by Robert Stone
When the college politely reclaimed its rooms, four students followed her outside. There, they sat down on the cold ground until after dark and Margaret continued to delve into the arcane systems beyond whose mere appearances the heart of the cosmos beat. One of the kids was a general’s daughter. Two were the star horsewoman of the equestrian team and her boyfriend, a scholarship kid from Weed, California. The last was an unusually cultivated, impressive young man, a student from New Orleans.
Deep in the night, when the campus went quiet except for distant drunken yells, Margaret and her company of pilgrims were wandering the fragrant grounds, the four students trailing their cicerone like tourists at an antique tomb site. The campus police watched but did not question; professors had been weird for years. Morning came and another evening, and then the sun rose again on Margaret, hoarsely gesticulating, beautiful as life-in-death in her transfixion, and on the students, dead-eyed, weeping, laughing together, raising their hands in wonder at all that Margaret, once the smartest shipwright’s daughter in Bath, had conjured out of the mornings and the evenings of a few days in May.
A woman from the counseling office named Jo Carr put a stop to it with an arm around Margaret, who seemed ready to slug her. The students wandered in circles. The psychiatrists treating them thought they were on drugs, which some of them may have been, but it made no difference. Two kids dropped out of school for a year, the two others for some months. The college accommodated them. Right after the exercise Margaret made her way to her house on Nantucket.
Margaret Kemp had a close friend at the college, another English professor with an office next to Brookman’s, named Constance Haughy. Constance was an older woman who usually seemed quite sensible, but occasionally surprised. One night Brookman was working late when Constance’s telephone began to ring next door. He concentrated on the piece he was finishing. Then, after two hours, he noticed something strange: the phone was still ringing and, he realized, had been ringing the whole time. When he left his office it was still ringing. Walking home, he knew that it must be Margaret attempting to reach out. The night-shift cleaners later swore the phone had gone on ringing all night. The next day, on Nantucket, Margaret hanged herself in her garage, kicking away her bicycle.
As usual, nothing was free. Margaret was far from the first faculty suicide. Historically, violent death was never too long away. Adolescent turbulence, middle-aged despair, alcohol. Not to mention heroin and coke and speed. The pressure of relentless competition generated toxins catalyzed by the disorientation, the separation from love, the random sex, the sheer cold uncaringness of the college. When these elements came together it could be quite unsettling in the cozy firelit libraries and among the dreaming Gothic spires. Which was not to say the place lacked its pleasures, large and small.
The papers Maud had given him the day before lay on the desk. He pushed them away, then opened the envelope and took them out. The piece proved to be an article she had written for the weekly Gazette. The text seemed to be an objection to the anti-abortionist demonstrators who picketed Whelan Hospital each week.
One page that hadn’t come through clearly showed photographs of some animal or other. Brookman put it under the light to see more, but the shades blended into invisibility. The captions were unreadable too. On one of the following pages the pictures were similarly obscured, but the caption was plain: “Cute kiddie pictures courtesy of the right-to-life folks.”
“Ever ask,” the text read, “in the name of what authority do they harass women who choose to exercise their rights as full human beings? Most of them are dispatched by the Holy Romantic Megachurch. We know the Holy Romantic Megachurch loves cute kids. It’s in the papers every week; the priests of this religion can hardly get enough cute kids. If women decide to terminate pregnancies, how will the guys get their hands on enough institutionalized or semi-institutionalized adolescents to instruct? Think about it!”
This was the paper he had left unread, the one she had specifically asked him to read.
He read on.
“This intrepid band of intimidators treat us to their visits and their cunning fetus pictures about fifty-seven times a year. If they don’t come in the name of the Holy Romantic Megachurch, they represent the Assemblies of God, assembled by God for the purpose . . .”
Of course there was more. Brookman put the page under the light to see the picture. He thought it might have been a person, a child.
“Holy shit,” Brookman said aloud.
Of course it was the kind of thing she would do. I could have talked her out of it, he thought. If he had read it. If he had not been dodging her phone calls.
“You guys might not be able to tell, but these deformed children are made in the image and likeness of the Great Imaginary Paperweight in the Vast Eternal Blue. It’s true that the Great Paperweight is also the Great Abortionist—a freeze-chilling twenty percent of the sparkly tykes he generates abort—but he don’t like some girl doin’ it.
“His eye is on the sparrow and he’s got all his creatures covered, even those who aren’t as cute as the wee life forms his assembled fusiliers carry. Remember, there’s life after birth, as the Assembled Ones never tire of reminding us. That’s what prisons and lethal injections are for. He’s the Great Torturer, and he wants nothing more than to fry your ass eternally—not for just an hour, not for just a year, but always.”
She had gone too far in writing it. She had gone too far with him. She would go too far all her life. As for him, there were boundaries to his foolishness and selfishness. He had gone briefly to prison for it once, otherwise he had always been lucky. He had loved her. Loved would be the word. Lover, older brother. Father almost—she confided in him, maybe said to him what she would have said to her father but dared not. In loco parentis, one might cynically say. Or not cynically say.
Maud’s father was a widowed New York policeman from somewhere out in Queens and Maud was plainly crazy about him. At length she would mock and jeer this man, do impersonations of him, imitate his hard-edged accent, unaware that she sounded like him without trying. The idea of a policeman with a personality like Maud’s was frightening. Is he a religious fanatic? Because Maud is, regardless of the side she’s on. She had come to the college impacted in the sort of antique Catholicism Brookman thought had disappeared from literate circles a generation ago, thin-lipped and bitter, to every man his cross. Now she dealt the same card reversed. Armed with the childish energy of a parochial school minx, reciting every dirty word that’s ever occurred to her.
What she thought of instinctively as her moral derelictions were at once deliberate, heedless and passionate. She has described her own petty thievery to him in a state of fascinated self-laceration. She has told him that as a teenager she was “abnormally devout.” Now this, which will probably go viral online. It will circulate online and be darkly cherished by the wrong audience.
She’s a policeman’s daughter, he thought; does she not know what’s out there? Does she expect nothing but cheers from all directions? He was, after all, her faculty adviser; he might have talked her out of this folly, which would surely bring down on her more trouble than she knew. But of course he had commenced to abandon her.
The telephone, he noticed, had stopped ringing. He went to the window and looked out at the quad. Her cell phone was off when he tried it, and no one answered the phone in her room. He wondered if he might hear the Morse tattoo against his door.
The Gazette was due out the next morning. It occurred to him that the other editors there might have the sense not to run it. But those editors were kids like her. Why would they feel they should restrain the general rage at the overreaching, corrupt harassment of the churches?
Then it came to him, outside reason, that she might have effected some kind of curse on his marriage—his wife and the child she carried. Of course: the child unborn. At the same time, he thought, he could not leave Maud alone and friendless in that place, and he went out to find her.
; It was getting cold again outside. Across the street from his quad gate in the Taylor Library someone had lit a fire in the Great Hall, a quasi-medieval concoction from the prime of Stanford White. It was beautiful beyond the sneers of modernists and postmodernists, beyond authenticity. The firelight glowed invitingly in the leaded windows. Why this is hell, Brookman thought. Nor am I out of it.
8
ON FRIDAY MORNING Maud woke up to sleety rain. Though she could hear his telephone voice in her head, she realized that he had never picked up. She had not reached Brookman, and she only partly remembered making her way back to the dorm room from a booth in one of the bars near the river. She thought they must have told her to leave. Shell was searching their closets when she saw that Maud had awakened. She picked up a fresh copy of the Gazette and laid it on Maud’s bed.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Shell said, “notoriety is driving you to drink. You were staggering last night.”
“Shit,” said Maud softly.
“Well, there’s your story.”
Maud stared blearily at the college paper. Her column was front page left, with the jump on page three.
She got painfully out of bed and drank from her warm bottle of water and dressed.
“They left the pictures out.”
“Well, somebody looked the conditions up and put them online. With your picture too. Like you may get some shit over this.”
“Good.”
“Me, I love it,” Shell said, “but I ain’t gonna be standing next to you in any pictures in case you get famous like Joan of Arc. I got semi-stalkers already. Like my lately old man who just got born again again.”
Maud rose slowly and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom.
“Your beloved mentor was up here looking for you last night,” Shell told her. “Like he came twice. A big old professor coming to the squalid chambers of us waifs. For you, his sweetheart. Only he was on his way to the airport to pick up his wife, I guess, ’cause he got a call from her.”
“Shut up!” Maud shouted and slammed the bathroom door.
When Maud came out, still pale, Shelby was contrite.
“I always talk too much in the morning, sweet thing. Birdseed under my tongue.”
Maud stood weeping. And in her tears she looked to Shell like a savage child Shell never before glimpsed in her friend.
“I don’t know what to do.”
Shell went over and hugged her.
“Maud, honey, I been there. I been so unhappy. I been so scared. This, by God, happens to us.”
She left Maud in the middle of the room and went to look out the window. Bums lining up for the church feeding, like pigeons.
“It’s all good,” she said. “Except how it sucks. Listen, Maud, go home. That’s what you do. Get out of this laughing academy. It’s break next week; a few days won’t hurt your line. Go home and get away from him and me and this vida loca up here.” She took Maud’s duffel bag out of the closet and put it on the bed. “Get out of town before—”
“I want to see him,” Maud said. She had stopped crying. Her mouth tightened, her teeth clenched behind a thinning of her long lips. Her jaw trembled. She pressed her nails into her palms.
Shell shook her head.
“Uh-uh.”
She emptied Maud’s drawer into the bag and went to her own closet and filled the bag with various things—jackets, a beret, some bracelets.
“Hey, lookie, I’m gonna give you cool shit of mine I never paid for. My bling and my star-quality wardrobe and starlet shoplifting trophies. You can’t have my dope or my gun, but.”
She put her best fake-fur coat around Maud’s shoulders and turned her roommate toward the door and hugged her again.
“Keep warm, Maudie-pig. I love you round the neck. Don’t drink so much, your ears’ll swell up. It’s true!”
Maud went out but left her bag on the floor. Shell did not pursue her, only watched from the window as her friend headed up the street toward the college with the fake fur wrapped around her shoulders. Then Shell stared blankly at the sky and sighed.
It had come to Maud that Brookman, returned wife or not, had a class scheduled that morning. As she passed Bay’s en route to the college, Herbert, the café’s chief of inmates, defying the weather at his outside table, bellowed a hoarse greeting at her, demanded Shell, whom he so loved. She hurried on toward the quad, Shell’s coat close around her, and began to run.
At the quad the locks slowed her. She failed to intercept Brookman coming out of class and so went to his office in Cortland Hall. She sounded no tattoo for him this time, just three knocks, each knock a little louder than the one before. He opened the door, showing no surprise.
“Come in, Maud.”
“‘Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, has flown.’ That it?”
“Sit, sweetheart.”
“You don’t want to touch me? Don’t you want to shake hands?”
He took hold of her hands.
“Better close the curtains, huh?” Maud suggested.
“I looked for you last night.”
“But you had to go pick up your wife at the airport.”
“Yes. Remember, I told you my wife was coming back.”
“Did you? Yeah, I guess you did. That why you avoided me?”
“What I wanted was to catch you sober and in an orderly state of mind.”
She pulled a hand free and, Brookman thought, came close to hitting him.
“I was concerned about you, Maud. How could I not be? And you know my wife was coming here. She’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant,” Maud said, “really? That’s ironic, isn’t it? Timely topics.”
“Maud, sit down.”
She stood where she was. A disturbing notion occurred to Brookman. He felt he had been given an insight into what her father, the detective, might be like.
Brookman himself felt tired enough to sit down in his emblazoned captain’s chair. Lux in umbras procedet.
“We never said in so many words that our lives were going to change,” he said, “but we knew. Lives always change. You’re old enough to know that now.”
“No,” she said. “Not me. I ain’t.”
“What drove you to carry on like that about abortion?”
“Whatsa matter,” she asked, “you didn’t like it?”
“It was all you, my young love. But it’s likely to get you more trouble than you bargained for.”
“Get you trouble? Get your wife trouble.”
“Sit down, Maud. No, I don’t mean that.” He saw that she was wrapped in an absurd fake fur and she smelled of alcohol.
“I’m sorry you didn’t like it. Why didn’t you read it? Would you have told me not to publish it? Maybe you would’ve told me not to publish it.”
“No. I might have had suggestions, I guess. I got worried.”
“That why you came looking for me last night?”
“I wanted to be sure you were all right. Grounded. And that you had thought a little about reactions. You were out.”
“And you had to pick up your wife.”
“Hey, Maud, you knew about my wife. Did you expect me to leave her at the airport?”
Maud reacted to his flash of anger. She leaned against the back of the chair that faced his desk.
“Why didn’t you read it, Stevie? For God’s sake. I was showing off for you.”
Brookman stood up.
“Maud. My Maud. I want to be your teacher. I want us to be something in each other’s lives. We cannot be lovers now.”
“I know what the answer is,” she said. “You’ll be my eternal teacher. I’ll be your eternal student.” She watched him from the corner of her eye, looking venomous and sly.
“There is no answer to these things.”
“Oh yeah, there’s an answer. We’ll go to Paris. Want to take me to Paris?”
“You better sober up, kid.”
“I’ll become a nun like Jo Carr used to be and I’ll get my father
to cut your prick off and we’ll live in France and write cool letters to inspire future generations of assholes. Like me and you, Prof.”
“I’m a human being, Maud. Same as you. You’re gonna see that someday.”
“You see how you hurt me, Stevie?”
“Yes, Maud.”
She felt dizzy and her mouth was too dry for any more questions or suggestions.
“I hurt you, Maud,” he said. “But you . . . you knew that—”
“Don’t say it,” she said.
Then she went outside to the quad. He sat in his captain’s chair and watched her walk away.
When Shell got back to their dorm room, the bag she had packed for Maud was gone, and Maud with it.
9
EDDIE STACK HAD developed an odd skill. He was able to comb his hair—what was left of it—without looking at his own face in the mirror. He kept his gaze above the hairline. Some foreign wit had observed that after forty a man was responsible for his own face. Stack was over forty; in fact he was just over sixty-five, and he desperately did not want any more responsibilities beyond those he bore.
The face wanted answering for. Young, he had never got enough of it. Don’t think he hadn’t looked in mirrors then. He had the deadpan, dumb mick face that could be transformed within a fractal to the deadliest of satirical grins. And the assumed angry face, the hassled face, the put-upon, uncontainable-rage face that would break his partners up in the middle of a collar. The false smiles and the semi-genuine smiles and the honest smiles that were not entirely unstudied. Not until he had gone into the job had he realized how attractive he was to women. Most women kind of loved all police officers, but Detective Stack was envied in his appeal. There was also, he vaguely knew, a mug of true rage, and that was one he never looked at and yet privately had worn sometimes. His entire life was private now and he knew he must wear it very often.