No one saw Aaron for more than a year. He got his degree and did a semester of graduate study in computer science. Presumably he communicated with his father and half sister, but even that was unknown to us. Because we taught together, I saw Patrick often, but he had become more withdrawn and wouldn’t socialize. People said he was looking for a job in another town. And the fall after Janice’s murder, he moved to Utica. Coincidentally it was at that time that his daughter returned to take a job as a guidance counselor in the dean of students’ office at the college. Even people who felt that Aurelius was the best town in the world didn’t see why she had returned. In fact, she moved into her father’s house.
I don’t think anybody realized Aaron was back in town, too, but his sister must have known and others as well, though Aaron avoided the bars and didn’t seem to go out much. He had moved back in December, rented an apartment in a brick apartment complex near City Hall, and was employed as an analyst for a database company in New York City, meaning he worked at home with a computer. This fact struck me as the strangest of all. Aaron had a job that enabled him to live anywhere, but he chose to live in Aurelius. But hadn’t his sister moved back as well, as if both needed to be near Janice’s ashes? Though perhaps that is too melodramatic.
As for Janice’s murder, the police were no further along than on the day of her death. Often in these cases there is knowledge even when there is no concrete evidence for a grand jury. The police have suspicions, even certainties, which get talked about. But in this case there was nothing. It was assumed that Janice met someone passing through town, or perhaps someone had visited her from out of town. Of course all the people staying at the motels, even motels fifty miles away, had been investigated.
The dominant theories were those easiest to believe: the killer was someone from far away. If anyone suggested that the killer might be a person we saw regularly—a teacher at one of the schools or someone who worked in a shop—that suggestion was met with scorn. In our minds, the case was closed. There was even a sanctimoniousness about Janice’s death: that the nature of her life, its sexual untidiness, had brought about her demise.
But we’d thought the case of Aaron McNeal had been closed as well and here he was again.
Eight
Besides Aaron, I happened to know another member of Inquiries into the Right, Barry Sanders. I had taught him in three classes—general science, biology, and advanced biology. Now he was a biology major at Aurelius College. I had tried to get him to go to one of the better state colleges, but he chose to remain here in order to be near his mother, who claimed to be sick, though I believe her illness was greatly exaggerated. Barry had been one of my best students and if he were fortunate enough to have a career in biology much of the credit would be mine.
What made it possible that Barry might not have a career in biology wasn’t his intelligence but his own uncertain nature. Even getting him to take my advanced biology, a class reserved for very few and taught in my own free time, had required much persuasion.
One thinks of the course that people cut through life. For some it seems simple. They don’t hesitate. They are handsome and intelligent and life opens up to them as the Red Sea opened before Moses. But even into the lives of these people a shadow might come. For instance, Franklin was a person whose progress seemed charmed, but who could have anticipated the death of Michelle? I would hear people say it wasn’t fair, but what does fairness have to do with anything? Yet some people appear to make it all the way through without mishap. They lead happy lives and leave behind them happy children.
Others have a constant struggle. They are shy or peculiar-looking. They stutter. They have no ability at athletics. They never lose their self-consciousness. They stumble and have a foolish snicker. They talk when they shouldn’t and remain silent when they should talk. When they hear laughter, they assume it is directed at them. Though smart, they feel stupid. Though creative, they feel dull. Their path through life resembles that of a person wading through deep mud. And many appear born this way. It almost makes me believe in reincarnation, how some people’s lives seem a punishment. And what could it be a punishment for if not for some previous sin?
Barry Sanders was albino: white hair, white skin, and pink rabbity eyes that he squinted and blinked constantly behind the dark lenses of his glasses. He was also overweight, not fat but a victim of the many treats—cookies, brownies, fudge—that his mother made for him, which was her way of apologizing for the fact that he was different from other children. And Barry was short. He was short all through school, and when he attained his full height he was five foot six. And he was shy, which was a particular curse in someone so noticeable.
In grade school Barry was known as Little Pink. Though an average student, he was quite bright. It was only anxiety that kept interfering and hurting his grades, for Barry never forgot himself. It was as if he were always outside himself, seeing himself in the classroom or standing at the edge of the playground, seeing his peculiarity in relation to others.
He lived alone with his mother, Mabel Sanders, on Birch Street. The father had disappeared when Barry was two. Mabel was office manager at State Farm Insurance. She felt that Barry was frail—although I think that untrue—and treated him as if he might break at any time. On spring days when other children removed their jackets, Barry was still bundled up. He wasn’t allowed to go trick or treating on Halloween. He couldn’t participate in sports.
Barry was the best student in my eighth grade science class and he didn’t say a word the entire year. He sat to the side about halfway back and kept his head down. He was so shy that I myself was shy about calling attention to him. I talked to him occasionally after class but he found even that a torment, especially when I was praising him for something he had done well. The boys who called him Little Pink, I made them stop.
In tenth grade biology he was better, but he still wouldn’t talk in class. A few times, however, we spoke after class, and by the end of the year he might even initiate the conversation. Of course our conversations dealt with science. I knew nothing about his life out of school, though I knew who his mother was and where they lived. I took to lending him copies of Scientific American when I was done with them, and he came to expect this and received pleasure from it.
In the spring of Barry’s senior year I realized he was gay. He was taking my advanced biology class and doing well. The class met at the end of the day and he would often stay after, at least once a week. It took several months to reach the subject of Barry’s homosexuality, but at last he admitted he had had a brief affair with a man in town, though he wouldn’t say who. When I tried to quiz him, he withdrew almost entirely. His fear seemed directed not at me but toward the man with whom he had been involved. The only further piece of information was that Barry called this person “a professional man,” as if to indicate that he wouldn’t go out with riffraff. Then it turned out that this was how the man had referred to himself. Though I knew of a few openly gay men, I didn’t think it was any of them. This became for me another of Aurelius’s small mysteries. The subject also made me mildly uncomfortable. Not the subject of gayness but perhaps Barry’s interest in me as a single man. We never reached the point where I had to say I was unavailable, but I suppose Barry sensed it. When Barry started college, I felt quite relieved. At least I wouldn’t be seeing him every day.
For the first year he lived at home. Relations between Barry and his mother, however, became strained. It wasn’t that Barry was rebellious, but he was sullen and, I think, resentful, as if his mother were at fault for his condition. She surrounded him like an old blanket, making him take pills when he wasn’t sick and fussing about drafts. She wouldn’t even let him mow the lawn, saying the outdoors was bad for him. She hired a neighborhood boy to mow it. A few times Barry described to me how he’d sit at the front window watching Sammy McClatchy mow the lawn and wish that he could be the one doing it. Really, it was a pathetic stor
y.
But at Aurelius College Barry began to make friends. Not many, just two or three, but they gave him a world to set against the world of his mother. He would still visit me at school, ostensibly to borrow my Scientific Americans, and he would tell me about young men who seemed utterly dull except for an interest in chess, science fiction, or Dungeons and Dragons. But by the second semester of his freshman year Barry entered into a relationship with one of them, a piano student from Wilkes-Barre. It didn’t last, and the result was to make Barry even angrier, not at his gayness or his mother or about being an albino but at life’s whole dreary setup, the fact that one is born, slogs along, and is dragged out against one’s will, usually screaming.
Well, there was nothing unusual about this. Barry was tired of being a freak and he sought people and systems to blame. That was why he moved into the dorm during his sophomore year, though it meant he had to work in the school cafeteria fifteen hours a week. It’s odd with people who are shy: they never quite learn how to speak, to feel at home with words in their mouths. Barry enunciated each word as briefly as possible and the result was to give his speech a jerky quality. Mostly he talked about school, his mother, and how he was doing, fairly general talk. At the end of the first semester of his sophomore year, he was still seeking something that would free him of this terrible self-consciousness. That was when Houari Chihani arrived at Aurelius College.
Barry didn’t have Chihani as a teacher that spring, though he knew of him. How could he not? But he also knew of the reading group because he was friends, or at least acquaintances, with Jason Irving, since both belonged to the chess club. And, like others, Barry might have assumed that Jason was gay, though, as I said earlier, Jason appeared to repudiate both sexes. Barry wouldn’t have joined the IIR at the beginning. He hated to call attention to himself. But after Franklin published his interview with Chihani, Barry grew curious. Then, when the theater majors Bob Jenks and Joany Rustoff joined, Jason began to pressure Barry to join too.
I don’t know if Jason would have persuaded Barry if Aaron McNeal hadn’t also joined right then. Barry was three years younger and didn’t know Aaron personally. But he knew his story as it had gradually become exaggerated. Certainly it had been dramatic for Aaron to have bitten off Hark Powers’s ear, but by the time Barry heard the story it had been raised to the level of high opera. Even Aaron’s attack on Sheila Murphy was turned into a tale that reflected credit on Aaron, though mostly among those luckless young men for whom Sheila was out of reach.
Barry joined Inquiries into the Right around the end of March. He was proud of his decision. He was striking a blow for something important, though he was never able to articulate the exact nature of that important thing. But he talked to me about it. Every couple of weeks he stopped by the high school and once or twice he visited my house, though I often discourage such visits from students or former students. After all, people gossip.
—
At the beginning the IIR met Monday evenings in a seminar room in Webster Hall. Chihani discussed the rise of the middle class after the French Revolution, the nature of imperialism, and the exploitation of labor. The group read and discussed Marx, but also Veblen and novels like The Grapes of Wrath, for Chihani’s aim was not only to teach his charges but to make them indignant. And of course Chihani controlled the discussion with his dry, passionless voice—the voice of reason, he would have said. These youngsters knew nothing of history and so even tales about the government’s involvement in Latin America upset them. In high school, American history had been a happy story; now Chihani told them the sad one.
If the IIR had been confined to these Monday meetings, it would have remained a relatively innocent endeavor, but soon Chihani began inviting the group to his house on Fridays. These were social occasions, though for Chihani no occasion was purely social. For instance, if he played music, he might play Paul Robeson and tell his students the story of that frustrated man. Or they might see a video, like Woody Guthrie’s story, Bound for Glory. Chihani was always teaching, even when he seemed to be orchestrating a social event. And much of what he said was accurate. He didn’t need to invent stories about the villainies of capitalism. Many true stories were available.
As others began to join the IIR, the meetings leaned more toward discussion than lecture. The members discussed their reading, discussed Marx, and they discussed what was wrong with Aurelius. We were the IIR’s sample community. We were an illustration of what could go wrong. The youngsters who had been members longest—Jesse and Shannon Levine, Leon Stahl, Jason Irving, and Harriet Malcomb—became, as it were, noncommissioned officers. They felt proprietorial toward Chihani and argued with the new members. The difficulty was that Aaron was older and had read more. He became the leader of the new members. While he did not argue with Chihani, he argued with Harriet and fat Leon Stahl over interpretation. Both old and new members competed for Chihani’s favor. Chihani saw this and encouraged it. After all, he wanted converts rather than friends.
We would see them other times as well. Whenever it snowed, two or three IIR members would shovel Chihani’s walk and driveway. When the weather improved, they would all sit in Chihani’s backyard on Friday evenings and argue over endless pitchers of ice tea. This was obvious to the neighbors, and even the most tolerant felt suspicious. Sometimes voices were raised and sometimes there was laughter.
By April the five new members met every Thursday in Aaron’s apartment downtown. I don’t believe they saw themselves as opposed to the others but Aaron went over what they were to discuss for the following week, coaching them, so they could hold their own against Leon and Harriet. Barry was excited about these meetings and he came to have a crush on Aaron, running little errands for him and following him around. Aaron had no sexual interest in Barry but he was flattered by the attention. Or even if he wasn’t exactly flattered, Aaron liked to exercise his power, what little power he had. He enjoyed sending Barry on errands. He even began calling Barry Little Pink, though, I think, affectionately. At least Aaron wouldn’t let anyone else call Barry by that name.
At the Monday meetings the main competition was between Aaron and Harriet. Even though Leon Stahl was well-read, he appeared, in his fatness, rather comical. He sat on the floor and needed help to get to his feet. Jesse and Shannon would drag him up, while the others laughed. For Chihani, too, there was something corrupt about being so fat. It indicated a lack of discipline, and though Chihani didn’t mock Leon, he talked to him about losing weight. I believe that Leon did cut back on his Coca-Colas or at least switch, temporarily, to Diet Coke. Leon was the most intelligent of the students, but his obesity and the various comic elements that surrounded it, such as his passion for Harriet Malcomb, kept him from being an intellectual leader. That left Harriet and Aaron.
According to Barry, the two despised each other, but it wasn’t so simple, nor perhaps was it true. In her way, Harriet was quite vicious. Her beauty, her shiny black hair, her pallor, her tiny waist and large breasts—these were her weapons. At school she wore short skirts and sweaters, away from school she wore jeans and T-shirts, both very tight. Aaron seemed indifferent to how she looked. In meetings, he spoke to her courteously but condescendingly, and always briefly, as if eager to turn his attention to someone else. She spoke to him sarcastically and he listened without apparent emotion, except perhaps with a slight smile.
Around the middle of May, Aaron mentioned to Barry that he was going to “get” Harriet Malcomb. Barry assumed he was going to make a fool of Harriet among the group, which was incorrect. They were having lunch at Junior’s, Aaron had a hamburger. Barry, having decided he was a vegetarian, ordered a salad. They sat at the counter. Aaron’s hair was receding a bit, which gave him a slight widow’s peak and made him look rather distinguished. He still wore his hair in a ponytail.
Barry asked what Aaron meant by saying that he was going to “get” Harriet Malcomb.
“I want to mak
e her my soldier.” Aaron cocked an eyebrow at Barry as if to suggest that Barry understood his meaning.
“How can you do that?”
“By making her my whore.”
Barry disliked talking about sex and he had come to think such conversations intrinsically wrong. Of course he knew that Harriet was beautiful but he prided himself on being immune to her charms. He began to stutter.
“Wha . . . what do you plan to do?”
“I want you to take her a letter.” And Aaron withdrew an envelope from his canvas book bag.
It was then that Barry understood that the day, the lunch, the time had all been chosen with the idea of delivering this letter. After all, the letter was already written. It was Thursday and Harriet had no classes on Thursday. Indeed, she made it clear that she reserved Thursdays for her IIR reading.
“What does the letter say?”
Aaron handed it to him, then grasped Barry semi-affectionately by the back of his neck. Barry wasn’t sure if Aaron meant to stroke him or to lift him like a kitten.
“It invites her to talk. It flatters her mind.”
Nine
Barry delivered the letter. It was two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in May, a blustery spring day with the sky clear one moment and full of dark clouds the next. Dust blew from the sand spread on the streets during the winter. A few retired people raked dead leaves from under their rhododendrons. Barry drove a rusty Ford Fairlane that had been his mother’s, a car with broken springs and collapsed shock absorbers that swayed like a ship on the ocean. From the rearview mirror hung a deodorant dispenser in the shape of a pine tree.
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