The Theban Mysteries (16 page)

“People who are honest are more dishonest than liars because they disarm you. Somerset Maugham said you could make a character sound breathtakingly brilliant by just letting her tell the truth. You ever heard of Esalen?”

“That place in California that cures drug addiction?”

“That’s Synanon. Esalen has lots of techniques and we, that is—well, some of us tried this. You hit a mattress, which is soft and doesn’t mind taking a beating, and pretend it’s whomever you feel hostile toward. That way, you work out the hostility and even recognize some you hadn’t wanted to think about, which is always useful. Do you think there shouldn’t be any sexual mores at all?”

“Wait a minute. Where did you find out about Esalen—has one of you been there?”

“You can read about it.”

“I think women should be virgins when they marry, because their jewel is the most precious thing they have, and how else could they wear white at their wedding when they are handed from one man who owns them to another? You learned it from Mrs. Banister, didn’t you?”

“If you know, why are you asking me?” Betsy said, sounding more like a petulant child than she had all afternoon.

“I didn’t know until a few minutes ago. It sounds a damn good idea—the mattress bit, I mean. Why be so secretive about it?”

“Well, it wasn’t
exactly
what the Theban had in mind under the heading of dramatics. We talk to pillows, too, as though they are our other self with whom we are arguing, or someone else who—people used to kid about our encounter groups, but they never really thought …”

“Yes.”

“Well, sometimes we had sessions after school, and Mrs. Banister, though she never said so, wasn’t certain, anyway we weren’t certain …”

“If the school would officially approve.”

“That’s it. Actually, she helped us an awful lot. You can’t imagine.”

“I think I can, you know. I told Mr. Jablon just today that what one wanted to do was more to the point than what one should do, and you don’t know what you want till you face what you hate, face it, and recognize it into proportion.”

“In case you’re wondering, Mrs. Banister hasn’t got any sort of thing over girls, you know what I mean?”

“Perfectly.”

“One has to be careful; it’s a nasty and suspicious world, though we try not to be more paranoiac than absolutely necessary. I wish I could think of a perfectly sizzling question to ask you about sex …”

“When you do, I shall answer it between my blushes.”

“I’ll remember that. Don’t tell …”

“Only if necessary, and then only in perfect confidence. Trust me.”

“I’ve decided to,” Betsy said, sweeping from the room at last.

Reed didn’t sweep into the room; he tiptoed in and cast glances about him with all the furtiveness of an eavesdropper in a Restoration comedy. He carried with him a heavily padded jacket which Mr. O’Hara had insisted upon his wearing against the possibility that the dogs’ teeth might close around an arm or neck. While the dogs were guaranteed not to bite or play unnecessarily roughly, precautions were nonetheless taken against their doing any such thing.

The question was, could he find a place where the dogs would overlook him? That was O’Hara’s challenge. While doubting that he could, Reed was prepared to try.

The room he had chosen was a small gymnasium, designed for gymnast feats, and hung with ropes, rings, and swinging booms. With agility, Reed swung his lean form up onto the ropes and reached over to the ladderlike rungs which lined the wall. Here, holding on
first with one hand and then the other, he donned the jacket. The gymnasium clock, coy behind its protective wire, told him it was three minutes of eight. At eight promptly, O’Hara would release the dogs from the roof. In fact, their departure was announced, so to speak, by the bell which sounded on every hour throughout the school building. With the sound of the bell he swung himself off and hung suspended by the rings from the ceiling like—when Kate had described him she had no idea how literal a description it would be—a tethered goat; well, hamstrung, rather.

He was on a high floor, so the dogs would not be long. Indeed, before long he thought he heard them, their nails clicking on the floor as they emerged, he assumed, listening, from the stairway to begin their methodical survey of all the rooms on the floor.

Although he heard them approaching, heard, because he was listening for it, the sound of their feet and their breath, they were aware of him almost sooner. He was at the farthest corner of the room and high up, but they knew immediately that he was there. The growls began in their throats, and the lips pulled back, baring the teeth. Yes, Reed thought, it’s enough to scare anyone to death, enough certainly to frighten a young man into backing up, tripping, and hitting his head, but will they actually let me descend unharmed?

They did not, as he had thought they would, leap for him as he hung in the air. They stood and watched. Slowly, he released his feet and swung himself back over to the ladder on the wall. Their growls increased as he descended, but they did not move. “They won’t go for your legs,” O’Hara had said. “If you don’t try anything cute, they won’t touch you. But they are
trained to leap for a hand holding a weapon” (hence the jacket, should the dogs hallucinate a weapon where there was none) “and, should you attack them in any other way, they will hurl their weight against your chest and knock you down. But only if you lunge at them.”

Lily and Rose, Reed thought, what singularly inappropriate names. He kept his eyes warily upon them as he climbed slowly down. The growls increased, the teeth glared more menacingly, but the dogs did not move. “Get your back against a wall and stay still till I come,” O’Hara had said. Reed flirted with the idea of lighting a cigarette and abandoned it. It would calm his nerves, but would it do the same for the nerves of Lily and Rose? He doubted it, Furthermore, the actions necessary to reach beneath the padded jacket for cigarette and lighter seemed unlikely to inspire confidence. Without moving his head, Reed raised his eyes to the gymnasium clock. Even as he did so, O’Hara appeared in the doorway.

“All right, my beauties,” he said. And, going forward, he clipped short, stout leashes onto the collars of the dogs. “Glad you picked a high floor,” he said to Reed. “I couldn’t have done with a much longer wait.”

“Nor I,” Reed admitted. “O.K. to take the jacket off now?”

O’Hara nodded. “Convinced?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Reed said. “A very commendable performance. I recommend it to anyone who wants to lose weight fast.”

“Did you feel afraid, then?” O’Hara asked.

“Oh, yes,” Reed said. “Scared to death, to coin a phrase.” And he reached for a cigarette and lit it, breaking,
he supposed, one of the school’s most stringent rules. Well, he had earned the right.

“Could you,” Reed asked, “hold on to those charming ladies while I poke around a bit downstairs? There’s something I’m looking for.”

“How long will you be?” O’Hara grudgingly asked. He owed Reed a good deal, he knew, for demonstrating both that the dogs were unlikely to have frightened Mrs. Jablon to death and then deserted her, and that they did not viciously attack anyone they found—which nasty suspicion had been voiced more than once since knowledge of the dogs had become general. Still, he didn’t care to break the dogs’ routine. “I’ll take them back to the roof. Call me from the switchboard on the main floor when you’re ready to leave; I’ll give you ten minutes after that.”

“Right. Mr. O’Hara, let me try your patience a minute longer. On the evening Mrs. Jablon was found here …”

“The evening before the morning she was found here.”

“All right. On the evening of the meeting. You took the parents up in one of the elevators. Was the other elevator on the roof?”

“Yes. I told you that …”

“Be patient. No one could have brought that second elevator down without your knowing?”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“It was up in the auditorium, as high as the elevators go. You would have had to walk all the way, know where to find the key to open the elevator door up there, and bring it down.”

“Did you use the other elevator—the one not on the top—to bring the parents and teachers down again?”

“Sure. Ten-fifteen prompt I was up there waiting for them. That’s the orders from Miss Tyringham.”

“Suppose someone had wanted to leave early?”

“They could have walked down, or rung the elevator bell.”

“Were you sitting in the elevator?”

“I was around.”

“What does around mean? You were always in the building, always on the first floor?”

“Or just outside the front door. There were a couple of chauffeurs waiting for the parents and I talked to them some. My job is to watch the entrance, not to serve as butler.”

“Do the chauffeurs who bring parents wait for them?”

“Sometimes. Mostly, they go off for a while, with orders to be back at ten. They usually get back sooner and stand around.”

“O.K.,” Reed said. “Thanks. Do you happen to know which parents come with chauffeurs? If not, I can get the information from Miss Tyringham, I suppose; the chauffeurs might have seen something.”

O’Hara knew the chauffeurs by sight, and their cars, of course, but that was all. “I’ll give you ten minutes after you call,” he said, turning toward the stairs with Lily and Rose.

“By the way,” Reed said, “if the dogs heard someone downstairs, would they break their routine and go see?”

“Of course. They’d find the person wherever he was. I’d miss a regular alarm, and go to look for them; it
might take a little longer.” He disappeared up the stairway.

Reed ran the many flights down to the lobby, stopping on the way to crush out his cigarette and drop the stub in his pocket. He switched the lights on in the lobby and looked around. The entrance, which was large, rather like a theater entrance, had a double set of doors, which formed two sides of the entrance hall leading to the lobby. He saw what he was looking for immediately, behind a set of glass doors in the entrance hall; the doors led to an emergency stairway from the floor below. Lighting another cigarette, he went to phone O’Hara.

“What’s the dolly for?” Reed asked when O’Hara had answered. “The one off the entrance hall under a canvas?”

“To move supplies. Papers, books, anything. After they’ve been delivered.”

“O.K.,” Reed said. “I’m off. With one last question.” And he asked it.

He called Kate from a phone booth on the corner to tell her he had emerged unscathed from the lions’ den. They were very well-trained lions. “I know now what happened at the school,” he said. “But I don’t know what happened before, or how she got there. Rose and Lily send you their love, or so I discerned. O’Hara obviously wasn’t thinking of you at all, but I made up for that by thinking of you all the time. Did you really, in your ferociously upper-class girlhood, hang from those rings for fun?”

E
ARLY
on the following day, for which no seminar was scheduled, Kate awoke with the uneasy conviction that she had determined upon some action and the inability to remember exactly what it was. I shall probably emerge from this entire Theban episode, she unhappily thought, no longer able to sleep in the mornings. I shall have to join Reed in the shower and learn all of Cole Porter’s lyrics. She mentioned this dismal conclusion to Reed, who had just arisen. “Excellent,” he said, and disappeared into the bathroom, whence, shortly, could be heard the strains of
Kiss Me, Kate
.

Kate gathered her wits together sufficiently, first, to remember what she had decided to do, and then, which was harder, to decide how to do it. The day seemed, the more she thought about it, to contain an amazingly large number of conversations, heart-to-heart talks, or what she hoped would be heart-to-heart talks, and just
plain worming round. She began upon this rather long series of investigations by calling Miss Tyringham at school. Miss Tyringham, as Kate had learned, arrived at the Theban shortly before eight every morning, and could be reached in her office by those to whom she was willing to speak after they had identified themselves to Miss Strikeland at the switchboard, whose arrival was planned to precede Miss Tyringham’s by a matter of minutes. Miss Strikeland had failed to arrive, despite the threats of weather, strikes, and power failures, once only, when the crosstown bus she was on had broken down in such a way that the driver was unable to open the doors. Miss Tyringham had been so worried by this uncharacteristic tardiness that she became visibly distraught and sat there working the switchboard herself in the hope of some news. This morning, however, Miss Strikeland was in place and soon put Kate through.

“How are you?” came Miss Tyringham’s cheerful voice. “I understand your gallant husband faced our menacing beasts with commendable sang-froid. Mr. O’Hara is beside himself with admiration, feeling that total canine vindication has been accomplished. Where does that leave us with our other problems?”

“I’m not sure,” Kate said, “but I’m full of theories, and shall certainly never get a moment’s rest until I test them. For that I need your permission or at least acquiescence.”

“Why don’t you stop in this morning as soon as you can? I shall have to cut two meetings, but it’s all in a day’s work. How much time do you need?”

“Oh, well, probably not too long. Sorry to barge in on the school day, but of course I’ve become compulsive
and insist on bringing this whole business to some conclusion. I knew that the
Antigone
seminar would interfere to some extent with my work on the Victorians, but not that I would become so feverish. Reed says the only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it; I hope he’s right.”

“You’re suggesting he may have been right when he counseled us to abandon the whole investigation?”

“Well, he was certainly right about not stopping halfway through. Nine o’clock then?” Kate rang off.

She decided to walk to the Theban, since she had ample time, taxis were impossible to get at that hour of the morning, the buses were crowded, and walking would help to clear her head. In fact, she wanted to reduce her confused emotions to some sort of order. She had not many doubts, after talking to Reed last night, about what had happened on the night before the morning when the body so mysteriously appeared at the Theban. There were a great many details to be worked out, of course, either laboriously or more quickly, through a lucky chance. Discovering hidden events is like searching for a misplaced document immediately required. You may hit on it the first place you look, or you may have to peer into every cranny and file folder you own, but if the document is there you will find it, and it will all come to the same thing in the end.