The Memorial Hall Murder (10 page)

The meeting of the Board of Overseers was in full swing when Homer opened the door of the Faculty Room in University Hall. No one looked up at him. They all seemed to be talking at once.

Homer was glad. It gave him a chance to get used to the room.

There wasn't anything clever or original about it. It was probably just run-of-the-mill Bulfinch. The man had probably just tossed off the design in an hour or two. He had chosen those high round-headed windows on the east side as a matter of routine. Ditto the west side. Ionic pilasters, ditto, ditto, all around the room. Classical moldings. Cut-glass chandelier. And then other people had come along, year after year, and lined the room with busts and portraits. There were presidents of Harvard all over the place. Eliot, Lowell, Conant, Pusey, Bok. It was intimidating. “Improve the shining hour,” they seemed to be saying. “Expand another orbit on the great deep.” Asa Gray, Louis Agassiz. Noble heads with great noses and foaming sideburns and marble muttonchop whiskers. Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles. William James. And who was that fellow there, naked as a baby below his bushy curling beard? Longfellow, of course, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow looked dreamily at Homer and reminded him that
in the world's broad field of battle, in the bivouac of life, one should be not like dumb, driven cattle but a hero in the strife.
Homer hunched his shoulders and sat down in one of the imposing chairs out of Longfellow's view. He wasn't about to be a hero. He was just here at this meeting as a reporter in this matter, that was all. He was just passing information along. He was merely a conduit between the forces of law and order and the institutional establishment of Harvard University.
Come, come, my man
, murmured Longfellow.
Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime; have you ever thought of that?
No, I haven't, insisted Homer, and I'm not about to start now. He dismissed Longfellow's nagging verses from his mind and tried to concentrate on the matter under discussion in the Faculty Room. It was a heated argument. What was it all about?

There were twenty or thirty people sitting in majestic chairs around three sides of a square, facing a table on the east side of the room. The table was a great circle, polished and old and venerable as the Table Round. The tall woman at the table must be Julia Chamberlain. She was sitting at the head of the table because she was the President of the Overseers. James Cheever was there because he was the President of the University. One of the others was the Treasurer. Who were the rest? Aha, the five Fellows. The old chap who looked as if he were falling asleep must be Shackleton Bowditch, the Senior Fellow. The Harvard Corporation was present in full strength: the President, the Treasurer and the five Fellows, that little self-perpetuating band of men who really ran the business of the institution. To Homer's critical eye the five Fellows looked a little resentful and disgruntled. Mrs. Charnberlain had said this was a rare occasion, a meeting of the two boards in the same room at the same time. Awe-inspiring. Homer felt duly humble, to be a witness to the secret deliberations of the mighty.

Mrs. Chamberlain was looking at Homer. “Oh, Mr. Kelly, thank you so much for coming. Would you mind waiting a moment? We'll be finished with this thing in a few minutes.”

But they weren't finished in a few minutes. The matter under discussion obviously provoked strong feeling. People were shifting in their chairs, interrupting. James Cheever seemed to be standing his ground alone.

“But, Jim,” said Julia Chamberlain, “it isn't just the faculty who won't stand for it. Don't forget the poor old alumni and alumnae. The money would have to come out of them. Do you remember the trouble we had getting funding for the new tower steeple on Memorial Hall, to replace the one that was burned off back in 1956? And those new clocks? The four new clocks on the steeple? It was like pulling teeth. They kept whimpering about getting blood from turnips. They couldn't see the sense in putting all that money into an unnecessary piece of architecture that didn't even add any classroom space. You know, it was just for old time's sake, just for looks. Well, it will be the same way with this. Money's too scarce. All we can think of right now is salaries. Salaries and scholarships. We can't cut back on those two things, and I doubt the old grads will hear of funding a project like your new Decorative Arts Building.”

“Nobody,” said. President Cheever, “is suggesting for a moment that we cut back on salaries and scholarships.”

“And of course, don't forget, there's the stained glass,” said Julia Chamberlain, rushing forward bravely. “Did you know that, Jim? They're talking about replacing the broken stained glass in Memorial Hall.”

James Cheever was obviously taken by surprise. “They're what? Oh, no. Oh, no they don't. No, sir. Why, that would cost thousands. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. You mean they're thinking of pouring more money into the restoration of a monstrous horror of a building that had the misfortune of being constructed at the very nadir of this country's architectural history? Oh, no they don't. Not while I'm President of this university.”

Homer looked up at the sun-filled volume of air over the heads of the Overseers. He could almost see its clear substance thickening and hardening into clots of opposition. There was some common but unspoken solidification of opinion, of polite but stubborn separation. Some of the Overseers were sitting with folded arms, studying the floor. Others were looking steadily at Cheever, their faces blank. Most of the Overseers were prosperous-looking men in the prime of life, but a few were women. One of the women looked young enough to be a high school girl. Nearly all of them had slipped down in their chairs. They were all stretched out straight, with their ankles crossed on the floor in front of them. Homer could see why. His own great chair felt slippery and uncomfortable.

Cheever seemed to be aware of the lack of sympathy. His voice was rising, he was looking from one face to another for a support that seemed to be slow in coming. “Look here,” he said. “It would be a new capital drive. It wouldn't diminish the contributions that maintain our regular programs. It would be a special extra request made only to those alumni of large means who normally contribute substantially to new undertakings in the arts. They'll be giving the money away anyhow, don't you see? To other institutions. To great museums, schools of ballet, opera houses, theatres. All we would be doing in this case would be redirecting their contributions to Harvard University. It would merely be a matter of appealing to a handful of wealthy alumni, whom I could name right now. And of course we'd ask for a few corporate gifts. Janeway and Everett, right, Tinker? Janeway and Everett have never turned down a request for support for a project of this kind, isn't that right?”

James Cheever turned around, and Homer noticed for the first time the man sitting behind him in a chair that was midway between the round table and the chairs of the Overseers in the hollow square. Sloan Tinker was the Senior Vice President, Cheever's right-hand man. Homer had seen him stepping out of a car with Cheever to visit the scene of the disaster last Wednesday.

Tinker was opening his mouth to speak, but now somebody else was bobbing up on the far side of the room. “But it isn't only the alumni and the faculty. It's the students. Don't forget the students. They'll have strong opinions on this matter too, and that's a fact.”

Homer leaned forward. Who was that? It was another visitor like himself. The man was standing up, boldly interrupting. It was Charley Flynn, the assistant chemistry professor who had delivered the eulogy to Ham Dow yesterday in church. What was Charley Flynn doing here? He looked more like a buccaneer than ever, with a sort of loose open shirt displaying a triangle of hairy chest.

“Now, just a minute, Charley,” said Julia Chamberlain. “Before you speak your piece, I have to introduce you and get the parliamentary business straightened out. Now, ladies and gentlemen, as some of you know, Professor Flynn is a member of the Department of Chemistry. He's here today because he wrote me a letter asking permission to attend this meeting and speak on the matter of President Cheever's Decorative Arts Building. But of course, he speaks only with the indulgence of the rest of us. Now, are there any objections?”

There were objections. President Cheever didn't see why any Tom, Dick, or Harry could attend a meeting of the Harvard Overseers and speak his mind about something that wasn't any of his business. The whole point about the Overseers was that they were an elected body of objective and disinterested people from outside the university. People from the Harvard community were by definition out of place. And therefore he, for one, was against the presence of this person as a matter of principle.

Julia Chamberlain took a vote. The Fellows cast no vote. Neither did Sloan Tinker. Tinker was probably an invited guest like the Fellows, decided Homer. He apparently tagged along wherever Cheever went.

The vote was twenty-nine to one. Only Cheever voted nay.

Charley Flynn came forward and spoke. “It's the students. You can't just pretend they're not there And the students are just not about to take a new Decorative Arts Building sitting down. They raised a hell of a lot of trouble over the new steeple for Memorial Hall, remember? They wanted that money to go to subsidized housing for the working people of Cambridge. I'm sure you all must know Harvard's reputation with the students, Harvard the slumlord, the parasite on the body of the city of Cambridge. Most of you people weren't in town to see it, but I can tell you what they did when that new steeple was under construction. They hung signs all over the scaffolding. They tried to talk the workmen out of working. And if it hadn't been for Ham Dow, that damned steeple might never have been put up at all, with all those expensive clocks all around it. Clocks! My God, what good is another bunch of clocks? But Ham persuaded them the steeple was providing jobs for local construction workers, and then he even gave a couple of concerts on behalf of the steeple and the clocks, and the students really knocked themselves out, playing and singing to raise money to help out. But Ham isn't around any more to lend you a hand. Look here, the new stained glass would be bad enough They'll be plenty mad about the money that goes for that. But just wait till they hear about a new Decorative Arts Building. There'll be hell to pay. It'll be the strike all over again, like in ‘69, when this whole institution came apart because of the war in Vietnam and the presence of the military. Do any of you remember that? This room right here, it'll be taken over again.. They'll be grinding their shoes into that antique table right there, the way they did before. I know. I was one of them. Just wait till they hear you want to put up a building full of porcelain teapots and gold salt shakers. Just wait.”

Homer wanted to cheer. Oh, the gall, the mad suicidal courage. The daredevil would probably lose his job, speaking out like that against the President of the institution by which he was employed as a humble assistant professor. But Charley Flynn was not alone in his rebellion. There were sympathetic murmurs, mumbled eruptions of “Hear, hear.” James Cheever had closed his eyes. The Harvard strike had happened long before his term of office, in fact it was a couple of presidents back, but Homer could see that the very thought of it was distasteful in the extreme.

The Senior Vice President was speaking up in the President's cause. “Mr. Flynn,” said Sloan Tinker, “I've been a part of the administration here for a long time. I came back to Harvard to be Dean of Freshmen after World War Two. I've seen a great many students come and go. And I can tell you from my own personal experience, we've never regretted a building. Without building projects like this one—whether it was a comparable project like Houghton Library to house a priceless collection of rare books and manuscripts, or a dormitory like Mather House, or the laboratories and lecture halls of the Science Center—this university would not maintain its reputation as the most distinguished institution of higher learning in the country, with the most broadly diversified program of studies. As for the cost, my motto is simple:
Economy of means for maximum effect.
In this case, we merely approach a few donors chosen wisely from the larger body of our alumni. I regret to say that I have so far been unable to persuade the Vice Presidents for Administration and Finance and Alumni Affairs to see the merit of the scheme. But with the advocacy of this group, I am sure they would come around to our point of view. And as for the students, why, the building would be so small! Mr. Cheever has had the clever idea, you see, of building the thing in the shape of a small triumphal arch, there in the Sever Quad, so that the present path would not be obstructed. It would really be a little jewel of a building, with two exhibition rooms on either side of the arch, and a gallery across the second floor to join one side to the other. I hardly think the students would object to so small a building.
Economy of means
, you see, once again,
for maximum effect.
Do you understand, Mr. Flynn?”

“But teapots,” said Charley Flynn. “And porcelain shepherdesses. Just wait till they hear what it's for. Porcelain shepherdesses. My God.”

“I never said a word about porcelain shepherdesses,” said President Cheever. He was looking up over Charley Flynn's head at the glittering diamond facets of the chandelier. “I was talking about Coptic glass, as a matter of fact, and Harvard's distinguished collections of silver and Wedgwood. The students would not speak of porcelain shepherdesses unless they were instructed to do so by you, sir.”

“Well, see here, now,” said Julia Chamberlain, her good-humored voice pouring over them like a pitcher of milk. “I suggest we put this matter aside for a minute or two and listen to what Professor Kelly has come to talk to us about. We don't want to keep him waiting any longer. Is that all right with you, Jim? We'll just let Mr. Kelly tell us what he's got to say and satisfy ourselves the whole place isn't about to be blown up. All in favor?”