Styx & Stone (29 page)

“I just left Victor Chalmers,” I said. “I’m sure you could tell me a lot about him.”

“I don’t think it would be proper, Miss Stone. I mean, Ellie.” She smiled.

“This isn’t for my titillation,” I said. “Someone has tried to kill my father twice. The same person, I believe, succeeded in killing Ruggero Ercolano. I need to understand the dynamics of the department to get to the bottom of this. That means all the information has to come to light, because I don’t know what’s germane and what isn’t until I hear it.”

“You talk like a detective, but you’re just a young girl. Don’t you want to find a guy and get married?”

“Don’t be fooled by my age or sex,” I said, ignoring her question. “I’m after the man who attacked my father and killed Ruggero Ercolano. And I’ll find him. I’m quite good at this kind of thing, and I don’t easily give up.”

She seemed to accept that. “All right,” she said. “I’ll speak frankly, but I need your assurances that what I say about these people will not be attributed to me.” I gave her my word. “Dr. Chalmers is a level-headed, consistent man,” she began. “He was an average scholar, when he was producing scholarship.”

“Would you say he is a serious man? A man of conviction and honor?”

“How do you mean?”

I thought of a tactful way to put it: “Does he fool around?”

Miss Little cocked her head. “Is that pertinent to the attack on your father?”

I shrugged. “It could be. I don’t know.”

“Well, it was the biggest, yet most hushed-up scandal since I’ve been with the department. And that’s five years.”

“What scandal?”

“I don’t want you to think of me as a gossip; I’m just telling you what you want to know. A year and a half ago, Professor Chalmers found himself in a most embarrassing situation. He was investigated by the ombudsman on a charge of impropriety. It involved Miss Jaspers. It all began after he went to see her in that disgraceful play.”

“
Our Town
?”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, not that
Our Town
is disgraceful, just the version she was in. Stark naked on the stage, she was. No shame, no modesty—naked under the bright lights in a theater full of men.”

I swallowed hard, thinking of Gigi watching her from the front row. But then, Gigi hadn’t yet arrived in New York at that time. Of course, since then he’s probably enjoyed her private performances . . .

According to Joan Little, Professor Chalmers began pressuring Hildy Jaspers for a date after he’d seen her perform. As she understood it, Miss Jaspers dodged him for about a month, then he started to follow her, wait outside her apartment, and send her flowers, all to no avail. I could just picture him, making a fool of himself, chasing a girl young enough to be his daughter. His devotion grew all the same, like ringworm, and he endured her repeated refusals, hoping to breach the chasm that separated him from the reach of Hildy’s ten-foot pole. When none of his efforts bore fruit, he supposedly used his authority as chairman for leverage, a kind of extortion. But he had underestimated Miss Jaspers’s resolve and smarts. She marched down to the ombudsman and filed a complaint. When the dust settled a few weeks later, Dr. Chalmers was suitably apologetic, though he acknowledged no wrongdoing. He maintained that it was all a misunderstanding on Miss Jaspers’s part.

“What about his daughter, Ruth?” I asked. “She withdrew from Wellesley for a semester, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Miss Little hesitantly. “But what does Ruthie’s leave of absence have to do with this?”

“I don’t know, unless you tell me.”

“She withdrew for some personal, family reasons. Dr. Chalmers never told me why. She just came home from school.”

“And did she go anywhere? Did they send her away?”

Joan Little screwed her face into frown. “No, I told you she came home. She used to come to the department at least once a week; she was helping her father with a research project. What are you implying, Ellie?”

I shook my head. “Nothing, I guess. I thought they might have pulled her out of Wellesley to send her somewhere for a while.”

Her eyes began to smolder.

“All right,” I said, coming clean. “I thought she might have been pregnant. You’re sure she didn’t go anywhere, even briefly?”

“Absolutely not! I saw her every week that semester. Ruthie is a good girl. The only one they ever sent away was Billy. And, now that you mention it, they sent him away just before Ruthie came home.”

“Where did he go?”

“I’m not sure. It was some boarding school in New England.”

“What about Roger Purdy? What’s the dirt on him?”

Miss Little shrugged. “He’s a petulant little so-and-so. Spoiled rotten. Arrogant and unpleasant.”

“Nothing else about him?” I asked. “No gossip about his personal life?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t have one, as far as I could tell. Someone once joked that he’d never kissed a girl.”

“Petronella?”

“I didn’t like him. No one really liked him,” she continued. “He was the kind who tried too hard to endear himself to everyone, but he was awkward and devoid of charm. His fawning was false, and people sensed that. I’m sure he was the prissy, little tattletale when he was a child. The boy the bullies picked on. I pitied him at times, but then he’d say something ugly or condescending to remind me why misfortune dogged him. I can’t say I was sorry to see him go.”

“His personal life?”

“Single. I don’t know how any woman could stomach him.”

Unwittingly perceptive, Joan Little was a smart woman, but simple enough to mistake two queers for hapless ladies’ men. It just didn’t occur to her that they didn’t like women.

“What about Ercolano?” I asked, shifting gears. “Can you tell me anything more about him?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, sipping her tea. Then she wiped her nose again with the handkerchief. “What’s to tell? He was a nice man, a good man. It’s a tragedy what happened.”

“Do you know anything about his personal life? Did he have a girlfriend? Girlfriends?”

Her mouth dropped open slightly, and I wondered if it was the question or some mind-numbing cold medication that accounted for the dull look on her face.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you, or anyone else, know if he had dates?”

“No,” she said crisply, then rose to refill her teacup from the liquor cabinet across the room. I watched her from behind as she poured, shoulders shaking, then shuddering. She bowed her head, and I realized she was sobbing.

The older girlfriend used to scour that place at least once a week. I saw her on all fours in the open doorway, hair tied up in a red kerchief—a red-and-black kerchief—scrubbing his floors right out to the hallway.

Awkwardly, I tried to comfort her, amazed at how ingenuous I, too, could be. She was his “angela” as in
angel
, not Angela the name. Tillie Arnsberger’s words echoed in my head as Joan Little wept on my shoulder.

For the next hour, I listened to the story of Joan Little’s heart-breaking fall for Ruggero Ercolano. It was the first time all week that I felt someone was telling me the truth, or at least the first-hand truth. Grief flowed from her weeping form, as she related their first meeting, their first tryst, their first fight.

Ruggero Ercolano had come to New York to interview at Columbia three times in the spring of 1958. The department was searching to fill the faculty position vacated by Petronella’s dismissal, and the young scholar from Yale was the top candidate. Joan Little noticed his Latin good looks the first time he walked through the door, but the thought of romance didn’t enter her mind. He was younger than she by almost five years, and the only handsome young men who pursued older women were gigolos.

Ercolano stopped to chat with her at her desk that day, then returned to New Haven to wait for a call. A month later, he was back for a second interview, and again he made time to speak to her. He complimented her on her hair and told her she was pretty. Still, she figured his flirtation was a ploy to curry favor in the department. Then he got the job, and Joan secretly reveled. When he moved to New York in August, the courtship began in earnest. Ercolano cornered Joan Little as she was leaving the office one evening.

“I don’t know New York,” he said with a crooked smile she found adorable. “I have no pots and pans yet. Do you know a good restaurant near here?”

“Why, yes,” she answered, blushing from the attention and his irresistible charm. “There’s Chez Mon Oncle, a French Bistro. Oh, but that’s near where I live in the West Village.”

“I have heard about Greenwich”—he pronounced it
Green Witch
—“Village. May I invite you to dinner with me tonight? Chez Mon Oncle?”

Joan Little fell in love that night, but resisted the temptation to give in to his repeated entreaties for a nightcap
chez elle
. In the weeks that followed, Ercolano wooed her discreetly, secretly. She thought he feared that discovery by Professor Chalmers might lead to a dismissal for both of them.

“It’s not that I am worried to tell people, but my life is my own business,” he explained to her one October evening in 1958. She remembered it as just a couple of days after Pope Pius XII died. The pontiff’s death didn’t strike me as particularly romantic or germane, but Ercolano was Italian, after all.

Miss Little told me how Ercolano’s persistence finally won her over, and without blushing, she recounted the time she had “yielded to him.” In fact, she had done the yielding the night Pope John XXIII was elected, on the very couch where we were now sitting. It would have been insensitive to change seats at that moment, so I suffered in silence.

The affair burned with the glow of fresh love in the following months. A wink at the office, a grope in the conference room when no one was around. The clandestine nature of the relationship enhanced the romance, and Joan Little found it delicious. No more papal milestones.

But novelty eventually turns into routine and becomes stale. By March 1959, Ercolano’s passion had leveled off, and Joan suspected he was dating other women. She discovered a copy of
Playboy
magazine in his apartment and confronted him. He shrugged it off, explaining that he appreciated jazz and was reading it for the music reviews. She lived with it.

Then in June, Ercolano put the relationship on ice, telling Joan he had met someone else. She was crushed, and retreated from the world for two weeks. She didn’t go to work, inventing a story about a sick aunt in Pennsylvania. In reality, she was holed up on Barrow Street, yearning for the man who had shown her the dizzying joys of passion (her last chance, she figured), only to snatch them away once she had fallen. She felt discarded and cheap, and that made her want him even more. In the darkness of her closed apartment, she decided that she must hold on until he realized his error. And so she suffered the humiliation of begging for a part of him. She went to his apartment and offered herself to him on his terms, when and if he wanted her. She became the other woman in Ercolano’s new ménage.

Love’s tides rise and fall; they’re rarely constant. And, so, in the autumn of 1959, Joan Little’s tolerance paid off, at least to her mind. Ercolano grew tired of the new girlfriend, and Joan was the temporary tonic. But when one lover realizes he holds the cards in a relationship, it’s hard to resist shuffling and reshuffling the deck to taste. People will take what you give them, and Joan Little had given him unchecked control. The status quo from October 1959 to Ercolano’s death was Joan Little during the week and the other girl (who was, of course, Ruth Chalmers) on the weekends. Joan told me tearfully of her last night in Ruggero’s arms, the Wednesday before his death. They had argued, and now he was dead.

I arrived home around seven o’clock. Raul was on duty in the elevator, and I had a few questions I was sure he’d like to answer.

“Have you seen Mrs. Farber’s gentleman friend recently?” I asked.

“The guy who didn’t show the other night?” he asked. “Geez, Mrs. Farber chewed me out something awful yesterday. Said that wasn’t Mr. Walter I let up. Don’t go getting me into trouble, Miss Stone. I’ve always minded my own business around here.”

I let it pass.

“I can’t figure it, though,” he continued. “I seen that guy before,” he said, referring to Chalmers. “I remember faces. Not much else for me to do around here, so I watch the people.”

“That other time,” I asked, “did he come with the lady and the young man like he did Tuesday night?”

“No, I never seen those two before.”

“You don’t suppose you saw him when he was visiting my father?” I asked.

Raul snapped his fingers. “You know, that’s a possibility. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“He works with my father,” I said by way of instruction, and let the matter drop. I promised myself never to ask Raul anything ever again.