Death of the Black-Haired Girl (8 page)

Maud’s father was a widowed New York policeman from somewhere out in Queens and Maud was plainly crazy about him. At length she would mock and jeer this man, do impersonations of him, imitate his hard-edged accent, unaware that she sounded like him without trying. The idea of a policeman with a personality like Maud’s was frightening. Is he a religious fanatic? Because Maud is, regardless of the side she’s on. She had come to the college impacted in the sort of antique Catholicism Brookman thought had disappeared from literate circles a generation ago, thin-lipped and bitter, to every man his cross. Now she dealt the same card reversed. Armed with the childish energy of a parochial school minx, reciting every dirty word that’s ever occurred to her.

What she thought of instinctively as her moral derelictions were at once deliberate, heedless and passionate. She has described her own petty thievery to him in a state of fascinated self-laceration. She has told him that as a teenager she was “abnormally devout.” Now this, which will probably go viral online. It will circulate online and be darkly cherished by the wrong audience.

She’s a policeman’s daughter, he thought; does she not know what’s out there? Does she expect nothing but cheers from all directions? He was, after all, her faculty adviser; he might have talked her out of this folly, which would surely bring down on her more trouble than she knew. But of course he had commenced to abandon her.

The telephone, he noticed, had stopped ringing. He went to the window and looked out at the quad. Her cell phone was off when he tried it, and no one answered the phone in her room. He wondered if he might hear the Morse tattoo against his door.

The
Gazette
was due out the next morning. It occurred to him that the other editors there might have the sense not to run it. But those editors were kids like her. Why would they feel they should restrain the general rage at the overreaching, corrupt harassment of the churches?

Then it came to him, outside reason, that she might have effected some kind of curse on his marriage—his wife and the child she carried. Of course: the child unborn. At the same time, he thought, he could not leave Maud alone and friendless in that place, and he went out to find her.

It was getting cold again outside. Across the street from his quad gate in the Taylor Library someone had lit a fire in the Great Hall, a quasi-medieval concoction from the prime of Stanford White. It was beautiful beyond the sneers of modernists and postmodernists, beyond authenticity. The firelight glowed invitingly in the leaded windows.
Why this is hell,
Brookman thought.
Nor am I out of it.

O
N FRIDAY MORNING
Maud woke up to sleety rain. Though she could hear his telephone voice in her head, she realized that he had never picked up. She had not reached Brookman, and she only partly remembered making her way back to the dorm room from a booth in one of the bars near the river. She thought they must have told her to leave. Shell was searching their closets when she saw that Maud had awakened. She picked up a fresh copy of the
Gazette
and laid it on Maud’s bed.

“Hey, girlfriend,” Shell said, “notoriety is driving you to drink. You were staggering last night.”

“Shit,” said Maud softly.

“Well, there’s your story.”

Maud stared blearily at the college paper. Her column was front page left, with the jump on page three.

She got painfully out of bed and drank from her warm bottle of water and dressed.

“They left the pictures out.”

“Well, somebody looked the conditions up and put them online. With your picture too. Like you may get some shit over this.”

“Good.”

“Me, I love it,” Shell said, “but I ain’t gonna be standing next to you in any pictures in case you get famous like Joan of Arc. I got semi-stalkers already. Like my lately old man who just got born again again.”

Maud rose slowly and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom.

“Your beloved mentor was up here looking for you last night,” Shell told her. “Like he came twice. A big old professor coming to the squalid chambers of us waifs. For you, his sweetheart. Only he was on his way to the airport to pick up his wife, I guess, ’cause he got a call from her.”

“Shut up!” Maud shouted and slammed the bathroom door.

When Maud came out, still pale, Shelby was contrite.

“I always talk too much in the morning, sweet thing. Birdseed under my tongue.”

Maud stood weeping. And in her tears she looked to Shell like a savage child Shell never before glimpsed in her friend.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Shell went over and hugged her.

“Maud, honey, I been there. I been so unhappy. I been so scared. This, by God, happens to us.”

She left Maud in the middle of the room and went to look out the window. Bums lining up for the church feeding, like pigeons.

“It’s all good,” she said. “Except how it sucks. Listen, Maud, go home. That’s what you do. Get out of this laughing academy. It’s break next week; a few days won’t hurt your line. Go home and get away from him and me and this
vida loca
up here.” She took Maud’s duffel bag out of the closet and put it on the bed. “Get out of town before—”

“I want to see him,” Maud said. She had stopped crying. Her mouth tightened, her teeth clenched behind a thinning of her long lips. Her jaw trembled. She pressed her nails into her palms.

Shell shook her head.

“Uh-uh.”

She emptied Maud’s drawer into the bag and went to her own closet and filled the bag with various things—jackets, a beret, some bracelets.

“Hey, lookie, I’m gonna give you cool shit of mine I never paid for. My bling and my star-quality wardrobe and starlet shoplifting trophies. You can’t have my dope or my gun, but.”

She put her best fake-fur coat around Maud’s shoulders and turned her roommate toward the door and hugged her again.

“Keep warm, Maudie-pig. I love you round the neck. Don’t drink so much, your ears’ll swell up. It’s true!”

Maud went out but left her bag on the floor. Shell did not pursue her, only watched from the window as her friend headed up the street toward the college with the fake fur wrapped around her shoulders. Then Shell stared blankly at the sky and sighed.

It had come to Maud that Brookman, returned wife or not, had a class scheduled that morning. As she passed Bay’s en route to the college, Herbert, the café’s chief of inmates, defying the weather at his outside table, bellowed a hoarse greeting at her, demanded Shell, whom he so loved. She hurried on toward the quad, Shell’s coat close around her, and began to run.

At the quad the locks slowed her. She failed to intercept Brookman coming out of class and so went to his office in Cortland Hall. She sounded no tattoo for him this time, just three knocks, each knock a little louder than the one before. He opened the door, showing no surprise.

“Come in, Maud.”

“‘Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, has flown.’ That it?”

“Sit, sweetheart.”

“You don’t want to touch me? Don’t you want to shake hands?”

He took hold of her hands.

“Better close the curtains, huh?” Maud suggested.

“I looked for you last night.”

“But you had to go pick up your wife at the airport.”

“Yes. Remember, I told you my wife was coming back.”

“Did you? Yeah, I guess you did. That why you avoided me?”

“What I wanted was to catch you sober and in an orderly state of mind.”

She pulled a hand free and, Brookman thought, came close to hitting him.

“I was concerned about you, Maud. How could I not be? And you know my wife was coming here. She’s pregnant.”

“Pregnant,” Maud said, “really? That’s ironic, isn’t it? Timely topics.”

“Maud, sit down.”

She stood where she was. A disturbing notion occurred to Brookman. He felt he had been given an insight into what her father, the detective, might be like.

Brookman himself felt tired enough to sit down in his emblazoned captain’s chair.
Lux in umbras procedet.

“We never said in so many words that our lives were going to change,” he said, “but we knew. Lives always change. You’re old enough to know that now.”

“No,” she said. “Not me. I ain’t.”

“What drove you to carry on like that about abortion?”

“Whatsa matter,” she asked, “you didn’t like it?”

“It was all you, my young love. But it’s likely to get you more trouble than you bargained for.”

“Get you trouble? Get your
wife
trouble.”

“Sit down, Maud. No, I don’t mean that.” He saw that she was wrapped in an absurd fake fur and she smelled of alcohol.

“I’m sorry you didn’t like it. Why didn’t you read it? Would you have told me not to publish it? Maybe you would’ve told me not to publish it.”

“No. I might have had suggestions, I guess. I got worried.”

“That why you came looking for me last night?”

“I wanted to be sure you were all right. Grounded. And that you had thought a little about reactions. You were out.”

“And you had to pick up your wife.”

“Hey, Maud, you knew about my wife. Did you expect me to leave her at the airport?”

Maud reacted to his flash of anger. She leaned against the back of the chair that faced his desk.

“Why didn’t you read it, Stevie? For God’s sake. I was showing off for you.”

Brookman stood up.

“Maud. My Maud. I want to be your teacher. I want us to be something in each other’s lives. We cannot be lovers now.”

“I know what the answer is,” she said. “You’ll be my eternal teacher. I’ll be your eternal student.” She watched him from the corner of her eye, looking venomous and sly.

“There is no answer to these things.”

“Oh yeah, there’s an answer. We’ll go to Paris. Want to take me to Paris?”

“You better sober up, kid.”

“I’ll become a nun like Jo Carr used to be and I’ll get my father to cut your prick off and we’ll live in France and write cool letters to inspire future generations of assholes. Like me and you, Prof.”

“I’m a human being, Maud. Same as you. You’re gonna see that someday.”

“You see how you hurt me, Stevie?”

“Yes, Maud.”

She felt dizzy and her mouth was too dry for any more questions or suggestions.

“I hurt you, Maud,” he said. “But you . . . you knew that—”

“Don’t say it,” she said.

Then she went outside to the quad. He sat in his captain’s chair and watched her walk away.

When Shell got back to their dorm room, the bag she had packed for Maud was gone, and Maud with it.

E
DDIE STACK HAD
developed an odd skill. He was able to comb his hair—what was left of it—without looking at his own face in the mirror. He kept his gaze above the hairline. Some foreign wit had observed that after forty a man was responsible for his own face. Stack was over forty; in fact he was just over sixty-five, and he desperately did not want any more responsibilities beyond those he bore.

The face wanted answering for. Young, he had never got enough of it. Don’t think he hadn’t looked in mirrors then. He had the deadpan, dumb mick face that could be transformed within a fractal to the deadliest of satirical grins. And the assumed angry face, the hassled face, the put-upon, uncontainable-rage face that would break his partners up in the middle of a collar. The false smiles and the semi-genuine smiles and the honest smiles that were not entirely unstudied. Not until he had gone into the job had he realized how attractive he was to women. Most women kind of loved all police officers, but Detective Stack was envied in his appeal. There was also, he vaguely knew, a mug of true rage, and that was one he never looked at and yet privately had worn sometimes. His entire life was private now and he knew he must wear it very often.

Look at the face on him, his mother used to say. Fondly. But the face on him now, the one he might have to avoid in the mirror and the one he wore on the street, was another matter. Richmond Hill was an immigrant neighborhood. Most people there now simply did not resemble him. They were not fair or tall. They were not bleeders, as white boxers had once been called in the fight game. When he wore his face on the street—a face now flayed by alcohol and high blood pressure and a volatile temperament—he could imagine he was being spotted as a boozy Irishman, a slave to drink and an aging ruffian. To what might be on Lefferts Boulevard a stare of curiosity at one of the aboriginal occupants of Queens by a recently arrived Bengali or Mauritanian or Parsee and those he suspected as despisers of his kind, he showed the watery blue eyes, the rosy face. His strategy was to take his glasses off so that he would not see clearly the expressions of passersby or his own reflection in store windows. Beyond his own front hedges, which he paid a friendly Ecuadorian to trim, he truly did feel responsible for his face. Almost, he thought, ashamed.

What caused him to have his bushes trimmed by a hired man was actually what drove him nearest to actual shame. He went on his errands step by step and only after using—or neglecting to use—his three maintaining inhalers. He had emphysema that the doctors now called severe. So outstripped on the sidewalk by people twenty years older than himself, blocking the progress of young women uttering impatient sighs behind him, he tried not to notice, or even to see straight. He felt ashamed of himself. Early on, before the diagnosis, he had stopped cold climbing the second flight of stairs at the deep-down Jackson Heights subway station. About to pass him on the way down was a beautiful young woman, one to speculate about, a babe. Dry-drowning as he was, she got his attention. “Oh sir!” she said. “Oh sir, can I help you?” He wondered if he would ever be the same after that.

Smoking had done it, as well as and especially his useless—as he saw it—presence at the twin towers. He never mentioned that, not that there was anyone to mention it to. Plenty of people he knew had been there. Some, quite a few, had died there. Then there were those who had been there a month and a half after and talked about nothing else. There were those who had not been there and said they had. What Stack knew was the dark side of it, by which he did not mean the misled lads from afar with their faith-based initiatives, or the poor victims, God help them, but a different human dimension. Nothing was so bad it didn’t have a dark side, Stack thought.