Poetic Justice Read online

  Praise for Amanda Cross

  and her Kate Fansler novels

  “If by some cruel oversight you haven’t discovered Amanda Cross, you have an uncommon pleasure in store for you.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Amanda Cross writes wonderfully witty mysteries full of well-developed characters and insights on modern foibles.”

  —United Press International

  “Cross is wise in the ways of academe, and her figures speak in literate, complete sentences, which surely is a requirement for nuanced ambiguity.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Treat yourself to some of the best mysteries around, and read all the Kate Fansler novels. You won’t be disappointed.”

  —Bay Area Reporter

  “Cross remains queen of the American literary whodunit.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  By Amanda Cross

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group:

  THE THEBAN MYSTERIES

  POETIC JUSTICE

  DEATH IN A TENURED POSITION

  IN THE LAST ANALYSIS

  THE JAMES JOYCE MURDER

  THE QUESTION OF MAX

  SWEET DEATH, KIND DEATH

  NO WORD FROM WINIFRED

  A TRAP FOR FOOLS

  THE PLAYERS COME AGAIN

  AN IMPERFECT SPY

  THE COLLECTED STORIES

  THE PUZZLED HEART

  HONEST DOUBT

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1970 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1970.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-109381

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80210-1

  v3.1

  Note

  It will, of course, be obvious to every reader

  that the quotations at the heads of the chapters,

  and most of the poetry scattered reverently

  throughout this work,

  are from the writings of W. H. Auden.

  The author is grateful to Random House, Inc.,

  for its permission to quote from the

  copyrighted works of Mr. Auden.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note

  PART ONE

  Before Death

  And where should we find shelter

  For joy or mere content

  When little was left standing

  But the suburb of dissent?

  PART TWO

  Death and After

  Truth was their model as they strove to build

  A world of lasting objects to believe in,

  Without believing earthenware and legend,

  Archway and song, were truthful or untruthful:

  The Truth was here already to be true.

  Part One

  Before Death

  though one cannot always

  Remember exactly why one has been happy,

  There is no forgetting that one was.

  Prologue

  PROFESSOR KATE FANSLER mounted the stairs to the upper campus where the azalea bushes were just coming into bud. She did not yet know, on that May morning, that the students had already occupied the administration building. Few knew as yet; tomorrow, it would be front-page news around the world. Now she walked past lawns just turning rich with green. The students, damn them, were trampling thoughtlessly across the new grass, heedless of all the cautionary signs and fences erected by the University’s tireless gardeners. The annoyance she had always felt at this desecration had grown, if anything, more acute with the years. She reprimanded herself for crotchetiness. “ ‘…unready to die,’ ” Kate thought, “but already at the stage when one starts to dislike the young.’ ” The lines were Auden’s and, as always, they gave Kate special pleasure. She was going that afternoon to see him receive a gold medal for poetry.

  Kate had never met Auden and was unlikely ever to do so. Yet there had existed between them for over ten years what she considered to be the perfect relationship. That it was wholly satisfactory to Auden was to be inferred from the fact that he had never heard of it; its satisfactions for Kate rested securely on the knowledge that he never would. Auden’s private person did not interest her. But, over the years, his poetry and such delightful facts about him as appeared in books by his friends had given her a new awareness of life. She had never read a word of criticism or scholarship about him and, safely and professionally ensconced as she was in the Victorian period, planned never to do so. Which just goes to show, as, indeed, did everything happening that day, that foresight is not a human attribute. At that very moment the students had opened the President’s files and begun to read his letters.

  Abruptly mounting her ramshackle wheel,

  Fortune has pedalled furiously away;

  but Kate, who did not know that, sat down and pleasurably regarded the newly blossomed tulips.

  Kate had first seen Auden a decade before on a television program which, since she did not own a set, she had gone to considerable inconvenience to catch. (Her hosts had been more inconvenienced still, since the program had begun at nearly midnight and went on into the small hours of the morning; abandoning Kate, Auden, and their living room, they had finally gone to bed.) Kate could no longer remember the occasion for the program, nor exactly what Auden and the others had been discussing, but she did remember that throughout the long hours Auden had called loudly and unsuccessfully for tea: apparently as difficult to obtain in a television studio as Coca-Cola in a four-star Parisian restaurant. Kate had never forgotten Auden’s frown. Reportedly, he had been frowning since boyhood. “I see him,” Christopher Isherwood had written, “frowning as he sings opposite me in the choir, surpliced, in an enormous Eton collar, above which his great red flaps of ears stand out, on either side of his narrow, scowling, pudding-white face.” They had been at school together: Isherwood was to present Auden with his gold medal that afternoon.

  “And so, after all these years, I am forcibly evicted from my office. They have taken over the College building too.”

  “Who has?” Kate stared at the man standing beside her.

  “Fate,” Frederick Clemance observed, “has, I see, granted you some additional moments of blessed ignorance. And what were you thinking of, sitting there contemplating tulips?”

  “Auden,” Kate said.

  “You don’t say?” Clemance sat down beside her on the bench. “Do you know his poetry well?”

  “I browse in it,” Kate admitted, “as though it were a meadow.” She regarded Clemance with a certain degree of discomfort. She had admired him for years, had studied with him as a graduate student (which for a woman had been a singular honor indeed), had followed with interest and devotion his growing reputation—he was now one of the University’s luminaries. She was, indeed, technically speaking, his colleague, but she had never before chatted with him.

  “There they go, you see. Crawling around the ledges like so many monkeys and s
houting obscenities. If you come close enough, they will spit down on you. Can it be a new form of panty-raid? At least,” Clemance added, “no one ever before involved me in that sort of escapade.”

  By standing on the bench they could indeed see the students, mostly bearded, and looking, even at that distance, unwashed, posed out the windows, hanging on the bars. “Perhaps, Miss Fansler,” Clemance said, climbing down, “you could do me a favor.” Kate smiled nervously. So, she imagined, Frederick the Great might have spoken to one of his courtiers.

  “If I can, of course,” she said.

  “It’s about Auden.”

  Kate stared at him blankly. Neither of them, of course, knew yet that their world had changed. For them, the academic machine was still grinding on. Had anyone suggested then to Kate or Clemance that they would soon see their colleagues obscenely mocked by students and clubbed by policemen, they would have questioned his competence. We shared, Kate would think later, a last hour of innocence.

  “I am directing a dissertation on Auden; it’s finished, actually; the work of a brilliant young man who’s eager to have the dissertation examination soon. Professor Pollinger is also on the committee. I was about to look for someone to take over in the final stages, because of all the pressures I’m under. You see how lucky I am to have found you. Do you know Auden?”

  “No,” Kate said. “And I’ve never approached his work academically. I really don’t feel qualified.”

  “You’ll do beautifully. Knowing Auden, I’ve never been able to feel properly academic about his work either. I’ll tell them at the English Office. Many thanks; I shall be off now and see where all this is leading. I am glad, in more ways than one, that we have met before the tulips.” He smiled and walked away. And indeed, in the next day or two, the academic machine, not yet sputtering, ground out an official notice to Kate: “Title of Dissertation: The Poetry of W. H. Auden; Name of Candidate: R. E. G. Cornford; Chairman of Dissertation Committee: Professor Fansler.”

  By two thirty that afternoon the students had taken a third building and delivered a series of ultimatums to the President of the University who, as usual, was somewhere else. Rumor announced that he was flying home. Meanwhile, the faculty had begun to meet in groups, discussing what action they might take. The Vice-President, temporarily in charge, began to talk of calling the police. Kate hailed a taxi and asked to be driven to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  But she was not to see Auden in person; that much was immediately clear. At the annual ceremonies of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the members, and those who are to receive awards or be inducted into membership, sit on the stage in numbered seats. The programs held by the audience contain a diagram of the stage indicating who is to occupy each seat. Neither Auden nor Isherwood was there. At the end of the program, Mr. Glenway Wescott agreed to read both Isherwood’s speech presenting the gold medal to Auden and Auden’s acceptance of it.

  The audience was disappointed, but Kate, seated in the balcony, was strangely satisfied; it had always been their words she cared for, not their presences. Isherwood’s short speech spoke of “the transformation of seven-year-old Auden Minor into the sixty-one-year-old poet whom we honor today,” and ended with Isherwood’s taking “advantage of his non-presence to tell him how very proud I am to be his friend.” “Dear Christopher,” Auden’s acceptance speech began; and then: “For me, poetry is firstly a game.” Which, Kate thought, listening to the voice of Mr. Wescott, is why we can allow him to be profound. Who but Auden could have written so fine a poem about his bedroom:

  Don Juan needs no bed, being far too impatient to undress, nor do Tristan and Isolde, much too in love to care for so mundane a matter, but unmythical mortals require one, and prefer to take their clothes off if only to sleep.

  It was, in fact, an odd poem for Kate to have thought of—had she, perhaps, possessed that day unrecognized prophetic powers? For at her university no one was to undress and go to sleep for an entire week. By the time Mr. Cornford’s dissertation arrived at her office, Kate was far too tired even to resent on Auden’s behalf the hand of academe.

  Though mild clear weather

  Smile again on the shire of your esteem

  And its colors come back, the storm has changed you:

  You will not forget, ever,

  The darkness blotting out hope, the gale

  Prophesying your downfall.

  One

  THAT classes at the University began, as they were scheduled to, on September 17, was a matter of considerable astonishment to everyone. There was not a great deal to be said for revolutions—not, at any rate, in Kate’s opinion—but they did accustom one to boredom in the face of extraordinary events, and a pleasant sense of breathless surprise at the calm occurrence of the expected. Kate said as much to Professor Castleman as they waited for the elevator in Lowell Hall.

  “Well,” he answered, “I might have found myself even more overcome with amazement if they had not managed to put my course in historical methods, which never has less than a hundred and fifty students, into a classroom designed to hold ninety only if the students sit two in a chair, which, these days, they probably prefer to do. Though come to think of it,” he added as the elevator, empty, went heedlessly past, apparently on some mysterious mission of its own, “I don’t know why students should expect seats at lectures, since audiences can no longer expect them at the theater. We went to a play last night—I use the word ‘play,’ you understand, to describe what we expected to see, not what we saw—and not only were there no seats, the entertainment principally consisted of the members of the cast removing their clothes and urging, gently of course, that the audience do likewise. My wife and I, fully clothed, felt rather like missionaries to Africa insufficiently indoctrinated into the antics of the aborigines. Shall we walk down? One thing at least has not changed in this university: the elevators. They have never worked, they do not now work, and though an historian should never speak with assurance of the future, I am willing to wager that they never will. Where are you off to? Don’t tell me, I know. A meeting. What’s more, I can tell you what you are going to discuss: relevance.”

  “That,” said Kate, “would be the expected. As a matter of fact, I have a doctoral examination: the poetry of W. H. Auden. He wrote a good bit of clever poetry to your muse.”

  “Mine? Gracious, have I got a muse? Just what I’ve needed all these years. Do you think I could trade her in for a cleaning woman, three days a week with only occasional ironing? My wife would be prostrate with gratitude.”

  “Trade Clio in? Impossible. It is she into whose eyes ‘we look for recognition after we have been found out.’ ”

  “Did Auden write that? Obviously he’s never been married. That’s a description of any wife. I thought you were in the Victorian period.”

  “I am, I am. Auden was born in 1907. He only missed Victoria by six years. And don’t be so frivolous about Clio. Auden called her ‘Madonna of silences, to whom we turn When we have lost control.’ ”

  “Well, get hold of her,” Professor Castleman said. “I’m ready to turn.”

  The dissertation examination was not, in fact, scheduled for another hour. Kate wandered back toward her office, not hurrying, because no sooner would she reach Baldwin Hall, in which building dwelt the Graduate English Department, than she would be immediately accosted, put on five more committees, asked to examine some aspect of the curriculum about which she knew nothing (like the language requirement for medieval studies) and to settle the problems of endlessly waiting students concerning, likely as not, questions not only of poetry and political polarization, but of pot and the pill as well. Kate strolled along in the sort of trance to which she had by now grown accustomed. It was the result of fatigue, mental indigestion, a sense of insecurity which resembled being tossed constantly in a blanket as much as it resembled anything, and, strangest of all, a love for the University which was as irrational as it was unrewarded.

  Sh
e would have been hard put to say, she thought looking about her, what it was she loved. Certainly not the administration (had there been one, which, since they had resigned one by one like the ten little Indians, there wasn’t). Not the Board of Governors, a body of tired, ultraconservative businessmen who could not understand why a university should not be run like a business or a country club. The students, the faculty, the place? It was inexplicable. The love one shares with a city is often a secret love, Camus had said; the love for a university was apparently no less so.

  “Kate Fansler!” a voice said. “How very, very nice. ‘I must telephone Kate,’ I have said to Winthrop again and again, ‘we must have lunch, we must have dinner, we must meet.’ And now, you see, we have.”

  Kate paused on the steps of Baldwin Hall and smiled at the sight of Polly Spence. Talk of the unexpected! Polly Spence belonged to the world of Kate’s family—she had actually been, years ago, a protégée of Kate’s mother’s—and there emanated from her the aura of St. Bernard’s—where her sons had gone to school—and Milton Academy, the Knickerbocker dancing classes and cotillions.

  “I know,” Polly Spence said, “my instincts tell me that if I wait here patiently you will say something, perhaps even something profound, like ‘Hello.’ ”

  “It’s good to see you, Polly,” Kate said. “I don’t know what’s become of me. I feel like the heroine of that Beckett play who is buried up to her neck and spends every waking moment rummaging around in a large, unorganized handbag. Come to see the action, as the young say?”

  “Action? Profanity, more likely. Four-letter-word-bathroom, four-letter-word-sex, and really too tiresome, when I think that my own two poor lambs were positively glared at if they said ‘damn.’ It’s not an easy world to keep up with.”