by Amanda Cross
“I don’t know your first name,” Kate said. “Mine’s Kate.”
“Paula. Arabella could never understand how she could have been given such an ‘icky’ name. She swore her classmates thought it a typically black name. Her mother gave it to her; she thought it beautiful. I always called her Arry, but her father called her Arabella.” It was the nearest Paula had yet come to blaming her husband. “What are you going to do next?” Paula asked.
“Go on talking to people. Thinking. Trying to guess. I’ve never thought of working out problems, detection, as only the gathering of clues, or even facts, important as those are. Whatever happened is a story; it’s a narrative, and my job is to try to find out what that story is. That’s what I’m going to try to do, mostly by talking to people. Professor Adams’s secretary comes next. I hope I can talk to you again.”
“I’ll be back on my job. But call at night if you need me for anything, or at work. Here’s my card. I’ve written my home number on the back. If I don’t talk too much the moment you reach me at home, it may be because I don’t want to upset my husband; but I’ll get back to you.”
“He blames me?” Kate asked.
“You, and the university, and the gangs, and drugs, and everyone who wouldn’t live a decent, middle-class life once they’re given a chance.”
“He doesn’t understand anger,” Kate ventured.
Paula Jordan took Kate’s hand. “No one’s but his own,” she said sadly.
Kate met Adams’s ex-secretary the next day at lunch. Kate had invited her out, wanting for herself a different ambience and hoping that Susan Pollikoff would be glad of a meal rather than anorexic and picking at her food as though it were poison.
Ms. Pollikoff’s cheerful greeting at the restaurant allayed Kate’s fears: she was pleasingly plump, a phrase that Kate, despite her own slimness, cherished from an earlier time; a thoroughly cheerful person ready to enjoy whatever pleasures life offered. She was also, it soon became clear, highly intelligent. After they had ordered, Kate asked about Ms. Pollikoff’s decision to leave the job in Adams’s department.
“Call me Susan,” Ms. Pollikoff inevitably said. “I used to object to male professors who called me Susan while I called them Professor Bumbum, but a woman professor is different. I figure we should all call you women professors Professor to make a point about your being here. Unfortunately, there weren’t many women professors on whom to practice this sensible decision. Now there’s you and several more.”
“I take it Professor Adams wasn’t overwhelmingly appealing?”
“My God; he had the most underwhelming appeal I’ve ever seen in a pompous male, and I’ve seen plenty. Ah!” This last was at the arrival of the food. Kate warmed to Susan, who was frankly hungry and began eating.
“The fact is,” she said between mouthfuls, “Canny, as we all called him among ourselves because that’s what his absolutely awful wife called him, was like something left over from an earlier era that he thought ideal but we thought probably the pits. He flirted with young women, was rude to older ones, wielded what power he had, and he had more than he should have had because he corralled and kept it, with more arrogance than one would have thought possible. In addition he lied whenever it suited him, which was most of the time, and always blamed someone else for his mistakes, which were numerous. I hope you won’t think me unfeeling if I say that when we heard of his death—I’d left the department by then and gone back to being a full-time graduate student—we assumed he’d been forced out of the window the way one is forced out of an airplane, by the sheer pressure of dislike everyone had for him. This is very good Mexican food, considering it’s not a Mexican restaurant.”
“Were the black students using a room on the same floor while you were still there?”
“Oh, yes, they’d just gotten permission for that, and wasn’t old Canny the very picture of Lady Bountiful or whatever the male counterpart of that is. He liked to offer space on the floor as though he were a subcontractor, which he obviously thought he was. He probably disliked them because they were black, but the fact is, he was so rude to everyone he didn’t happen to need at that moment that it was hard to distinguish racism from usual plain beastliness. I was horrified to hear about Arabella; I got to know her a little when the black students first got the room on our floor. She had the guts to stir things up, and of course old Canny would rather academia hadn’t been stirred since Nicholas Murray Butler began his presidency of Columbia University, which lasted half a century or something. The word around is that you’re going to solve the murder of Arabella; I certainly hope you catch the bastard. I would have thought it was Adams if he weren’t dead already, or if he would ever venture above Ninety-sixth Street, which is unlikely in the extreme.”
Kate concluded that Susan’s wonderful line of chatter depended, perhaps excessively, on subordinate clauses beginning with which, but she was in no mood to quibble about syntactical niceties. “Could you be more specific about Adams?” Kate asked. “I gather he was far from the salt of the earth, but everyone who talks about him is so overcome with his plain awfulness that they hardly offer any particular examples thereof. Can you think of one or two?”
“I can think of thirty or forty, but let me be selective, which is a talent I am trying to develop. He was a solitary solipsist: he thought he was the only person in the world who mattered, except maybe for the president of the United States. He thought nothing of making us secretaries work late because he didn’t give us something until five of five and absolutely had to have it right then. Most of us held the job while attending classes—that’s why we worked for such piddling salaries—but he would always find a way to impede, or at least object to, our going to classes about which he certainly knew. He patted behinds; he thought if he asked for something flirtatiously he could hardly be denied. And the damn trouble is it often worked, at least with women students who didn’t like to turn him off completely because he had so much power, and who often misunderstood his obscene gestures until they became absolutely unmistakable, at which point they were in danger of being raped, the students I mean. Professor Fansler, we’re talking horrible, not just difficult, or on the lunatic fringe, but horrible. I’m frankly surprised no one killed him earlier, if you want to know.”
“What about his wife? Did anyone like her?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Sorry, I suppose that’s not the way to talk to a professor, but you can’t be serious. She thought nothing, nothing, of calling up and saying that Canny was asking some students or some faculty up for some social thing, and would we order all the needfuls and come and help her arrange things. I mean, that woman had chutzpah she hadn’t even used yet; she made Canny look almost human from time to time, which was not easy, believe me.”
“Do you suppose all secretaries in all departments resent the professors, or most of them, so much?” Kate asked out of real curiosity. “It’s always seemed in our department that there was a certain esprit de corps, but no doubt all professors think that because they want to.”
“Some departments are worse than others, but all have their problems, which is the truth whether or not you want to hear it. I’m sure you’re courtesy itself to the staff; I can tell that. But you, I’m sure, have never come into an office full of the likes of us and said, ‘There’s nobody here.’ You’ve never told someone to give something to ‘the girls’ to type. You may never have screamed at us as though we made the university rules, but believe me, many have. The funny thing is that almost everything that gets done at this university gets done because members of the staff in each department and office know what’s what. The ignorance of the faculty is exceeded only by their impatience. I’m going too far, I know I am, which is my cardinal fault.”
“What are you studying?” Kate asked.
“Art history,” Susan said, “and please don’t ask me about that department. I am trying to close my eyes to the
facts of life here, and just get on with my work, a decision that is long overdue, I do assure you.” She had not said “which is long overdue”; Kate inwardly cheered. She liked Susan more and more. But she was getting nowhere. Wonderful conversations, grand people, no clues, not even many stories except the same old one about dreary Professor Adams and his worse wife.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Susan said when she had started on dessert. “Adams was a finagler. He liked to manipulate people; he prided himself on it. He’d got himself most of what he had by worming his way around among the administration and powerful faculty members for years. I think he finagled himself right out the window, that’s what I think.”
“But who was the one or ones he was finagling?”
“That’s the main question, which is the one you’re going to have to solve. Have you thought about his family? He had children from his first marriage; if I’d been them I would have called a family reunion of which the chief event was throwing papa out the window. You’ve got a problem, because the victim was so widely disliked. He was probably blown out the window by the pressure of accumulated hate, which is what I said at first, wasn’t it?”
“The truth is,” Kate said, suddenly realizing it to the full, “except for the first shock of his death, the violence of it, the fact of it, you don’t really care that he’s been snuffed out, not really care. And neither does anyone else I can find,” (except, Kate added to herself, the widow, who might have pulled off a few hundred thousand more for her nest egg). “No one will miss Adams; in fact, his departure is in the nature of a relief, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“I’m afraid so. It might not have been so clear if Arabella hadn’t died, but I do miss her, as well as resenting like hell her death. I mean, I keep thinking I’ll see her along the halls, even if I’m not in the same halls. She was part of the landscape, and she still should be. Arabella belonged where she was; she mattered; people cared.”
“Which,” Kate said, “made her murder the biggest mistake, perhaps the only mistake Adams’s murderer made. I’d rather never have known who killed Adams if the price was the death of Arabella.”
“But,” Kate said to Reed that night, “suppose Adams’s death was the price of Arabella’s? Suppose Arabella was the intended victim all the time?”
“It would be cute on the telly, I’ll give you that.” Reed said. “But think a moment. A young black woman falls to her death on 140th Street. How much attention would that get? You know and I know that black gangs kill each other at a great rate, and no one even notices until they bulge outside their territory and kill some white person in a ‘nice’ part of town. This goes for any town: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Haven—how many cities do you think I could name if I kept going?”
“I get the point. But don’t you think there was some connection between Adams and Arabella?”
“My dear, they were on the same floor in the same university and on opposite sides of just about any social issue around today. That’s not exactly a connection, but it doesn’t suggest pure chance either. The obvious conclusion is that Arabella saw the murderer.”
“Obviously. But why not mention it? Or, if she kept it to herself, why mention it eventually? I mean there’s a matter of months between murders.”
“You can’t know there’s a connection in their deaths, only in their lives. Lives are much more complicated than they make them on television.”
“Reed, will you stop mentioning television? I can’t understand why it keeps coming up. You don’t watch it, I don’t watch it, why the hell are we discussing it?”
“Because it shapes our lives. It suggests possibilities to us; in your immortal words, it suggests stories. On television everything that happens is connected; it’s got to be. In life, marvelously unconnected things keep happening in the same prime time series.”
“Thank you for those words of wisdom, O sage!”
“You always get petulant, my love, when you feel frustrated. I’ve noticed it often. No doubt it’s a general human trait, but you do get frustrated rather quickly, if you don’t mind my saying so. You haven’t found out anything useful, so you’re furious at the world.”
“I’m furious at you. Really, Reed, you’ve moved so far from your usual understanding self I’m beginning to think you’ve taken up with another woman. Television indeed. Just reflect a moment, before you start accusing me of irrational frustration. I’ve talked to more people than central casting could round up in a month. Deans, provosts, vice presidents, students, women faculty—don’t interrupt me, I’m just starting—an English lover of Adams who appears on the face of it to have more taste than to give him the time of day let alone days of dalliance, a wealthy pillar of Waspdom who decided for reasons that are probably true they’re so ridiculous to study Islam, a dippy, crafty widow and a frankly unsympathetic son, not to mention Arabella, her mother, and various other I shall, out of the goodness of my heart, fail to enumerate—”
“But, Kate—”
“Don’t interrupt; I’m not finished. I may never be finished, so you can leave if you want, quietly vanish, but don’t interrupt; I haven’t reached my peroration yet. Which is, as Susan Pollikoff would say, that none of this fits together or bears, with the exception of the mise-en-scène, the slightest concatenation. I’ve been given permission to search a haystack that had been carefully arranged with no needle in it.”
“May I say something?”
“Not unless it’s sympathetic and consoling.”
“I’ll try. You may not remember with the clarity I bring to my reminiscences, but you always reach a point in any investigation when you feel exactly like this. It is usually, to add to this evening’s admirable collection of clichés, the dark before the dawn. Suddenly you will understand it all, as though you had found the magic word. Why not go and sit in Adams’s office, if they haven’t yet given it to someone else, and meditate? Maybe you’ve been seeing too many people in your office, and the vibrations are jumbled. Try it.”
“I’m willing to try anything, including killing you. That’s neither sympathetic nor consoling.”
“Yes it is; think about it. Then try the daughters-in-law; maybe they united to do in their father-in-law. And you could try the widow again. She certainly inspired you with a certain je ne sais quoi.”
“Are you trying to make me attack you physically?”
“At last,” Reed said, “you’ve guessed it.”
Chapter Ten
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
Kate woke the next morning to find Reed gone; with her breakfast, which he had fixed for her, was a note. “My darling: all I can think of in the way of counsel is advice from a long-ago movie (not television) with, I think, Danny Kaye. Was he a jester, like you and me? Some wonderful woman sidled up to him to offer advice on their plan to poison the king: ‘The vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.’ Sometime later, as always happens, the advice had to change: ‘They’ve broken the vessel with the pestle and replaced it with a flagon with the figure of a dragon on it. Now the pellet with the poison’s in the chalice from the palace and the flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true.’ I may not have this altogether word for word, but I’m sure you get the message. With my love.”
Kate, when she had digested this message and all the good news in The New York Times, decided to review her facts. It’s not the facts, it’s the narrative they’re arranged to tell, she reminded herself. Were there any new facts not paraded out last night for Reed’s delectation? A few: for one, she had read Adams’s book, or anyway had read at it, and decided that it certainly told her more about the Arab cultu
re than she had ever known, but that only went to show that it might not be quite as informative to someone who already had a certain knowledge of the subject. The book certainly left her with the impression that the Arabs were the single greatest influence on world culture at that time, which was probably true but you couldn’t prove it by Kate.
For another fact, she had inquired into the history of the young man in the department whom Adams had been pushing for promotion. For this information she went to the dean of arts and sciences, who had been helpful to Kate once or twice before murder had come to muddy their conversations. He told her, after the usual cautions about confidentiality and the sacredness of the internal affairs of departments and the whole promotion process, that this young man’s promotion—his name was Jonathan Shapiro—had caused the biggest brouhaha in a department that never settled anything without a struggle that made the crusades look like a ten-day cruise. What it came down to was that the young man was competent enough, had published, done his services as a citizen, committee member, and runner of tedious programs, and was good as a teacher. The problem was that his field was Islam, and the others, whose fields were other parts of the Middle or Near East, thought that Islam already had more than its share of the department’s resources. In the end the administration had agreed with the department and had refused the young man’s promotion. It happened, however, that the department had been given a remarkable collection of Arabic books and documents that, added to the university’s already large Near Eastern library, called for an expert full-time librarian. Adams’s young man had been offered, and had accepted, this job. Kate had, in fact, trotted around to have a word with him, and he seemed scholarly and in every way suited to his work.