The Scapegoat

by Sara Davis

  I had just set my plate and glass down on the table when a small flash of red caught my eye. The light on the telephone was blinking, and upon closer examination I saw that the number in the little window was now an illuminated 2. I have two voice messages, I thought, with some surprise. I lifted my finger to press the button marked play—and hesitated. Would it be better, perhaps, to wait until after dinner? There was so much I needed to think over, and who knew—what I meant was, would it be more prudent to wait to introduce these new variables?

  All the same, I thought, and pushed the button. The machine made its preliminary high-pitched beep, and then a youngish female voice filled the room.

  “Hello,” she said. “This is Jennifer calling from Dr. Ferguson’s office. Please let me know if there’s a better number—” The machine squawked in protest as I brought my index finger down heavily on the button marked delete. That—an elaborate piece of bureaucracy, due to a misunderstanding that arose the night I’d learned of my father’s death—was certainly not something on which I would spend another moment. The telephone collected itself, beeped again, and Gerry Van Gelder’s deep voice said:

  “Hello there, it’s Gerry.”

  He paused, clearing his throat, and I heard the faint rustling of papers in the background.

  “Ann thought I should call and remind you about dinner on Friday—also to let you know that her father will be joining us; you met at Thanksgiving. We were thinking around…”

  Not listening, I let the message play on to its finish. No new messages, pronounced the machine. The red number in the little window changed from 2 to 0.

  I took my seat again at the table and spent the next minute or so not moving, staring out the window with no sense of what was on the other side of it. Gerry Van Gelder with an invitation to dinner, of course. It had been ridiculous to expect otherwise. Nothing to consider there; this was not a new variable at all, but a very old one.

  I took a sip of seltzer and a bite of my sandwich, and let my mind wander. Most nights I put something on: the television, or the radio—always a talk station; human voices, even disembodied, can make a night a little easier to bear. But on that night, the night of my father’s open house, I had no need for any distractions, and I ate in silence.

  Little by little, it grew dark. Dusk turned the fading daylight gray-purple, then black. The fog crept up the lawn, toward the window, reaching its long white fingers through the pines, and as it did I felt my mind slowly empty.

  The closer the white fog came, the more passive I grew, and when it was pressed thickly against the windowpane, moisture beading on the inside of the glass, I felt the tightly wound coil of the day’s anticipation begin to unwind. Then I set my plate and glass to the side and took out the item I’d retrieved from the pocket of my father’s coat at the open house—a piece of notepaper, folded in half, which I put on the table and smoothed open with my palm.

  I saw at once that it was a piece of stationery from a hotel, the Old Mission Hotel San Buenaventura. The name appeared at the top of the square, and above it a crude drawing of a steeple, its two long fingers meeting in a point beneath a simple cross.

  Written on it, in my father’s near-illegible hand, were the words Saturday, 10 am, MC. Nothing more.

  MC, I thought. MC. A person? A place? In either category, nothing came to mind. Tomorrow, I decided, I would think.

  I turned the piece of paper over, but the other side was blank.

  By then it had grown too dark to see, and I got up to switch on the light, and then sat back down with a feeling of satisfaction. I had been right to go to the open house, I was certain. I had the impression, somehow, that things were beginning to move. It was just as if— I checked myself. Did I want to think, again, of my horoscope? That unwelcome moment of intimacy I’d shared with Kirstie that morning in the break room? There was something unsavory about it, and yet the temptation was strong. What was it that the horoscope had said? That the path between unrelated events would soon become clear. Well. The message was impossible to ignore. I was uniquely positioned, I thought, to set things in motion. Some headway was being made in the matter of my father’s death.

  * * *

  When I had washed and dried the dishes, I made my way down the long hallway to the bedroom, undressed, and wandered into the bathroom to brush my teeth. With the light off, in the mirror, my naked torso was pale and luminous, soft in the middle and punctuated by two dark, disk-like nipples, a sparse V of hair between them. How repulsive I had grown in my middle age.

  Did I already have a glass of water on the nightstand? I did. I turned on my reading light, got into bed, and reached for my book, a Swedish police novel I had recently begun. The chief detective was a divorced man with unhealthy eating habits and a weakness for Maria Callas. It seems that every detective novel I read now features this policeman, whose nationality varies, but who is dependably bitter and divorced, opera his soul’s only worldly solace.

  3

  Despite my good intentions, over the next few days I made very little progress. I worried away at several far-fetched ideas about the initials MC, with no success.

  And still I clung to the message in the horoscope. Perhaps it could still be true that I had set something in motion. And I was right. Still, it was not until several weeks after the open house that I made my next measurable advance.

  * * *

  I slept badly and woke before dawn that morning, then rose and ate a bowl of cereal in the dark. The panes of the bay window were covered in a thick blackness, with condensation clinging to their insides. I had hoped to catch the sunrise going over the reservoir—that can always give a welcome boost—but a thick fog had blanketed the valley, like a layer of cotton wool, and the day slid in gray and melancholy from the night, with little fanfare.

  * * *

  I made an uneventful pot of coffee in the break room, and as I was walking back to my office with my second mugful, I put my hand out reflexively to the inside of my mailbox, where my fingers brushed against a single sheet of paper. It had not been there when I’d left the day before.

  It was a flyer printed on peach-colored paper, advertising a performance of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder at the hospital. The first in a series of lunchtime concerts, it said, and dimly I remembered that there had been a series like it before, several years ago, which I had never attended. And why not? I wondered, as I stood in the quiet hallway, steam rising from my coffee. I appreciated classical music, unlike the majority of my colleagues, and one could not have asked for a more convenient location. A concert, I thought, pleased by the idea, at lunchtime. A performance of the Kindertotenlieder. It seemed just the kind of thing I would enjoy. I looked at the flyer again and saw that the date of the concert was Friday, the very next day.

  I made my way back to my office and sat down at my desk, lost in thought, when something moving outside the window caught my eye. A figure was bobbing along the path that ran next to the building—a jogger, I realized, a woman. And after a few aimless moments of watching her, I saw that the jogger was Kirstie.

  The sky behind her was just beginning to lighten, and a faded orange light was showing through. She was wearing a dark windbreaker over her elastic pants, and fluorescent sneakers, her heels cutting cleanly through the air behind her as she made her way past the rows of empty parking spaces, out toward the center of campus. She did not appear to be moving very quickly, but her stride was regular and soothing to watch. The morning was crisp and cold, and I could see my breath on the windowpane in small white blooms.

  How long I stayed like that I can’t recall—a strange, slack feeling had spread throughout my limbs—but it must have been until I became aware that the telephone on my desk was ringing, and I started back from the window as if I had been caught in a compromising pose.

  “Hello?” I said, regretting that I hadn’t paused to let my breath grow more even.

  It was a colleague of mine, calling to see if I was available for dinner. H
e was sorry for the late notice, he explained, but he was in charge of putting together a dinner party for a guest lecturer and was in need of one more person. Was I available?

  Was I available? I thought. I hesitated a moment. Had this phone call really been intended for me? But, I thought, was it really necessary to always be so self-sabotaging? Was there any real reason I could not graciously accept an invitation to dinner?

  Still, I hesitated. I could say, convincingly enough, that I would need to check, and I could open up my datebook and pretend that the snowy expanse inside was in fact filled with engagements. But, in the end, what would be the point of that? Yes, I said, I could make it; I would meet them at the restaurant at seven. I replaced the phone in its cradle and turned toward the window. Kirstie was gone, and the gray in the sky had burned off to reveal an equivocal blue.

  And why, I asked myself, did I need to fret so about an invitation to dinner? I was cordial with many members of the department, more than I could count. And yet I could not help but feel a certain shameful pleasure. I felt—the thought is distasteful to me now—flattered by the invitation.

  Which is not to say that I had illusions about it. It was clear to me even then that I had most likely been asked as a last-minute replacement for some other person, someone more naturally inclined to the company of others, and less remote from the department’s social universe. But all the same, I thought, I had certain professional obligations. And perhaps it was … a renewal of something. Perhaps if I had not been the first choice of dinner guest, I also had not been the last.

  * * *

  The guest lecturer turned out to be a woman, of the heavily made-up, sand-colored variety. Her décolletage had been squeezed into a tight lavender suit jacket. She was, she explained, from Colorado.

  “I imagined it would be so warm here,” she said, shaking her head incredulously. “California! I thought. You know how you imagine it. I tried to go to the beach! I had to wear the sweater I brought for the plane!”

  We (myself and my two colleagues, whom I knew only slightly) nodded appreciatively.

  “And the fog!” she went on. “I could barely find the rental car this morning!”

  We murmured our condolences politely, and I thought: It is one thing to be surprised, even pleased, by an unexpected invitation to dinner, and another thing entirely to attend. It’s easy to forget, when one is so much alone, just how taxing the company of other people can be. And as the meal went on, the guest lecturer, no doubt delighted to find herself in a strange restaurant, in a strange city, in the company of three men, grew increasingly voluble and intoxicated. By dessert she was holding forth on a minor issue of internal politics at her home institution, pausing only to ferry spoonfuls of baklava into her open mouth and wipe its corners daintily with her napkin. There was a tangible feeling of relief when the check came, was perfunctorily fussed over and paid, and we all went out into the dark night, where the air was cold and sweet.

  “Where did you say you were staying?” one of my colleagues asked our female companion, barely concealing a yawn.

  “Oh, what is it called,” said the guest lecturer with a laugh, as if to say: Look at scatterbrained old me! And then, with curious sharpness: “The Old Mission Hotel San Buenaventura.”

  “Oh right,” he replied. “That’s the one with the—you probably don’t know, but there was a big thing about it, when they let them move in; in fact, some people say it was the nail in the coffin for our former—”

  “No,” interrupted my other colleague, in an unnecessarily loud voice, “I’m sure our guest is not aware.”

  The first man stared at him, flicked his eyes to me—and fell silent.

  “No,” he said sheepishly. “Right.”

  The guest lecturer rejoined with something I failed to hear, because the name of the hotel had arrested me, and for a moment I was unable to think clearly of anything. The folded piece of stationery I’d fished from my father’s coat had had that name printed on it: the Old Mission Hotel San Buenaventura. The two fingers, meeting in a steeple, and above it the simple cross.

  Somehow I’d fallen behind, and now I pushed forward to join the little trio; they were all standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out toward the street. For all my haste to reach them I had not thought of what to say; would they still be on the subject of the hotel? I wondered, but as I approached I heard the guest lecturer ask:

  “Is there anywhere you’d recommend going tomorrow morning? My flight isn’t until five.”

  “Hmm,” said one of them, moving aside so I could join them. “Well—”

  “I’ve heard,” she went on, and her eyes swung from him to me, her breathing audible in the silence of the parking lot, “that the redwoods are a must.”

  “Oh yes,” I heard myself reply. Suddenly the parking lot had grown very still and dark; even the cars on the street in front of us seemed to be moving without sound.

  “There’s even one you can drive through? Is that true?”

  She gave me a close look. It was clear that her question was meant particularly for me, and I was vaguely aware of the figures of my colleagues silently receding.

  I struggled to speak for a moment. Of all the places she could have mentioned, why that one?

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “That’s true, there is one you can drive through.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Once.”

  “Well, by the look on your face,” said the guest lecturer teasingly, “it can’t have been very fun.”

  “No,” I said. “Well—it’s been so long now, and I went there with a … with a friend, who was visiting me from Ottawa.”

  Astonishing, really, how painful that was still, I thought, like the pulse of an old toothache that is inexplicably revived. It was unlike me to speak of such things. It was because of the hotel; it had thrown me off course.

  “Ottawa,” she said, eyebrows raised. “Is that in Canada?” I could see that my stumble over “friend” had not escaped her, as incapacitated as she was. “Is that where your accent is from? You’re Canadian?”

  “No,” I said. “British, but that was very long ago.”

  “I see,” she said. “Your accent’s very faint.”

  The conversation, if it could be called that, was threatening to peter out.

  “Hadn’t we better find your car?” I said.

  “Yes, probably,” she replied, and smiled mysteriously. Then she took a few uncertain steps away from me, looking with expectation over the sea of parked cars.

  “It’s a white car,” she said, apparently to herself.

  “Are you sure you’re feeling up to driving?” I asked, having merely voiced the question that would have been on anyone’s mind, watching her shift her weight unsteadily from spine-heeled shoe to shoe.

  The guest lecturer stopped, paused, and turned around. A smile spread slowly across her wide mouth, to which new lipstick had been recently and inexpertly reapplied.

  “No,” she said. “You’re right. Anyone can see I’m not up to it at all. Would you mind taking me to my hotel?”

  4

  We drove west, cutting through campus.

  “Are those…” slurred my passenger, “those palm trees? The famous ones?”

  It was a dark night, and a crescent moon was visible above the roof of Memorial Church. We turned right into the Arboretum, and I sensed the guest lecturer sitting up a little straighter in her seat.

  “Is that,” she said, more distinctly, “where the dead son is buried?”

  I looked over at her, startled, and then I saw that she was squinting through the dark at the white form of the mausoleum.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so, yes.”

  “So sad,” said the guest lecturer in a mournful voice. “They told us all about it on the tour. The children of California shall be our children.”

  She gave me a sideways look, as if this quotation from our university’s founder might hav
e particularly impressed me.

  “That’s right,” I said, and then we were spat out on the other side of campus at the base of the foothills heading north past the golf course.

  “He died of typhus?”

  “Typhoid, I think,” I replied.

  What a strange thing she wanted to talk about, I thought. I had not anticipated discussing the century-old death of a boy from typhoid as if it were recent news, and to call it “so sad” did not seem quite appropriate, but it was often the case, I remembered, that tourists were most interested in this somewhat morbid aspect of our institution’s founding.

  “I think I know where we are now,” said the guest lecturer, pulling herself upright with effort. The headlights swept along a vast expanse of yellowed grass. In the darkness it glowed pale and eerie against the black sky, as if we were crisscrossing the foothills of some other planet.

  “Even this,” said the guest lecturer, indicating the land around us, “belongs to the university?”

  I nodded.

  “And can’t be sold.”

  I looked at her again. I doubted that I had ever met anyone who’d shown such interest in the campus tour.

  “Right again,” I said. “Only leased.”

  “Here it is,” she said abruptly, and I turned into an unmarked driveway, flanked on either side by a thick hedge of oleander. The plants were so tall, and the path so gently winding, that it was only when we had come around the very last bend that the hotel itself rippled into view: low, white, and crouching like a cat. It was lit dramatically from below, and I could see that it was that most ubiquitous of all Californian buildings, a stucco building with a red tile roof.