Shortest Day (7 page)

It had started slow, this kind of pain in his marriage with Sarah. He told himself it was natural to be a little jealous, perfectly natural. Of course, some jerk of a psychiatrist would call it an obsession. He'd explore Morgan's childhood and uncover the usual traumas of a middle child, he would learn about the radiant intelligence of the older brother who had drowned, and the adorable charm of the younger sister who still lived. But he would never probe deep enough to learn how the drowning had happened, he would never see the agonized drowning face of that good kind brother, so beloved by everyone and afterward so deeply mourned.

The memory of Morgan's older brother was so pinched and puckered with scar tissue and so cauterized with a hot iron that Morgan seldom picked off the scab.

The accident the other day was entirely unrelated, it had nothing to do with it, nothing at all. Morgan admitted to himself that Sarah's preoccupation with the attractive kid from West Virginia had become an anxiety, and then a threat, and finally a torment. But Morgan would never have planned to run over him! The accident had simply happened. There the kid had been, dodging out of Morgan's way, and at once a high excitement had risen in Morgan's head, in his chest, in his arms, in his hands on the steering wheel. It had been so easy, just a twist of the wheel and the kid had gone down!

But the impact had burst open the cauterized scar—the shock of the collision and the ghastly thump of the body beneath the wheels. At once the face of Morgan's drowning brother had reared up in the windshield and the tears of that awful day had burst out in a torrent.

It was all the more strange that he had felt so much better the next morning, so calm and serene, so intensely relieved—so glad.

Unfortunately, the serenity was already beginning to give way—because Sarah didn't have any sense! It was all her fault, he had seen it at the rehearsal, it was the way she threw herself at everybody, the way she hugged and kissed them all. Especially—God!—her codirector, that guy Tom Cobb. Sarah and Tom were always together, they were buddies, they were pals, they sat side by side, they were always touching.
My God, Sarah! Goddamnit, Sarah!

Morgan looked back at his book without seeing it, and wrapped his distrust around him like a blanket of thorns. It lacerated him, it tore at him, but he clutched it tighter.

When Sarah came up behind him and put her arms around him, he stiffened. She didn't love him, she couldn't love him. She loved someone else, she loved—

“Oh, Morgan, darling, what are you going to do today?”

At once his suspicions were aroused. Was she trying to discover when he would be out? “Why do you want to know?”

Sarah laughed, and kissed his ear. “I like to think of you, and know what you're working on when I'm doing something entirely different.”

“Oh, well, I guess I'll be in the field part of the time.”

“This morning?”

“Yes. No! I mean, I'm not sure.” Craftily Morgan hedged his bets. “I might do it this afternoon.”
Don't give her a window of time safe from interruption
.

Sarah had fallen in love with Morgan Bailey because of his passionate commitment to his field of study, his fascination with migrating wildfowl—Canada geese and snow geese and tundra swans. And she loved him for his habit of mind, which was clever and subtle.

But Sarah was clever too. She saw his trouble as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. He couldn't hide it. In this matter which had begun to overwhelm him there was nothing witty, nothing subtle. It was a primitive force, huge and dark, blocking out the light.

“What about you?” he said, glancing sideways at her.

“It's an all-day rehearsal. Tom and I have a lot to do. Oh, and that reminds me.” Sarah fumbled in her pocket-book. “He asked me to stop at Niki's Market and get him some of those chocolate bars he's so fond of. Oh, God, I've forgotten what they're called. Tasty sweets, or something? I wrote it down. Where is it? Oh, here it is. Oh, that's right, Tastychox. Poor Tom, he's got this terrible sweet tooth.”

Once again it was Tom Cobb.

“So long, darling. I'll be back about four-thirty.” Sarah's feet thumped down the stairs.

It was almost a relief to be alone. Morgan stood up and went to the window and craned his neck. There she was, hurrying to Inman Square to catch the Number 69 bus. When she turned the corner, he sighed, and hunched his shoulders to loosen the tension in his back. Then he pulled the curtains to darken the room, turned on the lamp, and looked over a stack of his own homemade videocassettes. He had recorded the mating of common eiders in Nova Scotia, the nesting of mute swans on the Elizabeth Islands, the rearing of families of great blue herons in the Everglades.

All these things had been worked on by other people, but Morgan's specialty was his gift for noticing simple things, basic things that no one else seemed to see.

Choosing carefully, he plugged in one of his tapes on Canada geese. Canadas were one of the most heavily studied migrating birds in the world, and yet no one had written as thoroughly as Morgan Bailey on the aggressive behavior of the male during the nesting season.

This morning he had a particular reason for looking at this tape. Morgan sat back in the darkened room and watched the pair of geese he had stalked so carefully last May at that little lake in New Hampshire.

There was the female, sitting patiently on her eggs, apparently asleep. Nearby stood the male, his head erect on his long dark neck. Now he stalked along the shore, darting glances left and right, stopping to lower his head and probe for parasites in his tail feathers.

Pretty soon—yes, the zoom lens was picking up the interloper, far away, on the other side of the pond. It was a single male, all by himself, paddling grandly forward. How close would he be allowed to come?

Here was the moment. Morgan's male jerked his neck upright and uttered a honk. Then he took to the water with a rush and lunged at the enemy, eager for battle, beak hissing, wings flapping.

Morgan always laughed at this point, because the other goose backed away as if he were saying, “Excuse
me
, no offense,” and took to the air, with Morgan's male in hot pursuit.

The female had been protected. The male had exercised his rights. It was the way any lover would feel when his possession of the female was endangered. He would see it as a threat, he would fend it off, he would keep his mate to himself.

Let the psychiatrists invent their theories. Let them pile theory on theory. The protection of mating rights was instinctive. It was the way of the world. It was natural, perfectly natural.

CHAPTER 8

O master and missus, are you all within?

Pray open the door and let us come in
.

O master and missus a-sitting by the fire
,

Pray think on us poor travellers
,

A-travelling in the mire
.

“Somerset Wassail”

T
he cold had settled in with a vengeance. There had been a few beguiling days at the end of November, days of fraudulent warmth when people thought,
Oh, well, this winter may not be so bad
. Now illusions were shattered. Winter was a hard, bad time. They had forgotten how awful it was. Heavy coats were pulled out of closets.
Oh, God, the moths!
Gloves were exhumed from drawers, the left one missing.
Forty dollars? Just for gloves?
The children had mislaid their winter hats and scarves and mittens, they had forgotten them at school, they had lost them in the rough and tumble of last March. Thermostats were turned up, furnaces roared into life, radiators rattled and steamed, hot air billowed through registers. Oil trucks rumbled up and down the streets of Cambridge.

In Memorial Hall the huge hollow spaces to be heated were as vast as in any cathedral. The dilapidated auditorium where Mary and Homer Kelly taught their classes was often cold. It tended to be forgotten when the building manager twiddled his thermostats in the morning.

The Saturday class was early. At home in Concord they had to get up at six in order to have breakfast and get one of their cold cars going by seven. Then it was a matter of rushing the car up the steep hill beside the Sudbury River, failing to make it the first time, rushing it up again, hurtling through the woods, tearing down Route 2 to the Alewife parking garage, and boarding the train to Harvard Square.

One of the subway exits in the Square was right beside the Johnson gate, the most pompous of all the entrances to Harvard Yard. This morning the weather in the Yard was even colder than that of the Square. The buildings looked cold too, huge rectangular chunks of brick and stone. People were going to and fro, professors and students bundled against the chilly air, their breath steaming. Burly teenage kids were taking a shortcut to Rindge High. Some sentimental freshman had put a lighted Christmas tree in a second-floor window of Hollis Hall.

Hurrying forward in the direction of Memorial Hall with her arm tucked into Homer's, Mary boldly brought up again her doubts about the accident that had killed Henry Shady. “Listen, Homer, don't you think we should say something to somebody in the Cambridge Police Department about what I heard?”

“What you heard? Oh, you mean the way the brakes squealed at the wrong time?”

“And the way the car was way off the street. And, you know, the goose.”

“The goose!” Homer looked at his wife and burst out laughing. “You mean you want to go to an experienced officer of the law who has studied thousands of auto-vehicle accidents in the city of Cambridge and tell him a goose flew over this one? Mary, dear—”

“It's not silly. I heard it. It wasn't just some goose flying from Fresh Pond to the Charles, nothing like that. It was really weird. You know, different.”

Homer snickered. “Well, okay, tell him that too. There was this weird goose, this really huge goose, and it flapped up in Henry Shady's face and knocked him down, so the car rolled right over him. And then the goose flew up over Mem Hall and came down on the clock tower and laid an egg.”

Mary jerked her arm out of Homer's.

“Well, damnit, I'm sorry. Can't you take a joke? What's happened to you, anyway? You're so prickly lately.”

It didn't help. Mary stalked along in stony silence. Not until they had passed through the iron gate onto the overpass above Cambridge Street did she forget her anger. “Homer, look. Something's going on.”

There was a village of tents on the overpass. Some were new dome tents in giddy colors, snapped up on plastic stiffening rods, some were old-fashioned tents spiked into the grass with a sledgehammer, one was a huge army tent like a survivor of the First World War. In the middle stood a couple of shacks made of ill-assorted pieces of lumber like flimsy structures knocked together by children in the branches of trees. People were milling around, ducking in and out of the tents. Someone had a noisy ghetto blaster, someone else was trying to squeeze a rolled-up mattress into a pup tent. Beyond Memorial Hall a siren began whining as a fire truck pulled out of the fire station. Was it coming this way? No, the siren was fading. The truck was heading for East Cambridge.