by Amanda Cross
“The cheapest sort they have in the drugstore. My doctor said aspirin is aspirin and it’s preposterous to pay more than a dollar for five hundred of them.”
“He’s right, of course, except that if you don’t happen to like the taste of aspirin, which will begin to dissolve on the tongue immediately, you pay considerably more than that and buy buffered aspirin—you are acquiring, in your new husband, a buffered aspirin eater, by the way—which doesn’t taste any more than Paracetamol does; get it?”
“Someone, therefore, supposedly replaced Cudlipp’s Parawhateveritis with a buffered aspirin that looked the same. How much else about you is there that I do not know?”
“I shall refuse to follow that entrancing thought, and plod on instead with the question of aspirin-analgesics. You know, in any case, how dull I am when puzzled.”
“I was just thinking earlier this evening how enchanting you are at all times. You know, Reed, I think if you’d only come to a Department party earlier, and let me see you, beautifully lanky and relaxed among all those professors, I would have proposed long ago. Would you have accepted?”
“Probably with a lot less trepidation than I have now. You know, Kate, I’ve never really minded your being a sort of overage Nancy Drew …”
“Now that’s unkind, Reed, that’s downright nasty …”
“Forgive me. I guess I realized you were going to be smack in the middle of this business and I was hoping, in my manly way, that you might be willing to bow out—you know, just go on with what you were doing.”
“But none of us can just go on with what we were doing; it’s just no longer possible, not, at least, if you’re the sort who listens and admits to being confused, which is something no one ever said of Nancy Drew. But why are you getting the wind up so? It’s unlike you. I know it’s a ghastly mess, but after all, it could have been an accident—or somebody may have put some aspirin in his British thingammies months ago.”
“They mightn’t, as it happens. Naturally, that’s the first thing I looked into. He was beginning on a new load of pills just today—yesterday, I guess, by now—and the entire bottle of two hundred tablets is O.K., so clearly, it was the small tube in which he carried a day’s supply of pills around with him that had been tampered with. As it happens, the two he took at the party were the first of the new batch, but he might have taken them at any time—he was nervous, and prone to headaches. Someone got hold of that pill-carrier, supposedly after Cudlipp had filled it, and replaced the first two British pills with buffered aspirin.”
“There, you see,” Kate said. “And he might have taken them anywhere, and I wouldn’t have been at all involved.”
“You weren’t near his office that day, no. But you had had lunch with Clemance some days before—though you had admired the man this side of idolatry for decades without finding it necessary to lunch with him before. And, as it happened, Cudlipp was talking to you when he decided to take the pills, and Clemance rushed right off and got him some soda water—right?”
“Right. Who noticed that?”
“Just about everyone.”
“Well, all it proves is that I couldn’t have had anything to do with it. If he had just got the new pills today, I wouldn’t have had time to substitute the aspirin for the pills in his pill tube.”
“You could have done it right at the party.”
“My dear man, I may be Nancy Drew; I’m not Houdini.”
“The fact is, anyone at the party could have done it. He carried the tube with the pills loose in his outer pocket; child’s play. Or anyone who visited his office today—which includes students from your beloved University College (which should have gone right on being extension courses, if you want my candid opinion), Frogmore, McQuire, and one or two other chaps from that little luncheon you had before you asked me to marry you.”
“Reed, aren’t you being a little overdramatic? If anyone wanted to kill Cudlipp in that way, doesn’t it seem likely that it was someone of a non-university sort? His wife, someone like that?”
“When you hear the history of the pills, I think you’ll discount that.”
“Is Cudlipp married?”
“He and his wife have recently separated, amidst much acrimony, I am given to understand.”
“You’ve picked up more in five hours than I have in five years.”
“You are not, I am pleased to say, a gossipy sort. What floors, by the way, were you stuck between when you and Everglade were in that elevator together?”
Kate stared at him. “The third and fourth. Why?”
Reed took her in his arms. “Why indeed?” he said. And then for a while forgot all about it.
Between those happenings that prefigure it
And those that happen in its anamnesis
Occurs the Event, but that no human wit
Can recognize until all happening ceases.
Seven
“To put it crudely,” Frogmore said, “Cudlipp’s death can be the end for us, or the beginning. I would not have lifted a finger to injure Cudlipp, but if his death can help the University College, I will make use of it. Need I say more?”
“It will scarcely help us,” McQuire remarked, “to have the University College discovered to be the motive for the murder. It does seem to suggest that we don’t produce people of the right sort. There is, after all, a distinction between occupying the President’s Office and murder. Or so I assume.”
“Correctly, I am certain,” Hankster said in his hoarse whisper.
The same group who had met previously, when McQuire had brought Kate to luncheon, was now reconvened, minus the student (to Kate’s relief). She did not doubt the judgment of students, which, in some cases, she valued over that of the faculty, but she did doubt their discretion. In a case like this, rumor could do irreparable harm, particularly if it were true.
Castleman apparently not only understood the power structure of the University with remarkable clarity but with ease shifted this understanding to problems of murder. “We have donned our academic gowns and attended a memorial service for Cudlipp,” he said, “and we have all contributed to a fund to establish a prize in his honor.”
“To be awarded, naturally, to an outstanding student in the College,” Frogmore said.
“Naturally,” Castleman acknowledged. “But we had better realize that the administration and the senior faculty are profoundly shaken by all this. Disruption is one thing, murder—however haphazard in appearance—another. It follows inevitably that if Cudlipp was given the aspirin accidentally, more or less at random as a flying brick may hit someone, that is one thing; if he was given the aspirin intentionally as part of some personal grudge or individual pottiness, that is another. If, however, he was poisoned fatally on behalf of any school in this University, or any group of students or faculty …” Castleman shrugged, not bothering to complete his sentence.
“Whether fortunately or not,” McQuire said, “we know exactly when Cudlipp got this latest batch of non-aspirins, so we know that the substitution of the pills must have taken place on that day, the day of Kate’s party.”
“I don’t see how that really helps us,” Cartier said.
“It helps the detective work, not us,” Castleman pointed out. “It means that the aspirin Cudlipp took had to be given to him that day—they couldn’t have been mixed in with his British pills, simply waiting for him to light on them. We know, furthermore, whom Cudlipp saw that day. Alas, having refused for weeks to talk to anyone from the University College, he appears, on the day of his death, to have decided to lend his ear if not his sympathy.”
“That may have been thanks to Clemance,” Kate said.
“Thanks are not, as it has turned out, what we especially want to offer,” Frogmore said.
“That’s unfair, I think,” Kate said.
“Of course it is,” Frogmore agreed.
“We know,” Castleman went on, “that on the afternoon of the day of his death, Cudlipp saw McQuire and Frogmo
re and Cartier; he agreed to be called upon by four students from the University College; he also had a conference about the College English Department with Clemance and O’Toole. In the morning he had a class; he had lunch with Hankster and …”
“And,” Hankster added, “we were joined by Professor Emilia Airhart.”
“Which does not, of course,” Kate added, “necessarily account for everyone he saw that day. There are the secretaries, casual encounters on campus paths …”
“And in the men’s room,” Hankster said. “Let’s face it, anyone could have switched those pills, if murder were the intent. I don’t believe it was. I think someone copped what he thought were a couple of aspirins, and then returned others, unaware of their lethal qualities for Cudlipp.”
“Then,” Castleman said, “we’ve got to find him—the innocent aspirin-changer.”
“Perhaps he will confess,” Frogmore said. “Let us hope so. Meanwhile, I would like to know what the next move is—for University College. Whether or not we can find the person who caused Cudlipp’s death, we can certainly determine the effect of the death on us. O’Toole will be taken up with running the College. Clemance, while not our advocate, seems actually to have some decent sense of reticence about wiping us off the face of the map. The Graduate English Department, from what I can gather, is all for promoting our assistant professors from the English Department, helping themselves and doing the College in the eye at the same time. I think we ought to move.”
“Move cautiously,” Castleman said, “but move—I agree with you. Let’s discover, in an informal way, how the administration feels.”
“I thought we were clean out of administration,” Kate said.
“The Administrative Council is still functioning,” Frogmore said, “and will go on until we get the Senate. The Acting President has promised that a statement of confidence in the viability of University College, and instructions to departments to promote its qualified faculty to tenure, will come before the next meeting of the Administrative Council.”
“Which is when?” Hankster asked.
“In three weeks, and every hour of that time has to be used to get us the votes we need—not only in favor of the motion, but also against a motion to table for any reason whatsoever—for example, so that all undergraduate education at the University can be studied. Because if the Administrative Council doesn’t give us its mandate we’re as good as finished. By the time we get a Senate and a new President it will be a whole new ball game—as Cudlipp knew.”
“So his being out of the picture will make a difference?”
“Oh, yes,” Frogmore said, “all the difference in the world. Cudlipp had a lot of favors to trade, and now isn’t around to trade them.”
Kate walked from the meeting with Hankster; she fell in step beside him so that, without being rude, he had no choice but to proceed at her side—and Hankster was never rude. He had, since the spring, acquired a reputation for devoted radicalism; yet, tête-à-tête with him, one found it hard to believe. Not only the scarcely audible voice—the intimation was that he was unable to speak loudly, though Kate suspected strategic rather than physical inhibitions—belied the drama of radicalism. He was a gentleman, from the top of his sleek head, past the elegant clothes, to the tips of his beautifully made shoes. Kate, because she had come from his world, understood him, and knew better than most that there are those who cling to the finger bowls, those who dismiss them with a shrug but not without nostalgia, and those like Hankster whose life was devoted to smashing the finger bowls against privy walls.
“What did you talk about with Cudlipp, if I may be forthright enough to ask? If you don’t want to tell me, don’t; spare me the gentlemanly circumlocutions.”
“I’m honored,” Hankster said. “As I have gathered, you’re often peppery, but seldom rude. You dislike me very much, don’t you?”
Kate stopped a moment, with Hankster waiting patiently by her side. “Yes,” Kate said, “I do. I think I always dislike people who are destroyers by principle, though I never really faced up to it, until this moment. Sorry. I’ve no right to ask you any questions at all.”
“Sure you have. You really think, don’t you, that we’ve seen the last of the troubles. That from now on, we just rebuild our university, better than before but not fundamentally different.”
“Oh, I expect students will sit in buildings, or whatever the new ploy is, again this spring. But I don’t think it will make any real difference; not here. We’ve had our moment of awakening. This spring, it will be other universities who have the uprisings; don’t you agree?”
“Perhaps. But the whole system’s finished all the same. Sure, you’ll have your Senate, which will bring students and junior faculty into the system, and will perhaps keep an antediluvian administration from making the kinds of mistakes which, in any case, they aren’t going to make anymore, because no university will ever again have so basically stupid a president as this university had. But it’s only reaction you’re institutionalizing. Administrators on the whole, you know, are more up-to-date than the senior faculty. That’s where the bastion of conservatism is, if you want to know. And this Senate will simply give them more power. So—when the big break comes, it will be a lulu.”
“And you look forward to it, hope for it, will work for it?”
“It will happen whatever I do, though I’ll lend a hand if I can. I don’t know what revolutions you’re dreaming of, Professor Fansler, or hoping for, or fearing.”
Kate laughed. “You’re accusing me, in your ever-polite way, of being like the dreaming lady in an anecdote of Kenneth Burke’s. She dreamed a brute of a man had entered her bedroom and was staring at her from the foot of her bed. ‘Oh, what are you going to do to me?’ she asked, trembling. ‘I don’t know, lady,’ the brute answered; ‘it’s your dream.’ ”
Hankster laughed. “It is delightful to talk to someone who enjoys one’s point, even against herself.”
“I know. It’s our guilts and our hidden desires that you work on most, you radicals. We shall destroy ourselves in the end, whether because we understand the radical students too well or too little.”
“But it’s not just the radical students; it’s all students. There simply is no longer any reason for their being in college—not the smart ones, anyway. The engineering students, those on their way up the social ladder, the blacks—college has some point for them. But for the bright kid who’s been to a first-rate high school, what’s he got to learn at college? He no longer comes to college for his first drink, his first woman. Until college becomes a privilege again.…”
“But that’s the point of the University College—for the older students. Education is again something they’ve had to earn.”
“The University College, and places like it, are the future. Whether this University has the sense to see that or not is important only to us here, now, but in the end it will make no difference. The question is not if the state will take over this University, but when. Every year, also, fewer kids make it through undergraduate education uninterrupted. To leave college is the norm, not the exception now. The whole picture’s changing. That, if you want to know, is what I talked to Cudlipp about at lunch. Since I teach in both the adult and the boys’ colleges, he wanted to know where my loyalties lay.”
“And what did you tell him?” Kate asked.
“That I was a smasher of finger bowls. But ask your colleague Emilia Airhart. She joined us near the beginning.”
“How come?”
“I met her and asked her to.”
“Didn’t Cudlipp mind?”
“Horribly. He dislikes women if they are not beautiful, not slender, not stupider than he—or willing to pretend they are—and not flirtatious. Mrs. Airhart made a clean sweep. You would do better, or would have done; we will never know now.”
“I am quite past deciding if that is nasty or nice. Anyway, I like Emilia Airhart.”
“So do I. And if you ask her, she will tel
l you that Cudlipp tried to co-opt me and I said no. The system’s finished. You and I came out of the same world, but only one of us dreams of going back.”
“I know I can’t go back,” Kate said. “I just don’t hate the memory. What’s Frogmore going to do now?”
“What everyone must do: reach every member of the Administrative Council; tell each one a vote for University College is a vote against the growing power mania of The College. We’ll come through now. It’s truly amazing what aspirin can cure, wouldn’t you say?”
Kate found Emilia Airhart in her office riffling, as one seemed to do these days, through mimeographed pages. “Come in,” she called to Kate. “I was just about to write you a note. One less dirty piece of paper, thank God. I knew I had lost my interest in revolution when I lost my interest in mimeographed announcements from every splinter group on campus demanding this, foretelling that, condemning the other. There is now even an organization for liberating women—utter nonsense. Women are liberated the moment they stop caring what other women think of them.” With a gesture of great delight she dumped the whole package of papers into the waste basket. “I hear you’re an admirer of Auden’s and have just sponsored a brilliant dissertation on him.”
“Yes, though the less said about the dissertation defense, the better. There was a moment there when I feared for the whole future of the academic world.”
“Do tell. Professor Pollinger mentioned it as the most interesting dissertation defense he had been to in years. What do you admire about Auden, by the way, if you can enunciate it in several well-chosen sentences—a talent of yours, I’m told.”
“I can’t imagine by whom. As a matter of fact, I babble on, hitting the truth occasionally by happenstance which inspires students by the sheer surprise of it; the rest of the time they just feel comfortably superior. As to Auden, he’s interested in squares and oblongs, rather than in sensory effects, which I like; that is, he understands that men always have moral dilemmas, which makes him intelligent, and he is able to present these structurally, which makes him an artist. The structures he uses are patterns of words, which make him a poet. He’s conceptual rather than descriptive, and he always sees objects, natural or not, as part of a relationship. He knows that, first and last, a poet has to express abstract ideas in concrete forms, his own words, as it happens. How’s that for a one-minute lecture?”