The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  Avery opened his mouth to speak, but his mouthpiece got there first, all assurance and very little information. “In the extremely unlikely instance, Karen, that you should choose to refuse the directorship of the center, the probability exists that, rather than suing you or the college directly, Mr. Brewster would petition the court to have Meadowbrook and its endowment revert to the estate, to which he, as Dr. Hart’s closest living relative, would then lay claim.” Marc ceased speaking, waited for my response. I gave him a go ahead nod. “Now, it is my understanding that you initially expressed some, er … reluctance … to undertake the responsibilities of this position.…” His voice trailed off. Once again I nodded: Go ahead. “Ah, since your inclinations regarding this directorship might well impact significantly upon the future direction of the institution’s response to any challenge legally instituted by Mr. Brewster, we feel it imperative at this point in time to ascertain your, er, definitive disposition in this matter.” I nodded again. “And I am empowered by the Office of the President to assure you that, should you allow yourself to be named director—say, even in a somewhat nominal capacity, such as, perhaps, Executive Director or Chairman of the Board—as an agent of the college you would, of course, be immune to any personal liability should the lawsuit proceed.” Avery’s head was bobbing in affirmation. “And, I believe, you would find the compensation more than adequate. Now, at this point in time—”

  At his attorney’s second this point in time, Avery winced. “Karen,” he inquired bluntly, “do you or do you not intend to accept the directorship of the Northbury center? That will make a great difference in how we decide to proceed.”

  “Oh,” I replied, all innocence, “I do intend to accept it. Given the proper compensation, and a written assurance of legal immunity, of course, and with the understanding that, after an appropriate period, I would be free to retire from the position and go back to teaching.”

  Marc glanced over at Avery. Both men sat back in their chairs, as if their spines had simultaneously unstiffened. The sense of relief was almost palpable. Clearly the president and his minion had anticipated some serious resistance. But I’d already made my decision before I entered this room. I didn’t have to marry the job. I could do it for a year or two, get the Northbury Center going, and then go back to full-time teaching. Which I definitely would do; I did not relish the prospect of a future composed primarily of board meetings and fund-raisers.

  Walking through Meadowbrook with Avery the other evening, envisioning reading rooms, seminar rooms, archives, maybe even nineteenth-century flower gardens, had brought the center to life in my imagination. And, as annoyed as I might be at Edith Hart for saddling me with an unanticipated responsibility, I owed it to Serena Northbury to do this for her. To Mrs. Northbury and her contemporaries, women who had braved the censure of their culture to write about their lives and dreams, many of them with names that had vanished in the mists of the past. I was truly psyched about the Northbury Center—but with these two potentates of institutional power I intended to play it cool.

  And, anyhow, a vague question was beginning to niggle at my mind: How long had Avery known about this particular complication in the Hart bequest? Had he known about the college’s need for my cooperation the evening we toured Meadowbrook? The evening he—No. I refused to think … Oh, Jesus. What was going on here?

  While the two administrators plotted their next moves in the legal game of chess the college was about to play, I stared thoughtfully out a small-paned, leaded window. It was raining again. An azalea bush, its pink flowers just past their peak, drooped under the weight of the intermittent drizzle. I knew that by the time the shower had passed, a circle of brown-edged blossoms would surround the azalea’s base. From the bowl of candy at my elbow, I chose a cellophane-wrapped peppermint and untwisted the wrapper. The mint was sharp and fresh on my tongue. Sweet, too. An almost breathtaking sensation.

  The men’s voices had ceased. I glanced back at them. Marc was shuffling through some papers on his lap. Avery was examining me with an unreadable expression on his features. “Thank you, Karen,” he said, when my gaze met his. Then, after a silence measurable only in heartbeats, he continued. “I can’t tell you how much I, personally, appreciate your decision.”

  My expression as unreadable as his, I also chose to pause enigmatically. “That’s not why I’m accepting the directorship, Avery,” I said, finally.

  He appeared startled. “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “I’m doing it for Serena Northbury. I’m doing it for my students. I’m doing it because Edith Hart wanted me to.”

  “Of course,” he said, hastily. “Of course.”

  Marc jumped in here, “Brewster will probably sue, anyhow, Karen, but you’ve saved the college a great deal of legal hassle.”

  “I am so glad,” I said. “So very glad.”

  The rain had let up by the time I left Avery’s office. Strolling past the now-denuded azalea bush, I bent down impulsively and scooped a handful of limp petals from the wet grass. Really, I knew nothing at all about Avery Cabot Claibourne Mitchell except what he wanted me to know. I fingered the damp blooms. He had a reputation as a brilliant administrator and fund-raiser. A breeze came up as I reached the portals of Dickinson Hall. I released a few petals, watched them flutter toward the grass. Was it possible his kiss that night at Meadowbrook had been part of some devious plan to get me to go along with his agenda for the Northbury Center? Who knew? And, anyhow, could he possibly think I would be that easy to manipulate? Well, he was wrong. Just because Tony was no longer in my life didn’t mean I was vulnerable to any smooth talker who chose to play kissyface with me. I felt my lips tighten. Not on your tintype, I wasn’t. I opened my hand and freed the remaining blossoms into the wind.

  Nineteen

  I sat at Rudolph’s bar, licking salt off the rim of a frozen margarita, and waited for Dr. Willis Thorpe to arrive. In a far corner, Miles Jewell and Thibault Brewster huddled in close confab. The old guard girding their loins over martinis, straight up.

  Will slipped onto the high caned seat next to me and ordered a double martini, straight up. Well, there’s old guard, and then there’s old guard.

  “Have you heard about Gerry’s coup?” he asked.

  “No-oo.” I didn’t think he was referring to Jill’s pregnancy.

  “He has a publisher for his book of poems.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Helen Whitlow just told me. Some independent press, somewhere in Vermont, I believe. Small, but respectable.” Will grimaced. “Book’s title, believe it or not, is Bastard. He dedicated it to Edith.”

  “Oh.” A mixed message to give about someone you believed was your mother.

  Will smiled, wistfully. “I do wish Edie was still around; she’d have a good laugh.” He paused. “I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss that woman.”

  “I can imagine.” I laid my hand on his arm in sympathy. “I miss her, too, and I hardly knew her.”

  “She liked you, you know. Said you were a no-bullshit kind of person. And that you …” The martini arrived in its stemmed glass; and he drank it in three gulps, like a man downing medicine. That much gin would put me under the table, but it didn’t seem to affect him at all.

  “What?”

  “Well,” reluctantly, “she said you had a huge untapped reservoir of passion.”

  “Jesus!” I could feel the blush rising.

  “She talked like that, you know. Like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. Edie was the only person I ever met who was totally candid about what she thought. It got her in trouble more than once.”

  “I’ll bet it did.”

  While Will ordered another double martini, I took a closer look at him. Tonight he wore his nearly eighty years like a heavy coat. He looked far more stooped and elderly than he had when I’d first met him, earlier in the spring. His broad shoulders slumped noticeably, and a gray tinge had replaced the ruddy tones of his complexion. Edith’s death
had hit him hard.

  Will had called that morning—to tell me he was staying with an old friend in Enfield while he tied up a few loose ends in Edith’s affairs, and to ask if I would have dinner with him. He’d like, he’d said, to apprise me of Edith’s thinking about the Northbury Center. When he’d told me Helen Whitlow was the friend he was visiting, I’d exclaimed in surprise, “But I thought—” Helen Whitlow the recluse? The crazy woman in the big house behind the overgrown yew hedge? The house on Whitlow Street where I liked to walk. The house with the scent of lilacs.

  “I know.” Will had laughed. “You’ve heard the rumors. You think she’s a crazy lady, don’t you? A cat-ridden recluse. Well, Helen’s distinctly odd, and she does have a number of cats, but she’s … well, she’s sane. And—she’s an old friend. I’ve known Helen as long as I’ve known Edith. They were friends as girls.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Then they had a falling out over … Well, they had a falling out, and I’ve been … a rather sporadic link between them for over forty years.” He’d chortled. “And, believe me, it hasn’t always been easy.”

  “Tell me, Will,” I asked as I sipped the last of the margarita, “how did Helen Whitlow know about Gerry’s book?”

  Will pushed away his half-finished second martini. “If I drink any more of that, I won’t find my way back to Whitlow Street. Well, it’s quite a story—about Helen and Gerry. Let’s get a table, and I’ll tell you.”

  With the Enfield students gone, Rudolph’s is quiet in the summertime, its clientele a mix of locals and academics, with a few tourists thrown in for the money. So, as we passed the table where Miles and Brewster conspired, they had a difficult time not seeing us. “Hello, Tib,” Will Thorpe said. Brewster nodded, without making eye contact. Miles grumbled unintelligibly in my direction. His spiky white eyebrows needed a good combing. As I walked with Will Thorpe into the dining room, I could feel the eyes underneath those brows burning into my back. What new wrinkle does it portend, the old guard must be wondering, my presence here with Edith Hart’s good friend?

  According to Rudolph’s highly cosmopolitan menu, the grilled breast of local free-range chicken I ordered would be served with Ceylon mango salsa, Moroccan couscous, broiled Holland tomatoes au gratin, and New Jersey asparagus bundles wrapped in paper-thin Parisian pastry. This was one of the ironies of eating at Rudolph’s: My food would be more well-traveled than I could ever hope to be. Will ordered porterhouse steak— rare—baked potato with sour cream, early corn on the cob, and a carafe of burgundy. “Unhealthy,” he told me. “Especially for a man with a history of heart disease. But I might as well. Life’s not much fun without Edith, anyhow. God, I loved that woman.” The alcohol was beginning to take hold. I hoped he wouldn’t get maudlin.

  While I tucked into my salad, Will broke open a roll and slathered it with butter. “I fell in love with Edith in med school, you know—the first day of anatomy class. It was in the middle of the Depression, and we were a fairly threadbare crew, we medical students. My family had suffered serious reverses in ’29, and overnight I’d been transformed from a privileged adolescent to a frightened young fellow, terrified to open my mouth for fear I’d jeopardize the only chance I had to keep a toehold in the middle class. Well, here were these rows and rows of stone-faced young men—not many women in medicine in those days—and the lecture began. I was scribbling in my notebook, when the auditorium door flew open and this dark-haired vision in a gray wool suit, high-heeled sandals, and a full set of fox furs walked in. Everyone gaped, and Professor Lowell halted in midsentence. ‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘I believe you’re in the wrong classroom.’ ‘Is this Human Anatomy and Physiology?’ she asked. ‘It is,’ he responded. ‘Then I’m most definitely in the right classroom.’ She swept in, taking a final drag on her cigarette, and, granting me a dazzling smile, she slid into the seat next to mine.” Will placed the buttered roll on his plate, and poured himself another glass of burgundy. “I was her slave from that moment on.” He took a gulp of the wine and fell into a meditative silence.

  Following his example, I poured wine and sipped at it. Unaccustomed to more than one drink, I was getting pretty loose myself. “Tell me, Will,” I ventured, “were you and Edith, well …?”

  “Lovers? Of course. For decades. But it was an off-and-on kind of thing. Always on for me, but off for her a good deal of the time.” He nodded at the waitress who’d arrived with our meals, then poked his steaming baked potato with a fork. Just as the silence threatened to prolong itself beyond the comfort level, he met my eyes. “She preferred a more—heightened—kind of experience than I was able to give her. I was always too … safe … for Edith.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  He shrugged. “But she always came back.”

  “It must have hurt a great deal.” I didn’t know how else to respond to such unguarded revelations. I cut into the chicken breast, and piled mango salsa on the slice.

  “It hurt like hell,” Will replied. “But in some ways she was always mine. What hurt even more was seeing her deteriorate these past few months. That broke my heart.” He reached in the pocket of his seersucker jacket and pulled out the fine gold chain and heart locket I remembered Edith wearing on Easter Day, the keepsake she had left him in her will. He began sliding the chain through his fingers, as if it were a set of worry beads—or a rosary. His sigh bespoke a deep, almost somatic resignation. “The police believe I killed her, of course.”

  At my exclamation, he laughed. “Oh, I don’t blame them. And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t talked about it, she and I. About playing the role of Dr. Death for each other, I mean.” He cut off a bit of steak, checked it for rareness, chewed. “Look at it this way. The police have three obvious suspects: Tib Brewster, Gerry Novak, and me. We’re the logical candidates for perp.” He gave the final word an ironic twist. “Tib for the inheritance he expected. He’d approached Edith several times in recent months for loans. She couldn’t understand how he could possibly have gotten himself in such a shaky financial position so suddenly. Finally she said no. So, there’s Tib: greed and anger.

  “Now, Gerry. Gerry also needed money. Edith paid him a generous salary, but he was always broke. We’d begun to suspect that he had expensive habits.” Will rubbed his thumb and forefinger together underneath his nose. “And he had an attitude problem. It’s hard to define, but there was always an … underlying resentment in Novak’s relationship with Edith.” Will paused, contemplating some particular incident, I thought, then continued without sharing his memories. “So, there’s Gerry: greed and resentment.

  “Now, me. Euthanasia, of course. Because I loved her. It wouldn’t have been a bad death, you know, as deaths go. She would have become weak, maybe confused; she’d have experienced a declining level of consciousness and gone into diabetic coma. And, without medical intervention, that would have been it. There are worse deaths.” He shrugged, as if he’d seen a few. The burgundy came into play again. “And of course, I would have done it had she asked. But—she didn’t. And I didn’t.”

  “And you told them that—the police I mean?”

  “Of course, I told them; I have no desire to spend my remaining days in incarceration. That large officer … the one in charge …?”

  “Lieutenant Piotrowski.”

  “Yes, Piotrowski—he’s quite intelligent, isn’t he?—well, I got the feeling he wouldn’t have blamed me if I had confessed to euthanasia. He told me his father’s in advanced Alzheimer’s. He has to have round-the-clock care for him. He thought, if his father could have predicted his present state, he would have wanted someone to do something. I was surprised to hear him say that, officer of the law that he is. And I was almost sorry not to be able to oblige him by confessing. The only problem is—I didn’t kill her.”

  “Of course you didn’t, Will.” But I wouldn’t have blamed him either. And—Piotrowski with a father? Well, why was I surprised?

  “No of course about it. All
she had to do was give the word.”

  “Oh.” What could I say to that? Fortunately Miles Jewell attracted my attention at that point, stalking by our table with a disgusted glance at me. I tried to catch Will’s eye, but he had begun eating in earnest and seemed not to have noticed Miles. Will worked his way through the entire meal with a kind of stolid determination, finished off the carafe of wine, then ordered brandy with his coffee. Pretty composed, I thought, for a man who had just coolly provided himself and two longtime acquaintances with compelling motives for murder.

  I ordered caffeine with my coffee—I had a twenty-minute drive ahead of me—and sat back to listen as Will Thorpe, having pushed his empty plate away, began to relate Edith’s vision for the Northbury Center. As he relayed it, her thinking pretty much matched mine: a research center with a major library of women’s literature and an archive concentrating on authors whose papers had previously not been thought worth collecting. Authors such as Serena Northbury. “Edie was extremely enthused about it,” Will related. “It had been a long time since I’d seen her look to the future like that.” He tilted his head toward the bar, where Thibault Brewster still sat—by himself now. Lingering alone in bars, I thought. Not the healthiest of pastimes.

  “That piece of work in there was expecting to get everything,” Will continued. “And Edie never felt very good about that—” He broke off, and looked thoughtful.

  “You know, Tib’s mother—Edith’s sister Lydia—was diabetic, too. And she lived with Tib until she died—maybe fifteen years ago.”

  “Oh …?”

  “He would know how to administer insulin.” He shrugged, let the statement die, and went back to his previous topic: Edith’s plans for the research center. “Afternoon tea,” he said, laughing. “She thought that would be civilized. Around four-thirty every day, researchers would have tea and sandwiches available in the dining room, so they could meet each other and share ideas.”