once, released her. How extraordinary, that kiss!—how Maggie’s heart swelled!—though in the next instant Calvin Gould was gone, the entire dream had faded, and only the wintry chill remained.

  And Maggie Blackburn woke alone in her bed to a snowy January morning and cold yet stale air that meant—oh, unmistakably—that her oil-burning furnace had gone out for the third time that winter.

  How swiftly it had been Christmas 1988, and then New Year’s 1989, and though the police investigation into the poisoning death of Rolfe Christensen surely continued, and Christensen’s death remained the focus of social conversations in Forest Park, there were, so far as anyone knew, no significant new developments; there were no arrests or even any leading suspects except the luckless Brendan Bauer—whom most people believed had committed the crime, whether police would ever succeed in linking him to it or not.

  (By now it was known that the purchaser of the chocolates, of ambiguous gender, had not spoken a single time during the entire transaction, but had made herself—himself?—known by way of hand signals. “Exactly the strategy for a stammerer,” people said; and if Maggie were present she would counter, at once, “Exactly the strategy for someone who wants to suggest a stammerer!” Her friends had learned not to discuss the case, or Brendan’s probable involvement in it, in Maggie’s presence.)

  Whether innocent, as he insisted, or guilty, as others suspected, Brendan Bauer, miserable with the new, yet crueler aura of notoriety attached to him, had quit his job at the Book Mark (where, he believed, customers stared openly at him) and moved from his shabby apartment on the outermost periphery of Forest Park to another, even shabbier apartment three miles north on Route 1 in the scrappy industrial-suburban town of Waldrop. There, he was wholly dependent upon bus transportation—“God, how I hate buses!”—but at least, as he told Maggie, with whom he spoke frequently on the telephone, he could lead an anonymous life in Waldrop, where he knew no one, and no one knew him, and where he had an “outdoor, healthy” job working in a car wash alongside robust, well-muscled high school youths who knew him only as Bren and took not the slightest interest in him. Hardly the life he’d envisioned for himself a few months before when he’d come east to study at the prestigious Forest Park Conservatory of Music, but he supposed he dared not complain. “After all, the police haven’t arrested me for murder yet, and I haven’t been sexually assaulted for months, and I am alive.”

  Hearing Brendan so sardonic, so brash, so oddly energetic, Maggie Blackburn was amazed; did not know whether to pity him, for the quivering edge of mania in his voice, or to be relieved that he seemed no longer despondent. She knew that, under duress, some personalities strengthen, perversely—perhaps she was of that type herself?—she had not been tested. But it seemed to her (though she did not mention it to him) that in a way Brendan was maturing, for his self-pity was laced with humor and irony, and his stammer was becoming infrequent.

  She told him, “I’m confident that the police will find whoever poisoned Christensen soon—I have a good deal of faith in the detective I met, David Miles—and that things in Forest Park will return to normal. And then you can move back, close to campus, and start classes, and—everything will be all right.”

  “Oh, s-sure!” Brendan laughed.

  Oddly, as he reported to Maggie, he was beginning to be able to write music again, after being blocked for weeks. He had no piano, so maybe when he actually got to a piano he’d be disappointed with what he had, but he was composing in his head during the day, at the car wash; then in the evening the pent-up music tumbled out onto sheets and sheets of paper—all kinds of music. Weird experimental sounds with much silence separating them, traditional music with a hope of symmetry and beauty, some of it for voice, for soprano. And he was writing a series of brief piano pieces Schoenberg-style: “If they turn out halfway interesting, Maggie, I intend to dedicate them to you!”

  Maggie hesitated, perhaps not perceptibly, then said, “How kind of you, Brendan. Thank you.”

  Now with the enormously public fact of death—of murder—it had been revealed that the Forest Park Conservatory of Music had tried to conceal a scandal some months before: an act or acts of aggravated sexual assault committed by a senior faculty member against a student. Thus the Conservatory administration was often in the news locally, and Maggie steeled herself when she opened the weekly Packet, or the student paper The Chronicle, preparing to see yet another photograph of Provost Calvin Gould, or Attorney Andrew Woodbridge, or Dean of the Faculty Peter Fisher, or another of her chagrined colleagues and to read yet more about the attempted cover-up and its consequences. By early January the president of the Conservatory, Mr. Babcock, a gentleman in his late sixties who had had a coronary bypass operation two years before, was given out to be in poor health and was rarely available for comment; he would resign at the end of the academic term, so it was pointless, and cruel, to harass him about the Christensen case. His successor would very likely be Calvin Gould, who was now president de facto—if, in the wake of so much unfortunate controversy, the Board of Trustees had not revised their high opinion of him.

  As the man most in the spotlight, Calvin handled the protracted crisis with admirable authority. He told the press no more and no less than he was obliged to tell them, explaining that, since the victim of the alleged sexual assault had declined to press formal charges with the police, the Conservatory had no case with which to dismiss Rolfe Christensen from its staff; there was only the heated testimony of one man against another. As Andrew Woodbridge was frequently quoted, “Our hands were tied.”

  Maggie winced at this expression, which seemed to her singularly ill-chosen.

  But she supposed they were right—and now that Rolfe Christensen was dead, the terrible fact of his death took precedence over even his alleged crime.

  The police investigation was making public a number of odd, disparate facts, which Maggie believed must be parts of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, to be fitted together by someone (Detective Sergeant Miles?) at a future time. Or perhaps they were simply odd, disparate facts. For instance, on a suggestion made to them by an unnamed source (in fact, Maggie knew the source was Brendan), police had secured a warrant authorizing them to search Christensen’s house and property for evidence of other, earlier assaults, the “shallow graves” of which Christensen had boasted in order to intimidate Bauer. No corpses were unearthed, however. (Was Maggie disappointed at this? She surely hoped not; she was hardly so vindictive!)

  Rolfe Christensen had been involved, however, in as many as a dozen reported incidents involving sexual assaults or offenses of one kind or another, at music schools, music festivals, colleges, and universities—from Oberlin College in 1955 through the Interlaken Music Festival in 1966 to the Salzburg Festival in 1974. Nearly always there had been settlements out of court. Twice there were lawsuits and countersuits. The only actual arrest had taken place in Miami, in 1981, when the fifty-two-year-old composer was charged with the sexual molestation of a fourteen-year-old boy: he had been sentenced to sixty days in jail with a fine of $500 and the proviso that, if he enrolled in a sex therapy program, the sixty-day sentence would be suspended. (It was.) The most recent incident had occurred in 1986, in New York City, but there charges of sexual assault against
a student enrolled in the New York University Institute of Fine Arts had simply been dropped when the victim declined to press them.

  So that evil man was passed along, Maggie Blackburn thought, almost bitterly, to Brendan Bauer: to us.

  Yet there were facts that mitigated so negative a portrait of the deceased, for, in investigating certain gay circles in Manhattan with which Christensen had been associated, police discovered that he had helped establish a foundation to provide funds for AIDS victims and had contributed $20,000 anonymously; he had established a composers’ scholarship fund at his former school, Juilliard, as well as here at Forest Park (of which Maggie had naturally known); he had set up a trust to provide an annual award (“The Rolfe Christensen Award for Distinguished Musical Composition”) at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. While a number of Christensen’s acquaintances and associates spoke openly of his “troubling” or “disagreeable” personality to police, there were those who insisted he’d been a “good, generous man,” a “true eccentric but a genius,” a “man incapable of inflicting any real harm upon another person.”

  One man spoke of Rolfe Christensen as “impulsive, yes, as a child is impulsive—but he was never intentionally cruel.”

  Reading such things in the newspaper (in fact it was The New York Times, which had printed several stories on the Christensen case), Maggie had the sudden thought that it was just such innocent-sounding parties whom Detective Miles should investigate, those who put themselves conspicuously on record as having not the slightest dislike of the deceased. Whereas a suspect like Brendan Bauer was—simply too obvious.

  “Unless Brendan is emotionally unbalanced. And I can’t believe he is.”

  This mode of reasoning struck Maggie as typical not of her but of her father. Mr. Blackburn had been by instinct a shrewd, suspicious man, quick to puzzle out motives where others saw nothing but surfaces; in his dealings with lawbreakers, however middle- and upper-middle-class, he had learned to suspect duplicity, even among his own clients. Of course criminals lied. Of course human beings lied. How obvious a truth—so obvious it was often overlooked.

  Maggie halfway wondered if she should drop a note to the detective to alert him to this possibility. But perhaps it was self-evident to him. Perhaps he suspected everyone, even Maggie Blackburn herself?

  What had David Miles said, fixing her with his tight little smile, “Poison is the weapon of choice, Miss Blackburn, for people like you”? Or had it been, more reasonably, “Poison is the weapon of choice … for that type of personality that can’t bear violence”?

  In her brooding on the case Maggie had also wondered if the inaccurate zip code address on both packages might have been intentional. For if the chocolates had been mailed by a resident of Forest Park, by way of a Manhattan post office, it would be a clever distraction to get the address just slightly wrong. That would appear to indicate that whoever sent the chocolates was not a native or was (like Brendan Bauer?) new to Forest Park. For no long-term resident of any community gets his zip code address wrong.

  Like her telephone number, Maggie Blackburn’s zip code number was permanently impressed upon her memory: 06545. Whereas on both her package and Christensen’s the zip code had been 06540.

  She felt convinced the error was intentional.

  For part of an excited evening Maggie fantasized contacting Detective Miles about these matters; then, sobering abruptly, she realized she was being ridiculous. The last thing a professional policeman wanted to receive was advice from an amateur. And a woman.

  In any case, Maggie Blackburn was far too shy for such an intrusion.

  (And what did it mean, that someone might have had a motive and might have committed the murder?

  Surely there were many, an infinite many, in this category; and very few of them—of us—could be seriously suspected, let alone investigated. So Maggie was compelled to think, soberly, one morning when, rummaging through a kitchen drawer, she came upon a ball of string—ordinary white durable string, the kind with which the killer had wrapped his or her packages of gift chocolates—at the back of the drawer.)

  Sunday afternoon of January 8, 1989. Maggie Blackburn was attending, alone, a cocktail reception in a newly opened gallery in New Haven, an hour’s drive from Forest Park; and there, by chance, she caught sight of Calvin Gould amid the crowd—Calvin and a woman with a dark dense cloud of hair who must have been his wife, Naomi.

  Her heart beat absurdly. She had heard that the reclusive and eccentric Mrs. Gould was an amateur artist of a kind and that she sometimes attended events of this sort, by herself or with her husband, so long as the events were not in Forest Park, but Maggie had never run into the couple in such a context and was undecided what to do. She felt a childlike impulse simply to turn away, to avoid a meeting … but it was too late, for Calvin had seen her, apparently, and raised a hand in greeting. Or was it too late?—for Calvin made no further effort to acknowledge Maggie and showed no signs of approaching her.

  Maggie Blackburn, tall, in a navy-blue wool suit and a white silk blouse, her silver-blond hair braided and wound about her head, felt rather more relieved than rebuffed. She returned her colleague’s casual gesture and continued on her way.

  The new museum was a splendid bold structure of open spaces, dazzling white surfaces, plate glass, stone and brick, ramps and open staircases and white wire mesh; the premiere exhibit, no less striking, was of gigantic antediluvian-looking figures by a woman sculptor from West Germany. How strong, how assured these images, part animal and part human, and the imaginative new building that housed them—Maggie found herself wandering wide-eyed, wholly uncritical. For months, since that terrible Sunday in September when Brendan had come to her house, she had rarely been of a frame of mind to respond to aesthetic experiences of any kind; but now an impersonal happiness flooded through her. Her fingers twitched with pleasure as if seeking an imaginary keyboard. I am an artist too, she thought. A sort of artist.

  Though lately her experience at the piano was frustrating. When she concentrated on the interior life of a piece, not merely its notes, she played with something of her old feeling; but much of the time she was distracted, even anxious. As if, while she immersed herself in the piano, something urgent, even fatal, were happening elsewhere. This intolerable mystery must be solved! The Beethoven recital had been rescheduled for February, but Maggie was having difficulty getting Bill Queller to rehearse with her. The last time she’d seen the cellist, at a New Year’s Day open house at the Lichtmans’, he had seemed to be trying to avoid her until at last Maggie approached him directly; but he’d been vague about making plans—“My concentration isn’t quite back to normal.” Maggie was struck by the man’s sallow skin, an air of something both sickly and sullen in his face. Near-bald for years, Bill Queller had yet had a certain youthful manner; he had cultivated not the roguish-puckish humor of his friend Rolfe Christensen, but another quieter, more assured, sort of public persona. Now that stance was gone. The cellist looked middle-aged, defeated, yet angry too. The thought came to Maggie—and was at once rejected—that here was Rolfe Christensen’s murderer: his oldest friend in Forest Park.

  She’d said, clumsily, “I—I know you’ve taken—this all so—hard—”

  Bill had said, with a mean little smile, “Some of us, yes—we have. Taken it hard.”

  Now, in the museum, contemplating an earthen-colored six-foot-tall stylized fossil, part humanoid, part leaf, Maggie Blackburn again considered the possibility of Bill Queller as the killer—and rejected the idea a second time. For Bill, who played the cello so beautifully, whose life was his cello playing, any act of violence, however indirect, would be unthinkable. Only in the abstract can we suspect people, Maggie thought; people, at least, whom we know as friends, colleagues, like-minded men and women. She knew Bill was bitter (and publicly embarrassed) over the fact that Nicholas Reickmann, and not he, had been named Rolfe Christensen’s literary executor; but he had not known of this until a
fter Christensen’s death. It had been a posthumous slap of a kind, very likely devised by Christensen in a moment of pique.

  Staring at the six-foot fossil, a thing of beauty possessed of a crude, primitive power, Maggie felt someone touch her shoulder; it was Calvin Gould. He was smiling his sociable smile and said warmly, “Why, hello, Maggie! I was sure it must be you.” His words were perhaps not quite sincere, but Maggie understood their purpose. (For Naomi Gould, indifferent to Maggie Blackburn, very likely not knowing or caring who Maggie Blackburn was, continued to stroll at the far end of the gallery, her back to them.)

  As they spoke together—initially, of the museum and the exhibit—Maggie felt her face burn, thinking, He knows. For surely her love of this man shone in her eyes, exposed and helpless.

  Calvin Gould was standing rather close to Maggie, it seemed. He was regarding her rather closely. And smiling—smiling hard. She saw that the irises of his eyes were hazelbrown, rimmed with black distinctive as crayon; the whites were faintly threaded with blood. Though, as always, Maggie was confused in this man’s very presence, happy and scattered, prone to nervous laughter, uncertain speech, as if her vision of herself had suddenly lost its focus, she could see that Calvin too was sallow-skinned; if not defeated, he was tired; despite his animation there was a current of something strained and apprehensive in his manner, worry lines in his forehead, the hairs at his temples touched with gray, like frost. His mouth appeared thinner, tighter, than Maggie recalled. Poor Calvin! The pressure of the past several months had exhausted him. Maggie felt a stab of sympathy and anger that his detractors were deriving satisfaction from his predicament. Maggie had long since reconciled Calvin’s politic advice to Brendan Bauer with what she knew of the man’s essential integrity.