by Amanda Cross
“I see we’re on the same wave length. Perhaps you know what those books bring in, what the reprint rights bring in, what the movie rights bring in? Publishers make a fair amount on best sellers like the Frank Held books, but that just makes up for all the good books they publish that barely make their get-out. The money really begins to come in, Mr. Amhearst, with subsidiary rights—movies, and so on.”
“Interesting. But what has this to do with Mr. Mulligan?”
“He writes the Frank Held books.”
Reed’s surprise brought him to his feet.
“A very attenuated Trevor Howard,” Ed Farrell said.
“The Frank Held books are written by an Englishman, what’s his name. I know he hates publicity, and there aren’t supposed to be any photographs of him, but the facts are plentiful enough. Why, I thought everyone knew he was related to . . .”
“Padraic Mulligan writes the Frank Held books. Believe me, Mr. Amhearst. And he was especially anxious that Kate not know it, and especially that someone named Knole not know it. I don’t know when he began to realize he could make us publish his ‘academic’ books, and so get him a fast promotion in the crazy publish-or-perish academic world. What I can tell you is that everyone in the academic world is so busy publishing, no one reads anyone else unless he’s in exactly the same line of country, and then only to be certain he hasn’t been anticipated.”
“But why should Mulligan want to go on being an academic? What an extraordinary thing. With what he’s making he could, he could . . .”
“The ways of men are strange, Mr. Amhearst. No one knows that better than an editor. Whether he has a deep longing to be part of the academic world, whether he really likes to teach, whether his whole delight consists in mocking for his own benefit the standard of academic judgments, whether he secretly thinks his books are good—who knows? All I can tell you is that if we hadn’t agreed to publish his academic stuff, he’d have taken Frank Held elsewhere. And we could not bear, Mr. Amhearst, to see Frank Held go elsewhere. I know what you’re thinking. Sam Lingerwell could have borne it. Sam Lingerwell wouldn’t have published Frank Held in the first place, and that’s the bloody truth. But he lived in different times. What with mergers, the gigantic cash payments to authors—don’t get me started. I console myself with the thought that one Frank Held, and one dreadful academic book by Padraic Mulligan, support any amount of first-rate stuff, some of it even poetry—stuff that doesn’t sell in ten years what a Frank Held novel sells in ten minutes.”
“Mr. Farrell, I won’t waste your time with euphemisms and subtleties. Do you think Padraic Mulligan would kill to keep his secret from being made public, or to stop himself having to pay for silence?”
“Naturally, the question in my own mind. We can never say with assurance, but I should doubt it. In the end there would be too much at stake. He treasures his secretive role, and he never spends a fraction of the money he makes, or rather has left after the government gets through with him; he’s a bachelor, of course, and our tax laws really do make true the old saw about two living cheaper than one.”
“I know,” Reed said. “I’m a bachelor myself.”
“But Mulligan likes just having all that money. He’s not a bad egg, you know. He likes giving people things, he likes to know that he could walk into any store in the country that sold anything, and buy it. The knowledge is more important than the purchase. In my experience, there are two general attitudes toward money: the one that wants to have a million dollars, and the one that wants to spend a million dollars. Mulligan is in the first class. He wouldn’t risk all that, I think, even if his secret were in peril.”
“Yet suppose, as happens to be the case, that he didn’t actually have to commit the murder. There’s the beauty of it. You drop a little bullet into a gun, and then leave it up to chance. You don’t pull the trigger, you can’t even be certain the trigger will be pulled.”
“I don’t believe it of Mulligan, though you can’t trust me; I may be simply protecting a valuable property. But whoever dropped the bullet in that gun was taking a long chance—not only that the gun wouldn’t be fired, but that it might be fired at the wrong person. It might have killed a stranger, a child—I think Mulligan would have shied away from that. He’s got more imagination than your criminal seemed to require.”
“Thank you, Mr. Farrell. You’ve been kind and more helpful than you can guess. I promise to preserve Mr. Mulligan’s secret if it’s at all possible. It was he who tried to stop Kate on her way to you, or so we think.”
“It would appear so. When he reached me on the phone he complained of not being able to get to me all afternoon and evening, and he swore me again to secrecy as though he knew I would be questioned shortly.”
“He did his best to stop Kate without injuring her, and he succeeded. I wondered that Mr. Mulligan would know enough to disconnect a generator in that way, and know exactly the effects of the disconnection, but of course, that’s the sort of thing Frank Held has to know.”
Mr. Farrell shook hands. “My best to Kate,” he said. “Tell her to come and see me when she gets tired of cows.”
After lunch, Kate poked her head in the library to see how Emmet was getting on. He seemed sunk in thought, and when she spoke his name, he leapt to his feet like one suddenly possessed. “I don’t know what’s the matter with everyone today,” Kate said.
“I was thinking.”
“No kidding. About whose problems, yours, mine or Joyce’s?”
“All of them, I guess. Kate, would you mind shutting the door?”
“Only,” Kate said, “if you promise not to confide in me.”
“I’m saving that for when I’m a good deal drunker. I’m always more amusing when I’m drunk.”
“As someone pointed out, you only think you’re more amusing.”
“I’ve got through the 1930s. Lingerwell’s letters, I mean. I’ve been going through each year trying to collect the letters by author—I’ve explained all that, but this time around I’ve been paying particular attention to the Joyce letters, which are only beginning to be organized. Of course, the folders are just lying here—I mean, this isn’t a guarded room or anything . . .”
“Emmet, I have never heard you so incoherent. And I thought that there was no situation which would find you without the right words, the light words . . .”
“You sound like an advertisement for beer.”
“Ah, that’s better. You’d got through the 1930s letters—”
“I was reading each letter, you know, trying to give future students a rough idea of the contents—my excuse, of course, since they’re fascinating and I couldn’t bear not to read them. Toward the end they get easier to decipher because Joyce dictated them, his eyesight was failing. The one I read yesterday was an ordinary, pleasant letter to Lingerwell—they hadn’t been writing as frequently, but suddenly, in the middle of the letter is a sentence. Let me read it to you.” Emmet picked up the letter and began to read with difficulty. He cleared his throat several times. Kate suddenly knew how he must appear to the woman he loved. She had never seen the mask drop before. “ ‘Watch out carefully, my dear Lingerwell, for the next letter I write you. There will be a long envelope—we can only seem to find a small one today—and in it an attempt to thank you for your help.’ ”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all. The letter goes on to say he’s fine, delighted with his grandson, and so forth.”
“What was in the next letter?”
“That’s it. It’s gone.”
“It may have been something valuable. Sam Lingerwell took it out and put it somewhere else.”
“I wonder. A lot of these letters are valuable, in a monetary sense. But he left them all together, intending, I suppose, to go over them someday. Kate, I’ve been reading all I could get about Joyce, and you know, in order to thank that woman who sup
ported him in Switzerland, he offered her the original manuscript of Ulysses. She declined it. Do you think . . .”
“That could hardly be contained in what Joyce calls ‘a long envelope.’ Besides, I seem to remember it was bought by some famous collector for a handsome sum. It can’t be that. Emmet, are you suggesting that the envelope has been stolen?”
“I don’t know.”
“If someone stole it, why not steal this letter too, which gives the show away?”
“That’s just it. Someone was looking through here, and happened on the valuable envelope, but didn’t have time to check through for other references.”
“I think you’re imagining things. Perhaps whatever it was, was too valuable to accept as a gift, and Lingerwell sent it back.”
“That’s what I thought. But there’s a reference in a letter years later, which seems to argue against that. Apparently Lingerwell had sent some money to the Joyces, whether his own or money he’d collected isn’t certain, because we don’t have Lingerwell’s letters. But this last one from Joyce, dictated of course, refers obliquely to Joyce’s past gift; it says: ‘If you do as I have requested, and I trust you as much as anyone, it will be thirty years before you can consider yourself repaid.’ Sounds rather as though someone else worded it for him. Joyce was very sick at the end, wasn’t he, and then there was the war.”
“What idiocy to have come to Araby at all. I should have persuaded Veronica to present the whole mess to the Library of Congress and let it go at that. What could this gift possibly have been?”
“Have you read Harry Levin? I think I’ll go for another walk. Kate, you might as well know, I’ve searched the house.”
“Emmet!”
“I had to, every room, dodging people, sneaking into guest rooms—illicit nocturnal pussyfooting between bedrooms is nothing to it. I think I’ll take up being a sort of Raffles; if only I looked more like Cary Grant, and less like Little Lord Fauntleroy. I found your driver’s license, by the way.”
“Thank you, dear boy, but I had already discovered it. You were thorough. Emmet, what are you suggesting?”
“Walking in the fields isn’t so frightful,” Emmet said, “if you sidestep the cow dung and refuse resolutely to think about snakes. Brad is out baling again—enormous amounts of hay those cows eat.”
When Leo came home, Kate sent him down for the cake. “Try not to drop it,” she said, “and walk carefully. Watch out for cars.” Why is it, she thought, that we cannot restrain ourselves from flinging advice at children, though we must all know in our heart of hearts that they are incapable of paying the smallest attention to it. Perhaps it’s the modern way of fending off evil spirits. “Leo,” Kate said, suddenly reminding herself of something, “I understand you enjoyed riding in the hay wagon when the baler was flinging the bales in?”
“Now, Aunt Kate. It’s not dangerous. I showed William. An inchworm could have gotten out of the way.”
“Where was William when you were riding in the wagon?”
“He was there, most of the time. Sometimes that Mrs. Bradford, you know, asked him to help her with something. She was a real—I won’t say it, now she’s dead.”
“And, Leo. Do you think you could carry this bottle of wine down to the young lady who made the cake without dropping it either, or drinking any?”
Leo appreciated this final jest. “I’ll probably swill it to the dregs,” he said. And he reeled off down the road, pretending to lift the bottle to his lips, upending it in the process. When I think, Kate said to herself, that Lord Peter Wimsey wouldn’t even let anyone dust a bottle of wine. There’s no question about it, we live in parlous times.
Chapter Fourteen
A Little Cloud
“As far as I can see,” Grace said, coming up to Kate, “there’s nothing wrong with that little boy. Of course I’m a childless old maid, and wouldn’t know.”
“Aren’t old maids usually childless?” Kate asked.
“You’re not. You’ve got Leo.”
“Only for the summer, thanks be. How’s Lina doing?”
“Waiting for William to come back from Williams—what an uneuphonious sentence.”
“My advice to her was to try to think less about William.”
“Have you noticed how advice like that always seems to have the opposite effect?”
“Now that you mention it, I have. Grace, this whole business is getting more and more disturbing. Emmet now thinks that a valuable Joyce letter, perhaps more than a letter, has been stolen.”
“Does he indeed?”
“You scarcely sound surprised.”
“I scarcely am. You can’t put all that temptation under the noses of three people whose academic careers depend upon the chance to make a publishing coup—and not expect trouble. ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ the prayer says.”
“You’re terrifying me. Which three people?”
“William. Mr. Mulligan. Emmet himself.”
“Mr. Mulligan? He’s already a full professor.”
“I know. He’d still love to make a coup, I’m sure. As to Emmet, who knows when the letter was stolen, or when, so to speak, he decided to discover it was missing?”
“Grace, you shock me.”
“For the second time in two days—not bad, for an aged, cast-off lady.”
“You resent it like hell, don’t you, being retired?”
“Like hell. I try to recognize that retirement laws are important; we must get rid of old fuddy-duddies automatically, to keep from breaking hearts. But I do wonder sometimes if the cure isn’t worse than the disease—it so often is, you know, in academic life. Perhaps I’m an old fuddy-duddy and don’t know it, but I really think I still have all my marbles, and they are quite a handsome collection of marbles by this time. Something too much of this. What about you, Kate?”
“I? Don’t ask me for an answer about anything. Maybe I’m just waiting for this murder to dim with time—maybe I’m just lying fallow, like one of Mr. Bradford’s fields. I’m getting old, Grace. Don’t laugh. There’s old and old.”
“I had no thought of laughing.”
“Reed’s asked me to marry him. It just goes to show, we all fall apart in the middle years. The one thing certain about Reed and me was that we would never really matter to each other. Grace, if a man hasn’t married before he’s in his forties, I don’t think he ought to marry. I mean, one can’t take up marriage as though it were the violin—to fiddle with in one’s off moments.”
“Jung has a theory about human life I’m rather taken with. I know the Freudians all frown on him, but to a literary mind, or perhaps I mean a mature mind, he speaks of possibilities beyond those offered by the viscera. As I said, a childless old maid. At any rate, he thought that about age forty—a few years more, a few years less—a human being needed to remake his life because, in a certain sense, he had become a different person. It was the unconsciousness of this which caused many breakdowns in middle age. Jung didn’t believe in looking back to childhood sexual patterns. He believed in discovering who it was you were trying to become.”
“Grace . . .”
“Don’t argue. Think about it all, and we’ll argue another time. I wonder if you didn’t get involved in this peculiar summer because you knew this kind of stasis was somehow needed, the protection of the womb before birth.”
“Some womb.”
“A womb with a view, as a wit remarked. You can’t stand still, Kate. You’ve got to keep going, and changing, or die. Remember Emmet’s saying some are dead though they walk among us; others have never been born. Personally, not to change the subject, I’ve always found Simone de Beauvoir hard to take, largely, I think, because even past forty, she kept right on acting like George Sand.”
“So Lina’s been talking to you about my talking to her.”
“We all of us talk a great d
eal too much. Here comes Leo, about to drop the cake. Will Reed be back soon? He’s the only one around here who ever seems to do anything.”
Reed returned a little after five, seemingly intent upon refuting Grace’s compliment. He was met in the driveway by Emmet, and the two of them began strolling down across the fields, obviously deep in conversation. After a time they headed back, and Reed, capturing Kate, took her for a long walk in another field. He explained about Mr. Mulligan, but seemed unwilling to assume that that mysterious gentleman was guilty of anything more serious than stealing Kate’s license and Reed’s registration and generator wire. Kate told him of her day: her morning with Molly, and Emmet’s discovery. “Emmet has already told me about that,” Reed said. “Tell me about your conversation with this Molly: all you can remember.”
“I’m not Archie Goodwin, who has total recall.”
“We ought to hire him in New York, whoever he is.”
“He’s got a very good job already.”
“Well, just try telling it as though you were one of those boring ladies on a park bench. ‘And then she said, and then I said,’ you know the sort of thing.”
“You want me to be boring?”
“To be honest, I doubt if you could accomplish it. But try.”
Kate tried. She was surprised at how a conversation came back, once she began trying to recall it. Reed listened attentively. Then he wandered off, and Kate was not really surprised to see him again in conversation with Emmet. She had gone inside when Reed again captured her and led her out onto the lawn.
“Kate,” he said, “will you do something for me and ask no questions?”
“Not unless you tell me what. I’ve had a trying day.”
Reed lit her cigarette. “I’m going to make it far more trying,” he said. “I want you to go with me to a drive-in movie.”