The Lesson of Her Death

  Philip's mother was on the floor, on all fours, her knees spread out, skirt up to her trim waist. The eyes in her pretty face were nearly closed and her head lolled as the muscles in her smooth arms tried to keep her shoulders from dropping to the ground. Mr. Halpern stood above her, his hands gripping the stained orange blouse, saying desperately, "It'll be all right, it'll be all right. No, no, it'll be all right."

  And she was repeating louder and in a shrill soprano, "Lemmealone, lemmealone!" In her hand was a white wad of cloth. On the stained carpet was a fresher stain of vomit. The smell of sour gin was thick in the air. Philip started to cry.

  "Mrs. Halpern," Jano whispered.

  Philip's father looked up. "Get the fuck out of here, both of you."

  Jano said, "But she's sick."

  Whimpering, Philip said, "She's not sick."

  "Get the fuck out!" his father shouted. "Both of you. Out out out!" He stamped his foot as if he were spooking dogs.

  Philip said to Jano, "Please."

  "But--"

  "Please," Philip said. His friend fled outside. Staring out the front window Philip heard the scuffling of his mother's shoes. His father had lifted her into an armchair and was whispering to her. Philip walked past his parents and out the back door then he slipped under the porch.

  Philip hid the bag containing the purse under a mound of soft black dirt. He rocked back and forth in the crisp dusty leaves.

  Oh, he was tired.

  He was tired of so much. His father wore torn T-shirts and made the handy man visit. His mother packed him greasy sandwiches for lunch--when she made his lunch--and forgot to wash his clothes. There were enemies everywhere, everywhere you looked. His sister was a 'ho, he was fat. She was Halpern, he was Philip, Phil-lip. He got a D in phys ed and a B in biology and, while another glass shattered somewhere in the house above him, a single thought centered in his head--an image of a shy young girl leaning on a lab table and telling him how brave he was while Philip stuck a needle way deep into a frog's brain then slit its belly open and watched the slick lump of a heart continue to beat on and on and on.

  Bill Corde was sitting in infamous Room 121 of the Student Union. He was alone, surrounded by the now familiar scents of fatty meat, bitter paper and burnt coffee.

  More students, more three-by-five cards. Today's questions were similar to last week's but they were not identical.

  Today he was asking about two victims.

  Corde took notes, jotting down the boxy oriental letters, but the hours were unproductive; he heard variations on what he had already learned or pointless, obscure details. "Emily wore this yoked dress a lot then one day it got stolen from the laundry room. That was just before she was killed. I mean, like the day before." Corde nodded and recorded this fact, unsure what it might mean or what he would ever do with it but afraid to let the item get away. He had this feeling often.

  Many thoughts intruded on the interviews, not the least of which was a vague disquiet about Charlie Mahoney, the mysterious consultant. Ribbon had introduced them but the man had said little to Corde and been in a hurry to leave the office. Corde had not seen him since.

  When Corde asked Ribbon what "real helpful insights" Mahoney had provided, picking up the sheriff's phrase from the Register, he'd been as elusive as Corde expected. "Mahoney's here as an observer is all. What I said was mostly for public relations. Trying to calm people down a little."

  Well, who the hell got 'em un-calm in the first place, with all this talk of a Moon Killer?

  "I don't want a civilian working on this case," Corde said.

  "I know you don't," Ribbon had answered cryptically and returned to his office.

  Now, in Room 121, Corde looked at his watch. Four P.M. He wandered out to the cafeteria and bought an iced coffee. He finished it in three swallows. He was eager to go home. He nearly did so but his resolve broke--or discipline won--and he stepped to the door and waved a final student inside then told the others to come back tomorrow.

  It was just as well that he did not leave. This last student was the one who told him Jennie Gebben's secret.

  She was round and had thick wrists and was worried about a double chin because she kept her head high throughout the interview. With that posture and the expensive flowered dress she seemed like an indulged East Coast princess.

  The lazy Southern drawl disposed of that impression quickly. "I do hope I can help you, officer. It's a terrible thing that happened."

  Did she know either of the murdered girls? Just Jennie. How long had she known her? Two years. Yes, they shared some classes. No, they had never double-dated.

  "Do you know either Professor Sayles or Brian Okun?"

  "Sorry."

  "Do you know who Jennie might have been going out with?"

  The fleshy neck was touched.

  It reminded him compellingly of Jennie's throat. Corde looked from the white flesh back to the paler white of his three-by-five cards.

  "Well, would you be speaking of men she went out with?"

  "Students, professors, anyone."

  "... or girls?"

  The tip of Corde's pen lowered to a card.

  "Please go on."

  The girl played tensely with the elaborate lace tulle on the cuff of her dress. "Well, you know 'bout Jennie's affair with that girl, don'tcha?"

  After a pause he wrote "Bisexual?" in precise boxy letters and asked her to continue.

  The girl touched her round pink lip with her tongue and made a circuit of Corde's face. "Just rumors. Y'all know how it is." The plump mouth closed.

  "Please."

  Finally she said, "One time, the story goes, some girls were in a dorm across campus and saw Jennie in bed with another girl."

  The flesh was no longer pale but glowed with fire.

  "Who was this other girl?"

  "I was led to believe their ... position in bed made it a little difficult to see her. If you understand what I'm saying."

  "Who were these girls who saw it?"

  "I don't know. I assumed you knew all about this." The frown produced not a single wrinkle in her perfect skin. "You know of course about the fight she had?"

  "Tell me."

  "The Sunday before she died. Jennie was on the phone for a long time. It was late and she was whispering a lot but I got the impression she was talking to somebody she'd dumped. You know that tone? Like where you have to get meaner than you want to because they're not taking no for an answer. They all were carrying on and my room is right near the phone and I was going to go out and tell her to hush when I heard her say, 'Well, I love her and I don't love you and that's all there is to it.' Then crash bang she hung up."

  "Loved 'her'?"

  "Right. I'm sure about that."

  "The call, did she make it or receive it?"

  "She received it."

  No way to trace. "Man or woman?"

  "She sounded like she was talking to a man but maybe I'm projecting my own values. With her, I guess it could've been either. That's all I know."

  "Nobody else has said anything about it."

  She shrugged. "Well, did y'all ask?"

  "No."

  "Then that pretty much explains it, would'n you say?"

  When she had gone Corde bundled his cards together and tossed them into his briefcase. He noticed that the phone booth up the hall was free and he walked quickly to it. As he stood waiting for someone to answer his call, two young men walked past lost in loud debate. "You're not listening to me. I'm saying there's perception and there's reality. They're both valid. I'll prove it to you. Like, see that cop over there? ..." But at that moment T.T. Ebbans said hello and Corde never heard the end of the discussion.

  He lusted for her.

  What a phenomenon! He was actually salivating, his nostrils flaring as if he could smell her and he wanted more than anything to pull open her white blouse and slip a high-rider breast into his mouth.

  Brian Okun said to Victoria Feinstein, "I'm thinking of do
ing a seminar on gender identity in the Romantic era. Would you be interested in being on the panel?"

  "Interesting idea," she said, and crossed legs encased in tight black jeans.

  They were sitting in the Arts and Sciences cafeteria, coffee before them. Victoria was Okun's most brilliant student. She had stormed onto campus from Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. He had read her first paper of the semester, "Gynocriticism and the Old New Left," and bolstered by her self-rising breasts and hard buttocks decided she was everything that Jennie Gebben was and considerably more.

  Alas this proved too literally true however and he found with bitterness that certain aspects of her knowledge--semiotics, for instance, and South American writers (currently chic topics in the MLA)--vastly outweighed his, a discrepancy she gleefully flaunted. Okun's hampered hope vaporized one day when he saw Victoria Feinstein kiss a woman on the lips outside his classroom. Still Okun admired her immensely and spoke to her often.

  It troubled him to use such a brilliant mind in this cheap way.

  She said, "Why Romantic? Why not Classic?"

  "Been done," he dismissed.

  "Maybe," she pondered, "you could do it interstitially--the Augustan era interposed against the Romantic. You know Latin, don't you?"

  "I do, mirabile dictu. But I've already outlined the program. I hope you'll think about it. I'd like the panel to be straight, gay, transvestite and transsexual."

  Victoria said, "Ah, you want a cross-section?"

  He laughed hard. Why oh why don't you want to sit on my cock and scrunch around?

  She was courteous enough to ask the question before he had to steer her there. "Is this for Gilchrist's class?"

  "Leon's? No, it's my own idea. He's out in San Francisco. Won't be back for a couple days." Gilchrist had in fact called Okun the night before to tell him that he would be arriving in three days and had ordered Okun to prepare a draft of a final exam. Okun noted that the son of a bitch called at exactly the moment a substitute professor was delivering Gilchrist's lecture; he wanted to make certain that Okun hadn't been standing before his class.

  "What's he doing out there?" she asked.

  "Healing the wounds, I guess."

  "How's that?" she asked.

  "You know. The girl."

  "The girl?"

  He looked confused. "You told me, didn't you?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "What was her name? The first one who was killed. Jennie something. I thought you told me. About the two of them?"

  She asked in astonishment, "Gilchrist and Jennie Gebben, they were fucking?"

  "It wasn't you who told me?"

  "No."

  "Who was it?" He looked at the ceiling. "Don't recall. Well, anyway, I heard they were a unit."

  "Poor girl," Victoria said, frowning. "Gilchrist, huh? I wouldn't have guessed Jennie and him. I heard he was an S and M pup."

  Okun nodded knowingly, quelling resentment that this was the second person who seemed to know for a fact something about his own professor that he had not been aware of.

  She continued, "I'm surprised at the leather. My opinion was that Gilchrist would be more of your classic postwar British pederast. You know, I think they should castrate rapists."

  Okun thought for a moment. "That might make another seminar. 'Mutilation and Castration as Metaphor in Western Literature.'"

  Victoria's eyes brightened. "Now there's an idea for you."

  She wasn't sure what the vibration was. Alignment maybe. Or a soft tire.

  Driving home from Auden University, Diane Corde noticed that the steering wheel seemed to shake; her engagement ring bobbled noisily on tan G.M. plastic. Then she realized the station wagon was fine; it was her hand that shook so fiercely--the first time in her life that a reference to money had made her fingers tremble.

  Diane was returning from a meeting with the admissions director at the Auden lab school. The woman, who looked sharp and professional (no sultry pink, no clattering bracelets, no hussy makeup), had explained the procedures. Sarah's file, which Dr. Parker had already forwarded to the school, would be reviewed by the school's special education admissions board. They would make a recommendation about placing Sarah in one of the classes or arranging for private tutoring.

  "I'm sure," the woman said, "your daughter will be accepted."

  Diane was grateful to tears at this news.

  Then the director had consulted a sheet of paper. "Let's see.... Tuition for a special education class at Sarah's level is eight thousand four hundred. Now we--"

  "A year?" Diane had interrupted breathlessly.

  The woman had smiled. "Oh, don't worry. That's not per semester. That's for the entire year."

  Oh don't worry.

  Eight thousand four hundred.

  Which exceeded Diane's annual salary when she'd been receptionist for Dr. Bullen the oldest living gynecologist in New Lebanon. "Does insurance ever cover it?"

  "Medical insurance? No."

  "That's a little steep."

  "Auden's lab school is one of the best in the country."

  "We just bought a new Frigidaire."

  "Well."

  Diane broke the silence. "Dr. Parker mentioned a private tutor is an option. Three times a week, she said. How much would that be?"

  The woman had cheerfully parried that the total fee for a tutor would be two hundred seventy dollars a week.

  Oh don't worry.

  Diane had smoothed her navy blue skirt and studied a cleft of wrinkle in the cloth. She felt totally numb; maybe bad news was an anesthetic.

  "So you see," the admissions director had said, smiling, "the school is in fact the better bargain."

  Well, Diane Corde didn't see that at all. Bargain? What she saw was everybody taking advantage of her little girl's problem--all of them, Dr. Parker the harlot and this pert L.A. Law admissions director and the prissy tutors who weren't going to do anything but get Sarah's brain back up to the level where God intended it to be all along.

  "Well, I'll have to talk to my husband about it."

  "Just let me say, Mrs. Corde, that I think we can be of real help to your daughter. Sarah has the sort of deficit that responds very well to our method of education."

  Well, now, miss, hearing that makes me feel just jim-dandy.

  "Shall I start Sarah's application? There's no fee to apply."

  Oh, a freebie!

  "Why not?" she had asked, wholly discouraged.

  Pulling now into the driveway of her house Diane waved to Tom, standing scrubbed and ruddy beside his Harrison County Sheriff's Department cruiser. After the two threatening Polaroids and the second murder, he had taken to marching a regular line around the backyard at various times throughout the day. He was also armed with his wife's opera glasses, which, he explained, she bought for when they went to Plymouth Playhouse Dinner Theater. With these he'd often scan the forest for hostile eyes. He looked silly, a beefy red-cheeked young man holding the delicate plastic mother-of-pearl glasses, but Diane was grateful for the effort. There had been no more threats and the sense of violation had almost vanished.

  "Coffee, Tom?"

  He declined, gosh-thanks, and turned back to the woods.

  Jamie walked outside, slipping a T-shirt on over his thin muscular body. He was the epitome of grace and she enjoyed watching him climb on his bike and balance while he pulled on his fingerless riding gloves.

  "Where're you off to?"

  "Practice."

  "When's the match?"

  "Saturday."

  "How's your arm?"

  "It's like fine. No problem."

  "Garage looks nice."

  "Thanks. I did the windows. They were totally gross."

  "You did the windows?" she asked in mock astonishment.

  "Very funny. And I found the old Frisbee."

  "We'll play tonight, you and me."

  "Yeah okay. We oughta get a glow-in-the-dark one. Gotta go." He pushed the bike forward
without using his hands and coasted down the driveway as he closed the Velcro fasteners on his gloves. She watched him lean forward and his muscular legs start to pedal. He's going to be a heartbreaker.

  Inside the house Sarah was playing with a stuffed animal. After Diane had delivered the news that school was over for the year, the girl glowed with Christmas-morning happiness. This bothered Diane, who saw in the girl's face the look of a spoiled child who finally got her way.

  "The Sunshine Man ... He came back."

  "Did he now?" Diane asked absently.

  "He saved me from Mrs. Beiderbug."

  "Sarah. I've told you about that."

  "Mrs. Beiderson." She sprang up and ran into the kitchen.

  Diane hung up her jacket. "Who's the Sunshine Man again? Which one's he?"

  "Mommy." She was exasperated. "He's a wizard who lives in the woods. I saw him again today. I thought he'd gone away but he came back. He cast a spell on Mrs. Beider--" She grinned with coy nastiness. "--Beiderson. And I don't have to go back to school."

  "Just for the term. Not forever."

  Although the girl's insistence that magical characters were real frequently irritated Diane, at the moment she wished that she herself had a Sunshine Man to watch over her shoulder. Or at least to cast a spell and cough up some big bucks for special ed tuition. As she looked through the mail she asked, "Your father call?"

  "Naw."

  Diane went into the kitchen and took four large pork chops from the refrigerator. She chopped mushrooms and sauteed them with oregano and bread crumbs then let the filling cool while she cut pockets in the pork.

  "You sure your father didn't call? Maybe Jamie took a message."

  "Mom. Like there's the board. Do you see any messages?"

  "You can answer me decently," Diane snapped.

  "Well, he didn't call."

  Diane carefully cut a slit in the last pork chop.

  "I'm not going back to school ever again," Sarah announced.

  "Sarah, I told you, it's just for--"

  The girl walked upstairs, singing cheerfully to herself, "Never ever again ... The Sunshine Man, the Sunshine Man ..."

  Children. Sometimes ...

  The young woman said, "I believe it was Leon Gilchrist."

  Cynthia Abrams was a thin sophomore, smart and reasonable and unpretentious. Corde liked her. She had long shimmering dark hair, confident eyes, earrings in the shape of African idols. She was a class officer and the campus director of ACT-UP. She was sitting forward, elbows on the low desk in the Student Union, holding a cigarette courteously away from him while she answered his questions.