Soul/Mate Page 11

  Yet she managed to enjoy herself nonetheless. She was tough, hardy, resilient: yes, and stubborn to the core. She’d brought along an entire suitcase of work—Institute matters, and correspondence, and notecards, slides, and drafts of a book-length essay on Charles Burchfield for which she had signed a contract with a New York publisher of fine art books—and she managed, on those long uninterrupted winter days in her room, to accomplish a good deal. Her meals were provided, her room briskly cleaned and aired and restored to her. There was no television set in the room. There was no telephone. The Brannon Institute was closed for the holidays so there was no pressing need for her to think of it. Or of Mr. Morland, who for all his sweetness seemed to be avoiding her lately. Or of Mr. Krauss, who, that day in the French restaurant, had so pointedly not avoided her. (“How nice of you, Dorothea, to entertain the boy!”) After a late dinner in the inn’s low-beamed dining room Dorothea propped herself up cozily on her bed and read one or another of the numerous books she’d brought along with her, the majority of them newly purchased novels in smart bright eye-catching jackets. She favored long, weighty novels, novels densely textured (if not snarled and knotted) as life, in which she might lose herself for hours at a stretch. And she had, too, her old companionable edition of Shelley’s poems.

  And now it was January 4, a blowsy overcast Monday morning, and Dorothea Deverell was back in Lathrup Farms, set in motion, in perpetual motion she sometimes thought it, but determined to acquit herself fully. She might resign her position at the Institute before it was required of her—before Mr. Morland called her in for that embarrassed regretful conversation. She might send out letters looking for new employment, she might put her house on the market, might move away; anything was possible since there was no one to prevent it. She switched on the lights she customarily switched on when preparing to leave the house for the entire day, these truncated winter days, and turned up the volume on the radio (as Michel had insisted: loud voices in a house discourage would-be intruders). She went into the freezing garage and climbed into her car, breath steaming, gloved hands cold on the steering wheel, wondering why, in this familiar setting, she felt so apprehensive, so anxious … as if the very silence surrounding her were taut with expectation. And opaque, and dense. Impermeable even to her screams.

  Something is going to happen, she thought. Or has already happened.

  Dorothea Deverell, much praised for the quality and efficiency of her work and her unfaltering good grace in its execution, had never wished to confront her admirers with the rejoinder: But what is the alternative? My efforts are in the service of a single grand effort, the combating of loneliness.

  It had been so since early childhood, interrupted for the space of some swift-passing months during her brief marriage (and briefer pregnancy); then resumed again, with pitiless exactitude, after her husband’s death. Work was the blessed anodyne, the there to which, in times of stress or despair regarding the worth of her own being, she might retreat. It was the inevitable completion of the task, and the resumption of the life to which it was presumably marginal, that constituted the problem.

  Yet at times of supreme concentration, Dorothea Deverell was energized, even quite happy—and it was this mood, intensified by the solitude of the early hour at the Brannon Institute and the agreeable surroundings of her office (a surprisingly capacious room with lustrous cherrywood paneling and old-fashioned mullioned windows reaching nearly to the fifteen-foot ceiling), that Dorothea’s assistant, Jacqueline, interrupted at 8:55 A.M. when, still in her coat, breathless from the stairs, her fox-slanted eyes moist from the January cold, she burst in upon Dorothea Deverell to say, “Dorothea! You’ve been away! Have you heard? Did you read? About Roger Krauss—?” Jacqueline was a solidly built flamboyant attractive woman in her mid-forties, mysteriously married yet hinting of an acute disappointment in marriage, given to irreverent asides meant to placate, or support, or entertain Dorothea Deverell, to whom she was wonderfully loyal and with whom she must have felt her fortunes at the Institute bound. They had worked together for six years, and though Dorothea did not wholly trust Jacqueline in matters requiring tact and diplomacy, especially over the telephone, she could hardly imagine the Institute without the woman’s ebullient presence.

  Now Dorothea Deverell and Jacqueline stared at each other, and Dorothea felt her heart clutch, for she saw in Jacqueline’s excited glistening eyes—ah, what did she see? Jacqueline, still breathless, was saying, “It was in the papers day before last, how he died—Mr. Krauss; one of our trustees, you know,” she said unnecessarily, as if, at this date, Dorothea Deverell might not know who Roger Krauss was, “—the victim of some sort of sex thing, not just robbery, and there’s all sorts of rumors, but anyway, the thing is,” Jacqueline said, now briskly unbuttoning her coat, “the man is dead.”

  Dorothea had hardly taken all this in. “What? What has happened?” she asked faintly.

  “The night of New Year’s Day. In a parking garage, in the city. Mr. Krauss was killed.”

  “Mr. Krauss?”

  “Yes. Him. They don’t know who did it yet.” Jacqueline was trying very hard not to exude an air of cruel satisfaction. “But they didn’t mention us, they didn’t mention the Brannon Institute—in the papers, I mean—mainly his business reputation, who his father was in Boston, and things like that, and it was on the television news too, of course, like it’s all some sort of big scandal that might open up.” Jacqueline paused, regarding Dorothea Deverell intently. “So that’s the man who tried to pass judgment on us, Dorothea, on you, writing such nasty things in the paper about our exhibit last spring, and now—look what has happened to him!”

  “Roger Krauss is dead? He has died?”

  “Not just died,” Jacqueline said impatiently, drawing a newspaper out of her handbag with a flourish, “but been killed. ‘Garroted,’ the police called it.”

  “Garroted!”

  The word hung in the air of Dorothea Deverell’s office like an exotic obscenity.

  Alone in her office, door shut, telephone off its hook, Dorothea with trembling fingers spread open the creased pages of the Boston Globe that Jacqueline had provided her, to read, with shock, dismay, and an incredulity that deepened, rather than diminished, with the passing minutes, of the violent death of Roger Krauss, fifty-six years old, “area businessman and philanthropist”: he had been strangled with a wire bound tightly around his neck and also wantonly stabbed in the eyes and groin; robbed of his wallet, wristwatch, cuff links, tie clip, ring, even his belt, hat, and necktie; found in his car, a two-month-old Lincoln Continental, at 4:40 A.M. of January 2, behind the wheel, in a pose very like that of a living man, by the attendant on duty at the high-rise parking garage on Providence Street near Tremont. Krauss’s car was on the third level of the garage and no one had heard any struggle. His parking ticket had been stamped for 8:15 P.M.; the attendant then on duty had no memory of him, since business had been brisk at that time, but the late-night attendant remembered his returning on foot sometime around 3 A.M. and taking the elevator, though there had been no exchange of words between them. He also remembered having seen a young, or youngish, black man wearing dark glasses, a goatee, stylish fawn-colored suede clothes, and carrying what appeared to be a clarinet case, around that time too, but he had not caught a very clear glimpse of the man. Police detectives said that Krauss’s murder did not seem to have been simply a mugging death, on the evidence of the extreme violence done to the victim (Krauss’s eyes had been “severely gouged” with his own car keys, and the murderer had razor-slashed his groin through his trousers) and other details, which at the present time, in the interests of their investigation, they did not care to divulge.

  In the earlier part of the evening Krauss had had drinks with friends at the Ritz-Carlton and had spoken of going on to have dinner with other friends, unnamed. Divorced for the past eleven years, he had maintained a small apartment on Beacon Street but spent most of his time in his Lathrup Farms residence. D
orothea read that he had been active in civic, church, and charity organizations. He had graduated from Harvard Business School. He had served in the U.S. Air Force as a first lieutenant. He was survived by two sons, Roger Jr. and Harold.

  “How horrible!” Dorothea whispered.

  The accompanying photograph was of a younger Roger Krauss, hair darker, features sharper, expression more affable than Dorothea recalled. She studied it and could not see in that face the face of the man who had mocked her so openly a few weeks ago; she decided she would expel that unfortunate memory from consciousness since it did not do the poor dead man any credit, nor did it do Dorothea Deverell credit, to insist upon remembering. It is enough that he is dead, Dorothea thought, not knowing, perhaps, what she meant. She felt only pain for Roger Krauss now, a rush of sympathy, and pity for the ignominy of his death—its slightly shady aura, against which he could not protect himself.

  So Dorothea Deverell read the article, and reread it, and sat at her desk for a long while, as if entranced or struck dumb. Then she folded the paper carefully up, put her telephone back on its hook, and resumed her day.

  But it was not so easy!—there were telephone calls from friends; there were messages for Dorothea to return calls (one of them from “C.C.” at his business number—a rare request); there was above all the sparked-up presence of Jacqueline, who, though Dorothea pleaded with her to let the subject drop, could not forbear hurrying out at noon to buy the late-morning edition of the Globe. “They caught him! The killer! It looks like!” Jacqueline reported, again breathless, and laying, uninvited, the newspaper across Dorothea’s desk. Two other secretaries joined them to read of the newest development in the Krauss case: police had arrested a suspect who answered to the general description of the killer, a black man, unshaven, thirty-two years old, with a record of several convictions for muggings and armed robbery, picked up on a street two miles from the parking garage on Providence at 1 A.M. of January 4. The man had been in an “intoxicated state” and had “offered resistance” to police officers. He was wearing a new suede jacket similar to the one worn by the killer and could give no satisfactory explanation of how he’d come into the possession of Roger Krauss’s wallet and credit cards. No photographs accompanied this article. “Well, that was quick!” Jacqueline said, mildly disappointed.

  Dorothea Deverell leaned forward suddenly and pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes, as if she felt faint, an uncharacteristic gesture in the presence of others. Asked if anything was wrong she said, almost inaudibly, “Of course something is wrong—a man is dead.” Her reply was prim, not quite what she’d intended; Jacqueline and the secretaries retreated, as if chastised. She heard them whispering in the corridor outside her office and went to close her door. She telephoned Charles Carpenter but was told of course that he wasn’t in—it was twelve-thirty and he wasn’t expected back in the office until after two and who is calling please? Dorothea said quickly, “Thank you, it isn’t important, I’ll try another time.”

  Next, she would have liked to see Howard Morland, not to discuss the death of Roger Krauss of course (that would have been unthinkable) but to exchange New Year’s greetings perhaps, and to take from the elder man some measure of patrician calm or consolation; but as Mr. Morland’s secretary explained, he would not be returning for two weeks—he was vacationing in the Caribbean. “Of course,” Dorothea said. “I’d forgotten.”

  For the remainder of the afternoon she worked with sporadic flashes of efficiency and zeal, trying not to be distracted by thoughts of the dead man, or of the ugly circumstances of his death, but haunted by such words as garroted, eyes gouged, razor-slashed, mutilation. She tried too not to hear, as if echoing lewdly in a closed corridor, How nice of you, Dorothea, to entertain him! I do not want to think ill of the dead, Dorothea Deverell instructed herself, but what is to be done if the dead thought so ill of me? But at 4:00 P.M., when most of the Institute staff was still working, Dorothea gave up the effort, which had brought on a headache and an inexplicable sense of malaise, and shut up her office and drove out of the parking lot as if released from a prison.

  Yet she did not want to go home. She was fearful, for some reason, of going home.

  The lovely white outfit Charles Carpenter had given her—did it not resemble a bridal gown?

  Was it a bridal gown?

  “And we promised we wouldn’t exchange presents this year,” Dorothea said aloud, in a tone of faint protest. But of course she was quite excited too. She would not have wanted to say quite how excited.

  Charles must have repented, then, for allowing her to go off by herself to Vermont.

  Yet his letter—so staid and circumspect, so typically lawyerly—had made no reference to the gift at all.

  “He bought it at the last minute,” Dorothea said aloud. “He bought it on impulse.”

  Driving in her car she began almost immediately to feel better, much better: as if the phenomenon of even moderate speeds, the achievement of even a modest number of miles between herself and the Brannon Institute, were mysteriously tonic. And she’d driven so many miles the previous afternoon, from Vermont! Soon she found herself beyond Prides Crossing, beyond Beverly Farms, headed, it almost seemed, for Maine.… She parked her car at the end of one of the cliff roads, on a high bluff overlooking the Atlantic, and sat there dazed and exhilarated, as if she had come an enormous distance simply for this: this brilliant waterscape of purples, blues, and greens, choppy and white-crested with foam, like a Winslow Homer painting. Despite the cold she got out of the car, standing for a while looking—staring—at the ice-bound shore, and the riotous waves, and the glowering winter sky, her hair whipping crazily in the wind and her eyes filling with tears. This was not like her, was it! This was not like Dorothea Deverell, was it! She felt an uncanny sort of life, livingness, thrumming through her … she felt flooded with strength, purpose, hope, resolve. Her enemy was dead and she was alive. It was so simple a thing it might have been overlooked.

  She stood there for a while, hugging herself, shivering, her face damp with tears that began, in a light film, to freeze on her cheeks. She stood there until the air turned dark, gradually at first and then abruptly, as with the rushing of thousands upon thousands of dark-feathered wings. But there were no birds, were there? She glanced up, startled. Only the massive snow-laden clouds. Only the oncoming night.

  “Wasn’t it shocking! Yet, at the same time, you know, not really surprising,” Ginny Weidmann was saying. Her manner was somber, even grave, but resolute; she glanced up to take in Dorothea Deverell with the others. “It seems the man led a double life.”

  “Why? What do you mean?” one of the women asked.

  “Sit down, Dorothea, and let Martin get you a drink; you look lovely,” Ginny said. She lowered her voice. “The police found pornographic material in his car, you know. It wasn’t in the newspapers. Video-cassettes, magazines.” She lowered her voice even further. “Male pornography. Homosexual.”

  “Really?”

  “Roger Krauss?”

  “They found a ticket stub in his pocket, too, from some X-rated theater,” Ginny said. “Martin doesn’t like me to speculate,” she went on hurriedly, while Martin was out of the room, “but the police themselves have speculated that he might have picked up the man, the young black man, you know, in the theater, and was bringing him back home with him. Which would explain—certain things.”

  “Oh, but it’s so hard to believe of—”

  “—so hard to believe of him—”

  “Roger Krauss, of all people—”

  “Oh but, these days, you can’t tell—”

  “—can’t predict—”

  “Yet with Roger you could, actually,” Ginny Weidmann said reprovingly. “Remember his campaign against Dorothea? Against ‘feminists’? Clearly, there was an emotional bias against women.”

  The gathering of some six or seven people looked to Dorothea for confirmation; but she murmured only a few ambiguous words and m
ust have shown her discomfort, for they let her off lightly and returned to their spirited analysis of the “mystery” of Roger Krauss without her—clearly the subject was in full throttle and must be allowed to run its course. Several times Ginny Weidmann interrupted to say passionately, as if in Dorothea Deverell’s stead, “None of it surprised me. There was a logic to it all along, to me.”

  “But has the black man confessed yet? I heard on the news this morning—”

  “He claims he is innocent, of course—what can you expect?”

  “The evidence does certainly seem—”

  “—very damaging!”

  There was a collective pause. The doorbell rang; another friend or neighbor had arrived. Again it was murmured, in an air of amazement, “But who would ever have thought it—of Roger Krauss?”

  It was Sunday evening. Ginny Weidmann had telephoned Dorothea Deverell the day before, inviting her to drop by for a drink, just a handful of friends were coming over, not a party but an impromptu gathering; we haven’t seen you since before Christmas, Dorothea, where on earth have you been keeping yourself? So, with mild reluctance, Dorothea came to the Weidmanns’, both dreading and anticipating further talk of Roger Krauss, about whom she had heard so much this past week from various sources and with whose name her own seemed, at least temporarily, so unhappily bound. The “homosexual” details Ginny Weidmann had just now supplied were new, however, to Dorothea, and affected her more powerfully than she would have wished to acknowledge. As talk swirled about her head she sat unmoving on the sofa, her drink untouched in her hand, thinking, So that was it. It was nothing personal, then.

  Dorothea had come to her friends’ home for consolation of this sort, perhaps; or out of simple loneliness; or fear; or guilt. (Though why should she feel guilty?) Since the Carpenters’ white Cadillac was not parked outside, Dorothea knew that Charles would not be here; yet she had unconsciously prepared herself, stiffening slightly, for the man’s possible presence—his eyes, narrowed, moving quickly and warmly onto her, as, invariably, they did, in these sociable circumstances. But there was no one. That is—there were several men, including (Dorothea saw belatedly) Jerome Gallagher; but there was no Charles Carpenter.