Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read online

  On Brookman’s desk were piled the student assignments due to be graded and returned the following day. He had been awake all of the previous night evading any responsibility to them. Now they were neatly stacked against him on his green college blotter and there seemed nothing for it but to read them. He felt, on that particular morning, that he would rather die.

  It was true that most of the papers were fairly boring, but that was not Brookman’s problem. The real trouble was that they could be quite ingenious, experimental in style, original or contrarian in reasoning. These were kids whose high school teachers carried them to the airport on their shoulders—the preppie stars, the advanced-placement-class brains and scholar athletes, the alpha girls, the youths of destiny to be raised up or broken by time’s wheel. Some schools were said to instruct their students on the techniques for ruling the world. A revered visionary of the nineteenth century had said Brookman’s college thought of itself as examining the moral authority of privilege, which was far more high-minded, and exactly the same thing.

  He had been hearing Andean flutes outside since dawn, thin wintry sounds just the near side of tonality. The music had become a daily presence around the college. When he picked a paper from the top, whose should it be but young Maud Stack’s. It had not been on the pile the day before, from which he had to conclude that she had let herself into the building and his office, to which he had rashly given her a key the year before. Maybe, he thought, he could have the office lock changed, discreetly, at his own expense. An odd guilty thought, of uncharacteristic foreboding.

  Maud’s paper was too long as usual and also a week late. Maud’s assignments were always late. She turned in less than half of the minimum due, invariably borne on one of her fits of manic energy and insight. The results could be truly dazzling. Even on days when he was not particularly in the mood for Maud, he would take up one of her essays with a stirring of anticipation not untouched by dread. Dread of her winning her way inside him again, of threatening to crowd out the contoured life he had made himself, the devotions and sacred loyalties within it.

  The student papers that day concerned Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Maud had no line on it; the bookish kids never did. It was low showbiz, they thought; it was vulgar and corny.

  The passage that had caught her attention was the one in which the Doctor asks Mephistopheles how he manages to wander about tempting obsessed intellectuals while doing time in hell.

  “Why this is hell,” says the Diabolus, “nor am I out of it.”

  “Shakespeare,” Maud had written, “would never be so impious.”

  Next to her line, Brookman wrote: “True.”

  This is the line that gets to her, an odd precocious insight for a spoiled college girl. In discussion, he will tell her this, if not in so many words.

  Maud was seriously, determinedly in love with him. Too young to know better, he would have joked, had it been a joking matter. Which it was not, because that was the situation. She actually was too young to know better.

  Maud was a passionate person; Brookman also. He was not immune to obsession, which was really the basis of his success as a travel and adventure writer. He had been crazy about Maud for a year, not only because she was beautiful and sexually inspired but because of her youth, her moments of sheer brilliance, the unquiet being behind her eyes.

  Not that the flame burned less brightly now but that the kindling furnished a different smoke. As far as Maud went, he would have to digest the venom of loss. There was only one love the loss of which he could not contemplate, and it was not Maud’s. A few days before, Brookman’s wife of eleven years had, with confidence and joy, confirmed to him that she was pregnant. She was on leave for the semester and had been in Saskatchewan on her family’s farm since Canadian Thanksgiving, their ten-year-old daughter along, leaving Brookman to his ways. He loved her very much and was filled with guilt and superstitious dread about their safety. He had resolved to break off the thing with Maud. Whatever it took.

  Brookman walked from his desk to the Tudor windows that opened to the quad. He brushed open the gray and black curtains, which displayed the same salvific motto of missionary days, about darkness and light and converting the Indians. His desk was genuinely old, a rolltop bequeathed to the college by Charles Sanders Peirce or some other Brahmin savant of the nineteenth century.

  Outside in the quad he saw a middle-aged man walking deliberately in the direction of the street gate, one of the lost souls who wandered the campus yards and passages at every hour. The security staff knew all the regulars and, even in the aftermath of the World Trade Center events scarcely three years before, let them have free range of the place. Art students who could make them sit still liked to pose such people. They had faces undergraduates would recall all their lives, not remembering who they were, where or when seen. Maybe, Brookman thought, Maud had one of them in mind, locating Faustus already in hell. Was it not an odd line for an adolescent to seize on—the world as hell? Not really. Father’s influence. Her father had been a New York City police detective. Her mother, dead.

  The man Brookman watched was in his forties and had been around the college for a very long time. He lived in the small downtown condo his parents had bought for him. No backpacks for him; along with the plastic bags from Price Chopper and Target and 7-Eleven he carried a worn briefcase with a college sticker he had pasted on it more than twenty years before as a student. Sometimes he walked silently, eyes fixed on the pavement. At other times he carried on a dialogue with the unseen, an exchange that sounded so nuanced and literate that new students and faculty thought he was addressing them or talking into a cell phone. Occasionally he grew angry and shouted a bit, but like many of the delusional, he had learned not to confront real people who—downtown—could prove all too substantial.

  Brookman stayed at the window to watch him. It was possible to picture this man sitting all night in the room his family had bought for him, and Brookman wondered if he was alone or accompanied through the small hours by the voices he heard. Whether he turned on the light or sat in the dark with them, whether they were visible to him or simply voices. What their identities were, how they treated him. Did they make him angry? Certainly he heard no good news from them.

  Sometimes the man wandered into the college buildings and rode the elevators. Security never stopped him; no one bothered him. If he was in an elevator when someone got on, he would get off, even if he had just got on. If he was trapped in the elevator by a crowd, he began to act desperately sane, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief, nodding pleasantly at no one in particular, ignoring his voices. When he reached a floor he would race out, plainly agitated. Madness was hardly unknown in the college. There were others like this man, forever groping through the maze of alma mater.

  Still at the window, Brookman watched the quad. The only color was of the autumn-yellowed grass on the lawns; the sky matched the sidewalks and the Norman tower of New Chapel. There was faint snow, salting a drizzle. It was slightly cheering because the month had been gray and wet, more chill than truly cold.

  He saw that the man with the bags had reversed direction. The man was now walking as fast as he could, fleeing a noisy group of students excited by the powdering of snow. He was dull-eyed, chin down, jaw clenched. He didn’t like the snow on his fair balding skull, didn’t like the happy youths. In a moment he would turn again and walk back to his own voices. It was so much work to be crazy, Brookman thought.

  There sounded a knock against the dark paneling of Brookman’s office door, a loud single rap followed by a pause, then two rapid knocks. It was a d-delta in toneless Morse code, a little of Brookman’s obsolete nautical education that he had passed on to Maud, an impractical skill for some decades but useful at that moment.

  Tiny snowflakes rested on the locks of her hair that showed around the edges of her watch cap. Brookman took a quick look right and left along the hall. Maud noticed his display of guilty stealth. She brushed back the hood she wor
e over the cap and laughed at him. He drew her into the room, gathering her up by her jacket and yanking her, somewhat violently, into his office. The containers of cold coffee at her feet went over.

  “Help,” she said.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, walking to the inlaid window to close the dusty curtains. Lux in umbras procedet. Then he kissed her and found himself in his Maud transport. He felt as if he could drain her, overwhelm and consume her, all her scents and silky turns, the firm athlete’s body. Or else that he was the one being consumed, confused and incapable of escape.

  “Oh,” she said, “you’re hard.”

  “Don’t be coarse,” he said. It had taken him a moment to get the reference. She didn’t care for this reproach.

  “Coarse. What?” She demanded an answer of him in the agitated adolescent manner of the time. “You think that’s coarse? You’re such a middle-class prude.”

  “Working-class prude.” He had been around the world at least once and had never thought of himself as a prude. “Maybe just lower class.”

  Before long he was sitting at his desk and she was more or less under it, down on him, and he could only think of those long lips and those all-at-once—on a single day it seemed—suddenly knowing eyes. He bent to twist her long black silky hair into a coil and ran his fingers, wrapped in it, down the back of her neck.

  He sat in a dazzled aftermath, watching her every move. She brazenly blew him a kiss, lips to fingers.

  “Oh, baby” was all he could think of to say.

  Not poetry. Perhaps inappropriate? Certainly not the older-brotherly chat he had had in mind for this particular visit.

  “I love you,” she said. “I love your brains and cock and knees and eyes. I love your hokey dipshit tattoos. I don’t scare and you don’t scare, but I’m shit terrified that I so adore your bones, Professor Brookman. Aren’t you scared of loving me?”

  “Maybe I don’t love you, Maud. Maybe I’m just obsessed with you, body and soul.”

  “Now,” she said, “you’re scaring me.”

  “What we have is fearsome. We’re both going to live in dread.” He saw that she was at the point of tears.

  “But,” she said, “with your wife, with that shepherdess creature, the Albigensian or whatever—that’s all cozy sweetness and light, right?”

  “That’s right. But you’re a little tart. A little Kerry gallows bird of an outlaw. Maybe we’ll swing on a rope in the rain for each other.”

  She put a lock on him, held him as hard as she could. She was trembling.

  “You’re scaring me, Steve.”

  “Because I love you,” he said. Yet love was not really what he felt for her. In times to come he would long ponder what he had been trying to say.

  “I thought what you said about Shakespeare and Marlowe was on the money,” Brookman told her when all was in order. “Faustus and hell and so on. Well observed.”

  “Think I’m right?”

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “You tell me why,” Brookman said.

  “Because Shakespeare would never have said the world was hell. It would have been blasphemous.”

  “Shakespeare made some defamatory statements about the world.”

  “Yeah. But he wouldn’t have Mephisto be right. Not with hell right there. They both know a single drop of Christ’s blood could save him.”

  “What a wicked creature you are,” Brookman said. “Get out. What are you doing here anyway?”

  “I want to see you. Is your wife, like . . . ?”

  Brookman’s wife and daughter were returning early to keep their Christmas at home with him. Ellie’s parents were of a Mennonite sect that more or less rejected Christmas, but they still expected a winter visit from their daughter and grandchild. Watching Maud, Brookman saw a cloud of resentment cross her brow. She did not like hearing about his domestic arrangements.

  He cut her off.

  “We don’t know yet when she can get back. There’s a storm in western Canada. Planes may not fly. On the other hand, they may.”

  “But I want to see you.”

  “We’ll see each other.”

  “I’ll call you later, Steve,” she said. “Have to buy a pretzel and get to class.”

  When she was out the door, he went to the window, drew the curtains open again and watched her walk across the quad. Frozen rain clung to the coats of students passing by. The man Brookman had seen earlier was standing by the street gate, staring at Maud as she passed.

  He closed his heraldic curtains again and turned out the lights. Such domesticities served to bring Maud closer to him, because that was what he did when she came to his office outside of hours.

  Brookman’s appointments were about to begin, and he wanted a break between the stream of Maud’s frantic consciousness and his first actual student of the day. He kicked his rolling chair back against the wall and put his feet up. The room was still scented with Maud’s perfume and the soapy schoolgirl odors of her body, and Brookman found it difficult to banish her from his mind.

  3

  CROSS INN, WHERE Maud and Shell lived, afforded beautiful views of city and campus. In the twenties and thirties it had been the best hotel in town. Over time, like everything else downtown, it degenerated, eventually becoming a ratty dope-and-suicide hotel. In the end, the college acquired and renovated it for a dormitory, keeping some of the art nouveau pieces and paneling of the original. To Shell it still looked depressing. She liked to say that the place accommodated as much dope and nearly as many suicides as a dorm as it had as a welfare hotel. This was an exaggeration. But the dim-lit hallways, dusty mirrors and portraits of scholarly immortals were, Shell thought, a bringdown. She knew a cheapo hotel when she saw one. One tip-off was the smell of insecticide and garbage awaiting incineration. Shell and her mother had lived for a while in a welfare motel on the edge of a river running brown across from a stretch of woodland.

  On her way back from her poetry class, Shell had gotten a call on her cell phone from her ex-husband, John Clammer. She promptly switched it off. Then he called her on the college’s automated service line. It seemed humiliating to go through the business of taking the phone off the hook and trying to ignore the cacophony and wanga-wanga that would ensue. And she would be goddamned if Crazy John Clammer would drive her into the cold weather.

  Shell had a restraining order against her ex, but it seemed to provide no practical release from his phone calls. In any case, when he referred to it, he tended to laugh in a way she found unpleasant. To actualize the legal abstraction, Shell had purchased a Sauer Luftwaffe-style automatic pistol, which she kept on her knee during Crazy John’s phone calls to remind her of the syllogism that stated all men were mortal.

  “Hello,” she said sweetly in one of the British accents she had been learning on tape for an audition piece.

  “Ma’am,” said Crazy John, “may I please speak with Miss Shelby Magoffin?”

  “That,” Shelby said, “is forbidden, I’m afraid.”

  “Forbidden?”

  “Hello, John. You ain’t supposed to telephone me. Send a e-mail.”

  “Shelby? Honey?”

  “How come you’re being affectionate? I thought you hated my poor guts. You said that.”

  “I thought you wanted a real man. I wasn’t gonna hurt you.”

  “Don’t you treat me like I’m your little girl punk, Johnny. Don’t think I can’t get you arrested from up here. When you gonna grow up?”

  Shelby was subject to goofy telephone calls at the college, and not only from her ex. For the most part she slipped under the radar of C-list paparazzi, but the year before she had made a screamer called The Harrowing of Hell, and since then she got calls from admirers who told her they liked imagining her dead in various costumes and wanted a date. Her agent had provided her with a “personal-representative number” to dead-letter such calls, but no matter how often she changed numbers the bastards seemed to slip through, and C
razy John too. The calls weren’t frequent but, depending on her mood, they imposed a certain gloom.

  “Remember when you said I was a good man?” John asked.

  “Oh, you are a good man, Johnny. It’s just”—she thought of what it might be with Crazy John—“it’s just your ways are not my ways. And my ways are not your ways and the center will not hold and the past is forever past and . . . you know, man. Leave me alone, will ya?”

  She had been warned about John Clammer back home. He had been older than she—as it turned out, older by nearly ten years. He was crazy too, inasmuch as he and his family struggled a lot with emotional illness. But he was gorgeous to look at, especially for sixteen-year-old Shell. He sang and looked like one of God’s personal sunbeam angels. He had curly black hair and rosy cheeks and a nose that turned up to show more of his nostrils than you regularly saw of someone’s, and—don’t ask why—she thought that was cute too. She believed, in her teenage years, that he looked and sang so like an angel he might actually be one. He played the guitar and sang in church and when he spoke regular words his voice was joyous and delightsome. In fact, some boys from Middleboro let him pay to make a prayer CD called Worship for the Challenged in Vision. He had his and Shell’s picture on it, showing them in prayer with their eyes closed, but when you tried to play it, it didn’t, and when he reached the boys in Middleboro, they told him only blind people could hear it. John had paid them $150. Still, never knew though, but that picture of her on the CD might have led to great subsequent success. For her, not for him.

  Because as Shell grew older and John got crazier, Shell persuaded her mother, who had started as an online psychic and graduated as a psychiatric nurse, to get John Clammer confined. Then Shell’s life changed. She became an actress and went off to the college in Amesbury, which he called Hell House.

  John’s hope was that she be saved and they perform Christian music together. Shell’s hope was that a stone be tied around John’s neck and he be cast into the depths of the sea. It was John’s equally crazy but well-spoken aunt Calla Lily who made them get married. A dreadful idea.