by Amanda Cross
Reed asked her to have dinner with them—in a restaurant, of course, they entertained nowhere else—and Kate found the young woman delightful: down-to-earth, vigorous, obviously one of those exhausting individuals who jogged and pulled on machinery to strengthen their upper bodies, but frank and spritely, with a boyish charm and a girlish giggle. Her name was Barbara, but “everybody calls me Bobby.”
“You don’t look like the sort who would want to work in a corporate law firm,” Kate said. “Not that I have the slightest idea really what type that is. More conventional, I thought, more given to suits with long jackets and short skirts, with their hair cut to look windblown.” Bobby’s hair was longish, gathered up on either side with combs, which, occasionally relinquishing their hold, allowed her hair to fall forward over her face.
“Oh, I shall have to conform,” she said. “I might have been hired for my brains, but they’ll only keep me for my conventional attitudes. As to why a corporate law firm, there are three reasons—money, money, and money. Loans to pay off, that sort of thing. Besides, since I hope to work for the president one day—Democratic, of course—I thought I should know how business firms operate.”
“I oughtn’t to have asked,” Kate said. “You are kind to have answered so frankly.”
“A pleasure,” Bobby said, and seemed to mean it.
Kate told Bobby the story of their locked-in seminar, which, given its easy solution, induced a certain amount of hilarity. Then Reed and Bobby went on to discuss the running of their clinic, already well under way. Kate turned her attention to her food and was happy to listen to them in silence.
* * *
Yet pondering, later that night, on Blair, their class, and his reasons for initiating it, she decided that in the morning she would call him and ask to see him. There was too much about him that was still a mystery, and a few direct questions were certainly in order. By morning she still thought questioning him a good idea; she called, and was invited to join him in his office that afternoon. “I’d offer to meet you more uptown,” he said, “but there’s a faculty meeting I must be here for, more’s the pity.”
So Kate arrived at his office at the appointed hour.
“I know I’ve already asked, and you’ve already answered, my question about how you came to be here in the first place. At this inferior law school, I mean. Reed says you could certainly have found a job in a better place. Not that we’ve been discussing you,” she hastily added, “but the question did come up.”
“Why I came here in the first place,” Blair said, bending a large paper clip out of shape as, years ago, he would have made quite a business of lighting a cigarette, “is an easy question. In fact, I’ve already told you the answer. I wanted to be in New York. The jobs I was offered elsewhere were not that exciting or that much better paid, though they were probably in better law schools. I was already itching to get out of my marriage, and my wife had an excellent job offer in St. Louis. She was as glad to get rid of me as I of her, in case you’re wondering, but as a woman, she was less inclined to walk out of a relationship rather than endure it. New York and Schuyler Law seemed the way out of a lot of problems. I did get another offer soon after I arrived here, so this faculty offered me tenure, and I stayed. They thought I was one of them, and I was.”
“Which brings me to a harder question. What brought about the change?”
Blair reached across the desk toward Kate on the other side and took her hand for a moment. Then he let it go, smiling at her as though making up his mind. “The beginning of the answer is easy enough,” he said. “Bit by bit these guys began to turn my stomach. You know, like discovering caffeine gives you a headache; it takes quite a while before you are ready to admit that it’s caffeine, and not a lot of other less important things. Their attitude toward the students, which was bad enough in class, was more disturbing at committee meetings. Men have always made remarks about women’s bodies, and I just took them as par for the course, like remarks about ‘niggers’ and ‘Jewboys’ and ‘Chinamen’ in the old days. Once you’re made aware of what you’re saying, you can’t believe you said it, but in fact you did: everyone did. So it wasn’t that so much, it was their scorn of the students, as though they despised them or were putting something over on them. I’m not putting this too well.”
“Well enough,” Kate said.
“You have to understand it was all a rather slow process, to say the least. When you’re a WASP male, there isn’t much that you can’t swallow; it’s horribly easy not to think about it at all. And then Nellie came here to teach. I think they were getting antsy about questions being asked because they didn’t have a woman on the faculty, so they hired her in case anyone brought the matter up. God knows the women students didn’t bring it up. And the faculty already had its black. He was willing to be one of them—well, you’ve met him—so they thought they’d get a woman in just the same way.”
“Did she take it all for granted, too, at first?” Kate asked.
“Not nearly as long as I did. For one thing, she was overwhelmed by the women students, who, however unraised their consciousnesses, wanted a woman to talk to. It was a strain. They would get angry if she didn’t make time for them, assuming her attention as their right, even though they wouldn’t dream of making the same assumptions about a male teacher.”
“I know enough about that to take it as read,” Kate said. “Then what happened?”
“She made friends with me because I was the youngest male around, and not quite as set in my ways as the other guys. Oh, it began in the usual way. She asked if she could talk to me, and the next thing we knew we were in bed. It’s funny, but these days we seem to go to bed first and talk afterward, almost as though we were getting it out of the way. Now AIDS is changing that. Anyway, we soon traded in the sex for companionship. At first I found her complaining a bit much, though she did try to contain it, but little by little it sank in—how she felt about teaching here, how the faculty treated her, and the problems with the students. Some of them became her friends, and a few actually began to support her and listen to her problems; not many, but a few. I guess it was all affecting me more than I realized. And then”—Blair seemed to be trying to return the clip to its original form—“we had moot court. I’ve never told this to anyone,” he added. “I feel like an idiot.”
“You were involved in the moot court?” Kate asked, to help him along.
“I was one of the faculty observing. There was a student there, a woman, who was a lot brighter, or maybe I ought to say less rough-edged, than most of our students, and she did a really brilliant job. Afterward I took her and another guy who’d won out for a drink. Her happiness at having done so well, even in a half-assed place like this, was touching. Then she left us, and the guy and I walked off in the same direction. ‘She really was into it, really excited about moot court,’ he said. I thought he was appreciating her, but there was something about the chuckle I didn’t like. I asked him how he knew. ‘I could see her nipples were erect,’ he said; ‘she was hot.’ And that, my dear Kate, is what did it. And I’ve never told that to a living soul.”
Kate smiled at him. “Yes,” she said, “you crossed the line.”
“What line?”
“The line that makes men, a few men, understand what the whole women’s thing is about. They cross over into another country, and they can never go back, or most of them can’t. Because once you understand, you are doomed to understanding, and all the shit you take from other men doesn’t change that. It’s always interested me, and I always wondered if there was one moment that did it, like your moment.”
“Did Reed have a moment?”
“You know, I’ve never asked him. Maybe I will someday.”
“And,” Blair said, “you had to ask me because you weren’t sure I’d really crossed the line, wasn’t sure that, as Harriet’s le Carré world would say, I wasn’t a mole.”
Kate looked down at her hands in her lap.
“All rig
ht,” Blair said, “don’t spell it out. I don’t blame you. There are times when even I wonder what I really believe. And despite your fine talk about crossing the line, if Nellie hadn’t died under that truck, I might have crossed back. Well, I might,” he insisted as Kate shook her head. “But I never believed in that accident. I’d walked with her enough, she was a real New Yorker, she knew New York drivers, she would never have stepped out into traffic that way. But who can really tell? She may have been upset, preoccupied. Anyway, I couldn’t shut my eyes to the fact that she was causing a lot of questions to be asked around here. A few of the students, many of the women and some of the men, were not being as docile as they used to be. And let’s face it, since her death those few students have reverted to their previous form.”
“And,” Kate said, rising, “I must allow you to revert to your previous form as a proper attender of faculty meetings.” For a moment Blair seemed about to say something, but Kate left before he could decide exactly what to say. I’m getting into my detective mode, Kate said to herself; that’s easy to see, but what am I detecting? She decided, since she was here, to call on Harriet.
The secretarial room was in full operation, with male faculty standing around making demands, and women scurrying here and there. Only Harriet, seated at her desk, retained a firm, unshakable demeanor. She greeted Kate formally, assuming, for any faculty observing them, that Kate had come with some manuscript to be dealt with. “Take a seat, Professor Fansler,” Harriet said without so much as a blink.
“No rush,” Kate answered, doing as she was bid.
Eventually the men cleared out, the women went to work, and Harriet approached Kate.
“Is there a women’s room near here?” Kate asked.
“Certainly,” Harriet said, rising. “I’ll show you.” And together they left the room, to regroup amid the sinks and stalls.
“What, ho?” Harriet asked when they were there.
“I wanted to ask some questions about Nellie,” Kate said. “I know you weren’t here when she was, but I can’t very well ask anyone who was.”
“Not even Blair?”
“Not more than I have already. I believe him,” Kate said, “I really do. But I want a more unbiased report. What have you gathered?”
“Not a damn thing.” Harriet washed and dried her hands. “Did you know that handling paper dries your hands? It was news to me, but I’ve come to believe it. The only thing I wondered about was if the police had checked alibis. You know, where were all the members of the faculty when she went under the truck? You’ll never guess the answer.”
“Let me try. Not one of them was anywhere that could be firmly established.”
“Correct. Except for Professor Abbott, who was at the dentist, testified to by the dentist, the hygienist, and the receptionist. They might all have been in cahoots with him, but there were also other patients there who remembered him. Being black in most white surroundings makes him easily memorable, which must be beastly, but in this case was a benefit.”
“The police told you all this?”
“Well,” Harriet said, “I did rather misrepresent myself as a lawyer from another faculty. You needn’t look so dubious; I have been on a faculty and can behave as pompously as any male, if circumstances so require. I said there was worry in the legal academic community, did these lawyers have alibis, and so on and so forth. They didn’t tell me much, but they did tell me about the alibis, or the lack thereof. They also pointed out that this meant little; few people have alibis, and I understand that the possession of one always merits a closer look.”
“Which Professor Abbott endured and passed?” Kate said.
“That’s it. I had better get back to my duties. The women, who are bored to death with their work, poor dears, tend to chatter when left unattended, and the faculty men who drift in tend to become first bantering and flirtatious, and then peeved.”
“Did Nellie have an office?” Kate asked.
“She did. I know that because I was asked, as an extension of my duties, to arrange for her personal belongings to be cleaned out of it.”
“And what happened to what they cleaned out?”
“It’s in the basement, in a box, waiting to be called for. So far, no one has. Her family scarcely wanted her leavings from this beastly place. Are you contemplating a snoop among them?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl. I’m glad to see you’re beginning to take an interest.”
“I hope I’ll be able to justify this sort of snooping; but she is dead, and one would rather like to know why. Not that I don’t feel a certain moral pang, but in this place, I can subdue it rather easily. After all, it’s no one’s business but Nellie’s, and I can’t believe she would mind.”
“In the very first book he wrote about Smiley, le Carré says: ‘It was a peculiarity of Smiley’s character that through the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end.’ I think if you have the same peculiarity, you should cherish it. I’ll show you where her stuff is in the basement. But do try not to get locked in there, or even discovered in there, will you, Kate? We don’t want to worry the old boys unnecessarily.”
Harriet led Kate to the basement, an area with which she had, through her weekly seminar, become somewhat familiar. Harriet, who appeared, like a medieval chatelaine, to have all the household keys dangling from her belt, opened a small storage room, waved a welcoming hand, and pulled the string to turn on the light. “All yours,” she said. “Good luck. Just bang the door shut when you leave.”
Kate settled down to her task; she pulled out a box and sat on it while examining the other boxes by the light of the single bulb dangling from the ceiling. Almost all the boxes contained books, and files removed from their file drawers—doubtless the file cabinet itself was passed on to someone else. Kate hoped, shamelessly, that among the law books would be a novel that Nellie had marked with pinpricks to indicate a code contrived to reveal the nefarious secrets she had uncovered about Schuyler. There was no novel. The files all contained class schedules, student papers, student records—at least up to the last year of her life. The most recent ones had been removed so that her orphaned students might be granted a grade, or so Kate surmised. Kate reproved herself for her idiotic expectations. Nellie had not known she would die; she had not left clues to her murderer, if any. If she had learned anything untoward about the school, she had not recorded it, or if she had recorded it, someone had seen to its removal.
Kate moved off her box and, sitting back on her heels, turned over its contents. More papers relating to law—Nellie had taught Contracts—and a few letters addressed to her. This box, then, held the contents of Nellie’s desk. The letters were all academic, the sort Kate regularly received at her university, different content, same themes. Nellie had had a desk set, and it was here: a blotter, left over from the days when people actually wrote with fountain pens, a leather letter holder that matched, and a picture frame. The picture was of Nellie—Kate had seen her picture in an old catalog of Schuyler Law—and a man, standing with his arm around her shoulder, both of them laughing. Carefully, Kate removed the picture from the frame, but there was nothing written on the back; carefully, she reinserted it in the frame. Kate would have to find out who he was.
But she had no hope that anything would come of this information. You’re off on a wild-goose chase, she told herself; pondering a mare’s nest, grasping at straws. Nellie may have known New York, Kate and many others knew New York, its traffic dangers included, but that didn’t mean that one couldn’t be killed by a truck. Probably Nellie’s fall under the truck’s wheels was as unintended as the truck driver’s crushing her. Your detective whiskers are quivering, Kate told herself, and they are picking up nothing, because nothing is in the wind.
She turned out the light, allowed the door to slam behind her, and headed for home. She had taken the picture with her, still in its frame that matched the blotter and letter holder, promising N
ellie to return it to the storeroom if it proved to lead nowhere.
Once home, she called Blair’s apartment; he had not yet returned; she left a message asking him to call her, and wondered if this was wise. Wise or not, she had to decide either to forget Nellie or to follow up the man in this picture, if Blair knew who he was.
It was some hours later that Blair returned her call. She had wondered how much to tell him about how she had acquired the picture, and ended, as she usually did end, with the truth. He listened to her account of the storage room and its disappointing contents with some amusement, conveyed by the intermittent chuckle.
“It was a characteristic Schuyler cleanup,” Blair said. “As it happens, I was there at my own insistence when the cleaning staff cleared out her office. I was still angry about her death, and in pain. They dumped her belongings into boxes—the ones you found, no doubt—and left everything else that belonged to the school right there—the furniture, the computer, the bookshelves. She had a picture on the wall, and I offered to call her parents to ask if they wanted it. They didn’t; it was a reproduction of Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party.”
“It’s in your office now,” Kate said. “I noticed it.”
“Yes. I’ve pondered it a good deal. It says a great deal about family life, that picture—Nellie mentioned it to me. The baby’s eyes are on the man, the woman’s eyes are on the man and the baby, the man’s eyes are on his rowing, or perhaps the shore. Nellie was also impressed with the composition; anyway, I kept it as a memento from her.”
“There was a picture on her desk,” Kate said, not mentioning that she had borrowed it. “At least, I assume it was; the frame matches her desk blotter. It’s a picture of her with a man. Do you know who he is, or was?”