The Puzzled Heart (24 page)

“You wanted Banny,” he said. “So did I. All the time in the hospital, you kept talking about Banny.”

“Well, that damn woman nearly shot her. In cold blood. And now she seems to be demanding as much money for her as if she hadn’t tried to kill the poor beast in front of my eyes.”

“It’s complicated,” Reed said. “Judith is managing the kennels for her, and being very businesslike as is only proper. Banny is a valuable dog.”

“Bitch—I know that much. Are you valuable, Banny?” Kate said, reaching a hand back without quite turning her head. Banny’s plume waved in confirmation. “Have you thought how we’re going to manage?” Kate asked Reed. “We both work all day on many days, just for starters.”

“You’d be amazed, Kate, to know the canine services available. Dog walkers, all sorts of people in the dog business. We’ll manage.”

“Any other news you’re planning to break to me
before we get home? I’d appreciate some warning if you’ve undertaken other profound renovations in our life.”

“Oh, come off it, Kate. Not that I begrudge you the exquisite pleasure of having Banny forced upon you when you want her but hardly dare to say so. After all, you saved her life, you’ve a right to grumble.”

“Do you think we should go on calling her Banny? Any name given by that dotty woman may carry bad vibes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Anne Bancroft, is there? It’s not as though the dog had been named Marilyn Monroe or Joan Crawford. Obviously one couldn’t put up with that.”

“I see your point.”

“Good. The only other news is that Harriet will be there as a welcoming committee, and Archie as well, to explain the legal ins and outs. He’s been attending to what we might call The Case while I’ve been attending to you. But if you’re too tired, we can call it off.”

“It sounds just the distraction I require. Did they get a lot of information out of Marjorie?”

“Some. Now stop talking, close your eyes, and think only about long walks with Banny until we get home.”

“Long walks?”

“You’ve got to get into shape, Kate. Get your muscles into shape, I mean. You’re out of practice, and that woman could have killed you. Didn’t you
ever fight with anyone? Never wrestled with your brothers and learned something about self-defense? I can’t think what the use is in having three brothers if they didn’t teach you how to fight.”

“They were too much older to fight with me. I wasn’t worth the effort. I don’t think they really taught me anything, except how frightfully dull and pompous men could be. Having learned that, I searched for their opposite and found you.”

“I don’t know if that’s a compliment, and I do know that it’s in no way true, but thank you all the same. As to the walks, I’ll do the mornings, you do the evenings, and one of us, or someone else, will function in between. You’ll discover a whole new meaning to life.”

“I had enough meaning before all this happened, Reed. Although perhaps I didn’t know how much I would care if someone snatched you away. And I didn’t know that having had Banny for a while, I could not possibly let her out of my life. But none of this is to deny how perfectly happy I was before this whole sorry episode started.”

“Close your eyes and try to relax,” Reed said.

“E. M. Forster noticed that everyone in America is always telling everyone else to relax. But I’ll try.”

When the four of them had, as Reed had warned, settled down for an extended consultation in the living room, Kate was lying on the couch under a light blanket with a pillow at her head. “I feel exactly
like Elizabeth Barrett-not-yet-Browning,” Kate said, “though Banny is nothing like Flush.” Banny was lying beside the couch and Kate’s hand rested, from time to time, on the dog’s large head, causing the tail to wave gently in response. Harriet, Archie, and Reed sat in chairs grouped around the couch. “We look like one of those Victorian paintings of a domestic scene,” Archie observed.

“Entitled
The Reckoning
, no doubt,” Reed added. “You begin, Kate, offering if you possibly can a brief but coherent account of why you rushed off to confront Marjorie in that ill-considered way.”

“I suggest we omit personal attacks from this discussion,” Kate said, removing her hand from Banny’s head; Banny sighed deeply. “But I do admit, since you put it so delicately, that my actions were probably not the wisest. It was like this. After talking to Harriet about the ad for Banny and one thing and another, I began to realize that Toni must have been working for the other side, at least at the beginning. That seemed to explain why she had hired Harriet as a means of getting to me. Not,” Kate added with emphasis, “that Harriet didn’t turn out to be a damn good private eye. I’m certain Toni would have continued with her as partner if assault, attempted murder, and eventual murder had not intervened. Could I have some water?”

Reed went to fetch a pitcher of water, returning with glasses and a bottle of single malt Scotch. “I
thought we might need some fortification,” he explained, pouring the water for Kate.

“I’m actually thirsty for water,” Kate announced, quaffing a large amount of the stuff. “I shall lie here in clarity and purity, while you three imbibe. Liquor isn’t supposed to mix with whatever it is I’m taking, and to tell you the truth, strange as it seems, I don’t want any of the hard stuff. I am certain it would give me a blinding headache. Now, how’s that for the effects of being throttled?” And she touched her neck.

“To continue, then, without the aid of alcohol, I reasoned thus: the only person who could possibly have been Muriel was Marjorie, and the more I thought about it the likelier it seemed. She had hired Toni to work out the plot, probably telling her some wild tale or other, and Toni had arranged the kidnapping and all that followed with the aid of Bad Boy and his mother. I set off to confront Marjorie or Muriel, really with the idea of suggesting that this grudge had got a little out of hand, and maybe we could talk the matter out. Don’t interrupt,” she added, as both Reed and Harriet seemed about to burst into anguished speech. “I know it wasn’t the world’s brightest idea, but you asked what I was doing and I’m telling you.” She took some more water, and Reed refilled her glass.

“While I was exchanging remarks with Marjorie, however, she standing there with that gun and Banny between us”—here her hand descended again onto the dog’s head—“she said something about recognizing my name when she heard it and joining in the
fun and games. Well, something like that. So I guessed that she hadn’t been the one to initiate the plot but had joined in later. I was about to wave a flag of truce, when she announced that she was going to shoot Banny. You all know what happened then.

“So what have I figured out since? I know”—she motioned to Reed with her other hand—“I was only supposed to tell you what I was doing, but surely my conclusions are part of what I was doing. Anyway, I’m going to tell you. It won’t take long, and will take even less time if you stop interrupting me.”

Reed threw back the Scotch in one dramatic gulp, as they do in Western movies, and adopted an expression of determined silence.

“That’s better,” Kate said. “There’s not much more, really. I’ve more or less decided that Mama and the right-wing types were behind the kidnapping scheme before Marjorie got wind of it—probably from Dorothy Hedge, whom, after all, she knew—and decided to join in the fun. Over to you all,” she said. Harriet and Reed looked at Archie.

“It’s odd as it’s worked out,” Archie said. “When Reed brought me into this rather odd situation, he explained that you had at first thought it was a right-wing plot, and then had decided, upon the advice of Emma Wentworth—whom, by the way, I know and respect—that an individual was behind it. Emma was wrong about its being a colleague, but she at least got you to consider an angry individual as the instigator. Thus you first suspected Kate’s less enlightened
colleagues, and then, at the suggestion of Kate’s friend Leslie—and it was a damn smart suggestion—you began to search for a revengeful individual from Kate’s past, someone Kate might have forgotten but who had certainly not forgotten her. The intriguing fact, at least from my point of view as an outsider who was persuaded into looking at the situation”—here he glared at Reed—“by the highhanded calling in of a good many chips, is that all the suppositions were in part correct.” He paused to sip his Scotch, eschewing Reed’s dramatics.

“Like Kate, but for different reasons, I determined that Muriel, if she existed, and unless she had some close connection to the university, could hardly have instigated the whole thing. I didn’t then know, of course, that she had joined the Kate Fansler offensive at a later date. The question for me became, how did all this begin?

“I had one advantage over the rest of you. I knew none of the players and could therefore begin to examine the situation with an open mind. I had been called in to defend Harriet from charges, should any be made, but the police had no grounds on which to hold her and only interviewed her. All of you demonstrated great faith in Harriet’s innocence of the plot and of the attack on Toni, but to me at first she seemed the likeliest suspect. I’ve already explained this to Harriet,” he added, glancing her way. Harriet raised her glass to him in a mocking salute.

“Several things ultimately convinced me that she
was innocent,” he continued. “First, I did a certain amount of checking back through her history with Toni, and it seemed clear enough that she had not joined Toni’s outfit in order to undertake this siege against Kate. By then I had decided that the woman Harriet had met in the ladies’ room was probably Toni’s attacker. And I then did what, if you three will forgive me, you ought to have thought of a lot sooner. I do realize that clear thinking was hardly to be expected under the circumstances in which you all found yourselves, but I have to brag a little to justify imbibing this excellent booze.”

“What did we overlook?” Kate asked. “Break it to me gently.”

“I got hold of the university’s record of suits against them by women who failed to get tenure. My aim was to find someone with a special grudge against Kate. No,” he said, in answer to Kate’s smacking herself on the forehead in self-rebuke, and then wincing from the pain, “in whatever flattering light I am succeeding in putting myself, do remember that Reed had been kidnapped, Kate had been threatened with the possibility of having to publicly refute her deepest convictions about feminism, and Reed, when rescued, admitted to having been sexually tempted by nymphets. None of these are situations likely to clear the mind. But to continue:

“It didn’t take very much time to go through the tenure fights, particularly since the records I was examining were of women who had sued, gone to court.
The great number of women unfairly denied tenure do not sue, and were not, therefore, in the proceedings I was examining. I hoped, naturally enough, for a suit against the English department, which would obviously have involved Kate, but there wasn’t one. Nor, though I’d hoped, had I expected it, since the likelihood of Kate’s not remembering a suit in her own department was remote. Sorry, I seem to be being rather long-winded about this—a habit of the profession when addressing a jury, arising from the need to cover all the necessary details.

“Well, I found the tenure case, and what was more, Kate had been involved in it, though only at a very late stage. A standing committee of tenured faculty had been appointed to evaluate all disputed tenure reviews, and someone not in the department of the suer was assigned to head the committee and write the final report. It will hardly astonish you to learn that Kate was, in this case, the head of the committee. The woman suing was in the physical education department and it was one of those difficult and disturbing cases.”

“Can I have simply forgotten the whole thing? There were so many threats of suits some years ago,” Kate said. “Often, however, those who seemed to have the best cases didn’t choose to sue. I think I had some responsibility for that. I’d known women who sued universities back in the Seventies, and I was well aware of the personal price they paid, in their health, their relationships, their sanity. I was often
asked my personal opinion, and always emphasized the price of suing, as well as the university’s habit of fighting such cases with no holds barred. Nothing in the woman’s past life would be out of bounds to them. To be fair, this is probably true of all universities, but I only knew mine and the few cases I had heard of elsewhere.”

“Exactly,” Archie said in consoling tones. “This case was not atypical. The one woman whom no one liked or could support, neither her own department nor her students, nonetheless insisted on going through with it. This particular woman in the physical education department put a great strain on all the tenured women who would have come to the aid of someone they respected, or for whom there was even any genuine support. In the end, Kate wrote a report explaining the inability of any members of the Association of Tenured Women to support the woman in this suit. Her name, of course, was, or became, Dorothy Hedge. She waited for revenge, planning it, hiring Toni, using her mother’s and brother’s right-wing connections, and she didn’t have to wait as long as Muriel. Barely six years, in fact.”

“I’m going to slit my throat,” Kate said. “Quietly, making no mess, but with a firm hand. My God, it’s as though my whole life has paraded before me as a dismal failure. Don’t try to console me,” she said, as the others began murmuring comforting sounds. “I seem to have been a wonderful feminist, no doubt about that. At least two women wanted to kill me, or
destroy me, endangering my husband while they were at it. It hardly seems the crown on a career of successful feminism or even humanity. No,” she added, as Reed offered her a drink, hoping it might calm her down. “I am simply going to die or to become a fugitive like Lord Jim, lurking about in hot climates. I hate hot climates. Oh, God!” It was a cry worthy of someone with faith actually calling upon an exalted deity.

Reed got to his feet but was pushed down again by Harriet, who also glared Archie into silence.

“Now you listen to me, Kate Fansler! I don’t want to hear another word of this shit. Because that’s what it is: shit. Emerson said a person who made no enemies never made anything else, and someone else said you knew who a person was by knowing who her or his enemies were. Sure, you pissed off two women, and I have to say that you certainly did a good job of it, they stayed good and pissed from that day to this. Do you want me to hold a celebration in Radio City Music Hall and invite all the women you’ve encouraged, assisted, persuaded, swayed into good actions and brave deeds? Because it will be a lot more than two, you can bet on that. Don’t interrupt!