The James Joyce Murder Read online

  “Bringing with her an eight-year-old boy named Leo whom she had acquired at the nearest orphanage.”

  “Reed, you’re not paying attention. I told you Leo was my nephew. There is no connection between Leo and Veronica.”

  “Of course not. Silly of me to have thought it. Do we risk the blueberry pie or just settle for coffee? Good. Veronica, you were saying, came to see you.”

  “There’s no need to tell you this if you’re going to be petulant.”

  “I petulant? I have the world’s sweetest disposition, as who knows better than you. It is only that, as I motored up here in my little Volkswagen, I pictured talking to you by the fire in peace and quiet, instead of which I find you in the midst of a positive holocaust of male activity. Do you suppose if we went back now the fireside would be deserted? At least all those dreadful boys may have shrieked their way off into the night, stuffed with wienies.”

  “Reed, don’t you care for children?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Odd, I never knew that.”

  “I would have told you, as the maid said when resigning from the house where they kept alligators, but I didn’t think the question would come up.”

  “Well, well. I’m afraid my hearth will not yet be sufficiently deserted. Shall we take a walk?”

  “Since I don’t appear to have a choice in the matter, I acquiesce with my usual grace.” Reed paid the bill, and they walked into the evening. “Do continue,” Reed said. “Veronica came to see you . . .”

  “Yes. She explained that her father had left all his possessions including his library and papers, and the ‘boarding house,’ as you call it, to her—and would I help her to determine exactly what was in the collection so that it might be best disposed of. I pointed out that someone who knew the market value of these things would be more to the point, but it seems she’s not interested in money, but in getting the books and papers to the places where they will do the most good. She had already been besieged by universities, the Library of Congress, and so forth and so on.”

  “Was there any particular reason why she should come to you?”

  “No reason, or—if your mind happens to work that way—every reason. I knew and loved her father, who had gone out of his way to be kind to me on many occasions; I think she understood that I would welcome a chance to serve him, even posthumously. There aren’t, I suppose, many people who realize that to provide an opportunity for service may be in itself a service. Do you follow me?”

  “Exactly, as you know.”

  “Also, there weren’t really all that many people she could go to. All she suggested, of course, was that I take a couple of days to look through things—families with collections of papers rarely have a clue as to the work involved in sorting them out. You know about the Boswell papers found in a croquet box in an old castle?” Reed shook his head.

  “Remind me to tell you, the next conversation but one. It became clear that the collection ought to be sorted, and that it would take more than just me to do it. I began, in the vaguest way, to fool with the idea of spending the summer here instead of dancing off to Europe.”

  “I begin to see, as through a glass darkly.”

  “A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. That cloud was soon joined by another, Leo.”

  “I wait, ears eagerly attuned, for an explanation of Leo. To be frank, I have never fathomed the mystery of your familial connections.”

  “Familial connections are always difficult to explain, and impossible to sever. Not that one really wants to, I suppose. However trying one’s family, there is some call of blood to blood which one is somehow impelled to answer. I have nothing in common with any member of my family, and yet in crisis, personal or national, one always rallies round.”

  “What is a national crisis?”

  “Christmas.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “This crisis, however, was personal. Leo is the middle one of three children, and apparently all middle children exist precariously upon the earth, threatened from above and below, so to speak, and trembling with insecurity, which often takes the form of obstinance, violence and pure laziness. I don’t claim to understand why, if you can be beautifully secure thinking of yourself as an older child, or a younger child, you can’t say to yourself ‘I am the middle child’ and go on to something else, but then child psychology has always been beyond me. In any event, Leo was doing poorly at school, badly at home, and indifferently at Group.”

  “Group?”

  “Reed, I really think you’re trying to be perverse. Surely you know what Group is—didn’t you go to one on Saturdays when you were a little boy in New York?”

  “I was not a little boy in New York. I was a little boy in Baltimore, Maryland.”

  “Oh. A backward community, obviously. Groups are to knit up the loose ends of offsprings’ hours when parents might otherwise go mad. For a walloping sum. Group takes your child to the park, ice skating, or climbing on the Palisades. Leo did not care for Group. Personally, I see this as a sign of clear intellectual ability, but Leo’s parents, and the child guidance counselor they consulted, looked on it in a different light.

  “All this, of course, would have had nothing in the world to do with me,” Kate continued, “if fate, which the Greeks understood so well and we so poorly, had not taken a hand. Leo’s parents decided to give a family dinner party to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and in an unfortunate moment of familial sentimentality, I consented to attend. All three of my brothers are constantly trying to draw me into their various social circles, though they have, thank God, rather given up introducing me to socially acceptable bachelors. I’m getting older, the bachelors are becoming more inveterate in their bachelorhood, and anyway I can never be trusted to behave properly. Leo’s father is the youngest brother. Reed! What an angel you are to listen to all this. The truth is, I guess, I’ve been rather lacking a sympathetic ear.”

  “Is this youngest brother as stuffy as the rest?”

  “Stuffier. But he’s also the one who invests money for me, and helps me with my income tax, so I’ve developed more of a modus vivendi with him than with the others. What possessed me, at the night of their anniversary dinner, to mention Sam Lingerwell and his library and his house in the country, I cannot imagine. True, I was graveled for lack of matter in conversation there, as always, but I am still inclined to blame the gods. However, the fact that I might be spending the summer in the country implanted itself in the not particularly fervent imagination of my brother, and a week later I got an invitation to lunch.

  “This in itself,” Kate said, stopping to light a cigarette, and perching herself uncertainly on a tree stump, “was ominous. He said he had a favor to ask of me, and hoped I would lunch with him at White’s, where they serve Beefeater martinis for which, he remembered, I had a fondness. It would never occur to my brother to come uptown and have lunch at a place convenient for me. Favor or no favor, he works and I—well, he has never really faced the fact that I work, and anyway, what do professors do? With my usual dexterity, I leapt to the conclusion that it was a question of money. It has always bothered my brother that although I inherited exactly as much money as he did, I have been content to live off the income, and let my stocks grow, or divide, or whatever it is stocks are always doing. As long as I never actually touched my capital, my brother couldn’t really complain if I wasn’t trying as hard as I ought to be to double my portfolio or turn over my investments or any of those obscure financial operations. But I thought, well, probably he’s gone and discovered he needs a little ready cash, and he’s going to try to negotiate some complicated thing. I went, prepared to have two martinis and to extract every ounce of satisfaction from his monetary problems.

  “I couldn’t have been more wrong.” Kate made a little hole in the earth and buried her cigarette end. “My brother is very rich indeed, and probably w
ould have been startled to death to know I’d even thought he would be interested in my slender funds. He, needless to say, has doubled his inheritance many times over, as well as earning all sorts of money in that Wall Street law firm of his. It transpired, when I was barely through my first martini, that he wanted to talk about Leo.

  “What it all came down to was that Leo was behind in school, recalcitrant when he wasn’t aggressive, and he needed a summer devoted to being tutored, not being sent away to a camp, and living in a household of which he would be a single juvenile member. In short, my brother, putting together Leo’s problems, the advice from the guidance counselor, and my unfortunate confidence about my summer plans, suggested that I take Leo for the summer, complete with tutor, give him that sort of ‘I take you for granted and like you just as you are’ treatment which appears to be my manner with children—the truth is, if forced to talk to children, I talk to them exactly as I talk to anyone else—and see if we might get Leo back on the rails. My brother had promised to take his wife to Europe for the summer, and I gathered, without exactly being told, that any disappointment in this matter would be likely to render my brother’s life uncomfortable for a considerable period of time. He offered to pay for the tutor, whom I would hire, to lend me his elegant car, and to bear the expenses of the whole ‘boarding house’ operation.”

  “So you agreed?”

  “Of course not. I absolutely declined. I told my brother that he and his wife could jolly well take a house themselves and minister to Leo. I finished my two Beefeater martinis, my lunch, capped it off with an excellent brandy, and departed in a cloud of righteous indignation.”

  “Kate,” Reed said, “you are the most maddening woman I have ever met. I can’t imagine, for example, why I, who could’ be happily resting in an air-conditioned apartment in New York, should be walking along a country road with you, being devoured by mosquitoes and uncomfortably aware, from the tickling in my nose, that I am about to begin a prolonged attack of hay fever.”

  “One doesn’t get hay fever in July.”

  “Well, whatever one gets in July, I’m getting. There! You see.” Reed sneezed violently “Yet here I am, slapping at mosquitoes, hating the country, and an exile from even such house as you have in it. How did you end up with Leo, for God’s holy sake?”

  “He ran away and came to me. It became quite clear that everyone was trying so hard to understand him that he longed to be in the company of someone who didn’t understand him and wouldn’t even try. I sent him back home, of course, but I promised he might spend the summer with me. My brother, with the mulishness that marks all simple-minded people, was outraged that Leo should have run away to me. Anyhow, that’s how the ‘boarding house’ came so overwhelmingly into existence.”

  Chapter Two

  An Encounter

  Reed, who had fallen into what fitful sleep he could find between the discomforts of mosquito bites, sneezing and confusion, was awakened the next morning by a boy’s voice saying, quite distinctly, almost it seemed in his ear: “Hurray! I got the bitch, I’m sure I did!” This was followed by an older voice answering in stern tones: “You must not use the word ‘bitch.’ As I have tried to explain, there is language one uses with one’s associates, and language one uses with one’s elders, and these overlap only about fifty percent of the time. ‘Bitch’ is not an incidence of overlapping, except when applied to the female of the canine species. But,” the voice added, in lower tones, “I do believe you nailed her.”

  Reed sat up in bed. Probably it was a dream. He found his watch on the night table and consulted it: five forty-five. Impossible. Yet the second hand of his grandfather’s excellent watch continued to plod its way round its small dial. This was it, the absolute, unarguable end. He would climb into his car and be gone as soon as he could capture a cup of coffee, Kate or no Kate. However fond he was of Kate, there were experiences he was not prepared to undergo. Kate—Reed lay back for a moment and thought about Kate. A shout from some female in what seemed the throes of a temper tantrum could be heard at a certain distance. Not Kate: an unpleasant voice. Kate’s voice . . . Reed was asleep.

  When he awoke again his grandfather’s watch said ten minutes to ten, and all was golden silence. Perversely, he wondered what had happened to everybody. Dressed, he tiptoed into the living room: deserted. No one burst into the room or catapulted down the steps. Relaxing slightly, Reed moved on into the dining room, where he found a place set, with a sign saying “For you” sitting neatly on the plate. A glass of orange juice stood on the sideboard in a bowl of chopped ice; next to it stood an electric coffeepot, a toaster, some bread and a box of cold cereal. Propped against the cereal was a sign saying “No eggs served after nine-thirty.” Grinning, Reed carried his orange juice to the table and picked up the newspaper lying by his plate. A newspaper in the country! Imagine! His astonishment turned to bemusement as he noticed it was yesterday’s Berkshire Eagle. On it Kate had written: “In case reading a paper at breakfast is a necessity.” Reed settled down to the Berkshire Eagle.

  The silence of the household persisted through breakfast and followed him out onto the lawn. It was one of those days, Reed decided, when even the person most persistently skeptical of rural charms succumbs to the conviction that the creation of the earth was not an absolute nonsense. A hummingbird, apparently motionless in midair, darted from flower to flower. Reed gazed happily about him.

  The guest room in which he had spent the night looked out over the back of the house; a fence, with a gate in it, ran perhaps six feet from his window. The voices he had overheard must have been leaning on the gate. Who, Reed wondered, was the bitch they had “got”? Turning from the gate, he followed a path which led to a driveway and thence to a road. He would take a walk. He paused in the road to light his pipe and muse on the peace of rural life. Apart from the telephone poles and electric wires nothing had changed, he was certain, in a hundred years. On a distant hillside, cows moved in the sunlight. Reed decided he quite liked cows forming part of the landscape on a distant hillside. Puffing at his pipe, he thrust his hands in his pockets and started down the road. Any illusions he might have had about a rural universe untouched by the industrial revolution were immediately shattered by four simultaneous uproars. First he heard the roar of jet engines, and, looking up, saw the white trail of what was probably the eleven o’clock jet from Boston to Chicago. On the road an old jalopy roared by, apparently with a souped-up engine, going. Reed was prepared to swear, eighty miles an hour, and driven, to judge from the glimpse he managed to get, by an adolescent whose arrogance, together with his engine’s exhaust, floated out behind the car in a general pollution of the atmosphere. On a field to Reed’s left, a tractor started up, and down the road from him a giant milk truck performed some mechanized maneuver. Reed retreated into the driveway.

  Perhaps on the whole it would be better to go through the gate and down across the fields. He unlatched the gate, walked through it, latched it again (for the field was clearly for cows, though none were presently inhabiting it), and started to stroll. He was immediately joined by the large brown dog, but its aim seemed companionship rather than violence. Reed again lit his pipe, thrust his hands into his pockets, and stepped forward into an enormous mound of fresh cow dung.

  His remarks, happily audible to none but the brown dog, were certainly such as might have been heard on the countryside a hundred years ago, perhaps on a similar occasion. Some aspects of rural life were clearly unchanged. These did not, however, include the extraordinary machine which, headed in Reed’s direction across a field of hay, seemed to be making the most frightful clatter and flinging huge objects into the air. With a shrug indicating that he would have to throw out the shoes in any case, Reed set off across the fields in the direction of the machine. The dog, who considered that some union had been consummated by the occasion of Reed’s swearing, trotted along.

  Together man and dog approached the machin
e, which seemed, with some amazing mechanical awareness, to have seen them coming and to have paused in its flinging operations. As they approached, however, Reed could determine that if mechanization had reached farming, automation had not: the machine was being pulled by a tractor, and the tractor was being driven by a man. He awaited Reed’s approach in an attitude of pleasant anticipation.

  “Stepped in it, eh?” he asked when Reed was within earshot.

  “Could you see all the way from there?”

  “Just could tell by the way you hopped about. Visiting Miss Fansler?”

  “Temporarily,” Reed answered, amused to see that curiosity extended to the males hereabouts. It occurred to him that this might be the husband of the disliked Mary Bradford who came to borrow vinegar.

  “My name’s Bradford,” the man on the tractor said, in confirmation of this thought.

  “Amhearst,” Reed answered.

  “That’s the name of the town where I went to college,” Bradford said. “U. Mass. Agricultural School. Are you surprised that a farmer went to college?”

  “I am,” Reed said frankly. “I thought farmers considered book learning nonsense.”

  “Those that do go broke. Farming’s changed more in the last twenty years than in a thousand years before that.”

  “I can see that.” Reed pointed to the baler.

  “That is quite a machine,” Bradford said. “It picks up the hay, pushes it through that machine there, which binds it into bales and wraps them with string, and then tosses the bales into that wagon. When the wagon’s full, I use my other tractor to pull it back to the barn, where the bales are put on an elevator which carries them to the hayloft.”

  “What do you do if the machine breaks down?”

  “Fix it. A farmer who can’t fix his own machinery is in trouble. Want to see this thing work? Hop up.”