The Morning After Death, Page 2

  “There’s Edward Dickinson. Papa below. Poor Papa. So upright. Such a good citizen. So totally incapable of communication,” Sukie pointed out.

  “Like some other fathers,” said Chester, a rueful quirk on his mouth.

  “He just wanted them all to stay at home—for ever and ever.” Sukie sighed, “And here they all are. Safe in their alabaster chambers. If he could have imagined the journeys Emily took from her little room over there—”

  “But I thought she never—” began Chester.

  “Spiritual journeys, poop.”

  “Right away to the outermost circumference,” said Mark, who had just returned.

  “‘The Outer—from the Inner Derives its Magnitude,’” Sukie quoted.

  “And that reminds me—where and how soon are we going to eat?” said Reilly. “My inner, my inner is yelling for dinner.”

  “Oh, Charles, really!”

  “You must learn to pronounce my name the correct way. Char-luss.”

  “Well, it is about lunchtime. Let’s go to the Yankee Pedlar,” said Chester. “It’s pretty nice.”

  “Yes, we must show Charles—Char-luss—a genuine old colonial inn. It’s cute. The waitresses wear eighteenth-century Puritan dress, and you can drink from yards of ale, and they serve you dishes—”

  “Now wait a minute, my angel Susannah.” Charles interrupted. “Wait while the elders get a word in. I do not expect food, in the civilized sense of the word, over here. All I ask is bare sustenance. As your distinguished poet put it, American meals are a general mess of imprecision of feeding.”

  Mark groaned. His brother looked bemused. Nigel found Sukie’s eyes on him again, with the candid, rather ingenuous gaze of the American woman.

  “The only things the Irish can cook are potatoes and soda bread,” Chester was saying—a nervous attempt to get into the lighthearted mood of the others.

  “Well, you may have something there,” Charles replied pacifically. All three of them, Nigel noticed, treated Chester with a sort of compunction, as though he were a foreigner for whom special allowances should be made. And he seemed an especially complicated man, for, though evidently a good driver, twice on the road there he had done a foolish thing. Was Chester Ahlberg accident-prone? Nigel wondered. Hardly. The accident-prone show it in their driving even when there’s not another car in sight, snatching their gear changes, overbraking, doing nothing rhythmically. . . . Well, Americans were perhaps different all around. He didn’t understand them fully so far.

  An hour later in the bar of the colonial-type restaurant, they were digging gobbets out of a huge round cheese, each vowing every gobbet must be his last or there would be no appetite left for dinner. Charles and Nigel were drinking Scotch and water, Chester and Sukie martinis, Mark was on his third bourbon.

  “Why do they wear those goddam mobcaps?” inquired Mark truculently.

  “Atmosphere, my love,” said Sukie.

  “Don’t they know that in the late seventeenth century ‘mob’ was a cant word for a strumpet, drab, or whore?” Mark pursued.

  “I expect they’re comfortable,” said Nigel soothingly.

  “I don’t like being served by waitresses wearing whores’ caps—not in a fine old typical Puritan-type joint. I must find out if they are aware of the etymology of their goddam caps. Waitress!”

  “Mark! You mustn’t!” hissed Sukie.

  “Madam,” said Mark to the waitress, “could you enlighten our English friend here? He wonders are those caps you wear as comfortable as they are attractive.”

  “Oh, yes, sir, they sure are.”

  “I’m exceedingly obliged to you.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  Sukie flashed an angry look at Mark, but said no more. Yes, he is a clown, thought Nigel; an intelligent clown, who is wild not far beneath his academic surface, and could be dangerous. A rich man’s son. A bit spoiled? Old New England family. Inbred? Kicking over the ancestral repressions?

  Summoned into the restaurant, they chose their food.

  Charles Reilly turned to Chester. “Now’s the time to ask you—in this fine respectable place—What do you actually do in the Business School? Just what goes on there now?”

  “There are courses in economics, management, salesmanship, commercial history, theory of exchange, the ethical aspect of business—all that kind of thing.”

  “Well, that’s fascinating,” commented Charles, without undue enthusiasm. “But come, Chester, can you teach people to be successful businessmen? Sure, it sounds to me like those courses in creative writing you have over here: if you want to be a creative writer, you’d best stay at home and start writing creatively.”

  “Like Emily Dickinson,” said Sukie.

  “Oh, that’s quite different. Business and writing are not a bit alike. A writer has to be alone, I guess. But a business nowadays is a team, hopefully at least.” A mildly fanatic gleam had appeared in Chester’s eye. “Take a problem we’re tackling in one of my seminars as of now. The students are divided into two teams; each team has the assignment to put on the market a new and novel deodorant. One man is in charge of production, one handles labor relations, another the area marketing angle, another the costing, and so on; and of course they all get together on the basic factor in the promotional context.”

  “And what might that be?” Charles Reilly purred.

  “Why, the image of the product, of course.”

  There was an awed silence, broken at last by Sukie:

  “Chester, you’re letting your steak get cold.”

  “It’s like one of those war games H. G. Wells invented,” said Nigel. “Or a house party to choose Foreign Office candidates.”

  “The logistical aspect presents an ever-increasing complexity. But we’re handing that over more and more to computers,” Chester said, prodding his steak with his fork.

  “Are you now?” said Charles. “I wish you’d find one to write my poetry for me.”

  Mark leaned back with a satisfied sigh. “What I can’t figure out, Ches old fellow, is why you go on teaching. With all this know-how lodged in your massive brain, you could become a captain of industry, a Napoleon of commerce.”

  A shuttered look came over Chester’s face.

  “I mean it, I’m not ribbing you. Look at father.”

  Chester frowned. “He was the last of the individualists. It’s all teamwork now, from the white-coated men in the laboratory to the board room of the giant syndicate—”

  “‘From Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,’” bellowed Mark. “Say what you like, Ches, if I was father I’d stake you to a couple of million and take a side bet that you’d become another Rockefeller.”

  Chester blushed, looking secretive, and changed the subject to his forthcoming trip to Britain, where he was being consulted by the authorities of a new university about setting up a Business School there.

  “Is your da all that rich?” asked Reilly. “Couldn’t you prevail upon him to set up a foundation for indigent Irish poets?”

  “Really, Charles! Why is it you Europeans are always begging?” said Chester, with unusual acerbity. “I mean—”

  “What Chester means is that father’ll use his dollars only for making jumbo-size public gestures,” said Mark. “Like donating a fully equipped hospital to his home town, or building a new House at Cabot.”

  “Well,” said Sukie, “if I was him, I’d subsidize the desegregation campaign—just buy up a few dozen Southern congressmen: they wouldn’t cost him all that much—”

  “Sukie, Sukie, how can you be so cynical at your tender age? Anyway, brother Josiah wouldn’t approve your eating into his patrimony,” grinned Mark.

  “Josiah is a phony—a lousy, double-crossing rat. And you know it.” Sukie’s pretty, red mouth was distorted; she positively glared at Mark.

  “My girl, you are speaking of the distinguished Homeric scholar? Can I believe my ears? Don’t gorgonize me, pet: I am not his keeper.”
<
br />   “I should have thought you’d have minded what happened to John, considering—”

  “Now look, honey, we’ve had all this before.” Mark lowered his voice and Nigel could not hear what was said.

  He turned to Charles Reilly, and they shortly wound up in conversation about W. B. Yeats, whose centenary was to be celebrated the following year. Charles, in his most reductive idiom, started telling several damaging stories about the poet.

  “None of you Irish writers seems able to say a kind word about him,” protested Nigel.

  “Of course we can’t. Willie Yeats is too big for us. We have to cut him down to our size, I know that. Still and all, he was a bit of a cod. But mind this—he hated fanaticism in politics because he knew the fanatic, the capacity for hatred, in himself.”

  Charles fell silent and Nigel heard Chester saying, “. . . tell him to go and talk to Josiah next Thursday then. I’ll have a word with him. But I can’t promise anything, Sukie, you realize that?”

  Nigel saw the girl touch Chester’s hand gratefully. It was noticeable that she kept her face turned away from Mark. “A Maud Gonne come to judgment,” Nigel remembered. A strange thought, considering how tiny she would have looked beside that larger-than-life Irish heroine: but there was the fanatic glint in Sukie’s eyes, the humorlessness, and the decisive way she now rose, collected her belongings, said it was time to go home.

  2 Cockroaches and Crusaders

  NIGEL EYED HIS hostess with mild misgiving. One could never be sure what May Edwardes would say next: her remarks came at one from unpredictable angles, and the spectacle of a person trying to fend off her faster deliveries was as depressing as that of a village batsman failing to deal with a Test-Match bowler. A classical story was still going the rounds in Hawthorne House. May liked the tutors to call her by her Christian name. An observant freshman at one of her parties, noting this, said, “May I get you a drink, May?” “Yes, thank you,” she replied. “I will take some bitter lemon. And please feel quite free to call me Mrs. Edwardes.”

  The wife of the Master—it was unwise to address her as the Mistress—of Hawthorne House was a Scotswoman of distinguished family and considerable academic attainment: she kept the latter cunningly masked so as to open the more devastating fire upon unsuspecting strangers. Tonight, unbecomingly clad in coffee-colored silk, she appeared to be in a permissive state of mind.

  “I hope you’re comfortable in your rooms, Nigel.”

  “Very comfortable, thank you.”

  “No trouble with cockroaches?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Well, you know Cabot is famous for its cockroaches, and we like to think we have the most plentiful supply here at Hawthorne. Earlier this term, just before you came over, that poor wee Chester found a stage army of them walking round and round his bedroom one night.”

  “How very unpleasant. What did he do?”

  “Slept on the couch in the sitting room. They come up from the basement in search of diversion, you know, or just a little peace and quiet, maybe.”

  Nigel thought it might well be the latter. The hardiest cockroach would surely be intimidated by the whirl of undergraduate life on the subground floor all around the main quadrangle: the boiler rooms, laundry rooms, canteen and locker rooms, television rooms, table-tennis rooms, and the Lord knew what else. By skillful use of this underground complex a student, unless compelled to attend lectures, need never put his foot out of doors once the New England snow had set in.

  “I suppose they had walked to meet Chester,” said Nigel thoughtfully.

  “I was not aware that cockroaches can fly.”

  “No, I mean someone might have put them there—an enemy hath done this thing, May.”

  “Oh, come now, Chester is not only his own worst enemy, he’s his only one.”

  “So you feel he’s not persecuted, he just has persecution mania? He appears to take the opposite view himself.”

  May Edwardes, who had been gazing ruminatively toward the other end of the drawing room, where the person in question was talking with a group of colleagues, laid a hand on Nigel’s sleeve.

  “Then he deceives himself. People are persecuted either for their faith or for their eccentricity. Chester, as a typical modern American, has neither the one nor the other.” Her voice took on the slight boom which heralded her cultural pronouncements. The company fell silent. The silence continued. Mrs. Edwardes broke it. She bent forward and eyed Nigel solemnly. “Considering what I’ve heard of your background,” she said, “tell me, do you read detective fiction?”

  “Sometimes,” said Nigel.

  “I hope you are sound on it.”

  “Sound?” asked Nigel.

  “As an art form.”

  “It’s not an art form. It’s an entertainment.”

  May nodded approvingly. “Excellent. I have no use for those who seek to turn the crime novel into an exercise in morbid psychology. Its chief virtue lies in its consistent flouting of reality: but crime novelists today are trying to write variations on Crime and Punishment without possessing a grain of Dostoevsky’s talent. They’ve lost the courage of their own agreeable fantasies, and want to be accepted as serious writers.” This seemed to annoy her.

  “Still, novels that are all plot—just clever patterns concealing a vacuum—one does get bored with them. I can understand readers getting sick of blood that’s obviously only red ink.”

  “I’d have thought that you at any rate would prefer that kind.” She seemed hurt.

  “Now, May, please! I didn’t come to Cabot to—”

  But she was in full cry. “Zeke told me you have got yourself mixed up with a number of unsavory cases.”

  “And Zeke also told you, my love,” said the Master firmly, coming over to them, “that Nigel’s unsavory past was not to be mentioned in the clean, wholesome atmosphere of Hawthorne House. I cannot have my students distracted from their courses by prurient curiosity about the seamier side of British life.”

  “But the methods of a private investigator should be highly instructive—”

  “My dear May, the private investigator is out—in fact as well as in fiction. Crimes of violence can only be dealt with now by teams of professionals,” said Nigel.

  “So much the worse, if that means we have to rely on our city police here. They’re corrupt to a man.” She sighed.

  “I guess we’d best break it up, before you land yourself in court for slander. Nigel, I would like you to know another Ahlberg—this one, Josiah?” The Master, an exceedingly tall man with a skull-like head, who seemed to add interminably to his length, like a snake, when he straightened out, led Nigel to another corner of the drawing room, where a middle-aged man was sprawled in his armchair, smoking a pipe and paying no attention to the rest of the company.

  Josiah and Nigel said they were glad to know each other. Josiah had the neat, dry face common among classical scholars: he looked as if he had grown into his skin—every wrinkle was in place. But this appearance of sedateness was contradicted by the fidgety glance of his eyes.

  “Well, what do you make of us?” he asked abruptly.

  “I’ve not been here a week yet. Too early for generalizations,” Nigel said.

  “If you can’t make generalizations in the first few days, you’ll never make them.”

  “That’s probably true. But I’m not a journalist.”

  “Uh-huh. And I suppose every goddam student in the place has asked you how Cabot compares with Oxford.” Josiah puffed a cloud of smoke over Nigel’s head.

  “Quite a few. And they really seem to want to know.”

  “That is typical of the American student. He believes that indiscriminately sucking in information is equivalent to acquiring knowledge.” The eyes rolled.

  “I find them extremely well mannered.”

  “An Ivy League tradition,” Josiah remarked sourly. “And, of course, in the dining hall polite conversation is necessary to palliate the horrors of the food. You re
alize that our food is shot through tunnels by compressed air from a central kitchen?”

  “Have you proof of this?”

  “The proof is in the pudding, as they say.” Ahlberg permitted himself a half chuckle. “And the hot air is generated by the President and the Heads of Faculties. But your glass is empty. What are you drinking?”

  “Bourbon and water.”

  Josiah Ahlberg returned with full tumblers. “They’re tearing one another to pieces just now about the Aims of Education. As if they were the first living men to notice that it ought to have an aim. General education versus specialized studies—you know the setup. Insane! All it means is that each Faculty wants to grab more dough and prestige for itself.” Josiah gave Nigel an amiable snarl.

  “But the Classical Faculty is above such low motivations?”

  “My dear Strangeways, you were a classicist yourself, the Master tells me. You know the classics don’t need prestige. They’ve trained the best minds through the centuries; they’d still be the best discipline, the best way to put bone into thinking—conceptual and practical thinking—if we gave them a chance.”

  “Your brother would hardly agree.”

  “Chester?” Josiah made a smirking grimace. “The Business School! Trying to make a gentlemanly discipline out of the pursuit of rogues and anarchists! Every successful businessman has been an anarchist, a pure self-seeker: they’ve got to the top because the rest of us keep the laws, or can’t share their monomania for money.”

  “I was thinking of Mark,” Nigel put in mildly.

  Josiah narrowed his eyes. “Mark? His talents don’t lie in the money-making direction. Very much the reverse.”

  “No, I meant he wouldn’t agree with you that the classics are the best foundaton—”

  “Oh, I see. Sure. English. Not content with going to bed with that softest of soft options, he tries to make a governess out of her.”

  “He seems quite able,” said Nigel.

  “He writes crappy little articles for pseudo-scholarly magazines, if that’s a proof of ability. When I was at Harvard, we read books—English and American literature—because a gentleman naturally read such books, took them in his stride. We did not—” Josiah snorted—“we did not ‘study English literature.’ Any more than the Greek audience ‘studied’ Aeschylus. Fancy telling an intelligent fellow why and how he ought to like Shakespeare!”