by Amanda Cross
“Is Ivy Day Parnell’s birthday then?”
“That’s funny,” Kate said. “I’m not certain if it’s his birthday, or the day he died, or something to do with the divorce. But on that day, October 6, everyone in Dublin who wishes to bask in remembrance of Parnell wears ivy in his buttonhole. They are all paralyzed of course.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Stratton.
“Why do you suppose Emmet showed Mr. Stratton ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’?” Lina asked.
“It was Joyce’s favorite story,” Kate said. “Everyone else’s favorite, of course, is ‘The Dead,’ one of the great stories in the English language.”
“What’s that about?” Mr. Stratton asked.
“About a man named Gabriel Conroy who has never learned to love,” Kate said. “About the truth that everyone in Ireland is dead, except perhaps the dead.”
“Cheerful sort of chap he sounds,” Mr. Stratton’s associate surprisingly put in.
“Ulysses is more cheerful,” Kate said.
“Isn’t that supposed to be an immoral book?” Mr. Stratton asked.
“Neither legally nor actually,” Kate said. “In point of fact, it’s one of the most moral books in the language. Bloom is bringer of love to a dead city, and to a not-yet-artist who has not yet learned to love. Light to the gentiles.”
“I thought there was a lot of sex in it,” Mr. Stratton bravely said.
“There’s a lot of sex in life,” Kate answered.
“In some lives,” Grace Knole said. Kate avoided Lina’s eyes.
“Would you say,” Mr. Stratton asked, “that Joyce is important?”
“Of course he’s important,” Grace said. “Read Richard Ellmann’s biography. Brilliant. Not, I believe, in paperback. Too expensive for me to offer you a copy, even with a faculty discount. Perhaps,” she suggested, “you could put it on your expense account.”
“I never know what people mean by important,” Lina said.
“All these letters of his lying around here,” Mr. Stratton said, before a literary argument could ensue. “Mr. Crawford tells me the Library of Congress and lots of universities have been after them.”
“Ah,” said Grace Knole.
“Odd that a woman should be killed at a house with a collection of letters from an Irishman.”
“There was probably no connection at all. Now Mary Bradford was the sort,” Kate added, “who would have found Ulysses a dirty book, and Bloom a dirty man. Of course,” she added, “Joyce didn’t have much use for WASPS.”
“Wasps?” Mr. Stratton asked, with the air of one prepared to hear anything.
“White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; Puritan; Calvinist.”
“I’m a Calvinist,” Grace Knole said.
“I am sure he would have made exceptions.” Kate smiled. “In fact, we know he did. But his vision encompassed mainly the world of Catholics and Jews. There was a time, you know, when he thought of being a priest. ‘I have given up the Society of Jesus for the society of Jewses,’ he’s supposed to have said.”
Mr. Stratton and his associate looked rather shocked. “You seem to know a great deal about Joyce, Miss Fansler,” Mr. Stratton said.
“Very little, I assure you.”
“I thought you said your specialty was Victorian.”
“So it is, but we are not all allowed to stay sheltered and unmolested within our periods, however vast. I give a course in the history of the English novel, under which title we include the Irish.”
“Well,” said Mr. Stratton, rising, “I think I had better speak to Mr. Mulligan now. I understand he was here. Is he still, do you know?”
“Talking to Emmet, I believe,” Kate said, rising also. “Shall I send him in?”
“If you would be so kind,” Mr. Stratton said. “Thank you for your literary help, all of you.”
“Our pleasure,” Grace Knole said, leading the way from the room. “But what,” she asked when the door had shut behind them, “is the name of that other man, the one who’s always with Stratton but barely utters?”
“I haven’t a clue,” Kate said, “but I call him M’Intosh.”
“Why?” Lina asked.
“Read Ulysses,” Kate maddeningly said.
“I shall make a note of it,” Grace said, “and of all the other interesting information just received. White wine.” She took a notebook from her pocket and wrote in it.
“Do you make a note of everything?” Lina asked in amazement. “Is that how you remember everything?”
“Absolutely. Even the frightful things.”
“I have no trouble remembering them,” Lina laughed.
“Oh, yes you do. When Alice picks the Red King out of lie grate he says, ‘I shall never forget the horror of that moment,’ and the Red Queen says, ‘You will, though, unless you make a memorandum of it.’ Since,” Grace went on, returning the notebook to her pocket, “we have been ushered from the committee room, shall we take a walk? I wonder if it is milking time, by any chance.”
“They’re probably just finishing up,” Kate said, “to go by what Leo has told me. But of course I did not make a memorandum of it.”
“Do you think Mr. Bradford would mind our intruding on him, especially today?”
“He’s rather patient about it, actually. It seems to me Leo and William used to spend every afternoon down there at milking time, till they knew more about it than he did. Anyway, maybe we ought to be detectives and see how he’s reacting. Shall we go? Across the fields, or down the road?”
“The road, I think,” Grace said. “I understand how to cope with cars better than those dangers I know not of. With which, incidentally, the rural life seems to be replete. I have known many raging passions in my time, from naked ambition to naked lust, but no one has ended shooting anyone else, though a few to be sure have ended their own lives. I blame it not on the greater inherent violence of rural life, but on the greater familiarity with guns and violent death. I expect after you have many times seen a deer or wood-chuck blown to bits, the thought of a human being blown to bits is that much less impossible to conceive.”
“Bradford once told me,” Kate said, “that there are no thefts around here precisely because everyone knows that everyone has a gun, knows how to use it, and will use it.”
“It does then, doesn’t it,” Grace asked, “sound rather as though someone would be likelier to grab a gun and shoot Mary Bradford out of sheer annoyance, rather than slip a bullet into someone else’s gun? I mean, do you think this really sounds like a rural crime? It seems to me more the crime of a metaphoric mind.”
“A Joycean mind, you mean?” Lina asked.
“Literary, anyway.”
“I don’t follow that,” Kate said. “It seems to me some rural type who hated her saw the chance of getting rid of her and took it. The fact that it would be involving a pack of nuts from the city in a hell of a lot of trouble simply added to the attractions of the method. Here comes a car.”
The three of them stepped to the side of the road as the car, driven too fast by the inevitable adolescent male, slowed only enough to permit the yelling back of some invitation seething with sarcasm. As the three of them returned to the road, Grace chuckled.
“Now in a piece of mystery fiction, that car would contain not howling adolescents, but adventure. Do you read mystery stories?”
“Certainly,” Kate said. “And do Double-Crostics. It’s either that, I’ve found, or bridge, boats and skiing. Why?”
“It is interesting,” Grace said, “how unlike life those stories really are. Their whole point is that so much happens. I don’t mean those Ian Fleming books. Even nice little English mysteries, of what Auden calls the body in the vicarage type, they’re so full of events. We have had a murder, now, but all we do, of course, is talk about it, and walk down a road together, three odd la
dies in tennis shoes, to watch the husband of the deceased milk some cows.”
“I know what you mean,” Kate said. “The English mystery begins with someone reading one of those advertisements in the Times, on the front page where they used to be so eccentric as to put them, and it says, ‘Peter, if you are wondering about me, go and see Henry. Colin.’ So Peter rushes off to see Henry, who turns out to be an old nanny aged eighty, and the next thing you know he’s trapped in some house behind the Iron Curtain, climbing out by hammering a piece of metal into the brickwork over and over again. If anybody locked me into a house, which is of course highly unlikely, I’d stay until I was rescued or, more likely, die of starvation.”
“That was a very good book all the same.”
“Of course it was a good book. Then there was the one I read recently of a thirty-fiveish spinster who goes to Europe for a vacation, has her car used for smuggling something or other into France, ends up locked in a cellar with some marvelous Frenchman, and takes the opportunity to learn what sleeping with men is all about, while the criminals are dropping bodies into the ocean the while.”
“That was a very good book too.”
“Excellent. But the point, I think, is that things don’t happen to people who’ve lived thirty-five years or more without their happening.”
“You’re right,” Grace said. “If I’d been locked in the cellar at age thirty-five with a Frenchman, however fascinating, I would have ended discussing some abstruse point of medieval culture if he was educated, or letting him tell me about the perils of the French economy and Gallic bravery in wars if he wasn’t. Either one is the sort to whom adventure happens, or one isn’t. And if one is the sort, I suspect one doesn’t think or talk or read very much, one just adventures.”
“One is certainly not likely to be locked in the cellar with a fascinating Frenchman,” Lina said.
“And if we were, we would be so distressed at the thought of all those bodies being dropped into the ocean, we would not be thinking about having experiences.”
“I would,” Lina said.
“The whole point about mysteries,” Grace said, “is that it is so nice to read about other people’s doing things without having to do that sort of thing oneself.”
“We are the sort who read mysteries and make memoranda,” Kate said, smiling.
They had arrived at the barn. Bradford was milking, helped by the farmer from down the road.
“Do you mean they milk with machines?” Lina said, looking about her.
“They do everything with machines,” Grace said. “I’ve gathered that much.”
“Do the cows like standing with their heads caught that way?” Lina asked, after the visiting ladies, properly introduced, had, together with Kate, offered their condolences.
“Since they’re fed that way, they like it,” Bradford said, “but the new theory is that they’re better off in open-pen barns, with a milking room and no stanchions. Watch out now.” He reached above their heads and opened a trapdoor in the ceiling. A bale of hay came tumbling down from the hayloft above. He untied it and began raking the hay out to the cows.
“Mr. Bradford,” Kate said. “Is there any way we can help with your children? We’ll be glad to take them home with us for supper, and to sleep, if that would help you in any way.”
“Thank you,” Bradford said. “That’s very kind. But a young lady from the village, friend of the family, has come out to look after things.”
“Well,” Kate said, “let me know if there’s anything at all we can do.”
The three ladies watched as Bradford fed the calves with powdered milk dissolved in water, removed the milking machine from each cow, fed each cow varying amounts of grain, and listened with a practiced ear to the machinery in his milk house. There a large, stainless steel tank, he explained to them, cooled the milk in three minutes from the cow’s body temperature, about a hundred degrees, to less than sixty degrees. Three times a week the milk truck siphoned the milk out of the tank directly into the truck and drove away with it.
“Amazing,” Grace said. “Is the whole top of the barn filled with hay?”
“It will have to be full soon, for the winter,” Bradford said. “The hay we just fed the cows is the last of last summer’s crop. There are over four thousand bales of hay in there already, and more to come. Would you like to see the hay elevator work?” he asked.
“Well,” Grace Knole said, “if you would be so good.”
“Please don’t trouble,” Kate said at the same time.
“No trouble,” Bradford seemed glad to take his time explaining. “Those bales in the wagon,” he said, “were thrown up there by the baling machine. We take each bale out of the wagon and put it on this elevator, which lifts it up to the hayloft. Watch out now.” He started the machinery, and the elevator lifted the bale of hay up to the second story of the barn. Bradford, leaping to the hayloft before the bale, lifted it from the elevator and threw it back in the hayloft. “Come up and see,” he said.
The three ladies eyed the perpendicular ladder leading to the hayloft with varying concern. Lina and Kate, without much hesitation, scrambled up it. Grace Knole remained on the ground. “I no longer admit,” she said, “the possibilities of either cellars or haylofts. Look around, and tell me about it.” Kate and Lina were astonished at the size of the barn’s second floor. There was not a support or column visible; only open space and thousands of bales of hay. “It’s a beautiful building,” Kate said to Bradford.
“Designed it myself. Mary thought I was crazy, but I said it was possible to design an absolutely open hayloft. Poor Mary,” he said, remembering. The three of them climbed solemnly down.
“One man,” Grace said, as they started back up the road, “can run a farm, provided he is a mechanical genius, an architect, an agronomist, and a veterinarian rolled into one.”
“What an extraordinary amount of hay,” Lina said.
“On the whole,” Kate said, “should one run into a Frenchman, I think a cellar would be preferable. Less irritating to the nasal passages, and less likely to induce acrophobia.”
Reed was waiting for them halfway up the road. “Where have you been?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to wander off from the scene of a murder without permission.”
“Do you mean we’re under house arrest?” Grace asked.
“We were exploring haylofts,” Kate said. “Find anything?”
“I should hate,” Kate said, “to have to find anything in a hayloft. Bradford seems something less than inconsolable.”
“I couldn’t help wondering,” Lina said, “about the girl from the village.”
“Has Mr. Stratton asked Mr. Mulligan about Joyce?” Kate asked.
“What in God’s name,” Reed said, “is ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’?”
“He has been asking about Joyce. What about ‘Ivy Day’?”
“It seems Mr. Mulligan didn’t know about something going ‘Pop.’ But then, of course, neither did I.”
“But you haven’t written several books on form and function in modern fiction.”
“It’s odd about Mr. Mulligan,” Grace said.
Chapter Nine
Clay
By Sunday night, the police squads had finished. The mortal remains of Mary Bradford had been removed. “And where her immortal remains may be, I scarcely dare to think,” Emmet observed. Mr. Stratton departed, together with his associate now dubbed M’Intosh.
On Monday, William was due for arraignment in the county court. Reed offered to drive him down, and Lina, for whose company William now manifested an almost childlike need, went along. They were to be met in court by John Cunningham, who would bring, Reed astonished everyone by saying, five thousand dollars in cash or certified check. “Cunningham’s certain that’s absolutely the highest bail they can set,” Reed told Kate. “In fact,” he co
ntinued, “if it’s that high, it doesn’t bode well for William if the police fail to find the murderer.”
“But William hasn’t committed murder,” Kate said.
“He has, my dear. Accidental murder, but murder nonetheless.”
“No more than if I ran over someone in my car, and killed her.”
“In both cases, you see, the victim would be dead at the hand, so to speak, of another.”
“Reed. Where is Cunningham getting the five thousand dollars? Does he provide it as part of his legal services?”
“May I live to see the day. The money is put up by the prisoner, or his friends, who will get it back if he doesn’t vanish.”
“I’m certain William doesn’t have five thousand dollars.”
“William doesn’t have five thousand cents; not, that is, to spare.”
“Reed, it’s clearly my responsibility . . .”
“Which I, temporarily, am assuming.”
“I can’t see why you should come all over gallant.”
“Neither can I. If you insist on immuring yourself in the woods, setting up a household which startles even the most hardened criminal lawyer in Boston, and then strewing the countryside with bodies, there is no good reason under the sun why I shouldn’t let you find bail for your unfortunate employees, or leave them to battle their own way out of this predicament. After all, they must have known what they were letting themselves in for when they went to work for you. However, since I am not only as besotted as you are, but entangled into the bargain as a prime witness, if not a suspect, you must let me take upon my manly shoulders what responsibilities I can. In short, be of good cheer, have a drink waiting, should we return, and pray that the judge lets our William off with bail. This news, and more, will I bring upon my return; now, I to county courthouse, and thee to Araby, as they insist on saying in those dreary Shakespearean histories.”