He did not believe that he had killed Maud by loving her, through what had happened between them. Still, there was some kind of blood debt, something to be endured as a result of what had happened. He thought of it as something to be learned, a mystery he was compelled to live out. What brought him to the office and the meeting with Stack was akin to every other high-risk venture he had ever undertaken. Maybe the temptation of oblivion, or an obsessive curiosity about the ineluctability of fate. And an ancient anger he had been born with, an insatiable rage against himself, his cast of mind — a sense that he had been born out of line, raised wrong, lived deserving of some unknowable retribution that it was his duty and honor to face down, prevent, overcome. His yielding to the spell of Maud, the pain he had caused Ellie, his coming into the path of the unfortunate old man’s revenge, all were mysteriously part of it.
He heard the outside door open slowly. When it shut, the building sounded with an echoing hush, the magnified whispery desperation of Stack’s breathing, in discord with his footsteps and the reports of his cane against the oak floors.
Brookman sat silent and unmoving, frozen in place. In the office, he could detect a lingering savor of the girl that quickened on the thoughts of her he had spent so many days resisting. Somewhere at the center of the confusion and grief of the past weeks, he remained trapped in images from the teeming street in front of his house in the moments before the phantom car had struck. At his heart was a dreadful sense of loss, of life, of love, all lost, so wrongly, so unjustly, so in accordance with the wretched laws of life. Maud lost. And Ellie and Sophia — every loving impulse he knew, dead at the source, dead on arrival. Can I have brought down all this death in life on us, Brookman wondered, through my fondness for a pretty girl? And could Maud have been led to death through so commonplace an adolescent adventure? It was all so good, he thought, all about the beauty of a girl and of the world, of its forms, its sublimest language. He waited, despising his own fecklessness and self-pity yet offering them to fortune as his alibi. He thought of the Thomas Wyatt verse in her pocket. God have mercy on her.
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall…
She carried it in her wallet, he thought. Carried it for me. God have mercy on her, he thought. On us, on me. How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way.
The tapping of the old man’s cane was harrowing him. Then there was the knock on his door, and it was a four-beat measure that reminded him of Maud’s signal.
“Professor Brookman?”
“It’s open, Mr. Stack.”
He heard Stack pause for breath and cursed the impulses that had led him to wait seated at the desk like some lame victim of justice. He ought, he thought suddenly, to have stood by the door and taken the old guy down, weapon and all if he had one. Brookman grew angrier and angrier. In the hurried failing breaths of the man at his door he could sense the satisfaction of an avenger, and a sense of his own justification drove his rage. He put his hands on his desk and watched Stack come into his office.
Edward Stack looked to be a hard man with a practical cop’s face. A man used to being feared. Maud had his eyes, Brookman thought; you would have paired the two of them by sight because of the eyes.
“You,” Stack said. He did not say it in an agitated manner but softly, with an edge of satisfaction. It was an intimidating way to be addressed, but it fed Brookman’s anger. As Stack said it, the cane fell from his hand, clattered on the wood floor and rolled across it. It was the kind of stick chain drugstores sold to aging cut-rate cripples. Both men looked down after it. Stack made no move to retrieve the thing.
“Were you going to hit me with that, Mr. Stack? Were you going to cane me?”
He watched the old man struggle for breath, not able after a moment to conceal his gasping.
“For God’s sake,” Brookman said.
Brookman stood, his eyes on Stack’s, and came around the desk. Stack took a move back and put the right hand that had held his cane on the arm of the chair nearest Brookman’s desk. It was there for students’ use during office hours and Maud had sat in it often enough. Stack put his hands on the chair and eased himself into it, fighting for air.
Brookman saw that the old man had miscalculated. Whatever he had intended was beyond him, whatever havoc on Brookman he saw himself as wreaking in his mind’s eye was well past his capacity. He was settling for life and breath, propped on the chair. There were no threatening motions, no reaches for weaponry. He did not even try to talk. At first he could not bring himself to look at Brookman, and when he did, he was attempting not to show the fear he plainly felt. Brookman was ashamed.
“Are you all right?” Brookman asked him, avoiding his eyes. “Do you want oxygen? Should I get help?”
“You son of a bitch,” Stack said, breathing hard. “I came here to kill you.”
“That would have been wrong, Mr. Stack.”
Stack began to laugh. Brookman wanted to beg him to rest and be silent.
“We got to be friends over the years I was her adviser. I let it get out of hand. I was emotionally involved and she was…” Something in Stack’s expression made him stop.
“You… you phony obscene son of a bitch. You… bastard. She was a young child.”
“No. She was my student, Mr. Stack. I always respected her. I let the distance between us become too close.”
“Stop calling me that, you posturing fuck. Stop calling me Mr. Stack.”
“Sorry. What shall I call you?”
Stack tossed his head in what looked like a spasm of pain.
“It sounds like you’re passing yourself off as someone her age. You’re a married man, you bastard. She was a child.”
“Not to me.”
“Like you were a couple of kids, you dirty-handed son of a whore.”
“Two grown people.”
“She was younger than her age,” Stack said fiercely.
“She was a beautiful, educated young woman.”
“Oh, bullshit. She was a kid!”
“She looked that way to you.”
“You killed her, didn’t you? That’s what it comes to.”
“She died in an accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Stack insisted. He sounded as though he knew he was arguing against logic.
“She died in an accident. It could have been anyone in that street. It could have been me.” He leaned his forehead on the heel of one hand. His elbow touched the weight of the gun in his pocket and he was ashamed of having it. “It’s so cruel,” he said to Stack. “I’m sorry.”
Stack stared at him wide-eyed, his handsome ravaged face ugly with animal suffocation and his hatred.
“But emotionally,” Stack repeated, “she was younger than her age. She was a kid.”
Without meaning to, Brookman shrugged. He sat silent, to let the old man catch his breath and because he did not know how to answer.
“You say cruel,” Stack reminded him. “How about you for cruel? To crush a kid’s feelings like that. Break her heart! You act like I don’t understand. Like I don’t know what you did.” He coughed, took out his handkerchief, turned in the chair and folded his hands over the back of it.
A nice-looking man, Brookman thought, his adversary had been. But his basically lean, intelligent looks were utterly blasted, the fine eyes swollen, the fair skin flanneled and flayed, marred under his high cheekbones by sickening spidery angiomas.
“I saw your family, Professor,” Stack said. “I bet they’re good people. They weren’t enough for you? Why didn’t you leave us alone?”
“Maud was my friend and my student, Mr. Stack. I never, ever meant to hurt her. I respected her and I respect you. If you thought I was patronizing you, you were mistaken.”