Styx & Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  It ended suddenly one Friday evening. I called on him in his room, and he announced that he was getting married. To Jackie. They had started dating again about two months earlier. He had continued to meet me secretly in his room, all the while he was courting Jackie. I was floored, felt the wind knocked out of me. I ran from his place and wept in the subway, wandered around for hours, then got terribly drunk in a lounge in Murray Hill and was sick in a trash can on Madison Avenue.

  They got married six months later. The last time I saw him, he apologized for the way things had played out. He hadn’t intended for me to fall for him. He had just wanted some fun, and had heard I was a good time.

  He taught me the hardest lesson in love I’ve ever had, and I have the scars to prove it.

  “Listen, Janey,” I said, “something’s happened to my father. He was attacked in his apartment.”

  “Russell, leave the cat alone!” shrieked Janey from her end. “Kenny, can’t you watch him for two minutes while I’m on the phone?”

  She covered the receiver, and all I could hear was muffled exchanges. Then she came back on and apologized.

  “Sorry, Ellie, what was that you said about your father?”

  “Oh, just that I’m in town to visit him for a few days or so. Thought we might get together if you were free sometime.”

  “Of course! Call me next week, and we’ll make a plan.”

  She hung up, and I knew I wouldn’t call her again. I was on my selfish, intemperate path, not ready for adult responsibilities, while she had them crashing down about her.

  The morning was brisk and sunny. I walked up Fifth Avenue, then over Thirteenth to Saint Vincent’s, arriving at my father’s bedside at ten thirty. The day nurse shrugged dolefully at me when I asked if there was any change in his condition. I took up the vigil, staring at the walls, examining the state of my manicure—disgraceful—and counting the tiles in the floor. After an hour, I broke down and fetched a copy of the New York Times from the newsstand near the elevator.

  At twelve thirty, Dr. Mortonson made his rounds and asked me how my father was doing.

  “He hasn’t moved since I got here. That was at ten thirty,” I said. “How long can he go on like this without a change?”

  The doctor consulted a chart, pursing his lips as he read. “No change,” he said. “I wish he were making some progress. This has me worried.”

  Great bedside manner. “Could you be more specific?” I asked.

  “If there’s no improvement soon, it could mean he’s in for a prolonged coma, perhaps even irreversible. Impossible to say at this point. We don’t know the nature or extent of the damage, and until we do, it wouldn’t be fair to make a prognosis.”

  Mortonson picked up his charm and plodded off to cheer some other patient’s family. I left the hospital at three, planning to return after Ercolano’s memorial service.

  The pews creaked under the weight of Columbia’s luminaries, from renowned scholars to administrative bigwigs, including Grayson Kirk, president of the university, who could scarcely avoid the service without loss of face. I arrived somewhere near the end of Chalmers’s eulogy (Alas, poor Ruggero, I knew him . . .) and took up a position in the back of the nave. The dean of Columbia College made some brief laudatory remarks about a colleague he’d obviously never met. At the close of the service, Chalmers took to the pulpit again to offer some final words.

  “We, the faculty and administration of this university, like to think of ourselves as a family. We have come together today to say goodbye to our colleague, our friend, and, yes, our brother. For Ruggero was part of our extended family. And, since his biological family could not be here today, I think it proper that we act as proxy and see the funereal ritual through to its conclusion. I invite you all, therefore, back to Hamilton Hall for a gathering to celebrate Ruggero’s life. A buffet will be served.” Then came the expected: “Ruggero would have wanted it this way.”

  I watched the mourners file out of the chapel. Joan Little dabbed her swollen eyes; Bernie Sanger walked on the balls of his feet, his eyes roaming the congregation, self-conscious as if he was being watched; Gualtieri Bruchner, appearing more charcoal than pale-gray this day, left the church with stony, impassive, dull eyes. Students and professors filed by on their way out. Chalmers headed up the aisle with his wife, Helen, on one arm, and an attractive girl of about twenty on the other. Her hazel eyes, numbed by grief or boredom (it’s hard to tell sometimes) caught mine, and I thought I knew her. Her pallid cheeks cracked the tiniest polite smile of recognition, she looked down as if embarrassed, and the three passed. I watched them recede, wondering if the girl could really be Ruth Chalmers, Victor’s precocious young daughter. A shapely figure, dressed in black, swept past, leaving a perfumed breeze in her wake: Hildy Jaspers. Then the young man seated in front of me turned and smiled. It was Gigi Lucchesi. His beauty was as extraordinary and unexpected the second time around as it had been the first. He stepped into the aisle and waited to cede me the right of way. I nodded and started for the exit. That’s when I noticed Hildy Jaspers stopped at the chapel door. She was gazing back in our direction, surely unaware of me. She smiled with her eyes. It wasn’t the aching, self-conscious smile Ruth Chalmers had displayed moments earlier. Even without moving her lips, Hildy managed to flash a naughty, I-know-you-find-me-sexy grin, just with a sparkle of her eyes. I turned to see Gigi’s stare fixed on her, and he was smiling. I made my way alone to Hamilton Hall.

  Two long tables draped in white linen presented a banquet of modest proportions in the lounge where I’d met Hildy Jaspers and Gigi Lucchesi the day before. The centerpiece of the spread was an overcooked roast, sitting dry on a stainless steel platter. There were Italian macaroni casseroles, some with red sauce, some white, and one green. Heaps of lettuce, tomatoes, and croutons had been tossed in three glass salad bowls. There was poached salmon, bread, and wedges of Parmesan cheese. Someone’s desk had been pressed into service as a full bar, complete with red and white wine and a variety of spirits.

  Presiding over the drinks was a brawny bartender in a starched shirt—short sleeves—and black tie, one of those ruddy-faced Irishmen with an icy, inscrutable glare and jet-black hair pasted on his head. He looked lonely, so I took pity on him and ordered a double Dewar’s on the rocks. He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. It wasn’t his place to comment on a customer’s choice of drink, even if it was a small, brown-haired girl of twenty-three doing the boozing. I chatted with him—Sean McDunnough of Bensonhurst—and watched the people arrive.

  It was a pitiful gathering. By the time I’d finished my second drink, I counted only eleven people, including the bartender and myself, all from the Italian Department. The faculty and administrators who had made appearances at Saint Paul’s Chapel evidently felt relieved of any further obligations to the untenured Ruggero Ercolano.

  The roll of the mourners included Chalmers, his wife and daughter, Hildy Jaspers, Gigi Lucchesi, Bernie Sanger, and a tall young man introduced to me as Roger Purdy.

  I instantly pegged Purdy for a snot. He stood there slouching, his face screwed into a petulant scowl. He was sweating an oil slick, and I feared his highball glass would slide from his greasy hand and crash to the floor.

  “Hello,” he said, his voice oozing bother at having to speak to me. “Sorry about your father,” he said.

  “Do you know him well?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he repeated. “It wouldn’t be proper to say anything more.”

  “My mother used to say if you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all.”

  “Mine too,” said Purdy, and he migrated to the other side of the room.

  “What’s his story?” I asked Bernie Sanger, who had just finished chatting with Ruth Chalmers.

  “Hates your father,” he said, chewing on the roast beef. “Hates me, hates everyone. Hated Ercolano.”

  “Why does he hate my father?”

  Sanger shr
ugged, swallowed once, then again, clearing the remains of his last mouthful. “You won’t believe why.”

  “Try me.”

  Sanger smiled. “Your dad gave him a B two years ago, the only B on his transcript. Roger is the worst grade-grubber I’ve ever seen. Terminal case,” and he popped another forkful of food into his mouth.

  “Would you say he hates my father more than he hates others?”

  Sanger shrugged again. “Probably about the same. He’s a miserable sort. Say, Ellie, what are you driving at?” He seemed amused. “You’re not thinking that Roger Purdy attacked your father, are you?”

  “He’s not exactly Gorgeous George, but big enough to do the job,” I said, watching him wipe his nose into a moist and crumpled handkerchief.

  “I don’t see it,” said Sanger. “What would he stand to gain by robbing your father? He’s the youngest son of Wilbur Purdy, of Purdy and Marchol Adding Machines.”

  “Really? We’ve got lots of those at the paper where I work.”

  “They’ve made millions on those things,” said Sanger, eyeing the heir jealously. “So he has no motive for stealing odds and ends from your dad. It seems pretty clear to me that it was just a run-of-the-mill robbery.”

  “Not to me,” I said, sipping my drink.

  Sanger stopped chewing and gaped at me. “What do you mean?”

  I looked at him pointedly. “You know, Bernie, I’ve been waiting for you to ask me about my father’s manuscript.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Hadn’t you expected to get it from my father yesterday?”

  “Of course, but I met you yesterday, and I already knew about the attack.”

  “Don’t you want it now?”

  “Of course I do,” he huffed, putting down his plate to defend himself. “What are you driving at? What’s Daughters of Eve have to do with this?”

  “Did you work on it Friday night?” I asked, avoiding his question for the time being.

  “No, we had dinner at a Spanish restaurant over on Perry Street, then I walked him back to his place to get the manuscript.”

  “Did you see the manuscript, or did you just assume it was there?”

  I’d provoked him. Bernie was nervous or guilty or annoyed by my line of questioning. “Just say what you want to say. What’s the big deal about the manuscript?”

  I drained my glass. “Someone stole it Friday night.”

  The bartender poured Bernie some wine from a fiasco of Chianti. He took the glass and digested the information I’d just fed him.

  “Why?” he asked finally. “Why would anyone want to steal a scholarly text?”

  “My father once told me a joke about a scholar who calculated the worth of a sheet of writing paper. For the sake of an argument, let’s say half a cent.”

  Bernie nodded, indicating he was following me.

  “Write a poem on that same piece of paper, and it loses all its value.”

  Bernie chuckled.

  “The same can be said of scholarly work,” I continued. “In a sense, it’s worth less than the paper it’s printed on.”

  “Then why would a burglar take it?”

  “Because this wasn’t just any burglar. I think my father made a formidable enemy of someone in academe.”

  “What?” Bernie spilled some wine on his white shirt. “Are you saying that someone from the Italian Department—this department—attacked your father and stole his manuscript?”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re saying one of your father’s colleagues tried to kill him? Just on the basis of a few missing pages?”

  “Four hundred missing pages.”

  “That’s absurd! Do the police share your suspicions?”

  I shook my head.

  “You can’t run around saying things like that,” he said in a tense whisper, grabbing me by the arm. “What if someone hears you? They’ll think I agree with you. Chalmers would end my career before it gets started. As it is, I don’t think he appreciated my talking to his daughter.”

  I felt a hand on my other arm—a softer grip and a better-looking interlocutor attached.

  “Mr. Lucchesi,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

  “How’s your father today, Miss Stone?” The pain in his eyes may have been an act, but in that moment I didn’t care. I was just happy he had come to speak to me. Not that I could tell for sure what his motivation was; maybe he was indifferent and didn’t want to show it, or maybe he was trying to impress me.

  “No change,” I said.

  “Does Mr. Sanger make you thirsty?” asked Gigi, winking adorably at Bernie. “May I offer you a drink?”

  “Now that’s a gentleman, Bernie,” I said.

  “Geez, I would have asked,” he said, waved a hand in the air, and walked away.

  Then Hildy Jaspers appeared. She was a gin drinker. She confessed that her Achilles’s heel was martinis.

  “Let’s make it a gin-tonic,” Gigi said to the bartender. “She has to be careful not to get drunk in front of the profs.”

  Sean McDunnough mixed the drink, heavy on gin. He watched me as he poured, his red-iron face immobile except when he winked at me.

  “So you’re a chandelier swinger?” I asked Hildy.

  “No,” she said, sipping the drink the bartender had handed her, “I’m more likely to say something stupid.” She paused. “Or take off all my clothes.”

  “Eleonora,” called a strong voice from behind me. “I thought it was you.”

  “Professor Saettano,” I said, holding out a hand. He had to switch his cane to the left hand to shake. Hildy and Gigi drifted away. Franco Saettano was the doyen of Columbia’s Italian Department, a legendary Dante scholar, and the man who had hired my father in 1933. I knew him best of all the Columbia faculty. “How are you?”

  He attempted a shrug, which came off more like a quiver. “I’m all right.”

  “I didn’t see you at the service,” I said.

  Saettano drew some saliva off his lips with a quick swig of air. “I don’t like such ceremonies,” he said. “Reminds me of my mortality. And I hate listening to Victor Chalmers’s oratories. He can’t say hello without injecting a pedantic metaphor.”

  Unlike Bernie Sanger, Franco Saettano didn’t have to worry about others overhearing his opinions on the department or its chairman.

  “But how is Abraham?” he asked, his voice suddenly soft.

  I didn’t mind giving him the details; I knew he cared. He said he would try to visit my father in the coming days.

  “I live in Riverside Drive,” he said. “The Village is far for me.”

  Professor Saettano eased himself into a chair against the wall, taking the ponderous weight of eighty-six years off his tired legs, and we talked about Ruggero Ercolano.

  “He was an able scholar,” said Saettano. “Not brilliant, but qualified. A pleasant young man.”

  “I hear he liked the ladies.”

  “There was that, yes, but he was good. He’ll spend some time among the lustful in purgatory before passing to paradise.”

  “What about my father?”

  Saettano frowned. “Abraham has time still here on Earth. But his sins are of pride, not of the appetites.” His eyes smiled gently.

  “How are the arrogant punished in Dante?” I asked.

  “Of course, there are many arrogant souls in the Inferno and Purgatorio,” he said. “Some are seared by a fiery rain, while others are burdened with heavy stones around their necks. The punishment, you see, is rooted in a kind of divine irony: the horrors of each soul’s damnation—or time passed in purgatory, as the case may be—are somehow fit for the sins of the lifetime. For the arrogant, who hold their heads so high in pride, the weighty stones force them to bow before God.”

  “Stones around their necks?” I asked. “Fitting for a prideful professor named Stone, wouldn’t you say?”

  Saettano smiled.

  “Have you heard a rumor about my father challenging Chalmer
s for the department chair?”

  “Of course,” he said. “There was talk. Ruggero approached me to know how I would vote. I said Abraham would have my support if he wanted it. But in the end he decided to leave administration to Victor. For all his faults, he is nevertheless a good administrator.”

  “Don’t you think it strange that Chalmers was the one who found Ercolano’s body?”

  The old man shrugged.

  “After midnight on a Saturday?”

  “That is unusual, yes,” he said, bouncing his cane lightly on the linoleum floor. “But these things always have an explanation. The tragedy, of course, is that Victor did not arrive sooner.”

  “Well, the shepherd returns to his flock,” said Chalmers, arriving before us. Saettano threw me a glance to make sure I’d caught the metaphor. “I was worried when I didn’t see you at the service.”

  “Worried I was dead?” asked the old man.

  The chairman’s face dropped for a moment, his eyes flashing terror: Had he been humiliated? But just as quickly, his iceman face broke into a grin, as if he were suddenly in on the joke. Maybe.

  “Poor Ruggero,” he said, sipping a glass of Moscato.

  “I didn’t know him,” I said. “How is it the radio fell into the bathtub?”

  Chalmers shook his head. “Who knows? It’s such a waste, dying so young and so pointlessly.”

  “Eleonora, here, was wondering,” said Saettano in his strongest voice, “how it was that you were the one who found Ruggero in the tub.”

  Chalmers gulped—and it wasn’t Moscato—then looked at me. He fidgeted, took a sip from his glass, and looked at me again. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, his eyes avoiding mine. “I often stopped by to see Ruggero. We were close friends as well as colleagues.”

  Chalmers cleared his throat and excused himself. He crossed the room and joined his wife, daughter, and a new arrival: a handsome young man with a mop of sandy hair. He looked vaguely familiar.

  “Who’s that with Chalmers?” I asked Saettano.

  The old professor leaned on his cane, squinted through the smoke, then sat back. “His son, Billy.”