by Amanda Cross
He appeared to Henry James, “so utterly other than had been supposed by the ‘fond prefigurements of youthful piety,’ ” and [he faced] “the full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.”
—HAROLD NICOLSON, Tennyson
Six
I SCRIBBLED notes while Rick talked, writing with one hand and occasionally scooping up mouthfuls of food with the other. It was a technique I had fully developed. The notes I took on such occasions rarely turned out to be important, but taking them was necessary to ensure concentration on what I was hearing. If I just listened, it was possible I would let something significant slip by me; taking down the sense of what was being said meant I didn’t miss much. It worked, at least for me.
Some detectives pride themselves on having a meticulous memory and perfect recall. Maybe they do, although I doubt it; and even if they can rely on their unerring memory today, who knows what tricks it may play tomorrow? Some P.I.’s use tape recorders, but I scorn that. It’s like copying some essential document instead of reading it. Tapes are okay for interviews, but no good for detection, not unless you want some sort of legal record, and then the courts will probably throw it out. I use tapes only to bully reluctant husbands who think there’s no proof with which their wives can nail them for adultery; sometimes I find that hearing their own voices saying what they denied having said pushes them over the edge.
I took notes as Rick talked, stopping now and then to wave for another martini and going into more and more digressions, which is to say more and more details. I didn’t interrupt often, and then only with a question to refuel his energy for compulsive talking. Not that I blamed him for the way he felt about Clifton; and I thought he’d certainly been smart to get out and move away. But at the same time, I could tell that the likelihood of his forgetting, or forgiving, or getting over the Clifton experience was not great.
He spoke of the dynamic of relationships in the English department there. Sick, he called them, and I could hardly doubt it. The “old boys,” as he dubbed them, meaning everyone who had been there since forever, joined ranks to defeat any new appointment or promotion to tenure they found in any way threatening, which Rick said was all of them. They promoted and hired only clones of themselves. At the same time, he insisted, these older types didn’t exactly like each other much either, and bickering went on between them, at meetings and in the corridors, punctuated by insincere greetings to whoever was passing. One of them, according to Rick, would shout out, “Fine,” if anyone seemed to be greeting him, although he was too deaf to know what the greeting was or if anyone was asking him how he felt.
Meanwhile, he and Antonia, and three of the four assistant professors, including the one who was away this year, had joined into a group supporting one another, and letting off steam at regular intervals. He and Antonia and the assistant professor, Catherine Dorman, who had been turned down for tenure, were the closest. Rick’s partner, Frank, had gotten to enjoy the group as well. The four of them often met at Rick and Frank’s apartment to discuss department conditions and possible maneuvers. Well, Rick said, Catherine was gone now, and he and Frank lived in New Jersey, but he sure as hell missed Antonia, seeing her on a regular basis, talking with her, laughing together.
“What did you laugh at, mainly?” I asked. He was getting a little repetitive, and I thought concentrating on some particulars was not a bad idea.
“Tennyson,” Rick said. “Tennyson, and Haycock’s idiotic books on him. Harold Nicolson, in a book written in the Twenties, had referred to Tennyson’s ‘polluted muse,’ and Haycock had written volumes, absolute volumes, refuting, or trying to, that hideous phrase. Antonia looked it up and found that Nicolson was actually quoting a review on Tennyson’s early work; it also referred to Tennyson’s ‘feminine feebleness’—never will I forget that phrase. Obviously Haycock refused even to quote it in anger; the idea of Tennyson as feminine, let alone feeble, was more than he could countenance. And should anyone suggest that Tennyson and Hallam had loved not wholly in the pure way of manly men—well, I need hardly tell you what old Haycock would have thought of that. Actually, he might have burst a blood vessel and saved whoever did it from murdering him.”
I looked puzzled, and I was. “You think it all sounds mad?” Rick asked.
“Not mad, perhaps, but hardly what I imagined academics went on about. They sound more like kids arguing over the relative skill of baseball players.”
“Of course they do. You’ve seen too many professors in movies, Woody, my love. Haycock had given his whole working life to Tennyson, he liked to think of himself as the world’s authority on Tennyson, and he suspected that Antonia was trying to take Tennyson, which is to say his life, away from him.”
“Was she?”
“No, of course not. If he’d been a little more sensible about everything, including women and Tennysonian criticism, he’d have played around with it, and everyone would have been happy. But instead he fought Antonia and everything she stood for, including, alas, Catherine Dorman, who, one has to admit, joined Antonia in whooping up the Bloomsbury view of Tennyson.”
“Bloomsbury?” I said, sneaking a look at my watch. Please God, I said to myself irreverently, don’t make whatever he plans to say about Bloomsbury important; I was too tired. But tired or not, it was clear Rick was getting to the heart of the matter, and I had better pay attention. I signaled the waiter for coffee, and looked at Rick with what I hoped would pass for eager anticipation.
“Decaf ?” the waiter asked, responding to my summons.
“Certainly not,” I barked at the poor man. “Perhaps you can double the caffeine.”
“Getting sleepy?” Rick asked, not quite mockingly. Thanking what powers there be that I hadn’t drunk much, I denied this charge with vigor, and urged him on to explain what he meant by Bloomsbury.
“They were a group of clever people—geniuses, some of them—in England between the wars. Who they were doesn’t matter. Virginia Woolf was perhaps the most important. She and her sister Vanessa Bell, an artist, and various relatives and friends, liked to put on plays. Virginia wrote them, Vanessa designed them, and they were produced in Vanessa’s studio. The cast of this particular play included Duncan Grant, who was an artist, Vanessa’s longtime lover, a homosexual, and the father of Angelica, Vanessa’s daughter, who was in the play, together with Vanessa’s son Julian, by Clive Bell, her husband, and Virginia’s nieces, the daughters of her brother Adrian.”
My eyes were rolling. Perhaps I had overlooked a few of his drinks. “Were these people in the English department?” I asked.
“You haven’t been listening carefully,” Rick said, sounding not the least drunk. “Although I admit it is confusing at first.”
“I should think it would be confusing forever,” I said nastily.
“Never mind all that. I’m telling you about Bloomsbury, which included the aforementioned as well as others. They didn’t go in for conventional sexual morality, but that’s not the point right now. The point is that this group put on a play called Freshwater, which had Tennyson in it as a character, mocked—lovingly mocked, but mocked. Virginia had grown up with ‘Maud,’ and was only joshing at what she loved, but Haycock could hardly be expected to understand that. It increased his hatred of Antonia and her part in the play, and everything and everyone she touched.”
“Who is Maud?” I said, though I hardly dared to ask.
“Oh, Jesus,” Rick cried—a name I never evoke in anger. I’m not religious, but there is such a thing as respect. I frowned.
“Sorry,” Rick said. “ ‘Maud’ is a poem by Tennyson; a famous poem: ‘Come into the garden, Maud, / For the black bat, night, has flown, / Come into the garden, Maud, / I am here at the gate alone.’ Those are the lines quoted in the play. Antonia and Catherine and Frank and I put it on once, for an audience of friends; we had a few others in the cast, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Don’t you even know ‘Alice
’?” he asked, as though suddenly considering whether or not he had been wasting his time, and whether the people who hired me ought to have their heads examined. “ ‘She’s coming! cried the Larkspur, I hear her footstep, thump, thump, thump, along the gravel walk,’ ” he quoted happily.
“Rick,” I said. “Could we put this into context for a simple soul like me? It’s getting late, and we should think of leaving. Could we sum it all up?” The great thing about New York restaurants is that people go on eating all evening, the later the better, so the waiters don’t start glaring at you if you stay awhile. They’d like new customers and new tips, but when leaving a tip I always take into account how long I’ve been hanging around taking up the table; it’s only fair.
“To sum up,” he said pompously, “the Moderns do not think Tennyson is the greatest thing in literature; in fact, they count him as rather dull. Harold Nicolson even thought he was pretty awful, except for some of his lyrics. Personally, I like some of Tennyson; I used to memorize ‘Ulysses’ as a child. Well, I won’t quote it now; and then there’s ‘Tithonus.’ That’s where Aldous Huxley got the title, ‘After many a summer dies the swan.’ ”
“Rick,” I said, dire threats evident in my voice.
“Haycock thought Antonia and Catherine, being Modern and playing around with Freshwater, were, so to speak, pissing in his and Tennyson’s tea. It was just one more thing to add to his hatred of women in academia, any literature later than Queen Victoria, and all those who didn’t think Tennyson was what poetry was all about. I think that even the other old boys got a bit weary of Tennyson and the other Victorians Haycock went on and on about. Ruskin is okay, but he was a bit tiresome about Whistler.”
“Rick!”
“Damn it, Woody, you asked for the context. That’s the context! He was a perfectly dreadful person. Was he dreadful enough to induce someone to drop serious poison into his drink? I wouldn’t have thought so, but then, someone did, didn’t they? I’ve no doubt most of those in the department would like to blame Antonia, but killing people isn’t Antonia’s way. Don’t believe me on this. Talk to all her other friends. Look, I’ve got an idea: Antonia was friendly with a woman who used to be dean of the faculty at Clifton. She’d had enough before Haycock got knocked off, so she isn’t a suspect, but she’d be a good person to talk to for the whole picture, so to speak. Here, I’ll give you her phone number.”
He took out one of those small electronic appointment books, telephone directories, and keeper of all secrets as far as I know. The thought of something electronic wiping out all my appointments and notes is more than I can contemplate. I’ll take up using one when paper and pens are no longer available.
“Here we are,” he said. He read me off her full name—Elaine Kimberly—and her address and telephone number. I wrote them down and waved for the bill. I had every intention of calling her first thing in the morning, but then I had a horrible thought. “She isn’t a literary type, is she?” I asked with more passion than tact.
Rick laughed. “Not exactly; something in the classics line, I think. I doubt she’ll have any views on Tennyson or Bloomsbury. Anyway, deans give all that academic stuff up when they start deaning. No time for mere academic pursuits; time only for academic politics. I think you’ll like her.”
We parted outside. He offered to talk to me again anytime. I thanked him and said I’d be in touch, which maybe I would be when I recovered from this evening. I couldn’t imagine why they’d hired me to find Haycock’s murderer and, more to the point, why I’d taken the damn job. Oh, well, there was always the dean. I had high hopes of the dean.
Dean Kimberly still lived in New Jersey, in one of those upper-class areas that somehow fail to conform to the rather tacky impression people seem to have of New Jersey. Not that I was overwhelmed by the elegance, mind you. The neighborhood didn’t strike me as that different from the elegant parts of Westchester. For my money, suburbia is suburbia until you’re at least far enough from New York City for all the natives to be Republicans with opinions of New York varying from unlivable to sinister. Still, her house, when I reached it, looked inviting: land, big trees, no impression of anything being manicured, and with a large dog lying on the stoop. Not a Saint Bernard, but huge, black with a white face. It rose to its feet as I roared up on my bike, but didn’t bark. It just kept me covered, as it were. Big dogs figure they can handle it and don’t need to arouse the troops; I’ve noticed that.
She must have heard the bike, because she came to the door and waited, with a pleasant air of greeting, for me to dismount and shed my helmet. I took to her immediately, suburb or not. We went into her front hall, the dog with us, where I left my helmet and jacket and followed her into the kitchen.
“I thought you might like a cup of coffee or tea,” she said. I told her coffee would be fine, and like every other nut in the world—strictly my own opinion—she started to grind coffee beans. We said nothing during the short racket, and nothing further while the coffee machine gurgled away. She had one of those coffee-brewing gadgets attached to the wall. Detecting, I concluded that she was a devoted coffee drinker. I requested milk and sugar when asked; I would have preferred cream or half-and-half, but nobody keeps that sort of thing around these days; it’s a no-no. Too bad, really, because coffee with cream is simply delicious.
“Would you rather drink it here or in the living room?” she asked. “The chairs are more comfortable in there.”
“I always like sitting around a table,” I said, settling down. In my experience conversation goes better around a table; people relax more and when I make notes I’ve got something ready to be leaned on. She sat down opposite me and sipped her coffee—black, of course. Someday those research types are going to discover that cholesterol is essential to health, and the effects of avoiding it downright deleterious. You can bet on it.
“Rick called me,” she said. “He told me you want to talk about the college and particularly the English department. I should warn you that I’m not your best source for information on the English department, although by the time I left I did have the impression that it was in pretty bad shape. Do you remember the Clinton impeachment hearings in Congress, in the House?”
“Definitely. Very partisan,” I added, suspecting that was the point she wanted to make. “The Republicans were out to get him, no other considerations allowed.”
“Exactly. That’s what had happened to the English department by the time I quit. The more established professors were against any new approaches to literature, and did not want even to consider them. For instance, there was one of the older members, Daniel Wanamaker, who was chair of the department, a man I liked and had a great deal of respect for; we had served together on a number of policy-setting committees. I hear he’s retiring this year. I thought him honorable, which he certainly had been. But when I pointed out to him that the department had blatantly rigged a vote on a new hire—the evidence having been given me, as dean, by a more forward-looking member of the department—he simply shrugged. It shook me up.”
“Is that why you left the college?”
She rose to get herself another cup of coffee. I shook my head when she looked to see if I wanted another. She wasn’t a woman to waste words on persuasion, which I liked about her. Try as I might—and I do try, I really do —not to be swayed by first impressions, all the same I get them and believe them. I’m aware that dishonest types know how to make a good impression, but I like to think I can see through that. I can’t, of course; no one can, not all the time. But you can’t help responding to people. It’s just important to be ready to shift views if required.
“It was just a small piece of why I left. Mostly why I left is personal and probably hasn’t anything to do with your investigation. Or not much. It is true that the tone, the spirit of the whole college had, in my opinion, badly deteriorated. I’d say that the attitude of that professor in the English department, representing the dominant force there, was repeated throughout the adminis
tration. I was fighting a lonely battle; I was fighting it as a woman, which made it harder; and one day I just decided it was enough. I walked out.”
She smiled, anticipating my question. “No, I don’t mean I got up from my desk, left, and never came back. I handed in my resignation and finished out the year. They wanted me to stay until they found a new dean, but I wasn’t having that. Either the new dean would be a creature in their own image, whom I would dread meeting, or, if not, I would have to warn the poor slob not to take the job.”
“Have you always lived here? It must be quite a commute from the college.”
“I had a small apartment near the college, and stayed there Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. This is where my home was and obviously still is. This is where I’ve lived ever since my divorce, after our children were grown and out in the world. Surely that can’t have anything to do with Professor Haycock’s murder. It’s a while since I’ve even seen anyone from the college.”
“Did you know anything about the fight to promote that young woman whom they succeeded in turning down? That seems to have been a major event in the life of the English department—the culminating event, so to speak.”
“I knew something about it because I’m a friend of Antonia’s. We used to meet from time to time and talk about the department’s situation; she was very upset about that decision and about the way it had been handled. Sometimes she’d drive out here for a cup of coffee—just like you. Would you like a cookie, by the way? Have one. I made them.” She pushed the plate toward me; I’d been eyeing them in the middle of the table, and trying to avoid glancing at them too often.
“Do you live here all alone?” I asked. I knew she did, but it pays sometimes to ask questions to which you know the answer, as opposed to suspecting the answer. People respond to personal questions differently, and how they respond tells you about them; at least, I find it does.