MATHER’S FIRST CLASS ON Tuesday was not part of the curriculum: he coached a group of male delinquents who were having to face up to final examinations after a semester devoted to basketball and female anatomy. He found them as impossible to insult as they were to teach. They might know a member of the faculty to have been murdered the night before, but the fact that he was a physicist removed him from their personal concern as surely as if he had been a Kashmiri rug merchant. They read newspapers from back to front, starting with the sports page and reaching the comics. After that boredom set in. The only book they read in order to learn something they wanted to know was Fanny Hill. Mather watched the clock through that interminable period no less assiduously than they did.
His second class was a different matter. Sophomores, they wanted to learn everything there was to learn at once. God help him on such days as this when he had come ill-prepared for class. But that morning they paid him the opening tribute of an awed silence when he entered the room. He reached his desk to learn that someone had placed The New York Times there, folded to the Bradley story. He caught his own name in the second column, listed as among those present at the dinner party. He scanned the faces before him, solemn, expectant boys and girls. He called them men and women, speaking to them, but they were not really. To them this death was probably romantic. They did not believe in death; they could be anti-war and anti-capital punishment, they could Remember Mississippi and pass out ban-the-bomb leaflets. But to them death had no sting. Nor had it had for him at their age. He thought briefly of the day he had saved Peter: that he might die himself jumping off that boat had not entered his mind at the time.
He opened his briefcase and took from it a mimeographed review quiz.
“Mr. Mather,” a silvery feminine voice requested from halfway back in the room, “would you read ‘Adonais’ aloud to us?”
He looked at the girl without raising his head: her face shone with cherubic innocence. There were others in the class who could not so successfully dissemble. They feigned busyness.
“I think not, Miss Adamson,” Mather said blandly, “but I should like to hear your rendition since it must be a favorite of yours.” Over the ocean-swell of protest from her classmates, Mather turned to the textbook index and said aloud: “Page one hundred seven: ‘Adonais’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Miss Adamson?”
The next half-hour was no less an agony for Miss Adamson than for the rest of the class. For Mather the hour was simply to be got through; now a discussion of elegiac poetry would save him the humiliation of giving a stale quiz.
As soon as he dismissed the class, Mather took the elevator to the Physics Department which occupied the entire top floor of the General Studies Building. He found Steinberg and the boys who had been at Bradley’s in a student conference room. They greeted him with some small camaraderie. He glanced at the blackboard. The names of the four of them had been written in block letters:
ROBERT STEINBERG
MITCHELL HOYTE
ALVIN ROBBIE
JAMES L. O’ROURKE
“So the police could get them down right,” one of the boys said.
Steinberg added: “They’ve just left.” He gestured toward a small box lying on the desk. “There’s the film we didn’t see last night.”
“It wasn’t stolen?” Mather said carefully.
“It was returned along with his wallet—without the money—in a public mailbox this morning.”
“They must’ve got scared,” one of the boys said, “finding out who he was.”
Mather did not say anything for a moment. There was no room left for doubt now that his original plan had been put into motion. “Where’s Anne?”
“She’s gone down to the police lineup—or rogues’ gallery or whatever it is—to see if there’s anybody she recognizes.”
Mather took a chance on the boy’s name: he was glad the names were on the board. He could never remember them. “Fill me in, will you, Robbie? I haven’t had the stomach to read the papers.”
“I’m O’Rourke,” the young man said. “I don’t know what’s to tell, just that Annie saw a man going into her building when she went home for her glasses. The only thing she could remember about him was the smell of chewing gum when he went past her. But they took her down to the police station anyway.”
Mather reached for his cigarettes, patting his pockets, anything to distract from his own dismay. Gum-chewing, idealistic, lovable Jerry. Let there be no more war!
Steinberg pulled himself out of a morose lethargy. “I’m going over there now to take Louise some things. Do you want to come?”
“I ought to see Janet,” he said. “Thanks. I’d like to go along.”
On the way Steinberg peered out the cab window. Seeing a cluster of police cars near St. John’s Church, he asked the cab driver to stop. He motioned to one of the detectives, and asked him if he was working on the Bradley case. “You ought to have somebody question the news vendor on the corner of University and the park …”
It was not that simple, the matter of giving a detective a lead: Steinberg had to identify himself and his connection with the case. He got out of the car. It gave the waiting cabbie a chance to tell Mather that the cops had already screened every cab coming into the area between 9:00 P.M. and 11:00 last night. “Don’t it make you wonder what they’re doing between murders, the way they’re swarming all over the place now?”
“I can’t say that it does,” Mather said to shut him up. He supposed Jerry had a car; men in his profession were provided with what they needed.
The cabbie was not to be put off. “It should, Mister. People like us forget the cops are civil servants. That means they work for us. Did you ever think of that? We the people.”
Which put Mather in mind of the two detectives who had been waiting for him the night before. Better see a doctor about that toe. The city has a responsibility … They had taken his shoes. For what? Would they demand an X-ray of his toe? It occurred to him then that they had been searching the street afterwards for the knife, thinking he had taken the sprawl to get rid of it, to throw it away, the knife from Peter’s back. Could they be looking for Peter’s blood on his shoes? The thought of it made him physically ill. He rolled down the window.
Steinberg, at the door of the cab, said: “I’m coming now.”
In front of the Bradley house Mather stood for a moment looking up at the second-floor windows.
“Come on,” Steinberg said.
“I don’t know what to say to Janet.”
“Don’t say anything. Or else say you’re sorry and you’d like to get your hands on the bastard.”
“If you could get your hands on him, Bob, what would you do?”
Steinberg shifted Louise’s valise from one hand to the other. “Come on. This kind of talk doesn’t get us anywhere.”
Mather followed him up the steps. “In tribal times it was easy, wasn’t it? You just cut him off and the world outside devoured him. And that was fine. Men didn’t have to kill their own.” In the vestibule, waiting for the release of the lock, he added: “That’s one of the refinements of civilization, isn’t it? the ability to kill one’s own?”
“Nonsense,” Steinberg said. “Men like to kill when they think they have to. There’s no other explanation for it, war and the whole bloody bit. You’d think that the thought of their own mortality would hold them back. It’s just the opposite. They live. Inside themselves killers live because they’ve killed.”
The lock-release clicked and they went upstairs. Mather did not suppose Steinberg had ever spoken to him directly before. Louise hugged her husband sloppily and then gave Mather very nearly the same treatment. All emotion. Her eyes were red from weeping. Death had its intimacy for her—but so did life: the flesh was good. Louise lived with all her senses and from them evoked zest and joy and such pleasures, Mather was sure, as he had never known. Sometimes he was revolted by her, put off the more because she was one of the few people who accepted him for his own sake. He now returned her embrace with fervor, shutting out the brief insight to his own sickness.
There were a number of people in the livingroom, Peter’s brothers who had flown out from Chicago, Louise explained. They would go back together for the funeral. Peter was to be cremated. And Janet’s family had come from Bridgeport, and Dr. Bauer was there …
Janet came to them then, her hands outstretched, but her whole body straightened as in some invisible armor. The touch of her cold hands claiming, it seemed, the warmth in his, moved him profoundly. He rubbed them and lifted them to his lips, cherishing to his heart’s depth the little throb of response he quickened in them. Not until she had withdrawn them did she allow her eyes to directly meet his. Whatever their message, he could not probe it, for his own eyes bleared.
Janet kissed Steinberg lightly and thanked him for his kindness, and for letting Louise stay with her. “I don’t know what I should do without her.”
It happened without Mather’s knowing: a great sob escaped him, a cry that seemed the louder for his trying to cover it with other sounds. People turned from the far room to stare at him and their image froze in his mind, the disapproving faces peering round chairbacks, a Gothic starkness to them: it was as though the whole of his Puritan ancestry were pillorying him with their rebuke.
Janet did not look back; her body a little stiffer, she moved steadily toward the brethren. Mather turned and went out the door, moving quickly so that Louise might not follow him. He ran down the stairs. Solace would be more than he could stand, as was love—if that was what was rising in him above the dirge. If Janet loved him—could love him—and he could love. What did it mean, simply to love? Unashamed and unresisting, letting the heart’s song soar?
Was it Saul on his knees, blind and humble, crying out: “I believe!”