Pale Betrayer (16 page)

“No. You are the only one.”

She opened the folder and glanced at the letter of application Mather himself had typed eight years before. “I thought so,” she said. “He had taught at Albion Preparatory School for one year, and then studied abroad for a year before coming to us.”

“Do you have a letter of recommendation from Albion?”

She drew it from among the several papers in the folder and gave it to him. It was virtually the same letter as he had read at Central University. It made no reference to his tenure at the school. Marks wondered if he was not making a mountain out of a molehill. But why the variation in the records of the two teaching institutions? Was the University likely to have checked into his study abroad where St. Monica’s was not? Probably, if he had wanted to use that credit toward his graduate work. The question still remained, why had he left Albion midyear?

“I’m very grateful to you, Mother St. Ambrose,” he said, returning the letter. “There’s something I want to admit to you and I’d like your comment on it—if you don’t mind. I’ve talked with Professor Mather a couple of times now, I’ve talked with some of his students, and the picture I had of him was considerably different than the one you’ve given, except for the dilettante part and him being a good teacher. Personally, I find him glib and wily, like quicksilver. I get the feeling that he’s a master of improvisation, and that he’s staying just a leap ahead of me and enjoying it—in spite of the fact that he’s a very frightened man.”

The nun raised her eyebrows. “Frightened of what?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Marks said. “It may or may not have anything to do with Bradley’s death. If it doesn’t, it is none of my business. But I’ve got to find out.”

“When he first came to us,” the nun said thoughtfully, “I remember having the impression that he was—I so dislike to use the word—disturbed. He was like a novice to the priesthood in that terrible period of not being sure of one’s vocation. I’m trying to remember now just what it was about him—self-doubt? fear of unworthiness? the attempt then to lose oneself in God and work. These are unrealistic terms I suppose to a skeptical person. I wonder if you understand what I’m getting at?”

“I believe in belief,” Marks said.

“There!” the nun cried. “You are exactly like Mr. Mather. He might have said that.”

Marks assumed it to be a compliment, but he would not have said it described Mather at all.

“He spent a great deal of time with Father Dunne who was our chaplain at the time and who also taught metaphysics. Mr. Mather audited some of his classes. He seemed always to be searching. For what? Reality?”

“In metaphysics?” Marks said skeptically.

“Then—in physics?” the nun countered. Marks did not say anything. “Father died last year, at the age of forty-two. He was a great loss, and I think he had been very helpful to Mr. Mather who left us a much more confident man than he had come to us.”

“Obviously he needed help,” Marks said.

The nun threw up her hands. “The words we bash into images! Disturbed, needing help. Which of us does not, sir, in order to know ourselves, to live?”

“And you think that was what Mather was trying to do? To know himself? To live?”

She was slower to answer this time. “Yes. I think that was so.”

Marks leaned forward. “Forgive me, but isn’t it possible that he was only trying to make that impression on you—and the rest of the college—to create an image of himself as the ascetic scholar, happiest at the feet of a priest?”

“Possibly. In which case I would find it a little sad, perhaps, but nothing to condemn. For don’t you see, Lieutenant Marks, it would mean that that
was
the person he most wanted to be. And to me it was an entirely admirable person.”

M
ATHER LANDED AT O’HARE
Airport shortly before ten o’clock Chicago time. He rented a car and headed northeast over a complex of tollways entirely strange to him. The highways familiar to his youth were long since obsolete. Only the sky was familiar, the vast openness of prairie still unbroken. Homecoming. For him, the original Wasteland. The little soil he cherished here was mingled round his grandmother’s bones. Having the car, he thought he might visit her grave that afternoon … and not far from it, the graves of two people he had never known: his parents had been killed in an accident when he was two years old. He glanced at his watch and realized that in New York at that very hour, the memorial service for Peter Bradley was taking place. Tears and eulogy …

“
Mr. Mather, would you read ‘Adonais’ aloud to us
?” How brutally close to the mark his students had come in that estimate of him, thinking they would flatter him into wiling away the class exhibiting himself before an imaginary bier. He set his mind to following the road only; no more revisiting of past ignominies. And yet he was driving pell-mell toward the greatest of them all.

Albion had changed. The village which had taken its name from the preparatory school built in what was then near-wilderness had become a common town within commuting distance of the city. A giant new post office stood in the center of what had been a village square. The tearoom, once the refuge of sweet-starved youngsters who could get their fill of neither food nor love within the campus grounds, had been turned into a tavern. He parked in front of it. How often he had trooped a half-dozen teen-aged boys inside, crowded them into a red-upholstered booth and watched them stuff their pimpled faces. He could see them now counting out their money in small change and looking in jealous awe at the amount he always added to the waitress’s tip. It was in this shop, in a noisy, crowded booth that he had first become aware of the boy—his large, eloquent eyes full of articulateness while he stammered out the lonely boy’s story: a watcher at his mother’s wedding feast. But he spoke of the opposite of loneliness that day: he got the attention he sought by painting a picture of the hilarious good time he’d had, the champagne he’d got drunk on, the friend of his mother’s who had cornered him in the bedroom … Mather could see the boy still, the veins standing out on his splendid forehead. The others had fallen silent, eager for the sex detail, then raucous with scorn when the boy suddenly covered his face with his hands and wept.

The palms of Mather’s hands were wet. They left a mist on the chrome of the steering wheel which he watched through its slow evaporation.

He went into the tavern, ordered a drink, and waiting for it, went to the phone booth: he needed now to hold one continuity by starting another in its midst. He called the Albion School and asked for the headmaster’s office.

It was the headmaster himself who answered: “Rossiter speaking.” The clipped voice had retained its Olympian resonance.

“Eric Mather here, Clem.” Even now he found himself fashioning his speech delivery to the master’s pattern. “I’m driving up your way this afternoon. Could I drop in for half an hour?”

“By all means, Eric. I’ll see what I can set aside. Where are you now?”

Mather was about to lie, to say that he was in Chicago. But he had come for the sake of truth. “In the village,” he said.

“Then come along and I’ll have lunch sent up.”

Rossiter had been his friend. True, he had been saving himself and the school from scandal, but even so he had extended himself in the subsequent recommendations. If he had hoped by giving them to need never hear the name of Eric Mather again, no indication of it came through now in his voice. It was as cordial, he was sure, as Rossiter could be to any man who hadn’t a son to give to Albion.

The headmaster met him on the steps. He looked to have changed no more than had the gray stone of Albion. A little settling weight at the girth, but nobly cloaked. His hair was still sandy and his hand, extended slowly, was still moist and soft to the touch as a plucked pigeon.

They walked along a pebbled path, past the dining-hall windows. The clamor inside was intense.

“Boys don’t change much,” Mather said, “one generation to the next.”

“Nor does the menu, I’m afraid, at Albion. You weren’t fond of it then. Now I suppose you’re a gourmet—though I can’t say it shows.”

Mather was already aware of his own leanness, striding alongside the master. They reached the side door entering directly onto the master’s office. Rossiter performed his ritual of selecting the key from numerous others attached on a ring at one end of a chain that crossed his vest to his watch pocket.

The office still smelled of sweet pipe tobacco and Old Spice shaving lotion.

“I’ve got a tutors’ meeting at one thirty. That gives us a little time. None of that nonsense at the University, what—tutors and all that? You like it, Eric?”

“Yes, I like it.” He took the leather-backed chair Rossiter indicated at the side of the window and watched the master pull up his rocker and take his binoculars from the bookshelf. He was a bird watcher. The boys of Mather’s day, and no doubt still, thought the hobby a ruse behind which the master could spy on them.

“Then why are you here?”

Mather met the small gray eyes full on. It was Rossiter that looked away. “Because I think my offense at Albion has caught up with me.”

“Oh, dear me,” Rossiter murmured and busied himself with the adjustment of his binoculars.

The curious thing about being with Rossiter in Mather’s days at Albion was that he had never felt so much a man as in the master’s presence. Rossiter then, and presumably now, had a wife who, Mather suspected, had come with his appointment to the headmastership. She lived in what the boys called The Castle, on the bluff at the campus’s edge overlooking Lake Michigan. The master, a turret if not a tower of authority throughout the day, ambled home to her in the dusk, burdened with books and a small brown leather bag in which he kept a change of linen, measuring the path before him as might a peddler who had to sell something of which he was not especially proud.

“I must know now everything that happened afterwards,” Mather said, “and who knew about it.”

“There were not many sources,” Rossiter said, fussing still with the glasses. “You know, we have an oriole this spring. See that tamarack, the second one, next to the maple sapling? They dangle their nests like ladies’ handbags. She’s found a bit of Christmas tinsel and woven it into the nest.” He put the glasses to his eyes. “I suppose you’ve been discreet yourself? Psychiatry and all that, too?”

“I’m in love with a woman, Clem,” he said. He had not meant to say that. It evaded within himself the truth he was seeking. And Janet was worthy of more honor than it paid her, in his position. “But that has nothing to do with it,” he added.

Rossiter looked at him. “Oh, I should think it might. I should think it might.”

“I want to know who exactly knew.”

“At the time?” Rossiter put the binoculars away. “She ought to have built a window in that nest if she meant to hold my interest,” he said, obviously of the oriole. “Well, there was myself, the boy and his father—fortunately there was no mother—for you, that is, and our lawyer. He’s still our lawyer by the way, Wes Graham. A good friend to Albion, but he did not send his sons here.” Rossiter did not attempt to disguise the reproach implicit in the last sentence. “Still, I shouldn’t think there would have been any … leak, shall I say, from that source. And surely not from the boy involved: they would have fervently wished to forget the incident. I mean two people were involved, weren’t they? You would not say the boy was entirely innocent now, looking back, would you?”

“I would not say,” Mather said quietly.

“No, you wouldn’t,” Rossiter said dryly. “I recall it was I at the time who silenced his father by
that
suggestion.”

“‘At the time’—you said that before, just a minute ago. Has anyone talked about it since? Have
you
talked about it, Clem?”

“I resent it very much, Eric, your challenging me this way. No man could have had a more understanding friend than I was to you then. I virtually perjured myself, recommending you without qualification—to St. Monica’s, was it—that girls’ school in the East?”

“I have never been ungrateful. Nor have I given you reason to regret it.”

“You have done something, Eric, whether you were aware of it or not. At some recent time you have joined an organization—applied for a fellowship or some such activity that a discreet man, knowing his own record, would not have done.”

Mather was wracked with sudden trembling. He could hardly trust himself to speak. “Why do you say that?”

“For what other reason would you have been investigated by the F.B.I.?”

He moistened his lips. “I didn’t know that I was.”

“Now that I tell you it is so, can you think of any reason?”

The fear was sickening him, striking in the way it had when the police had driven up to him outside his house—fear, mostly of the unknown, fear now that his complicity in what had led to Peter’s death was better understood by others than by himself. Until now he had thought that there still was time, that he still had the chance to master himself and possibly in the end, what was to become of him. Deep in his own thoughts, he had lost the trend of Rossiter’s question. “Any reason for what?”

Rossiter made a gesture of impatience. “For the F.B.I. to be interested in that particular aspect of your career?”

“When did they come to see you?”

“Early February. During term examinations.”

“And they told you
specifically
what they wanted to know?”

“Directly,” Rossiter said. “Those boys don’t beat about the bush. They wanted to know if there were any incidents of perversion in your record.”

Mather flinched at the word. But having heard it spoken, he was better able to think, to get outside himself and look about. Early February: that was before Jerry had spoken to him in the park. Why at that time would the F.B.I. have been seeking information on him? “Didn’t they tell you why, give some reason for being interested in me?”

“My dear Mather, they never do. They ask all the questions, and completely ignore any you might ask of them.”

“You told them the truth?”