The Memorial Hall Murder (6 page)
His great-aunts were gone, but the pain in his head was still there. He could feel it pulsing and throbbing in the dark. Why he should be on shipboard he didn't know, but there he was. It was a small creaking wooden ship, some explorer's ancient sailing vessel, trying to find North America, wallowing uneasily around in a heaving sea in the middle of the night, and he was wedged in the hold like a piece of cargo, and far over his head he could hear the distant shouts of the seamen on deck. He wanted to tell them they were off the coast of New Jersey, because after all he came from New Jersey, and he knew the coast of New Jersey like the back of his hand. He could even smell the wild grapes on the shore and hear the shore birds cry. But the damnfool captain was yelling, “Port! Port your helm!” and the ship was coming about. They were missing the mainland altogether, heading in their doomed boat back out to sea.
Chapter Ten
It was an expeditionary force that assembled on the second balcony above the great hall. Fire Chief Campbell was there, and Frank Harvey from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and Oliphant from the Cambridge Police, and Peter Marley, Chief of the Harvard Police, and Donald Maderna, the mechanical foreman from the Buildings and Grounds Department for the North Yard, and a swarm of men from Captain McCurdy's department in Boston. Then McCurdy himself came puffing up the second flight of stairs.
“We found a belt buckle,” he said, “and some melted plastic credit cards, and a fulminate of mercury detonating cap. That's all so far.”
Donald Maderna led the way up the third flight of stairs to the door at the summit of the ceiling, where the arching hammer beams met nearly a hundred feet above the floor. Homer climbed the last stairway slowly, looking down, feeling a pleasant sense of vertigo, enjoying the panorama of the colossal chamber. It had once been a dining hall, he knew that, but now it was more like an empty unused attic or lumber room on a stupendous scale. The wooden walls were a clutter of dusty hangings, marble busts, painted portraits of officers in the Union Army, electric fans, old radiators, and, wires meandering from here to there. Shriveled balloons hung from the ridgepole, left over from a freshman mixer. The room was as long as a football field, a cavernous, yawning, empty space. The stairway led to a series of empty rooms, one above another, in the turret at one side of the north entry. There was a mattress on the floor of the uppermost chamber. “What's that doing here?” said McCurdy.
“Maybe somebody used to live here once,” said Homer. “Nice room. Great stained-glass windows. Terrific view. All the colors of the rainbow.”
Oliphant kicked the mattress. Dust flew out of it. “Not lately. Nobody's slept here lately. Who would have a key to these rooms up here anyway?”
“Oh, of course nobody's supposed to have keys unless they're issued by the university,” said Donald Maderna. “But after the keys get out of our hands, we can't really guarantee what happens to them.”
“They have to change the locks all the time,” explained Marley of Harvard Police. “We get a hundred break-and-enter complaints a year around here. I mean, let's face it, this is a high-crime area.” He turned to Homer Kelly. “You should have seen all those little rooms in the basement. Crazy mess of offices and organizations they've got down there. And the whole place was full of cots and blankets and sleeping bags and illegal hot plates. Makes you wonder what the hell's going on.”
“Not like that in my time,” said Frank Harvey darkly. “Back in the fifties. Not so many fruit cakes around here then. Whole Boston area's gone to hell.”
Donald Maderna opened another door. “Careful now,” he said. “From here on it's all catwalks and ladders.” He climbed a narrow stair and led them crouching under a low-hanging jungle of ventilating ducts and pipes. “Your people will have their work cut out for them up here, Mr. McCurdy. It's like this under the roof all over the building. Look, here we are at last.” Mr. Maderna's voice turned thin and flat, its reverberations lost in the great empty spaces of the tower. “We're right above the memorial corridor now. The trap door to the bell deck is way up there over our heads.”
They had emerged from the jungle of pipes to find themselves suspended on a narrow wooden catwalk over a void. For a moment they were silent, looking up at the high brick walls rising around them, up and up to the floor of the belfry, and down and down to the curving surfaces of the wooden vaults below. The space contained within the four lofty walls had never been intended for human use. Most of it was filled with another vast system of galvanized iron air-conditioning and ventilating ducts, some of them glittering with silver padding.
Until now Homer had been silently bringing up the rear, feeling like an Indian in the midst of all the chiefs. But now he was enchanted, and he spoke up. “Oh, isn't this staggering. Look at those vaults from up here. Wastebaskets! Don't they look like giant wastebaskets?”
“Wastebaskets?” said Frank Harvey.
“Look. See the way they taper down to a point at the bottom, like a container? See those paper cups and lunch bags down there? People working up here have thrown things over the railing. See there: popcorn boxes. Beer cans. Look at all that trash.” Homer threw back his head and laughed, while the others peered solemnly down. “I mean, when you're standing on the floor of the memorial transept, or whatever you call it, I mean down below, looking up at the vaults, you see all these rising ribs and pointed arches, and you're filled with religious awe and inspiration, right? When really, just look at that, they're just a lot of big wastebaskets for old cigarette packages and beer cans.” Homer clutched the railing and the catwalk bounced with his laughter, as the others hung on and tried to see what was funny. “I mean, the way they look like those complicated, mathematical, three-dimensional curves. You know, hyperbolas and parabolas, only all meeting at infinity, you know, those beautiful three-dimensional geometrical constructions with grids making hills and valleys. Oh, noble. You know, now that I really take a look at this building I can see its charm. It's the sublime and the ridiculous all mixed up together. Grotesquely noble. Nobly grotesque. And what could be more charming than those two things together? I ask you.” The chiefs looked at one another silently and began moving slowly along the catwalk again, while Homer trailed after them, chuckling to himself, shaking his head. “Inside-out vaults. I'm just crazy about upside-down inside-out vaults.”
Afterwards he tried to explain to Mary and Vick what it had been like. He sat at the kitchen table in the flat on Huron Avenue, eating his third bowl of vegetable soup, describing the open bell chamber at the top of the tower. “There wasn't any railing, you see, and the asphalt sort of sloped down in the direction of the open arcades all the way around, and it was all slippery with pigeon droppings. Some of McCurdy's boys were climbing past us into the tower roof to look around up there, and then the bell rang. The clock was striking the hour, and we all nearly fell over the edge with shock and plummeted to our doom. But I hung on to Harvey, and he hung on to Maderna, and Maderna hung on to Oliphant, and Oliphant hung on to Marley, and Marley hung on to Campbell, and Campbell hung on to the corner of a brick with his little finger, so we're all still here.”
“Oh, Homer, my God,” said Vick.
“Oh, don't worry about Homer,” said Mary. “Don't believe a single word he says.”
“Well, it was really great up there,” said Homer. “You could see all over. The river and all the bridges and Harvard Yard. And Donald Maderna showed me all the sights of Harvard, you know, all those nice blue and gold domes. But in the meantime I was looking eastward, straining my eyes for a glimpse of the dear old Middlesex County Courthouse, over there in East Cambridge, where I used to hang out with the District Attorney. Of course, Maderna didn't know anything about East Cambridge, and neither did the federal guy, Harvey. All they could see was Dunster House and Eliot and Mather, and all those other places with distinguished old Puritanical New England Wasp names like that. Not crummy old Irish East Cambridge, where I grew up.”
“Well, of course it's just Town and Gown again,” said Mary. “It always happens like that, I suppose. There's always a gulf between a school and the city the school is in. I see them in the street, you know, Homer, there in Harvard Square, nice old ladies with shopping bags getting off the subway from Central Square, struggling up those cruel steps, or taking the bus to Lechmere. They look so lost in Harvard Square, with all those wild-eyed students charging past them, never giving them a second glance.”
“Oh, that's right,” said Vick. “You're absolutely right. I know exactly what you mean. I see them there in the square, only I don't really
see
them. And they must feel it, sort of. I bet they hate us. I bet they just loathe us.”
“It's too bad the citizens of New England don't have to support the college any more,” said Homer, “the way they did at first, with a peck of wheat or a cord of wood, or something. Then they'd feel sort of responsible for the place. Now they're just mad at Harvard because it squats and sprawls all over the city and doesn't pay any taxes. That's what people think. Actually, it does pay the city a lot of money in lieu of taxes as a sort of friendly gesture of bonhomie and neighborly good will.”
“Well, I just can't help but feel for them,” said Mary, “those old dowagers. There aren't any corner groceries or nice cake shops or dry-goods stores that cater to their needs in Harvard Square.”
“Oh, well,” said Homer, “I suppose you could say that most of the world is busy catering to their needs. You could say Harvard Square is one of the few places in the universe that caters to the raw gray quivering furrows of the mind. Although I must say, when I think of Harvard Square in all its giddy colors, it's certainly a funny kind of mind. Not what you normally think of as cold intellectual ponderous deliberation. Mad! It's a mind gone mad! A dizzy phantasmagoria of steaming fumes from an overworked feverish brainâthat's more what Harvard Square is really like.” Then Homer looked thoughtfully at Vick's outfit, which was a purple vest over an orange striped blouse that hung loose over her tattered scarlet skirt. “Well, when you get right down to it, it's just youth, really. It's just the delirium of being young. That's what it is, really.”
