Styx & Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  “The police are watching him tonight, and I’ve already arranged for a guard for tomorrow.”

  Saettano nodded. “Good. Then what is your next move?”

  “Actually, I’d like to pick your brain, if I may.”

  The old man smiled. “I don’t see how I can help you, Eleonora.”

  “Tell me about Dante,” I said.

  At six, Professor Saettano and I sat down at either end of the eight-foot oak table in his dining room. Libby, the professor’s companion, served the dinner and took a place next to him on the corner. I felt isolated on my far end. Saettano’s diet permitted only lighter fare, so we began with a consommé and an Orvieto Classico; he was born in Umbria and had retained a nostalgia for its grapes.

  “The Commedia is the perfect poem,” announced my host, leaning to one side to see me around a centerpiece of dried flowers. “By perfect, I mean total, complete, circular. Dante Alighieri achieved a rare union: perfection of poetic form and theological doctrine. The very structure of the poem is part of its mystical mission.” He sipped some soup, wiped his lips with the linen napkin tied around his neck, and strained to see me again. I tried to meet him halfway. “I’m sure you are familiar with the basic tenets of Christian dogma: from a condition of universal sin, we gain salvation or fall into eternal perdition. A kind of morality play with high stakes. Dante understood this, as the word commedia, or ‘play,’ indicates.

  “In brief, the story is that of the poet who has lost the right way and finds himself in a dark wood. A slave to his fear, he is set upon by wild beasts: an allegorical crisis of faith. The spirit of the poet Virgil, summoned by a divine lady—Beatrice—comes to him and leads him on a journey of redemption through the horrors of hell and the sufferings of Mount Purgatory. Then Beatrice guides him through the empyrean of paradise to the very sight of God.”

  At Libby’s urging, the professor interrupted his lecture to eat his cooling consommé. I watched her surreptitiously as we spooned our soup in silence. She was a short, vigorous woman of about sixty. I found her face to be stiff, at times stubborn, but never severe. Her gray hair, cut short for maximum ease of care, was pushed behind her ears. She wore a plain housedress and no jewelry.

  “You’re such a sloppy eater, Franco,” she scolded softly, daubing his chin with her own napkin.

  The old man said nothing, submitting meekly to his companion’s authority. Then Libby cleared the bowls and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “The Commedia,” said Saettano, resuming his lesson, “is divided into three canticles: the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, each counting thirty-three canti. The first canto of the Inferno is considered an introduction and makes the total perfect: one hundred canti in all. The rhyme scheme is terza rima, an intricate verse pattern in threes. Three is, of course, the number of canticles in the poem and of the Holy Trinity. Within this perfect structure, Dante built the perfect universe, from hell to the heavens.”

  Libby pushed through the door from the kitchen, bearing three steaming plates of spaghetti prepared with oil and garlic. Just another ascetic meal for the aging professor’s delicate constitution: tasty, but not very substantial.

  “What about punishment in the Comedy?” I asked.

  “I was getting to that,” he said, chewing a forkful of pasta Libby had chopped down to size for him. “As I told you yesterday at the reception for Ruggero, the contrapasso is a metaphysical quid pro quo of sin, judgment, and punishment. Souls condemned to hell are judged when they arrive. They are hurled into one of the nine circles of the abyss, and there they must suffer for all eternity, until judgment day. Each circle punishes a different category of sin, which is divided into three major types: sins of the leopard, sins of the lion, and sins of the wolf. These represent incontinence or lust, violence, and treachery.”

  “And violence is the most severe?” I asked.

  “No!” he said, almost shouting. Then, remembering he was not in class, he took a friendlier tone. “Treachery is the most severe class of evil. Lust is an appetite, the lowest order in the rank of mortal sins. Violence falls in the middle. It is a physical offense. Treachery is a sin of the intellect. It includes all transgressions of reason and the mind, from treason to blasphemy.”

  “So, Judas Iscariot, say, would be in hot water in the Inferno?”

  Saettano chuckled and looked to his consort, who shared his amusement. “You are confused by the ignorant stereotypes of hell, Eleonora,” he said, not exactly flattering me. (First the remark about my drinking and now this.) “Dante’s Inferno is not a furnace throughout. Contrary to popular imagery of hell, in Dante, its lowest circle is a frozen lake.”

  I blushed as I twirled the spaghetti around my fork.

  “But you are right: Judas can be found in the very pit of hell, stuffed into one of Satan’s three mouths. He is there with Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar.”

  “What about the violent?” I asked.

  “They are punished in a variety of ways. Some are cooked in a river of boiling blood. Others are burned by a fiery rain on an arid plain of the Inferno. The topography of hell is remarkably diverse.”

  “And the . . . incontinent?” (I was trying to be mature about it, but that word wasn’t cooperating.)

  “Again, it varies. There are many sins that fall into the category of incontinence. Lust, gluttony, avarice, and so on. Each punishment has its own penal logic. A famous episode from the Inferno tells of a pair of adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, who are whipped about mercilessly by a thrashing wind.”

  I paused a moment to reflect on where I might land in hell: surely among the lustful. If so, I could count on running into a few people I have known. With all respect to the Florentine poet, I didn’t buy a word of it.

  Saettano was permitted two forkfuls of the final course of the meal: a grilled scallop of veal with a squeeze of lemon.

  “You will not find me among the gluttons of hell,” he said, chewing on his pittance. “I am assured eventual salvation, as I am already in purgatory here on Earth,” and he smiled. I wasn’t quite sure I got his joke, but I chuckled nevertheless.

  We had coffee in the den. The sun had long since set, and the view from Saettano’s window was the rippled reflection of a half moon in the Hudson and the illuminated skyline on the Jersey side. The room was dark except for the fire Libby had built in the fireplace. The red and yellow flames splashed light over us, and the old man seemed to draw the same strength from their heat as he had from the sun that afternoon. The three of us sat silently for several minutes before Saettano spoke.

  “Why have you asked me these questions about the Commedia?” he said, turning his face from the fire’s glow to look at me.

  I shrugged. “Maybe it’s my way of getting closer to my father. Dante is his life’s work, and I know so little about it. I think I avoided it just because of him.”

  “Let us hope it is not too late,” he said.

  It was about nine when I put shoulder to glass and pushed through the revolving door of 26 Fifth Avenue. Rodney was sitting stiffly in his usual chair, but he was not alone. Across the lobby, sinking into one of the upholstered armchairs, Detective-Sergeant Jimmo McKeever looked like a half-folded convertible top. He rose from the chair, and the creased overcoat on his lap dropped to the floor. The little man bent over and furled it in like a sail.

  “Please excuse the interruption, Miss Stone,” he said, holding out a moist hand. “I was wondering if you had a few minutes. It’s rather important.”

  “Of course. Please come up.”

  Rodney ferried us to the fifteenth floor, and I let McKeever into my father’s apartment. His mood was troubled.

  “Couple of things,” he began. “I drove up to Westchester and checked out the cemetery.”

  “And?”

  “I think it’s unrelated to the attack on your father.”

  I stared him down, making obvious my disagreement. He sweated under my gaze then offered that there
was no evidence to connect the two crimes, that there was little evidence period at the gravesite.

  “I’ve also been looking into the Ercolano case,” he said once we were seated in the study. “Did you know him?”

  I shook my head. “I know some of my father’s colleagues, but he was new to the department.”

  McKeever rubbed his pinkish eyes with the palms of his hands. “Detective Kinlaw from the Twentieth filled me in on the details of the case. Looks like a simple bathing accident, but who knows? He recommended that finding, pending the coroner’s report. Everything was in order, everything according to Hoyle, so he wanted to drop the whole thing.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  The cop drew a long sigh. “I think Ercolano was your burglar.”

  “I led a second search of Ercolano’s apartment on Eighty-Seventh Street this afternoon,” said McKeever as we sped up Tenth Avenue, then Amsterdam, in the backseat of a squad car. “We dusted for prints and asked the neighbors if they had heard or seen anything that night.”

  “Had they?”

  McKeever looked out the window at the passing streets as we negotiated the trivium at Seventy-First. “A fuse blew, but nothing else that night. And it seems this Ercolano fellow was quite the ladies’ man. The old widow next door says he had a parade of young lovelies filing in and out of his apartment at all hours. Thinks it’s too bad what happened, but at least she won’t have to listen to the bed banging against the wall every night.”

  He blushed and excused himself for his bad manners.

  “Any descriptions of his regular visitors?”

  “We’ve got some leads, no names yet.”

  The patrol car streaked past Eighty-Seventh Street without slowing down. I cranked my head around to watch the street sign recede.

  “We’re not going to Ercolano’s place,” said McKeever dryly. “I want you to have a look at something up at Columbia.”

  The campus was still in the cold January night. Having lived at home during my undergraduate years, I had never known the feeling of enclosure that clung to me now. Hamilton Hall was dark. McKeever nodded to the watchman waiting outside, who let us in and switched on the foyer light.

  We rode the elevator to the sixth floor and the Italian Department, where McKeever led us to number 605: Ruggero Ercolano’s office.

  “Do you recognize any of this?” he asked, sliding open a desk drawer to reveal a potpourri of writing instruments, ink cartridges, and scattered papers.

  I nudged a pair of gold pens in the drawer, turning them over to see better.

  “I know these,” I said. “My grandfather gave them to my father fifty years ago. He was a musician. And that strongbox in the back looks familiar. Have you opened it?”

  McKeever nodded. “I’m pretty certain it belongs to your father. We found some money and silver things, but nothing with his name on it. We’ve dusted everything for prints, and we’ll have the results tomorrow.”

  I sat down in the swivel chair behind Ercolano’s desk and surveyed the scene, rocking lightly. The office was organized in a functionally efficient manner; not obsessive, just neat, logical piles of papers, books, and an Olympia typewriter. I glanced at the black telephone on his desk—extension 339—leafed through a library book on Byron, then looked up at the shelving against the wall. The spines of the books, lined up in straight rows, bore names like Manzoni, Verga, and Foscolo. Luminaries in the Italian canon, perhaps, but to my ignorant and Anglocentric mind, they were more obscure than Jude.

  The other drawers of Ercolano’s desk were empty except for some interoffice envelopes and a couple of writing pads.

  “Anything in his papers?” I asked.

  McKeever shrugged. “Memos, notes, some kind of book in progress. We’re not finished going over it all yet, and it’s all in Italian.”

  “What about his apartment? Does anything there match the articles stolen from my father’s place?”

  The detective shook his head. “But we can have another look.”

  “I’d like to browse through some files here first,” I said. “The confidential personnel files in the locked cabinet behind Miss Little’s desk.”

  McKeever gaped. “Well, all right. I don’t see the harm.”

  We popped open the filing cabinet with little trouble—McKeever knew a few tricks—and dug in. The cop stood to one side as I pulled several files: Stone, Ercolano, Chalmers, Bruchner, Sanger, Purdy, Petronella, Jaspers, and Lucchesi.

  Starting with my father’s, I found a curriculum vitae; tax and payroll information; memos from the chancellor and president pertaining to awards, salary raises, and general administrative details. One interesting item chronicled Chalmers’s attempt in 1952 to impose a loyalty oath among the department faculty. It was the height of the Red Scare, and Columbia’s administration took a strong anti-Communist position. My father and Franco Saettano refused to sign, and Chalmers ended up as the only signatory.

  I closed the folder and moved on to Ruggero Ercolano, a graduate of the Università di Bologna, with a PhD from Johns Hopkins. He was on a tenure track, due for review in the spring of 1962. The information was thin, and about all I could gather was his American Social Security number, visa, and vital statistics. There were some letters of recommendation written on his behalf, all laudatory—at least the ones in English were. I found a photostatic copy of the first page of his passport and visa stamp. A photograph of the late professor stared up at me from the grainy black copy, his jaw thrust upward and to the side in a pompous philosophical pose. Ercolano was born in 1926 in Parma and had been living in Bologna when his passport was issued.

  Victor Chalmers, according to his CV, was born in 1907 in Baltimore, graduated Choate and Dartmouth before earning his doctorate in 1935 at the University of Chicago. He was hired by Cabrini College outside Philadelphia immediately thereafter, and came to Columbia in 1943 after a three-year stint at Georgetown. He was 4-F during the war. The file didn’t say why.

  Gualtieri Bruchner: visiting professor from the University of Padua. He was a specialist in twentieth-century Italian literary and cultural movements, from Futurism to Cubism to Neorealism. He came highly recommended, according to a letter from Professor Arturo Marescialli, an old acquaintance of my father’s. Bruchner was born in 1908 at Merano in the Alto Adige region of northern Italy. He, for one, hadn’t spent the war teaching grammar on the Main Line. A brief biographical sketch explained: A Jew, Bruchner was deported in January 1944 to Auschwitz. He was liberated from the camp on January 27, 1945 (fifteen years ago to the day) by the Red Army, then he spent another year in a displaced-persons camp in Germany before finally returning to Milan in June 1946. He pursued studies in classics and Italian literature at Turin from 1947 to 1953, rather late in life, but he gets a free pass in my book. Working full-time as an upholsterer in the FIAT automobile plant, Bruchner supported himself through six tough years while completing his degree. A virtual autodidact, the gray man had risen above prejudice, genocide, and the alienation of modern times to make something of himself. No wonder they had invited him to Columbia, even if for one year only.

  Bernard B. Sanger, born 1934 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, had come to study Italian literature at Columbia after a stellar undergraduate career at City College. According to a letter attached to his original application for admission, he had wanted to study Dante at Columbia since reading my father’s Dante at the Edge of the City of Dis for an undergraduate seminar on world literature classics. I found Bernie’s letter pandering, but how can you gauge sincerity on a typewritten page? Under my father’s tutelage, Bernie had distinguished himself among the other graduate students from the start, and, judging by the comments in his file, he was following the straight and narrow to a distinguished academic career.

  Roger Purdy hailed from Greenwich, Connecticut, though I doubted he had spent much time there growing up. His CV told of seven years at Hotchkiss and four at Yale before coming to Columbia. His test scores were nearly perfect, and h
is outside references impeccable. I found a copy of an official transcript from May 1959, stapled to a stack of mimeographed letters. Circled in red ink on the transcript was a B for a course from the spring semester of 1959 titled Divine Comedy. My father’s name appeared at the far right as the instructor. The attached correspondence began with a formal letter of protest from Purdy, complaining to Chalmers of the unfair mark. There followed the chairman’s response to Purdy and a brief note of inquiry to my father, who answered in a terse memo that Purdy had earned a B, no more, no less, and the grade would stand. The polemic continued with a letter from Purdy to the dean, the dean to Purdy, then to Chalmers, who in turn answered the dean. Purdy’s father got into the act later, offering to make a generous donation of $2,000 to the university, ostensibly with no strings attached. My father was urged in subsequent letters to reconsider the grade. He did, offering to reduce it to a B-minus in light of an unattributed quotation he’d discovered in the course of his subsequent review of Mr. Purdy’s final paper. The grade remained a B, and Chester Purdy withdrew his offer with no explanation.

  Anthony Petronella served as assistant professor of Italian from September 1954 to May 1958, when he was denied tenure and asked to move on. A copy of Petronella’s departmental review showed Professors Saettano and Stone opposed to Petronella’s tenure. Chalmers had voted no as well, though he voiced no strong reasons. My father’s argument against centered on Petronella’s limited achievements within the narrow interests of his scholarship: eighteenth-century poets.

  Hildy Jaspers, twenty-five years old, had graduated from Rosemont College on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. Her recommendations and academic honors painted a picture of a free-spirited intellectual, the brightest girl in class. On the personal side, however, a sister from Rosemont cautioned the department on Miss Jaspers’s sometimes-wayward comportment, especially with members of the opposite sex. The faculty’s evaluation of her application did not seem to consider the sister’s alarm germane to Miss Jaspers’s academic potential. Her grades at Columbia were excellent, though her dossier contained none of the high praise and promise of a Bernard Sanger, or the ugly grade war waged by Roger Purdy. In fact, there were no opinions anywhere in her file (besides the good sister’s) on Hildy’s human or personal side. I pictured the faculty meetings: four dour professors discussing the new crop of graduate students. Good work, yes, quite satisfactory, keen mind, excellent promise. But none was so bold as to be the first to volunteer an opinion on Miss Jaspers’s shapely figure, coquettish behavior, or racy reputation.