The Puzzled Heart

by Amanda Cross

  “Personal experience, my dear—suffering and tumult, and the residue of a lonely life.”

  Kate stared at her friend. Leslie’s was not a life Kate would have suspected of proffering loneliness. She had married young and stayed married for years; she had borne children, had painted when she could—which, lately, was most of the time—and had found in Jane a partner who offered her both a separate life and companionship. How little we know one another, Kate thought, and this is my best friend.

  “Oh, not to look at,” Leslie said, referring to her lonely life. “To look at it was crowded. Do you know, I’ve never lived alone. I even went right from marriage to life with Jane. But the loneliness stopped the moment I got out of the marriage.”

  “And how has that experience given you insight into Reed’s kidnapping?” Kate asked. “It doesn’t seem connected, not on the face of it, at least.”

  “Well, it’s not as odd a connection as you think. I’m one of those who’s spent her life looking for a friend and for some success at my chosen calling. Let’s say I look at you, and lo and behold, you’ve got a good relationship and you’re good at your calling, and I don’t have Jane or anyone else, and instead of painting, I’ve had to get a job illustrating greeting cards to support myself. You see what I mean?”

  “Well,” Kate said, “not exactly. I do think I’m getting there, but I’m not there yet.”

  “Okay. Let’s forget art, which is not your field. Let’s take up writing and teaching—that is, being a professor at a prestigious university and publishing well-received books.”

  “I’m not sure about the various adjectives,” Kate said, “but I’m following. Go on.”

  “Look, nine-tenths of criticism, or reviewing, or whatever you want to call it, is, as you well know, composed largely of envy, rancor, and defense of one’s own established ideas. But whether you’re attacked or praised, you’re taken seriously. Are you with me?”

  “With you.”

  “Good. Now let’s surmise a woman something like me, no real friends—which may be her fault or not—anyway, real loneliness, and no particular success in her profession, which I know you have assumed is academic, but just suppose it isn’t. Suppose she didn’t make it in academia, or only taught writing courses as an adjunct—whatever, I’m making this up. But the point is that she’s now earning whatever living she can doing something she doesn’t really respect and doesn’t really respect herself for doing.”

  “Like what, for example?”

  “How the hell do I know? That’s what I’m suggesting you find out. Look into your past. Maybe she knew you. In fact, if you’re the object of her revenge plan, her hatred, you must have known her at one time or another. The point is, Kate, I’m suggesting you forget the right wing and your colleagues in all this, and look for someone who may well be right-wing, may well be associated with the right wing, but whose animus is personal and personally directed.”

  “How do we know it isn’t directed against Reed? He was the one kidnapped. He was the one grabbed off the streets and incarcerated and threatened with sexual exposure.”

  “True. But you were the one who was supposed publicly to condemn feminism, and you would have been the one held up to mockery if you had had to do that, and if they had got the pictures they were after, the ones of Reed with a nymphette. No, dear, shaming you was the object. The rest was fun and games, at least for those carrying it all out.”

  “And why get the right wing involved? I mean the whole tone was right-wing; they must have been a part of it.”

  “Obviously the right wing was glad to be used. It was carrying out their agenda. The question is, did they think it up? I know you have plenty of evidence of right-wing activities in the academic world, so that you’re quite willing to believe they could have thought this up. I don’t blame you for coming to the conclusion you did. I’m just offering a different conclusion. I’m suggesting a personal animus directed against you as the originating source of all that happened.”

  Kate pondered this for a while. “What I don’t get,” she said finally, “is how you arrive at this idea of the culprit as friendless and frustrated professionally?”

  “I told you: personal experience. Kate, throughout my old life, from the time my parents lost interest in me because they’d by then had the boy who really mattered, I was looking for a friend. I guess I was too earnest, or, what is probably nearer the truth, I had too funny an idea of friendship, probably modeled on stories of boys’ companionships and adventures, and not realistic about them either. I remember at camp asking a girl to be my friend, and she said, ‘We’re all friends.’ But we weren’t. I wanted a special friend. Then, when I got married young, I thought: well, my husband is my friend. I kidded myself about that for quite a while. But husbands aren’t friends; they’re husbands, however friendly and supportive. It took the women’s movement to make that clear, I guess. Meanwhile, I saw classmates from school and college who were getting somewhere, or I thought they were. I never seemed really to get time to paint. I tried studying art history, but even that didn’t seem to satisfy; I wasn’t really a scholar. If I hadn’t left the marriage, and begun serious painting, and found Jane, and if I’d looked at you—successful, lots of friends and colleagues, with tenure, a good marriage, and, well, what looks like a pretty fulfilled life—I might be damn sore. You see what I mean?”

  “More or less. You are, of course, wildly exaggerating the total satisfactions of my life. From time to time it seems quite purposeless to me, and full of petty professional squabbles, duties, and arbitrary decisions on the part of tyrannical administrators and pompous, aging, male professors.”

  “Of course it does. I’m asking you to look at yourself from the outside. I’m not saying that’s how I see you; I’m saying how I might have seen you if things had been different with me.”

  “And the next step? I have to look in my past for a professional failure without friends? You don’t ask much.”

  “Kate. Try being the detective you’re always making yourself out to be. Obviously it’s someone connected with what’s happened, though I haven’t an idea how she or he is connected. Whether it’s someone behind the scenes or one of the players, I don’t know. What I’m suggesting, dear friend, is that you start from the beginning, get over the mental stagnation caused by Reed’s being kidnapped, and use your head. Is that clear enough? I could draw it for you, I suppose—well, a diagram anyway. How about a drink?”

  “Lovely,” Kate said, obviously deep in thought.

  When Leslie returned with the drinks, she offered a toast to Kate and the new solution.

  “Wasn’t I a friend?” Kate asked. “We’ve known each other for, what, fifteen years? You never thought of me as a friend?”

  “Oh, Kate. You came along after the friendlessness and the artistic frustration were, if not over, at least being defeated. Maybe meeting you even helped me. Did you ever think of that?”

  “It can’t be fifteen years.”

  “Now she’s quibbling about years. Fifteen, fourteen, what’s the difference? And the best part is when you’ve made one friend, you make more.”

  Kate twirled the glass around in her hand. “Do you really think,” she asked, “that someone could go that far in trying to shame me?”

  “Yes, I do. Not most people. If this whole mess hadn’t happened, I’d never have thought of it; it’s not the most likely thing in the world. But since it has happened, I’m just suggesting a possible explanation, at least as probable as the right wing or a demented professor whirling around on his or her own.”

  “I’ll take it under serious consideration,” Kate said. “Here’s to professional jealousy as a solution.”

  “Give it a try,” was all Leslie said, before they began to speak of other things.

  Once home, Kate turned her mind to her past, trying to remember friendships from kindergarten on. It was amazing and a little troubling to discover how many people she had forgotten. School, camp,
summer communities, travels, college—the task was daunting. Even if she could recall someone in particular whom she had once befriended, who had slipped away and not been encountered for years—and she couldn’t—where would that get her? To trace every girlhood or student companion would be the job of months, perhaps years. Kate was not at all certain that Leslie was right in her surmise, but it certainly was worth thinking about. None of the other suppositions had yielded any helpful leads.

  After a time she sought out Reed and told him Leslie’s interpretation of the plot. Rather to her surprise, and a bit to her disappointment, he did not dismiss it out of hand.

  “I’ve been beginning to question our ideas myself,” he said. “The more I think about it, the less likely it seems to me that a professor would be involved, even some of the troglodyte types you’ve got in your department. Students, yes. This is exactly the kind of caper they could find themselves in. It resembles all the beastly games that fraternities seem to find so rewarding, in spirit if not in detail. The question is, as we have already seen, who got the students started, who arranged it all? Let’s say the boys, given the ideas about pictures of sexual activities, recruited the girls. Who suggested that scheme to the boys? It’s not that they couldn’t have thought of it; of course they could have, but for some reason I’m fairly sure they didn’t. Why am I sure? Because it wasn’t me they were after; it was you. College boys might have dreamed up the scheme as a way to get back at some male they loathed, but the point of this scheme was to shame you. Ruining my life was a case of collateral damage whoever was behind this probably never even considered.”

  “Fine,” Kate said. “I’m with you. But where are you? We seem better at eliminating people than at identifying the culprits.”

  “If we assume it’s a woman, and if we accept Leslie’s explanation for her rage at you, then we might begin by assuming she’s more or less your age.”

  “No kidding,” Kate said, with more emotion than tact.

  Reed ignored this. “Let’s begin by limiting ourselves to women you met in school, college, or graduate school.”

  “Lovely. It should take me merely a year to compile such a list, let alone learn anything about where the women are now.”

  “Just list the ones you remember, the ones you had some sort of close contact with.”

  “Maybe I’ll write the story of my life while I’m at it.”

  “You’ll be right in style,” Reed said. “Memoirs are what everybody’s writing these days.”

  Kate in her turn ignored this. “You do realize,” she said, “that we may never have met this woman—that she may not have shown herself in the course of this investigation. That she could be not only firmly behind the scenes, but determined to stay there.”

  “Quite possible,” Reed admitted. “But she had to be in touch with someone we did meet, someone who has shown herself or himself.”

  “So we question all the girls, all the boys, all the people investigated by Harriet and Toni—Reed, we can’t start that all over again.”

  “We can ask Toni and Harriet to start all over again. After all, that’s their profession, isn’t it? They’re certainly as eager to figure this out as we are.”

  “True. I’ll get on to them then.” And she left Reed to his work.

  The next day, therefore, she met with Toni and Harriet. She outlined Leslie’s idea, said that she and Reed had found it plausible, or at least as plausible as anything else that had been suggested, so what they had to discover was who had been the originator of the scheme. Everybody had to be questioned as to who had talked them into taking part, from the kid who ordered the car onward. Kate was prepared to pay for Toni and Harriet’s time for as long as it took.

  “In short,” Toni said, “we start all over again from the beginning.”

  “That’s about it. Except,” Kate pointed out, “I might at any moment get a clue, or become overpowered by the right memory, or have a brainstorm. And I don’t intend to just sit by and cheer you two on. I think I’ll start by going to see Dorothy Hedge again.”

  “Why do that?” Toni asked. “Do you think she might be the long-lost angry friend?”

  “No, alas, I don’t,” Kate said. “But she is the sister of that goof who wrote the right-wing letter. Remember him? And besides, if you must know, I intend to tell her I’m coming, and ask her to borrow Banny from the woman who owns her. It can’t hurt to have a little visit with Banny, can it?”

  “It’s not really advisable,” Harriet said. “Like dropping in to see a child you’ve given up for adoption. A clean break is best, don’t they think?”

  “I’m not sure they do these days,” Kate said. “I think adoptive mothers often know the biological mother and keep in touch with her. Anyway, I’m not adopting Banny. I’m just dropping in for a visit.”

  “Are you sure it’s fair to Banny?” Toni asked.

  “No, I’m not sure. I just want to see her again. It will probably turn out that she doesn’t remember me at all, which will be crushing to me but not to her.”

  “Don’t you think Reed or I should go with you?” Harriet said.

  “Of course not. Reed may want to, in fact, but you two had better get going on the investigation. I’ve got classes and meetings all day tomorrow, but I think I can manage the next day. I’ll ask Reed, if that makes you feel any better.”

  And having arranged certain financial details, and left a check to cover anticipated costs and payments, Kate left their office.

  Ten

  Two afternoons later Kate and Reed prepared to set out on their visit to Dorothy Hedge and Banny. Reed, like Harriet, had not altogether approved of the proposed visit to the puppy that was not theirs and which they ought, sensibly, to forget or to accept as an eccentric and unrecoverable event of the past. In the end, however, he had decided to accompany Kate—whether to provide her with emotional support at this canine crisis or to get another glimpse of Banny was not clear to Kate or to himself.

  Kate had not again that day referred to Leslie’s theories about an old friend of Kate’s turned enemy, but she had worried Reed slightly by quoting Auden’s lines, “Each life an amateur sleuth / Asking who did it?” Whenever Kate quoted Auden, Reed grew concerned.

  They had called Dorothy Hedge the night before, and she had agreed to ask Marjorie about borrowing the dog. She too had issued a word of warning; indeed, she had tried to discourage the visit but had acquiesced upon their insisting that she at least leave the decision up to Marjorie. Late that night, Dorothy had called back saying that Banny and she were prepared to welcome them the next day.

  Kate and Reed were almost out of the apartment when the telephone rang. After a moment’s hesitation, Kate ran back to answer it. Harriet’s voice was closer to frenzy than Kate had ever heard it.

  “It’s Toni.” Harriet seemed almost to be gasping. “Someone tried to kill her.”

  “Where are you?” Kate asked.

  “At the hospital. I found her in the office, lying on the floor. I thought she was dead, except that she was still bleeding. Dead men don’t bleed—didn’t someone once say that? I don’t even know if it’s true.”

  “Harriet,” Kate said. “Tell me exactly where you are. We’ll come.”

  “Roosevelt Hospital; the emergency room. It’s—I think it’s on Ninth Avenue.”

  “I know where it is. We’ll be there, Reed and I. It won’t be long.”

  Kate hung up. “Someone tried to kill Toni. Harriet’s at the hospital. I said we would come.”

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Oh lord, I didn’t ask. Harriet said she was still bleeding when she found her. In their office.”

  The hospital was not far away. A taxi delivered them to the emergency entrance with commendable, if dangerous speed; Reed had said something to the driver. Kate dashed from the taxi, leaving him to pay, which seemed to be only a matter of thrusting some bills at the driver. Just like the movies, Kate thought, wondering if she was los
ing her mind to think that at such a moment. They found Harriet hovering amid a crowd of waiting people.

  “Thank God you’ve come. They’ve taken her off to test her brain. I called the police, and that may have got her faster attention here; maybe the ambulance came faster. I don’t know. Someone hit her all over the back of her head. She may die. The doctors weren’t all that hopeful.”

  Reed spotted an empty chair. “Sit down,” he said. “Tell her to sit down”—this to Kate. They urged Harriet into the chair.

  “She ought to have tea with lots of sugar,” Kate said. “That’s what the English take.”

  “I don’t need anything; I’ve had something,” Harriet said.

  “Tell us about it then.” Reed squatted down until his face was on a level with hers. Kate leaned over Harriet’s chair and took her hand. For the first time since she had met Harriet, Kate was aware of her friend’s age. Kate had always known her to be in her sixties—or even, by now, beyond—but never before had Harriet looked aged, tired, and fragile.

  “Tell us what happened,” Kate said, holding Harriet’s hand. “Start at the beginning. Take it slowly.”

  Harriet sighed, more of a gasp, really, as though she had been holding her breath and her body needed oxygen. She seemed to be searching for a handkerchief, and Reed gave her his. She wiped her eyes, and held the handkerchief to her mouth as she talked.

  “I had gone to the bank,” Harriet said. “We had spent the morning talking about how we would start again, trying to find some new clue that might lead us to whoever was behind this. Actually,” she added, as though she had just thought of it, “Toni seemed rather distracted. We needed cash, and she urged me to go to the bank—you know, the teller machine. It’s not far, but of course there’s always a line around lunchtime. I could hear Toni starting to make some phone calls as I left, setting up some meetings and so forth. I didn’t really listen. There was a long line at the bank machine, and when I came back, when I opened the office door, there she was. I thought she was still bleeding, which made me hope. I called the police and an ambulance, the ambulance first but they came at the same time. Then I called you, I mean right after calling the police and ambulance. The police looked at me very suspiciously. I think they’re keeping an eye on me. They asked a lot of questions. The police don’t especially like private eyes. In books the private eye is always a tough guy, maybe an ex-policeman, and they, the police, get on with him. I think the only thing that kept them from taking me in was my age, and that Toni was my partner.”