by Jane Langton
It was the northernmost vault of the five that crowned the high memorial corridor. Homer had often thought of the compartments of the arching wooden ceiling as treetops, their towering ribs meeting like the branches of trees in a forest. But now, looking down at the dark cavity of the inverted vault below him, he could see again that it was like an immense empty wastebasket for sandwich wrappers and paper coffee cups, for a president of Harvard who had thrown himself from the top of the chain of being.
Chapter Forty-eight
Ham had lost consciousness again. He woke to find himself slumped against the door. Had he dreamt it, the hammering and the shouting on the other side? He dropped his head back and stared at the top of the door. The line of light was gone. He sank his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. His fainting brain had played on him. one final savage trick. Then he fumbled at the handle of the door. In his dream, the knob had turned. It turned again. It turned all the way around. Slowly he dragged his haunches an inch away from the door and pulled.
The door opened.
Mary Kelly had given up her place in the chorus to sit halfway down the stairs inside the basement entrance beside the south door. She was falling asleep. She had been sitting in one position with her head against the railing for two hours. What if she were to stretch out on the floor at the top of the stairs and take a nap? If anyone came in, if anyone tried to step over her, going up or down, she would wake up. She shook her drowsy head and stood up and stretched, and then she stopped with her arms over her head.
“Oh, Ham,” she said, “it’s you.”
She said nothing more. She ran down to the man who had fallen into a huddle of rags along the wall at the bottom of the stairs. He was trying to get up. She helped him to his feet, and then slowly they worked their way up the stairs and out of doors. Ham lifted his head and gulped in drafts of cold night air.
“Who’s that?” said Julia Chamberlain sharply, staring down at them from the south door. “Is that you, Mary?”
“It’s Ham,” said Mary softly. “Help me. You hold him on the other side.”
“Good God,” said Julia. She ran down the steps and took his arm and together they half guided and half carried him inside. “An ambulance,” said Julia firmly. “We’ll just put him down in that chair and I’ll call an ambulance.”
Ham tried to speak up and say no, but he was shaken by a palsy of trembling and nothing would come out. He shook his head and tried to shuffle forward by himself. From Sanders Theatre he could hear Rosie Bell’s trumpet trilling and flourishing. Mary shrugged her shoulders at Julia, and together, two tall strong women, they bore him between them into Sanders Theatre. With Julia at one elbow and Mary at the other, Ham stood in the amber air looking up at the pale intent face of Vick, who was beating a majestic pattern of three, pomposo, ma non allegro, smiling at Rosie Bell, nodding to Mr. Proctor, and now Mr. Proctor was standing, closing his eyes, opening his mouth to sing the first words of his last triumphant aria.
The audience saw Ham first, and a few of them shouted and rose in their seats. The basses and altos were standing on the right side of the stage, and they all began surging forward, blundering between the chairs and music stands of the second violins. Mrs. Esterhazy was screaming. And at last Vick glanced around to see what was going on, and saw Ham’s face turned up to her, and she dropped her arms and burst into sobs. With one swift motion Jack Fox and Tim Swegle reached for her and lowered her gently to the floor. Only Mr. Proctor kept his eyes firmly shut. The trumpet shall sound, sang Mr. Proctor, and the dead shall be rais’d incorruptible.
Chapter Forty-nine
The reading room of the Faculty Club was the kind of place where Homer felt ill at ease. The slightly stuffy air of quiet splendor made him want to upset little trays of sherry and say unspeakable things at the top of his voice. He huddled beside his wife at one end of a sofa. But before long he found himself warming and expanding in the comfortable presence of Julia Chamberlain, so that when he dropped his little glass it was only a typical blunder rather than an act of defiance and rebellion. “Whoops, there I go again.” Homer sprang to his feet and swabbed at the rug with a paper napkin.
“Oh, Homer, you poor clod,” said Mary.
Julia laughed and summoned another glass.
“Now look here, Julia,” said Homer, sitting down again. “The only thing that still puzzles me about this whole thing is the connection between Dow and Cheever. I mean, I figured it out about Cheever. You people were pulling your forces together two years ago to get rid of Cheever, isn’t that right? But then you were going to dump Ham Dow too. Whatever for?”
“We were going to what?” Julia looked at Homer in surprise. “What makes you think we were going to dump Ham Dow?”
“Oh, you know, Julia,” said Homer. “It was at that emergency meeting of the Corporation and the Board of Overseers, the day of the Yale game. I was hanging around there in the hall, eavesdropping, remember? I heard you in there, all of you. I heard you say, if only Harvard had got rid of Ham in time, then he never would have been blown up, or words to that effect.”
Julia laughed again, and slapped her glass down on the table. “That’s what happens, Homer, dear, to people who listen at keyholes. They don’t get the whole story, you see. They don’t see it right out plain on the table. We weren’t going to get Ham Dow out of Memorial Hall by firing him. The faculty does all the hiring and firing. We were going to get him out of there by promoting him.”
“Promoting him?”
“Promoting him as far as we could promote anybody. Well, of course, we couldn’t do it by ourselves. There would have had to be a big search committee, and a long process, with everybody getting a whack at nominating somebody, and then, of course, it would have been up to the Corporation to make the final decision. But two years ago there was a consensus of opinion among the Fellows, and most of us Overseers felt the same way, that we should get rid of James Cheever and put somebody an awful lot like Ham Dow in his place. Ssssshhh, sssshh—it wasn’t ever supposed to be common knowledge.”
“You wanted to make Ham Dow the President of Harvard? Jeeeeesus.” Homer giggled at Julia and tried to take it in. “So that’s it. Ham was a personal threat to Cheever’s job. And Cheever knew it. And Tinker too. Right? I knew there was some reason they hated his guts.”
“Oh, yes, Tinker too. Tinker was Jim’s man, of course. Two years ago he was the big voice of opposition when we were all so determined to ask for Jim’s resignation. I mean, the first time. Oh, we tried to be discreet about the whole thing, but Ham’s name kept right on coming up as somebody who could put the place back together again if we asked for Jim’s resignation. We didn’t discuss the matter in front of Jim. We weren’t far enough along for that. But of course Tinker was always there, and he passed everything along to Jim, naturally. So I suppose it was natural that Jim and Tinker would feel that way about Ham. That they feared and hated him, I mean. You can’t blame Jim. It wasn’t personal, really. I know that. He really did think Ham would destroy the place. Harvard, I mean. You know. He thought Ham would change the whole character of the university and destroy all it had stood for in the past. Oh, he meant well, he really did. I know he did.”
“So it was only Tinker who supported him?” said Mary. “The others were all for forcing Cheever’s resignation?”
“All of them. All of them except Tinker.”
“But then why didn’t it go through? Two years ago, I mean, when it came up for the first time.”
“Oh, it was Tinker again. Tinker can be pretty eloquent. He persuaded two or three of the Fellows and some of the older members of the Board of Overseers to wait awhile, to think it over, before doing anything so unheard of as asking for the resignation of a president of Harvard.”
“After all,” said Homer, “it wasn’t as if he were an Antipedobaptist, or anything like that.”
“What?” said Julia. “Oh, you mean like President Dunster. That’s right. And Increase Mather. There haven
’t been many enforced resignations of Harvard presidents in three hundred and fifty years. That’s a long time. So the Fellows finally agreed they would wait awhile, and in the meantime we would all speak to Jim and make it very clear to him about the necessity for a broader, more generous kind of spirit, for accepting a majority vote with good grace, and he wasn’t to go behind people’s backs any more in a foolish effort to get what he wanted. Well, anyway, the upshot was, we waited around for the transformation to take place. Only it didn’t. That Decorative Arts Building of his was the last straw. A Curator for Porcelain and another one for Objects of Silver and Gold. We all got sick to our stomachs. I mean, it just made you want to smash something. You know, like a Ming vahz or something.” Julia laughed her great laugh. Then she straightened her big face and leaned forward grimly and stared at the table. “So we were gathering our forces again. I snatched the opportunity and then we met behind his back, for a change. Not something we would normally ever dream of doing. But we’d been driven too far. And he could see the handwriting on the wall. They knew what was coming, Cheever and Tinker.”
“So Tinker hired the man from Philadelphia,” said Mary softly.
“Yes, I suppose they decided it was the only thing left. Of course, they were fools to think the removal of one man would make any difference.”
“But what went wrong? Why didn’t it work? Oh, I know your theory, Homer, about the clocks being ten minutes slow, and how the man from Philadelphia forgot his wrist watch. But I really don’t see what he was doing on the scene at all. Why didn’t he just set the thing to go off at a certain time and go back to Philadelphia?”
“Because he had to be sure the job” got done. Tinker told me. If Dow didn’t get blown up, the hired killer didn’t get his hundred thousand in small bills. The money came from some discretionary fund of Cheever’s. I don’t know who the alumnus was who supplied Cheever’s office with money like that. Maybe they’ll squeeze that information out of Tinker, although I don’t suppose there was anything illegal about that kind of gift.”
“But how did the hired accomplice manage to blow himself up?” said Julia. “Pretty clumsy of him, if you ask me.”
“It was Ham’s fault,” said Homer. “Ham didn’t cooperate. I saw Ham this morning in the hospital. He told me it all began coming back to him, little by little, there in the dark in that little room in the basement. There had been some stranger. Just before the explosion he had been talking to a stranger. A big man. A big fat man. A perfect stranger. Ham was supposed to meet Cheever in the memorial transept at the entrance to the great hall at eleven-thirty. They were going to have lunch in some hotel. Tinker had called Ham and made the appointment on Cheever’s behalf. So Ham decided to wait for Cheever outside in the sunshine, because it was a nice day. And then this stranger came gasping up the steps and dragged him back indoors, saying Cheever would be there any minute, and then the guy rushed off again, and then, of course, Ham drifted cheerfully out onto the steps again, and this poor guy rushed back again, sweating and fuming, and tried to jockey him into position again, only his clock mechanism went off ten minutes sooner than he expected it would, because he was judging the time by the new tower clocks, and the clocks were wrong. The damn thing went off and killed him and dropped Ham into the cellar.”
“But I still don’t understand why Tinker—I mean, everybody thought the dead man was Ham,” said Mary. “So I should think Cheever and Tinker would have been satisfied. What was Tinker doing later on, hanging around Memorial Hall the way he was, pretending to be a janitor?”
“Oh, Cheever was satisfied, all right,” said Homer. “But not Sloan Tinker. I talked to Tinker yesterday. He was perfectly frank and open about the whole thing. Seemed resigned to his fate.” Fortunes of war, you know the kind of thing. Anyway, he told me he had had an appointment with the man from Philadelphia for one o’clock. The man was supposed to show up and collect his fee. But he never came. So Tinker began to worry. He went over there to Memorial Hall with Cheever on an official expedition of administrative concern, and then while Cheever was pulling his chin and staring at the hole in the floor and falling on his face in the blood and turning green, Tinker was looking under the sheet. And then he saw that the blackened headless remains could belong to the man from Philadelphia just as well as they could to Ham Dow. And he began to fret. Only he didn’t tell Cheever. Cheever thought Harvard was rid of its incubus at last. But poor Tinker was left with the whole thing to do over again. And of course the burning question was, where in the name of God was Dow? It haunted him, day and night. He began to pick at his coverlet and gnaw at his blanket. He began to hang around the building. At first he thought Ham might be hiding out in the basement along with all of those Rats of his. But then one day he wandered into Crawley’s office and heard him calling for help by knocking on the pipe. And then he knew what had happened.”
“You know, it seems awfully strange to me,” said Julia, “that nobody in Memorial Hall recognized Sloan Tinker. I mean, you say he was walking around in plain sight all the time. He wasn’t even wearing false whiskers or anything like that. Why didn’t somebody say, ‘Why, Mr. Tinker, whatever are you doing with that mop and that bucket of dirty water?’”
“It’s just a matter of expectation,” said Homer. “If you’re used to seeing a man in a business suit behind a desk, you just don’t expect to find him pushing a broom. Vice presidents of Harvard don’t push brooms in the basements of university buildings. And it works the other way around. Old broom-pushers don’t guide the planets in their courses. Not in this university. And of course he fooled me too. I kick myself for not even trying to see him face to face. Well, I’m black and blue from kicking myself about one thing or another.”
Mary Kelly put her hands to her head. “Oh, Homer, it really sickens me to remember how they went through all that debris down there, and didn’t find Ham. How could they have missed him? They kept saying they had examined everything so carefully. I mean, they came up with tiny pieces of dynamite caps, but they missed Ham entirely. I just don’t see how they could have made such an awful mistake.”
“There were a few teeth missing from that fine-tooth comb,” said Homer. “That was the trouble. And it just never occurred to any of us that they could have made a mistake. I asked McCurdy how it could have happened, and he said it wasn’t his fault, he didn’t look behind the door, it was supposed to be Tom that was going to look behind the door, and he asked Tom, and Tom said he didn’t look behind the door, because Bert was supposed to look behind the door, and he asked Bert, and Bert said he didn’t look behind the door, because somebody else said he’d already looked behind the door. And you know who it was? Only he didn’t look behind the door either. He just said he did. Who do you think it was?” Homer looked drearily at Mary.
“I don’t know, Homer. Who was it?”
“Crawley.”
“Crawley!”
“Crawley. That vile, peevish, careless, dead letter Crawley.”
“But—” Mary flapped her hands in horror. “Oh, Homer, there was Ham, right there on the other side of the door. You mean, because of Crawley, he was sealed up for almost two months, all that time without food or light or any hope of discovery, there in the dark? Oh, Crawley, Crawley.”
“That’s right. It was old creepy Crawley.” Homer clenched his fist and pounded it on the table and quoted “The Man with the Hoe,” dropping his voice an octave, ominous and dire:
“Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
I mean, talk about bestial creatures snuffling about at the bottom of the great chain of being! Crawley is the bottom, the very bottom. And if Ham Dow hadn’t been carrying around a lot of extra fat, he never would have made it. I asked the doctor this morning. He told me he’d seen people go for a year without eating, if they were terribly overweight. Only, of course, people like that are under
supervision, and they’re given vitamins and protein supplements. It was the protein that mattered most, he said. The body breaks down protein to get glucose. The brain can’t get along without glucose.”
“The brain,” said Julia. “But does that mean … Homer, is he all right?”
“Oh, you bet. I talked to him. He was obviously his old self. Well, of course, I don’t know what his old self was like. But I don’t see how it could have been any better than the man I met this morning. And he told me he hadn’t been entirely without protein because he had some candy in his pocket. Peanut brittle. The peanuts had a little protein and a little salt. The candy gave him a little sugar. It may have saved his life.”
“Well, thank God, his ordeal is over.” Julia reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of the Crimson. “Of course, things are never going to be the same again. Did you see this?” She held up the front page.
Mary leaned forward. “What is it? Some kind of map?”
“It’s the tunnel. It’s a map of the entire tunnel system under Harvard University. What are we going to do now? I ask you. We’ll have people pouring into the tunnel from all over. Donald Maderna told me he’s going to have to change every one of the locks on all those doors, just to be sure nobody but authorized people have the keys.”
Homer reached for the paper and laughed at the picture of Assistant Professor Charles Flynn. “Look at Charley. That chase through the tunnel after Tinker, it’s made him a hero. Poor old Charley; he told me he thought Tinker wasn’t going to give him any more trouble, because he had just finished knocking him down with a brick. But then Tinker got up and threw Charley down the stairs and disappeared down the hall. Charley picked himself up and ran after him and then they had another tussle at the entrance to the tunnel, and Tinker got away again and tried to lose himself in the labyrinth of branching corridors down there. But he made a big mistake. He headed for the part of the tunnel that goes under Massachusetts Avenue with a little cart.”