by Jane Langton
“Well, I guess I see what you mean,” said Homer. “He was somewhat lower than the angels, as people say. Is that it?”
Sloan Tinker made a hooting noise in his throat. “Lower than the angels. I should think he was. He was a slobbering pig of a man. Not exactly what one would like to see as an example for the young men and women in this institution. Think of the gluttony! To have become so obese!”
It was a shame Ratchit wasn’t here, thought Homer. Ratchit could have made some remark about the magnificent human body God had given you, so you ought to take care of it, right? But then he forgot about Ratchit, because Cheever was talking again about Pico della Mirandola, and it was clear to Homer that he was witnessing James Cheever at his best, warming to a subject in which he was at home.
“You know, Mr. Kelly, when I read the Oration on the Dignity of Man, I often think of Harvard University. Pico speaks of the friendship through which all rational souls shall come into harmony in the one mind which is above all minds, how they shall in some ineffable way become altogether one. I think of this university as Pico speaks of the soul, that it may be adorned with manifold philosophy as with the splendor of a courtier, surrounded by a varied throng of sciences, to become the bride of the King of Glory. Of course, in my opinion what Pico meant by the King of Glory was simply those things that are of eternal value—truth, beauty, justice—all that I hope we cherish in this university. I mean in the fundamental sense. Our ultimate purpose as educators here.”
“Well, yes,” murmured Homer, who was becoming more and more befuddled. “You mean, like veritas and all that sort of thing.”
Sloan Tinker leaned forward. “The point is, Mr. Kelly, some of us think of this university as setting a standard. Our students, after all, are the most sifted of the sifted, the best the nation has to offer. And therefore we owe them something rather out of the ordinary. And one man’s truth can be another man’s poison. We must choose what we offer them very carefully.”
“There is only one thing we must offer them, on pain of failing our stewardship,” said James Cheever. “One precious thing. The little flame of scholarship. It’s all we have. So we must do our best to guard it, to keep its flickering light from going out. For example, consider the pressure from the state. Harvard receives seventy million dollars a year from the federal government, a relationship that calls for a certain wariness—not altogether unlike that of our Harvard forebears Mather and Brattle and Leverett, when Massachusetts Bay lost her Royal Charter, and Sir Edmund Andros landed in Boston in 1686 with a commission as Governor from the Crown. We must hoard our precious inheritance and keep it sacred, and pass it along. There are only a few of us in every generation. A little band of scholars down through the years. A saving remnant. That’s all Harvard is. Nothing more.”
“But what does all this have to do with Ham Dow?” said Homer, trying to bring the conversation back down to earth. “He was one of the barbarians, you mean? The Visigoth, sweeping down on the monastery? You mean his one hot breath could snuff that candle out?”
Sloan Tinker chuckled. “That’s about it. Personally, I think what bothered me most was his lack of professional decorum. There is ideally a certain distance between a professor and his students. Dow paid no attention to this delicate boundary. And you know, Mr. Kelly, even in the Music Department there was some question about his professional competence. I don’t know whether you were aware of that or not.”
“There was?” Homer lifted his eyebrows in surprise.
“You should talk to one or two of his peers in Paine Hall. You’d be interested, I’m sure, to learn that his taste was rather too catholic to suit some of the more discriminating members of the music faculty. And there was some question, too, about the standard of musical judgment exhibited at his performance of Handel’s Messiah every year.”
“Some question? What do you mean?”
“It was just a little too much of a circus, if you see what I mean. For instance, just as an example, there was the way he encouraged the audience to join in singing the “Hallelujah Chorus.” In the middle of the concert he would turn around and conduct the entire audience in a gigantic sing-along. Now, I hardly think a community sing is what Handel had in mind, do you? That is, I’ve heard some repercussions from people of unquestioned musical taste whose opinion I trust.”
“Again,” said James Cheever, “it gets down to standards. The man had no standards. He didn’t know the wheat from the chaff. He had as many outsiders among his friends and supporters as he did students. Some very peculiar people indeed. And what about those women who were living in his house? One of them is pregnant, I understand. Well, you can draw your own conclusions. I mean, all questions of professional excellence aside, as a moral example to the student body the man was dangerous. His ego seemed to demand that he become a kind of Pied Piper. I think a man of that type is a menace in any institution of higher learning. Don’t forget, Mr. Kelly, not only did the Pied Piper charm the rats; he charmed the children too, and led them astray forever.”
Rats. The word was well chosen. In Ham’s case the rats and the children had been one and the same. Innocently Homer let his gaze rove the ceiling. “You don’t suppose it was merely kindness on his part? You don’t suppose it was simple kindness?”
“Oh, rot,” said Sloan Tinker.
“Oh, well,” said James Cheever. His face, which had been alight with malice, turned bland once more. He stood up. The audience was over.
But Homer wasn’t finished. He hadn’t yet asked his question. He couldn’t think of any polite way to insert it harmlessly into the conversation, so he let it fall from his lips crash-smash. “I don’t suppose, sir, you had an appointment with Ham Dow on the sixteenth, did you? His appointment book has turned up, and it shows that the person he was to meet at eleven-thirty had the initials J.C., like J.C. for James Cheever.”
Tinker made a contemptuous noise in his throat. But Cheever merely blinked at Homer and then leaned to one side and called Mrs. Herbert. Mrs. Herbert bobbed into the room. She was instructed to show Mr. Kelly the President’s appointments for October sixteenth. Mrs. Herbert went back into her office and returned with a big loose-leaf notebook, and held it up for Homer to see.
“I see an entry for eleven o’clock,” said Homer. “See there? ‘11 A.M. Memorial Hall.’”
“Oh, no, that wasn’t Wednesday,” said Mrs. Herbert. “That was Tuesday, the day before. Mr. Cheever took part in a ceremony in Sanders Theatre on Tuesday to start the clocks.”
“The clocks?” said Homer.
“The four new clocks on the new tower steeple,” said James Cheever. “I pushed a button precisely at noon and the clocks chimed twelve and began running for the first time. A terrible waste of money, if you ask me. An utterly useless new steeple on that hideous tower, and a set of four fabulously expensive clocks made in Germany. At any rate, that ceremony was the day before. As you can see, there is no appointment for Wednesday other than the two-o’clock meeting with George Croft, the Vice President for Administration. It was right here in my office. Thank you, Mrs. Herbert. That will be all.”
“What about you, Mr. Tinker?” said Homer, firing off a careless shot in another direction. “Have you got one of these little black appointment books on you anywhere?”
Sloan Tinker reddened, but then he drew something out of the inside pocket of his coat. It was his little black book. He flipped the pages silently, then held the book forward under Homer’s nose. “Two P.M., Croft,” he said.
“Ah, yes, but eleven-thirty has been written in and circled on that date,” said Homer, pouncing. “What does the circle mean?”
Tinker looked again at his little black book, then closed it and tucked it back in his pocket. “I really cannot say.”
But Cheever tapped on the table. “It was going to be at eleven-thirty that day, remember, Tinker? The meeting with George. And then it was changed to two o’clock. That must be why you circled eleven-thirty.”
“Oh, yes, I had forgotten.”
Homer stood up at last and said thank you. He shook hands with the two of them and left the room. As he closed the door behind him he looked back for a moment and saw them silhouetted against the dappled light pouring into the window behind them. They might have looked the same fifty years ago. A hundred. Maybe they were what kept a place like this going, decided Homer gloomily. Stalwart Yankee bastions of conservatism. Harvard past, Harvard present, Harvard sempiterna. A little band of scholars. A saving remnant. “Remnants are okay,” said Homer, speaking up cheerfully to Mrs. Herbert. “But no rags or patches, please. Let’s not have any of those.”
“Right you are,” said Mrs. Herbert gamely. “As a matter of fact, I’m going out this afternoon and buy myself a new dress. Something absolutely smashing.”
Homer beamed at Mrs. Herbert. She was a woman after his own heart. It might be worth his while to test her out. “Do you know offhand, Mrs. Herbert, why the meeting with Mr. Croft last Wednesday was changed from eleven-thirty in the morning to two in the afternoon?”
“Changed?” said Mrs. Herbert. “It wasn’t changed. I arranged the two o’clock meeting at the request of Mr. Tinker.”
“Mr. Tinker? Oh, well, then, I misunderstood.”
Homer walked out of Massachusetts Hall and looked around for a moment to get his bearings. He gazed for a moment at the Johnston Gate, an elaborate barrier of brick and wrought iron that separated Massachusetts Hall and Harvard Yard from the traffic in the square. For James Cheever the iron gate was something that contained, guarding and protecting the Yard from the teeming street outside. Whereas Ham Dow had tried to throw open all the gates, to expose the narrow space within the brick walls to the wide world. Well, that was a sentimental notion perhaps. It sounded generous and fine, but what did it really mean? Maybe the man had been a corrupting influence, the way Cheever had said, snuffling around there at the bottom of the great chain of being.
“Oink,” said Homer aloud. “Oink, oink,” and a couple of women students going the other way looked at him and laughed.
Chapter Twenty-one
Ham spoke up. Why hadn’t he tried it before? Why was it taking him so long to get his wits together? He was still so dizzy, that was why. Merely turning his head from side to side was enough to send him off into a spinning sickness. But the water in the pipe was helping. He had been waking up and lapping at the pipe and drowsing off again, and waking up to drink once more. This time he felt less ill. His mouth still tasted foul, and he wished he could brush his teeth, but his head felt perceptibly better. Ham hunched his shoulders up off the floor and coughed and said, “Hey, there,” in a hoarse whisper. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. “Hey, out there.”
He held his head still and listened.
There was no answer. He dropped his head back on the floor. He would keep it up. He would call out every now and then, in case somebody happened to come within earshot. Because this place might be some broom closet in an inhabited building, next to a passage that went somewhere. All he had to do was keep calling out, and they’d hear him eventually, people going by. They would stop and listen, and then they would call back, and pretty soon they’d open the door and say, “Well, for God’s sake, so that’s where you’ve been. We’ve been looking for you all over the place.”
“Hey, hey, help, help.”
It hurt his head to shout. But he called out a few more times anyway, cocking his head up, staring into the darkness. Then he lay back and listened once again.
There was no response. There was nothing in his ears but the echo of his own voice. And there was something dread about the way it battered back at him, as though the noise were not getting out at all. There was something ominous in the silence. It wasn’t the temporary quiet of some useful chamber with a door giving on the outside world. It was the silence of—well, go ahead—it was the silence of the grave.
For the first time since he had begun waking up and going back to sleep, Ham permitted himself to wonder whether he might not have been buried alive underground. Or walled up alive like the man in Poe’s story. At least he wasn’t stretched out on some undertaker’s cushion in a coffin that had been locked over his still-breathing body and lowered into the ground too soon. This hard littered surface was no coffin. That much was sure. But there was still the poor bricked-up wretch in “The Cask of Amontillado.” That man’s fate wasn’t out of the question yet.
With a groan Ham sat up, and then struggled to his feet. Instantly his head began to throb. He was aching in every limb. He held his head with one hand, stretched the other in front of him, and began shuffling one foot in front of the other. This vault or hole or cave or subterranean chamber was small in size, he was sure of that. The echoes of his voice had rebounded too quickly. The room was very small. He had measured the size of the chamber with his ears, like a bat.
His shuffling feet nudged an obstruction. Ham stooped and felt it. The obstacle was a great beam of wood, slanted up off the floor. He had crawled out from under it. He could remember doing that. Following the beam with his fingers, Ham found the wall against which it leaned. Then, to his satisfaction, his groping hands discovered hinges, a doorknob. The beam of wood was leaning against a door. If he could move the beam aside, he might be able to open the door.
Gasping, he tried to push the high end of the beam to one side. But it was wedged against the door. He would have to raise it first. Lift now, lift, lift. There. Ham shuffled his toes backward, as the beam dropped and thudded heavily to the floor. Then he sagged to his hands and knees and leaned his whole weight against it, trying to shove it out of the way. Grudgingly it grated on the littered floor and slid sideways. Ham lay flat and rested for a few minutes. The effort had exhausted him. Then he stood up once again and felt his way to the door. He found the doorknob with his fingers. It refused to turn. It was locked. The door was locked. Discouraged, his strength giving out altogether, Ham sank to his knees and leaned his head against the door. “Hey, out there,” he whispered again. “Hey, hey.”
Chapter Twenty-two
The place was beginning to get a grip on Homer. Every time he opened the battered door and stepped into the high windy space that ran through the middle of the building, the lofty corridor with its banging doors at both ends and its population of students taking shortcuts from classrooms and laboratories along Oxford Street to Quincy Street and the Yard, he felt pulled farther in, as though Memorial Hall were a kind of labyrinth of varnished wood. There was a spacious compartmented melancholy about it that peculiarly attracted him. Trying to put his finger on it, all he could think of was—of all the idiotic things—old lithographs by Currier and Ives, those jolly Currier and Ives calendar pictures of farmyard scenes, or sleighs dashing out of forests. Only it wasn’t the hearty farmer and his wife or the fashionable lady and gentleman in the sleigh that were like the building. It was the woods in the background of all the pictures. All those Currier and Ives calendar pictures had the same thick woods, the same dark tangle of winter branches, or the same dense summer shade of trees in the woodlot, growing darker and darker as one looked deeper and deeper in.
It was the forest into which the farmer and his wife and the lady and gentleman would one day disappear. One by one they would slip into the dark woods. The gentleman in his frock coat and the lady in her thick skirt would move around the trunks of the trees and vanish. This building with its forest of varnished lumber reminded Homer of the woods. Only that moment the dead soldiers whose names lined the walls had slipped through the door into the great hall, or they were ascending or descending a staircase, or hovering in the shadows at the top of the balcony in Sanders Theatre, or moving slowly from level to level in the dim spaces of the tower, or occupying the dusty rooms in the turrets at either side, like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
But the soldiers were not real. Homer wasn’t about to frighten himself with a population of ghosts from the Union Army. It was only the hunchback who turned out to exist,
after all.
It was Tuesday morning. Tuesday wasn’t ordinarily a class day, but Mary was busy with students just the same, making herself available, helping them choose topics for the first paper of the semester. She would be through at twelve o’clock. Homer looked at his watch. He was early. He could hear music in Sanders Theatre. He poked his head in the door to see what was going on, and found Vick Van Horn working with a couple of her soloists. He walked into the amber light and sat down on one of the benches at the side.
Betsy Pickett was standing at the front of the stage. Tim Swegle, the tenor, was waiting his turn. Jack Fox was accompanying Betsy at the harpsichord. “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” sang Betsy, “and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” Vick was brooding at the back of the hall, staring at Betsy, her elbows on the back of the bench in front of her, her chin in her hands. Betsy’s thin trembling voice was a silver wire, a floating spun-glass thread. She was lost in her own miracle. Her seamless outpouring flowed around Homer. He could feel the ethereal spirals of her aria curling around the little iron pillars that supported the balcony, wreathing the rising rows of benches, billowing over the white marble statues of Josiah Quincy and James Otis, filling all the spaces and interstices of the forest of Sanders Theatre. Even the wooden volutes above the stage seemed ready to spring open and flower lush oaken blossoms in celebration of Betsy’s faith in the risen Christ, in all things of the spirit, in everything true and—