Natty Bowles, the half breed, told me he had caught Hackett and Gordon on the black leather couch in his office one night. He had gone in to Old Main to check the thermostats. But Natty had such a vivid imagination. As it turned out that was only a preliminary interlude to what happened between the young drama instructor and the prim hipped dean of women.
Natty, a cross between a French Canadian mother and an Algonquin chief, became one of my best friends. He had carried my trunk to the third floor of the wooden faculty dorm when I arrived at midterm. From his Indian heritage he had acquired the body of a blacksmith, from his French mother, his peeping Tom character. He could outwork any two farm hands, replace a leaky roof in the morning, dig a trench for a broken pipe that afternoon. And all night every two hours he walked the rounds of campus buildings, against the threat of prowlers, fires, or panty raids of the girls’ dorms. He would fall asleep in my office, listening to the radio, but in ten minutes he would be on his rounds.
He was the first one to tip me off as to what went on between the young drama instructor and the dean of women. He had heard them talking together on the stage of the gym. It was after midnight and he had come down to check the furnace. He had slipped back in the vestibule, listened.
“Make love,” he said, grinning, exposing a missing front tooth. The tip of his red nose almost slipped into the hole.
“You mustn’t go around telling lies like that about people you don’t like,” I said, recalling that Natty had complained to me a month earlier about Cyril Gordon tearing him out for turning down the heat the evening he had scheduled a rehearsal for the spring play.
Not that it. seems too unlikely Miss Hackett was having her first affair. It had to happen sometime, he being a poet. Besides it was all too evident Cyril Gordon had had it up to his bobbing Adam’s apple with his marriage to a fading red-headed actress.
Mrs. Gordon had brought with her the wrinkled neck glamor of Broadway. She had understudied Helen Hayes, appeared with the Lunts. Any day you could find her in the snack bar on a stool making up to whatever sweat shirted athlete might slide into the next stool for Ma Pringle’s mid-morning hamburgers and coke.
Late afternoons from the office on the raised ramp of the gym, I could hear them. During rehearsal Mrs. Gordon lent her Helen Hayes voice in coaching the play. They were staging Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”. Cyril had agreed to be the narrator, off stage, having been unable to entice any of the farm boys to read the part.
“Stop mouthing those lines like a trained seal,” she would call out of the darkness to her husband. “Damn it all, Cyril, put some guts into it.”
“Yes, darling,” Cyril said. “It’s been quite a while since I played this part.”
“Well, get with it,” she called, motioning to the student players. “Let’s go through the graveyard scene again. From the stepladder where the dead girl says ‘Mother look at me, just once.’ ”
As the time came nearer for the pre-Easter performance, Mrs. Gordon continued to chew him out. He seemed to grow meeker, with his quiet, “Yes, darling. Of course, Martha, you know best.”
Even the cast took to feeling sorry for him. No one resented his having this affair on the sly with the prim Victorian dean of women.
The night of the performance, with the auditorium crowded, when Cyril was halfway through the narration, speaking the lines with the nasal twang of a Yankee telling the story to. his cronies around a pot bellied stove, a voice roared from the wings, “Damn it all, Gordon, put some feeling into it.”
The Irish drama coach dropped the sheet to the stage. He switched off the mini light that had been focused on the page. He turned and vanished into the wings, back stage. Like a fadeout. That was the last any of us saw Cyril Gordon alive.
It almost broke up the play, her swearing at him, his walking off like that. But she hurried up the left aisle, switched on the light and continued to read the narration as if nothing had happened.
The young players were quite upset. Some forgot entire lines. But with awkward pauses they ran through the third act and the curtain dropped with a plop on the stage.
Dr. Cloute came back stage to talk to Mrs. Gordon. She was sitting on the divan, crying. Dr. Cloute sat down beside her, patted her hand.
“You were quite right in correcting his reading,” he said. “His enunciation was abominable.”
“I just don’t know what got into me,” Mrs. Gordon said quietly. “By the way, where did the bastard go?”
The Irish poet wasn’t anywhere in the gym, nor in the Gordon apartment in the faculty dorm. Only Natty Bowles had seen where he had gone, to the apartment of the dean of women. But no one else knew that at the time. None of the students and surely none of the faculty. Dr. Cloute appeared to be the most mystified about the disappearance of the drama director.
As an able administrator, Dr. Cloute that same week appointed Mrs. Gordon to carry on her husband’s classes. She even agreed to coach one of Miss Hackett’s speech classes that was preparing for the spring debate with the team from Dennison.
The former actress proved an able replacement of her husband. She held tryouts for Macbeth, arranged for a girl’s chorus in the Greek style, wrote the verses to come in at the end of each act, to comment on the cruel murder of the King.
Her target for abuse became the dean of women. Not that she ever went into the dean’s office, accused her of adultery, or anything like that. Instead she cut Miss Hackett down, word by word, criticizing her students of speech.
“Who ever taught you to talk like an Edison record?” she would ask the girls. “Gestures like that went out with elocution, years ago. Say the lines naturally, Phyllis. This lady Macbeth is a murderess, not a dean of women in some smart assed college, like Horseham.”
It was Natty who told me that Cyril Gordon was still on campus, hiding out, waiting for an opportunity to settle for her bawling him out, ruining his career. Natty had seen him twice slipping into Miss Hackett’s apartment well after hours. He was carrying a tennis racket, as if this were the weapon with which he planned, when opportunity offered, to do away with his wife.
Dr. Cloute alerted the troopers. Obviously there was a potential killer on the loose around campus, a disgruntled member of the faculty bent on possible murder of his wife. Anything might happen.
“Not a word of this in the papers, Henderson.” He had called me into his office where he sat in state, like a ruler in more ways than one.
“But word’s bound to leak out, with the troopers nosing around.” I knew something would soon slip into the Bedford Eagle through one of the campus correspondents.
“That’s what I hired you for, public relations, Henderson.” He pressed the tips of his fingers together to show how all things can be contained. “Horseham’s image must be maintained, especially with the riots and violence on most campuses.”
The troopers searched every nook for the missing Cyril Gordon. Even the dark room in the science building where Natty claimed to have seen the lovers go one evening last fall. The drama instructor had vanished.
Then one afternoon in May, bloodhounds were brought in to track the missing Irishman. They smelled a pair of Gordon’s trousers, then set off along a tan bark path that led into the hemlock woods. There on an open knoll, under alder bushes, they came on the decomposed body of the former drama director. The poet’s head had been bashed in. by a flint tomahawk that lay by his naked, fly-blown body. A red swastika had been smeared on his chest.
Naturally at first everyone suspected Mrs. Gordon had followed her husband and the dean of women up the tan bark path, interrupted their party and cracked in his skull. Probably he had been murdered shortly after she had interrupted his reading the part of the narrator in “Our Town.”