by Ann Waldron
“I’ve been driving all day for three days, and I’m exhausted,” she said.
Natty Ledbetter said he had to go, too, and George helped him on with his coat, hat, scarf, and gloves.
“I’M SORRY I had a guest your first night here,” George said after Natty had gone. “But I wasn’t sure which day you’d get here, you know.”
“This time I only stopped twice on the way up—Thursday night with my mother in Atlanta and last night with Rosie in Charlotte. I should have telephoned. But I wasn’t sure I could make it from Charlotte in one day. Don’t worry. I enjoyed Natty.” She yawned hugely. “George, I’m going to bed. Sorry I’m not helping with the cleanup.”
“It’s all right,” said George. “You’re excused. Go to bed.”
It took McLeod’s last ounce of energy to get up the stairs, into her room, and snuggle under the down comforter on the bed prewarmed with an electric blanket. She was asleep before she could dwell on all that Nat Ledbetter had talked about: cuneiform and incunabula and Henry van Dyke—and the murder house.
Two
THE NEXT MORNING, McLeod had a chance to get a better look at the murder house. She and George had a leisurely breakfast and tried to catch up on all that had happened to them both in the past three years.
She did like George Bridges, McLeod thought after breakfast as she buckled down to unpacking and settling in. He had called her in Tallahassee as soon as he learned she was going to teach a writing class during the spring semester. He had for years worked as assistant to Princeton University presidents, three presidents in all, then he had gone off to Brussels for two years to work for one of these former bosses at some European Union education apparatus. He was back in Princeton now, back at the university with a huge promotion—vice president for public affairs.
“I’ve bought a house,” he had told McLeod when he called to congratulate her on her appointment to teach non-fiction writing at Princeton. “It’s on Edgehill Street—you know, the little one-block-long street between Stockton and Mercer. You can stay with me while you’re here. You can have your own room and private bath.”
“That sounds palatial,” McLeod had said.
“The whole house is tiny, but it seems palatial to me—I’ve lived in apartments for years. It’s wonderful, but it’s bewildering, too. I look at the yard, and I ask myself, ‘Now what is all that space for?’ ”
“Mowing?” suggested McLeod.
“Not just mowing,” George said. “It all needs lots of work. I could see that when I bought it. But it obviously used to be a nice yard.”
“You’ll deal with that eventually,” said McLeod cheerfully.
“I know,” said George. “Oh, well. Do stay here. I’ll be very glad to see you.”
“And I’ll be glad to see you,” said McLeod. “Thanks so much for calling.”
And she was glad to see him, she thought now as she hung up clothes in the guest room closet. She and George had had a little fling two years ago, the second time she taught at Princeton, but she had not seen him since. Still they had kept in touch. It would be nice to resume the friendship, even on the platonic basis he seemed to have in mind, she thought.
George had urged her to try to arrive on a Saturday or Sunday so he could be home when she got there, and when she had turned into his driveway on Saturday, he came out on his little porch, grinning at her, his black curly hair rumpled, and looking as full of vitality and brio as ever. She cut off the engine, popped the trunk open, and got out of the car, as George came down the steps and gathered her, thick coat, tote bag, and purse into a huge bear hug.
“McLeod, I am so glad to see you,” he said, holding her tight and rubbing his cheek on hers.
“I’m glad to see you, too,” she said. “And I love your house. Aren’t you cold? You don’t have on a jacket even—just that sweater. And it’s cold up here.”
“Your blood is thin from living in Florida,” he said. “But it is cold.” He pulled two of her suitcases out of the trunk and started up the steps to the porch “Come on in. You’ll love it.”
“I love it already,” McLeod said as she went in the door, with its stained glass panels, and saw the square hallway with a staircase winding upward.
The house was indeed tiny, she thought, but darling. On the left was a small parlor and on the right a large dining room with bookshelves and a bay window at one end. Through the panes of the bay window McLeod could see the backyard, which didn’t look too bad, she thought. A door led from the dining room to a kitchen that was small but surely big enough to allow George to cook more of his wonderful food. “It looks like you’ve really settled in,” said McLeod.
“The downstairs is in pretty good shape,” said George, “but upstairs is still a mess.”
Upstairs were three bedrooms—one for George, a guest room, and a third that George was setting up as his study with more bookshelves and a desk and computer, copier, and fax.
“Impressive,” said McLeod, although the room was in some confusion, with cartons, as yet unpacked, stacked on the floor and no curtains or shades at the windows, no pictures on the walls.
“Lots of work to do in here,” said George, “but you can use any of this equipment anytime.”
“I brought my own laptop and a little printer,” she said.
“And here’s your room.” George made a wide gesture, ushering her into the guest room, which was at the front of the house, facing Edgehill.
“It’s charming,” she said. “I love the wallpaper.”
“Don’t the flowers look like camellias?”
“A little bit, I mean they have petals,” said McLeod, “but camellias don’t grow on trellises.”
“Picky,” said George.
“I love the wallpaper,” McLeod said again. “What more can I say? Actually, I can say I like all of it. I love the pictures —where did you get the watercolors of the campus?”
“Oh, I bought them at a charity auction,” George said. “I knew you liked watercolors and these were done by a local artist.”
“They’re great,” said McLeod. “Nassau Hall and Stanhope and Murray-Dodge . . . It’s the perfect guest room, George, the desk by the window and a wing chair”—she was walking around—“the big closet and the nice bathroom and the ancient oriental rug. . . .”
“Don’t you like all the old rugs? I bought them in New Hope last weekend at a secondhand store—I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it an antique store.”
“You’ve had fun furnishing this house, haven’t you?”
“I’ m not near through,” said George. “I moved at break-neck speed after you said you’d stay here, and got the guest room finished, but everything else is still in a mess. Come see my room.”
George’s bedroom, which overlooked the backyard, was as bare as the study, with a bed, chest of drawers, and another full complement of unpacked cartons.
“It’s a perfect house,” said McLeod, ignoring the disarray.
THE NEXT WEEK passed in a whirl of getting settled. George left for work every morning before McLeod was up, and usually worked late. She seldom saw him, but she had plenty to do—finish unpacking at home, settle into her office at the university, and get reacquainted with the Princeton campus.
In the office of the Humanities Council in Joseph Henry House, Frieda, the administrator, welcomed her for her third visit to teach the class on writing about people.
“It’s good to be back,” said McLeod. “I love it that I get to return now and then.”
“ ‘Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon thee,’ ” said Frieda. “That’s from the Song of Solomon.”
McLeod had forgotten Frieda’s skill at producing a quotation for nearly every occasion.
“And now, I’ll take you upstairs,” said Frieda. The “offices” for visiting writer/teachers on the third floor of Joseph Henry House were not really offices, but cubicles with a work surface, shelves, a few drawers, and a file cabinet.
&nb
sp; “We’ve given you the choice cubicle this time,” said Frieda.
It was indeed the choice cubicle, located by the window overlooking what one architect had called the “kaleidoscopic octagonals” of Chancellor Green Hall, once the Princeton University library, a remarkable building designed by a nineteen-year-old architect.
During the next few days, she got familiar with the university computer system and obtained a decal for her car from the parking office so she could park in the garage down near the hockey rink.
As she walked all over the campus, she admired the old buildings she knew from past visits and stood stock-still, amazed, before the new sculpture in front of the Art Museum. The sculpture consisted of twenty very tall—at least nine feet—headless, armless men standing on a low concrete platform. Walking up to her office from the garage, she had come upon the sculpture, Picasso’s Head of a Woman, which used to be in front of the museum. Now it stood below the I. M. Pei-designed Spelman dormitory.
Well, she thought, we had Head of a Woman and now we have twenty headless men. Why not?
One cold afternoon, she walked down to the brand-new Ellipse dormitory to see the Sol LeWitt painting on the arched ceiling of a tall passageway—and admired it wholeheartedly.
The cold weather made her think of knitting again, and she went out to the shopping center to buy yarn. She decided to knit George a sweater—she had made enough sweaters for her children, Rosie and Harry—and she picked out a beautiful gray wool and then selected a dark blue for doing some figures across the front. She would go all out, she decided. Surely, he would like a hand-knit sweater? The sales-woman assured her she could return the yarn if George didn’t like it. When George saw it, he did like it and was obviously pleased that she would knit him a sweater.
She asked George about the sculpture in front of the Art Museum. “Do people like it?” she asked.
“Older alumni hate it,” he said. “Young people like it. A Polish woman named Magdalena Abakanowicz is the sculptor. It doesn’t belong to the university—it’s on long-term loan from the parents of three alumni.”
“And the Sol LeWitt?” she asked. “Did he come out and do it personally?”
“It seems he doesn’t do any of the finished work anymore. He designs it and he has workers who actually produce the finished product.”
“It’s a very beautiful ceiling,” she said.
“Everybody likes that one,” George said.
She met her first class on Thursday and marveled again at how astonishingly bright Princeton students were—and at how they seemed impervious to the cold. While she bundled up in a shearling coat, a knitted cap that came down over her ears, a heavy muffler, and warm mittens, most of them drifted about in jackets and jeans as though it were Indian summer. If it got above freezing, a few wore shorts and one lad appeared one day in flip-flops.
She ran into people on campus she knew from her previous teaching stints and made dates for lunch and accepted invitations to dinner.
When she came home at night to the little house on Edgehill —nearly always empty—she thought of Jill Murray and her murder. She put off doing her laundry—the washing machine and dryer were in the basement where Jill’s body had lain for—how long? Days? Eventually she had to have clean clothes, so she went down the steps to the basement. She saw no stains on the concrete floor, and thought, Well, that’s one hurdle passed, and put her first load in the machine.
Three
SHE DID NOT forget Nat Ledbetter. The first time she was in Firestone Library with time to spare, she went to the Rare Books and Special Collections rooms on the first floor. To get to the collections, you pass through an exhibition gallery, and McLeod paused at a permanent exhibit, behind a store-front kind of window, which looked like a stage set. It was a replica of the office of Jonathan Belcher, CAPTAIN-GENERAL AND GOVERNOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE PROVINCE OF NEW JERSEY FROM 1747 TO 1757, when it was a colony of Great Britain, according to a nearby plaque. The governor had given his entire personal library of 474 books to the little new College of New Jersey, along with two terrestrial globes and his portrait. Now the books that had survived the ravages of fire and time were lined up behind an eighteenth-century desk; his portrait (red faced and wearing a magnificently curled gray wig) hung on the wall beside the desk and one of the globes stood some distance from it. McLeod stared at this permanent exhibit, wondering what Governor Belcher would think if he knew that the tiny College of New Jersey had metamorphosed into the august institution known as Princeton University. Then she went past the gallery’s current exhibition, material drawn from George F. Kennan’s papers. Kennan, a Princeton alumnus, had designed the containment policy for the Soviet Union.
Finally, she found the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and was eventually ushered into Nat Ledbetter’s office, where the splendor astounded her. The room was vast, lined with bookshelves full of books—they must be very “rare,” she thought—set in dark oak paneling, with heavy brocade curtains at the windows.
Nat stood up behind his big desk and greeted her warmly. “I’m so glad to see you. Sit down. I’d offer you some coffee, but drinks are not allowed in Rare Books.”
He still looked gray today, except that he had on a red tie, and beside that he just looked rosier. When Nat asked her if she had come to see a Trollope manuscript, she said yes, indeed she had.
“Let me see if Philip Sheridan is here,” he said. “I know he’d love to meet you. The Trollopes are part of the Sheridan collection . . .” He disappeared through a small door in the inner wall of his office and came back a moment later, beckoning to her.
“Philip is here and wants to meet you,” Nat said. McLeod followed him through another paneled room lined with bookshelves, into still a third book-lined room with two desks. A white-haired, beaked-nosed man in a pin-striped suit rose from behind the big desk and smiled at McLeod. He had the rosy cheeks of old age, but he was tall and straight. McLeod thought he must have been blond before his hair turned gray because aside from the rosy cheeks, his skin was pale and his eyes were blue.
“McLeod, this is Philip Sheridan,” said Nat. “He’s a great collector. And this is McLeod Dulaney—I told you about her. She’s a real Trollope fan.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Sheridan. “I’m a Trollopian, too.” He came around from behind the desk to shake hands. “This is Chester”—he waved at the young man at the smaller desk—“my assistant and the curator of the collection.” Chester stood up and smiled shyly. “Do sit down, Mrs. Dulaney,” Sheridan said. He ushered her to a large wing chair, and pointed to a smaller chair for Nat. “Which is your favorite Trollope?”
“I used to think it was the Parliamentary novels—all of them,” said McLeod. “But I’m reading The Vicar of Bullhampton now and it’s wonderful. I believe it’s my all-time favorite. I really do.”
“Oh, yes, that’s the one where the vicar tries to rescue the ‘fallen woman,’ ” said Sheridan.
“That’s right. And there are all these plots and subplots —the love affair between the squire and Mary, the murder of the farmer—it’s wonderful.”
“What edition are you reading?”
“What edition? Oh, you’re a book collector, so you care about the edition. It’s just a paperback I bought secondhand at Micawber.”
“I see. Then you’re not interested in books except for their content?”
“Some books are quite beautiful—I appreciate that. But I guess I do care mostly about the content. I wish I knew more about books as books. Are you interested only in first editions?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Some first editions are unobtainable. Shakespeare’s quartos, for instance, are no longer in private hands. But a first edition makes you feel closer to the author.”
“And a manuscript still closer?” said McLeod.
“Exactly. And you want to see a manuscript.” He spoke to the young man at the smaller desk. “Chester, would you fetch the manuscript of The Eustace Diamon
ds, please.”
“Oh, good, that’s one of the Parliamentary novels,” said McLeod. “I love them, because I covered the legislature in Florida and that gave me a taste of the parliamentary process.”
Chester disappeared through still another door and returned to lay a gray carton gently on the big desk. Sheridan moved the carton to a small table that he pulled up in front of McLeod’s chair. He opened the carton and looked tenderly at its contents. McLeod stood up as Sheridan lifted another box, this one dark leather, out of the carton; he opened the leather box, slid out the manuscript, and laid it in front of her. It was an enormous pile of paper, at least three inches thick. She lifted the first page—good, heavy, slightly textured ivory-colored paper, on which Trollope had written the novel’s title, The Eustace Diamonds, and below it, “Chapter 1.”
The rest of the page—both sides—was covered with Trollope’s handwriting in brown ink. McLeod sighed in admiration. She knew that Trollope had written ten pages a day, relentlessly, two hundred and fifty words to the page, none of it ever rewritten and all of it fully legible a hundred and thirty years later, with only an occasional word crossed out, an ink blot here and there, a smudge now and then.
She admired the manuscript silently and then looked up, smiled at Philip Sheridan, and said, “I find it strangely moving. Thank you so much. It’s an amazing experience—to look at what Anthony Trollope actually wrote.”
“We’ll make a collector out of you yet,” said Sheridan.
“I’m very grateful,” McLeod said. “To both of you.”
“Thanks, Philip,” Nat said and steered McLeod back to his office.
“That was so interesting, Nat. Tell me about the Sheridan collection. Who is he? Do the books and manuscripts belong to Princeton or to Philip Sheridan?”
“Philip Sheridan is from a tremendously wealthy old Princeton family. He went to Princeton and he’s always been a loyal alumnus. His father was something of a collector of Americana—he’s the one who bought the Bay Psalm Book. That’s the jewel of the Sheridan Collection.”