The Memorial Hall Murder (8 page)

“No embalming? They must be out of their mind! It'll swell up! It'll stink! Well, we've got it in the fridge. Maybe it'll keep. Let's hope it's cool on Sunday.” Mr. Ratchit reached over and poked Homer in the chest. “You know, you're not in such great shape yourself, friend. Three quarters of an inch of blubber there. Maybe an inch. You ought to get out in the open more, you know?”

Chapter Twelve

Homer and Mary Kelly came to the church early because Mary was going to sing with the chorus. Mary dodged around to the back, and Homer started for the front, but early as he was, he suspected he might be too late to get a seat. People were streaming into the building from every direction, crowding on the stairs, pressing thickly into the doorway. Most of them were students, or people the same age as the students. Some of them looked bizarre to Homer's innocent eye, a motley lot, a little odd and wild, dressed in the fantastic plumage of street people selling bangles or handing out religious pamphlets in the square.

Homer waited patiently on the stairs, moving slowly upward one step at a time. To amuse himself he studied the delicate white spire, floating above the roof like a piece of intricately cut and folded paper. The spire was too light for the monumental pillars of the porches, he decided, but the building itself was in keeping with the other buildings in the Yard. It was better matched to the local architecture than was Memorial Hall, over there across Cambridge Street. But this church was a war memorial too, he knew that. When he squeezed through the vestry into the main body of the church, he saw the tablets on the high south wall, recording in gold letters the names of the Harvard dead in World War II. World War I had a room to itself, off to the side. He could see it through an open door, all polished marble and solemn inscriptions and flags.

The church was nearly full. The ushers were seating people in the rear seats under the balcony. Homer sat down in the last row and took off his coat and looked around. The place was luminous and white. Through the tall windows light flooded the high ceiling and the massive white columns and the rows and rows of white-painted pews. Hot air warmed the church, blowing out of the registers under the windows, and the great space was comfortable with red cushions and red carpets. Not dark and drafty like Memorial Hall, where there was nothing to sit down on while you contemplated the martial sacrifice of those who had gone before. But this building. seemed to expect a well-groomed sort of mourner. It wasn't a primitive holy place like Memorial Hall, where some remnant of the bloody superstitions of the Middle Ages seemed to stain the dark tracery of the woodwork, matching the carnage of the battles in which those young Union soldiers had died. Of course, the two world wars had been worse, if anything. But the polite perfection and bright light of this handsome building gave no hint that mankind could ever under any circumstances be anything but reasonable and heedful of the requirements of etiquette. It wasn't like Memorial Hall, where the air was thick with myths of death and resurrection.

Homer stared at his big right shoe, which was skewed sideways against the back of the pew in front of him. He wondered if anyone had erected a memorial to the Harvard men who had died in Vietnam. Probably not. Altogether too controversial and nasty a little war. Too sticky a little problem. For the Civil War you got a building. For World Wars I and II you got a building. For Vietnam you got a dean carried
out
of a building. Heads busted in by the cops.

“Excuse me.” The usher was squeezing a crowd of people into Homer's pew. Homer looked up and moved over, and then he saw the Vietnam memorial. It was a small plaque on the north wall. Beside it hung another small tablet for the dead of the Korean War. “Sorry,” said the girl sitting next to Homer. She glanced at him apologetically and socked him in the hip with her bony little haunch. The usher was wedging still one more friend and admirer of Hamilton Dow's into the pew.

The ushers had their work cut out for them. The church was full. Homer looked over his shoulder and saw large jowly faces jammed in the doorway, raising their eyebrows at Homer's usher. And now the usher was looking across the rows of seated bodies, searching for somebody expendable. He was walking forward, bending over the scruffy boy in front of Homer, murmuring something about prominent alumni.

The student didn't move a whisker. He spoke up clearly. “Fuck the alumni.” A fleeting expression of pleasure bloomed on the bland face of the usher, who then softly withdrew and approached the prominent alumni, shaking his head.

Something was going on up front. Homer craned his neck to see past the frowsy head in front of him. A mighty woman in a black pyramidal veil was creating a disturbance. She looked gigantic and monumental like the Great Sphinx, only all in motion. It was the woman Homer had seen on the sidewalk outside Memorial Hall. Her two tubby little boys were behind her now, forming a phalanx. She was hissing at the usher, jabbing her finger at an empty pew in the front row. And now the usher was hastening to the back of the church to consult with Homer's usher. “But it's the President's pew. It's all I've got left. I can't put her in the President's pew. I've already got to get all the pallbearers in there. She can't sit in his pew. But what am I going to do with her? She says she's Ham's mistress, for Christ's sake.”

“Oh, God, it's Mrs. Esterhazy. She's not his mistress. I mean, good God, just look at her. Go ahead, put her in there. She's going to start swinging in a minute. The hell with President Cheever.”

The organ began filling the church with sound, and there were trumpeters, too, behind the choir screen, and then Vick's chorus began to sing, massive and serene.

James Cheever was doing his best to control himself. He had been chivvied about in the crowd, and pushed aside to make room for the casket, and then prodded to walk directly behind the pallbearers. Now he was walking slowly, holding back, because he was afraid the pallbearers weren't going to make it, they were having such a struggle with the coffin, they were so burdened by the weight of the gluttonous body within. The idea of bringing the casket into the church at all was grotesque. A memorial service would have been in better taste. And the choice of music, good lord. “Worthy Is the Lamb That Was Slain.” As if Dow were some sort of latter-day Jesus Christ. Then the President of Harvard stopped short beside his customary pew and gazed thunderstruck at Mrs. Esterhazy and her two sons. The woman gazed fiercely back at him, streams of water pouring down her cheeks from eyes that were black blotches of mascara.

President Cheever turned boiled eyes on the usher. “I can't sit here,” he said.

“I'm sorry, sir. It's all there is left. Now, if you'll all just push over as far as you can, the pallbearers will just squeeze in here alongside.”

One of the pallbearers was a young red-headed boy with a big nose. The President of Harvard recognized him immediately, because he often saw him in Massachusetts Hall, washing windows and emptying wastebaskets. The whole thing was a plot, a conspiracy to make the President of Harvard look ridiculous, squeezing him into his own pew in the front of the church between a janitor and a prostitute. It was just one more example of the way everything connected with Ham Dow had brought him bad fortune from the beginning. Well, it was the last time. From now on the pew would be his alone. The white Corinthian columns with the rams' heads and the four signs of the gospels and the doves of the holy spirit, they would be his too, in a manner of speaking, and the fanciful pulpit, and the serene classical spaces filled with music. No longer would he have to share them with Hamilton Dow.

James Cheever folded his arms on his chest and glanced to the side and nodded across the aisle at Julia Chamberlain. Julia was sitting beside Sloan Tinker, looming above Tinker and the whole row of gray-headed faculty, looking as usual like one of the caryatids on the Acropolis. Julia was blowing her nose dolefully. It passed through President Cheever's mind to wonder if she would grieve for him, if it were his own funeral rather than Dow's. Because it had come down to that, very nearly. A choice. Oh, Julia had pretended to be impartial. But her bias showed through. Her true feelings were perfectly clear.

Who was that climbing into the pulpit? Oh, good lord, not Charley Flynn? Wouldn't you just know. James Cheever fixed his eyes on the choir screen, refusing to look at the idiot as he put his hand in the pocket of his blue jeans and began the eulogy. But, in all the pews to left and right, people were sniffing, sobbing, breaking down. The President of Harvard reached into his breast pocket for his handkerchief and passed it across his nose. It should not be said of him that he was lacking in feeling.

“Homer, here we are.” Mary was beside him in the crowded vestry, coming up from the locker room downstairs with Vick.

Vick's fingers pierced Homer's coat sleeve. “Homer,” said Vick.

“Well, now, Vick,” said Homer, patting her on the back, “the music was magnificent. You did him proud.”

Vick's hair had been twisted into thick pigtails and pinned up at the back of her head, but now the pressure inside her skull burst the pins. Her pigtails sprang loose and one braid came apart, its three rivers of red hair untwisting in one flood. “Yes,” said Vick. “I think he would have liked it. Nobody was allowed to cry. I mean, until we were all through. Then we cried buckets. Now listen, Homer, what are you going to do about it? I mean, it's your turn now.”

“What do you mean, what am I going to do?” Homer stepped out of doors onto the porch, urged along by the throng pressing up against his back. “My dear girl, I'm no longer an official member of any law-enforcing body. I can't—”

“But don't you
care?”
Vick hung on to Homer and pounded his arm. “Oh, I know you didn't really know him, or anything like that, but just the same. Mary, he's got to do something, doesn't he?”

“Homer, dear,” began Mary, “I really think—”

“Now look here,” said Homer. “There are at least four or five different outfits already involved in this investigation: the Boston Police Department, the Cambridge Police Department, the Cambridge Fire Department, the Harvard Police, and the United States Treasury Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Not to mention the FBI. So what possible reason could there be for me …?”

“But they don't have the personal sort of close-up, you know, relationship,” said Vick.

“My dear Vick, I never met the man.” Homer stumbled, and almost lost his footing.

“Oh, Homer, watch out, you poor great ox,” said Mary. “Now just be careful. The steps begin right here. She's right, you know, Homer. Vick's right. You can't just stand there. You've got to do something.”

“I'm not just standing here. I'm falling downstairs.” Wedged in by a thick crush of human bodies pouring inexorably forward, Homer bungled the top step and sent a wave of imbalance reeling forward among deans, professors, students, Overseers, and miscellaneous nonacademic types from Harvard Square and the back streets of Cambridge. “Oh, God,” said Homer, throwing his arms around the great bosom of a matron at the bottom of the stairs' “I don't know. I just don't know.”

Chapter Thirteen