Bech at Bay (21 page)

He went to the public library, the Hamilton Fish Park branch over on East Houston, and in the children’s section found one of Deborah Frueh’s books,
Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday
, and checked it out. He read it and wrote her another letter, this time in blue ballpoint, on unlined stationery with a little Peter Max-ish elf-figure up in one corner, the kind a very young girl might be given for her birthday by an aunt or uncle. “Dear Deborah Frueh,” he wrote, “I love your exciting work. I love the way at the end of ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday’ Jennifer realizes that she has had a pretty good day after all and that in life you can’t depend on anybody else to entertain you, you have to
entertain and preoccupy your own mind. At the local library I have ‘The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home’ on reserve. I hope it isn’t too sad. I liked the positive ending to ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday.’ ‘A Teddy Bear’s Bequest’ they never heard of at the library. I know you are a busy woman and must be working on more books but I hope you could send me a photograph of you for the wall of my room or if your too busy to do that please sign this zerox of the one on the cover of ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday.’ I like the way you do your hair, it’s like my Aunt Florence, up behind. Find enclosed a stamped envelope to send it in. Yours most hopefully, Judith Green.”

Miss Green in Bech’s mind was a year or so older than Mary Jane Mason. She misspelled hardly at all, and had self-consciously converted her grammar-school handwriting to a stylish printing, which Bech slaved at for several hours before attaining the proper girlish plumpness in the “o”s and “m”s. He tried dotting the “i”s with little circles and ultimately discarded the device as unpersuasive. He did venture, however, a little happy-face, with smile and hair ribbon. He intensified the dose of hydrocyanic acid on the envelope flap, and eased off on the sugar water. When Deborah Frueh took her lick—he pictured it as avid and thorough, not one but several swoops of her vicious, pointed tongue—the bitterness would register too late. The covenanted bitch would never know what hit her.

The postmark was a problem. Mary Jane up there in New Rochelle might well have had a father who, setting off in the morning with a full briefcase, would mail her letter for her in New York, but two in a row from Manhattan and Frueh might smell a rat, especially if she had responded to the last request and was still feeling queasy. Bech took
the ferry from the World Financial Center to Hoboken, treating himself to a river ride. He looked up Greens in a telephone booth near the terminal. He picked one on Willow Street to be little Judy’s family. Hoboken made him nostalgic for the Depression. In this densely built port from the past, lacy with iron balustrades, he went into an old-fashioned greasy spoon on Washington Street; there were wooden booths and stools at a counter and the selections and prices up in movable white letters on a grooved blackboard. He sat in a booth. He needed a table to write the return address on. In case he spoiled one envelope he had brought a spare, with a pastel elf in the lower left corner. But the address went well, it seemed to him. For a flourish he added a smiley face underneath the zip code.

Art excited his appetite. He ordered liver and onions from the lunch menu, a dish he hadn’t had for years. The fried slab of gut came framed in oblong bubbles of blood-tinged grease. He ate it all, burped, and tasted the onions again. He deposited his letter in a small box on a concrete post—he hadn’t known boxes like that still existed—and took the ferry back to lower Manhattan. His nerves hummed. His eyes narrowed against the river glare. The other passengers, too, felt the excitement of waterborne transition; they chattered in Spanish, in Chinese, in ebonies. What did Whitman write of such crossings?
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
And, later on, speaking so urgently from the grave,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d / Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried.
That “yet was hurried” was brilliant, with all of Whitman’s brilliant homeliness. Soon, Bech reflected, he too would be dead, looking up through the flowing water to the generations as yet unborn, his bloodless visage sadder than Whitman’s,
because for all his striving and squirming he had—according to Lucas Mishner, himself recently enrolled in the underworld’s eddying throng—never been touched by the American sublime.

The fuck he hadn’t. Bech’s hurried heart hummed all the way up Church Street to Warren, then over to City Hall and on up Broadway and home.
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island …/I am he who knew what it was to be evil, / I too knotted the old knot of contrariety, / Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d
 …

A week went by. Ten days. The death he desired was not reported in the
Times.
He wondered if a boy fan might win a better response, a more enthusiastic, heterosexual licking of the return envelope.
“Dear Deborah Freuh
,” he typed, using the clunky Script face available on his IBM PS/1:

Boys did seem a bit more adventurous and thrusting in their thinking than girls, Bech discovered through this act of ventriloquism. Maybe he should cut down on Jason’s verbal braggadocio. The word processor, its frictionless patter, encouraged, as academics had been complaining for years, prolixity. But Featherwaite had pronounced Bech prolix when he was still using a manual, a Smith-Corona portable. He decided to let the boy have his say.

It was a pleasant change, in the too-even tenor of Bech’s days, to ride the Long Island Rail Road out to Amityville and mail Jason Johnson’s letter. Just to visit Penn Station again offered a fresh perspective—that Roman grandeur from Bech’s youth, that onetime temple to commuting Fortuna, reduced to these ignoble ceilings and beggarly passageways. And then, after the elevated views of tar-roofed Queens, the touching suburban stations, like so many knobbed Victorian toys, with their carefully pointed stonework and gleaming rows of parked cars and stretches of suburban park. Each stop represented happiness for thousands, and reminded him of his own suburban days in Ossining, married to Bea, stepfather to female twins and a small boy. He had felt uneasy, those years, a Jew with three acres and a dog and a car, as though occupying someone else’s dream; but wasn’t America after all the place to live in
a dream, a dream determined not by your own subconscious but the collective unconscious of millions? He had not been unhappy, until the bubble was pricked and New York’s leaden gravity sucked him back. In Amityville, he found a suitable Johnson—on Maple Drive—and mailed Jason’s letter and had a lettuce-and-cucumber sandwich at a salad bar full of suburban women and their fidgety little sprouts. Then he headed back to town, each station more thickly surrounded by shabbier, more commercial constructions and the track bed becoming elevated and then, with a black roar, buried, underground, underriver, under-city, until the train stopped at Penn Station again and the passengers spilled out into a gaudy, perilous mess of con-sumeristic blandishments, deranged beggars, and furtive personal errands.

Four days later, there it was, in eight inches of
Times
type: the death of Deborah Frueh. Respected educator was also a noted critic and author of children’s books. Had earlier published scholarly articles on the English Metaphysicals and Swinburne and his circle. Taken suddenly ill while at her desk in her home in Hunts Point, near Seattle. Born in Conshohocken, near Philadelphia. Attended Barnard College and Duke University graduate school. Exact cause of death yet to be determined. Had been in troubled health lately—her weight a stubborn problem—colleagues at the University of Washington reported. But not despondent in any obvious way. Survived by a sister, Edith, of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and a brother, Leonard, of Teaneck, New Jersey. Another ho-hum exit notice, for every reader but Henry Bech. He knew what a deadly venom the deceased had harbored in her fangs.

“What’s happened?” Robin asked from across the table.

“Nothing’s happened,” he said.

“Then why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a man who’s been told he’s won a million dollars but isn’t sure it’s worth it, what with all the tax problems.”

“What a strange, untrammelled imagination you have,” he said. “I wonder if selling computers does justice to all your talents.”

“Let me see the page you’re reading.”

“No. I’m still reading it.”

“Henry, are you going to make me stand up and walk around the table?”

He handed her the creamcheese-stained obituary page, which was toward the end of Section C today, this being Saturday and the paper the Weekend Edition. Robin, while the rounded masseters of her wide jaw thoughtfully clenched and unclenched on the last milky crumbs of her whole-bran flakes, flicked her quick brown eyes up and down the columns of print. Her eyes held points of red like the fur of a fox. Morning sun slanting through the big loft window kindled an outline of light, of incandescent fuzz, along her jaw. Her eyelashes glittered like a row of dew-drops on a spider-strand. “Who’s Deborah Frueh?” she asked. “Did you know her?”

“A frightful literary scold,” he answered. “I never met the lady, I’m not sorry to say.”

“Did she ever review you or anything?”

“I believe she did, once or twice.”

“Favorably?”

“Not really.”

“Really unfavorably?”

“It could be said. Her reservations about my work were unhedged, as I vaguely recall. You know I don’t pay much attention to reviews.”

“And that Englishman last month, who fell in front of the subway train—didn’t you have some connection with him, too?”

“Darling, I’ve been publishing for over fifty years. I have slight connections with everybody in the print racket.”

“You’ve not been quite yourself lately,” Robin told him. “You’ve had some kind of a secret. You don’t talk to me the breezy way you used to. You’re censoring.”

“I’m not,” he said, hating to lie, standing as he was knee-deep in the sweet clover of Deborah Frueh’s extermination. He wondered what raced through that fat harpy’s mind in the last second, as the terrible-tasting cyanide tore into her esophagus and halted the oxidation process within her cells. Not of him, certainly. He was but one of multitudes of writers she had put in their places. He was three thousand miles away, the anonymous progenitor of Jason Johnson, Jr.
Sic semper tyrannis
, you unctuous, hectoring, covenanted shrew.

“Look at you!” Robin cried, on so high a note that her orange-juice glass emitted a surprised shiver. “You’re triumphant! Henry, you killed her.”

“How would I have done that?”

She was not balked. Her eyes narrowed. “At a distance, somehow,” she guessed. “You sent her things. A couple of days ago, when I came home, there was a funny smell in the room, like something had been burning.”

“This is fascinating,” Bech said. “If I had your imagination, I’d be Balzac.” He chattered on, to deflect her terrifying insights, “Another assiduous critic of mine, Aldie
Cannon—he used to be a mainstay of
The New Republic
but now he’s on PBS and the Internet—says I can’t imagine a thing. And hate women.”

Robin was still musing, her smooth young mien puzzling at the crimes to which she was an as yet blind partner. She said, “I guess it depends on how you define ‘hate.’ ”

But he loved
her.
He loved the luxurious silken whiteness of her slightly thickset young body, the soothing cool of her basically factual mind. Beauty, the newspapers were saying that summer, is a matter of averaging out—babies and adults alike are more attracted to photographs of a morphed combination of faces than to the image of any specific one. What we desire is supernormality, a smooth statistical average; yet inevitably it comes in a package unique, fragile, precious. He could not long maintain this wall between them, this ugly wallboard partition in the light-filled loft of their intimacy.

The next day, the
Times
ran a little follow-up squib on the same page as the book review and the book ads. The squib was basically comic in its tone, for who would want to murder an elderly, overweight book critic and juvenile author? It stated that the Seattle police had found suspicious chemical traces in Frueh’s autopsied body. They were closing in. Bech panicked. He was going to fry. The lights would dim in Ossining when they pulled the switch. He confessed to Robin. The truth rose irrepressible in his throat like the acid burn of partial regurgitation. Pushing the large black man who pushed a body that pushed Featherwaite’s. Writing Deborah Frueh three fan letters with doped return envelopes. His belief, possibly delusionary, that before he
died he had a duty to rid the world of critics, or at least of conspicuously malignant ones. Robin listened while reposing on his brown beanbag chair in Claire Hoagland’s old terrycloth bathrobe. She had taken a shower, so her feet had babyish pink sides beneath the marble-white insteps with their faint blue veins. It was Sunday morning. The bells in that sinister walled convent over at Prince and Mulberry had sounded their unheeded call. Robin said when he was done, “Henry, you can’t just go around rubbing out people as if they existed only on paper.”