Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  She smiles at him and nods, her hands folded tightly at her middle.

  He shakes his head, tilts it slightly as if to get a better angle from which to appreciate her.

  —I ’ave to get ’ome now and save Mother from a terrible fate: Mrs. Craig’s pudding.

  Again, he laughs.

  —Mary, I’m afraid I must leave Bexley Heath for a time. I’m off for Glasgow tomorrow on business—a lectureship there. I accepted it last year. I’m sorry to say I’ll be gone most of the winter.

  She wants to reach for him, beg him not to go, but she keeps the humorous expression on her face, standing ramrod straight.

  —Well, she finds the strength to say, I guess you will be getting out and about more. The smile she bestows on him shows no trace of the desolation she feels. She wants to kiss his cheek, but then decides against it, and turns from him, strolling away.

  —It’s going to be a very long and dull winter, she says.

  —I’ll write you, he says. Will you write me back?

  —If there’s time in my desperately busy social life. Perhaps we should sign a treaty to the effect that we will acknowledge communications from each other no matter ’ow entangled in the affairs of the world we are.

  —Mary, he says seriously. You will make your place in this world. Mark my words. The world will hear of you, young woman.

  His eyes well up, and he lifts one arm to wave.

  —I’ll see you in the spring, she tells him.

  —Yes, my friend. Farewell.

  2

  SHE DOESN’T SEE HIM again for years. Her father moves them all to Cambridge, to a narrow house with windows that make it look like a beetle-browed angry face, overlooking a prospect of wide lawns called Parker’s Piece. There are cricket games there every afternoon in the summer. Her father, home early from his latest journey, is sixty now, and looking older than that. He’s had an attack of rheumatic fever, and is seriously weakened. It has taken him through the winter and spring months, recovering, gaining his strength back. Mary nurses him and her mother, and cares for Charley, who seems to have inherited his mother’s propensity for neurasthenic troubles. Mary has no time to think. She spends nights tossing, feeling as if something is undone that needs doing. But there are no other forms of tossing: she sleeps without dreams. Her father decides it’s time to settle down and write his book, but the days go by and nothing gets done. Mary works with him, sits at his side, pencil ready, and when he speaks she tries to write it all down. She has little use for the German she’s learned, but she keeps taking the lessons. Her father starts to talk, then stalls, then changes his mind. He can get up now, and go out. He takes long walks and sometimes she accompanies him. But her mother doesn’t want her to get too far away. He spends days watching university cricket over at Fenner’s, or lolling around on a blanket in the grass of Parker’s Piece, watching those games. He tells Mary that sitting there in the midst of cricket balls flying through the air gives him a sense of the danger he misses. That fall, feeling fully recovered, he wanders down to the towpath beside the river, and watches the college eights rowing and practicing. He stays too long, and receives a chill. Mary finds herself scolding him, saying that if he has no regard for his own health and well-being, he might remember that there are those in the world who do. He might think of his family a little, and of his rheumatism. He smiles charmingly and tells her that where he’s concerned, he would rather she keep her medical opinions to herself.

  More and more, she’s the only one who can soothe her mother. They still make each other laugh. The sick woman can do a perfectly wicked imitation of Henry Guillemard’s glottal voice.

  In December, Mr. Varley visits from Bexley Heath, having returned from Glasgow some weeks ago. He looks changed, smaller, and there’s a gauntness about his features. He sits with Mary in the front room of the house and remarks on the peaceful look of the fields outside the window. His hands tremble, and he never lets go of his hat.

  —I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to Bexley Heath sooner, he tells her, looking down at where his fingers work the brim of the hat. The world has a way of interfering with our best intentions.

  Mary remarks that this is something she quite understands. Abruptly, she feels the pull of her own desire to confide in him—to tell him about that morning so long ago when she wasn’t yet six years old and she had stood in the fresh snow of a winter morning, believing so completely in the delight of the world. She sits forward slightly and starts to speak, but then her father comes into the room and shakes Varley’s hand and behaves as if Varley’s visit is to him and not to Mary, and of course in one narrow way, in the form of the times, that is all it can be or should be. She sits and attends to their talk, her father going on about plans for one more journey around the world, if he can ever get his full strength back.

  —Did you know that Lord Dunraven has gone to Australia?

  Varley shakes his head.

  —No, I didn’t.

  —Gone to climb Ayers Rock, Mary’s father says. I’ve heard from him. Capital man, Lord Dunraven.

  —Well, says Varley, I haven’t had the pleasure of much time with him.

  They go on to talk about the murders in Cheapside. Four women, horribly slain, and the newspapers have been full of speculation. There has been a letter from the killer, sent to the chief inspector of police, signed “Jack the Ripper.”

  —It isn’t any Englishman, George Kingsley says.

  —Surely you don’t agree with those who want to pin it on the Jewish immigrant population, says Varley.

  —I heard of something chalked on a wall. “Jews won’t be blamed for nothing,” in the killer’s hand. Or words to that effect.

  —Surely you don’t take that as being serious, Kingsley. The killer’s hand? I read nothing about that.

  —I’ve read that the killer understands anatomy.

  Mary’s father glances at her, as if uncertain what he might be able to add, without violating the veneer of polite conversation in the presence of a woman. She says:

  —I’ve read the accounts, Father. He slit their throats, disemboweled them, and removed their organs of generation, except for the first victim on the night of the double event, as they call it. The night he killed two.

  —I think we will not discuss this further, says her father. The whole thing is too hideous.

  Varley leans forward, gazing at her with a severe expression on his face that surprises and disconcerts her. But when he speaks, his tone is merely horrified curiosity:

  —Have you read that there’s a second letter?

  —No, she says.

  —The second letter is not signed. It was sent with part of a human kidney, to a man named Lusk.

  Mary hasn’t seen this among the lurid accounts in the newspapers. But she recalls that at a recent afternoon tea given by her cousin Mary, the other girls were speaking with furtive, excited, giggling silliness about the removed kidney of the latest victim. They posed the theory of cannibalism, and were all the more excited to talk about the crimes. Think of it: a cannibal wandering Cheapside in the darkness.

  —I think I did see something to the effect of a second letter, George Kingsley says.

  —Well, they’re selling newspapers fast as Dickens, if you know what I mean.

  —There is an appetite for it, I agree. In my own house apparently.

  Mary’s mother calls her to the sickroom. She stands and excuses herself, and bows to Varley.

  —Very pleasant to see you again, he says.

  She bestows her best smile on him, smiling with her mind as well as her face. She hopes he can see it in her eyes. Then she bows to her father and leaves them there. She makes the climb up to her mother, and sits with her, and when she hears the door open and close, she has the sense that she will not see Mr. Varley again soon.

  —Poor Varley doesn’t have long, I’m afraid, says her father later that evening.

  She broods on this, and suffers quietly the gloom of the endi
ng day, like something settling over her mind. Her father seems to feel it, too.

  But his low spirits never last. His natural buoyancy takes over. He’s a Kingsley, after all. As in earlier times, he makes up games for her, challenges her knowledge of geography and chemistry and the other subjects of their mutual interest. He draws her out of her black mood. Charley takes part, too, but he’s getting ready to read for his degree now, and there’s a new seriousness between him and his father, almost like a competition.

  3

  LATE THAT MARCH, when the weather is finally warm again and she can open the windows of the house—windows she herself has recalked and resealed—her father revisits the idea that she should go to Paris. The idea resurfaces one afternoon when a family friend is visiting, a woman who has kept a special fondness for George Kingsley’s gangly, awkward, but bright daughter. The lady’s name is Lucy, a middle-aged person of accomplishment and strong intellect, with a hyphenated last name: Toulmin-Smith. Mary enjoys her company, because the lady has wide knowledge of the world—she’s a medievalist with a good reputation in the field—and she treats Mary as an equal. This friend will accompany her across the channel.

  —It’s time, her father says. We’ve been talking about it for years. Mary should see some of civilization if she’s ever to be anything but strange.

  He says this, and grins; it’s a joke between them. And Mary wonders if he means Paris as a joke. Yet things are running smoothly in the house on Parker’s Piece. Her mother’s feeling stronger—has even gotten out of bed and dressed herself, and walked a little in the shaded lane in front of the house, leaning on George Kingsley’s arm, just as they had, Mary imagines, when they were young. They tottered a little; the sun was bright on her father’s brown hair, and it made the gray in her mother’s more pronounced. They looked sweet, and watching them at the time, Mary couldn’t help wondering what their secrets must be. Her mother has never spoken about him as a wooer or romantic companion. There are no stories, no fond memories spun out in the lonely nights, while the two women wait for Mrs. Kingsley to grow sleepy. The connection between Mary’s parents is an iron-strong family tie: Mrs. Kingsley’s feeling about her husband is almost that of a daughter; indeed there are times when it’s exactly as if Mary and her mother are sisters. The idea, the reality, of Paris arises like a change in the look of the sky, far off. She can’t quite believe it, even as the arrangements are made and the day of departure approaches.

  4

  THEY SAIL on a bright Saturday morning in early May. The channel is smooth and calm and lovely, and they watch the cliffs of England recede on the horizon, to the west. Lucy’s American by birth, though she’ll never claim it; her father was a historian. She’s been a friend of the family for as long as Mary can remember. They stand on the boat deck and gaze out at the placid-seeming waters of the channel and talk. Lucy relates the story of her first time in Paris, where she met her husband, twenty-odd years ago.

  —Paris is truly the city for love, she says.

  It’s clear that her hopes for this journey, and about Mary, go too far. For all her involvement with the world of ideas, Lucy seems to be thinking of Paris as an invitation to romance, not for herself, but for her young companion. It strikes Mary that this might well be the reason for the excursion in the first place: her father’s hope that she’ll meet some suitable someone. A moment later, the idea seems absurd; he has never shown himself to be quite capable of thinking that far beyond himself and his own concerns. She has this thought without bitterness. That is the man as he is, so deeply concentrating on his own affairs, so absentminded about everything else.

  It’s not beyond Lucy Toulmin-Smith to think of it, though. Lucy has spoken before, in an oblique way, of her worry over the fact that at twenty-six, Mary is still unmarried. These gentle asides were directed at Mary’s father, mostly concerning the unfairness of requiring Mary to care for her mother, and usually wedded to the suggestion that George Kingsley hire a professional nurse.

  On the short sail across the channel, Lucy can’t help falling into the pattern of mentally trying to put Mary with one or another of the young men they are traveling among, all of whom Mary looks past and around as if they were no more animate than the mizzen mast. She watches a squall on the far horizon, and wonders if it will reach the boat before they tack in toward France, which is visible now, a line of dark green in the bluish distance.

  Paris is surprisingly small, and rather sedate compared to her memories of London. She and Lucy take a room in a little hotel off the rue de la Paix. Their window overlooks the Seine and the prospect of the Left Bank, the city crowding to the edge of the river. It seems always crowded with people, men and women strolling by, almost all of them couples, the women carrying parasols, and wearing bright clothes, and outlandish hats—one, she swears, looks exactly like the most aggressive of her gamecocks, worn by a heavy, strutting lady in a white dress with blue ribbons cascading down the front like a spill. Mary stares out the window of the hotel, while Lucy Toulmin-Smith unpacks and bathes, talking about a polite supper in the hotel dining room. Mary gazes beyond the bend of the river to an alleyway, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. She sees a young woman standing in a doorway, leaning on the frame of it, staring at something out of view. The young woman stirs, then steps out and on, walking away.

  Later, after the long supper, and the troublesome sociability of Lucy, who is so certain that this journey will provide a prospective husband for her young protégée, and all the while professing that she only wants the girl to have the true flavor of the city—after all the talk and the placation and the forced smiles, Mary lies down in her bed and hears Lucy sigh into sleep in the other, across the room. Carefully then, attending to the older woman’s every slightest motion or change in breathing, she gets up and slips back into her clothes. It takes many minutes to accomplish the task, but finally she’s dressed, and she lets herself out into the corridor with its row of gaslights and its thick carpet. She walks along past the rows of black doors, to an exit, and goes down the four flights of stairs, stopping to let two middle-aged Frenchmen pass, who are coming up, arm in arm, smelling of alcohol and cigars. She stands against the railing as they lurch by, and one of them glances at her over his shoulder to say something in a tone that she recognizes as being overly familiar, even intimate, prying: she hasn’t understood a word, but there is no mistaking the look, and the leering mouth, as the man turns back to his lumbering ascent. When they are on the landing above her, she continues, and comes out in the lobby, which is quiet, and looks deserted. At the front desk, there is a cigar sending up a plume of smoke, lying across a plate with encrusted food on it. Seeing this gives her the sense of the whole building as a place that has been abandoned in the middle of the rush of life. But then a heavy man in a white silk shirt walks in from the rooms behind the counter, picks up the cigar, and puffs deeply, blowing smoke. He doesn’t see her, and for an instant, she feels as though she’s about to commit some overwhelming transgression. She steps to the heavy wooden door and pushes through, and is out in the street.

  The air here is cooler than she expected, and there’s a strong odor of burning coal. The whole of the city seems to glow beneath the bright moon, and silvery light limns the tops of the trees, the borders of the roofs, the fluting of the columns in the facade of the Romanesque building facing her on the other side of the street. A beautiful night. She hears a woman laugh off in the stripes and angles and folds of darkness by the river, and there’s the sound of a carriage nearby, wheel creaks, the clop-clop of hooves echoing on stone, the cough and wheeze of a horse. She heads toward the water. She can see its muted brilliance shining with the moon in the near distance. She feels furtive, weirdly adrift. She thinks of London, the Cheapside killer, the Ripper, and a little chill rises up her spine. This is France, she tells herself. Still she walks fast, with false purpose. The water contains the luminous reflection of the moon-haunted stone bridge that crosses it, and the darker mirroring of a
ll the night-black shapes bordering it. Reaching the quay, she looks down into the river and sees motion, a shifting of disappearing eddies. A few paces farther along the bank, she makes her way up and into the alley that she had seen from the window of the hotel. Her heart races. She’s on the verge of an adventure. The street seems empty, but she hasn’t traveled twenty yards down it before a young man approaches her, wearing the bright colors of a clown, a satiny brightness in the cloth of his shirt, as if it is its own source of light. He speaks to her in the language that sounds like one long sentence, and of course she can’t understand a word of it. She presses past him and he steps to her side, still talking. A doorway opens down the street, sending a yellow band of light out from it. Someone, a big man in a white apron with a black vest and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the massive elbows, stands there in the door. The young man at Mary’s side speaks to that man, who is older—and now she sees that he is indeed much older. Such a large round man, with an enormous belly and a heavy-jawed, flat-nosed face. He begins to rattle in the language also, the two of them talking at her, it seems, the older man moving from the door front and stepping out to block her path. Beyond him there is more light, and people cross in it. She hears the murmur of other voices.

  —Hello, Mary says to the older man. I’m afraid I don’t understand you.

  He stops talking, and the young man stops, too. They look at each other in obvious bewilderment, and then they begin to laugh. They talk through the laughing, and she excuses herself and starts to go around them, but they move to block her way again, still laughing, the older man putting his hands on her shoulders and firmly holding her in place. It comes to her that she has never been handled in this way—not since she was a little girl in her father’s house.

  —Please take your ’ands off me, she says.

  —Excusez-moi, says the older man, and then rattles on in the other language. Je vous rend nerveuse? Mademoiselle, je ne suis pas digne de recevoir, mais dis seulement une parole et je serai gueri.