Honest Doubt (7 page)

Richard Fowler, speaking from New Jersey, sounded so nice it was obvious why Clifton hadn't kept him. He agreed to meet me in New York (“Any excuse to revisit that great city is welcome”) and told me he was a different man from the one I would have met three years ago at Clifton.

“Do you garden?” he surprisingly asked. I denied any such inclination.

“Well,” he said, “since settling in New Brunswick, we've taken up gardening. That is, my partner's taken it up, and urges me to join in; physical and spiritual therapy, he calls it. I gave him a gardening book, and he read me this bit out of it that perfectly describes the English department at Clifton. The gardening expert's describing something called tickseed—
Coreopsis
lanceolata,
officially. No, wait a minute, there is a point to this story. The instructions for growing tickseed might have been internalized by the tenured faculty at Clifton as the way to treat inferiors. Hold on.” He must have reached for the book, because he didn't leave the phone. “Tickseed, we are told, ‘prefers well-aerated sandy soil with some humus; but the soil should not be too good as the plant produces more leaves than flowers in fertile ground.'
²
Not too good soil and us growing more leaves than flowers says it all, trust me.” We made an appointment to meet the next evening. “Don't worry,” he assured me before disconnecting, “I won't confine my evidence to horticultural metaphors.”

We arranged to meet the next evening at Knickerbocker's in the Village—booths (I reserved one) and more down-to-earth food than I ate with Dawn. It occurred to me that dinners were playing a bigger part than usual in this investigation, but of course I would count them as legitimate expenses, which they were, when I handed in my account. After all, I was dealing with academics.

Once I'd made the appointment with Richard Fowler, I called Kate to see if I could stop in for a chat. I'd more or less gathered that late afternoon was drinky time around the Fansler establishment, and that intriguing chat might be welcome. I had to be careful not to overdo my welcome or to make my remarks less than interesting. But what I had to say to Kate wouldn't be a worry to me this time. She couldn't make it that particular afternoon, she said, but she could usually make it; I shouldn't stop calling, especially since, as I'd seen, she would frankly let me know if it didn't work out. I was feeling a bit let down, but maybe that was because everything about this case was confusing and not exactly getting anywhere.

Richard Fowler was waiting for me outside of Knickerbocker's, leaning against the entranceway. He seemed to recognize me as I walked up, and led me into the restaurant as though this were the very evening in his whole life he had been waiting for. I liked him with an immediacy rare with me when investigating murder cases, though I had to admit it was growing less rare with this case. Still, he seemed so much less tense than the academics I had met so far, less serious, more inclined toward fun or frivolity. They showed us into our booth, and handed us menus.

“I can tell we're going to get on,” he said. “I'm gay and you're fat, and we're both lovable. And we both understand that if I'm going to help you figure out who offed dreary old Haycock, it's because I'm against murder in general, not his in particular.”

It hardly required my fine investigative eye to discern that he was bursting to tell me what he thought of the English department at Clifton College, and that what he had to say was not likely to be modified either in tone or content. Everyone else I'd met during this case had been so restrained, or anyway so careful, that I felt wonderfully relaxed and hopeful. When the server asked us if we wanted a drink, Fowler said he didn't feel like wine, could he have a vodka martini?

I said sure, he could have whatever he wished, and I would have one too so that we could lift similar glasses to the afterlife of Professor Haycock. He immediately got the message that he could drink all he wanted on the lady detective, but that she would probably stop at one, being as it were in harness. An insightful chap.

“I know,” he said to reassure me, “a little buzz is one thing, a cheery fog is quite another; you're working.”

“That's it,” I said. I'd left the bike at home, as I always do for dinner engagements—what is dinner without some proper liquid accompaniment? With Dawn I could finish my half bottle of wine and keep up with her and her revelations; with Rick, as he asked me to call him, I hadn't a clue what he would say or what I would want to ask, and I was grateful to him for realizing that.

I was feeling a pleasant glow even before our drinks came. Well, why not? Within a few days I had met Kate Fansler and Antonia Lansbury, two women I was able to talk to on a more or less equal basis. Well, not equal, I guess, more from me up to them. This was a first for me. In my work I talked to a lot of men on what you might call a level playing field, but with women I almost always looked down on them at least a little—I admit it—and had to coax what information I wanted out of them with patience and skill that it had taken a lot of time to learn. Most of the women who came to me as clients were in trouble, hadn't ever dealt with a private eye, and were reluctant to come forth with what was actually on their minds. I might feel sorry for them before I was through, I might despise them, but I wouldn't expect to learn much from their particular personalities. Funny that I'd never thought of this before I met Kate and Antonia. Maybe there was something to be said for the academic life. Not, I reminded myself, that the men were likely to turn out to be any special gift or any different from men I'd met up with before.

I gathered my wandering thoughts together as the waiter brought our martinis. We raised our glasses and clinked them together.

“To the passing of the old order,” Rick said.

“To the solving of this murder,” I said. He might have to live with the old order or the new, but I had a case to get moving on.

“I don't know who did for old Haycock,” he said. “If I did I'd tell you. It wasn't me—and you mustn't let that denial make you suspicious of me. I might kill someone; I don't say I wouldn't, and if I became murderous, someone like Haycock would be a likely victim. But I found it easier just to get out.”

“Somehow I had the impression things had gotten worse in the last years. Were they always so tense?”

“They sure were, while I was there. Look, baby, the place isn't a university, it isn't famous, it probably isn't even notable. But those old codgers had a nice little setup. They did well by all the little lady students—it used to be all women until ten or fifteen years ago —and all of a sudden, people are questioning the old guys' right to domain.”

“Were they sorry to see the place go coed?”

“No, tickled at first. Boys, young men, ho-ho, what we are doing is now significant. But of course the female students just loved listening to the wisdom sprouting from those wise heads, or pretended to. The boys weren't so patient, and the girls weren't either anymore. The women's movement maybe, who knows why, but somehow the nest was beginning to unravel. And then the young faculty got uppity. My dear, the old boys fairly seethed. If I were a sadist, I would have stayed just to see them writhe.”

“But you didn't.”

“No. I guess it was making me a little tense. My partner . . .”

“The one who's taken up gardening.”

“The same. He said I was making him jumpy as hell, and that he wasn't going to sit around and watch me turn into a nervous wreck when I had the chance to move to a better place in every way and one where we could have a house and a garden. I adore New York City—he and I used to live here and I commuted to Clifton—but he's a country lad. So I escaped.”

“And you don't miss it a bit?” I added, as we ordered our food and he gestured for another drink.

“I miss the city. One does, if one has learned to love it. New York is a funny place. Living here is either mandatory or forbidden, it seems; there's no middle way, though I'm learning to make do living in New Jersey as well as working there. And I miss Antonia,” he said. “I see her from time to time, and I listen with a magnificently sympathetic and knowledgeable ear to her cries of distress, but it's not the same as working together.”

“Were you in modern literature too?” I asked. “I'm afraid these fields or areas or whatever you call them aren't as distinct in my mind as they might be.”

“They shouldn't be that clear in anyone's. I was an Americanist, actually, hired as one by the Clifton department. But I didn't make any secret of the fact that I was gay, and then queer studies came along. . . .”

“Queer studies?”

“It sounds like an insult to your innocent ears? It isn't; self-named in fact by the practitioners thereof. Anyway, the gay movement had taken on steam, there were some among the student body either already gay or wondering if they might be, or just interested, and of course when a perfectly normal-looking young man asked to write his senior thesis on homosexuality, the old boys flipped. At first they were going to forbid it on the grounds that it wasn't really literature, and then they decided to turn it over to me and Antonia.”

“Is Antonia gay too?”

“No, baby, but she's a feminist, and they figured they might as well put all the crazies together. She and I cooperated on directing senior honor theses, became comrades in arms, otherwise known as friends. There're a lot of great people where I am now, but no Antonia. I'd love to get her to move near me. Get yourself a garden, I say, but the very thought of New Jersey sends chills up her spine. It's something I've noticed in a lot of New Yorkers. A bit odd, but who am I to throw stones? Ah, here's our food.”

I asked for iced tea, not without having a fierce inner battle with myself over wine. I was happy listening to Rick, and I would have liked another drink. I couldn't remember another case where I seemed so often to be wishing I wasn't investigating and could just relax; I worried about it. But not half as much as I worried when Rick really got going on the English department at Clifton College, and the story of him and Antonia.

He appeared to Henry James,
“so utterly other than had
been supposed by the ‘fond
prefigurements of youthful
piety,' ” and [he faced]
“the full, the monstrous
demonstration that Tennyson
was not Tennysonian.”

—HAROLD NICOLSON,
Tennyson

Six

I SCRIBBLED notes while Rick talked, writing with one hand and occasionally scooping up mouthfuls of food with the other. It was a technique I had fully developed. The notes I took on such occasions rarely turned out to be important, but taking them was necessary to ensure concentration on what I was hearing. If I just listened, it was possible I would let something significant slip by me; taking down the sense of what was being said meant I didn't miss much. It worked, at least for me.

Some detectives pride themselves on having a meticulous memory and perfect recall. Maybe they do, although I doubt it; and even if they can rely on their unerring memory today, who knows what tricks it may play tomorrow? Some P.I.'s use tape recorders, but I scorn that. It's like copying some essential document instead of reading it. Tapes are okay for interviews, but no good for detection, not unless you want some sort of legal record, and then the courts will probably throw it out. I use tapes only to bully reluctant husbands who think there's no proof with which their wives can nail them for adultery; sometimes I find that hearing their own voices saying what they denied having said pushes them over the edge.

I took notes as Rick talked, stopping now and then to wave for another martini and going into more and more digressions, which is to say more and more details. I didn't interrupt often, and then only with a question to refuel his energy for compulsive talking. Not that I blamed him for the way he felt about Clifton; and I thought he'd certainly been smart to get out and move away. But at the same time, I could tell that the likelihood of his forgetting, or forgiving, or getting over the Clifton experience was not great.

He spoke of the dynamic of relationships in the English department there. Sick, he called them, and I could hardly doubt it. The “old boys,” as he dubbed them, meaning everyone who had been there since forever, joined ranks to defeat any new appointment or promotion to tenure they found in any way threatening, which Rick said was all of them. They promoted and hired only clones of themselves. At the same time, he insisted, these older types didn't exactly like each other much either, and bickering went on between them, at meetings and in the corridors, punctuated by insincere greetings to whoever was passing. One of them, according to Rick, would shout out, “Fine,” if anyone seemed to be greeting him, although he was too deaf to know what the greeting was or if anyone was asking him how he felt.

Meanwhile, he and Antonia, and three of the four assistant professors, including the one who was away this year, had joined into a group supporting one another, and letting off steam at regular intervals. He and Antonia and the assistant professor, Catherine Dorman, who had been turned down for tenure, were the closest. Rick's partner, Frank, had gotten to enjoy the group as well. The four of them often met at Rick and Frank's apartment to discuss department conditions and possible maneuvers. Well, Rick said, Catherine was gone now, and he and Frank lived in New Jersey, but he sure as hell missed Antonia, seeing her on a regular basis, talking with her, laughing together.

“What did you laugh at, mainly?” I asked. He was getting a little repetitive, and I thought concentrating on some particulars was not a bad idea.

“Tennyson,” Rick said. “Tennyson, and Haycock's idiotic books on him. Harold Nicolson, in a book written in the Twenties, had referred to Tennyson's ‘polluted muse,' and Haycock had written volumes, absolute volumes, refuting, or trying to, that hideous phrase. Antonia looked it up and found that Nicolson was actually quoting a review on Tennyson's early work; it also referred to Tennyson's ‘feminine feebleness'—never will I forget that phrase. Obviously Haycock refused even to quote it in anger; the idea of Tennyson as feminine, let alone feeble, was more than he could countenance. And should anyone suggest that Tennyson and Hallam had loved not wholly in the pure way of manly men—well, I need hardly tell you what old Haycock would have thought of that. Actually, he might have burst a blood vessel and saved whoever did it from murdering him.”

I looked puzzled, and I was. “You think it all sounds mad?” Rick asked.

“Not mad, perhaps, but hardly what I imagined academics went on about. They sound more like kids arguing over the relative skill of baseball players.”

“Of course they do. You've seen too many professors in movies, Woody, my love. Haycock had given his whole working life to Tennyson, he liked to think of himself as the world's authority on Tennyson, and he suspected that Antonia was trying to take Tennyson, which is to say his life, away from him.”

“Was she?”

“No, of course not. If he'd been a little more sensible about everything, including women and Tennysonian criticism, he'd have played around with it, and everyone would have been happy. But instead he fought Antonia and everything she stood for, including, alas, Catherine Dorman, who, one has to admit, joined Antonia in whooping up the Bloomsbury view of Tennyson.”

“Bloomsbury?” I said, sneaking a look at my watch. Please God, I said to myself irreverently, don't make whatever he plans to say about Bloomsbury important; I was too tired. But tired or not, it was clear Rick was getting to the heart of the matter, and I had better pay attention. I signaled the waiter for coffee, and looked at Rick with what I hoped would pass for eager anticipation.

“Decaf ?” the waiter asked, responding to my summons.

“Certainly not,” I barked at the poor man. “Perhaps you can double the caffeine.”

“Getting sleepy?” Rick asked, not quite mockingly. Thanking what powers there be that I hadn't drunk much, I denied this charge with vigor, and urged him on to explain what he meant by Bloomsbury.

“They were a group of clever people—geniuses, some of them—in England between the wars. Who they were doesn't matter. Virginia Woolf was perhaps the most important. She and her sister Vanessa Bell, an artist, and various relatives and friends, liked to put on plays. Virginia wrote them, Vanessa designed them, and they were produced in Vanessa's studio. The cast of this particular play included Duncan Grant, who was an artist, Vanessa's longtime lover, a homosexual, and the father of Angelica, Vanessa's daughter, who was in the play, together with Vanessa's son Julian, by Clive Bell, her husband, and Virginia's nieces, the daughters of her brother Adrian.”

My eyes were rolling. Perhaps I had overlooked a few of his drinks. “Were these people in the English department?” I asked.

“You haven't been listening carefully,” Rick said, sounding not the least drunk. “Although I admit it is confusing at first.”

“I should think it would be confusing forever,” I said nastily.

“Never mind all that. I'm telling you about Bloomsbury, which included the aforementioned as well as others. They didn't go in for conventional sexual morality, but that's not the point right now. The point is that this group put on a play called
Freshwater
, which had Tennyson in it as a character, mocked—lovingly mocked, but mocked. Virginia had grown up with ‘Maud,' and was only joshing at what she loved, but Haycock could hardly be expected to understand that. It increased his hatred of Antonia and her part in the play, and everything and everyone she touched.”

“Who is Maud?” I said, though I hardly dared to ask.

“Oh, Jesus,” Rick cried—a name I never evoke in anger. I'm not religious, but there is such a thing as respect. I frowned.

“Sorry,” Rick said. “
‘Maud'
is a poem by Tennyson; a famous poem: ‘Come into the garden, Maud, / For the black bat, night, has flown, / Come into the garden, Maud, / I am here at the gate alone.' Those are the lines quoted in the play. Antonia and Catherine and Frank and I put it on once, for an audience of friends; we had a few others in the cast, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Don't you even know
‘Alice'
?” he asked, as though suddenly considering whether or not he had been wasting his time, and whether the people who hired me ought to have their heads examined. “ ‘She's coming! cried the Larkspur, I hear her footstep, thump, thump, thump, along the gravel walk,' ” he quoted happily.

“Rick,” I said. “Could we put this into context for a simple soul like me? It's getting late, and we should think of leaving. Could we sum it all up?” The great thing about New York restaurants is that people go on eating all evening, the later the better, so the waiters don't start glaring at you if you stay awhile. They'd like new customers and new tips, but when leaving a tip I always take into account how long I've been hanging around taking up the table; it's only fair.

“To sum up,” he said pompously, “the Moderns do not think Tennyson is the greatest thing in literature; in fact, they count him as rather dull. Harold Nicolson even thought he was pretty awful, except for some of his lyrics. Personally, I like some of Tennyson; I used to memorize ‘Ulysses' as a child. Well, I won't quote it now; and then there's ‘Tithonus.' That's where Aldous Huxley got the title, ‘After many a summer dies the swan.' ”

“Rick,” I said, dire threats evident in my voice.

“Haycock thought Antonia and Catherine, being Modern and playing around with
Freshwater
, were, so to speak, pissing in his and Tennyson's tea. It was just one more thing to add to his hatred of women in academia, any literature later than Queen Victoria, and all those who didn't think Tennyson was what poetry was all about. I think that even the other old boys got a bit weary of Tennyson and the other Victorians Haycock went on and on about. Ruskin is okay, but he was a bit tiresome about Whistler.”

“Rick!”

“Damn it, Woody, you asked for the context. That's the context! He was a perfectly dreadful person. Was he dreadful enough to induce someone to drop serious poison into his drink? I wouldn't have thought so, but then, someone did, didn't they? I've no doubt most of those in the department would like to blame Antonia, but killing people isn't Antonia's way. Don't believe me on this. Talk to all her other friends. Look, I've got an idea: Antonia was friendly with a woman who used to be dean of the faculty at Clifton. She'd had enough before Haycock got knocked off, so she isn't a suspect, but she'd be a good person to talk to for the whole picture, so to speak. Here, I'll give you her phone number.”

He took out one of those small electronic appointment books, telephone directories, and keeper of all secrets as far as I know. The thought of something electronic wiping out all my appointments and notes is more than I can contemplate. I'll take up using one when paper and pens are no longer available.

“Here we are,” he said. He read me off her full name—Elaine Kimberly—and her address and telephone number. I wrote them down and waved for the bill. I had every intention of calling her first thing in the morning, but then I had a horrible thought. “She isn't a literary type, is she?” I asked with more passion than tact.

Rick laughed. “Not exactly; something in the classics line, I think. I doubt she'll have any views on Tennyson or Bloomsbury. Anyway, deans give all that academic stuff up when they start deaning. No time for mere academic pursuits; time only for academic politics. I think you'll like her.”

We parted outside. He offered to talk to me again anytime. I thanked him and said I'd be in touch, which maybe I would be when I recovered from this evening. I couldn't imagine why they'd hired me to find Haycock's murderer and, more to the point, why I'd taken the damn job. Oh, well, there was always the dean. I had high hopes of the dean.

Dean Kimberly still lived in New Jersey, in one of those upper-class areas that somehow fail to conform to the rather tacky impression people seem to have of New Jersey. Not that I was overwhelmed by the elegance, mind you. The neighborhood didn't strike me as that different from the elegant parts of Westchester. For my money, suburbia is suburbia until you're at least far enough from New York City for all the natives to be Republicans with opinions of New York varying from unlivable to sinister. Still, her house, when I reached it, looked inviting: land, big trees, no impression of anything being manicured, and with a large dog lying on the stoop. Not a Saint Bernard, but huge, black with a white face. It rose to its feet as I roared up on my bike, but didn't bark. It just kept me covered, as it were. Big dogs figure they can handle it and don't need to arouse the troops; I've noticed that.

She must have heard the bike, because she came to the door and waited, with a pleasant air of greeting, for me to dismount and shed my helmet. I took to her immediately, suburb or not. We went into her front hall, the dog with us, where I left my helmet and jacket and followed her into the kitchen.

“I thought you might like a cup of coffee or tea,” she said. I told her coffee would be fine, and like every other nut in the world—strictly my own opinion—she started to grind coffee beans. We said nothing during the short racket, and nothing further while the coffee machine gurgled away. She had one of those coffee-brewing gadgets attached to the wall. Detecting, I concluded that she was a devoted coffee drinker. I requested milk and sugar when asked; I would have preferred cream or half-and-half, but nobody keeps that sort of thing around these days; it's a no-no. Too bad, really, because coffee with cream is simply delicious.