Poetic Justice
Page 17
“They don’t say much, dear, but they glare, and I know what they’re thinking: four-letter-word-sex you, meaning me, of course. Tant pis.”
For Clemance, Kate felt an aching need to offer comfort and knew no comfort existed on earth.
“There is,” he told her, “a terrible need to demand punishment—to punish oneself. Resign, retire, go quietly and miserably mad in a richly deserved and dreary solitude. We never know, these psychological days, when we are fooling ourselves, but it seems to me that since I destroyed Cudlipp for the sake of the young men in the College, I ought to stay to serve those same young men—those, at least, who care for what I say. Yet, you know, it seems to me there is never a half hour together when I do not relive that moment of handing him the aspirin.”
“And how,” Professor Castleman said as he and Kate waited for the elevator in Lowell Hall, “is the proclaimer?”
“The who?” Kate asked.
“Clio, your muse of history. Kleio in Greek is the Proclaimer.”
“You don’t say. I never thought of her as proclaiming, I suppose because Auden never mentioned it.”
The elevator, going down, passed them without stopping.
“If your Clio is going to proclaim any change,” Castleman said as they started down the stairs, “I wish she would begin. The elevators do not stop, and the room I’m in now, while larger, is still not large enough.”
“Standing-room-only is a compliment,” Kate said.
“Which reminds me. We went to the theater again. Dionysian rites, as I live and breathe. Nude young women pretending to tear nude young men to pieces. Oceans of blood.”
“Did they try to persuade you to take part?”
“Alas, no. Not, that is, that I actually want to tear anyone apart—not even my students, bless them, who refuse to believe one can learn from history. Do you suppose,” he went on, “if we were all to enter the classroom nude—and Lord knows, it’s overheated enough for that—the younger generation might be willing to pay their tribute to Clio?”
Kate met Emilia Airhart in the ladies’ room, where she was regarding herself miserably in the mirror.
“My plan,” she said, “was always to avoid mirrors, the sight was so demoralizing. Do you know, I had actually learned to put on lipstick and comb my hair without looking at myself? But I will escape no longer. I am going to look and look and perhaps the continual shock will actually force me to diet. I will never be willowy, but at least I can be slightly angular.”
Kate smiled. “You are probably no one’s idea of either Aphrodite or Artemis, but you are wonderfully you and I doubt, really, that you ought to consider changing. The trouble with Queen Victoria was not her figure but her opinions. Are you writing a new play?”
“I am, actually. It’s a comedy with supernatural bits. A community of middle-aged parents and teen-aged children, and they change places—keeping, of course, their original ideas. The result is that the colleges and prep schools become frightfully proper and comme-il-faut, but the banks and brokerage houses keep having disruptions, and the different partners keep occupying their Wall Street law firms. Meanwhile, on the floor of the exchange, the radical brokers take over the ticker tape and demand open admission for all seats on the exchange. Of course, the college students insist that any broker who interferes with the workings of the market will lose his right to a capital gains …”
Cartier would not stop long enough to talk. “Have you heard,” Kate asked him, “that they have found the students who caused the elevator trouble?”
“I did hear something,” Cartier said, fairly dancing to be gone. “Sorry, but I must prepare a class.” He rushed off and then, to Kate’s astonishment, allowed the strings of restlessness to twitch him back.
“Hope you will sit on my lap one day,” he said, and then was gone.
Our bodies cannot love:
But, without one,
What works of Love could we do?
Epilogue
KATE and Reed were married on Thanksgiving and, since she had only four days, and a class to teach on Monday, they spent their honeymoon in Reed’s apartment cooking all their meals in the electric frying pan, which required very little attention.
Be sure to read the complete collection of
AMANDA CROSS mysteries:
IN THE LAST ANALYSIS
THE JAMES JOYCE MURDER
POETIC JUSTICE
THE THEBAN MYSTERIES
THE QUESTION OF MAX
DEATH IN A TENURED POSITION
SWEET DEATH, KIND DEATH
NO WORD FROM WINIFRED
A TRAP FOR FOOLS
THE PLAYERS COME AGAIN
AN IMPERFECT SPY
THE PUZZLED HEART
HONEST DOUBT
Published by Ballantine Books.
Available at your local bookstore.
From the master of the American literary
mystery come these short stories—
including eight mysteries featuring
Kate Fansler:
AMANDA CROSS
THE COLLECTED STORIES
A People “Page-Turner of the Week”
“For more than twenty-five years,
Amanda Cross has been blazing a trail
for the rest of us to follow.”
—Sara Paretsky
Available in trade paperback from
Ballantine Books.