Death of the Black-Haired Girl (7 page)

The college’s midnight music station was playing Chet Baker’s version of “But Beautiful.” As he poured himself a last drink, his wife’s cat, Fafnir, came into his study and sat down on the sofa, a privilege he was not allowed when the mistress was at home. Fafnir looked at Brookman as though he’d like Chet Baker explained to him. Brookman leaned over and gently brushed him off. Fafnir seemed to like music but he was very stupid. He had to be brushed off things gently because he did not command cat-like grace and was capable of falling on his ear.

Fafnir licked his whiskers and promptly climbed back on the cushion, knowing Brookman lacked his wife’s authority and persistence. Persian cats are dumb, Brookman thought, but some possessed mystical powers, and Fafnir was one of these. He could summon the presence of distant people from far places and reflect them in his vapid blue eyes. On this evening Brookman looked into Fafnir’s eyes and saw there Ellie and his daughter, Sophia. Behind them, a snowfield stretched to the ends of the earth. In late summer the field would be gold with wheat, but now there was snow and also the biggest feedlot anywhere near White Lake, Saskatchewan. Ellie and Sophia were wearing little starched caps, looking like a couple of local Mennonites, which was essentially what they were. Sophia would be spending her days being instructed in her mother’s faith, relearning the Gothic alphabet and reciting edifying verses in High German. There they dwelled in an eternal Sabbath.

Perceiving them in the occult cat’s eyes, Brookman was suddenly overcome with terror. What if they’re dead, the plane’s wings icing, the pilots talking shop. What if Justice was on its way, striking as it will at the innocent and good? Chet Baker was singing “Moonlight in Vermont.”

Brookman had met Ellie Bezeidenhout at his first teaching job, which was in Nebraska, where he came from. He had got the job after his Bhutan book was commissioned and completed. The position was at what could only be called a teachers’ college, formerly a state normal school, which was now naturally called a university. Certainly not a normal, a term that opened vast caverns of misunderstanding. On one of his first days there he had picked up the course catalogue. The place may have been a normal, but as a university it was quite absurd. Its directory featured maniacally joyous photographs of faculty members beside their names and degrees that made them appear as a band of merry pranksters who did animal voices on a kids’ cartoon show—
quack, baaa, oink.

One faculty entry stopped him:

Professor of Anthropology Dr. Elsa Bezeidenhout, Ph.D.

B.S., Nazareth College, Saskatoon, SK

M.S., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

Ph.D., University of California, Davis, CA

Elsa Bezeidenhout looked like a teenager. She was very blond, as—he later learned—was everyone in White Lake, SK. Her smile was wide but her face was long and her features were—how to say?—refined. He loved the “Bezeidenhout.” They’ve been married eleven years and she is firmly Ellie Brookman now. “Why don’t you use your maiden name?” he enjoys asking her. “So many women do.”

“The students can’t spell it,” she says primly. “They can’t even say it.”

She knows she’s being teased but won’t react. On the rare occasions when he gets to hear her pronounce her maiden name, she utters a priceless interlacing of Plattdeutsch and Canadian vowels that only other people from White Lake could possibly understand. She’s not crazy about the “Elsa” either. Chet Baker sang on.

Now it has to end with Maud. It’s been a week since Ellie called to tell him she was pregnant. He tried to reason it. Maud, he thought, was there to grow up.

She’s here to grow up. She has to learn a few things, and one of them is that everything comes to an end. Reasoning was not very supportive. Special pleas. As a friend of his had once claimed: “I’m not a womanizer. Just an easy lay.”

She won’t understand it now but eventually she will. It won’t be easy. Also, it was always a good idea to break upsetting news—or say anything that engaged her emotionally—when she hadn’t been drinking—which, after dark, was rarely. Maud was one of the great student juicers, a not uncommon group given the pressures of the college. The drink didn’t seem to drain her energy or affect her grades. Such was the resiliency of youth. The semester was ending; they won’t have to meet in class, and she will find herself another adviser.

Is this cynical? Yes, he realized it perfectly well. Still he felt compelled to reason a further defense. This is love, as it is sometimes called. It always has to end. In practice it has a morality all its own. Surely she didn’t expect to marry him. In the unlikely event of such folly, she would walk in a year or two, chasing the smoke of the next fulfilling experience. Maud wanted fulfilling experiences. She wanted them for free. She’s reckless, he thought—heedless, demanding, and she’ll always be that way. She’ll break a few hearts before she’s through.

Chet Baker explained love, how it was funny, that it was sad.

P
ASSING HIS CLOSED WINDOWS
on the street side of the quad the following afternoon, Brookman could hear his office phone ringing. Five or so minutes later, after he had opened the last lock that secured his office from the world, the phone was still sounding off. He let it ring as he hung up his coat. He had spoken with his wife from the Toronto airport minutes before, so there was no doubt in his mind that it was Maud. His cell phone was so frantic with messages from her, ranging from the apologetic to the drunkenly enraged, that he had been driven to turn it off. Whether Maud knew he was in the office or not, she was relentless. He let it ring. No signal or wire could convey what he had to tell her. In time she would show up at his office and he would say what needed saying. He threw the office curtains open because there were no longer any wonders to conceal.

The remnants of his fire simmered in the hearth. Every morning one of the college servants was dispatched to lay and start a moderate blaze in each of the offices. This would usually go out before the first appointments. Brookman tortured a flame from the kindling. The fire irons were folk art from a hospital craft shop in Rhode Island. They had an animal theme, horned and phallic. Over the mantel was a poster from the Museum of Modern Art depicting Picasso’s
Boy Leading a Horse.
Brookman set the wicked poker in the andirons and seated himself on a handsome black leather sofa he had salvaged from the building’s basement. He picked up the receiver. The silence on the wire was absolute. He imagined her palm pressed against the speaker.

Within minutes the phone began to ring again. This time, he thought, there might be news from Ellie on her journey, but the presence on the instrument, he was absolutely certain, was Maud. He heard street noises behind her. The Andean flutes. Traffic. When he replaced the receiver the phone rang once more.

The afflicted man was circling the quad outside. His hair was freshly and neatly trimmed to an old-time crewcut. He had newly rimmed glasses. Brookman had seen the man often enough that these refurbishings were regularly scheduled, seen to by whoever had chosen or been retained to assist his passage through middle age. He always appeared alone; Brookman had never seen him in company with anyone. Time passed, the telephone rang, and the afflicted man made his circuits.

Watching these grim winter circumambulations, breathing to the rhythms of his unrelenting phone, Brookman found himself thinking of an early summer day a few years before. It had been the last week of classes in the spring term. The mild sweet wind carried dogwood and azalea blossoms, mission fulfilled, message delivered. The college was busy with preparations for class reunions, graduations, hushed with the efforts of spring-struck adolescents striving against nature for diligence, getting ready for exam week. One of the professors in the English department was a tall, handsome, prematurely gray daughter of the coast of Maine named Margaret Kemp. Some said of Margaret that she burned with too bright a flame. At some point her comp lit class exploded into an explanation of the unitary systems behind the universe, galaxies beyond nebulae, counterworlds intricately linked. Other instructors wore themselves out waiting for the use of their classrooms, colleagues stopped speaking to her, students mainly complained and fled. Not all.

When the college politely reclaimed its rooms, four students followed her outside. There, they sat down on the cold ground until after dark and Margaret continued to delve into the arcane systems beyond whose mere appearances the heart of the cosmos beat. One of the kids was a general’s daughter. Two were the star horsewoman of the equestrian team and her boyfriend, a scholarship kid from Weed, California. The last was an unusually cultivated, impressive young man, a student from New Orleans.

Deep in the night, when the campus went quiet except for distant drunken yells, Margaret and her company of pilgrims were wandering the fragrant grounds, the four students trailing their cicerone like tourists at an antique tomb site. The campus police watched but did not question; professors had been weird for years. Morning came and another evening, and then the sun rose again on Margaret, hoarsely gesticulating, beautiful as life-in-death in her transfixion, and on the students, dead-eyed, weeping, laughing together, raising their hands in wonder at all that Margaret, once the smartest shipwright’s daughter in Bath, had conjured out of the mornings and the evenings of a few days in May.

A woman from the counseling office named Jo Carr put a stop to it with an arm around Margaret, who seemed ready to slug her. The students wandered in circles. The psychiatrists treating them thought they were on drugs, which some of them may have been, but it made no difference. Two kids dropped out of school for a year, the two others for some months. The college accommodated them. Right after the exercise Margaret made her way to her house on Nantucket.

Margaret Kemp had a close friend at the college, another English professor with an office next to Brookman’s, named Constance Haughy. Constance was an older woman who usually seemed quite sensible, but occasionally surprised. One night Brookman was working late when Constance’s telephone began to ring next door. He concentrated on the piece he was finishing. Then, after two hours, he noticed something strange: the phone was still ringing and, he realized, had been ringing the whole time. When he left his office it was still ringing. Walking home, he knew that it must be Margaret attempting to reach out. The night-shift cleaners later swore the phone had gone on ringing all night. The next day, on Nantucket, Margaret hanged herself in her garage, kicking away her bicycle.

As usual, nothing was free. Margaret was far from the first faculty suicide. Historically, violent death was never too long away. Adolescent turbulence, middle-aged despair, alcohol. Not to mention heroin and coke and speed. The pressure of relentless competition generated toxins catalyzed by the disorientation, the separation from love, the random sex, the sheer cold uncaringness of the college. When these elements came together it could be quite unsettling in the cozy firelit libraries and among the dreaming Gothic spires. Which was not to say the place lacked its pleasures, large and small.

The papers Maud had given him the day before lay on the desk. He pushed them away, then opened the envelope and took them out. The piece proved to be an article she had written for the weekly
Gazette.
The text seemed to be an objection to the anti-abortionist demonstrators who picketed Whelan Hospital each week.

One page that hadn’t come through clearly showed photographs of some animal or other. Brookman put it under the light to see more, but the shades blended into invisibility. The captions were unreadable too. On one of the following pages the pictures were similarly obscured, but the caption was plain: “Cute kiddie pictures courtesy of the right-to-life folks.”

“Ever ask,” the text read, “in the name of what authority do they harass women who choose to exercise their rights as full human beings? Most of them are dispatched by the Holy Romantic Megachurch. We know the Holy Romantic Megachurch loves cute kids. It’s in the papers every week; the priests of this religion can hardly get enough cute kids. If women decide to terminate pregnancies, how will the guys get their hands on enough institutionalized or semi-institutionalized adolescents to instruct? Think about it!”

This was the paper he had left unread, the one she had specifically asked him to read.

He read on.

“This intrepid band of intimidators treat us to their visits and their cunning fetus pictures about fifty-seven times a year. If they don’t come in the name of the Holy Romantic Megachurch, they represent the Assemblies of God, assembled by God for the purpose . . .”

Of course there was more. Brookman put the page under the light to see the picture. He thought it might have been a person, a child.

“Holy shit,” Brookman said aloud.

Of course it was the kind of thing she would do. I could have talked her out of it, he thought. If he had read it. If he had not been dodging her phone calls.

“You guys might not be able to tell, but these deformed children are made in the image and likeness of the Great Imaginary Paperweight in the Vast Eternal Blue. It’s true that the Great Paperweight is also the Great Abortionist—a freeze-chilling twenty percent of the sparkly tykes he generates abort—but he don’t like some girl doin’ it.

“His eye is on the sparrow and he’s got all his creatures covered, even those who aren’t as cute as the wee life forms his assembled fusiliers carry. Remember, there’s life after birth, as the Assembled Ones never tire of reminding us. That’s what prisons and lethal injections are for. He’s the Great Torturer, and he wants nothing more than to fry your ass eternally—not for just an hour, not for just a year, but always.”

She had gone too far in writing it. She had gone too far with him. She would go too far all her life. As for him, there were boundaries to his foolishness and selfishness. He had gone briefly to prison for it once, otherwise he had always been lucky. He had loved her. Loved would be the word. Lover, older brother. Father almost—she confided in him, maybe said to him what she would have said to her father but dared not. In loco parentis, one might cynically say. Or not cynically say.