The Transcendental Murder (3 page)

“Don't you worry your head, Mrs. Hand. And I promise not to trample on anybody either, unless they call me Paul Revere.” Charley slapped his side and galloped around the room, while the Girl Scouts giggled. One of them naturally said, “Hello there, Paul Revere,” and got spanked.

“Here now, Dr. Prescott, you behave yourself,” said Tom. “My mother's a sensitive old lady.”

Charley skipped out the door, then he yelled back in, “Sensitive old ladies like your mother know what a fool I am anyway. Don't you, Mrs. Hand?”

Mrs. Hand yelled back, “You just bet I do. When is Mary going to make an honest Christian fella out of you?”

“Whenever she'll have me. Put in a good word for me, will you, Mrs. Hand?” He disappeared. Mary watched him drive past Tom's cornfield and turn left into the driveway behind the long row of hemlocks that led to his house, the big impressive Goss house on the river side of the road.

“Of course, Philip is the sensible one, Mary dear,” said Mrs. Hand. “That Charley, he's still sowing his wild oats. Though he may snap out of it, that's what I tell his father. Ernie says Charley is going straight to the dogs. I keep telling him he's wrong.”

“Now, Mother,” said Gwen, “let my poor sister alone. She's not going to marry either one of them if she can help it.”

“Besides, I'm already madly, head-over-heels in love,” said Mary, throwing her eyes up at the ceiling.

“Who with, Mary, who with?” said Mrs. Hand.

“Henry David Thoreau,” said Mary.

“Oh, go along with you.”

John, the first-grader, came in then, after loitering home from school. He blew up his lunchbag and popped it with a sharp bang. “I'm hungry,” he said.

Chapter 4

	I accept the universe
MARGARET FULLER

Egad, she'd better.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Mary picked up the two gallons of good clouded Hand cider and slammed the door of the pickup truck with her knee. Then she stood for a minute in the small parking lot in front of Orchard House, looking across the dark fields, letting the hurdy-gurdy grind. Henry had walked here, calling on Alcott (his ally against the arch-enemy). Louisa May Alcott had written part of
Little Women
here, and Bronson had cultivated his vegetable garden without benefit of foul ordures, and conducted his School of Philosophy. And here on this very patch of ground Emerson must have stood, many times, listening to Alcott's never-failing fountain of eloquence. Wearying of it, perhaps, sometimes, and walking home to confide as much to his journal. But Bronson had been his Plato in the flesh. Or Apollo in disguise, the god of poetry himself, forced to do the plowing for King Admetus. But that was what they had all called themselves, struggling to earn the bread that would sustain their colossal souls—they had all been Apollos, gripping the plow handle for King Admetus, tilling the harsh fields of Thessaly, their eyes lifted to Mount Olympus.

“Come on in, Mary dear,” said Mrs. Hand, bustling ahead. “We don't want the whole Alcott Assocation to have to wait for us.” Mary followed her up the walk. In the front hall they ran into Ernest Goss, Charley's father. He was lighting candles, making a hash of it. Alice Herpirude was fluttering about, arranging little bowls of crocuses.

“Hello, Mr. Goss,” said Mary. She towered over him genially, balancing her jugs of cider, passing the time of day, thinking cheerfully at the same time how much she disliked him. He was as “Old Concord” as anybody could be, but somehow he didn't ring true. Or he had lost the spirit of the forefathers, or something. He wasn't the only one who had. There were plenty of others like him, well-meaning people with money, living in housees that looked like Christmas cards, spending the summer on the Cape, getting tan, playing tennis, driving around in convertibles, living what was supposed to be the good life. But hollow somehow. Ernest Goss had a handsome wife, four handsome children (well, three anyhow), he talked with an exaggerated nasal Yankee twang, he was a graduate of Exeter and Harvard, he wore tweedy jackets from the Country Store and he kept up the general impression of being the superbly appointed country gentleman. But there was something wrong somewhere. He was like a paper pattern that had been cut out very carefully on the black line. His wife was even more so. Together they bored Mary exceedingly. What she liked to think of as real “Old Concord” was Grandmaw Hand and her son Tom, and a lot of others like them. They were true squeezings from the Concord grape. The old Barrett place was still a working New England farm, and the Mission armchair and the roll-top desk with the stuffed duck and the plastic globe and the feathery egg-boxes stacked on it and the spindly geraniums in coffee cans and the calendars and the Angelus and the linoleum on the dining room floor—they were not there to be part of a certain kind of setting, they were just there. And Tom himself, in his overalls, and Mrs. Hand in her husband's old hat … But of course it wasn't just a matter of living in the past. Those new families in Henry's Conantum woods seemed to have soaked up the spirit of plain living and high thinking that had always been the best of Concord, like something given off by the soil, or breathed in the air. It occurred to Mary that Concord's aboriginal Indians had probably been just another flock of egregious individuals with a passion for sunsets and a taste for abstraction.

She lugged her cider into the little kitchen, ducking under the lintel of the door. And there she ran into the gorilla of the morning. He was leaning gigantically against the hutch-back bench, going over a handful of notes. “Excuse me,” said Mary. She set her cider down on the black stove and opened the door of the cupboard where the paper cups were.

“So you're one of them, too,” he said.

Mary looked up at him, and felt her cheeks flare. She knew what his “one of them” meant. (One of those little provincial biddies who play dolls with
Little Women.
)

“Yes,” she said shortly. He lifted his notes again, and Mary started pouring cider. It felt odd to be in such close quarters with someone bigger than she was. Carefully she poured out twenty-four cups of cider, exerting all her attention so as not to spill any. She turned politely to nod to the gorilla as she finished. The darn man wasn't reading his notes at all. He was looking at her with eyes that were little barbs of concentrated curiosity. She might be some new species of woodchuck or pit viper or something. Mary's cheeks went back on her again. She turned away, ducked her head grimly under the door and went out to sit in the dining room beside Mrs. Hand. Homer Kelly looked at the blank back of the door. Too bad he didn't know one flower from another. Carnations, was it? Peonies, maybe.

Grandmaw Hand was being outrageously charming, chuckling girlishly with Alice Herpitude, recalling the old days, remembering the Chinese laundry and Pierce's Shoe Store and the meat-market with the carcasses hanging out back. “Ooh, I used to be so scared to go back there,” said Grandmaw. “Remember, Alice?”

“Well, no, Florence dear. Don't forget, I'm practically a newcomer. I've only been here twenty-five years this fall.”

“Oh, of course, I was forgetting.”

Someone was sitting down in the empty chair on the other side of Mary. “Oh, hello, Teddy,” said Mary.

Teddy Staples started to say hello, then he changed it halfway to how are you, and it came out, “Hew, hew! How, how!” One of the staples that held his shirt together popped into Mary's lap. Mary liked Teddy, and she put her hand affectionately on his arm.

“Have you seen any more of Henry's birds?” she said.

“I-I-I-I saw a pied-bill g-grebe the other day,” said Teddy, his melancholy face brightening. Then it fell again. “But I've seen plenty of them before. There's just one I've really got to-to …” He started to cough, and couldn't stop. Mary slapped him on the back. Poor Teddy. His life was a simple, rounded eccentricity, a charming obsession, founded on two facts. One fact was that Teddy was the remote descendant of that same Samuel Staples who had locked up Henry Thoreau in the Town Jail. The other was the oddity that he had been born on the same day in 1917 that Thoreau had been born in 1817. Adding these two giant facts together, Teddy had come to believe that his life must be dedicated to Henry Thoreau's memory, and to the reliving of Henry's life as far as he was able. By some absurd sense of fitness, Teddy Staples mended his clothes with a Woolworth stapler, ka-snap, ka-snap. His one set of loose garments was a sort of masterpiece or tour de force of stapling, glittering at stress points with little silver dashes. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, Teddy lived alone on the shores of the Sudbury River, where it opened out into Fairhaven Bay. Thoreau had made pencils and surveyed lot lines—Teddy won a narrow living as a stonemason. “M-M-Mary,” he said, “I wonder if I-I-I …” Then the meeting was called to order.

Howard Swan did it with his usual grace. He was an all-round good fellow, and aside from Miss Herpitude and Mary and Teddy Staples, the only member of the Alcott Association remotely resembling a scholar. The rest were Louisa Alcott enthusiasts, proud of their responsibility for preserving the shrine to the memory of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Howard stood up tall with the candlelight reflecting softly from his head (so nobly bald, with a light fringe of hair like Bronson Alcott's) and begged the officers of the association to be brief. The officers tried heroically, but failed. Old Mr. Pusey was already asleep on Jo's bolster. Mary glanced at Ernest Goss, sitting beside Mr. Pusey on the sofa. He was anything but sleepy, nervously drumming his fingers on his briefcase. What was he impatient for? The speaker?

Homer Kelly was introduced at last. He reared up in front of the niche Branson had built for his bust of Socrates and put his notes on the table beside the plaster Rogers Group (“Taking the Oath”). His cowlick grazed the ceiling and the butterflies shone crassly on his tie. He began to talk about Margaret Fuller.

Mary listened soberly, smiling slightly when he was witty at poor Margaret's expense, disagreeing inside. Poor wretched Margaret. Mary had to admit that there was something vaguely repellent about the miserable woman, but this was hardly fair. She was too easy and quivering a target, and Homer Kelly wasn't the first to take pot-shots at her. “Bulgy-eyed spinster”—oh, that was mean. He diagrammed cleverly the greasy little pigtails Margaret had looped in front of her ears. He imitated hilariously the famous serpentine motions of her long neck. He sneered at her belief in animal magnetism and mesmerism. He pictured her reclining on a sofa and crying, “Let women be sea-captains if they will!” Then he stopped being funny and began to talk about her study of Goethe, the influence of her periodical
The Dial
on American letters, and the mutual inspiration she and Emerson had been to each other. Grudgingly Mary had to admit that he knew what he was talking about. But she hated him. He was one of those condescending professors who will amuse a class any time by destroying the dignity of some illustrious name with gleeful exposés of old privacies, old scandals and senilities. Homer Kelly finished by returning to the attack. With a pyrotechnical flashing of his snickersnee he skewered old Margaret to the wall. Then he sat down, while his audience tittered and clapped. (It was all right. After all, Margaret Fuller wasn't really
Concord
.)

Howard Swan called for questions. Alice Herpitude asked one timidly. Homer Kelly answered it carefully. Then Mary heard herself speaking up. “Don't you think it's a little unfair to judge the manners of one time by the standards of another?” Everyone turned to look at her, and she hurried on, explaining. “I mean, what might be neurotic or even psychotic now doesn't seem to have bothered her contemporaries at all. She was courageous, really, and a sympathetic friend to younger people, and of course she was one of the first to speak up for women's rights. It's easy to laugh at p-prophets …” Now she was stuttering like Teddy. She stopped. Homer Kelly looked at her with a broad smile, a kindly delighted look (as though a pet dog had rolled over or a horse talked.) Everyone was looking at her the same way. “Dear Mary,” she knew they were thinking, “such a sweet girl.”

Homer Kelly opened his mouth to speak. But before he could get a word out, Ernest Goss was on his feet. He got up off the sofa so quickly he bounced old Mr. Pusey, who snorted and rolled his head about. Ernest was waving some papers over his head. “I have something,” he said, “of the most profound …” He brushed importantly past Alice Herpitude and then tripped on the braided rug and lunged against the piano, smashing his way up the keyboard in a series of accidental arpeggios. The papers in his hand spilled all over the floor. Mary leaned forward to pick up one that had drifted under her chair. It was an old letter, the paper thin and yellow, the ink brown and faded, the writing bold. Across the top there was a crude drawing of a daisy. Then Ernest Goss snatched the letter from her. He gathered the rest hastily and stood up in the small crowded parlor right in front of Homer Kelly, who had no choice but to sit down.