by Amanda Cross
Sitting in the airplane by Reed’s side, however, sipping a vodka martini, Kate felt she could trust herself to speak. Instead, of course, she started to cry, not noisily, but with the tears streaming down her face. “Never mind,” Reed said, producing a large handkerchief. “Cry away. No, the stewardess will not think you are drunk, only bereaved. Perhaps she will decide I have told you of my passion for another woman, and you are trying to persuade me not to break up our happy home. That’s better. A faint smile, but a smile, indubitably.”
“I keep thinking about her, and remembering her. I would never have believed I could remember her so clearly, in such detail, or that my conversations with her would seem so vivid. That, no doubt, is what the poets keep telling us about life—we never perceive it with intensity until someone has drowned in a rocky pool. At least, that’s what poets used to tell us, before they abandoned intensity and syntax altogether. I sound like a congressman from the Middle West, of a particularly conservative persuasion. But, Reed, what can she have been doing there? Was she, who was from the Middle West, overcome with a need to see the sea? Surely she can’t have been robbing Cecily—not of the silver, I mean, but of papers and so on? She didn’t seem that sort. And why should she have decided to go rock climbing? Why did I, if it comes to that? Could her body have been thrown there?”
“Let’s not speculate until after the autopsy. I gather Max did not recognize her?”
“No. Why on earth should he?”
“Well, she had been at the university. He might have passed her on the campus.”
“I’m sure Max never noticed anyone to whom he hadn’t been properly introduced, certainly not one of the thousands of graduate students swarming about the place. She was a nice girl. Reed—what an old-fashioned phrase that is. An old-fashioned nice girl, and holding down a job to stay in school, though she had some sort of fellowship to pay her tuition. Her parents were poor; the whole heart-rending bit. I hope to God she was not their only child, but I have a sinking feeling that she was. Why should the thought that she was not, Reed, make it any easier to bear? Tell me that.”
“There will be nothing easy about this news,” Reed said. “Someone is on the way to deliver it now, miles away, even in another time zone. Kate, you have got to pull yourself together sufficiently to realize how absolutely extraordinary your whole story is. I don’t blame the Maine police for deciding you and Max were involved in dark and nefarious sin; how not, under the circumstances? When Max told me he was going to seek you out, I’m afraid I barely listened; more’s the pity. I should have told him you were addressing a group of gay activists in Minneapolis. That would have scared him off.”
“I expect Max was nervous being left with the results of Cecily’s death. After all, the decision not to marry or involve oneself in anothers’ life is supposed to be insurance against just this sort of thing. I think it touching that Max wanted his hand held, and by the least motherly female around.”
Reed reached over and opened the second little bottle of vodka martini provided by the airline; he poured it into Kate’s glass and stirred it for her. “You do realize, my darling, why it may have had to be you who accompanied Max on this touching mission? Because you could identify the body for him and get any suspicion nicely turned in another direction.”
Kate swallowed this statement with the first sip of her second martini. Then she shook her head. “Too clever by half,” she said. “You are, I am to gather, suggesting that Max, having got the body into the pool, wanted it identified by someone suspicious. But, Reed, if he had been responsible for that body, which is ridiculous on the face of it, the last thing he would want is any connection with it at all. Besides, what could he possibly accomplish by dragging me up there to identify the body? Whenever it died, I was nowhere near Maine, and could certainly prove it. But you know, there is a connection, not between Max and Gerry, but between Gerry and the house. Of course. That portrait. She was doing her dissertation on Dorothy Whitmore, and wanted, perhaps, to see the painting. It is extraordinary, that portrait. That’s why she was there, Reed; that has to be why she was there. That, or hoping for Whitmore papers, though she didn’t strike me as a snooper in the least.”
“No doubt you’re right. And at a less elevated moment, you must tell me about Dorothy Whitmore, Cecily Hutchins, and the story of English women novelists of the past century. Meanwhile, it would seem, if your speculation is accurate, that she was discovered by someone who may well have been after the silver, enticed or bullied onto the rocks, and killed. The police will have to find that prowler. He must have been fairly vigorous, for starters.”
“Or seductive.”
“I thought you said she was a nice girl, old-fashioned and all that?”
“Exactly why he would have had to be seductive, in a subtle way,” Kate said, feeling a bit better. But the pain of Gerry’s death had taken hold, and would never entirely abate.
In the weeks that followed, the police in Maine came, apparently, to the same conclusion as had Reed and Kate in the plane. They set about discovering the prowler, and were somewhat helped in this by the date of death, surprisingly established within a day or two by the medical experts. The girl had drowned, having first been hit on the head or, more probably, having hit her head on a rock after slipping. She had died, expert opinion was as certain as expert opinion ever allows itself officially to be, not less than three, not more than five days before the body was found. High tide and rough seas had dashed the body against the rocks as it lay in the small pool, but these injuries, received after death, were so identified. She was in good health—no disease of any sort to suggest another cause of death. And yes, of course, it was perfectly possible that she had died alone and by accident. Surely she would have been foolish to climb out on those rocks when no one knew she was going, or would realize that she was gone, but having done so, she might well have slipped, hit her head, fallen forward into the pool, and drowned. Altogether unsatisfactory, but where there was no motive, it seemed foolish to suggest murder. An unfortunate accident. Signs warning visitors away from the coast were suggested, but the residents pointed out, as they had before, that the coast hereabouts was private, and trespassers—this was not quite said—deserved what they got.
And that, it appeared, was that. The prowler was not discovered, despite profound questioning of everyone who might have seen such a person. No one had seen anyone. How, then, had Maximillian Reston come to hear of a prowler? This question, too, innocently resolved itself. An old lady with a house on the same private road had been for her afternoon constitutional, and walking up near Cecily’s house—they had been friends, and this was an established custom the old lady saw no reason now to change—she had seen a man about the place. No, she could not really tell anything about him. But she felt it her duty to let Max know. She was in her late seventies, and while vigorous, as lonely and eccentric (the police used another word unofficially) as Cecily. Max responded to this warning because he felt guilty about the papers. Since the old lady had also been in touch with Cecily’s lawyer, an old-time resident of the town whom she knew well, additional pressure had been put on Max to cope. It all fitted in neatly, and bit by bit the case faded away.
As for Kate Fansler, who agreed, in that entirely improper way, to accompany a man to Maine and spend the night with him in a local inn, she was absolutely and indisputably elsewhere at the time of the death, however widely one extended this. The police clearly, if inaudibly, were regretful. She would have made a nice solution. But at all the days and hours when Geraldine Marston might have died, Kate Fansler, who turned out to be a rather well-known professor of English at a prominent university with all sorts of important connections, was holding forth (one gathered she did rather hold forth) in the presence of several people at the least, except at night, when her husband, whose qualifications were awe-inspiring, even in Maine, was prepared to swear that she was with him.
There
for several months the matter rested. It was not until late March that the thought of Geraldine Marston became again, for Kate, more than a dull, persistent pain and a sad memory.
Chapter Four
The elevator opened directly into the gymnasium, disgorging its occupants into what would certainly have been one of the circles of hell had Dante been prescient enough to have thought of it. Fortunately for him and the world of medieval literature, he had lived too soon to envision the ambiance of the gymnasium of an all-male school in the last third of the twentieth century. Kate Fansler, whom experience seemed incapable of preparing for the assault on her senses, paused to allow herself to regain what equanimity the scene allowed. It wasn’t much. The smell of twenty-five or more adolescent male bodies engaged in relentless athletics, while at first apparently beyond the bounds of adult human endurance, would, Kate knew from experience, be reduced by the blessed action of olfactory fatigue. The noise, emanating in the main from a loudspeaker system amplifying the latest rock at several decibels above that safe for human hearing, would subside, not, as seemed likely, from the deafness of the spectators, but from the beginning of the game, when the speaker system would be blessedly shut off. “But what,” Kate had asked her nephew Leo, “can be the point of that awful noise, that deafening cacophony?”
“We like it.” Leo was by now inured to his aunt’s tendency toward polysyllabic expression. “Besides,” he conceded in the interests of truth, “it psychs up the team.”
“My God,” Kate had answered. She was capable of monosyllables when shocked.
The noise from the loudspeaker system did not quite drown out the other sounds from the gymnasium—the screams of young males, varying from bass to soprano in range, but remarkably similar in tone and vocabulary; the bells and ancient car horns being practiced for subsequent use in the expression of joy at a basket, home team or not, as the case might be.
Having taken account of smell and sound, Kate turned to consider the next feat required of her: the climb, through obdurately unmoving male bodies, up the grandstand to a seat from which she might watch the game. A backless seat, of course, providing little foot room and no place for one’s coat and other accouterments: Kate had learned to limit these, and to wear only pantsuits to the gymnasium. One evening of tugging helplessly at her skirts had been enough.
“Hi, Kate!” John Crackthorne’s mature tones managed somehow to make themselves heard. He patted a place next to him, and Kate, waving wildly in recognition—for no lesser gestures would have been observable—began the search for footholds between the stolid bodies of small boys.
“Hey, you. Alderman, Watson, Levy, let the lady up, please.” Crackthorne accompanied this command with certain well-placed kicks and blows. The boys addressed, suddenly awakened to their roles of courteous youths, as opposed to athletic demons, arose, revealing ties, blazers, and the promise of civilization, and let Kate pass.
“Marvelous to see you,” Crackthorne said. “You are becoming one of our most faithful followers of the team. Is it vicarious pleasure or support of your nephew? Direct pleasure it can scarcely be, so I don’t suggest it.”
“Leo seems to like me to come,” Kate answered. “Of course, he never asks me or notices me while I’m here. But he does announce when the game will be, and I have observed that all the other starters have faithful parents who attend with touching regularity. When I ask Leo if I should come, he always says, ‘If you feel like it, it’s O.K.,’ which, translated, means: I would like to have you there, but I would rather feel that you had insisted upon coming over my demurrings. The translation may, of course, as translations so often are, be distorted by the preconceptions of the translator. Why do you attend so faithfully?”
“All five boys are in my English class, and by coming I gain a certain moral ascendance over the basketball coach. He tried to retaliate by attending my English classes, but couldn’t fit it in between practices; the one time he came he fell asleep. Alas, so often, do the boys, from too much basketball practice—but you don’t want to hear any more of our tedious school wrangles. I understand if we win tonight, we can scarcely fail to have an undefeated season, a fact which the boys and I partly regret. Why has it never occurred to anyone that God, if he existed, would clearly be seen to be regularly on the wrong, if winning, side? We ought to have lost gracefully, while gaining school fame with a smashing performance by the orchestra or dramatic society. But such is not life.”
Anyone watching them, Kate supposed, would assume them to be involved in a relationship of great intimacy. Through long practice, Kate and Crackthorne had discovered that if one put one’s mouth exactly as though one were about to kiss the ear of the other, words might actually be exchanged. To any visitor from Mars—who, however, if he were clever enough to get to earth, would be smart enough not to enter the gymnasium—it would appear that Kate and Crackthorne derived great pleasure from the lengthy kissing of one another’s ears.
“Ah,” Kate said. She by now knew the signs. The teams left the floor, either for last-minute instructions in their locker room or, as Kate rather suspected, to enable them to make an entrance in their handsome warm-up suits. Kate had learned from Leo that no uniform was too fine for varsity teams, though the science teacher had been heard muttering about the shortage of Bunsen burners, and the library, however elegant, could certainly have done with some judicious filling in.
Kate, under Leo’s relentless instruction, delivered for the most part as an accompaniment to televised Knick games, had become something of a basketball aficionado. To her own and Leo’s regret, she could never recognize when someone had set a “pick,” and she tended to admire the wrong members of any team she watched; also, her most regrettable failing from Leo’s point of view, she disapproved staunchly of the Wilt Chamberlain type, all those over seven feet tall. She maintained that the game should be limited to those six feet five or under, and no amount of explanation on Leo’s part of the grace and talent of these tall men could reconcile Kate to the unfair advantage of their height. Still, Leo forgave her these failings because she maintained both her interest and a knowledge of her ignorance; those elders who pretended to understand the game when they did not, which was mostly, were the scorn of the boys. Similarly, if Leo should want to know something about a work of literature for an exam, whose imminence always coincided with his first reading of the work to be examined, he would wander into Kate’s room and say: “Let’s hear a few bright remarks about ‘Prufrock.’ ” Kate rather admired this mutual exchange of needed information, made possible by her willingness to leave the initiation of all conversations to Leo. Those conversations whose nature required they be initiated elsewhere, Kate, with great cowardice, left to Reed. The system worked surprisingly well.
It was Leo’s parents’ unwillingness to leave any initiative at all to Leo that had shattered, once and for all, Leo’s ability to get along with them or even, eventually, to remain in the same house. Whether because he was the middle son of three, or because of odd personality clashes, or because, in Kate’s opinion, her brother was a stuffed shirt with a closed mind and her sister-in-law a beautifully dressed and coiffured busybody with no mind at all, Leo had needed to escape. Once before in his life he had turned up, so to speak, on Kate’s doorstep and lived with her for a summer. Now, in his senior year in high school, he was living with her again. Reed had agreed they would try it, and it had worked, not that either Kate or Reed deluded themselves about the reasons. First, their apartment was large; second, they had ample domestic help; third, they were able to maintain an indifference to Leo’s actions which, such is the perversity of adolescence, impelled him to discuss them and thus allow a certain degree of guidance; fourth, and most important, Leo wanted to get on with Kate and Reed, the alternatives being to live with his parents, which was unthinkable, or go to boarding school, which was undesirable.
It had, of course, been left to Kate once again to soothe the ruffled ego
of her brother. He had argued with his eldest about the Vietnam war, alienated his second son, and seemed to suspect Kate, unladylike enough not to have produced any progeny of her own, of eyeing the third, Ted, now in the eighth grade. But Kate had been able to assure him that many adolescents like Leo were better off not living at home and boarded out, which was certainly true, and that Ted, the third son, already able to flatter his father into too large an allowance, was at thirteen too far down the primrose path for Kate to offer him house room should he want it. Sometimes, at the basketball games, Kate tried to picture her brother and sister-in-law watching, and failed wholly in this imaginative effort. “Some of us,” Kate had said to Reed, “were born to be aunts and uncles. A valuable and underrated role.”
“Still,” Reed had answered, “the roles might have been easier could you have managed to latch on to an uncoordinated nephew five feet six or, better still, a niece. One can grow tired of basketball.”
“It intrigues me,” Kate had said. And Leo was content to discuss other things with Reed. It made for pleasantness all around.
With a great whoop, mercifully accompanied by the cessation of the rock music, the teams returned. The starters doffed their warm-up regalia, and the loudspeaker began announcing the teams. As each name was announced, its owner rushed out to the court and stood there, avoiding all eyes. When the teams were assembled, the captains shook hands—Kate, watching this grudging gesture, was reminded that hand-shaking supposedly derived from an examination of the other man’s sleeve for hidden weapons—and the centers crouched to await the jump.