A Butterfly in Flame (9 page)

Chapter Nineteen

“Filling in for Morgan Flower,” Fred said. “Temporary. So temporary I am almost evanescent, like a fairy’s fart. But the school intrigues me. How the devil do you do it? I can’t think of a more endangered breed.”

“Smooth,” Philip Oumaloff said. He managed to deliver the single word in a thundery warning rumble.

“Phil knows the place better than anyone,” Bill Wamp said. “He’s been around for—what?—fifty years?”

“Phil goes back beyond Basil Houel, anyway. Ask him,” Bobby Ballatieri said.

The stout woman from behind the counter put her head in. Meg told her, “BLT on whole wheat. Ginger ale. To go. Thanks, Bee.”

“I’ll try the chicken salad, with coffee,” Fred told her. “Bread as close to pumpernickel as you can get.”

Meg slipped out of the room, leaving Fred stranded with his new companions.

“We will talk of the weather,” Phil Oumaloff decided. The others in the remaining group showed no sign of circumventing his will, but nobody volunteered an appropriate weather-related gambit. They sat in awkward silence until Bee brought Fred’s coffee in a thick white diner mug.

Fred said, “Why would the acting president offer me ten thousand dollars not to take Morgan Flower’s classes for a couple of days?”

“It has been raining, but may clear,” Phil Oumaloff intoned.

“So you say,” Bobby Ballatieri challenged.

“It’s a company town, is it?” Fred asked. “Everyone lives here?”

Bill Wamp had taken a mouthful from his plate of fish and chips. Still, he was able to say, “Nevertheless, what we experience today would have been, in former months, very possibly snow.”

“Admittedly it’s not the weather,” Fred said. “But we could try a different neutral subject. Hypothetical. Say I want to dispose of a body around here, how would I do it?”

Even so, the conversation did not go well.

***

“What I want is a tour of the campus,” Fred told his writing group. Even those who had collapsed most firmly rose as if they had been stung. “No. No. A virtual tour,” he amended. “Exercise. We do it from where you are. Walk me around the campus—you call it a campus? Hell, walk me around the town. But in writing. To hell with your problems.”

He looked around the room. Briefly as he’d been in town, some faces were familiar. The rosy young man who’d laughed last night in the Stillton Café, about the Meeker Method—that had to be Tom Meeker. From the lapsed Rotarian look of him, he might not be cut from true administrative cloth. No, there was a better prospect.

“You’re Steve, yes?” Fred said to the male who had been cooking and mopping in the kitchen of the Stillton Café the previous evening—“since anyone can do this who doesn’t have his head up his own hind end, you be the one who says, at whatever interval you want to, ‘Shift gears.’ That means, for the rest of you, writing, change paragraph, change subject, cross the street, go back in time, whatever. But change something. Meanwhile you are giving me the reader all the information I need to understand this place. Like, for example, what’s over our heads here?

“Meanwhile…”—he had recognized the student who, in the early morning before classes began, had been answering the phone at the receptionist’s desk. Not-Tom, though President Harmony had insisted on calling him that. “Your name?”

“Peter Quarrier, Dr. Taylor.”

“I’m Fred.” To the class, “Sorry. It’s not important. Let me be Fred. That’s what I’m used to, if you don’t mind. Peter, you’re off the hook. In a way. But on another hook. What I want you to do—pretend I’m blind and lead me around the place telling me everything. What’s what, what’s where, who’s who, what it looks like, what it used to be—so I can compare—and we’ll be back in a couple hours. Steve, you know when the break is so you can signal that too.”

“This means I’m not writing?”

“Like hell. Peter, let’s move.”

Peter stood, gathering up a knapsack and hoisting it to his shoulders.

The foghorn had started again, moving so insidiously into the atmosphere that the beginning of the sound’s recurrence had not been noticeable. A thin rain, which might be no more than settling cloud, had obediently followed. Fred turned up the collar of his jacket.

“You want the applicant tour?” Peter asked as they set off, heading toward a neighboring building that looked the same as Stillton Hall.

“I will go crazy if you give me the applicant tour,” Fred assured him.

“I thought so. We’ll get out of the rain. I’ll draw you a map, we can talk, I’ll maybe give you a line on what you want.”

“You’ve spent time in the service,” Fred offered.

“Marines.” Peter led the way around Stillton Hall and into the large shed Meg Harrison had indicated earlier. It gave the effect of a low barn in which a colony of nudists was engaged in hieratic contemplation of the ineffable.

“Harrison’s work,” Peter explained. “Don’t touch anything.” Harrison’s figures, either life size or three-quarters, stood in frank and simple poses reminiscent of, perhaps, the archaic Greek. They were oddly symmetrical, especially for this day and age. If a right arm was raised, the left was raised also, in almost the same gesture. They were both male and female, adult or young adult. One, her arms bent upwards so that her elbows reached the level of the top of her head, could have been intended as a caryatid, holding a roof up. There must be a dozen figures, all apparently transfixed with expectation of the second coming; maybe the third.

“How the devil does she move these things?” Fred asked.

“Fork lift. And very carefully,” Peter said. Each figure stood on its own wooden skid. Though they differed markedly from one another in stance, body type, and features, and even in the way the surfaces were treated, they seemed kin. “She says, in here we are in Plato’s cave,” Peter explained, “which means something to her. Maybe to you.”

“And she fires these? At this size?”

“We could. The kiln’s big enough. But she mostly lets them dry out, makes molds from them, sends the molds to New York to be cast in epoxy or bronze or plaster or whatever. There, over there’s, the machine to grind clay, and all. But you don’t care about that. Let’s sit.”

He led the way to a workbench and shoved tools and debris aside until there was space for him to lay out the drawing pad he pulled from his knapsack. They hoiked a couple of stools over and sat.

“There are buildings here and there. Some you wouldn’t find, like printmaking. Photography we don’t have any more. I’ll be drawing the map while we talk,” Peter said. “In case someone wants to know what we’re doing. But, like I say, you don’t care about that.”

“What
do
I care about, Fred asked.

“Harmony knows shit about what she’s doing,” Peter said. “Tom and I, we put her on speaker half the time, if nobody’s around.”

Chapter Twenty

“Problem is, most of the time I’m in class. Also she’s gone a lot. She goes to lunch. That’s what presidents do, she says, like she’s about to be crucified. Then comes back half in the bag. Or doesn’t come back, more like.”

“I can’t quite see her at Bee’s Beehive,” Fred said.

“Are you kidding? Mix with the natives? That would be unheard of, as she would say. She drives to meet friends in Salem or Marblehead or Beverly or one or two places in New Hampshire. Or Boston.”

“She lives in Stillton?”

Peter laughed. While he talked he had been drawing a map that seemed to include the entire peninsula. He was confident enough of his work that he drew with a pen. “That would also be unheard of. Nobody lives in Stillton.” Peter managed to sound like Liz Harmony when he said this: Liz Harmony confiding to friends, at a distance, after a bout of golf followed by a more ambitious round of whiskey sours. “She sometimes sleeps in the director’s cottage—here,” Peter put an X on one of the rectangles drawn along the shore, not far from what must represent Stillton Hall, the admissions building and the other classroom building Fred was aware of. Printmaking was blocks away, in its own little world as someone had said. And the academy owned other buildings here and there.

“Three or four nights a week she’ll sleep in town. But she’s Boston. So, but, anyway, the questions you threw at her. I liked those.”

“I’ll bet,” Fred said.

“She wants us to call it the presidential manse,” Peter said. “Has the kids clean it for her. Do her presidential dishes and toilets, everything. And then won’t stop complaining that it’s never right. Throws cocktail parties for her friends there and marks the bottles. You know. The most they can do is maybe switch the Chivas for Seagram’s Seven. As long as she has the Chivas bottle and the liquid matches the mark…”

“She invites faculty?”

“You’re kidding. She’s got them paralyzed. She’ll fire anyone she wants to, and they know it.”

The presence of so many witnesses, Meg Harrison’s brooding figures, fostered a sense of almost random conspiracy, and Peter dropped his voice. “Everyone’s afraid. Even the ones who hate each other hate her worse. And they can’t fight back, because nobody’s contract is worth shit, and Harmony makes it clear she doesn’t value a one of them. You’re not happy? Leave. See if you can find another job teaching art. Economy like this one.”

“Peter, how much did you hear this morning?”

“See, what it sounds like, nobody has a contract. Or. Well, everyone has a one-year contract that is worth shit. Harmony can renew it or not if she wants to, or if she wants to fire somebody’s ass, she will, and let them sue. Good luck finding money to pay a lawyer to get the rest of your year’s pay. Do you see what I mean?”

“You’re third year, right?” Fred said. “No. Scratch that. What I mean to say, you’ve been here all this time? Since first year?”

Peter said, “The people you should talk to are Rodney Somerfest. The director until they fired him. He might talk. Forget the faculty. Even if you got them drunk they’re all so scared…Rodney might talk to you. But who I’d try is Lillian. No question about it.”

“Lillian,” Fred said.

“She did admissions. Also reception. That’s her chair I’m in before class, and after until five-thirty; sometimes at lunch. Unless it’s Tom. Or there’s another…”

“Where do I find Rodney? He’s still in town? Or Lillian? She’s around? What’s her last name?”

“They paid Rodney off to take a hike. He’s not here, obviously. Before he was canned he was in the director’s cottage, before it turned into the presidential manse. A manse is like a house. You probably know. I didn’t.

“Listen. I want to graduate. I want my diploma to be worth something. In fact, I want my diploma to be a degree. I can’t afford to start again. I wouldn’t have started here in the first place except—well, that’s a long story. Half the kids…well, hell, they’re young.”

Fred said, “How do I locate these people?”

Peter hunched closer and whispered, “Everyone’s running scared. She’ll do anything she wants to. It makes no difference to her. She’s a volunteer. She’s willing to fire the whole faculty. I’ve heard her say so. You think she won’t expel a work-study student if she thinks I’ll make trouble for her?”

“Let’s walk,” Fred suggested.

“Then, scared as they are, she gets the faculty in to talk to her one at a time,” Peter said, rising and rolling the map he had been making. “She whispers and looks around behind her and makes everyone think she knows something. She’s—we’ll go through the back.” He started leading the way through the far side of the building. Once in the rain again, they heard the foghorn more clearly, felt the rain more precisely, smelled the salt air and the general marine decomposition, heard the screaming gulls craving the loneliness each felt to be its due. Silhouetted against the sea was a sort of small, square arched building of yellow fire brick, about the right size for a playhouse—“The kiln,” Peter said. And next to it, an open shed for the forklift on whose seat an elderly man sat smoking the stump of a cigar.

“Milan,” Peter said.

“Fred,” Fred said, walking over to shake the old man’s hand.

“What can I do for you?”

Peter, shaking his head almost imperceptibly at Fred, told the old man, “Fred’s the new guy. Teacher. I’m giving him the tour.”

“Nice day for it,” Milan encouraged them, replacing the cigar stump afterwards. His dress was black jeans with suspenders under an open jacket of stained, faded canvas. He’d set his black sou’-wester hat aside on the forklift’s gear shift. Big square head with mottled, weathered features, and a full head of hair gone gray. He blew smoke at them that hovered in the wet air, neither rising nor dispersing.

“He’s in her pocket,” Peter said once they were out of earshot. “Some people, if they don’t want much anyway, and they already have it, they get their entertainment making trouble.

“Not that she’s likely to fire him, if she even thinks about anybody that far down the line. Because who else knows how the lights work? And the furnaces, the water, the rest of it? Who fixes the toilet some asshole dropped clay in?”

Their walk was taking them in the direction away from the admissions and administration building. “Even though she went out for lunch, I feel like her office is watching all the time. Like Nazis in some movie about that war they had back then.”

“You’ve seen combat?” Fred asked.

“Not to talk about.”

Fred asked again, “How do I find these two people, Rodney Somerfest and Lillian—what’s her name?”

Chapter Twenty-one

“You could ask Tom Meeker if you want to, but I wouldn’t. He’s a decent printmaker but he’s a good-time boy. I wouldn’t trust him. He’ll do anything for a joke. Also I don’t trust the girl at the desk right now,” Peter said. “She’s a part-timer, she’s new, she’s dumb, and she let Harmony scare her into dressing up like a secretary, even though she’s a student. I’ll get you the info later if I can. I mean, I
can,
but only if it’s there. Krasik is her last name. I heard someone had seen her here in town.”

They’d reached a headland from which it was possible to see the lighthouse through the wreathing veils of whatever this precipitation was—fog? Rain? Steam rising from the gray surface of an ocean that could barely bring itself to lift the occasional modest swell. The birds were louder, and more varied, here.

A silence developed while they watched the weather.

“Since I’m a veteran,” Peter said after a few minutes, “I’ve been around more.”

“You know where I’m staying?” Fred asked.

“Sure. Everyone does. If they care. Flower and that girl. The first-year student…” He let the opening extend.

“Right,” Fred said finally. “I’ve heard about that. Is there anything to it?”

“Them together, you mean?” Peter asked. He lifted his shoulders. A bead of rain dropped from the tip of his narrow nose. “I’ll go back to Stillton B now and write your assignment. I’ll stop by this evening if I can get something for you. The map…” he gestured to the chest of the poncho under which he was carrying his earlier work…“I’ll fill in some more. Fred, whatever you’re here to do I figure it can’t make things worse. This place goes up in smoke, I’m out three years, all that tuition, and my grant. So, whatever you’re doing…” He turned and walked swiftly in the direction of Stillton B.

“Tell the gang to leave their work in the classroom where I can find it, in case I don’t get back in time,” Fred called. “Under a rock or something so it doesn’t blow away.”

Peter, without breaking pace, nodded his head and waved what could be construed as agreement.

***

At this point, going to Clay for information would be more infuriating than useful. The nearest public library must be forty minutes away and, in any case, unlikely to offer anything like privacy. A room with a telephone, and with a door he could close, would be a handy thing. Fred needed either a cell phone, which he could not yet bring himself to subject himself to, or a safe house with a phone.

***

Clayton’s voice at the Mountjoy Street end of the line was, as usual, made up of equal parts courtliness, impatience, and reticence. Still, he admitted being there, being substantial, and being in reasonable health.

“Acting on what you might qualify as impulse,” Fred told him, “I took a room at the Stillton Inn. I take it on faith that you’re after something. I can’t work from where they’ve put me.”

“You are able to speak freely?” Clay asked. He rarely trusted a telephone, dismissing them with the dark suspicion, “It lets them know what we are thinking.”

“Parker Stillton has telephoned, greatly upset,” he continued. “That attorney who appeared with him, what was his name? Baum? Has also telephoned. He undertook to volunteer directions and instructions until I informed him that I was in conference and, in any case, not at liberty to shape events. I allowed him to conclude that you are uncontrollable.”

The hotel room was so plain and simple that it likely would not make the set designer’s cut for that imaginary movie about Stillton. Fred had taken a single. It boasted a single bed with an orange cover, a single window, a single chair, a single closet big enough to hang a single damp jacket in, and a single bathroom with toilet, sink, and shower. The floor was wood, and grainy underfoot with ancient etched-in sand.

Most important was the single telephone on the exceedingly functional table next to the bed.

“I don’t have much time,” Fred said. “You can get messages to me at this number. If anyone’s listening at the switchboard, I don’t care.

“I’m no closer to information concerning the missing teacher and the missing student. But that’s not your concern. Also I’m not hoping for much cooperation from the powers that be, but I’m pushing on. What interests me is the larger setup.”

“Tell me,” Clay offered. “But use as few nouns as you can manage. It’s nouns that give the game away.”

Fred had pulled the somewhat comfortable chair over to the window from which—the room was on the second floor—it was possible to see Main Street with its desultory traffic. Was the town’s problem that many of the buildings were vacant for the drear months? The rain had not stopped. Rather, each individual droplet was sitting in the middle of the air, awaiting the advent of the power of gravity.

“You know it’s not my field,” Fred said. “In fact, I am allergic to academia. To me, academia always seems…”

“I know your views on the subject,” Clay interrupted. “The impressionable in pursuit of the inexpressible.”

“Your line, not mine,” Fred said. “Still. Here’s my impression of Stillton Academy of Art, based on less than a day’s exposure. It’s a real con.”

“Indeed. An illusion in pursuit of the irrelevant. Or—perhaps the reverse is more apt: the irrelevant in pursuit of an illusion. Yes, of course. Nevertheless, there must be something…”

“With the exception,” Fred pushed on, “that it’s like a house being sold by a crooked broker. The house is real enough—the students, the teachers, the classes—with the exception that it makes no sense to me that they teach two-dimensional design without giving the students access to computers—but that’s their business. Where there’s trouble is there’s a disconnect between the people doing the work and the people running the place, or pretending to. The volunteers on the board and the present acting tyrant Elizabeth Harmony. Whether it’s merely corporate stupidity or active hostility, I wouldn’t bet a nickel on the academy’s chance to survive.”

“All this talk about accreditation?” Clay offered.

“Without accreditation, the place is sunk,” Fred said. “That’s for sure. What do I know? But even if you reached blindfolded into the colleges that have to supply these visiting committees, you couldn’t hope to pull out nothing but dolts.”

Clay cut in, “As you say, this matter does not concern us. Fortune has given us a presence where I want a presence. I want you to look at everything.”

“Just filling in the context,” Fred said. “If you want a sense of the relations between Stillton Academy and its governing powers, think a few Belgians in the Congo a century ago.”

“There was considerable wealth in the Congo nonetheless,” Clayton observed.