He took the photograph of the dead mayor of Detroit from his pocket. He set it on the bed and sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at the photograph.
He heard Eric Heidigger’s voice echoing:
(“... the alternative, Miles Dorn. The mistake everyone makes is to believe that the alternative to change is preservation of the status quo. And this is so rarely true. The alternative to change is another sort of change. You know this.”)
“I betrayed you,” he told James. “By seeking to preserve you, I in fact betrayed you. For I could have given you so much better a death. At my hands you would have died peacefully and quietly and safely. I would have left not three but five of your children to honor your memory, and their mother would have lived to care for them.”
He got to his feet. It would be good to sleep a few hours in this narrow bed. It would be wise to devote a day or two to reconnaissance and planning. But he felt an urgency that could not be denied.
He placed the photograph of Walter Isaac James in an ashtray on top of the dresser. He struck a match. “Forgive me,” he said aloud. The photo flared and burned, and he watched even as he wondered at his own unaccustomed participation in the ceremony.
He flushed the ashes down the toilet. Then he opened his window and let himself out onto the fire escape, closing the window after him to within a few inches of the sill. He climbed down five flights, then let himself drop the last flight to the pavement below. He landed lightly, on the balls of his feet, and waited long enough to assure himself that his departure had attracted no attention.
Margaret Keller O’Dowd professed herself incapable of believing the fact of her husband’s suicide. “He was too much involved with life. He loved challenges, he loved to test himself in difficult situations. Of course he was under stress, but there was something in Pat that responded to stress. Sometimes he was depressed. He was one man in an impossible job at an impossible time. Of course he would get depressed. But he knew how to triumph over depression. And he was a Catholic, he was always close to the Church. How could he possibly kill himself?”
And yet it was impossible that he had not. The facts were clear enough. Shortly after midnight he had said good-night to his wife and stayed up in his study, going over reports of the latest school board crisis. The school situation had weighed heavily on his mind of late and seemed to be insoluble. When one crisis was resolved another sprang up in its place. He sat at his desk and smoked heavily and initialed reports.
By morning he had still not come to bed. The door to his study was locked from the inside. Attempts to arouse him from without failed. One of the policemen posted outside the mayoral residence was summoned. He kicked the door in and found O’Dowd hanging from a ceiling beam. He had used a cord from the study’s drapes to hang himself. He had cut the cord with a paper knife, and shreds of fiber adhered to its blade. He had stood on his desk chair, then kicked the chair over.
No one could have been in the room with him. There were no signs of another presence, no signs of a struggle, no signs that anything other than simple suicide had taken place.
Nor had there been a note. Press reports managed to suggest in an oblique fashion that such a note might have been repressed, either by the authorities or by the mayor’s widow. Close associates of O’Dowd’s testified to his increasing periods of depression and frustration over the political situation in Philadelphia and throughout the nation. His deepening sorrow over the continuance of the Indo-China War was also mentioned.
In Willow Falls, Dorn several times looked with longing at the cord of his Venetian blinds. He read Blake and Yeats and Auden and Arnold.
“Oh love, let us be true to one another...” He did not kill himself, or leave the country.
Thirteen
But if he could not leave the country, he could yet send himself out of reach of time and space, and if true death eluded him, he could taste la petite mort over and over again.
His appetite for her did not diminish. If anything it increased, and his capacity remained its equal. This astonished Dorn. Sexual pleasure had never played a strong role in his life, and in recent years he had thought himself to have outgrown it. Now it seemed he could hardly have been farther from the truth.
He occasionally wondered how his life might have turned out if he had ever loved anyone in the past.
For as long as he possibly could, he spent all his time in Willow Falls and as much of it as possible in her company. There were short trips, any number of them, that he might profitably have made. He did not make them. There was research he could usefully have undertaken. He did not undertake it. In all too short a time, he knew, he would have to devote himself to Case Six, the final and most important phase of the entire operation. When that time came, it would demand his complete attention. Until then, until the very last minute, he intended to give his complete attention to Jocelyn.
And so, although he duly read the papers and listened to the newscasts, nothing that he heard weighed very heavily upon him. Speeches, whether by Theodore or Rhodine or the President, did not much affect him. The periodic reports of riots and shootings and confrontations and demonstrations came to his attention but did not hold it long. He knew what was likely to happen and was neither surprised nor gratified when such things came to pass.
One day he saw a patch of overhead sky darken at the passage of a huge flock of small birds. Migrants from Canada bound for a winter in Argentina. The local birds had not yet begun gathering themselves for flight. But soon, he thought. Too soon.
There was a night when their lovemaking reached an almost painful peak. His climax fooled him — he truly thought himself to be dying, not petite mort but grande mort. Afterward he lay listening to his heart and considering the perfection of such a death.
But then he saw the tableau from without, not merely the pure personal pleasure of so dying but the horror of it for her, to emerge from the languor of love and discover that one held a dead man in one’s arms. The image jolted him, and brought with it the unwelcome realization that he had postponed their parting too long. This sweet death was an indulgence of self. She had to go on living, and the longer they were thus together the more difficult her situation would be.
He felt tears behind his eyes, and breathed deeply, and willed them away.
Then she said, “Miles? The fall term started last week. I didn’t enroll.”
“I thought you were going to.”
“I was. I went through all the shit of getting reaccepted, and then I just couldn’t hack the whole business. I figured I would just drop out again sooner or later and I couldn’t do that to everybody, go back just to drop out again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you spoken to your parents?”
“They want me to come home. But that’s out. No way.” She ran a hand down his chest, gripped him gently for a moment. “Some of the kids are talking about this commune in North Carolina. Up in the hills around Asheville.”
“And you were thinking of going?”
“I was thinking you might like to go for a couple of weeks. It’s supposed to be an interesting life-style. They grow their own food and make all their own belongings. The idea is to become as self-sufficient as possible and to live naturally, without doing badness to the ecology. Recycling wastes and living in balance with nature. That trip.”