A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  But Julia is like this.

  “What I find mystifying,” she is saying, “is how you could wait for a year, knowing this crazy man, and not tell us about him.

  “I was frozen,” I say, the answer I give her every time she asks.

  And it is true.

  She’s gathering plums, two dozen in a paper bag. “So tell me everything again.”

  I take a deep breath. “I met Victor at the library the first day I went back to school after Steven died. He told me that he was Steven’s friend, that he loved him like brother, and then he showed me the newspaper photograph of Benjamin and said he thought Benjamin knew who had killed Steven.”

  We had this conversation whenever we were together, Julia always beginning as if it were the first time the subject had come up.

  “After Steven died, I wanted to disappear,” I say, patient with her because she deserves that from me. “When Victor told me about Benjamin, he gave me a way out. For a while, a few crazy weeks, that’s how it felt.”

  “Enough to fall in love with somebody?”

  “I fell in with Victor, not in love with him.”

  “And when did you realize he was a monster?”

  “Over time, when I started to get the songs from Benjamin and wondered how could a man who writes this music be capable of killing, and then I met the woman in the ladies’ room at Café Rouge, and I started to doubt. That is the first time, really the first time, I doubted anything Victor Duarte had said to me. I was that urgent to believe him.”

  Julia shakes her head, moving on to the vegetables, loading her bags with zucchini and tomatoes and eggplant.

  “I don’t understand,” she says.

  We move along the rows of stalls, stopping for olives.

  “You never thought he was dangerous?”

  “He said he was Steven’s friend,” I say. “He said he loved Steven, and I wanted to believe him.”

  “They were not friends,” she says. “Steven would not have such a person as a friend.”

  I pull her aside from the crowd. “Mama.” My hands are on her shoulders, and she has turned her head away from me. “Listen to me. Steven trusted Victor, just like I did. They were friends.”

  Julia puts her groceries down on the end of a stall, her eyes filling. For the first time since we have had these conversations the last two months, she breaks down.

  “It was my fault,” she says.

  I shake my head. “You took too good care of us, Mama.”

  “I should have taught you to take care of yourselves.”

  She runs the back of her hand across her face, rubbing her eyes, and then she picks up the bag of groceries and we head in the direction of the butcher’s to buy lamb.

  The second major story about Steven’s assassination was on the front page of the Washington Post on August 13, with a photograph of Steven taken at GWU the year he died and another photograph of Victor standing with Agent Burns and an agent I didn’t know.

  At 4 a.m., August 12, the FBI arrested Victor Duarte for the murder of GWU law student Steven Frayn. Mr. Frayn was killed April 4, a year ago, on the steps of the library at George Washington University. Mr. Duarte is an unemployed and homeless engineer with a history of mental illness. The arrest was made following Duarte’s confession to the police, in which he described hiding in a basement room in the building next door to the library and firing at Frayn with a 9-mm Beretta through a window when Frayn came out of the library. Victor Duarte and Steven Frayn had been acquaintances for the past year, meeting regularly at a café near George Washington University campus and sharing, according to Mr. Duarte, many of the same political views.

  My mother doesn’t mention Victor’s taped confession until we are in the car, driving home with the dinner for Steven’s celebration.

  I am sitting in the back with Asa, and we’re waiting for the light to change so we can turn onto Rock Creek Parkway.

  “Do you think Benjamin’s going to come this morning to hear the tape?” she asks.

  “He says he will. He’s coming with his father.”

  “I like his father,” Julia says.

  “I like him, too, but he’s formal.”

  “Formal is good.”

  “Yes, formal is good, but he’s too formal.”

  We are on the brink of a different conversation, retreating from what is about to happen this morning in our kitchen with Agent Burns from the FBI.

  When we were told that the tape could be released for our hearing, that Agent Burns would bring it over to our house only if we wanted to hear it, with the clear understanding that we might be upset by it, Julia decided to make an occasion.

  “Closure,” she said.

  “I dislike that word, ‘closure,’ ” my father said. “It makes me sick.”

  I stayed out of the conversation. I didn’t want to hear Victor’s voice again.

  “I don’t know another word. All I know is that I want a ceremony to put an end to this horror in our lives. Close the door on it. Is that better?”

  My father decided that if we had to listen to the tape on the day of Steven’s celebration, then Benjamin and his father should be asked to come.

  I understood why he wanted Benjamin at our house. In his silent way, he was angry that Benjamin came back weekends from Ann Arbor to see Asa but made no mention of a life with me.

  In his own house, my father would be in charge.

  “Do we have to ask Benjamin?” I asked.

  Just the thought of Benjamin in our kitchen quickened my pulse.

  “We’ve had enough trouble between us,” I told Julia. “He doesn’t need any more bad news about me.”

  “Benjamin was also a victim of Victor Duarte, and so indirectly was his father.”

  My father was pacing as he sometimes did when words got stuck in his throat, back and forth across the kitchen, his hands in his pockets.

  “Perhaps if we’re all in the same room listening to this vile man’s confession, something will happen among us.”

  “Like what?” Julia asked. “That’s just too Welsh, David, expecting a little magic to come of this horror.”

  “You’re always saying our family is too small, Julia,” my father said, resting against the sink. “If Benjamin and his father are here, and us and Bernard and Faith and Milo, we’ll be sufficient to whatever Victor Duarte has to say.”

  I understood that my father wanted to capture all of us in a common moment of sadness or horror or relief—whatever the sound of Victor’s voice brought into the room. He hoped to set in place his daughter’s future, to secure my happiness, and it was daring, especially of my father, to go so far out on this long emotional limb.

  “Claire,” Julia begins from the front seat, taking a left on Massachusetts Avenue at the mosque, “I don’t like that Benjamin won’t forgive you. It’s petty.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be with someone who did what I did,” I say. “What’s to trust?”

  “You were crazy.”

  “Crazy is no excuse.”

  “It’s a forgivable condition, and you can tell him you’ve turned into a different person, the person that you used to be.”

  “He doesn’t know the person that I used to be.”

  When Agent Burns arrives with the tape of Victor’s confession, I’m slicing white and purple eggplants, cooking them in onions and garlic on the top of the stove, with Bernard standing too close. I tell myself that Bernard is a puppy and needs to rub up against us to feel connected.

  Julia is making plum tarts.

  “It’s the wrong honey,” Bernard says. “Steven liked clover honey. It was his favorite, and he put it on toast.”

  “This is very high-class honey, Bern. We only use it for important occasions,” Julia says.

  My father sits with his feet on a chair, trying to appear at ease, talking to Benjamin. Asa is draped over Benjamin’s shoulder like a shawl, and I wish they would stay just as they are, sitting in our kitchen with the far-off autumn
sun streaming across the bundle of Asa peering around the room.

  I wipe my hands on the apron and make a place in the middle of the table for Agent Burns to put the tape recorder.

  We pull up chairs, Faith and Bernard side by side, Milo next to me, Julia on the other side, Benjamin between my father and me at the other end of the table.

  Agent Burns puts his chair next to Benjamin, sits down, and, reaching to the middle of the table, he pushes “play.”

  “So here goes. Brace yourselves,” Agent Burns says. “The other voice you hear besides Mr. Duarte’s is mine.”

  AGENT BURNS: Identify yourself.

  VICTOR DUARTE: I call myself Victor Duarte.

  BURNS: Is that the name on your birth certificate?

  DUARTE: The name on my birth certificate is Donny Frazier.

  BURNS: Why did you change your name?

  DUARTE: I’d been looking for a new name. A man called Victor Duarte died on March 6 a few years ago, and I read his name in the obituaries in the Washington Post and decided to take it.

  BURNS: Why did you want a new name?

  DUARTE: Donny Frazier had bad associations for me.

  BURNS: What kinds of associations?

  DUARTE: They are personal.

  BURNS: How old are you?

  DUARTE: Twenty-eight years old. Twenty-nine tomorrow.

  BURNS: Where were you born?

  DUARTE: Washington, District of Columbia.

  BURNS: Do you know the name Steven Frayn?

  DUARTE: He was my friend.

  BURNS: You said you were the one who killed him, is that correct?

  DUARTE: That is correct.

  BURNS: Where did you meet Mr. Frayn?

  DUARTE: I saw his photograph in the newspaper and tracked him down.

  BURNS: Why would you want to track him down?

  DUARTE: Because I needed to find out if he was related to Dr. David Frayn, who was going to be my father when I was ten years old and then he backed out.

  There was a cracking in the tape—someone, perhaps Agent Burns coughed, stopped the tape—and when it started again, Victor was speaking. I was unable to look at my father except to note that Julia was pressed against him, lending the force of her body to his.

  DUARTE: My mother had a neurological disease, and she was atrophying internally—like dried prunes, is what a nurse told me—and she got accepted at the National Institutes of Health as a research patient, and Dr. David Frayn was her doctor.

  BURNS: What happened to her?

  DUARTE: She died.

  BURNS: What were the circumstances of her death?

  DUARTE: Dr. David Frayn couldn’t save her. Those were the circumstances.

  BURNS: She was expected to die, is that true?

  DUARTE: That is true. I asked her before she died if I could be adopted by Dr. David Frayn, and she said she would ask him, but she died before she had an opportunity, so I had to ask him myself.

  BURNS: What did Dr. Frayn say when you asked him?

  DUARTE: He said he couldn’t adopt me because I already had relatives downtown who would adopt me.

  BURNS: Was he correct?

  DUARTE: He was correct, but that’s not why he didn’t adopt me. He didn’t adopt me because he already had one son, whose name was Steven Frayn, and that was that.

  Benjamin, who is in my line of sight, hands Asa to my father, pushes his chair back from the table, tips it against the wall and closes his eyes.

  BURNS: What happened to you after your mother died?

  DUARTE: I moved in with my mother’s sister and her husband, who lived first in Pennsylvania and then on Capitol Hill, and I went to elementary school there and then to high school and then two years in engineering at the University of Maryland, and then my aunt and uncle moved to Cincinnati, so I was homeless, and I started to think about Dr. David Frayn again.

  BURNS: Did you try to contact him?

  DUARTE: I knew where he lived, and I knew his telephone number and that he worked at George Washington University Hospital and taught in the medical school there, so I started to go to the Gelman Library hoping to see him, and sometimes I’d drive by the Frayns’ house in Bethesda or call them from a public telephone and hang up.

  BURNS: What did you want from the Frayns?

  DUARTE: I wanted a home. A lot of people live with them. I’ve seen them go in and out of their front door.

  BURNS: Did you ever contact Dr. Frayn?

  DUARTE: I did not.

  BURNS: What about Steven Frayn? Did you contact him?

  DUARTE: I saw a photograph of Steven Frayn in the Washington Post two years ago, and he was at a vigil for a hate crime against a GWU student who was homosexual. That’s when I called Steven Frayn at his house in Bethesda.

  BURNS: What did you say to him?

  DUARTE: I told him I’d read about him in the newspaper, that I admired what he’d done, that I’d looked him up on the Internet and found out he’d written a lot of articles and op-ed pieces, so I told him I agreed with his politics and would like to meet him.

  BURNS: Did you meet?

  DUARTE: We met at the Café Rouge every Tuesday for a beer and then every Thursday, too, and pretty soon we were meeting or talking on the telephone every day. We were friends. He thought I was a member of DTT and a revolutionary, and he thought I was very smart. I’m the one who told him I was a member of DTT and a revolutionary and very smart.

  BURNS: When did you decide to kill him?

  DUARTE: I decided slowly. At first I just wanted to know him, and then as I got to know him, having drinks almost every night, I wanted to have his life. He had everything—a girlfriend and a sister and a mother and aunts and uncles. And Dr. David Frayn, who had loved my mother.

  BURNS: What do you mean that Dr. Frayn loved your mother?

  DUARTE: He loved her. I would sit on the chair by her bed, and Dr. Frayn would come in. His hair was black then, and he had a beard, and he’d ask me to leave so he could undress her.

  BURNS: He was her doctor. That’s what doctors do to take care of patients, yes?

  DUARTE: Yes. But he loved her, and he should have been my father.

  BURNS: What made you decide on April 4 to kill Steven Frayn?

  DUARTE: I had a gun. I’d had a gun for a long time and never had an occasion to use it. On April 2, Steven Frayn showed me an op-ed piece he had written for the Washington Post and it was full of my ideas, so I asked him if he would include my name on the op-ed piece, and he said no. That’s when I decided to do what happened on April 4, but I’d been thinking about it for a long time.

  BURNS: So you killed him because he didn’t want your name to be on the op-ed piece, is that right?

  DUARTE: That’s not exactly right. I killed him because he took up too much room in my life.

  BURNS: What made you decide to go into the basement of Phillips Hall?

  DUARTE: It was a place I had spent the night before, because it’s in the basement and it’s full of furniture and no one ever checks it out. So we met for a beer at Café Rouge in the afternoon, and he told me he was meeting his sister, Claire, at the library at five o’clock and had to be home for dinner at seven and would I call him later. I went to the window in the basement of Phillips, which has a view of the front steps to the library, and I stayed there until I saw him with my telescopic lens, standing at the top of the steps just ahead of his sister, Claire.

  BURNS: After you shot Steven Frayn, what did you do?

  DUARTE: I went home.

  BURNS: Where is home?

  DUARTE: That night I slept in the basement of an abandoned house on Thirteenth Street, and in the morning I got up early to see if the story of Steven’s death had made the front page of the Washington Post, which it had. That’s where I live in the winter.

  BURNS: Do you know Claire Frayn?

  DUARTE: I do.

  BURNS: Where did you meet her?

  DUARTE: After Steven died, I went to the library every day, taking a seat i
n the main reading room at the table where Steven usually worked. One day she came in just as I expected and sat down next to me.

  BURNS: What did you do?