by Jane Langton
“Hey, hey, I’m right here,” cried Ham. “Open the door!”
But the steps had begun again on the stairs. Again he heard the light tread on one step after another. This time it was diminishing, going away.
And then the hammering began again. Crash crash crash. The vault was being sealed once again with heavy boards and long sharp nails. The coffin lid was again being fastened down. Ham could feel the blows of the hammer shivering into his own flesh.
The hammering stopped. The silence began again. This time it was unbearable. Ham began to sob. He reached his hand up toward the top of the door where he had seen a strip of light. His blood thundered in his head. He fainted, and slumped heavily to the floor.
Chapter Thirty-one
Class was over, but it took Homer twenty minutes to work his way through the students crowding around him. He was starved, but then someone came running down the aisle with a plate of Mrs. Esterhazy’s pastry, and pretty soon Homer was trying to talk and eat at the same time.
Today’s lecture had been altogether too successful. It was the second half of his Abraham Lincoln chapter. Homer suspected he had made the mistake of telling one too many of Lincoln’s funny stories. And perhaps there had also been just a drop too much of awe and affection, in spite of the trouble he had taken to crush any remaining illusions his students might have had about the great emancipator. The students were an unsentimental lot, on the whole, hard-boiled in the cleansing water of historical cynicism, wary with disbelief. But today they had lapped up Homer’s lecture. It was the martyrdom that had finished them off. Like everybody else, they were suckers for a good martyrdom. Lincoln had been another martyred saint, like the dead Union soldiers whose praises lined the walls in the memorial transept upstairs. Abraham Lincoln should have had a tablet to himself in that wooden Valhalla. Only, of course, that would have been impossible, because the poor soul had never been to Harvard. (There was going to be another memorial. Homer had heard the rumor. The President of Harvard was going to dedicate a bronze tablet in the memorial corridor to the memory of Hamilton Dow. But then Ham had been a genuine alumnus of Harvard University, so that was all right.)
Homer accepted another piece of cake and looked around at his teeming classroom. Who were all these people? Some of them were members of Vick’s choir, Homer was sure of that. He recognized Jennifer Sullivan and Tim Swegle and Mrs. Esterhazy and Betsy Pickett, and that old guy who was the bass soloist—what was his name? Mr. Proctor. Mr. Proctor came down the aisle and tapped Homer’s chest and began talking about all the cities and towns in the country that had been named after Abraham Lincoln, especially Lincoln, Nebraska, which was Mr. Proctor’s home town.
At last Homer was able to excuse himself. He walked out of the lecture hall and around the outside of the building and then in again by the south door to pay his daily respects to the great draf ty vestibule, where he now felt so much at home. He never seemed to tire of wandering up and down the hall in the gloom, gazing up past the boarded windows at the wooden vaults rising dimly overhead. Today the memorial tablets on the walls invited reverie on the subject of martyred saints, and Homer remembered what Henry Thoreau had said about saints: that Christ was always crucified, and Copernicus and Luther forever excommunicated, human nature was so brutal and depraved.
Ham Dow was a case in point. Homer was beginning to get a sort of instinctive notion in his head, that the bombing in which Ham had lost his life had been a malicious intentional murder, rather than a random act of violence by a crowd of militant outsiders. The man had inspired too much affection for his own good. Homer looked up now at the golden shimmer of Latin words running around the high walls. They were noble sentiments, all of them. Everyone had believed in noble sentiments in those days. Nowadays if a noble sentiment stuck its head out of a foxhole, it was swiftly decapitated. That was what had happened to Ham. He had been a living, breathing noble sentiment, and maybe that was the whole trouble. He was another goddamned bleeding Messiah, cut down in the midst of his teaching.
And therefore the man from the FBI and the people at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms could waste all the time they wanted to, tracking down rumors about the Nepalese Freedom Movement. The Nepalese didn’t have anything to do with it. Homer was more interested in someone whose initials were J.C., someone Ham had expected to meet right here on this spot at eleven-thirty on the morning of October sixteenth. Who was J.C.? If Ham’s death had been accidental, if he had merely happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time when some underground organization had exploded its Harvard bomb, what had happened to J.C.? Why had he not come forward? It looked to Homer as if someone had set the bomb to go off on Wednesday, October sixteenth, at eleven-thirty in the morning, right there in the middle of the high corridor running through the middle of Memorial Hall, and then had lured Ham to that place at that time under the pretext that J.C. would expect him there.
Query: How had the bomber known where in the basement to attach his explosive device? The basement was a rabbit warren, a complex labyrinth of little rooms and corridors. In order to determine what coincided with what, one would have to superimpose a plan of the first floor over a plan of the basement.
Who would have access to a set of plans? Where would the plans be?
Homer stood on the smooth cement that had been poured into the broken floor by Mr. Maderna’s craftsmen, and listened to the bell in the tower chime a single stroke for one o’clock. Mr. Maderna would have a set of plans. Surely he would have plans for every building within his domain. Donald Maderna would know the place inside out, if anybody would.
Homer consulted his pocket map, and then he set out along Oxford Street in the direction of the Buildings and Grounds Department for the North Yard. The day was raw and cold, with a heavy mist lowering over the city of Cambridge. Halfway to his destination, Homer turned around and looked back at Memorial Hall. Shaggy clouds were dragging tattered shreds over the roof. This time Homer saw the building as a pathetic enormous beast, some fabulous ill-assorted creature crouched warily on its haunches. Its long backbone was knobby with vertebrae. The iron finials along the ridge were like birds picking fleas from the back of a rhinoceros. It was a behemoth, a camelopard, a vast griffin of a building. The fog pressed down on the tower and the building weighed down on its foundations and the foundations crushed down into the earth so heavily that it was a wonder to Homer that the entire planet was not lurched into a lopsided orbit. Ponderous as it was, Memorial Hall seemed threatened. In his imagination Homer saw it rising gently in the air, burst asunder in some final tremendous disaster, some dreadful last day, its monstrous fragments flying skyward, then pelting down again to bury Vick and all her musicians and Handel’s entire Messiah and all the rabble in the basement and Homer Feeble-minded Kelly in one colossal mountain of rubble. Maybe Freddy Fulsom was right. Maybe the Time was at Hand.
Homer turned around again and loped along Oxford Street. As he ran, he amused himself by imagining all the massive blocks of science buildings left and right exploding too, catapulting into the air in enormous chunks of brick and masonry. The study of science at Harvard would go boom, all these practical buildings for biology and geology and physics that had cropped up since the time of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz had collected specimens for his University Museum of Comparative Zoology with the help of people like Henry Thoreau. And Asa Gray had started the Herbarium. But of course, they weren’t the first scientists at Harvard. The study of natural philosophy had been an accepted discipline for years before that. And chemistry. There had been chemists here forever too, like young Charley Flynn, the buccaneer. Charley Flynn would know how to blow up a building. BOOM BOOM, so much for Mallinckrodt! KABOOM KABAM, farewell to the Science Center! KABOOMITY BIM BOM BAM, good-bye to the University Museum with its glass flowers! Oh, no, not the glass flowers! Oh, no, not tinkety-klinkety-smashity-crash! all those fragile botanical specimens of hand-blown glass, all blasted into a billion pieces by the mad bomber Charley Flynn! Hastily Ho
mer glued all the billion pieces of the glass flowers together again in his mind and looked around for 42 Oxford Street.
The Buildings and Grounds Department for the North Yard was at the end of a side lane next to the Engineering Sciences Laboratory. Forty-two Oxford Street looked like a train going around the bend. It had once been a cyclotron, that was the reason. They had fired atomic particles around a curving track, splitting atoms into pieces, until the project ran out of federal money. So now the big magnets had moved out and Donald Maderna had moved in.
Maderna’s phone was ringing when Homer walked into his office. He picked it up and waved Homer to a chair. “North Area Maintenance Office,” he said. “Oh, yes, the clock. You mean the four clock faces on the tower of Memorial Hall. Yes, I know, we’ve had a number of complaints that the clock is now too fast. I’ve sent somebody over there to shut it off. We thought we had it fixed the first time. We must have had a hundred calls the first day. Everybody was ten minutes late to class. We had to get this expert back again, the specialist who got the thing running in the first place. He travels all over the country, you see, adjusting big public clocks. Only he got the thing going a little fast this time, so now we’ve got to get hold of him again to slow it down. Don’t worry. We’ll attend to it.” Donald Maderna put the phone down and turned to Homer.
“The clocks aren’t running right?” said Homer. “The clocks on the tower of Memorial Hall?”
“Oh, it’s just a matter of getting the fine tuning straightened out, so to speak. A big clock like that, if the compensation is off a little bit, the whole city of Cambridge is five minutes early or late. Oh, I’m sorry.” His phone was ringing again.
Homer got up and crossed the room to look at the charts on the wall, while Mr. Maderna talked to a representative of the Cambridge Exterminating Company. “It’s cockroaches this time. Cockroaches in Richards Hall.”
Mr. Maderna’s charts were fascinating. The names of the seventy-five buildings in his domain ran up and down the left side of the chart and the fifty-two weeks of the year ran from left to right across the top. Mystic symbols were written in the squares of the chart to show what needed to be done to each of the buildings and on what particular date. Another wall was covered with a job order board. There were rows and rows of wooden pegs hung with green slips of paper under the headings PLUMBER REFRIG STEAM ELECT LIGHT GLASS MASON KEY CARP ROOF MILL.
“My God, Donald,” said Homer, when Maderna at last put down the phone, “this is a big operation you run here. I mean, you’re a sort of four-star general with armies of colonels and captains and privates defending the health and physical well being of Harvard University, keeping the whole place running smoothly, right? How many people are there in Buildings and Grounds, all told?”
“You mean altogether? The whole university? Oh, there must be, oh, maybe as many as fifteen hundred people, if you include the Business School and the Med School. Now, what can I do for you, Homer?”
“Well, I just wondered if you’ve got some plans and layouts of Memorial Hall here that I could see. And I’d like to know if anybody has been using them lately.”
“Why, certainly. I’ve got them right here.” Donald Maderna rose from his chair and pulled open a file drawer in a cabinet beside his desk. It was a wide cabinet with shallow drawers. “This drawer is all Memorial Hall. Nobody’s been looking at them, not so far as I know. Here, we can spread them out on the table. Which plans are you most interested in?”
Homer lifted the corners of the big sheets. He didn’t know what he needed. He was greedy and wanted to see them all. The topmost plans showed elevations of the new tower roof by the firm of Bastille and Neiley, with diagrams of the four clock faces and the clock works and circuit diagrams of the wiring and a cross section showing the system of fire protection in the tower. Below the plans for the tower roof the big sheets of paper went back in time, growing older as Homer groped lower and lower down. Putnam and Oriswold, alterations to the basement of Memorial Hall, 1946. That was for the Psychology Department. Professor Skinner had put his pigeons in Skinner Boxes in the basement of Memorial Hall. Densmore and LeClear, proposed addition for serving room and kitchen, 1905-6. Van Brunt and Ware, plans and elevations for Alumni Hall, Harvard University, 1871-8. That was the beginning. Van Brunt and Ware had designed the original building. He had come to the bottom of the pile.
Homer pulled a chair up to the cabinet and pored over the thick sheaf of plans, riffling through them from bottom to top, and top to bottom, while Donald Maderna answered his telephone and responded to the beeper attached to his belt, keeping his finger on the pulse of life in the North Yard, making sure that keys turned smoothly in the locks of doors, that elevators ran up and down in perfect safety, and that all the physics and chemistry and biology laboratories and experimental research projects scattered by the acre across the length and breadth of his territory were supplied with their multiplicity of individual needs, the proper flow of gas and water and air both hot and cold, and electromagnetic waves traveling along wires and cables at something like the speed of light.
Densmore and LeClear, 1905-6. Homer pulled out the big plan of proposed additions to the serving room and kitchen of Memorial Hall and laid it on the table. The addition had been built on the north side of the building in 1906 to make the task of preparing and serving thousands of pounds of food to the students in the great hall a little easier, in the days when that enormous room had been a student commons. Homer stood over the table and spread his hands on the plan. There had been a meat room down there in those days, and an apple room, a milk room, a bakery with huge walk-in ovens, a laundry and a vegetable cold room. And a room full of tables: White help dining room. White help? Homer was stunned. He looked further. Sure enough, there was the Colored help dining room, and here were the separate locker and toilet rooms for white and colored help. Of course. Good lord.
“What’s so funny?” said Donald Maderna, looking up from his desk.
“Oh, it’s not funny. That was what you call an ironical sort of laugh. More like a snort. I’m appalled, that’s all. Here you’ve got a building, a giant building, a huge colossal pile of brick erected in memory of the gallant graduates of Harvard who died in the Union cause in the Civil War. And what did they fight the Civil War for? To free the slaves, wasn’t it? Well, at least it was partly to free the slaves. And look at that, will you? They’ve got the colored help segregated from the white help in the basement. And the white help was probably mostly all Irish, I’ll bet. I’ll bet my own great-grandparents were down there with the rest of them, stirring the pots and passing the plates; while upstairs in the dining hall the students were all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Well, nowadays the students are pretty well mixed up, but otherwise it’s just the same as modern Boston. Oh, the human race. Oh, alas, for humankind. Oh, Donald, how one despairs. All that blood, all the names on those gallant marble tablets. And to think, Donald, just to think of Henry James standing in front of those memorial tablets with his hand on his heart, rejoicing that the place was erected to duty and honor, that it spoke of sacrifice and example, that it was a kind of temple to youth, manhood, and generosity. Generosity! and right there under his feet were the toilets of the colored help. Oh, it makes you think, doesn’t it, Donald, of the fall of man, of the lost last hope of—What’s it mean, here, Fan Room, next to the toilets? What was the fan room?”
“Well, I suppose it was part of the ventilating system. I guess it collected all the smoke and steam from the kitchen and blew it up through the big ventilating shafts in the tower, and then pulled the fresh air down. It was a big interconnected system of pipes running around into all those little spaces down there. The spaces are rearranged now, ever since 1946, when they did the basement over. But we’ve still got those ventilating shafts. It’s just more of the same thing. Of course, part of those shafts in the tower now are for the air-conditioning system in Sanders Theatre.”
Homer pulled more plans out of the drawer. “H
ere, Donald, this is the way it looks now, right? All these little rooms? Look, this whole plan is just plumbing. And this one is wiring. My God, what a complicated mess. What’s this thing here at the west end? It looks as if a piece of the basement goes right off the map.”
“Oh, that’s the tunnel. The service tunnel. For the utilities. It goes all the way to the Cambridge Electric Company down by the river.”
“A utility tunnel? But it’s so big.”
“Oh, sure. You could drive a small car through most of it. Except where it crosses the Charles by way of the Weeks Bridge to the Business School. And under Mass Av.”
“It goes all over the place? Right under Mass Av?”
“Sure. Right there behind Widener. It’s only about four feet high under Mass Av because of the subway under the street. They’ve got this little cart there. You lie down in the cart and pull yourself across with a rope.”
“Is that a fact?” Homer was dumfounded. “Well, how do you get into the tunnel in the first place?”
“Oh, there are entrances from all the buildings along the way. They’re kept locked, of course. We don’t want the students to have access to the tunnel. I mean, when you think of the mischief they’d think up to do.” And then Maderna told Homer a story about the time all the inhabitants of Lowell House had flushed the toilets at the same time and flooded the sewage system. “Of course, we have to use the tunnel for visiting dignitaries and important speakers sometimes. So they can get in and out of buildings without going through crowds of students. Like when Henry Kissinger was here, during the war in Vietnam. He was supposed to give a talk in Langdell Hall. There were a lot of hostile students collected outside the building, but Sloan Tinker brought him in through the tunnel.”