The Grasshopper King (12 page)

This counterfactual gave us both pause.

“But I
am
there,” I said. “It's just my job to be there. It's not my fault Higgs doesn't talk.”

“Maybe it's her husband she's really angry at.”

That made sense, in the abstract. But I'd been there, and I knew—it was me. Though angry wasn't quite the word; people had been angry at me, for good reasons, my whole life, and I knew what that felt like. Ellen wasn't angry; she
endured
me, as if I, McTaggett, the tape recorders, the scholars, were just another alien presence sharing space in her house, like the grasshoppers. Not even worth poisoning.

Three weeks into my tenure, Professor Treech came to the house for the first time. He announced himself with a quick double knock:
RAT
-tat. Ellen was in the basement with me, vacuuming. When she heard Treech's knock her face folded for a moment into something quite terrible. She looked as if she had something unpleasant in her mouth but were someplace where it would be inappropriate to spit. She leaned the still-running vacuum against the wall and went upstairs to let him in. I followed, with no little interest. It was the first time since I'd been there that anyone had come.

Treech was the department's liaison to the Henderson Society. The Society had imposed on him the duty of visiting the house each month, looking over Higgs and his surroundings, and quizzing us as to the likelihood, in our opinions, of a break in the case. Ellen responded to his greeting with a silence even frostier than the one she used on me. I would not have thought it possible. With a little sniff she vanished into the kitchen.

“So you're the new man,” Treech said to me, giving me an up-and-down look. He was nervous, thin, knife-nosed, a bit pocked. His hair fell in slack wings on either side of his head, giving him, as a whole, the shape of an arrow. He had a reputation as a facile and unoriginal thinker.

“That's right,” I said.

Treech had nothing more to say on that subject. He clapped his hands for punctuation. “Then let's stop down and see the good Professor, shall we?” His voice took on a desperate upward lilt which might have been his attempt at jollity. I wasn't sure Treech was talking to me. But I followed him downstairs.

He checked the tape recorders first, making sure each set of heads was spinning freely. Then he asked me a few obviously memorized questions: any unusual behavior on Higgs's part, any action I could read as mute complaint, mute enlightenment, mute despair . . . No, I told him, no, no, and so on, feeling, despite myself, a little chirp of competence—this was my job, I was doing it.

Finally he came to Higgs. Treech felt his forehead, tugged at his lower eyelids, pulled up his shirt and listened to his breathing with a cheap-looking stethoscope. Higgs accepted all this impassively.

“Healthy as a horse,” Treech pronounced. “Will you listen to that clapper.” Here, suddenly overtaken with fellow-feeling, he walloped my shoulder with his cupped hand. “Clean living!”

“You'd have to think so,” I said.

“We should all treat ourselves so well,” Treech said. He deployed a sort of leer in my direction. “But, you know . . .”

I was still trying to construct some suitable reply when Treech changed the subject again. “We're going to take pictures,” he said, pulling a camera from his satchel. “Mrs. Higgs!”

Ellen descended warily. “What is it?”

“Is it going to be all right if we just take some photos here? It's for the newsletter.”

“It is not,” she said. But Treech had already started shooting. He took one picture of the three of us, another of Ellen and Higgs, and one last shot—as Ellen reached out angrily for the camera—of her alone.

“Get out,” Ellen said.

“Right away, Mrs. Higgs. See you next month.”

After Treech left, Ellen vacuumed the basement for two hours straight, as if he'd left some trail that only her detective eyes could see, that only her rattling vacuum could erase. To my surprise I felt almost sorry for her.

I tried catching her eye. “Hey, what a jerk, huh?”

She straightened up.

“What Professor Treech is,” she said, “is not important. I'd like it much better if you wouldn't speak to me, now that you know your way around the house.”

Then she bent to her vacuum cleaner again, leaning her whole weight on it as if it were a broom. She moved behind Higgs to clean the corner; she tapped the back of his chair gently and he scooted up to give her room. No; it wasn't Higgs she was mad at. The two of them were still in league.

“The last one didn't talk at all,” she said.

“All right,” I said, with a hardness that unnerved me. “All right. I tried.”

I was no tenderfoot; in my social career I had annoyed, and been annoyed in turn, by hundreds of people of all temperaments and stations. When my irritation with one acquaintance grew too keen to be borne, I'd move on to annoy someone else. After a week or so, I'd feel a twinge of forgiveness toward my first partner; then I knew it was
time to reestablish contact, make up, and experience the slow and enjoyable build-up to antipathy once again.

With Ellen it was different; there was no decay. The moment she opened the door in the morning I was just as inflamed as I'd been the night before. Was she doing this to me on purpose? I couldn't tell. Somehow, that made it worse.

Julia suggested deep breathing. Ha! I could have chuffed like a racehorse with an “Om” on each exhale; it wouldn't have made a dent. I couldn't walk past Ellen without wanting to punch her; but I didn't punch her. It wasn't that I wouldn't punch an old woman. It was that I was afraid I might lose. She seemed like a woman who might know karate, or something more secret than karate; or who could just take my forehead in her palm and force me whimpering to the ground.

Anyway, I had another way of getting back at her, a slicker, more satisfying way. McTaggett had told me, in rough, the story of Higgs's retreat into silence, the Society's installation of the listening devices, and Ellen's futile resistance. So I knew that the absence of a microphone upstairs was a special favor granted Ellen by her father—and that seemed hardly fair. What if Higgs
did
talk in his sleep? What if Ellen's selfish desire for privacy was, all by itself, holding up the progress of human knowledge? It was only right, I assured myself, that I should take whatever steps I could to undo Dean Moresby's nepotistic leniency. If I succeeded in getting the bedroom wired up it would make Ellen furious; and at the same time it would advance the cause of learning.

Of course, I had no say in the matter. I was just a student, and a new one. I possessed no influence; I held no sway. But Treech did.

I arranged to meet him one evening at his office. The walls were covered with unimpressive-looking prizes and citations, neatly framed. On his desk there was a photo of his dog.

“My good man,” he said, skinny palms pressed together. “I'm glad we're having this meeting.” It did not seem quite right to shake his hand—unsure whether I was meant to come forward, I halted just
inside the doorway and stood clumsily on the spot until Treech motioned me to sit in the rattan chair across the desk from him.

“You're a Henderson man,” Treech said.

“I'm working on one of his stories.”

“That's good,” he said. “It should always be a Henderson man. So he'll feel among his own. Slotkin wasn't one.”

“But there wasn't really any choice.”

“No,” Treech said, then was quiet for a very long time, as if the possibility of there being no choice had just occurred to him for the first time, and he were faced with the abrupt and unpleasant necessity of counting out those instances of choicelessness which he might have still to endure. “There was no choice.”

“There's something I have to talk to you about,” I said. At this Treech retreated from his reverie and grew businesslike. “It's about Higgs.”

Treech nodded. “Naturally.”

I was trying to remember everything I'd read in spy novels about how to lie. I had read spy novels mostly for the sex scenes and my memory of the actual spying was sketchy at best.

“I've been having concerns,” I said.

“And bringing them to me is the right thing to do.”

“About the bedroom.”

“Ah—the
bed
room.”

“I think”—I steadied myself—“he's talking up there.”

This gave Treech pause; but only a little.

“That's potentially quite serious,” he said.

“I thought you'd think so.”

“Of course, the Dean's wishes on the subject are very clear. We're not in a position at this time to make any change.”

“So I understand.”

“If you don't mind my asking a question?”

I nodded, shoot.

“What brought on these—concerns?”

As darkly as I could: “I've heard things.”

“You have.”

“I think so. Just very quietly. Sometimes I get there when he's still upstairs.”

“Things that sound like talking.”

“Very much so.”

“But the actual
words
of which you are unable to make out.”

“That's right.”

“Well,” he said. “But if you had something more concrete.”

But I wouldn't, of course, and plainly my allegations alone were not enough to spur Treech to action. Some Iago I turned out to be.

“Perhaps we'll look into it,” he told me. And that was the last I heard of the matter for some time.

“How was Treech?” Julia asked me when I got home. I'd told her I was meeting him about an independent study.

“I couldn't get him interested,” I said.

“You tried,” Julia said, coming up behind my chair and resting her arms on my shoulders. She gave the back of my head a rub, briskly, like a Little League coach. “That's what's important.”

Once, telling venial lies had been fun—where were those days now? I just felt foolish and ill. “No,” I said, “trying is not important. Succeeding is important.”

Her hands lifted from me, and I heard her retreat to the bed. I'd spoken more sharply than I'd meant to. Apologies bloomed in me but I tamped them down.

“Back to work,” I commanded, and opened the book before me.

The story I was translating was Henderson's rendition of a traditional Gravinian folktale, “The Four Wives of Little Bug.” Because so much of my time as Higgs's companion was spent translating this piece, and because an acquaintance with Little Bug's unlucky career is necessary for the understanding of certain parts of my own story, I will reproduce it here.

Once, very long ago (the tale begins) there was a boy named Little Bug, who lived on a farm with his two very wise grandmothers and his two very wise grandfathers. One day Little Bug decided that it was time for him to take a wife. His grandmothers and grandfathers attempted to dissuade him.

“If you leave us,” they cried, “we will starve, for we are not strong enough to sow the harvest by ourselves. Besides, Little Bug, there is nothing to be gained from marriage but pain and heartbreak. Stay with us!”

But Little Bug was as foolish as his grandparents were wise. Unfortunately, he had gotten hold of books of a certain kind, and these books had instilled in him the idea that to have a wife was an altogether fitting and pleasant thing. So Little Bug ignored his grandparents' pleading and set off down the road.

Little Bug's farm was in a sparsely settled part of the world and he walked for a very long time without seeing any other people. (Meanwhile, his wise grandmothers and grandfathers starved to death, just as they had predicted.) After fifty days Little Bug came to another farmhouse. In this house there lived an evil widow, her two cruel sons, and her wicked daughter Clarissa. When the widow saw Little Bug coming down the road, she rushed out to meet him; for her favorite thing in the world was to play spiteful tricks on voyagers who came that way.

“Hello, stranger!” the widow shouted cheerfully. “What brings you to our humble farm?”

“I am looking for a wife,” Little Bug said.

The evil widow saw at once that Little Bug was very foolish, and in an instant she had hatched a fiendish plan.

“What sort of wife were you looking for?” the widow asked.

Little Bug thought for a long time. The question had never occurred to him before. He thought back to his books and remembered that the wives he had read about had all had long, flowing hair and long, slender legs.

“I would like a wife with long, flowing hair and long, slender legs,” Little Bug replied.

“Well, you have come to the right place,” the evil widow said, rubbing her hands gleefully. “I think I have just the wife you want.” The widow led Little Bug into the farmhouse, then went out to the back and returned with an old mare. Her two cruel sons and her wicked daughter, Clarissa, laughed behind their hands when they saw the trick their mother was playing.