by Amanda Cross
Kate said she would love to meet PC’s daughter, but that she ought probably to meet the Adams son à deux. PC agreed, and they returned by a circuitous route to the discussion of England as two nations under the redoubtable, and in their view regrettable, Margaret Thatcher.
The long march through institutions. Kate thought of the phrase quite often in the days that followed. The weather did its usual New York caper of freezing for three days and then bringing false promises of spring. Kate, who liked winter and found spring the most depressing season of the year, was happy when the cold kept the students inside, hurrying from one building to another, but was gloomy and irritable as the sun shone and they perched on every available step or piece of grass, leaving their litter and often their belongings behind them.
She got into the habit of dropping in on the security office when Butler was there, asking him questions and slowly getting a feel for how the security of this large university was managed. The answer was, though Butler never said it or even hinted it, poorly. Most of the burglaries, and they were frequent, were inside jobs, engineered by guards with keys. Alcoholism was an enormous problem on the security force: they drank huge quantities of beer, more out of boredom than addiction. Television sets, computers, and other equipment were too often wafted out of buildings in the presence of sleeping guards. Not that Butler mentioned any of this; it emerged as statistics. The interpretation was Kate’s.
She grew increasingly fond of Butler. He was a man of set ideas, by which Kate meant that right and wrong had been, for him, cataloged long since. There were venial and mortal sins, to be sure; the mortal sins included homosexuality, for which he thought AIDS God’s righteous punishment. He was careful not to express racist views, though he clearly held them; he did not, however, allow them to dictate his actions, which Kate liked. She suspected that one day he might wake up to find, as Hamlet had suggested, that in assuming a virtue he had acquired it. He knew a good deal of poetry by heart, and liked to quote it. It was his view, Kate knew, that literature was not taught by the likes of her, but by those who made you memorize the “great works” and beat you if you failed. His views on gender Kate could only assume: he was too tactful to mention them or, to put it differently, coming to like Kate as she liked him, he assumed her acceptance of most of his prejudices except that against women. Trying, in a letter to Reed, to explain her growing affection for Butler, Kate said that he was narrow-minded, even rigid. Yet he respected the rules they were playing by. She quoted to Reed a remark she had just come across by John Kenneth Galbraith about William F. Buckley: “As for all others,” Galbraith had written, “thought is often for me a painful thing. But I’ve found over the years that if Buckley takes a strong position on any issue, I can take the opposite position without any tedious cerebration and know that I won’t be wrong.” Buckley was Galbraith’s neighbor and friend, as Butler was hers.
From all these meetings, Kate learned the ease, if one put one’s mind to it, of getting in and out of locked buildings. She had even, in an experiment she had decided not to relate to anyone but Reed, forced open from the outside a ground-floor window in Levy Hall, six feet above the ground and reached by edging oneself along a parapet; she had crawled into the ground-floor room. Since the room was locked and she could not relock it without a key, she had crawled out the window again. No one had noticed her (it was after dark) except two young men who simply waved agreeably after asking if they could help. Discovering how someone had entered Levy Hall that Saturday night, whether with Adams or by such a means as Kate had tried, might hold its own interest, but its possibility could now be taken for granted.
The last time Kate had seen Butler, they talked of A. E. Housman, whom Butler could quote by the yard; Kate had the mixed pleasure and pain of telling him that Housman had been homosexual.
“Impossible,” Butler had said. “He was a Latin professor at Cambridge.” Kate forbore from mentioning all those “lads.” The point Kate tried to make was that his homosexuality did not make his poetry or his classicism less appealing for Butler. “He must have suffered,” was all Butler would say. Kate had managed, in the course of this conversation, to steal the key to Levy Hall off the rack in the front security office right under the eyes of the guard on duty there. She returned it soon after by the same technique. True, because of her new relationship with Butler, she had been permitted inside the security office, which usually allowed visitors no nearer than the open window behind which the guard on duty sat. The fact remained that if Kate had got in and nabbed the key, others, particularly other officers of the university, might have done the same.
Late one afternoon in the following week Kate met the Adams son, Lawrence Adams, in her office. She early determined that he was, in fact, the son who had visited Cambridge with his mother and gone on a tour with his father, Penelope Constable, and her husband. His older brother, Andrew Adams, had been somewhere in his medical career and unable to travel to England. “We have similar attitudes toward our father, however, so it probably doesn’t matter too much from your point of view which of us it was. We both thought the old boy an ultraconservative bigot, and still do, or did until his death.” Kate requested him to elaborate on this statement; he did so willingly.
“My brother and I are two years apart. We were children of the sixties—that is, we had just finished college when the seventies began; we took very seriously the riots about Vietnam, Kent State, all of that. My father was unalterably opposed. He became what I guess is today called a neoconservative. Like Alan Bloom, with whom he had everything in common except my father’s fascination with women as sex objects, he was traumatized by those anti-Vietnam events. My brother and I were also, but in the opposite direction. It became impossible to talk with my father. He hated, not the Chicago police who had beat up the protesters at the Democratic convention, but the protesters. He was firmly on the side of Mayor Daley. He didn’t talk to my brother and me for several years. Eventually, after the divorce, we tried to mend fences with him, but he didn’t make it easy.”
“I’ve met his widow,” Kate said.
“Well, then you can guess at the problem. She was obviously after his money and flattering in a way one wouldn’t expect to fool anyone, but apparently all old men have the capability of being old fools.” Lawrence spoke less with bitterness than resignation.
“Perhaps it is only old conservative men who are so easily fooled,” Kate said. “They have had to decide that they are wise, and most other people wrong. Even worse, they have to believe that their wisdom is superior, and that they are incapable of a foolish judgment. This gives them both tenacity in their political positions and vulnerability if caught in widowerhood.”
“Well put,” Lawrence said, smiling. “You’re making this a lot easier. As it happens, my father had a certain amount of inherited money over which he had discretion, and my brother and I admit to trying to keep him from giving all of that to her. But apart from this sum, which our grandfather should probably have left in trust to us, but didn’t—he was in awe of his intellectual son—we were strictly hands-off. I think Cecelia looked on us as a challenge; she had inserted herself into a male hierarchy, though she could never have put it that way. I think it seemed to her that she might snatch the prize from the big males and run off with it, like a sparrow among pigeons. I don’t mean she was a feminist; if she knew the word, she probably scorned it. But hers was a tactic against male dominance.”
“What did your wives make of that, yours and Andrew’s?”
“To change the simile, they thought she was more like a cuckoo in another bird’s nest. How did I get off on birds? Our wives thought she was awful, and she was, particularly to them. They thought her comic, too. I mean she was and is so blatant that you couldn’t believe she was unconscious of how awful she sounded and looked.”
“I know what you mean. One might even call it refreshing.”
“One might call it damnable,
when you have to live with it. I don’t mind telling you I’m sorry she has an alibi, though I have to admit she wouldn’t have wanted him dead so prematurely from her point of view. Have you any clues, by the way? Any insights, hints, possibilities?”
“I’m working on it,” was all Kate would say. “Can you tell me something about your mother? She seems a rather ghostly figure in this whole business; not, as we say in literature departments, foregrounded. The police did, I believe, look into her whereabouts at the time of the defenestration; she was in Madison, Wisconsin.”
“That’s where she works. She’s a rather high-up administrator. She went back for a graduate degree when we boys were almost grown; she did get a teaching job, in political science, but she was offered a deanship before she got tenure, and she turned out to have a flair for administration. A certain number of women do, though too often, my mother tells me, they’re isolated, overcautious, and therefore powerless. I think she rather gave up on my father about the time she became a dean. She was hired away some years later by the University of Wisconsin, and has been there ever since. She likes Madison.”
“At the time you and she went to England, was she still married to your father?”
“She was just about ready to leave him, though I didn’t know it until we’d been in England a while. We didn’t go together; we met there, and spent some time together in Cambridge. She was exceedingly nice to my father, in the way women can be to men they don’t give a damn about. Look here, Professor Fansler, Kate, I understand I’ve got to be honest with you, and I know that withholding information only leads to confusion. But I’m still reluctant to discuss my family, especially my mother.”
“Understandably; I would hate it too. But if one’s father was probably murdered, the hierarchy of inhibition shifts, inevitably and forever. Which is not to say that anything uncovered or revealed in an investigation has to become public knowledge if it isn’t absolutely relevant, and not always then.”
“Thank you. You’ve given me time to think, always the ultimate in tact. My mother fell in love with another woman while she was still married to my father. Of course my brother and I had to be tolerant—we were that generation, after all—but I think it was a lot bigger shock than either of us was prepared to admit for quite a while. Not that we didn’t offer her all support. We have always liked her far more than our father, and still do. The whole question has become a little less fraught with anguish these days, if one doesn’t hang out with Phyllis Schlafly or Pat Robertson, but no one can deny that life is easier if one can simply say, even think: My mother is divorced, my mother is married again, my mother is going with a heavyweight boxer from Des Moines.”
“What was your father’s reaction?”
“Mixed. He didn’t really believe in female homosexuality; without the proper male equipment, what can they possibly do? At the same time, it was not easy to be left for a woman, not even another man. My mother let him believe he had left her, but they both knew the truth and so did everyone else. She had no rancor toward him; he always thought he could fool her, and I think she thought he was sort of pitiful. For one thing, he was always having affairs, or at least dalliances, many of them with students, and I think it was a wonderful moment when she realized she didn’t give a damn. When she mentioned this she used a more pungent expression; my mother is of the earth, earthy, as well as smart.”
“Do you know the woman your mother lives with, if she does?”
“Oh, yes; we visit them regularly. My mother, being an administrator, has to be very discreet; she and her friend share a house, and everyone is happy to accept that. And my mother can work with men and rather likes them. She’s taught me, among other things, that most lesbians are not man haters, even if they prefer not to live with them. Lesbians come in all types and sizes, like everyone else. And, as I hope you noticed, the word lesbian has stopped making me nervous; my brother said the same thing. That was a very long speech; do you inspire everyone this way, which is how you finally nail your ultimate suspect?”
“Mostly I do it by asking dull questions about alibis, like ‘Where were you on the eight of Saturday, November whatever?’ ”
“Andy and I, and our wives, were within striking distance and without alibis, I fear. That is, we could have done it, within the nicest meaning of the word could, though I’m willing to try to persuade you that it was impossible for any of us to have got to the university and back to New Jersey without the others knowing. I do realize we may all be in it together; I can only offer as counter to that suggestion the total unlikeliness of any of us, particularly the women, leaving our children alone in a strange house, lent for the occasion, in New Jersey.”
“What was the occasion?”
“A friend of Andy’s offered the house, wanting a house and dog-cum-cat-sitter, and we decided to have a reunion and all spend Thanksgiving with the old man; my brother and I usually alternate. We also contemplated calling on our father’s paternal instincts, if any, sometime after Thanksgiving, but fate intervened.”
“Do your wives have names?”
“Oh, dear; sorry about that. Believe me, my referring to them as our wives is not an attempt to deny them personhood, though it certainly sounds that way. I guess I hoped you’d leave them, out of it. One can’t overcome all one’s protective instincts in a few decades. My wife—the woman whose husband I am—is named Katharine, called Kathy, and she is a microbiologist; Andy’s wife is named Clemence, called Clem, and she is a psychoanalyst. We each have a child, both girls, less than a year apart.”
“Clemence is an odd name.”
“Isn’t it. Clem says it’s a family name, but Kathy, who dotes on Ivy Compton-Burnett, says it comes from one of her novels. No reason it can’t be both, of course. Kathy and Clem like each other too; I’m afraid we rather resemble one of those dreadful chummy family movies of long ago, radical as we have often thought ourselves.”
Kate was silent. There didn’t seem, awfully much more to ask, or say. She already had the Adams sons’ statements to the police. It might in time turn out to seem productive to visit the four of them, but they were no longer conveniently assembled in New Jersey, and she rather hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. There was, however, one last question.
“I take it that you and your brother did get your inheritance?”
“Yes, we did; at least, I assume we will. Our inheritance is in the form of blue-chip stocks, and very welcome they will be. My father had them in a safe-deposit box that has been examined in preparation for the eventual settling of the estate. The only thing Reagan did that I can applaud even on a selfish basis is to have changed the tax system so that all our inheritance won’t go in taxes. None of the stuff left to his wife will go in taxes either.”
“Who’s the executor of the estate?”
“Andy. Cecelia wanted my father to change it and make her executrix, and it looks as though he was about to.”
“Hard cheese on Cecelia, as Evelyn Waugh would say,” Kate observed.
“Not really. The effects are more irritating than practical.”
“Andy because he was the elder?”
“Yes. Old customs hang on, certainly with men like my father. This is one I don’t object to.”
And after a certain number of general, gracious remarks and chitchat, Lawrence Adams took his leave. Kate pondered alone.
Chapter Seven
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Matthew Noble, vice president in charge of internal affairs (which meant not faculty, or even students, but finances and administrative structures), had, among his other promises to Kate if she would undertake the investigation of Adams’s death, assured her that he would gain her access to Harvard University Press, where Adams’s book was due to be published. He was as good as his word, and Kate found Adams’s Harvard editor n
ot only gracious on the telephone but willing to meet with her when he next came to New York. That time, as it happened, followed fast upon the visit of Lawrence, the Adams son, and Kate swung from one interview to the other. Whether she was getting anywhere was unclear, but she certainly had the sense of accomplishment that comes from busyness and a full appointment calendar, particularly when these occur on top of one’s ordinary professional day, not exactly empty to begin with. Kate agreed to meet the editor for dinner, and set out from the office for that appointment. She had a strong suspicion that the Adams book was pivotal to the case, but was at a loss to say why. Perhaps it derived from the fact that the book, an object, seemed more clear-cut than the murky human relations that had marked most of the other events in Adams’s life.
Peter Pettipas turned out to be young, on the way up (all editors, in Kate’s experience, were or were not “on the way up”; the signs were as unidentifiable as they were unmistakable), and able to classify Kate as worth cultivating for a variety: of reasons not unconnected with access to publishable and salable books. In a word, she possessed clout. Meaning, Kate happily assured herself before ordering a martini, that he would probably tell her what she wanted to know. They were in an elegant Japanese restaurant in mid-town, one with an upstairs where one removed one’s shoes and sat on the floor, one’s feet, thank God, in a hole in the floor designed for the women who, in New York, were served in this section of the restaurant always reserved, in Japan, for men. Kate, who liked raw fish no more than the subservience of the Japanese women servers dressed like Geisha girls and given to kneeling before the customers, settled on a tempura that, while not delectable, was also not off-putting. Pettipas ordered sashimi, or some other expensive version of raw fish. They began with a soup that was pronounced delicious by Pettipas, but tasted exactly like dishwater to Kate, who had never, of course, tasted dishwater. Differences of opinion make not only horse races but restaurants. Kate when on the trail was prepared to sacrifice more than eating the wrong food in the wrong position amid sexist attitudes, but not much more. One could not at any rate deny that the Japanese, at least in this place, made good martinis. Kate gracefully accepted another; Peter Pettipas ordered a second glass of soda water. Kale, who liked to divide her life into befores and afters, marked as another watershed when editors gave up drinking. Pettipas spoke about Adams book.