Death of the Black-Haired Girl (10 page)

“Pride,” he repeated dully.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Ellie said. “In my childish superstition I too still believe that God wills what I must do.” He watched her put a hand to her mouth, stunned almost at her own words. Thrilled and frightened at what he thought she might say. She let him lead her out to the cold rainy porch that opened to a dying acacia and the wooden top of a defunct well. They had tried for such a long time to have a second child. They laughed about her country potions. His wearing boxer shorts for a year, on the advice of some friend of Ellie’s. But they had never said a word about praying.

“But we did it, Ellie. We did it. Shouldn’t it be a sign for us? Isn’t it a blessing?”

“After so long,” she said. “So much trying.”

She turned her face away.

“I’m only who I am, dear one. Is it a blessing? If I let your pride dishonor me and my . . . children, I will have to feel my way. I will have to feel his pleasure, and if you do dishonor me—and in my benighted state I think you dishonor Him through me—I don’t know what will be commanded. I’m sorry, my Stevie, my love.

“This will sound stupid. I love you next to God. Don’t think I’m over the top. We’re not in an opera. You see that’s a commonplace, eh. All the girls where I come from, it’s required. Commanded. You’re my husband. You’re my Stevie too. But I have to feel that’s really how it goes. That has to be how it goes from now on. I must feel the rightness of things, the pleasure of things. You must make me have that.”

He moved a little apart from her, still holding her hand.

“I don’t think you ever put it to me that way before,” Brookman said.

“No, I suppose. It would have been pretty fucking uncool, back in the day. Right? But you knew, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And the old stuff comes back. We’re getting old. Maybe just me. Old stuff comes back, maybe just when I go up there.”

“Is the old stuff all we have?”

“It’s all I have, Stevie my darling. Of course I’m not as smart as you.”

M
AUD ENDED UP
in some mobbed-up club in the Meatpacking, thin film of blow on the bar, practically, more of it on the ladies’ room fixtures. The guy said he was on Wall Street. Well, his brokerage house was in Jersey but he lived downtown. Not far from Ground Zero.

“Really, my father was at Ground Zero for about half a minute.” She let that go. “My old man don’t work, he’s a cop in Queens.” The place she woke up in was a filthy apartment that smelled of asbestos and lead and dead people and guys making free telephone calls to Poland. He was gone but she didn’t steal anymore or fuck up assholes’ apartments for revenge. She might have done it once. She tried drinking his bargain scotch and could barely keep it down. The guy had left a condom floating in the toilet, which was kind of reassuring in its disgusting way. No shower, just a crummy bathtub with feet. That at least, she thought. It was a sort of date rape, but she thought the hell with it. She wasn’t sure but he hadn’t seemed to get it on. Maybe, she thought, he put the condom in the john to impress her. To induce happy false memories. Anyway, she got out of there, went home and cleaned up properly.

She slept again, but when she woke up her thoughts were about Brookman and she could not bring them to order. She tried to bring Brookman’s wife into the focus of her memory. It was ridiculous, so ridiculous—the Brookmans—that in the midst of her pain and distraction, she had a vision of the absurdity of her own grief and loss.

Female students often discreetly observed Brookman’s wife. Smiley face, big teeth, whitey blond hair in a ponytail, you could hardly tell if she was getting gray. Her eyes were a little close together and wild blue. She wore big horn-rimmed glasses. Some of them called her a dog. But with big tits. She had a big ass, oh yeah, some said her ass was humongous. But that was only because she had one and some of them didn’t. Her neck was wrinkly, her face too, from the sun. She dressed badly. She looked like one of the women on the PBS nature shorts you saw when you were a kid. Oh, Maud thought, there were a million happy-go-lucky women wearing khaki shirts being smart in nature shorts and sticking their fingers in wombats’ ears but there was only one Brookman. And only one me. Maybe on the next canoe trip she can wander into quicksand and they’ll find her horn-rims on the top and the rest of her thirty million years later. Laughing and crying, she spun around in her smoke-filled room until she sank to her knees by the bed, pressing her face into her forearm.

She burst out of her room to look downstairs and saw her father reading the day’s mail with a copy of the
Gazette
beside him. He looked up at her gravely.

“I owe you a bottle of whiskey,” she said. And she wanted to say don’t look so pathetic, and there were so many other things she wanted to say.

“Forget it,” he said coldly.

“No, I’ll get you one right now. I’ll go out. I’m really sorry. I’ve been out of my head.”

“Yeah. So forget it.”

She breezed past his chair to get a glass of cold milk. He followed her into the kitchen.

“Hey, Maud,” he said. He held up the college paper. “What’s this?”

“That’s my contribution to the
Gazette,
Dad.”

“Don’t they have a thing called hate speech?”

“It is not hate speech,” she shouted at him. “It’s the advocacy of the rights of women to access and control their own lives. And not have them controlled by—you know who I mean, don’t you, Dad? Controlled by hypocrites. You were the one who told me Grandpa’s stories of Fat Frank Spellman in New York.”

“Never mind Fat Frank Spellman,” Stack said. He ran out of breath and sat down next to his oxygen machine, though he did not pick up the tube. “Oh, Maudie, you don’t understand it at all. You don’t get it. You put yourself in danger. You think the whole world is that college?”

“If I want to speak out, Dad—”

“Oh, shit,” Stack said. “Speak out! Speak out! Stand tall! ‘Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring.’ Victory to the Vietcong! Those people don’t come from where you come from. Not in any way, get it? You’ll be the one that pays from riling up the religious fanatics and shitheads. It’ll be you that pays! Whaddaya bet? Not some rich kid. Not one of these professors. You.”

“Oh, thanks, Dad. Thanks for wishing me well.”

“I mean, if they wanted to do that, how come they got a Catholic girl to do it?”

“Me? I’m not a Catholic girl.”

“Sure, baby. Whatever you say. And speaking of professors, how come your adviser there, that guy Brookman, he’s your adviser, he should have known if he has your interests at heart. Where was the advice? How come he let you?”

“Steve Brookman never saw it.”

“Then he’s not much of an adviser.”

“I guess not,” she said.

Stack picked up the tube of his oxygen tank, pressed the On button, inhaled and looked up at her. Not a kid anymore, he thinks. Not anyone’s child. “He’s your lover, isn’t he? C’mon, Maudie, I don’t get to see you much but I can tell by how you talk about him.”

“You don’t read my e-mail, do you?”

“Never mind. Listen,” he said, “I want to tell you something. People’s religion—it’s not like opium. It don’t work that way. It’s their mother, you understand. They may not understand their mother at all. They may hate their mother. Maybe they’re ashamed of their mother. Sometimes a mother makes someone hate other people. Any thing can drive such people to anything.” He thought back for a moment and laughed a little. “When I started swinging a stick they told me: Put ’em in their place, tell ’em what shits they are, but for God’s sake don’t mention their mother.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m proud of what I wrote.”

She thought: I can’t stay here. He will be hurt and upset but I can’t stay here.

So later that day, when he was out to a meeting or taking his walk, she packed her duffel bag and put on Shell’s coat and went to Manhattan, where she knew some girls. When Stack returned he saw that she had gone. He was afraid and disappointed because he had thought she would stay over the holiday. At least he had thought that before the brouhaha over the article. Dizzy, he stayed on his feet.

“Barbara!” he called. Of course, every time Stack needed his wife, she was dead.

S
HELL’S COLLEGE LIFE
had lately taken the form of dodging the threatening calls and voicemail messages for Maud. Neither of them used the dorm room phone, but somehow or other someone had got the number. It was worse than after
The Harrowing of Hell,
when Shell had been compelled to change cell phone numbers again. And now it seemed that while people wanted to kill her and read about her being dead in the tabloids, they wanted to kill her roommate too, for more serious and worthy reasons. Three people had actually appeared at the dorm, gained access and entered in spite of the locks. All three were women; all three wanted to talk with Maud. So for Shell it was not only a matter of being herself but of being Maud’s roommate. There were individuals and groups wandering the campus over Thanksgiving break, carrying signs about Maud. Maud, Shell thought, would never be able to cope.

An added thrill arose from the fact that the whole issue had afforded yet another conversion experience for Shell’s insane ex-husband. The experience left John Clammer awash in insight. John was able to understand now that the breakup of his marriage had been caused by Hell House—his name for the college—when it cleverly placed his wife with a demon adversary who had converted her to Lesbian Law. The enthusiast Clammer was organizing an expedition to rescue her, dead or alive.

An e-mail from her mother set out to explain the spiritual adventures of John Clammer. Shell was tired of trying to make sense of her mother’s e-mails; interpreting her day-to-day speech was hard enough, but Shell thought her chances would improve on the telephone. She dialed her mother’s number.

“Tell me quick, Mom. Is John Clammer still locked up?”

“Well, he is.”

“You say he is?”

“Well, yes he is. But at times he isn’t.”

“Uh-oh. What times are those?”

“Well. John, they say, has this mentor, see.”

“That should be good, Mom, ’cuz if any man could use a mentor it’s John Clammer. Why do I have this feeling it’s not an altogether good thing?”

“Well, there’s this man and he’s a preacher and his name is Dr. Russell Fumes. Dr. Fumes used to be the chaplain at that whole place when it was the great ol’ state asylum, it was, and then of course it’s just a teeny tiny place now and his cure of souls got just smaller and smaller. So Dr. Fumes was telling people, Now y’all be sure and tell the doctors that you need my coming round and how important it is. And they, I guess, they just didn’t, or not enough of them did. So you know what was on his mind, he was thinking the hospital would stop paying him if he had no customers.”

“I’m with you, Mom.”

“Well, then he got John Clammer to accept the Lord as he sees ’um, and John told them he had to have this man Fumes. So Fumes come forward and says he’ll take this man under his pastoral care and I guess they said cool because he’s goin’ aroun’ with Dr. Russell Fumes.”

“Goin’ around with him? Where the fuck they goin’ around to? Don’t the court know I got a restraining order on that boy?”

“Well shit, honey, you don’t see him around anywhere, do you?”

“I want you to make sure you know where he is, you hear! I know you can do that. Every couple days I wanna be reassured I can rehearse and perform and like that without having to shoot that sucker.”

“Call your lawyer.”

“I mean, that would look like hell, wouldn’t it? I gotta shoot my crazy husband? Probably gotta shoot old Dr. Fumes too. Cute onscreen no more, Mom. I’ll be a Fatty Arbuckle.”

“Be what you gotta be, sweetie. He probably ain’t interested in you no more. Everything ain’t all about you no more.”

O
NE COLD MORNING, AFTER
Maud’s piece had appeared and protest demonstrations against it had begun, Jo Carr walked up College Hill to take a shift at Whelan Hospital. The wind at the top of the hill blew hard and the demonstrators had not arrived, but the Indian flute players were huddled near the glass hospital doorways cradling their instruments. With them was a man Jo thought she recognized. She had been trying to put the sense of recognition beyond her awareness. The sight of him brought her a thrill of fear that reached over time, distance and agonies of spirit.

He reminded her for all the world of a former priest who had called himself the Mourner. That priest had been one of her own order, a Devotionist in South America. She had known him only briefly then, and though she had not seen him for many years, she heard from time to time about his street theater. His movement raised money through the street performances of Andean music. He was the person she had been reminded of in the dark eyes of the young woman who sang with the montañeros.

A few days later, on a weekend evening, she was reading alone in the counseling office. The office was mainly below the sidewalk, but the upper third of the window commanded a view of the pavement, a drain full of frozen leaves and the footwear of passersby. When she had first taken the job years before, she had thought the office a strange place: a rather cast-down room in which to rouse depressed, confused or homesick students from their misery. For a while the counseling office had occupied the lobby floor of a downtown office building, sleek and sixties-modern. Now it had been shifted to this cellar of improvisatory afterthought. Owing to a confluence of ironies, counseling had been downgraded in the ranking nomenclature of the college.

There had been a time when students were simply expected to follow the rules and keep their own counsel. At the end of that era, the introduction of a dozen therapies, from gestalt to transformational breathing, collided with a crisis of confidence in these therapies, with extended individual rights and with the disappearance of in loco parentis as a defining relationship between institution and student. Then there was the expansion of legal liability. All at once it seemed that while nobody was responsible for anything, everybody was responsible for everything. In any case, Jo had low seniority in the counseling service and a subterranean chamber to go with it. But she had a following as a sympathetic presence, a word-of-mouth credibility passed along by students who managed to find her.