The Memorial Hall Murder

by Jane Langton

  “But teapots,” said Charley Flynn. “And porcelain shepherdesses. Just wait till they hear what it’s for. Porcelain shepherdesses. My God.”

  “I never said a word about porcelain shepherdesses,” said President Cheever. He was looking up over Charley Flynn’s head at the glittering diamond facets of the chandelier. “I was talking about Coptic glass, as a matter of fact, and Harvard’s distinguished collections of silver and Wedgwood. The students would not speak of porcelain shepherdesses unless they were instructed to do so by you, sir.”

  “Well, see here, now,” said Julia Chamberlain, her good-humored voice pouring over them like a pitcher of milk. “I suggest we put this matter aside for a minute or two and listen to what Professor Kelly has come to talk to us about. We don’t want to keep him waiting any longer. Is that all right with you, Jim? We’ll just let Mr. Kelly tell us what he’s got to say and satisfy ourselves the whole place isn’t about to be blown up. All in favor?”

  Homer stood up. “This morning the Nepalese Freedom Movement detonated a bomb in the central offices of the Bridgeport Insurance Company, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.”

  Around the hollow square of great chairs in the Faculty Room there were small gasps of dismay. But Julia Chamberlain thumped her fist on her agenda and shouted, “Good! Good news!” Then she made a funny face of comic apology. “Well, I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say, but for us I think it’s good, don’t you? I mean, don’t you suppose it means those crazy people don’t have anything personal against Harvard? What do you think, Mr. Kelly?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Memorial Hall clock was striking eleven when Homer walked out of the wrought-iron gate on the north side of the yard. The note of the new bell was of a different pitch from that of the church in the Yard, and the two bells clashed against each other, striking together, then one at a time in a disorderly pattern, then together once again.

  Homer wasn’t used to seeing Memorial Hall from this direction. He was astonished once again by its bulk. Ah, voilà quelque chose! some Frenchman was supposed to have said, coming upon it for the first time. Quelque chose, indeed. What a lot of nice sweet air had been displaced by this massive tombstone! This morning the transparency of the bright October sky made it seem more than ever like a mountain of densely compacted rock. Only the new iron pinnacles silhouetted like lace along the ridge of the roof seemed delicate against the light air, providing an intermediate stage or compromise between substantiality and insubstantiality. Homer was reminded of a fragment from Handel’s Messiah—the bass soloist had sung it at Ham’s funeral: For this corruptible must put on incorruption, this mortal must put on immortality.

  They had wanted the building to be noble. An inspiration to the young. They had mixed up architecture with morality. They had read Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture: The Lamp of Sacrifice! The Lamp of Truth! The Lamp of Power! The Lamp of Beauty! The Lamp of Life! The Lamp of Memory! The Lamp of Obedience! They had covered the building with Latin inscriptions and painted allegorical figures all over the stained glass. The whole thing was a sort of hodgepodge of Westminster Hall in London and the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford and the Ducal Palace in Venice and an old Navaho blanket; that was what people said. It was Picturesque Eclectic. It was awful and wonderful at the same time. And when they had finished it, they had been a little startled and taken aback. Voilà quelque chose!

  Homer began crossing the wide paths that stretched over the sunken traffic of Cambridge Street. The wind blew unobstructed, scudding yellow leaves before it, lifting them in whirlpools, throwing them against his trouser legs. He kept his eyes fixed on the turrets and towers of Memorial Hall, where something caught his eye against the glowing brick of the south side. What was that little spot of white in one of the pointed windows of the turret beside the entry? There was something out of place on the window sill. Could it be milk? Even from this distance the white object looked suspiciously like a carton of milk. Homer remembered the musty mattress on the floor of one of the tower rooms. But that had been on the other side, way over on the Kirkland Street side of the building. Maybe there was a secret inhabitant of Memorial Hall, wandering around its upper reaches at midnight, like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

  “Mr. Kelly, hey, wait a minute.”

  Homer swung around. It was the pirate, Charley Flynn, running through eddies and swirls of leaves, his coat flying forward around him. Homer waited for him and then they walked side by side, leaning back into the wind. “Meeting’s over already, is it?” said Homer.

  “Yes. Feelings were too hot. Julia Chamberlain pounded on the table and told everybody to go away and have an early lunch. They all went off to the Faculty Club. But I was satisfied. I’d said my piece.”

  “A triumphal arch.” Homer laughed. “Harvard conquers all. You know, I thought the Board of Overseers was just a polite bunch of people who put a rubber stamp on anything the rest of the administration wanted. But those people were really making a fuss.”

  “This damned school. I mean, there’s so much about it that’s good. But you’ve got to keep fighting bastards like Cheever all the time. Nobody rubber-stamps anything Cheever wants. Certainly not Julia Chamberlain. Not for this President of Harvard. The trouble is, he won’t take no for an answer. If he can’t get anybody in the administration to agree with him, he sends out letters to the alumni, over the protests of the Vice President for Alumni Affairs. There’s been a long history of this kind of double-dealing, from the very beginning, from the day he took over.”

  “Then he’s not what you’d call a popular President of Harvard.”

  “Well, no, he is certainly not what you’d call popular. But I don’t hold that against him. The president of a university doesn’t have to be everybody’s good old pal.”

  “I understand he’s a fine speaker,” said Homer encouragingly, aware of a slight sense of blood thirst.

  “Well, that’s right. He was a lecturer in the Fine Arts Department over there in the Fogg Museum. A pedagogue of the old school, I guess you’d say. I took his course in seventeenth-century painting when I was an undergraduate. It would all pour out of him, perfect polished sentences, a flood of information. Well, of course, he was a fine scholar, all right. Masses of small detail. And of course I know history is built up out of small things like the epitaphs and the laundry lists of the great men and women of the past. But somehow Cheever managed to miss out on the greatness. It just slipped through his fingers. I mean, after he was through with a picture it was hard to see it any more. I mean, to actually look at it and see the gods and goddesses reclining in the shade of the trees and the blue distances and the temples on the horizon—you know.”

  “Well, how did he get to be president of Harvard in the first place?”

  “It was Tinker’s doing. Of course, when Bok was appointed to the Supreme Court, they had a massive search for a new president. But Tinker had his finger on his friend Cheever from the beginning. Tinker was one of the four vice presidents then, and a member of the Search Committee. He managed to persuade the other members and the Fellows that what the university needed now was a genuine scholar of the old school, somebody who really cared about the classical definition of the educated man. Perhaps we had been so busy developing our professional schools, he said, that we had forgotten the good old humane studies that should have been our central concern. Our great heritage from the past, all that kind of thing. And Cheever can be charming when he wants to be. You know, dry little bony jokes. Learned witticisms. Quotations from Machiavelli, Voltaire. Anyway, they succumbed, and Tinker’s nomination won out over all the rest. Well, of course, the first thing Cheever did was to create a new officer in his administration, a senior vice president. That was a reward for Tinker. And ever since then, they’ve worked together as a team. Ever since the day he was installed. You know, I decided his election was a mistake when I saw him sitting there in the Faculty. Room five years ago with all that fancy silver in front of him—the keys, and so o
n, and the Great Salt. They haul all this ceremonial stuff out of the vault in the Pusey Library. He was enjoying it too much. It was as plain to me then as it is now that it was the trappings of the job he cared about, not the substance of the task of keeping Harvard about its proper business. Well, excuse me. I’m going the other way. I’ve got to get on over to Mallinckrodt and blow up my laboratory.”

  “Blow up your …?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’m just messing around with a highly unstable compound. And by the way, if I were really going to blow up something, I’d do it with equipment a lot more simple and sophisticated than dynamite and an old-fashioned alarm clock. I’d use one of those nice little remote-control devices kids use to fly model airplanes. I’d wire up the building with some kind of explosive and then just go away and blow the thing up at my own convenience with this little controj panel in my pocket.”

  “Well, unfortunately the old-fashioned contraption seems to have worked pretty well.”

  “But a little explosion like that isn’t typical of those Nepalese. They’re professionals. They usually blow up an entire building. They could have destroyed most of Memorial Hall if they’d gone about it the right way. All they had to do was run a wire around the foundations of the tower. Then the thing would have fallen down of its own weight. Simple. Nothing to it. Kablam. Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

  Homer shuddered.

  The chorus was still rehearsing in Sanders Theatre when he entered the memorial corridor by way of the south door. With the rose windows boarded up at either end of the long chamber, the place was cast into a kind of perpetual midnight. It took Homer a little while to get used to the darkness. The heavy chandeliers hanging from the wooden vaults cast only a dim light. From the open doors of Sanders he could hear Vick’s basses raging like the angry crowd around Pilate. He trusted in God that He would deliver Him, let Him deliver Him, if He delight in Him. And now the tenors were coming in, roaring the same thing. But they came in on the wrong beat, and Homer could hear them falter and stop, and then there was a loud laugh from Vick. Ticketytack, she was rapping on her music stand. “Now listen, men, you’ve got to sound mean. You’ve got to really sneer. This is one of those big turba choruses, where you’re all supposed to be a big crowd. You’re supposed to sound really evil, do you see? Now, once again, everybody, and this time come on, be really rotten.” They were starting over.

  Homer looked at his watch. It would be another twenty minutes before Mary would be released from Vick’s rehearsal, before their own class would begin. He opened the door to the great hall and sat down in a folding chair beside the white marble statue of John Adams guarding the door. Looking out at the enormous space, he tried to imagine it as a dining hall. Try as he would, he couldn’t picture it teeming with hungry turn-of-the-century freshmen. He couldn’t hear the clashing plates and the roar of voices. It was just an oversized empty room, so colossal that the man with a broom in his hand, entering by the door at the side, looked far away and small, almost blue with distance. Was it Crawley? No, that wasn’t Crawley. He was too tall for Crawley. And you never saw Jerry Crawley carrying a broom. The man began pushing his broom along the north wall, moving slowly away from Homer.

  “Hey, there,” said Homer. “Oh, sir!” He jumped up and began walking after the man with the broom. But the man was gone. He had opened one of the doors at the west end of the great hall and disappeared. The door led to the cloister porch, where Homer had wandered confused and lost that day last week (was it only last week?), looking for his classroom. The cloister walk was only one of the nonintersecting parts of the multitudinous separate space frames and time dimensions that were loosely called Memorial Hall. Hadn’t the man heard Homer call him? Was he deaf? He hadn’t quickened his pace at all; he had simply moved steadily out of sight and sound, like a playing piece on a game board, reaching the zone of safety before your own piece can catch up on the next throw of the dice.

  “Oh, well, the hell with it,” said Homer softly to himself. “It’s not my problem, God knows.” He looked up and shook his fist at the flaking blue ceiling high above, imagining God sitting on the loftiest pinnacle of the tower with his great feet spread out on the roofs to east and west. But the blue sky of the ceiling did not pulse with light, and no voice boomed down the balcony stairs its mighty official blessing on Homer’s hands-off policy in this matter of the death of Ham Dow. “Vengeance is mine,” God might have said, for example, or “Butt out, you big stupidhead,” or something really comforting like that.

  After all, it wasn’t as if he didn’t already have enough to do, just keeping ahead of his class. Because the class was terrifying. Sometimes he thought they didn’t know anything, but then other times he was afraid they knew absolutely everything, so if he wasn’t going to look like a fool he was going to have to bone up for every lecture, because he’d forgotten most of what he used to think he knew, and everything he had forgotten had to be grubbed up again from somewhere, and most of the time he’d forgotten where. And besides, he was doing something else. He was turning the course of lectures into a textbook. The two of them were taking turns, rewriting the lectures into chapters. And he couldn’t even keep up with that. Mary was way ahead of him. She had finished all her chapters. She was working on the index. She was clucking at him to hurry up.

  Homer looked at his watch again. There were still fifteen more minutes before the end of Mary’s rehearsal. He went back to the high transept and strolled back and forth. The chorus was still pouring jugs and vats of song out of Sanders Theatre. Homer dodged around the sawhorses in the middle of the floor and looked at the flat gray sheet of cement Mr. Maderna’s masons had laid across the new flooring. It was so wet he could write his name in it if he wanted to: KELLY WAS HERE. He resisted the temptation. He decided to spend the remaining minutes of the hour trying to decipher the Latin inscriptions on the wall. He threw back his head to look up. Then he blinked with surprise. The balcony over the entrance to the great hall was occupied. It was alive. There was someone on the balcony looking over the railing at him. Homer caught a momentary glimpse of a flashing pair of glasses, and something flapping and white, and then the thing was gone. What was it? Aha, the hunchback. The hunchback of Memorial Hall. Well, forget it. Homer sighed heavily. It was no business of his. He turned his mind to the problem of rendering pious Latin fragments into English. There was enough Latin glowing softly high over his head to sink a ship. Homer’s high school Latin was only good enough to give him a general sense of mixed batches of the same words over and over, fine phrases about the fatherland, and courage, and honor, and eternity, and holiness, and memory everlasting. Some classical scholar had been given the job of finding lofty consolations for the bereaved friends and relations of dead student soldiers, bits and pieces from scripture and the speeches of Cicero.

  O FORTUNATA MORS!

  proclaimed the inscription over Mr. Crawley’s door. Well, who would believe that? The death of a young man was never happy or fortunate. Useful, maybe, but not fortunate.

  BREVIS A NATURA NOBIS VITA DATA EST

  AT MEMORIA BENE REDDITAE VITAE SEMPITERNA …

  Homer stared at the inscription and half closed his eyes, trying to let the meaning sink in without struggling through it word by word. It was something about the shortness of life. Nature has given us a short life—that was it—but the memory of a good life endureth forever. Sempiterna. A good word. It seemed to go on foreverrrrrr. Sempiterrrrnaaaaaa. Only, memory didn’t endure forever, that was the trouble. Who gave a thought to these young soldiers now? They were just names, forgotten names on the wall. And who would remember poor old Ham Dow after a while? After this batch of students was gone? They were talking about putting up a memorial plaque for Ham, right here along with the others. But that wasn’t good enough. The memory of his life was a poor substitute for a good man cut down in his prime.

  The chorus was pouring out of Sanders now, hauling on jackets and knapsacks. Violinists and cellists were goi
ng the other way, carrying their instruments, butting open the doors with armfuls of books. Jonathan Pearlman bustled past Homer and nodded at him and walked into Sanders with Rosie Bell, and soon the timpani began thumping a mighty rubadub and Rosie’s trumpet pealed the Amen.

  Homer remembered a poem by Walt Whitman. “Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!” he said, as Mary ran toward him, pulling on her coat. “Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses.”

  And Mary grinned at him and said the rest, “So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  He had been asleep again, but now he woke up and lifted his face from the floor and stared into the darkness, listening. Could he hear something or couldn’t he? Somewhere there was a kind of rhythmic vibration. He kept feeling it in his head, and then not feeling it, and thinking it was his imagination, and then feeling it again. It was like music, like drums or brass instruments very far away. Like a marching band making threadlike sounds far away when you wait for it on the street. You hear only the thump of the drums at first, and then the toy bleating of the horns and trombones. But this was even less than that. It was only a kind of throbbing and buzzing in his temples. And now even the throbbing and buzzing had stopped.