by Amanda Cross
“And on that Saturday? How many of you came and went?”
“Just a few. Mostly I was there myself, except when Canny decided to honor me with a visit. He’d got in the habit of that, like the way you can’t keep your tongue away from a sore tooth.”
“What did you think of him?”
“I thought he was an idiot; what did you think of him?”
“I probably didn’t see as much of him as you did,” Kate said. “From what I did see, I’d say he seemed an idiot to me. Another way of saying we didn’t agree on much, if anything.”
“But you didn’t have him coming on to you, the way he did to many students, and even giving me the eye as if he didn’t know I’d . . . well, he knew.”
“About that particular Saturday . . .” Kate reminded her.
“It was like most Saturdays. I worked there, because there isn’t much room where I live, and I’m not into hanging out at the library, where you run into people and don’t get much done. If you want to know, I like to be alone sometimes. Canny stopped in that Saturday—I think because he couldn’t really stand the thought of me, of us, having a key to his building. We just made him uncomfortable. Look, if I could help you with some massive revelation about that Saturday, I’d gladly help you. I didn’t go to Canny’s office, I don’t know how long he was in it. We’re also on the seventh floor, but not near him, at the other end of the corridor.”
“Was he always alone as far as you could tell?”
“I think so; I heard voices when I went down the hall, but I assumed he was talking on the telephone. He did a lot of talking on the telephone; he was a very busy man. Who he would be talking to on a Saturday, don’t ask me. I left, locking our office and the door to the building around five, and I didn’t go back until Monday. I didn’t give the key to anyone else,” she added accusingly, though Kate had said nothing; “I can’t tell you anything beyond that. OK? Have you tried asking the fascists in security?”
“As a matter of fact,” Kate said, “I have. They hate me because I’m a professor, a woman, neither homophobic nor racist, at least by their standards if not yours; I’ve tried to get them to be frank with me and I’m trying to get you to be too.”
“Spare me the heroics. Look, Kate, take it easy, OK? Humphrey says you’re OK, and I’m willing to believe you are. We have trouble talking because you’re too delicate and I’m too touchy; I know that, believe it or not. I didn’t see anything I’m not telling you. I think Canny Adams was garbage, and I’m not sorry he’s dead, but I didn’t push him. Come on, do you really think I could get him out that window and over the ledge if he was fighting for his life? I’m not that big or that tough. The boys in the administration would love to pin something on me because then they could get me out of this place; I’m a pain to have around; I’m an insurrectionist. So you decide whose ball club you’re playing with.”
“Was there anyone else in the building with you that day who might have gone out of the room, wandered around out of your sight, and either returned or not?”
“They’d have to return, because I had to let them out the front door so I could relock it; someone had to go down with them. I was really responsible about that, mostly because I didn’t want anybody creeping up on any of us. And, no, nobody left the room long enough to push Canny out the window, and nobody wanted to anyway. We want more black faculty, more black students, more black courses, and less sense that we’re supposed to act like Little Orphan Annie. We may wish some folk would expire, just like you, no doubt, but we don’t do anything practical about it.”
And with that Kate had to be content. Arabella left with another admonition to “take it easy,” which had quite the opposite effect on Kate. The trouble was, it was unclear if Arabella could distinguish between condescension from professor to student, older woman to younger, white to black, presumed conservative to presumed radical. Much was unclear. Kate, who disliked undeserved animosity personally directed, and who despised herself for disliking it, found herself cursing the whole damn investigation yet again. But for the investigation, she would not have met Arabella. Despite it all, she was glad to have met Arabella.
She told Humphrey as much when she called him after Arabella’s departure. He gallantly offered to stop by her house for a drink and a talk about things. “You sound like you need your hand held,” he said.
“I’m sorry it’s that obvious,” Kate said, “but I do. Arabella makes me feel like I personally fought on the wrong side in the Civil War. I found myself wanting to tell her I’d been to Mississippi in 1964; the little twerp probably wasn’t even born yet.”
“What you need is a hand and a drink,” Humphrey said. “I’ll be there in half an hour. I’d ask you here, but the baby is not what you need right now.”
Chapter Eight
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools
Kate had known Humphrey Edgerton a long time; he had married late, and even later become a father, but to her he remained very much the same friend and ally. She had met him before he became a colleague at the same university, met him in the old days of civil rights battles, rage, the birth of feminism in response to the Stokley Carmichael declaration that the only position for women was prone. How she and Humphrey had remained friends Kate never knew, but she liked to think it was because he and she had changed, not in their politics, but in their openness, she to the politics of racism, he to the politics of gender. Kate regretted that she had no black woman friend as close as Humphrey. These women seemed to have condemned her in advance to an eliteness that her presence, apart from her actions, seemed inevitably to bespeak. The interview with Arabella had not increased Kate’s happiness on this score.
“Edna likes to quote Mr. Micawber,” Kate said, “and so shall I. As Mr. Micawber said: ‘Welcome misery, welcome homelessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end.’ No doubt my problem is that I have never known homelessness, hunger, rags, or beggary. I can lay some claim to the other conditions he mentions.”
“Come off it, Kate,” Humphrey said. “It’s not like you to sit around feeling unloved, even if you were unloved, which you aren’t. Perhaps we ought to call Reed back.”
“It hasn’t to do with Reed. I don’t know that it has to do with you, either, if I’m frank. It has to do with women, black women, and why they don’t like me.” As Kate looked at Humphrey she was unhappily aware that, far as any possibility of passion was between them, there was a spark of something that ignited their conversation as that between the black women she knew and herself was never ignited. A sentence from one of Virginia Woolf’s letters to her sister planted itself in Kate’s mind before she could forbid it entrance. “And I had a visit, long long ago from Tom Eliot, whom I love, or could have loved, had we both been in the prime and not in the sere; how necessary do you think copulation is to friendship?” Woolf and Eliot had been considerably older than Kate and Humphrey. Jesus, Kate thought, I must be going out of my mind.
Humphrey seemed to read her thoughts. “Black women feel very distant from white women unless they can be lovers; there’s scorn, a disdain black women feel. If I were you, I’d just live with it. Is that the only problem at the moment?”
“No, it’s not,” Kate said. “I wouldn’t mind beginning with Arabella, bless her little heart, if you can bear it.”
“We always want to control the young,” Humphrey said. “If we’re able to welcome change and not protect ourselves behind a wall of ‘old values,’ we like the young people we know to be revolutionary; but not too revolutionary, and not revolutionary in a way different from us. I hope I remember this about my son when he’s older, but I probably won’t. Some feminists called it ‘going too far.’ Arabella goes too far. She’s like a bunch of dry sticks and kindling waiting to ignite. But she has at least grasped that obe
dience, courtesy, and hard work are not the way to catch the attention of the haves if you’re a have-not. Blacks and women both tried that and neither of them found it worked very well. Which is not to say that if I could stuff Arabella into a room and make her get her degree and become a lawyer I wouldn’t do it.”
“Do you think she really works in that room, in Levy Hall?”
“I wish I thought she worked more. She started out with high aspirations and has lowered them year by year. First she was going to be a doctor, then a health specialist, then a lawyer; now she’s going to get a degree in child psychology if she graduates at all. And she doesn’t really want to deal with children; she should deal with adults. And don’t tell me I’m sounding exactly like a white yuppie, I know it.”
“What does she do in that room in Levy Hall?”
“She talks to her associates and followers. They stir each other up, try to keep each other from getting into lockstep in search of middle-class success. Keep each other angry. Which they should be, don’t get me wrong. Only, like you, dear Kate, I’ve learned to work through the system, and I’ve either learned, or convinced myself wrongly, that it is possible to work through the system. Arabella wants to change South Africa now.”
“So do I. So do you.”
“But not by blockading the administration building. Look, there are times when you have to do something to get attention. The whole country, the whole world, your own community, ignores you unless you do. I know that; you know that. We were both part of it. And there are places where that is still necessary. But I think the time has come to work for more blacks—students, teachers, even administrators, God forgive me—in the institution. Whether I’m right or have been coopted is anyone’s guess; I don’t know the answer. You must ask yourself the same question.”
Kate sighed. “Of course I do. I fight inside the system until I’m weary, and I wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective to shove, let us say, the provost out of a window. Which brings us nicely back to my so-called investigation. Would you like an omelet?”
“Why don’t we go out and get some Mexican food? That’s exactly what I feel like. We can begin with margaritas and rub salt from the glasses into our wounds.”
Kate ordered shrimp in green sauce, and didn’t even try to figure out what Humphrey was eating. In between bites of shrimp she continued to dip taco chips into the guacamole. To no one but Reed would Kate admit that, fond as she was of avocados, she would rather eat a plain half in its skin with a spoon than have it all spiced up. But Kate had learned to keep to herself her passion for plain food, thick soups, and little else.
“Humphrey, sooner or later I have to ask you. Do you think Arabella had anything to do with Adams’s fall? By accident, inadvertence, or intention?”
“No. I don’t. Her size for one thing.”
“He was probably hit on the head first and then pushed out.”
“She’d still have to be able to lift and shove his dead weight. You’ve seen Arabella.”
“And you’ve seen her friends. Come on, Humphrey, help me; I don’t know what I’ll do about it, but I want to know.”
“If I thought Arabella had killed him, or had any hand in killing him, I might not tell you. But I don’t think she did, so I’ll tell you that. And if I remind you of one of Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes, so be it.”
“Arabella could have had help.”
“Look, Kate. She could have. She disliked Adams heartily. So did all the members of her cohort who visited her in that office. He was a notably dislikable man; you’ve said so yourself. But underneath Arabella’s bluster, there’s a certain amount of sense. Why kill Adams? She and her group would be the first to be suspected, as indeed they are in any case. His death would not help her. And while gratitude is hardly Arabella’s most notable characteristic, it was Adams who insisted on access to the building for her and her friends. She might hate him for doing her a favor and for a thousand other reasons, but that hardly adds up to mayhem.”
“Why on earth should Adams do that?”
“I’ve no idea. But after Adams’s death, the police told me that Noble had arranged for it at Adams’s specific request; I suppose Noble told them that. I wasn’t consulted, and would have objected if I had been. Giving black students rights other students don’t have is simply another form of prejudice.”
“Arabella insists on first names,” Kate said, not too coherently. “All the young insist on first names. It’s driving me up the wall and out of sight. Not that I mind being called Kate; I know my name. It’s all those students and acquaintances calling themselves Susan and Barbara and Jeannie and Nancy that drive me mad. I get cards, Humphrey, from all over the world, saying ‘How are you, hope to see you when I get back,’ signed Barbara, and I haven’t a clue, not a glimmer, as to which of many Barbaras it is. Or I answer the phone, and someone says ‘This is Lizzie.’ Whoopy-do. I can’t quite find the right tone in which to say ‘Lizzie who?’ I pray the conversation will reveal her identity, and do you know, there have been times when it never does. Not to mention the times when I have a long powwow thinking I’m talking to one person when I’m talking to another. If someone says she’s Lizzie Rappaport, I know where I am. But if I say to Arabella, who at least is the first of the Arabellas, I will give her that, I’ll call you Ms, Jordan and you call me Ms. Fansler, she’ll write me down as a snob, an elitist, a classist, an ageist, and likely as not call me Kate and insist that I call her Arabella after all.”
“Ms. Fansler,” Humphrey said. “Unless I’m very mistaken, you don’t know what to do next. Is that true?”
“Not exactly. I’m to see a student, from the staff network, who used to be a secretary in Adams’s department, and who has a good deal to say about him, all of it bad. She resigned and is now a full-time graduate student. I’ve also been granted an interview with one of Adams’s daughters-in-law, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get to see the other son and daughter-in-law. I may even see the delightful widow again, and learn some more financial derring-do. She’s going on with her suit against the university; Adams died before she could get her hands on the last cent, and she’s not likely to let them forget it. I don’t myself see how it can be negligence if a full professor falls out of a window on whatever propulsion, but then I’m not a lawyer, I’m only married to one and related to a hundred others. With all this to anticipate, why should I be in any doubt as to what to do next? I’ll listen, and decide that he was killed by a creature from another planet who arrived in a UFO. There probably was a circular mark on the central square where it landed, but we all forgot to look. Are you going to have a Mexican dessert?”
“I’m going to take you home. You need a long talk with Reed on the telephone and a good night’s sleep. You must have guessed, being the smartest professor I know, that they only asked you to take on this investigation because they knew it couldn’t be solved. Your failure is proof they tried and there is no solution. Then they’ll get one of their lawyers to defend them against charges of negligence. You can’t win them all, Kate, but I think you can feel good about this case. The police would have pinned it on Arabella, excuse me, Ms. Jordan and friends, but for you. And who knows, maybe another professor would have been dumped out of a window but for you.”
“You’re a sweet man, Mr. Edgerton, and you’re also right. I need a good night’s sleep.”
But Humphrey was not as right as either of them hoped. Someone else was pushed out of a window. Not a professor. Arabella Jordan.
Her body was found in the courtyard of her apartment house at Riverside Drive and 140th Street. Forty-eight hours passed before anyone at the university was notified. The student paper received the news, called in by a classmate of Arabella. They had every intention of printing the story, and did, but not without first notifying the administration in the person of Matthew Noble of the death. Matthew Noble talked to other administrators as soon as he could drag
them from the meetings at which all deans and vice presidents and provosts seemed to spend their time. It was perhaps an hour past all these confabulations that they thought of Kate, but they did think of her, which indicated, as she later told Reed, that she had on some level entered their consciousness as an investigator. This placated her ego without in any way soothing her spirit.
This time Kate cared about the victim; she was angry, grief-stricken, and needed to talk almost constantly. Reed said he would come home, offering she never knew what excuse; she needed him, and was relieved to have him back. Kate demanded to be allowed to consult with the police; the demand was granted. No doubt pressure by Reed, with his long stint in the D.A.’s office, had been effective; Kate didn’t care whence the pressure. She had been transformed from someone taking on a challenge to someone determined upon justice or at least revenge. Noble did not argue with her, nor did Edna or the provost or anyone else. She and Humphrey, who had also been called, met some hours later; they simply held each other for a time.
Kate was in a state of stunned silence she knew would soon give way to endless verbiage, but for the moment she was bereft of speech. Humphrey led her over to a ledge on the campus, looking down on one of the few green spots in this urban scene.
“I heard from her the day before yesterday,” Humphrey said, “She was feeling good, with the old urge to succeed coming back to her. I don’t know if this is the right thing to tell you, or whether this is the right time to tell it, but she liked talking to you. She said you were straight-forward and not a knee-jerk liberal.”