by Robert Stone
“I’ll leave it to you. I’m glad you liked her piece.”
“I didn’t say I liked it.”
“But you thought it was good.”
“Oh, yes! Time loves language, you know. Forgives the writer, the poet says. And here we are.” She gestured in the direction of the college’s well-known library. “Books everywhere. We do too.”
34
ACCORDING TO THE afternoon timetable, Stack had to change trains at what had been a derelict station in Connecticut he had not seen in a few years. His last time through it had been a crack scene, a rat-haunted vault of pissy shadows. It had been improved somewhat since the downtown bombings. Maybe, he thought, one thing had to do with the other. Graffiti had been painted over. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling were as yet unvandalized, but the ticket counter was closed and the only person in the station with him was a suspiciously sleepy teenager in a hoodie. Stack went over and looked at him—a police impulse. The boy’s eyes were half closed. The kid never reacted, and it was as though he were trying to hide in plain sight.
Stack, in his best wool pants and rather shabby sport jacket, walked tilted against the weight of the semi-automatic pistol he had taken to carrying. New York cops had been issued Glocks while Stack was in the job. Glocks, which replaced the old revolvers, were fearsome, fateful pieces, and they could set a running man into an airborne spin. It was a weapon to display on a twenty-first-century coat of arms, Stack thought. If there was a piece of weaponry used to claim the streets, it would be the Glock, exploding into random fusillades. A carelessly drawn breath might set it blazing. A gun with a mind of its own, in the world that had come to be after 9/11—heavy, hard to use, ready to take out half the room in seconds. They had become popular. Prestigious weapons, they tempted bozos toward casual display.
The Glock had led to a pandemic of bizarre shootings. Things happened inexplicably, the gun creating absurd occurrences on the streets. He had not packed it since leaving the job, and it felt strange.
On the next train to the college Stack had his choice of seats. At New Haven he rose to change again and walked across the refurbished station’s interior. By Maud’s time they had cleaned it up, as befitted the classy young passengers who used it. Of whom Maud had been one. From New Haven a slow local train tunneled through the hills and up the river to Amesbury.
35
JO WAS IN THE OFFICE, closing it down for the holiday break. Amid the spreading tremors of accusation and fear that attended Maud’s death, she’d been giving the semblance of advice to students preparing to return transformed to their families. The home folks would be welcoming conditions as various as bird flu, drug addiction, kundalini yoga, and Salafism, and offering returnees a few unexpected variations on the lives they’d left behind. In short, it was a tough time anyway, compounding the elements of Christmas, the kids’ ages and so on. Mercifully for the college, the repercussions, for the most part, didn’t have to be acted out on college property.
Jo was almost finished with the mailings when an old man came through the street door upstairs and descended to her office.
“Miss Carr?” the old man asked. Jo smiled. “I’m Eddie Stack. I used to be Maud’s father.”
His way of putting it cut off her polite greeting.
“You’ll always be her father, Mr. Stack. Through eternity.”
“We talked on the phone,” Stack said. “You and me. The night before she died.”
She told him to sit down and took a place opposite him.
“I took her to the hospital that night because she was so upset. But she got away from me. You mustn’t say you used to be her father, Mr. Stack.”
She rose and shook his hand across the desk.
“Whatever you say,” he told her.
“I’ve told you how desolate we’ve been here. It makes such an awful Christmas.”
“Yeah,” Stack said. “It’s too bad. I see they got the streets in town decorated. I came up from Long Island.”
“We miss her so much,” Jo said. Stack was trembling a little. She wondered whether he had been drinking, and for how long.
“I know they liked her here. I heard.”
She could only take it for bitterness, and what could she say? That Maud was admired and loved here in ways with which she could not cope, before her time. That Maud herself had loved it here, that it was the fullness of life to her. That it almost certainly would have been fine in the end with a little luck and a little less of God’s appalling mercy.
“But you got her now, right?” Stack said. “You got her from me.”
She looked into the man’s ruined, unforgiving face. We lost you your pretty one. Forgive us!
“Mr. Stack,” she said. “I was going to call you today. You spoke about putting Maud with her mother? I understand that the church is making . . . difficulties?”
Stack writhed in his chair, and the scornful smile he gave her made her cringe as if she herself were the Church and the college and the self-indulgent faculty, all proclaiming their false love, their greed, their treachery.
“Well, look, Mr. Stack. One of our folks here is very active in the Church. And she’s arranged an interment for Maud with her mother at the earliest convenient time. And there’ll be a priest. A ceremony, if you require.”
“So you people,” Stack said, “you people up here, you can do anything, right?”
“No, sir,” Jo said. “We can’t. But we are people who care. Many of us.”
Stack sat silently for a moment, not looking at Jo. Then he stood up, walked to the window and watched the people above him in the street. A few students remained around the campus, selling their textbooks at the only independent store left in town, buying souvenirs for their friends and family.
“I don’t want a religious ceremony,” Stack said. “The priests can shove it. I want to put the kid with her mother.”
“We’ll do it, Mr. Stack. This week. In Advent.”
“I heard about this youth down south said he killed Maud,” Stack said.
“That was a false confession. A nutcase.”
“Yeah, I know. What about this Brookman? Some people say he pushed her in front of the car. The professor who seduced her. The ex-con.”
“No, sir. Can I call you Ed? It was another crazy rumor. The witnesses, almost all the witnesses, say he was trying to save her.”
“He was never arrested. Never charged. Is that because he works here?”
“There was nothing to charge him with, Ed.”
“That right?”
“I’m sure he didn’t hurt her. She was his beautiful prize student.”
He said nothing, only looked at her as though to ask how she could think being beautiful and prized could keep someone safe.
“I’m glad she can be with her mother,” Stack said then. “I don’t need any ceremony. She wouldn’t want it.”
“Whatever you want,” Jo said. “Whenever.” It became apparent to her that he was very ill. He took an inhaler out of his jacket pocket and breathed from it. She asked if he had asthma. Emphysema, he said. Severe.
“You know what I’d like?” Stack said. “I’d like to see the street where it happened.”
“Really?” Jo asked. She did not care for the idea.
“Yeah, I’d like to see the place.”
It was not clear to Jo whether Stack knew that Maud had been struck in front of the Brookman house. In any case, his wanting to see it made her distinctly uneasy.
“Can you direct me? Jo Carr? That your name?”
“Call me Jo, Ed.”
“Yeah,” he said, “sure.”
“I can show you the street if you want to see it.”
She led him out of the office and toward the muddy Common, edged in banks of soiled melted snow. The first of the homeless people had assembled for lunch, lined up along the spiked fence of First Presbyterian’s churchyard. Its carillon was sounding the Rose Carol.
Jo walked him around the Common and then
started down Amity Street to Walnut and the hockey rink.
“You don’t have to come with me, Miss Carr. Just show me the way.”
“I don’t mind,” Jo said.
“I don’t want you to come.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s two blocks from here. If you turn left at the rink. On the right side of the street. Midway.” He nodded his thanks and she watched him walk in the direction of the rink. He had bought a cheap drugstore cane that morning to support himself on the part of his journey that would have to be covered on foot. He did not really lean on it as he walked—rather, he swung it in front of him at shin level, almost like a blind man. Still, in his weakened state his progress was slow. Watching him, she wanted to call him back, interrupt whatever he thought he was doing.
“Ed!”
He turned slowly, reacting to his first name.
“You know where to find me, Ed!”
“Sure thing.”
Back in the office, Jo found her end-of-term caretaking bogged down in petty details and worrisome distractions. The distraction that worried her most was the conversation she had just had with Edward Stack. That he had come to the college at all was disturbing, and she avoided the question of his visit during their exchange. Finally it worried her enough to phone Salmone at the police station and mention that she had seen Stack. She called Salmone rather than college security because she knew he had spent time with Stack in the NYPD. She also had a question for the lieutenant, the answer to which she hoped would allow her to rest easier.
“He asked me to direct him to the scene of his daughter’s death,” she said when she had Salmone on the line. “It seemed a reasonable thing. I guess I didn’t put it all together in that moment. It being the Brookmans’ house.”
“Was he threatening? Was he agitated?”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Had he been drinking?”
“It occurred to me. I thought he might have been, but he wasn’t acting very intoxicated and there wasn’t a detectable booze aura there.” A little cagey was how she thought of him later.
Salmone thanked her for the call.
“Lieutenant? Did you find out anything about the man I mentioned? The man who calls himself Father Walter?”
“Your guy is dead ten years, Dr. Carr.”
“Is that certain?”
“Seems really certain. He was well known where he lived. Somewhere in Louisiana, as I remember. He died of cancer. Had it a long time.”
“A man came to see me one evening. Livid about Maud’s article. I would have sworn it was Walter. I knew him well. If someone asked me in court if I’d seen him, I would have sworn on the Bible this was the same man.”
“Couldn’t be, Dr. Carr. He was a well-known figure. Death’s been established.”
“You made a special inquiry?”
“Hey, we pushed those people so hard they think we’re nuts. Your Father Walter is dead. No question.”
When he had identified Brookman’s house, Stack found a bench with a dedicatory plaque under a massive catalpa tree almost directly across the street from it. He was out of breath after his walk from the counseling office; the place to sit and the warm sun were welcome. The day was bright, the street fairly quiet since the students were away now and many of the buildings were closed. Around the Common, two blocks away, the hour was told in Christmas hymns by each church in turn.
As Stack settled against one end of the bench, the holstered Glock thudded against its armrest. He laid his cane down the length of the seat and read the plaque. The dedication was to a professor and his wife whose favorite tree it had been, subscribed to by former students after their deaths, sometime in the 1930s. Nice world they lived in, he thought, but of course it would not have seemed that way to them. Stack stretched his embittered, whiskey-poisoned bones on the slats. So quiet was it that he might listen to the twittering of riverside swallows that had established themselves in the park shed’s ornamental eaves. Sitting here he could almost hear the impact that had crushed the last living breath out of his only child along with the skittering of the swallows and the earliest doves of afternoon, reporting into the quiet spaces.
At first Stack had cried over the violence of his daughter’s death. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed connected to his own fate and nature, and he cried no longer. It took a certain kind of individual to wipe out a beauty like Maud’s. But she was only Stack’s Maud and Stack was a thief and Maud was another and they had thrived on loot. Was that putting it too harshly?
It was all easy to understand. Stack the monster and the monster’s lovely daughter—it was a rendering of justice against both of them. Because she was Maud, the sometime thief, the spoiled and selfish. Because she was his beautiful brilliant only child. Because he loved her so much more than life. Because he and her mother loved her so much.
As for himself, he thought, for all the gifts he might have started with, he was a burnout and a drunk, not even a mediocre policeman, a lousy one in fact, and not a particularly honest one. A coward, morally and sometimes physically. A spiteful, vengeful nurser of old wounds, a bigot at heart, a rejoicer in the defeats of others, a betrayer of his adoring wife as womanizer and cuckold. An accessory to sometimes vicious things and to crimes he lacked the stones to perpetrate or prevent.
It seemed to him he had been poisoned by anger long before he had any right to it. It must be in his blood, he thought, the anger. He had known honor and pretended to despise it, and come in the end to really despise it, to dread hope, fear light, laugh off all the dreams of justice, laugh it all off. Those were the reasons she was dead.
Looking across the street from his bench, he saw a tall woman in a tan raincoat coming up the street with her eyes on the sidewalk. She wore glasses, and a scarf was tied loosely around her neck. With her was a girl of ten or so. The child drew Stack’s attention. She had darker hair than her mother and was at an awkward age of her growth. Her wrists showed beyond the sleeves of her ski jacket. She was tall and long-legged but her face, with its high forehead, was dour, downright sad, the face of a noticeably intelligent little girl. As they stopped in front of the Brookman house her mother pulled her sleeve at the elbow, reminding her that they were home. For a moment the woman stood looking down at her daughter with concern, touching her hair lightly, her face drawn with worry and unhappiness. They would be Brookman’s people, Stack decided, engaged in the pleasures of parenting. In that moment Stack realized how different his life would be as the father of dead Maud.
The thought was fascinating. All gone. The wife, the daughter who had seemed magical and more as a child but had proved only surpassing in beauty and intellect, otherwise an ordinary mortal like himself. A man, Stack thought, who has a child like her believes it’s himself transcended. But the Stacks of the world did not transcend. Still, she had surprised. Maud had been touched by something strong. She had surprised but the power of the Sidhe, the fairies who owned her, had brought her down. Head to head with religion, the kid had gone. How he had loved her!
He thought it the easiest thing in the world now, to understand. Some force overcome with rage like his own had demanded that miracle child of form and grace be crushed on the sidewalk like a roach. The life he was living since the day he made himself understand that his daughter was dead was different from the one he had lived before. It was compounded still of rage and grief—they were still present, still a scourge—only less confusing. He felt as if he suddenly commanded a clear view into what had been his life, and it seemed to be one where he had outlived identity. The papers he carried, for the weapon, the driver’s license, all the credentials that defined him—even his own name—had no significance at all. Not that this brought any particular freedom. Freedom had always been a thing alien to him, as a concept or as an experienced condition. No one and nothing was free, everything rigorously bound and priced, locked down and chained, from your last drink to your last orgasm to what you thought were the highest
flights of your soul. Stack was out of breath. He took his hat off and leaned on the cheap cane. It was late afternoon but the day was still bright. He was waiting for the courage to telephone Brookman in the house across the street.
He had been sitting a long time and the mild day concealed a chill at its core that worked its way into Stack’s bones. He had taken to feeling the outline of his Glock as though time or reason had somehow stripped him of it. Finally, after the winter shadows had edged from one side of Felicity Street to the other, he saw a man he knew must be Brookman headed up the street. Brookman was a large man, a few inches over six feet tall, and the unbuttoned charcoal-gray overcoat he wore spoke for the breadth of his shoulders. He would have to be approached, as the term went, “with caution.” He would have to be killed quickly and beyond a dying effort. Stack’s hand went to the weapon under the cloth of his coat.
He watched as the man he knew was Brookman turned briskly into his elegant residence on Felicity Street. At the point of taking out his cell phone, Stack was at once aware of an unmarked car, a few years old, blocking traffic in the near lane. His friend Salmone was at the wheel and rolled down the passenger-side window.
“Hey, Eddie!”
Stack stood up. His instinct was to walk away.
“Eddie!” Salmone pushed open the passenger-side door. “Eddie. Step into my office, brother.”
His capacity for escape was a thing of the past. Stack walked into the street and climbed into Salmone’s Camry. They drove down the street that led to the center of the Common and parked in a row of spaces marked off for utility vehicles.
“Dr. Carr call you?” Stack asked.
“What are you doing in front of their house, Eddie?”
“I was meditating.”
“Look, man. Somebody ran Maudie down and left her to die in the street. It wasn’t Brookman, for Christ’s sake. And everything we know is telling us now he didn’t do anything like push her. His wife was there.”