The Transcendental Murder (31 page)

The Governor of Massachusetts had called Homer into the State House for a confidential chat. It was a nice day, and Bulfinch's gold dome rose glorious over Beacon Hill. Far below it in his handsome office in the west wing, the Governor was lending his prestige to an inglorious proposal by a certain powerful member of the State Legislature.

“Look here, Kelly,” said the member of the legislature, “I've had my eye on you for a long time. Now I suppose you know how your county leaders feel about that chowderhead, the present incumbent of the District Attorney's office? With this last disaster of his all over the front pages he hasn't got a chance at the polls in November. Now it's my understanding by way of the grapevine that this blunder wouldn't have happened at all if the dumb boob had taken your advice. Now here's what I propose. I want you to resign from the case and oppose him in the party primary. You're a shoo-in. You can't lose. We'll back you to the hilt, all the way.”

Homer refused point-blank, but the Governor poured on oil and refused to take a final no. “Just think it over for a while. If ever anybody was destined for high office in this Commonwealth it's you, Kelly. You've got the right kind of name and at the same time you're a natural for the Brahmins. I don't know how you're going to get anywhere if you refuse the help of your political advisors. Think it over. That's all we ask.”

Homer found his way back to his apartment gloomily. It was a set of furnished rooms on the top floor of one of those large wooden purplish-brown houses seen nowhere in the world but in the vicinity of Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The furniture was a scrappy mixture of Grand Rapids Baroque and Rooming House Mission. Homer walked over to the window of the room his landlady referred to genteelly as his “sitting room,” and looked out. Beyond Longfellow Park he could just see some of the sycamore trees along Memorial Drive and a glint of the Charles River. Harvard boys and Radcliffe girls would be soaking up the sun's warmth on the riverbank, more aware of each other than of the books they had brought along to study.

Damn them all anyway. Homer turned away suddenly and sat down at his desk. It was a skimpy affair with peeling striped veneer. There was an open notebook on it, but he ignored the notebook and stared absently at the wall. Then, abruptly, he wiped his hand across his eyes. It was a new gesture he had adopted in an attempt to sweep away the interior vision of a face, a vision so constant that it was like some celestial phenomenon or ring around the sun. He could shake his head and turn away from the sun, but then the face would rise silently again from the opposite horizon, shining like a sun-dog or bright flaring spot in the sky.

Oh, the hell with it. Homer took his glasses out of his pocket, balanced the bow that was held on with adhesive tape on his right ear and frowned at the open page of his notebook. Half of the page had been written last winter, before he had had the bad fortune to go out to Concord at all. He read it over.

The sage himself admitted his inadequacies as a husband, and Henry Thoreau continually shrank from his friends. The indriven ego, the denial of sexual drives, the glorification of asceticism and the sublimation of emotional frustrations into vague spiritual strivings—it is clear that the transcendental movement in Concord was the febrile outpouring of sick natures as surely as the ravings of a De Sade were diseased at the other extreme.

Under this firmly written, neat paragraph there was another, scrawled in a larger, looser hand. It was a non sequitur, written barely two weeks ago.

From Nine Acre Corner to Walden Pond, from the Great Meadows to the Mill Brook, these men and women knew their Concord. They knew it in all seasons and all weathers. And upon these hardy descendants of the Puritans the New England landscape with its white winters, its honeyed springs, its languorous summers, its riotous falls wrought a curious spell. Concord became for them a hallowed place, encrusted with tradition, heavy with meaning, cathedral-like with symbolism. They very nearly invented Nature for themselves, ripping it bodily from the banks of the Sudbury River or plucking it like wild flowers in the fields, and letting it grow from the pages of their journals. Beside Thoreau's woodchuck, what price Shelley's skylark? Who would exchange Emerson's rhodora for Wordsworth's daffodils?

Homer stared at the second paragraph, then slammed the notebook shut and reached for a cardboard file labelled “Goss case.” His phone rang.

It was Letitia Jellicoe. “Letitia who?”

“Jellicoe. Miss Letitia Jellicoe. I've been away. I was visiting my sister-in-law. Oh, isn't it terrible. My best friend. Alice was my best friend. I said to my landlady, isn't it terrible. And she said, didn't you read it in the paper. And I said, no, it wasn't until I got home this morning that I heard about it on TV. I was eating breakfast at the time. Mercy, if I didn't choke. There was Cheerios all over my robe.”

“Are you referring to Alice Herpitude's death?”

“You are correct. And I can tell you something about her that nobody knows but me. She knew something about Elizabeth Goss. Some secret from when they were girls in Amherst!”

“Alice Herpitude knew a secret about Elizabeth Goss? How do you know?”

There was a pause while Miss Jellicoe looked for a dignified way to express herself. “Well, I used to be a telephone operator in Concord, back in the old days before automatic dialing, and I sometimes heard things. Without intending to, naturally. Sometimes you just can't help—”

“No, of course you can't,” said Homer, lying comfortably. “Do you know what the secret was, Miss Jellicoe?”

“No. I just know there was some secret Elizabeth claimed to have, and Alice didn't believe it.”

“Don't you suppose it was just some gossip that was going around?”

“No, I distinctly remember Alice's saying, ‘Don't worry, Elizabeth. I'll keep your family secret because I don't believe it anyway.'”

“That was all she said? A family secret?”

“Yes. Then Elizabeth said something very rude. She said, ‘I can hear someone breathing' (as if I had been listening on purpose!) and I switched off.”

“Hmmm. Well. Thank you, Miss Jellicoe, thank you very much for calling. Let's see—Elizabeth Goss came from Amherst, Massachusetts and Alice Herpitude did, too. I believe you're right about that.”

“Yes, they'd known each other all their lives. So Alice knew this awful secret!”

Homer hung up as soon as he decently could. Then he stood staring at the telephone. Old Mrs. Hand had told him Alice Herpitude's last words. How did they go? “I knew that what she claimed wasn't true,” or something like that. Had Alice been talking about Elizabeth Goss? At the back of Homer's head there began to arise the dimmest, ghostliest wisp of an idea. He took a railroad schedule out of his pocket and consulted it. Absent-mindedly, then, he picked up his briefcase and fumbled in a drawer for a clean shirt. There was a train from Back Bay at 2:30 …

Chapter 54

	The world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order …
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Fill in all the background, first. Homer Kelly lay at his ease on a settee, ignoring the handsome homelike atmosphere of Amherst's Jones Library, leafing idly through old local papers. Elizabeth Goss had been Elizabeth Matthews before her marriage. When would she have announced her engagement? He started with the fall season of the year before and studied the society pages, examining solemnly the yellowed photographs of dewy young brides in bobbed hair. Most of them were dogs. Their shapeless finery didn't help, and they had these tiaras that they wore low down on their foreheads, like Indian maidens.

But, say, here was one with class.
Post-deb announces engagement to Harvard man of Concord, Massachusetts.
Well, by jeeminy, here she was. It was Elizabeth Goss, nee Matthews. “Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Matthews announced the engagement of their daughter Elizabeth at a supper party yesterday evening at the Lord Jeffery Inn …” Homer's eyes ran on, then did a doubletake and started over. Could this be the right Elizabeth Matthews? She wasn't engaged to Ernest Goss, she was engaged to … but that was impossible. Homer looked at the photograph again. No, there was no mistake. It was Elizabeth Matthews, all right. So she had had another romance … here was a can of worms with a mightly peculiar smell …

Sniffing the new scent, Homer reared up off the settee and nosed around among the bookshelves. After a while he went to the desk and inquired the way to the Town Hall.

“Turn left, then right to Main Street, then left on Main across the green. It's just a block or two this side of Emily Dickinson's old homestead. You can't miss it.”

Homer picked up his briefcase and did as he was bid. The Town Hall turned out to be a grandly ugly Romanesque structure so glowering and heavy that Homer pictured the earth beneath it densely compacted all the way to China. The Town Clerk's office was down the hall to the right. The Town Clerk was out to lunch, but the girl behind the counter took some of the big canvas-covered folios of Births, Marriages and Deaths from the vault where they were stored and let Homer pore over them. When the Town Clerk came back from lunch, he found Homer crouched over one of the big volumes, his enormous forefinger moving along a line like that of a child just learning to read, his lips mumbling the words over and over.

The Town Clerk examined him with sharp analytic eyes. Making instant character analyses was his specialty. Take this chap, now. Odd-looking fellow. Giant. Obviously illiterate. Stringy brown hair cut in big scraps. Horrible tie. And say, look at that forefinger. Spatulate. He should have guessed. A criminal type if ever there was one. “What do you want, mister?” said the Town Clerk nervously.

Homer lifted his eyes and bored holes that went all the way through to the back of the Town Clerk's head with the keenest glance seen in Massachusetts since Daniel Webster's. “Tell me,” he said, “how long is the normal gestation period for human beings?”

Thrilling voice the fellow had. Come to think of it, he had very large prefrontal lobes. Obviously a fellow with plenty on the ball, a professor or something. Funny question though. “I dunno. Nine months, isn't it? Nine and a half?”

Homer stared at the Town Clerk. His lips moved. Then he picked up his briefcase and whirled it around in the Town Clerk's office in a huge circle. “
Wahoo!
” he said. “Me plenty heap awful smart!” The Town Clerk had to rectify his character analysis all over again. The man was a dangerous maniac, he should have seen it right away.

But Homer was going down the front steps three at a time. He was out on the street, charging back to the library, his mind alive with a wild idea. He tossed his briefcase on a library table and started assaulting the card catalogue and snatching books off the shelves. After two hours of tearing the meat out of them, he left their scattered carcasses on the table and ran down the street to the College Drug Store. He found the phone booth in the corner and wedged himself into it by a technique he had worked out years before. (You backed in, squeezed yourself into the seat, lifted your right leg and planted it on the farther wall, and then, ever so gently, you shut the door.) He began to make a series of long-distance calls.

Chapter 55

	I am perfectly sad at parting from you. I could better have the earth taken away from under my feet, than the thought of you from my mind.
HENRY THOREAU

Everyone was asleep except Mary. She had been up since four o'clock, working on her transcendental women. Now she was feeling sleepy again. She propped her head on her hand and looked out her bedroom window to where the elm tree branches made an armpit. In it the morning star hung dazzling. There were red puddles in the hollows of the pavement, like pieces of morning sky let into the road. It was time for some breakfast. Mary got up from her desk, watching the star. It followed her shuffling footsteps with a wobbling retrograde motion. All she had to do was set the pattern and the star fell in with the plan … Pattern again! Why must she be so obsessed with pattern?