He replaced the lid. He hid the jar in the drawer of his filing cabinet where he kept his old reviews. He did some research. Hydrocyanic, or prussic, acid was miscible with water, and a minute amount—a few drops of even a mild solution—would slow the heart, inhibit breathing, dilate the pupils, promote violent convulsive movements, cause loss of consciousness, and asphyxiate the victim with a complete loss of muscular power. Cyanides act within seconds, halting tissue oxidation and suspending vital functions. The victim’s countenance turns a bluish color, not to be confused with Prussian blue, an inert precipitant of the poison.
Bech wrote Deborah Frueh a fan letter, in a slow and childish hand, in black ballpoint, on blue-lined paper. “Dear Debora Freuh,” he wrote, deliberately misspelling, “You are my very favrite writer. I have red your books over ‘n’ over. I would be greatful if you could find time to sign the two enclosed cards for me and my best frend Betsey and return them in the inclosed envelop. That would be really grate of you and many many thanx in advance.” He signed it, “Your real fan, Mary Jane Mason.”
He wrote it once and then rewrote it, holding the pen in what felt like a little girl’s fist. Then he set the letter aside and worked carefully on the envelope. He had bought a cheap box of one hundred at an office-supply store on lower Broadway and destroyed a number before he got the alchemy right. He put on the rubber gloves. They made his hands sweat. With a paper towel he delicately moistened the dried gum on the envelope flap—not too much, or it curled. Then, gingerly using a glass martini-stirring rod, he placed three or four drops of the colorless poison on the moist adhesive. Lest it be betrayingly bitter when licked, and Deborah Frueh rush to ingest an antidote, he sweetened the doctored spots with some sugar water mixed in an orange-juice glass and applied with an eye-dropper. Several times he stopped himself from absent-mindedly licking the flap to test the taste. He recoiled, it was as if he had been walking the edge of a cliff and nearly slipped and fell off, down toward the Prussian-blue sea of asphyxia and oblivion. In the midst of life, death is a misstep away.
The afternoon waned; the roar of tunnel-bound traffic up on Houston reached its crescendo unnoticed; the windows of the cast-iron façade across Crosby Street entertained unseen the blazing amber of the lowering sun. Bech was wheezily panting in the intensity of his concentration. His nose was running; he kept wiping it with a trembling handkerchief. His littered desk—an old army-surplus behemoth, with green metal sides and a black plastic top—reminded him of art-class projects at P.S. 87, before his father heedlessly moved him to Brooklyn. He and his peers had built tiny metropolises out of cereal boxes, butterflies out of colored papers and white paste, scissored into being red valentines and black profiles of George Washington, even made paper Easter eggs and Christmas trees, under their young and starchy Irish and German instructresses, who without fear of protest swept their little Jewish-American pupils into the Christian calendar. Back then, the magazine covers on the newsstand rack, the carols on the radio, the decorations on the school windowpanes all bespoke one culture, stuck in the Depression and the tired legend of that goyish young Jew who had made his way from Bethlehem to Golgotha, a life-journey children still celebrated with paper, cardboard, and paste.
Bech thought hard about the return address on the envelope, which could become, once its fatal bait was taken, a dangerous clue. The poison, before hitting home, might give Deborah Frueh time to seal the thing, which in the confusion after her death might be mailed. That would be perfect—the clue consigned to a continental mailbag and arrived with the junk mail at an indifferent American household. In the Westchester directory he found a Mason in New Rochelle and fistily inscribed the address beneath the name of his phantom Frueh fan. Folding the envelope, he imagined he heard a faint crackling—microscopic sugar and cyanide crystals? His conscience, dried up by this century of atrocity and atheism, trying to come to life? He slipped the folded envelope with the letter and four (why not be generous?) three-by-five index cards into the envelope painstakingly addressed in the immature, girlish handwriting. As he licked the stamp he thought of the Simpson trial and the insidious intricacy of DNA evidence. Semen, blood, saliva—all contain the entire person, coiled in ribbons of microscopic code. Everywhere we dabble or dribble or spit, we can be traced. Bech stuck the tongue-licked stamp thriftily on a blank envelope and moistened the one for Frueh on a corner of paper towel held under a running faucet, then squeezed.
The tall old wobbly windows across Crosby Street cast a sketchy orange web of reflected light into his loft. Before Robin could return from work and express curiosity about the mess on his desk, he cleaned it up. The paper towels and spoiled stationery went into the kitchen trash, and the lethal jar into the back of the cabinet drawer with the old reviews, which only he cared about—only he and a tiny band of Bech scholars, who were dying off and not being replaced by younger recruits. Even the caretaker of his archives at NYU had expressed a lack of interest in his yellowing lowing clippings—which included such lovingly snipped tidbits as Bech sentences cited in the Reader’s Digest feature “Picturesque Speech and Patter”—claiming that old newsprint posed “a terrible conservancy problem.”
Bech took off the rubber gloves and hurried downstairs, his worn heart pounding, to throw Mary Jane Mason’s fan letter into the mailbox at Broadway and Prince. A lurid salmon-striped sunset hung in the direction of New Jersey. The streets were crammed with the living and the guiltless, heading home in the day’s horizontal rays, blinking from the subway’s flicker and a long day spent at computer terminals. The narrow streets and low commercial buildings imparted the busy intimacy of a stage set, half lit as the curtain goes up. Bech hesitated a second before relinquishing his letter to the blue, graffiti-sprayed box, there in front of Victoria’s Secret. A delicate middle-aged Japanese couple in bulbous sightseer’s sneakers glanced at him timidly, a piece of local color with his springy white hair, his aggressively large nose, his deskworker’s humped back. A snappy black woman, her beaded cornrows bristling and rattling, arrived at his back with an armful of metered nine-by-twelve envelopes, impatient to make her more massive, less lethal drop. Bech stifled his qualm. The governmental box hollowly sounded as its lid like a flat broad tongue closed upon the fathomless innards of sorting and delivery to which he consigned his missive. His life had been spent as a votary of the mails. This was but one more submission.
Morning after morning, the Times carried no word on the demise of Deborah Frueh. Perhaps, just as she wasn’t in Who’s Who, she was too small a fish to be caught in the Times obituary net. But no, they observed at respectful length the deaths of hundreds of people of whom Bech had never heard. Former aldermen, upstate prioresses, New Jersey judges, straight men on defunct TV comedies, founders of Manhattan dog-walking services—all got their space, their chiselled paragraphs, their farewell salute. Noticing the avidity with which he always turned to the back of the Metro section, Robin asked him, “What are you looking for?”
He couldn’t tell her. His necessary reticence was poisoning their relationship. We are each of us sealed containers of gaseous fantasies and hostilities, but a factual secret, with its liquid weight, leaks out, if only in the care with which one speaks, as if around a pebble held in the mouth. “Familiar names,” he said. “People I once knew.”
“Henry, it seems morbid. Here, I’m done with Arts and Sports.”
“I’ve read enough about arts and sports,” he told this bossy twat, “to last me to the grave.” Mortality was his meat now.
He went to the public library, the Hamilton Fish Park branch over on East Houston, and in the children’s section found one of Deborah Frueh’s books, Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday, and checked it out. He read it and wrote her another letter, this time in blue ballpoint, on unlined stationery with a little Peter Max-ish elf-figure up in one corner, the kind a very young girl might be given for her birthday by an aunt or uncle. “Dear Deborah Frueh,” he wrote, “I love your exciting work. I love the way at the e
nd of ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday’ Jennifer realizes that she has had a pretty good day after all and that in life you can’t depend on anybody else to entertain you, you have to entertain and preoccupy your own mind. At the local library I have ‘The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home’ on reserve. I hope it isn’t too sad. I liked the positive ending to ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday.’ ‘A Teddy Bear’s Bequest’ they never heard of at the library. I know you are a busy woman and must be working on more books but I hope you could send me a photograph of you for the wall of my room or if your too busy to do that please sign this zerox of the one on the cover of ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday.’ I like the way you do your hair, it’s like my Aunt Florence, up behind. Find enclosed a stamped envelope to send it in. Yours most hopefully, Judith Green.”
Miss Green in Bech’s mind was a year or so older than Mary Jane Mason. She misspelled hardly at all, and had self-consciously converted her grammar-school handwriting to a stylish printing, which Bech slaved at for several hours before attaining the proper girlish plumpness in the “o”s and “m”s. He tried dotting the “i”s with little circles and ultimately discarded the device as unpersuasive. He did venture, however, a little happy-face, with smile and hair ribbon. He intensified the dose of hydrocyanic acid on the envelope flap, and eased off on the sugar water. When Deborah Frueh took her lick—he pictured it as avid and thorough, not one but several swoops of her vicious, pointed tongue—the bitterness would register too late. The covenanted bitch would never know what hit her.
The postmark was a problem. Mary Jane up there in New Rochelle might well have had a father who, setting off in the morning with a full briefcase, would mail her letter for her in New York, but two in a row from Manhattan and Frueh might smell a rat, especially if she had responded to the last request and was still feeling queasy. Bech took the ferry from the World Financial Center to Hoboken, treating himself to a river ride. He looked up Greens in a telephone booth near the terminal. He picked one on Willow Street to be little Judy’s family. Hoboken made him nostalgic for the Depression. In this densely built port from the past, lacy with iron balustrades, he went into an old-fashioned greasy spoon on Washington Street; there were wooden booths and stools at a counter and the selections and prices up in movable white letters on a grooved blackboard. He sat in a booth. He needed a table to write the return address on. In case he spoiled one envelope he had brought a spare, with a pastel elf in the lower left corner. But the address went well, it seemed to him. For a flourish he added a smiley face underneath the zip code.
Art excited his appetite. He ordered liver and onions from the lunch menu, a dish he hadn’t had for years. The fried slab of gut came framed in oblong bubbles of blood-tinged grease. He ate it all, burped, and tasted the onions again. He deposited his letter in a small box on a concrete post—he hadn’t known boxes like that still existed—and took the ferry back to lower Manhattan. His nerves hummed. His eyes narrowed against the river glare. The other passengers, too, felt the excitement of waterborne transition; they chattered in Spanish, in Chinese, in ebonies. What did Whitman write of such crossings? Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! And, later on, speaking so urgently from the grave, Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d / Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried. That “yet was hurried” was brilliant, with all of Whitman’s brilliant homeliness. Soon, Bech reflected, he too would be dead, looking up through the flowing water to the generations as yet unborn, his bloodless visage sadder than Whitman’s, because for all his striving and squirming he had—according to Lucas Mishner, himself recently enrolled in the underworld’s eddying throng—never been touched by the American sublime.
The fuck he hadn’t. Bech’s hurried heart hummed all the way up Church Street to Warren, then over to City Hall and on up Broadway and home. I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island …/I am he who knew what it was to be evil, / I too knotted the old knot of contrariety, / Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d …
A week went by. Ten days. The death he desired was not reported in the Times. He wondered if a boy fan might win a better response, a more enthusiastic, heterosexual licking of the return envelope. “Dear Deborah Freuh,” he typed, using the clunky Script face available on his IBM PS/1:
You are a great writer, the greatest as far as I am concerned in the world. Your book titled “The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home” broke me up, it was so sad and true. The way little Katrina comforts her baby brother Sam and realizes that they all will have to be Dad for each other now is so true it hurts. I have had a similar experience. I bet thousands of your readers have. I don’t want to waste any more of your time reading this so you can get back to writing another super book but it would be sensational if you would sign the enclosed first-day cover for Sarah One Jewett, the greatest female American writer until you came along. Even if you have a policy against singing I’d appreciate your riturning it in the enclosed self-addressed stamped envelope since I am a collector and spent a week’s allowance for it at the hobby shop here in Amityville, Long Island, NY. Sign it on the pencil line I have drawn. I will erase the line when you have signed. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours very sincerely,
Jason Johnson, Jr.
Boys did seem a bit more adventurous and thrusting in their thinking than girls, Bech discovered through this act of ventriloquism. Maybe he should cut down on Jason’s verbal braggadocio. The word processor, its frictionless patter, encouraged, as academics had been complaining for years, prolixity. But Featherwaite had pronounced Bech prolix when he was still using a manual, a Smith-Corona portable. He decided to let the boy have his say.
It was a pleasant change, in the too-even tenor of Bech’s days, to ride the Long Island Rail Road out to Amityville and mail Jason Johnson’s letter. Just to visit Penn Station again offered a fresh perspective—that Roman grandeur from Bech’s youth, that onetime temple to commuting Fortuna, reduced to these ignoble ceilings and beggarly passageways. And then, after the elevated views of tar-roofed Queens, the touching suburban stations, like so many knobbed Victorian toys, with their carefully pointed stonework and gleaming rows of parked cars and stretches of suburban park. Each stop represented happiness for thousands, and reminded him of his own suburban days in Ossining, married to Bea, stepfather to female twins and a small boy. He had felt uneasy, those years, a Jew with three acres and a dog and a car, as though occupying someone else’s dream; but wasn’t America after all the place to live in a dream, a dream determined not by your own subconscious but the collective unconscious of millions? He had not been unhappy, until the bubble was pricked and New York’s leaden gravity sucked him back. In Amityville, he found a suitable Johnson—on Maple Drive—and mailed Jason’s letter and had a lettuce-and-cucumber sandwich at a salad bar full of suburban women and their fidgety little sprouts. Then he headed back to town, each station more thickly surrounded by shabbier, more commercial constructions and the track bed becoming elevated and then, with a black roar, buried, underground, underriver, under-city, until the train stopped at Penn Station again and the passengers spilled out into a gaudy, perilous mess of con-sumeristic blandishments, deranged beggars, and furtive personal errands.
Four days later, there it was, in eight inches of Times type: the death of Deborah Frueh. Respected educator was also a noted critic and author of children’s books. Had earlier published scholarly articles on the English Metaphysicals and Swinburne and his circle. Taken suddenly ill while at her desk in her home in Hunts Point, near Seattle. Born in Conshohocken, near Philadelphia. Attended Barnard College and Duke University graduate school. Exact cause of death yet to be determined. Had been in troubled health lately—her weight a stubborn problem—colleagues at the University of Washington reported. But not despondent in any obvious way. Survived by a sister, Edith, of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and a brother, Leonard, of Teaneck, New Je
rsey. Another ho-hum exit notice, for every reader but Henry Bech. He knew what a deadly venom the deceased had harbored in her fangs.