Monday, Monday: A Novel (47 page)

Looking up at the tower, she paused for a moment. It was a pompous, ugly piece of architecture, in her opinion, with those tall vertical rows of windows. The security fence around the observation deck made the top seem cluttered, and the huge columns that housed the bell tower looked like a stunted version of the Parthenon in Athens. The building was pretentious and unappealing. And it still frightened her a little.

But she approached it, pausing only briefly at the patch of pebbled cement where she had bled, and wondering if there might be a remnant or stain—any sign at all that she had been there. Of course there was no indication. The pebbles that had blistered her face were cold now. The shadows sloped away from the bright main building before her. She turned and looked at the English building, but saw no one looking back at her from the windows.

Climbing the steps of the main building, she entered through the heavy doors and asked a girl who sat with a pile of books on the elegant, curved stairway if she happened to know the procedure for going up in the tower.

“You have to buy a ticket over at the Student Union,” the girl told her. “It’s a tour.”

Shelly walked down the hall with its checkered tiles and hanging light fixtures and the marble drinking fountains, and left from the west entrance. She crossed the service drive and entered the Student Union through the doors that she and Wyatt had walked out of that day after their chance meeting and meal at the Chuckwagon—which, she noticed, was gone now, replaced by a different cafeteria and a cluster of fast-food restaurants.

At the information desk she was told there were still openings for the four o’clock tour. Tickets were six dollars, and she would have to check her bag. For an extra dollar, she could rent a locker. “You’ll have to hurry,” the student at the desk told her as she paid him. “The others have already gone over to meet the guides at the elevators.” He gave her a key to a locker. “You can’t take anything up.”

Shoving her bag into the locker, she retraced her steps to the main building and joined the dozen or so people waiting with a campus policeman in front of the alcove to the elevators.

The crowd of visitors was eclectic, all of them bundled in heavy coats, the youngest a chubby boy about Nicholas’s age, who wore a puffy parka and a ski cap and had rolled his tour brochure into a cylinder that he was using as a monocular, holding it to his eye and aiming it at places on the walls and ceiling.

Shelly couldn’t help but picture Whitman on his journey through the building that day. It was well known how it had all happened. He had been in the building many times before and had often gone up to the observation deck. Once, he had even visited the school psychiatrist in this very building for help with his disturbing hostility and because he had abused his wife and feared he would do it again. But on that day of the massacre, he didn’t intend to be merciful. He pushed his dolly, bearing a footlocker from his marine days, onto one of the two elevators. He was dressed in janitor coveralls, and no one asked him what was in the footlocker. It was filled with guns and ammunition and enough supplies for an extended siege: canned foods, an alarm clock. Among a lot of other things, he had a jar of honey, some deodorant, cans of Sego diet drink, toilet paper, and sweet rolls.

The tour guides today were two female students who greeted the little group and collected tickets while the campus policeman, an elderly man, escorted everyone through the metal detector and into one of the elevators. No one said much as they crowded in, the boy staring up at the floor numbers with his monocular. The elevator was halfway to the top when a man who stood at the back inquired, “I guess you’ll tell us about Whitman?” The policeman didn’t turn, but one of the guides, an Asian girl, answered. “If you have questions I’ll try to answer them,” she told him, “but we don’t usually talk about him as part of the tour.”

On the twenty-seventh floor, the elevator stopped and opened before a metal door that the officer, jangling a large key ring, unlocked. He admitted the group and led them around a corner and up a half flight of narrow concrete stairs, their shoes echoing loudly. Shelly imagined Whitman lugging the heavy dolly up these stairs.

At the top, another steel-meshed door, obviously not in place when Whitman was here, blocked the way. The officer unlocked it and escorted the gathering up several more flights to a third barrier door, this one opening into a room painted entirely gray—the ceiling, floors, and walls all the same gray shade, but glaringly bright from the sunlight through the banks of windows. A female officer greeted them here.

The group ambled around this small reception area, gazing out of the windows and waiting to be admitted onto the deck. Shelly remembered reading how Charles Whitman had clubbed and shot the receptionist here and dragged her behind a sofa and left her for dead. He had fired a sawed-off shotgun into a family of tourists coming in from the stairs, shooting repeatedly as they tumbled backward. All of this he had done while Shelly had puzzled about imaginary numbers and left her classroom in Benedict, stopping in the bathroom. She had walked out of Benedict Hall about the time that Charles Whitman had tied a white band around his head and stepped out onto the heat of the observation deck, jamming the door behind him with his rented dolly.

Here in the gray room now, the Asian girl said nothing about Whitman or about the subsequent tower suicides that had caused the administration to close the deck for twenty-five years until security measures were installed. She talked about the architect, Paul Philippe Cret, and how he had managed to create a cohesive look to the campus with the modified Spanish style of the red tile roofs. He had studied architecture, she said, in Paris.

The boy drifted away from the gathering, looking from the windows with his paper monocular.

“Does everyone here know how many bells are enough to make a carillon?” the Asian girl inquired.

No one did. “The bells above us are known as the Knicker Carillon,” she said. “It’s comprised of fifty-six bells, which makes it the largest carillon in the state. Tom Anderson is the current carillonneur. He plays once a day, three days a week, as a hobby. He’s been doing this since the fifties. You might have heard him on rainy days playing ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,’ or ‘Let It Snow,’ when it snows. What do you think he plays during finals?”

No one ventured a guess. “I don’t know,” a man said.

“The Death March,” she told him.

Shelly looked around at the few pieces of furniture and wondered if the sofa was in the same place as the one that Whitman had dragged the dying receptionist behind. A young couple had walked in off the deck after he finished stashing the body, having changed their minds about waiting ten minutes longer outside to hear the noon bells ring. They saw Whitman standing over the sofa, holding two rifles, and assumed he had come to shoot pigeons. They spoke to him, and he asked how they were, and they walked over the trail of blood, the girl presuming that it was varnish he had wiped onto the floor and warning her companion not to step in it. They had walked down the stairs to the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor just before the family about to be massacred had walked up.

It was frighteningly random—who lived and who died.

“We’ll go outside now,” the Asian girl said. “Tara and I will be happy to answer questions while you look around the deck.”

“Can you see the turtle pond from up here?” the boy’s mother inquired. She was a burly woman, wearing baggy trousers, a purple ski jacket, and a ski cap with a tassel. “The one that honors the people Whitman shot?”

“It’s hard to see the Tower Garden from up here because it’s so close to the building,” the girl answered. “If you remind me when we’re out there, I’ll point out where it is. It’s over on the north side. We’re coming out on the south side.”

Shelly had never seen the Tower Garden with its turtle ponds. She had known of the dedication a few years back because of the controversy over whether the university should create a memorial. Some people had felt it would only be a reminder of the infamous Charles Whitman, who ought to be forgotten. Shelly’s emotions about the subject were too mixed to be opinions, and she didn’t feel them strongly. She had avoided the debate as well as the garden.

Now she filed out onto the observation deck with the others. The cold wind hit her. She clasped her arms around herself and flung her hair back, taking in the view.

The scene astounded her, it was so vast. She ventured to the wall—a thick limestone parapet about four feet high. A protective steel lattice extending from the top and curving high up over her head made her feel as if she were standing in a birdcage. Directly below was the South Mall plaza, flanked by the two flagpoles in their grassy squares bordered by hedges—the U.S. flag on the right, in its circular concrete base behind which Wyatt had shielded her that day, and the Texas flag on the left, tossing erratically in the wind. The plaza itself was a flat expanse of beige stone with stairs leading down to the tree-lined walkways of the mall.

She was probably standing where Whitman had stood when he saw her. She could all but see herself back then: Up the walkway she had come toward the tower, up the steps, onto the plaza. She had hesitated, deciding whether to cut through the small opening in the knee-high hedge and across the grassy square. She had seen the boy approach her. He had lifted his hand to wave and then had fallen. And Charles Whitman had settled his scope on her as she had stared at the dying boy. She had dropped to the hot pavement of the plaza even before she heard the blast of the gun.

And now here she was, forty-one years and five months later, and Charles Whitman was gone. The frigid wind roared around her. The wall was as high as her chest; she leaned into it to watch the pedestrians—tiny figures with long shadows—make their way across the plaza. A girl mounted the steps and hurried across in the same direction Shelly had gone that day, cutting through the hedge and over the square of grass, just as Shelly had meant to. Looking out toward the far end of the mall, past the trees bordered by buildings roofed in terra-cotta, out beyond the fountain, along a perfect axis, Shelly could see the dome of the Texas capitol in the distance. How clear and open the vista was, compared to the sliver of vision she had seen through her squinted eyes that day, framed by her bloody arm: a view of the shoes of the man lying at the top of the steps, the soles pointing upward like the ears of a rabbit.

She swept her eyes over the skyline of tall buildings and cranes. To the left was the roof of the new Blanton Museum, which she had just walked from, and the art building, where Wyatt had painted her portrait, and the stadium, and farther off, Brackenridge Hospital. The hospital was now a sprawling series of structures built next to the site of the old one, which she and Jack had been taken to after the shooting and where years later she had brought Madeline into the world. It engulfed the location of the Planned Parenthood Clinic, long since demolished, where Shelly had gone for the pregnancy test, wearing the fake wedding ring.

She had been so devastated to learn that she was pregnant. It was different for Carlotta now, pregnant on purpose, unmarried, the father unknown to her, and everyone happy about it. The baby was due in a month. Carlotta had sold her shop and everything in it to pay for the sperm donation and the fertility drugs, and now was living with Jack and Delia indefinitely; they had offered to help her raise the child. Even being Catholic, Delia had accepted the situation, saying she had always wanted to have more children around. Carlotta would work part-time with a jewelry maker in Marfa and leave the baby—boy or girl, Carlotta had refused to find out—with Delia during the day. It was a good arrangement, if a little confining for Carlotta, who had loved the freedom to travel. Shelly couldn’t help but wonder what her own life would have been had she been offered this kind of support from her parents all those years ago.

Her parents were in their eighties now, her father suffering from arthritis and no longer able to drive. It was strange for Shelly to see how easily they had accepted Carlotta when they finally met her a year ago. They had welcomed her into their home and proudly told their friends and neighbors she was their granddaughter, almost as if it had been Shelly’s idea to give the baby up for adoption back then.

She looked at the place where Jack had fallen in the grass, and the wall he had been lifted over, and the red roof of the English building beyond the wall. In the falling light, she smelled rain, though the sky was cloudless, a winter blue, washed with a yellow smudge low to the west. The windows of the English building reflected the blanched light, and she thought of Dan standing there at the large center window on the third floor.

She missed him constantly. It was a shame for Nicholas not to have known him.

She wished she could see as far off as the river—the boat dock where she had met Dan. But the city was in the way. She was searching in that direction when the sudden pealing of bells broke out behind her. Wheeling around, she saw the clock face, so close that it filled her vision, just in front of her, slightly above her head. Pressing her hands up over her ears to block the thunderous chimes from the bell tower above it, she stared at the Roman numerals and the ornate golden arms.

It wasn’t until the ringing had stopped that she looked for the pockmarks made by the bullets. She had heard they were still here, embedded into the stone walls around the clock, evidence of the Austin police, the DPS, county deputies, and civilians—students with deer rifles—firing up at Charles Whitman. They had shot at him from the ground and the rooftops with every kind of gun they could get their hands on, such a free-for-all that when the police had finally made their way into the tower and onto the deck, their lives had been endangered. The ground fire had been useful until then, pinning Whitman down and preventing him from standing up to take aim as he had done in the beginning when he killed so many people so quickly. It had forced him to shoot through the rainspouts at the base of the thick parapet, and whenever he shoved a barrel through, it was met with a volley.