The first week of May, and the last week of classes at the university; Kate had written Phyllis to expect her on the eighth of May. Meanwhile, life in May, as was its yearly habit for those connected with the academic world, intensified perceptively over life in April—or March, or February. At the university, there were papers: course papers, master’s essays, chapters of doctoral dissertations, all flowering as though they were daffodils, or did she mean tulips? Kate was always vague about botanic allusions. All Kate really knew about daffodils, apart from Wordsworth’s rather hysterical admiration of them, was that they came before the swallow dared. Just when the swallow dared was another unknown . . . like everything else in my life, Kate gloomily thought.
“The one advantage to my existence,” Kate had recently remarked to Reed, “is that there are so many different problems I never spend long enough on one to become quite catatonic.” The trouble with successful businessmen, for example, she thought now, was that they never really concentrated on anything else, never actually focused all their attention elsewhere. They liked recreation and dalliance to be sure, but this was to relieve the tension of business worries, not to substitute one serious matter for another. Can that be what I’ve always disliked about businessmen? Kate asked herself. Or is the prejudice just a grumbling response to my impossible family.
This thought brought her, of course, to Leo. In one moment, she would have to go down the hall to a committee meeting; ten minutes ago she had come from a class. Now she sat in her office and, guiltily removed the phone from the hook. She wanted a moment to think. Of Leo, of Gerry Marston. Of England.
“The trouble with him,” Leo had once remarked to her of someone, “is that he hasn’t got his act together.” Leo was full of these phrases, clichés of his generation, most of them indicating a lack of integration. Small wonder. Kate remembered that Leo had once responded, when asked his opinion of a dinner guest: “I don’t know where he’s coming from.” Kate thought that both phrases described her rather well at the moment, or at least various puzzles in her life. Yet she had to admit, to herself at least, that since Max’s appearance in her cabin, and Leo’s wrestle with dishonor, she felt more alive, better: quite simply, less in despair. Was one so dependent on outer stimulation as that?
The point, shorn of its niceties, was that we all want to feel a part of something ongoing. Could the death of poor Gerry, or the cheating of Ricardo, be called ongoing? Some of us, she thought, spend our lives in preparation for what will probably never happen; others, like me, only live in a state of alarmed, but vital, unpreparedness. What with Leo, the Wallingford, university work, and the hours of end-of-semester student conferences, she had not been to the cabin in weeks. I must go there, she thought, after England, and work all this out. I’m in a muddle.
Whenever she sat in the office, which was rarely, quiet and barricaded (door shut, light out, phone off the hook), she thought of Gerry Marston, gentle, helpful, twenty-three—a girl who knew what she wanted from life, knew, at least, in what center of herself resided the possibilities of work and love (which Freud, with that rare simplicity achieved by the great, had called the important things in life). She was dead, and Kate longed, with a fervor as potent as it was irrational, to discover, somehow, why she had died, and how. But what else was there to do? In detective novels, which Kate had found herself reading less and less with the passing years, the detective would set out to discover. All sorts of other things would then happen, leading to one suspected criminal after another, not to mention other murders, attempted or achieved. (Kate thought particularly of Dick Francis, whose books she still did read, because she liked him and to discover how he would work the horses in this time.) In life, they simply removed a body from the rocks, and one’s nephew became closely involved in the modern world of violence, vandalism, cheating, and success which had nothing to do with accomplishment. One, meanwhile, remembering always the body in the pool between the rocks, went off to England to see if Somerville College had changed in fifty years.
There was a knock on the door. Kate opened it, to find Evergreen. “Coming to the meeting?” he said. His office was next to hers. “I’ll be right along,” Kate answered, smiling and closing the door so that he would not see the phone off the hook, about which she felt idiotically guilty. The lack of light, so that none could be seen through the glass top of the door, revealing one’s presence within, was a trick practiced by all who could think, or write, in the dark. One of the Renaissance professors, who could not, had put up a shade on the inside of his door, so that no one could tell if the light was on or not: ingenious.
Kate replaced the phone on the hook, and immediately it rang. The caller was Max.
“Ah. I had about concluded that you were engaged in the reorganization of the university with the president himself.”
“Not bloody likely; though I do admit, if he asked me for suggestions I could go on for days. How are you. Max?”
“Fine, except that my struggles with Cecily’s family over her papers having finally resolved themselves, I now appear to be caught up in some crisis with a Ricardo son; something to do with cheating, or accusations thereof. Do I remember your mentioning, at our lovely luncheon at the Cos Club, that your nephew and the Ricardo boy were buddies? Or is the word chums? Friends I could scarcely hope for.”
“None of those things. Enemies would probably be closer to it.” Kate did not remember Max as having been so skittish before, and she found she didn’t care for it.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear. Do you know what the trouble is all about? I’m afraid the Ricardo version is a bit vague.”
“Ricardo got someone to take the SAT for him,” Kate said. “You were, I now remember, surprised at his having got into Harvard.”
“But surely that’s impossible. Don’t they police those exams?”
“Only in a totally inadequate way. Incidentally”—Kate thought suddenly, for reasons not far to seek, of taped telephone conversations—“I should have said that it is alleged—I believe that is the legal term—that someone else took the exam for him.”
Max was clearly shaken. “I find it difficult to believe anyone would do such a thing. Still, these days . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Did you want something from me?” Kate asked, in what she hoped were not too abrupt tones. She was already five minutes late to the committee meeting.
“Just to have you hold my hand, as always. I do seem to throw myself upon your mercies at every crisis. Or perhaps only at the Ricardo-connected ones. The family, that is Cecily’s children, thought that I might do something since I have what they are fond of referring to as academic connections.”
“What could you do?”
“Obviously nothing. A most disturbing business. The boy, of course, denies the whole thing. You will let me know if you hear any more, won’t you? Having just got myself set straight with these people, I hate to plunge immediately into another muddle, particularly one I can’t seem to do anything about.”
“It’s just a mark of the times,” Kate said. “Everyone cheats these days. When were there paper-writing agencies? One can’t even be sure one’s master’s essays are written by the student any more.”
“I can be sure. It’s all because of a lack of discipline, student rioting, a loss of all values. Dear me.”
That’s just what Nixon would have said, Kate thought. “I must go now, Max. I’m off to England in a few days, but I’ll be in touch when I get back.”
“Thank God you didn’t say you’d contact me. I look forward to your return, Kate. Goodbye.”
I’m sure Nixon used “contact” as a verb all the time, Kate thought, walking down the corridor to her meeting. And that knowledge gave her, for no reason she could discern, much relief.
*
“Did everybody always suppose his or her world to be crumbling to pieces?” Kate asked that night, lying on the couch in the living room. Reed sat at the piano, picking out tunes from the twenties, in an idle, un-distracting way.
“I’m sure they did,” he answered. “They were just more grandiloquent about it; think of Euripides and the Trojan women. Besides, we’re getting near the end of the century. Fin de siècle, and all that.”
“ ‘Fin de globe,’ Wilde said.”
“There you are, then.”
“I remember,” Kate said, “Clarence Day, or perhaps it was J. P. Marquand, writing about his father’s coming out of his house to see the man next door on the stoop of his house in his shirtsleeves. He immediately concluded the neighborhood was deteriorating, and put his house on the market. Clarence Day’s father did, I mean, or J. P. Marquand’s. The signals were subtler in those days, and less devastating.”
Reed modulated nicely from “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to Coward’s “A Room with a View.” “What do you make of that Finlay boy?” he asked, neatly achieving a diminished seventh as accompaniment; Reed’s chords were apt to be sparse and dubiously chosen.
“As a studier of the young, I would say right off that he was a clear case of someone longing to be caught and relieved of burdens of guilt. After all, why tell everyone in your class else? All he had to do was shut up, and nothing in the world would have happened. Even Leo and his righteous friends would have let it go without a murmur, I’m sure, if it hadn’t been a question of the school knowing.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Reed said, finishing with a series of chords and swinging around to face the other way on the piano bench. “At least as far as you go. Why in the world he wanted to do any such thing to have burdens of guilt about is another matter. He had it made. Not only rich, and blond, and tall, and a champion wrestler, and generally charming, but a genius into the bargain—or, to modulate Leo’s term, a damn gifted boy able to use all he had. And with a family reaching back through generations of social accomplishment.”
“The way you put it, it all does sound rather awful, in the true sense of the word. Maybe he just had to make something go wrong, before something went wrong from the outside, if you see what I mean?”
“I see, but that’s to make him sound rather like you, if you don’t mind my mentioning it. Leo’s version is that he had the idea he could control anything, including getting his friend into college. Why should my friend not go to Harvard because of those tests?—that sort of thing.”
“And in Ricardo he found, of course, the perfect lad to take exams on behalf of. Leo says Ricardo drives without a license, not seeing why he should bother with such mundane matters if he wants to get somewhere. All that occasionally restrains him, one gathers, is the knowledge that if caught he won’t be allowed to get a license for five years. He’s like that manager who told his pitcher to hit the fellow on the other team with a bean ball, or is my mind wandering? Everything is all right for me to do, because my side is the right side.”
“That is the sickening aspect of this whole affair, if you’ll permit me to ignore the reference to bean balls, which sounds exclusive and athletic. The criminal mind at its simplest and best, but now shared by everyone. Since my cause is right—whatever it may be, anything from the presidency of the United States to a business deal or the pressure that makes it excusable to go through a red light—whatever my cause, my disdain for the law is justified. Disdain for the law on the part of others, nonetheless, is an insult to America and must be prevented.” Reed swung back to face the piano, and began to accompany himself: “The words you are speaking you were speaking then, but I can’t remember where or when.”
“Ricardo does have a point, however. He says if a Kennedy can get into Harvard because he’s a Kennedy, and some other moron because his father gave the money for the new hockey rink, why shouldn’t he use what pull he has, meaning Finlay taking the tests for him?”
“I’m surprised at you, Kate. We are none of us born equal, however created. There is a difference between using the advantages one has because of one’s birth, and cheating to get honors one does not deserve by any standard. After all, even the Kennedys have paid, and continue to pay, a pretty stiff price for all their advantages. So does the rich kid whose father built the hockey rink. One might as well say Leo shouldn’t have got into college because he did well on the verbal SAT through living with a glib aunt of large and distinguished vocabulary. Anyway, I gather the Ricardo boy is very smooth—cool is Leo’s word—which doesn’t sound as though he’s particularly concerned with social justice as a principle.”
“Do you think it possible the Ricardo boy could be at all like Max? Or do I mean Finlay? After all, neither is any real relation. Max called me today about the St. Anthony’s drama, by the way, so my two problems are merging. The dead girl who was honorable, and the live boy who was not.”
“My advice,” Reed said, “is to have a nightcap, and try to concentrate on England, not on puzzles. Think of Phyllis, for a short time able to enjoy your company, no longer doomed to stroll alone and aimlessly down the High, or is it up?”
Kate promised to think about England as ordered.
The promise was more easily kept the next day, when she found on her desk a letter from Crackthorne.
“Extraordinary to report,” he wrote, “I miss the basketball games and our lively, if unaudible, conversations. I am, however, writing you for selfish and grasping reasons which must not be camouflaged by sighs of regret. Rumor hath it that the Wallingford has the Cecily Hutchins papers, and that you are as near as any female can be to membership in that august body. Is there any chance that a mere dissertation writer, however given to male athletics, might have a look? She might have mentioned or corresponded with some of my chaps. I mean, there they all were, and maybe some who returned from or lived through the war spoke to her or, delicious hope, wrote to her.”
Ah, Kate thought, two can play at this game. She dashed off a note to Crackthorne asking him to notice if Hutchins, Whitmore, or any of that generation of women turned up in the course of his research. She pleased herself considerably by announcing to him that she would be in Oxford one week hence, and giving him her address should he have learned anything worth communicating.
She then opened her door to announce to those waiting outside the commencement of her office hour. It annoyed Kate to discover, sometime later, how to heart she had taken Reed’s advice to think about England, and all its ramifications. Especially its ramifications. Kate usually enjoyed her office hours, but today her thoughts kept slipping away to the Wallingford, and she would recall herself from a reverie to find she had missed at least two rambling paragraphs of a student’s problems. Eventually Kate gave it up and put in a call to Sparrow, begging to be allowed to come down for another look.
“I won’t make a habit of it and take advantage of your generosity,” she promised. “But it turns out I shall soon be going to England, and I want to make some sense of it all. I suspect I merely want to commune,” she weakly concluded. The fact is, she told herself in a taxi on the way east, I envy Max. I would like to write the biography. My motives are impure to a degree. Drag the disgraceful fact out into the open and face it, Kate Fansler. However good Max may be, a woman ought to write that biography. A thoroughly sexist remark, she concluded, paying off the driver and greeting the dignified doorman as to the manner born.
“We haven’t got a bit further with sorting,” Sparrow said, as they faced the boxes. “But commune away. When you’ve finished, root me out and let’s have a sherry—after the official closing, that is. You will put everything back?”
“I’ll be good,” Kate said. “Trust me.” And indeed, he was good, too. She felt, however, a bit sneaky at not having rung up Max to say she was coming. Well, Cecily, she thought, here we are. What remains of a life?
What chiefly remained stood between bookends on a table in the center of the room. Cecily’s books, the first edition of each bought by the Wallingford as part of the “papers.” There were twenty of them, a goodly number considering the care with which she wrote. She remembered Max long ago remarking of some extremely popular woman writer that she wrote more novels in a year than he read. Still, it was amazing what even so careful an artist as Cecily could produce by working steadily for a few hours every day. Kate turned resolutely from the novels. It had occurred to her during the night that the Bodleian was a depository, which meant that a copy of every book published in England was placed there. Since the library was noncirculating, it supposedly remained there, unlike the books in the library of Kate’s university, which circulated so steadily in ever-widening circles that one’s chances of finding any given book were fifty-fifty at best. Sitting in the Bodleian, between bouts of reviving Phyllis and the nostalgic rediscovery of the Oxford scene, she could read her way through the entire canon of Cecily and of Dorothy Whitmore if it came to that.
Was there anything rational to be expected of the papers at this point? The boxes were marked with their contents, and one box was labeled “Unclassified.” These, Kate discovered, were the papers actually on Cecily’s desk at the time of her death, including, oddly enough, unopened letters. Supposedly these had accumulated at the post office during her absence in England, and had been returned to the house after her death. How odd, however, that they had not been opened. Suppose they had required an answer? But looking through them, Kate saw they were all personal letters from correspondents known or unknown; the bills and other business matters had been dealt with by the lawyer or the children. These, supposed to be literary, had, she gathered, been left for Max. Kate picked them up and shuffled through them idly; then she stopped. There was a letter from Gerry Marston. Typed, in a long white envelope, with Gerry’s return address (her room at the university) in the upper left-hand corner. The postmark was hard to read, the date unclear, as was more and more likely these days.
Kate boldly carried the letter in to Sparrow. “I suppose there is no chance that we can open this?”
Sparrow stared at it. “Yes,” he said. “I take it that is your student, whom Max mentioned died in Maine. Odd no one noticed it before now.”
“No doubt it was shuffled in with all the other letters that looked as though they came from readers, individuals rather than firms.”
“Well,” Sparrow said, “it does belong to the Wallingford. Still . . . what do you say if I call Max and ask if we can open it?”
“A brilliant suggestion, if only he is there.”
He was there. Apparently he was murmuring his apologies for leaving the letters this long, and said that of course Kate might open it. So Sparrow reported. Taking a long letter opener, he slit the envelope neatly across the top, drew out the typewritten sheet, and handed it to Kate. She, responding to his courtesy, read it aloud:
“ ‘Dear Miss Hutchins: Thank you for your kind and prompt reply. I am disappointed to hear that you have nothing of great importance in connection with my work on Dorothy Whitmore, but I am excited to hear of the portrait. You are kind to invite me to visit you and see it when you return from England, and I look forward greatly to hearing from you then. Thank you also for saying you will make a search for anything you might have on Whitmore, even if you are so certain there is nothing. Sincerely yours,’ and it’s signed ‘Geraldine Marston.’ ”
“But supposedly she decided not to wait for Cecily’s return and went in for a little housebreaking?” Sparrow said, after a pause.
“It must have been almost maddening to have to sit on her hands and do nothing. I doubt she went in for housebreaking. She probably decided it would do no harm to survey the landscape, so to speak, and the landscape unfortunately included those rocks. I don’t suppose I could make a copy of this letter?”
“Of course no copy can be made,” Sparrow sternly said. “Those are the terms of the purchase. What you need,” he added, “is a glass of sherry. Excuse me while I get it.” And he walked from the room, stopping as he went to tap his fingers on some machine near the door. Some machine. It was—by God, it was a copying machine. Kate was used to them; who, in these benighted times, was not? They were almost as ubiquitous as the internal combustion engine. Within seconds Kate had a copy of the letter in her purse, the original was back on Sparrow’s desk, and she was staring vaguely from the window when he returned. Sparrow poured the sherry.
“To your trip,” he said, raising his glass. “I envy you.”