In return she snapped his picture.
“Dude,” she cried, handing him the shot, “if I had teeth like yours, I’d brush them.”
All the photogs wailed piteously in unison, mocking her self-satisfied bitchiness. They’d all been there before. Shelby, by the time she felt able to let go, had forgotten the young journalists. Clustering around the car windows, they had the opportunity to see her cry and to take pictures of it too.
40
AFTER NEW YEAR’S A YOUNG woman from Taunton confessed to vehicular homicide in the case of Maud Stack. Lieutenant Salmone called Eddie on the phone. Stack’s condition had declined, and though he did not bother to be abstemious in drink, his memory was intact.
“Woman,” Salmone reported, “called Mona Carberry. White girl from Taunton, Mass. Twenty-seven years old. Single parent of a thirteen-month-old. Driving without insurance. History of minor traffic violations. Sometimes employed as a stripper. The car was her boyfriend’s.”
“Maybe he was driving?”
“We think maybe he was.”
“God. Girls still do that?”
“Sometimes. You wouldn’t believe. Guys do it for their girlfriends too.”
“Jesus,” Stack said. “There’s hope for the world.”
“You see it that way, Eddie?”
Stack grunted.
“They don’t usually follow through on it if they’re looking at time,” Salmone said. “Just about never. So we think this guy will come forward pretty soon.”
“Is there any connection with the article Maud wrote?”
“It doesn’t look like it. The girl has no connection with the college, and besides, we think her boyfriend was the driver. He better come to his girlfriend’s rescue soon or he’ll be fucking sorry.”
“Break him down,” Stack said, “the dumb fuck. He doesn’t deserve her.”
“He was in Iraq. He got a Bronze Star. He has a drug arrest and a big pill problem. The girlfriend says he didn’t want to go to the game so she went without him and got drunk. Doesn’t sound very likely.”
“No.”
“Hey, listen, Eddie, how are you?”
“I’m lousy, Sal. But I’m old and sick.”
“Right.”
“I’ve lived too long already. Wouldn’t you say?”
“It’s not up to us, you know.”
“Oh, fuck that, Sal. What are you giving me? Fucking religion. I’m tired of this. I’m trying to get pills. Something reliable. I don’t like taking street shit.”
“Sure, Eddie.” Salmone disapproved. Man up, partner, he thought. Everybody dies. But of course not everyone has to lose a beautiful child.
“I’m gonna have to come for you and ask for my weapon back, Sal.”
“Not from me you ain’t getting it.”
“I’m glad you took it, I really am. I might have wasted the fuck.”
“You’re not getting it back.”
“I’d buy one, you know. I don’t want to, though.”
“That’s good, Eddie. You don’t need it, a guy like you.”
“You know why I don’t buy it?”
“Of course. You do it, you hurt other people. You hurt me.”
“Let me tell you something. I don’t worry about eating the gun or not. I worry about blasting some individual or other. I can take being remembered as a suicide. I don’t want to go down as an asshole. The raging psycho.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, Eddie. Put it in the hands of God — like — you know, man. Don’t hurt yourself anymore.”
41
ONE DAY THE FOLLOWING SPRING, Steve Brookman was walking on the campus for almost the last time when he happened to meet John Spofford and Mary Pick in front of the college library.
Spofford, Brookman had been happy to learn, had not been fired after all. The decision to keep him on, Brookman thought, had been wise and just and not at all what Brookman might have expected from the college. The three of them stood in front of the library, the center of covert observation by many of the passersby. They agreed that Amesbury was a great place to be in April; it beat England any day, in spite of everything. People said more or less the same thing to each other every spring. Brookman was more than ready to subscribe to these ritual notions, aware that he expected to be six thousand miles away by the following April. Mary Pick was as cool as ever. Brookman and Spofford could not conceal their embarrassment.
When they were all saying what Brookman and Spofford certainly hoped would be their ultimate goodbyes, Brookman gave him his hand and said, “Semper fi.”
“Yes,” Spofford answered. “Right.”
Immediately Brookman realized that the choice of words, in the circumstances, in the present company, was awkward. Spofford’s attempt to disappear the phrase was no less so. It was very painful.
As the two men looked around for some route of withdrawal, Steve, John and Mary saw that a schizophrenic man often seen on campus — a man whose presence Brookman had noticed repeatedly in the weeks before the death of Maud Stack — was standing a few feet away from them. He was staring in something like terror at the three people who were blocking his path. As they hastened to step out of his way, the man uttered a sound, an anguished, fearful groan that seemed to emerge from somewhere inside him, somewhere so deep as to be incorporeal.
Mary Pick looked stricken, though Brookman thought she must have seen him often before. “Are you all right, dear,” she said very sadly to the man.
He gave them a last terrified glance, turned around so that he was headed the opposite way and hurried off. The three stood silently for a while, watching him go.
42
ELSA BEZEIDENHOUT BROOKMAN TAUGHT HER advanced anthropology class until June. Her husband had contracted for a book on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and he went to Seattle to prepare for the trip. In July Ellie gave birth to another daughter, whom she and Steve named Rosalind after the witty heroine of As You Like It. Brookman came east but missed the event itself, which occurred a little earlier than expected. He was not displeased to be the parent of another daughter. They spent three weeks together before Brookman returned to his operational headquarters. After that, he came back at least once a month before suspending his field research. At the end of the year Ellie moved out of the house the Brookmans had occupied.
Ellie kept her job and, to the disapproval of many at the college, kept Brookman too. They planned to move to Boston, whence she would commute and where they were no longer a component of Amesbury’s social scene. Steve worked on his book. Over time he grew steadily more obsessed with tigers and planned more Siberian adventures, sometimes taking Ellie and the children along.
Maud’s death, and the degree to which his illusion of love for Maud had been its occasion, filled him with remorse and regret. What he suffered most acutely was the sense of his own unworthiness, of the mediocrity into which life at the college, the position and privilege of it, had led him. And Ellie demanded of him something like a promise of connubial fidelity. Not in any formula, utterance, whispered verse or knitted motto. Something worse, something that racked him with shame because it forced him to understand that he had impelled a person such as she was to ask such a thing of him, when what he owed her was nothing less than the renewal of his moral existence.
It came to be that the love and admiration he felt for Ellie, the strength he drew upon to feel like a worthwhile companion to her, were greater than any threat to what bound them together. Something like the same thing was true on Ellie’s side as well. She was in fact a proud person who knew well what love was. No one close to her had ever suspected her of not knowing that. A woman with a sure sense of what she required in a man and who put up with nothing out of mere fond regard. Enduring each other’s strengths, they survived something more formidable than serial adultery, jealousy or naive disillusionment. Survive they did, though, and made do with arctic winters, with watching the aurora and the proximity of tigers.