The Memorial Hall Murder (32 page)

Once again he pulled his awkward garment out of the way. He took a last cautious step upward. There was a trap door over his head. He pushed at it feebly with his free hand. The trap door was locked. He could go no farther. Below him he could hear that barbarian blundering up the ladder after him. Homer Kelly was another one of them, just one more of the rabble that had begun to close in from every side.

There was no way out. He had been driven into a corner. Slowly he turned around on the steep open stairway, grasping the railing with his right hand, shifting his feet one at a time, until his back was braced and he could look down at the man ascending below him. Carefully he shifted the object in his left hand to his right, and held it out into the void over Homer Kelly's head.

It was not Freddy Fulsom at the top of the ladder. Looking upward as he climbed, Homer could see the man crouched above him. The jag ends of the sheet drooped down like the wings of an albino bat. It was not Freddy. And then the moon slipped across the flat brick face of the tower and reached the window in the south wall and sent a long finger pointing past the giant ventilating shaft to touch the face of the man who was hunched on the top of the ladder with his back pushed up against the trap door. At the summit of the tower his robe was dazzling in the moonlight. He squatted there like a caricature of an angel at the pinnacle of a cathedral. He had removed himself as far as it was humanly possible from Ham Dow at the bottom, from the brute beast who had refused to perish in his subterranean cave.

But when the man at the top of the ladder spoke, it was not of angels or beasts. He reached his hand down to Homer as if to hand him something, and addressed him.

At the top of so many ladders, Homer felt dizzy and lightheaded. In a careless trance he reached up obediently and took the thing. “What did you say?” he said.

“I said, he rolled away the stone.” And then the man in the white sheet leaned forward and dropped into the air, falling away from Homer. The tumbling white shape plummeted, grazing the iron side of the ventilating shaft in the center of the tower, sliding down its vertical flank, and then falling perfectly, headfirst, into the very center of the tapering vault below.

It was the northernmost vault of the five that crowned the high memorial corridor. Homer had often thought of the compartments of the arching wooden ceiling as treetops, their towering ribs meeting like the branches of trees in a forest. But now, looking down at the dark cavity of the inverted vault below him, he could see again that it was like an immense empty wastebasket for sandwich wrappers and paper coffee cups, for a president of Harvard who had thrown himself from the top of the chain of being.

Chapter Forty-eight

Ham had lost consciousness again. He woke to find himself slumped against the door. Had he dreamt it, the hammering and the shouting on the other side? He dropped his head back and stared at the top of the door. The line of light was gone. He sank his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. His fainting brain had played on him. one final savage trick. Then he fumbled at the handle of the door. In his dream, the knob had turned. It turned again. It turned all the way around. Slowly he dragged his haunches an inch away from the door and pulled.

The door opened.

Mary Kelly had given up her place in the chorus to sit halfway down the stairs inside the basement entrance beside the south door. She was falling asleep. She had been sitting in one position with her head against the railing for two hours. What if she were to stretch out on the floor at the top of the stairs and take a nap? If anyone came in, if anyone tried to step over her, going up or down, she would wake up. She shook her drowsy head and stood up and stretched, and then she stopped with her arms over her head.

“Oh, Ham,” she said, “it's you.”

She said nothing more. She ran down to the man who had fallen into a huddle of rags along the wall at the bottom of the stairs. He was trying to get up. She helped him to his feet, and then slowly they worked their way up the stairs and out of doors. Ham lifted his head and gulped in drafts of cold night air.

“Who's that?” said Julia Chamberlain sharply, staring down at them from the south door. “Is that you, Mary?”

“It's Ham,” said Mary softly. “Help me. You hold him on the other side.”

“Good God,” said Julia. She ran down the steps and took his arm and together they half guided and half carried him inside. “An ambulance,” said Julia firmly. “We'll just put him down in that chair and I'll call an ambulance.”

Ham tried to speak up and say no, but he was shaken by a palsy of trembling and nothing would come out. He shook his head and tried to shuffle forward by himself. From Sanders Theatre he could hear Rosie Bell's trumpet trilling and flourishing. Mary shrugged her shoulders at Julia, and together, two tall strong women, they bore him between them into Sanders Theatre. With Julia at one elbow and Mary at the other, Ham stood in the amber air looking up at the pale intent face of Vick, who was beating a majestic pattern of three,
pomposo, ma non allegro
, smiling at Rosie Bell, nodding to Mr. Proctor, and now Mr. Proctor was standing, closing his eyes, opening his mouth to sing the first words of his last triumphant aria.

The audience saw Ham first, and a few of them shouted and rose in their seats. The basses and altos were standing on the right side of the stage, and they all began surging forward, blundering between the chairs and music stands of the second violins. Mrs. Esterhazy was screaming. And at last Vick glanced around to see what was going on, and saw Ham's face turned up to her, and she dropped her arms and burst into sobs. With one swift motion Jack Fox and Tim Swegle reached for her and lowered her gently to the floor. Only Mr. Proctor kept his eyes firmly shut.
The trumpet shall sound
, sang Mr. Proctor,
and the dead shall be rais'd incorruptible.

Chapter Forty-nine

The reading room of the Faculty Club was the kind of place where Homer felt ill at ease. The slightly stuffy air of quiet splendor made him want to upset little trays of sherry and say unspeakable things at the top of his voice. He huddled beside his wife at one end of a sofa. But before long he found himself warming and expanding in the comfortable presence of Julia Chamberlain, so that when he dropped his little glass it was only a typical blunder rather than an act of defiance and rebellion. “Whoops, there I go again.” Homer sprang to his feet and swabbed at the rug with a paper napkin.

“Oh, Homer, you poor clod,” said Mary.

Julia laughed and summoned another glass.

“Now look here, Julia,” said Homer, sitting down again. “The only thing that still puzzles me about this whole thing is the connection between Dow and Cheever. I mean, I figured it out about Cheever. You people were pulling your forces together two years ago to get rid of Cheever, isn't that right? But then you were going to dump Ham Dow too. Whatever for?”

“We were going to what?” Julia looked at Homer in surprise. “What makes you think we were going to dump Ham Dow?”

“Oh, you know, Julia,” said Homer. “It was at that emergency meeting of the Corporation and the Board of Overseers, the day of the Yale game. I was hanging around there in the hall, eavesdropping, remember? I heard you in there, all of you. I heard you say, if only Harvard had got rid of Ham in time, then he never would have been blown up, or words to that effect.”

Julia laughed again, and slapped her glass down on the table. “That's what happens, Homer, dear, to people who listen at keyholes. They don't get the whole story, you see. They don't see it right out plain on the table. We weren't going to get Ham Dow out of Memorial Hall by firing him. The faculty does all the hiring and firing. We were going to get him out of there by promoting him.”

“Promoting him?”

“Promoting him as far as we could promote anybody. Well, of course, we couldn't do it by ourselves. There would have had to be a big search committee, and a long process, with everybody getting a whack at nominating somebody, and then, of course, it would have been up to the Corporation to make the final decision. But two years ago there was a consensus of opinion among the Fellows, and most of us Overseers felt the same way, that we should get rid of James Cheever and put somebody an awful lot like Ham Dow in his place. Ssssshhh, sssshh—it wasn't ever supposed to be common knowledge.”

“You wanted to make Ham Dow the President of Harvard? Jeeeeesus.” Homer giggled at Julia and tried to take it in. “So that's it. Ham was a personal threat to Cheever's job. And Cheever knew it. And Tinker too. Right? I knew there was some reason they hated his guts.”

“Oh, yes, Tinker too. Tinker was Jim's man, of course. Two years ago he was the big voice of opposition when we were all so determined to ask for Jim's resignation. I mean, the first time. Oh, we tried to be discreet about the whole thing, but Ham's name kept right on coming up as somebody who could put the place back together again if we asked for Jim's resignation. We didn't discuss the matter in front of Jim. We weren't far enough along for that. But of course Tinker was always there, and he passed everything along to Jim, naturally. So I suppose it was natural that Jim and Tinker would feel that way about Ham. That they feared and hated him, I mean. You can't blame Jim. It wasn't personal, really. I know that. He really did think Ham would destroy the place. Harvard, I mean. You know. He thought Ham would change the whole character of the university and destroy all it had stood for in the past. Oh, he meant well, he really did. I know he did.”

“So it was only Tinker who supported him?” said Mary. “The others were all for forcing Cheever's resignation?”

“All of them. All of them except Tinker.”

“But then why didn't it go through? Two years ago, I mean, when it came up for the first time.”

“Oh, it was Tinker again. Tinker can be pretty eloquent. He persuaded two or three of the Fellows and some of the older members of the Board of Overseers to wait awhile, to think it over, before doing anything so unheard of as asking for the resignation of a president of Harvard.”

“After all,” said Homer, “it wasn't as if he were an Antipedobaptist, or anything like that.”

“What?” said Julia. “Oh, you mean like President Dunster. That's right. And Increase Mather. There haven't been many enforced resignations of Harvard presidents in three hundred and fifty years. That's a long time. So the Fellows finally agreed they would wait awhile, and in the meantime we would all speak to Jim and make it very clear to him about the necessity for a broader, more generous kind of spirit, for accepting a majority vote with good grace, and he wasn't to go behind people's backs any more in a foolish effort to get what he wanted. Well, anyway, the upshot was, we waited around for the transformation to take place. Only it didn't. That Decorative Arts Building of his was the last straw. A Curator for Porcelain and another one for Objects of Silver and Gold. We all got sick to our stomachs. I mean, it just made you want to smash something. You know, like a Ming vahz or something.” Julia laughed her great laugh. Then she straightened her big face and leaned forward grimly and stared at the table. “So we were gathering our forces again. I snatched the opportunity and then
we
met behind
his
back, for a change. Not something we would normally ever dream of doing. But we'd been driven too far. And he could see the handwriting on the wall. They knew what was coming, Cheever and Tinker.”