The Intuitionist (12 page)

Lila Mae recognizes James Fulton’s signature at the foot of an employee evaluation form, dated a year after her reassignment to the faculty housing of the Institute. Ink identical to that of his signature is observable in small boxes above, where the ink has been used to form x’s in a column of boxes that indicate “excellent.” Except for one box in the “fair” column, regarding a question about punctuality. The date on the form tells Lila Mae that Fulton had just resigned from the Guild Chair (to murmurs of varied volume from the larger elevator inspector industry) to become the Dean of the Institute. The final stage of his career. He’d stolen all the plums; there was nowhere else to go.

The Institute letterhead is more distinguished and staid than the ersatz antiquation of Smart Cleaning company stationery. Rarefied austerity appropriate to a place of higher learning. The document Lila Mae holds is addressed to the Institute’s Board of Directors, and the emotional tenor of the words, the unmodulated panic, provides an intriguing contrast to the serenity of the Institute crest atop the page. The letter urges “swift action” regarding Fulton’s “eccentric” behavior (“eccentric” being a word, Lila Mae notes dryly, that white people use to describe crazy white people of stature), detailed below. Lila Mae has heard most of the stories before—the quick rages, the sudden crying fit in the middle of groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Engineering Wing—but most of the outrageous acts she reads about now are new to her.
White people cover their own. Fulton’s behavior does not make her reconsider the father of her faith; Lila Mae does not expect human beings to conduct themselves in any other way but how they truly are. Which is weak.

The next document she finds is no real revelation, either. Fulton has acceded to the Board of Directors, the anonymous secretary reports (with much more enthusiasm than was present in his first document), and decided to resign. He has accepted our offer of allowing him to retain his faculty housing, as well as the proviso that a caretaker move in with him. This particular piece of paper (which shakes with the Buick’s velocity; not everything is within the chauffeur’s control) goes on to describe Fulton’s rejection of all the caretakers the Institute proposed (or “nannies,” as he referred to the pageant of efficient taskmasters who essayed his front door). The woman he wanted was the housekeeper, Marie Claire Rogers. No one else. The secretary is happy to report that Mrs. Rogers agreed, and will move into the old servant’s quarters on the first floor the second week of the next month. Congratulations, gentlemen, Lila Mae says to herself.

Lila Mae and the House chauffeur, Sven, are well into uncharted suburbia, which has been overgrown with kingsize discount emporiums and family restaurants catering to the primary color crowd since the last time she was out here. It is easier to breathe than in the city, there’s less to see. She looks back down at the next piece of paper, an old
Lift
magazine article Lila Mae read when it first appeared. The sheets are limp and glossy, thin as a breeze. The trial is over. The judge has decided. Marie Claire Rogers must relinquish any of Fulton’s papers in her possession to the Institute for Vertical Transport. According to the
Lift
reporter (whose choice of adjectives reveals him to be an Institute ally), when Fulton knew he did not have long to live, he bartered his personal papers for assurances that Mrs. Marie Claire Rogers could live in his campus house for as long as she saw fit. Needless to say, the Institute had already believed that they would get
Fulton’s papers once he died, having already constructed the necessary reliquary nooks; this unexpected stipulation was just a gnat’s annoyance. Or so they thought at first. Once Fulton’s spirit departed, Mrs. Rogers tendered the papers in question. But not all. Obviously some notebooks were missing, ones from the final two years of Fulton’s life. Academia, posterity, the implacable engine of history would not be denied. But Mrs. Rogers was quite adamant about holding on to the journals, and assailed her landlords with invective not often heard in Yankee climes, by white ears, relenting in her insufferable behavior only when ordered to do so by the court of the Honorable James Madison (no relation). The article ends there, but Lila Mae adds a postscript to herself, about the nature of evidence. It was obvious from the dates on the journals that some were still missing, but no one could prove that they were not, as Mrs. Rogers maintained, destroyed by Fulton in a wee-hour fit of hopelessness, or even stolen—the maid claimed that on the day of Fulton’s funeral, the house had been broken into. Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.

The car is near the Institute. She knows this without looking up because the sounds of the city have finally fallen away, as if Lila Mae and her driver had discovered the one true valley. The gnashing and grinding of the city, the keen laughter that follows a fresh kill. Perfect place for a spa out here, to urge one’s self back into health, gather arms for the social world. The final contents of the file are the handwritten notes of one Martin Sullivan, an Intuitionist acolyte at the Institute.
Subject slams door in my face, insults my mother, Subject catches me sneaking in through the kitchen window and stabs me in the hand with a meat thermometer, Subject sees me hiding behind tree and begins to approach menacingly—I decide to leave the perimeter
. Martin Sullivan goes on to catalog the contents of a garbage pail collected as evidence one week earlier.
Primarily food-related waste
, Sullivan notes,
with approximately 10 percent paper refuse. Two false starts of what appears to be a personal letter to someone named “Aunt Ida,” and
so on. One item looked promising—a copy of
Kwicky’s Weekly Crossword,
with two-thirds of the puzzles attempted to varying degrees of completeness and accuracy. But despite my best efforts, I could not find any hidden messages or other concealed meanings in the puzzles
.

That’s it. She’s the next one up, the next hassle for an old woman.

It has been a long time since she has been here. So long that her initial reaction is not of routine but of first impressions: she remembers entering the wide black gates of the Institute for the first time, her father’s hands on the wheel. She wonders again if news of the accident has reached her parents, if the reports contained her name. (Another thought: there is a file on her accumulating somewhere now, like the one she holds in her lap, an accretion of falsehoods.) She is not like the others who have come to interrogate and nag Marie Claire Rogers. Lila Mae has come to clear her name. At any cost.

Mr. Reed told her, “She refuses to talk to us. Perhaps you’re the perfect one to talk to her. You’re both colored.”

* * *

From
Theoretical Elevators
: Volume Two, by James Fulton.

* * *

No caramel soda, no prune juice, and definitely no coffee: Pompey won’t drink anything darker than his skin, for fear of becoming darker than he already is. As if his skin were a stain that could worsen, steep and saturate into Hell’s Black. They sent Pompey to sabotage the elevator stack in the Fanny Briggs building, Lila Mae is sure of that. It would have appeased their skewed sense of harmony to pit their two coloreds against each other. Dogs in a fighting pit. Pompey would have jumped at the chance, white foamy saliva smeared across his cheeks. Didn’t he say something to that effect when they were in O’Connor’s, just after the crash, when Lila Mae crouched against the wall like a thief?
She’s finally
got what’s been coming to her
. Something like that. Pompey in his too-small beige suit, bowler hat tilted, mischievous in the machine room.

She’s waiting in the car for Marie Claire Rogers to show up. The faculty houses lean behind a regiment of oak at the bottom of the hill. Always the incongruity: the preoccupied theoreticians and the bare-knuckled former inspectors united in academia, living behind indistinguishable Tudor facades. Through the car window Lila Mae can see the gymnasium where she used to live, see the small gutted hole that was her window onto campus. She draws a line across the air to the upper floors of Fulton Hall, the library where the man died. The man whose house she sits in front of now, with a man who does not speak in the driver’s seat. Sven breathes heavily through his mouth like a horse.

The tap at the window startles her. “If you’re going to be here all day, you might as well come in,” the subject says, her words threading through the inch of open window to Lila Mae’s right. Marie Claire Rogers adds, “Just you. Not him.”

She is a short woman, a hut on strong stumpy legs, and looks younger than Lila Mae expected. Not as used-up and exhausted as her profession should have made her. On this overcast day she is a solid living presence, a bull in a bright red sundress that squeezes up around her neck in white ruffles. Dry browned flowers clench in a fist on her straw hat. She does not wait for Lila Mae’s response, starting up the stone walkway to Fulton’s house, her house, in small, measured steps. Lila Mae tells the driver not to wait for her, she’ll make her own way back to Intuitionist House. Not a personality given easily to nostalgia, Lila Mae has nonetheless decided to walk around the campus after interviewing Mrs. Rogers. See if anyone is living in her old room. Perhaps it is the past days’ dislocation.

Lila Mae opens the door to the foyer and sees the red blur to her left. Mrs. Rogers says, “I saw you and him parked in front when I come around the corner.” She plucks a long hat pin from
her head and sets her straw hat next to her on the couch. “I waited twenty minutes and you weren’t moving. I’m not going to be kept out my own house.”

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” Lila Mae replies. “I just wanted to ask you a question or two. If you have the time.”

Mrs. Rogers shakes her head wearily. “I wouldn’t let you in,” she says flatly, “but you’re not like them other men been coming around here, in their city suits all full of themselves. Like they have to be nice to you because you have something they want, even though they think they better than you.” She stares into her visitor’s eyes. “But I give them so much trouble I guess they figure in their heads they send you and I’ll talk to you.”

“Something like that.”

“And I’ll just say what I’ve been keeping because we belong to the same club.” Mrs. Rogers’s hands scrape across her lap as if to brush something away. “Why don’t you sit yourself down,” she says, standing, “while I make some tea.”

The house is not what Lila Mae had expected, but then Fulton’s been dead for six years. It is Mrs. Rogers’s house now, by contractual agreement. There was no mention of it in the file, but there must be rumors that Fulton and Rogers were lovers. Why else go to so much trouble for a servant. Did she start redecorating when he was alive, by creeping degrees? Fifteen ceramic horses stand on the mantle above the fireplace, in poses ranging from mid-gallop to pensive graze. She can hear Mrs. Rogers clinking and fussing down the hall. Boiling water. What did Fulton say as she remade his house. Too far gone to notice the world around him, or too intent on his black box to care about the shells of things. The appearance of matter.

Mrs. Rogers returns with tea and brown wafers. The tea smells and tastes of cloves. The chair Lila Mae sits in is old and firm. Intractable. Mrs. Rogers asks, sipping tea and eyeing Lila Mae over the lip of her cup, “Why don’t you get on with it, then?”

“I just came here to ask you about Mr. Fulton.”

“That’s what the rest of them men said. What people you with? You with the Institute or that Department in the city? Or some new people come to harass me?”

“My name is Lila Mae Watson,” she says. “I’m an Intuitionist. Now I work with the Department of Elevator Inspectors. In the city.”

“Um-hmm,” Mrs. Rogers says. Without emotion. “Ask what you going to ask.” She nibbles a biscuit with tiny teeth.

“It was just you living here with Fulton?” Rogers may not make it easy, but she will find out what she wants to know, Lila Mae decides. She will.

“Somebody had to,” Mrs. Rogers answers wearily. “He couldn’t get along without having someone around to keep him out of craziness. Keep him from himself. First they brought in all these nice old ladies from Europe or some such.” She waves out the window as if that place were just beyond the trees. “But James just ran them right out the house as soon as they walked in. Said they scared him, them being from Sweden and Russia and so on. Then one day he said that he’d only have me under his roof with him.”

“And you accepted.”