Death of the Black-Haired Girl (6 page)

“We are Robin Hood,” shouted one of the people’s soldiers, who in his bourgeois life had gone often to the cinema. He would subsequently be denounced over his previous indulgences and murdered with what was, then, still unbelievable cruelty. “Look at the pictures of the rich on the money,” cried another. At a meeting at the edge of the village the people cheered, screamed actually, a sound that, like “Sora” and the speeches, Jo would remember for the rest of her life.

So there she stood on the hillside listening to the flutes and pretending to enjoy the concert, all over again.

Her experience in the valley had left Jo with variations on a recurring dream. Its setting was always the same, cobbled together out of recollections of the montaña and its valleys. Its contours were probably made partly from memories of what different local leaders of the movement had claimed life would be like after the only historically correct revolution in history. The dream was also composed of random images from the montaña, the villages, the Struggle, the visions of promise that the movement’s leaders laid out for the imaginations of its supporters, and of her own early denial and finally nameless dread.

In the dream it is early evening, showing a quarter moon. The sky is far away. “So blue” was her dreaming thought. The clouds are transparent. Smoke from a dung fire rises to a point, the height at which the wind disperses it. The Four sound their flutes around a fire the color of the sky. “Sora.” She never learned the words. So sweet but their meaning is unspeakable. The breath of the fluting marks the four directions of the winds. On high is Sirius and the stars near it in Canis Major where the Sacred Lines meet. Also the stars of Pictor, called by Western astronomers the Easel.

Canis Major was on the banner of the Struggle. The Spanish priests had believed that secret human sacrifices were made to Sirius and other stars. Surely they—practitioners of auto-da-fé—had also believed that the spectacle of ceremonial homicide was edifying. Everyone in Jo’s dream is smiling at the sky.

In an empty space where some malefactor’s house had stood there are panels of light blue plastic around a square of the exquisite sky. It is a window with no house. A sign under it reads:
SORA.
Maybe it meant freedom, or perhaps Sirius. I could sing it in my sleep if I knew the words, Jo always thinks before waking up.

Shivering beside the science building, she stood among the student audience. In the cooling early winter dusk, the young people smiled and applauded. Jo stayed with them, listening until some of the students wandered off and the musicians stopped playing. She was still standing on the hill when a colder wind settled in the valley and the college students began to drift off. One of the musicians, a light-skinned, delicately featured young woman, was taking contributions from the audience in her large broad-brimmed hat, embroidered on the crown with what looked like morning glory vines. There were many bills forthcoming. Finally the young woman looked Jo in the eye, tensing with a small smile.

She reminded Jo of someone she had once known. A pale man, eyes black as blood at night. Jo put the thought of him out of her mind.

She gripped her own shoulders to keep from trembling. She remembered the excuses the well-educated people, native and foreign, had made for the movement. All of them she had tried to believe when belief had come more easily. The effort of belief, the replacement of it with sheer terror and a sense of what she thought of as her own cowardice, had cost her. One price she had paid was the almost nightly reliving of awakening to find abomination in the stars. Her favorite stars too, the brightest and most beautiful she had ever seen. Spying out the heart of evil in the sacred lines of heaven made her suspect that perhaps the religious life was not for her. On the other hand, she thought, maybe it was.

A
FEW DAYS LATER,
Maud turned up at Brookman’s office door and tapped her secret signal. She had an envelope with some kind of printout inside. “You have to read this. I need your reaction.”

“I haven’t time now, love.”

He thought her look was suspicious. “Why?”

“I have a meeting,” he told her falsely. He was anxious for news of Ellie.

She stamped her foot a little. She looked genuinely pleading. Childlike.

“Really,” Brookman said, “I have to hurry . . .”

She handed it to him with what appeared to be a blend of anxiety and self-satisfaction. “Call me, Steve,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”

When she was gone, he locked up and went home without a thought of the envelope. She was always insisting he preview her writings.

In the Brookman house on Felicity Street—the larger half of what had been the marble-fronted Federal-style home of a single family—Steve Brookman prepared to grade and comment on his student essays. He was not particularly a drinking man but on this afternoon he poured a half snifter of Courvoisier, an expensive concession to his own self-pity.

Smart kids were wonderful if they could keep it all together, he was thinking, if nothing bad happened, though every year, somewhere in the college, something did. Whereupon Dean Spofford would call the parents, and you had to give it to the guy who had to do that. There were always casualties, of drugs or madness in general.

He was thinking of Maud and how utterly demure and innocent she appeared. These terms reflected the attitudes of his generation and she would probably be insulted by them. The young, young texture of her skin always astonished him. He was also wondering how he might be able to break things off with her, in spite of the fact that she was his advisee and had given up a junior year abroad for him. It was late in the semester. They were working on her undergraduate thesis.

Beyond anxiety, he was aware of feeling a kind of reckless, mindless joy.

Brookman had no native talent for intrigue. He had been careless and forgetful all his life. In twenty years of teaching he had never slept with a student before. College kids flirted, boys as well as girls. How could they not—the students had been the apples of their elders’ eyes from preschool. During what happened to be Brookman’s first semester with Maud, without intending any personal reference, a younger colleague of his had observed that innocent coquetry now led to innocent fucking. There was also innocent frenzy, innocent passion, the innocent, impalpable knife through the heart. Brookman was the one more experienced with consequences, and to that degree he had thought he could take care of her. Innocent love was not possible, love the least innocent of all things. For a long time he had believed he knew as much as anyone about love but that it had no nameable qualities.

He drank more than he ought have done if he intended to drive. He’d accepted an invitation to a party that evening, given by the college’s famous resident artist. She was not truly in residence; she commuted by plane from New York but maintained a rustic roost with a Franklin stove and a picture window up in the hills for use on teaching days. A never-to-be-seen friend would fly her from Long Island in a vintage DC-3, the kind of plane in which Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid escape from Casablanca. It didn’t get any hipper than that.

The artist, a tall woman in her fifties, affected a brunette style and black dress that suited her slim figure and large, expressive brown eyes. Brookman liked her work, which had Piero della Francesca–shaped women who were confined in some way—up against walls or prison bars, sometimes dead, sometimes portrayed as mounted condottieri in period breeches, cuirasses and greaves. The paintings invited narrative speculation from the viewer. There were some portraits too, of both men and women. Some of these pictures were in the college museum, which had given her a show. None of her work hung in her rustic hilltop house, however; there it was all West African art—masks, bronzes, elaborately worked cloth-and-feather fetish compositions, baskets, a lightning snake. These objects had been set up in dramatic ways in every public room in the house.

There were maybe thirty people at the party, most of whom he’d seen around the college. Two of the people he knew pretty well but rarely saw, a young female philosophy professor who had a history with Brookman and was present with her husband, and a frail, long-haired history professor named Carswell, who’d been working on his third volume of the origins, flourishing and destruction of Carthage. Carswell went to Tunis every year, and his first book was highly praised in the
New York Review.
His second volume was trashed by a rival and not noticed by supporters. He was still going to Tunis but looked a bit discouraged; years were passing without volume three. He told people he was rewriting too much. Behind his back, people were calling him Mr. Casaubon.

Brookman wished him well; he felt he had been in the same situation. He had a few drinks without paying attention to how many and went over to the historian.

“Hey, Dan, I ever tell you how much I liked your first book?”

It was true that Brookman had read and enjoyed the first volume on Carthage. But that had been pretty much enough Carthage for him.

“Yes, you did, and I’m grateful.”

“I really liked it.”

“Actually, the first volume on Carthage wasn’t my first book.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No,” said Carswell, “I realize that. I hope you’ll like the next. Maybe I should say I hope you’ll actually read it.”

“Hey, I’m waiting.” He put his hand on Carswell’s shoulder, which was lower than his own. “But don’t give yourself a hernia.”

He had not meant to say that. It had come out wrong. He had meant to compliment and encourage. He looked back at Carswell, who was staring into his own drink. Best not to apologize. Anyway, Carswell had been insufferable. Brookman thought it was time for him to be going. He took one more round of the African art and found his hostess, the painter, at the door.

“This is the greatest collection of African art I’ve ever seen,” he told her.

“Then you haven’t seen many,” she said.

Brookman looked at the woman in surprise.

“Buy it over there?” he asked her.

“Of course.”

“Did you buy any slaves?”

No, no, he thought, driving home. Not what he had intended to say at all. There was some bitter herb under his tongue that night. Had there not been a contemptible figure in the days of Emily Post called The Guest Who Is Never Invited Again?

“Not that I give a shit,” he said to the dashboard.

But his wife liked parties. Ellie liked people and people loved her, and it would not do for him to lurch from house to house poisoning their social life in a fairly small place. He had no desire to establish himself as the inevitable asshole spouse. As for the people they socialized with—sometimes he enjoyed them, sometimes not. But Ellie had to have her pleasures until she went back to teaching again.

Ellie’s popularity at the college, among both her colleagues and her students, was a source of great satisfaction to Brookman. He himself was not disliked. In fact he was widely admired, but not, like his wife, so affectionately regarded. He had been raised in a state orphanage in Nebraska, and his colorfully rendered recountings of early deprivations made him an exciting figure to the college’s students. His courses were always oversubscribed, and one he had given, on his own
Smithsonian
article about a sunken Spanish Manila galleon, illustrated with his underwater photography, had got him a regular forty-five-minute program on PBS. He had been bitterly disappointed at its cancellation after one season, though not everyone in the English and composition department had shared his distress. In any case, it helped secure him a tenured position very early on.

His popularity and attractiveness led some to suspect him of womanizing, of conducting affairs with colleagues, wives and students. The suspicions were exaggerated. He had indeed dallied with faculty wives, but Maud, with whom he had quite fallen in love, was his first and only student lover and in that regard a violation of his principles.

After the party he sat in his college-owned house, in the room he had chosen as an office—the room where the previous occupants had left their
National Geographic
s—and listened to Chet Baker’s “Let’s Get Lost.”

His answering machine was on for calls from Ellie. There were fretful calls from Maud. Playing the messages back, he realized she had been drinking. Maud was not a cheap date; she had a hard head and could put a lot away for a girl her age. It seemed the wrong time to redefine a relationship. He failed to call her.

“Never apologize, never explain” was some vitalist supremo’s line. Sound advice if anyone could hold to it. But within himself it was all he did. His conscience, or whatever it was, kept perfect time with him, stalked him adeptly. He would never be at peace with himself.

Maud’s youth, unquietness, intelligence, passion and lack of judgment were irresistible to him. So shamelessly bold, reckless. They lured each other. She did it probably out of impatience for real life. He had no excuse but greed.

At college age Brookman was serving in the Marine Corps at a naval air station in the Mojave Desert. Immediately afterward he had worked in a cannery in Homer, Alaska, then as a crewman on a crab boat out of the same town. The pay was good, the work unbelievably hard for twentieth-century Americans. They had recruited farm boys from the Midwest who were ready to do it. The risk—most of what counted as serious accidents were fatal—was very high. A single night in the rack, with Arctic water sloshing around the berthing compartment, the pitch and toss, the port and starboard rolls, had felt to him like sure, sudden death. Brookman had panicked utterly. He had wanted not to die in cold water, not to breathe his last with his lips up against the overhead while the water rose over his head.

In his terror he went to sleep. It had happened to him before, in childhood—absolute fear succeeded by sleep. When he woke up in the rack he put on his gear, climbed up on deck into the sleet and went to work. The captain of the boat, an active member of the Alaska Independence Party, had a procedure for men demanding to quit once aboard, which was the impulse of every man jack who had never been at sea before. Quitters had to wait until an inbound boat was sighted. The captain would then sell them a drysuit. The price of the drysuit was deducted from the pay due them, and the price was high. They wore the drysuit to jump overboard into Norton Sound, and assuming they got pulled out successfully the rest of their pay—plus—went for the other skipper’s trouble. For the genuinely ill, Brookman’s captain might provide a breeches buoy. Appendicitis might eventually get you a Coast Guard helicopter. Brookman had other tough jobs, at sea and ashore, and he had done time in jail for no good reason.