The Transcendental Murder hk-1

by Jane Langton

  "Alice Herpitude knew a secret about Elizabeth Goss? How do you know?"

  There was a pause while Miss Jellicoe looked for a dignified way to express herself. "Well, I used to be a telephone operator in Concord, back in the old days before automatic dialing, and I sometimes heard things. Without intending to, naturally. Sometimes you just can't help—"

  "No, of course you can't," said Homer, lying comfortably. "Do you know what the secret was, Miss Jellicoe?"

  "No. I just know there was some secret Elizabeth claimed to have, and Alice didn't believe it."

  "Don't you suppose it was just some gossip that was going around?"

  "No, I distinctly remember Alice's saying, 'Don't worry, Elizabeth. I'll keep your family secret because I don't believe it anyway.' "

  "That was all she said? A family secret?"

  "Yes. Then Elizabeth said something very rude. She said, 'I can hear someone breathing' (as if I had been listening on purpose!) and I switched off."

  "Hmmm. Well. Thank you, Miss Jellicoe, thank you very much for calling. Let's see—Elizabeth Goss came from Amherst, Massachusetts and Alice Herpitude did, too. I believe you're right about that."

  "Yes, they'd known each other all their lives. So Alice knew this awful secret!"

  Homer hung up as soon as he decently could. Then he stood staring at the telephone. Old Mrs. Hand had told him Alice Herpitude's last words. How did they go? "I knew that what she claimed wasn't true," or something like that. Had Alice been talking about Elizabeth Goss? At the back of Homer's head there began to arise the dimmest, ghostliest wisp of an idea. He took a railroad schedule out of his pocket and consulted it. Absent-mindedly, then, he picked up his briefcase and fumbled in a drawer for a clean shirt. There was a train from Back Bay at 2:30...

  *54*

  The world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order... —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Fill in all the background, first. Homer Kelly lay at his ease on a settee, ignoring the handsome homelike atmosphere of Amherst's Jones Library, leafing idly through old local papers. Elizabeth Goss had been Elizabeth Matthews before her marriage. When would she have announced her engagement? He started with the fall season of the year before and studied the society pages, examining solemnly the yellowed photographs of dewy young brides in bobbed hair. Most of them were dogs. Their shapeless finery didn't help, and they had these tiaras that they wore low down on their foreheads, like Indian maidens.

  But, say, here was one with class. Post-deb announces engagement to Harvard man of Concord, Massachusetts. Well, by jeeminy, here she was. It was Elizabeth Goss, nee Matthews. "Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Matthews announced the engagement of their daughter Elizabeth at a supper party yesterday evening at the Lord Jeffery Inn..." Homer's eyes ran on, then did a doubletake and started over. Could this be the right Elizabeth Matthews? She wasn't engaged to Ernest Goss, she was engaged to ... but that was impossible. Homer looked at the photograph again. No, there was no mistake. It was Elizabeth Matthews, all right. So she had had another romance ... here was a can of worms with a mightly peculiar smell...

  Sniffing the new scent, Homer reared up off the settee and nosed around among the bookshelves. After a while he went to the desk and inquired the way to the Town Hall.

  "Turn left, then right to Main Street, then left on Main across the green. It's just a block or two this side of Emily Dickinson's old homestead. You can't miss it."

  Homer picked up his briefcase and did as he was bid. The Town Hall turned out to be a grandly ugly Romanesque structure so glowering and heavy that Homer pictured the earth beneath it densely compacted all the way to China. The Town Clerk's office was down the hall to the right. The Town Clerk was out to lunch, but the girl behind the counter took some of the big canvas-covered folios of Births, Marriages and Deaths from the vault where they were stored and let Homer pore over them. When the Town Clerk came back from lunch, he found Homer crouched over one of the big volumes, his enormous forefinger moving along a line like that of a child just learning to read, his lips mumbling the words over and over.

  The Town Clerk examined him with sharp analytic eyes. Making instant character analyses was his specialty. Take this chap, now. Odd-looking fellow. Giant. Obviously illiterate. Stringy brown hair cut in big scraps. Horrible tie. And say, look at that forefinger. Spatulate. He should have guessed. A criminal type if ever there was one. "What do you want, mister?" said the Town Clerk nervously.

  Homer lifted his eyes and bored holes that went all the way through to the back of the Town Clerk's head with the keenest glance seen in Massachusetts since Daniel Webster's. "Tell me," he said, "how long is the normal gestation period for human beings?"

  Thrilling voice the fellow had. Come to think of it, he had very large prefrontal lobes. Obviously a fellow with plenty on the ball, a professor or something. Funny question though. "I dunno. Nine months, isn't it? Nine and a half?"

  Homer stared at the Town Clerk. His lips moved. Then he picked up his briefcase and whirled it around in the Town Clerk's office in a huge circle. "Wahoo!" he said. "Me plenty heap awful smart!" The Town Clerk had to rectify his character analysis all over again. The man was a dangerous maniac, he should have seen it right away.

  But Homer was going down the front steps three at a time. He was out on the street, charging back to the library, his mind alive with a wild idea. He tossed his briefcase on a library table and started assaulting the card catalogue and snatching books off the shelves. After two hours of tearing the meat out of them, he left their scattered carcasses on the table and ran down the street to the College Drug Store. He found the phone booth in the corner and wedged himself into it by a technique he had worked out years before. (You backed in, squeezed yourself into the seat, lifted your right leg and planted it on the farther wall, and then, ever so gently, you shut the door.) He began to make a series of long-distance calls.

  *55*

  I am perfectly sad at parting from you. I could better have the earth taken away from under my feet, than the thought of you from my mind. —Henry Thoreau

  Everyone was asleep except Mary. She had been up since four o'clock, working on her transcendental women. Now she was feeling sleepy again. She propped her head on her hand and looked out her bedroom window to where the elm tree branches made an armpit. In it the morning star hung dazzling. There were red puddles in the hollows of the pavement, like pieces of morning sky let into the road. It was time for some breakfast. Mary got up from her desk, watching the star. It followed her shuffling footsteps with a wobbling retrograde motion. All she had to do was set the pattern and the star fell in with the plan ... Pattern again! Why must she be so obsessed with pattern?

  But they had all been obsessed with pattern, too, those Transcendentalists. They had all leaped from the particular to the general, looking for the pattern in the daily jumble. Why? What was the matter with the particular anyhow? Why couldn't she just be-there-and-how-do-you-do? Why did the bare bones of a simple act like walking to the stove with a pan of water have to flesh out into something alive and complicated, with skin and hair growing on it? (How many other women had carried water, in what vessels, from what source? Oh, forget it. This is my water, my pan with the nicked porcelain, my soft-boiled egg, and shut up to you. It's not part of any pattern, it's my breakfast.)

  The trouble with the layers of meanings that grew like a fungus all over the little pieces of the particular was that the symbol might grow too huge, the stratification of meaning piled on meaning might become too ponderous, too heavy, too thick. One might start wandering in a forest from which there was no escaping; where every simple act and every trivial object became so much more than itself that one went mad. Mary shook her head and stared out the window. On this side of the house she could see the transparent moon. It was setting into a red horizon, looking angry and mottled, like a lump of amber with a dead fly caught in it. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. That's right, there was supposed to be a storm
brewing. But now there was no wind at all. Even Freddy's diapers hanging on the line hung limp and still, as stiff and orderly as dentil blocks on an architectural molding—a pure pattern, rosy in the dawn-light.

  ... But if you went mad, then you wouldn't be a pattern any more, would you? You would be one-of-a-kind, unique, all alone by yourself, yourself-in-yourself, crying in the forest. Look at Mrs. Goss. She had been more patterned and stylized that anybody—until she had forgotten the pattern altogether and gone crazy. Now she was, indeed, one-of-a-kind, crying in the forest...

  Mary sat down and looked at her breakfast. The dishes matched. She wanted to break them. She got up and found a bottle of ketchup and shook it on her egg. It tasted terrible, but at least it wasn't old patterned ceremonial salt and pepper. The blue willow plate had a crack in it. Mary looked at the crack and blessed it. Among the apples in the bowl on the table there was one with a spot on it. She reached for it suddenly and bit into the spot.

  There was that letter from Philip, leaning against the sugar bowl, Mary didn't want to read it. She knew what it would say. It would be Philip's pattern, nothing surprising. Philip didn't have any spots, that was the trouble with him. There was poor Charley in jail, all covered over with spots like a bad apple. He had fallen away from the pattern. He had run away from the template. He didn't fit the jig, so the jig was up. The letter looked at her. Read, Mary, read. Jump, Mary, jump. No, thank you, I don't want to jump today.

  Of course, that was her transcendental ladies all over. They couldn't jump. Emily Dickinson had refused to jump. Margaret Fuller had wanted to jump badly, but she didn't know how, and she kept blundering clumsily all over the rope. There were the Parcae, those grim women in the Grecian robes, turning and turning the rope, setting a pattern for you to leap and jump to, chanting it for you—

  Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn out the light;

  Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night.

  Then snip, with their big scissors, and out go you. And sometimes it was Double Dutch they swung for you, and you had to hop and leap, frantically, between two ropes at once.

  But you didn't have to jump. The little girl who was leaning in, getting ready, could just turn away and run, with her arms over her face. That was what Emily had done. She had run away. And that was what Henry Thoreau had done, too, after all, when he went to live in the woods. He had refused to jump.

  Mary went upstairs and lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. The jumping rope disappeared. Instead there was that procession again, with the barrel-vaulted triumphal arch and the sublime figures and the glorious flags. She could see it clearly now, she could see it all so clearly! Now at last she could see what it was all about. It was a funeral, such a pretty funeral! Alice's? Teddy's? Ernest Goss's? No. There was the glass box, like Snow White's, with the little girl inside. It was herself, little Mary, the little girl who had refused to jump. She was asleep in there, she was dead in there—that's what the procession was all about.

  Mary opened her eyes again, with the tears clinging top and bottom. Between the edge of the bed and the wall there was something wedged. It was Freddy's teddy bear. Mary picked it up and laid it against her face. Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night.

  *56*

  There was displayed a Titanic force, some of that force which made and can unmake the world. —Henry Thoreau

  The wind was rising. "Oh, boy," said John, "we're going to have one after all."

  "Well, I suppose it could have been a whole lot worse," said Tom. "We've got all the Macs and Cortlands picked. The Baldwins are what will get it."

  "Maybe it will go out to sea," said Gwen.

  The weather bureau had given everyone plenty of warning. At Vanderhoof's Hardware Store there were kerosene lanterns in the window and big bags of charcoal. Woolworth's did a land-office business in candles. People with pump-driven wells started filling bathtubs and gallon jugs and washtubs with water. Tom routed his whole family out to pick the apples that were ripe. Harvey Finn drove over with his sons to help. There was no school, and the children ran up and down between the trees with bushel baskets, shouting with excitement, glorying in the holiday. "Silly kids," grumbled Tom, ramming his ladder into the top of a tree, "it's their college educations that are going to get blown all to hell." Grandmaw was out in the orchard, too. She walked around the trees picking all she could reach from ground-level, her grey hair blowing out from her hairpins. Gwen stayed in the house fixing lunch and worrying a little. She had a suspicious backache, and the feel of her burden was different: Her center of gravity seemed lower, and she waddled around, leaning backwards to make up for it. How tiresome if she should have to be a pest just at this time. As if Tom didn't have enough on his mind. Tom came in to snatch a sandwich, and looked at her closely.

  "How are you feeling?"

  "Oh, fine, fine."

  Mary kept the library open until noon, then sent her staff home. Edith Goss lingered in the doorway. "Don't worry," said Mary. "Go on home. That brick house of yours is solid as a rock." When Edith was gone, Mary wandered back to her new office and stood looking out at the storm. The high winds were only beginning to rise, and the brushing of the branches against Alice's window was fumbling and ineffectual, like the hand of a wandering spirit desperate to get in. Mary turned away abruptly and went to the desk. The desk had been Alice's, too, and it had cost Mary some pain to transfer her belongings to it. There was one large drawer she had left untouched. It contained Alice's hat, the eruption of pink feathers she had worn so often in church. Mary looked at the drawer. Then she reached down and pulled it open, and looked at the hat. She took it out and put it on the desktop. Alice had left all her worldly goods to Mary, and so she supposed the hat was hers, now. So was Alice's house, down on Fairhaven Bay. So was the little rowboat tied at Alice's landing. So were the wooden swing-seats in her front yard. Heavens, what would the storm do to them? There was no one there to pull the boat up and check the house against the strong winds that were coming. Mary pulled on her coat. She must go and take care of things herself, not because they were her possessions but because they had been Alice's. She locked up the library and drove her car out Route 2 and down the mile-long dirt road that led to Fairhaven Bay. There was the fork where the road led to Teddy Staples' place. So that was two houses down by the river that had no occupants any more. And Charley Goss was gone, too, to sit out the hurricane in jail. Jails don't blow away. But lives do—they blow out. A mighty wind had picked up Charley and it was whirling him to destruction.

  The tops of the pine trees were swaying as Mary got out of her car. The water of the river was almost black, and small waves crowded its surface. She stared at the river. There was something odd about it. The waves were going the wrong way. The wind was coming from the wrong direction, that was why, and wrinkling up little white crests all over it. She turned and looked at the swings. They were rocking gently in the wind. She wouldn't be able to move the frame, but perhaps she could loosen the swinging seats and drag them under the high front porch. But there was the rowboat, too. Better tend to that first. She walked down to the boat-landing and looked at the small grey-painted rowboat. It was bobbing up and down, tied to the dock with a sort of bowknot. Alice had tied that knot herself. Mary loosened the knot and looked out across the water. The river was high, there had been so much rain. The island was a real island again, the way it had been in the spring, with the water surrounding it even on its landward side, hiding all but the tops of the buttonbushes. Mary stopped still with the rope in her hand. Wasn't that someone moving about on the island? Something had come between her and the sun, which was shining out now and then under the streaking clouds. She shaded her eyes. Yes, there was a figure there at the edge of the trees. Now it was gone.

  Someone must be camping there. There was no boat that she could see, but whoever it was must have come by boat. Was someone in trouble there? If they had been camping for more than twenty-four hours they wouldn't know about the hurricane. Even if they
knew, there was very little time for them to come away. Perhaps it was children, camping out. With a sudden movement, Mary pulled off her shoes and stockings, left them on the landing and waded out, pushing the little rowboat before her. If there should really be a high wind it would be the trees along the shore of the island that would be dangerous. They were partially submerged, and their roots probably all leaned one way, clutching the spongy soil for support against the southwesterly prevailing breeze. With the wind coming from the other side they would go over like candle-pins. She climbed into the boat, lifted out the oars one by one and inserted them into the oarlocks. Looking over her shoulder she started to pull. Keep abreast of the waves, now, and a little pointed into the wind. Don't broach them sideways, or you'll be swamped. Choppy going. Pull hard, hard. Overhead the clouds were in clots, surging like pulses, pulsing like throbs. There was no rain and no thunder, only the ever-rising wind, but the white birch trees in the dark woods were like forked lightning. The wind in her face began to be laden with torn leaves and pieces of twigs.

  And there was that sweet smell. Mary had forgotten that heavenly smell. With the dismemberment of the trees, the breaking off of branches, the sundering of leaf-stems, the snapping of the living wood there went a wonderful smell. Was it the bleeding sap from millions of open wounds? Mary drank it in—it was so sweet, so fresh. One might not mind dying if from one's broken body there arose so good a thing.

  Pull. Pull. Mary glanced over her shoulder again and adjusted her stroke until the boat was headed for the small sloping landing place there on the bay side of the island. The trees on this side were rooted on high ground. Their trunks swayed and their boughs pumped strongly up and down. The sound of the storm had risen to a roar, and above the roar there was the occasional snapping sound of slender branches breaking loose. Mary got out and pulled the boat up on shore and turned it over to let out the water that had slapped in over the gunwales. The noise of the wind was so steady and so loud that her own movements seemed soundless. Her bare feet were cold. She turned and hurried to the clearing where the giant pine tree stood. This was low ground, and the pine stood in water. There was no one here. Perhaps she had been mistaken, and there was no one on the island at all. A fool's errand. Mary pushed through the blueberry bushes and sumac on the other side of the clearing. Then she fell.