Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

Mark was right, there was someone in there with her. I could hear them talking. My mother-in-law was saying something in that flat moralistic tone of hers about ‘sucking the mother’s finger.’ A euphemism, I supposed, leaning toward the door: I hadn’t heard her speak like that before. ‘So he was married, then,’ the man said, his voice muffled, ‘and raped a woman who was as well as dead.’

‘Yes. And then he left her and forgot her, as you might expect. Though later, he went back and prolonged his illicit amours, it being his dissolute nature.’

‘I see. So it’s not true about the mother-in-law, the accusations, I mean, that she murdered — or at least tried—’

‘How could it be? It’s impossible when you think about it. No, it was his wife, who, with good reason, put in execution those so-called horrible desires …’

‘That’s a very serious accusation, m’um. Yet my own experience tells me it must be so. Funny how, with repetition, it gets all turned around.’

‘What are we waiting outside for, Daddy?’

‘Sshh! Don’t bother Grandma!’ I whispered and eased the door on open.

I was sure they’d heard us, but if so, they gave no indication. She was in her rocking chair and the man was on the floor at her feet, his head in her lap. ‘You’ve been so much help to me,’ he said. It was Inspector Pardew. She seemed to be stroking his temples. ‘I’d always thought of that story as a parable on time — the hundred years compressed to a dream, the bastard birth of chronology, then our irrational fear of losing it. The destruction of dawn and all our days, our sun, our moon, seemed so horrible that only something beyond our imagination, like a demon or an ogre, could be responsible. But, of course, all it takes is a jealous wife …’

‘Yes, but one mustn’t forget the prior crime, the one that set the rest in motion—’

‘Daddy? There’s something hard inside Peedie.’

‘Yes, all right …’

‘Why are we whispering?’

The Inspector looked up. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said irritably, and put his head back down in her lap. He was wearing his scarf again, clasping the ends with one hand. I pushed the door shut behind us. ‘You were saying, m’um, the original—?’

‘You know, the party, the disgruntled guest, the curse. The stabbing …’

‘Ah yes — but was it really a crime? Or only a sort of prior condition?’

‘Get it out , Daddy!’

‘All right, all right.’ I laid him in his bed and drew a loose sheet up over him (he kicked it off), took up the stuffed bunny. I knew, even before I’d pushed my finger in the hole and touched it, what it was. ‘It makes him stronger, Mark, like a backbone — you sure you don’t want to leave it in there—?’

‘I want it out! It hurts him!’ The Inspector sighed impatiently and closed his eyes. Mark was tired and on edge from all the excitement — the least thing and he could break into one of his tantrums. I reached in with two fingers, clamping the handle, pushing down on the point from the outside.

‘Perhaps, like you say, I’ve been struggling with this problem too long,’ Pardew brooded. ‘I feel as I circle around it, groping, scrutinizing, probing, that something is trying to be born here — but that, unfortunately, it might already be dead.’ My mother-in-law flinched at this. ‘I’m sorry, did I—?’

‘No … a memory …’

The end of the handle was protruding now: I drew it out, remembering something my wife had said, shortly after she came home from the hospital: ‘It’s not the loss, Gerald, there are others waiting to be born, but rather …’

‘Daddy, I’m afraid of the dark.’

I stooped to kiss him and tuck him in. ‘Rather,’ my wife had said, ‘it’s the way it hated me at the end, I knew everything it was thinking, the terrible bitterness and rage it felt, it would have killed me if it could — and what was worse, I agreed with it …’ ‘Well, it’s not dark now.’

‘When I go to sleep, it gets dark.’

‘I only meant that truth, when it is no longer pertinent, is not in the same sense truth any longer, do you follow, m’um? I may solve the crime, you see, only to discover that its very definition has moved on to another plane.’ The Inspector seemed not to want to be interrupted, so I set the ice pick on the emptied shelves near him, where he could find it later. My mother-in-law frowned at it, glanced sharply up at me. I shrugged. ‘It’s as if that prince of yours were to hack his way through his thicket of briars and brambles, only to arouse a creature suffering from a fatal disease, as it were, or one who’s lost her wits.’

‘Or perhaps to find a host of competing Beauties,’ she suggested, turning back to the Inspector, her face dark with consternation, ‘each seemingly fairer than the rest, and then what’s he to do? Awaken only one and condemn the rest to death in life? No, yet if he should kiss them all, their multitudinous awakenings would reduce his own life to chaos and madness …’

‘Yes! Strange! I–I was just thinking the same …!’

‘I know,’ she sighed and stroked his head.

‘It all goes round and round,’ the Inspector said, his voice quavering slightly. ‘Sometimes I … I don’t know where I am!’

‘Yes, yes … it’s all right …’

I turned to leave, but I heard a lot of people outside the door — Wilma, Patrick, Vachel, Kitty, Cyril perhaps (‘Fiona—?’ someone asked), Teresa, others — and I didn’t feel up to facing them. Anyway, Mark was settling down at last, his eyelids fluttering, it seemed best not to let anything or anyone disturb that.

‘May I … may I tell you a story, m’um? It’s been bothering me and I—’

‘Certainly.’ My mother-in-law had stacked some dirty plates and glasses on the chest of drawers near the door — I found half a warm old-fashioned and something else with ice and mixed them.

‘Well, many years ago, you see, when I was just getting started in the force, I was called in to assist on a strange case that had utterly baffled the shrewdest and most experienced minds in our division. A famous historian — his field was actually prehistory, I believe: would that have made him a prehistorian? no, it doesn’t sound right — at any rate, this historian was found in his library one morning, bound hand and foot, and strangled to death with a garrote believed to have been of ancient Iberian origin. At first it had seemed a case of simple robbery — several gold and silver artifacts were reported missing, the windows had been jimmied, there were footprints in the garden — but in fact it had seemed too simple, too self-referential , if you take my meaning. A careful examination of the impression made in the window frame by the jimmy revealed it to have been an exotic Iron Age relic, and that plus the murder weapon itself pointed to someone familiar with the victim’s scholarly field. This suspicion was soon confirmed by a laboratory analysis of certain fibers the dead man was clutching in one closed fist and a lone fingerprint on the garrote itself, which turned out in both cases to belong to the historian’s young assistant, a man known for his adventurism and unbridled ambition. But before the arrest could be made, the suspect died suddenly of a rare subtropical disease. Poetic justice, one might say. Some of the missing artifacts were found in the young man’s quarters and — even more damning — the exotic jimmy. The case seemed closed — until a meticulous autopsy revealed, about three inches inside the young man’s rectum, the remains of a suppository containing traces of a deadly bacterial toxin. Intimacy with his assailant was assumed, needless to say, leading the Inspector on the case to suspect the historian’s daughter, who, according to the family butler, had once been ravished by the young man and had subsequently become, though engaged to another man, his slave and paramour — I quote the butler, of course, m’um, who, as a native of the Andes, spoke with a certain quaint frankness. It is true, other suppositories of a more innocent nature were found in the man’s medicine cabinet, such that theoretically the murder weapon could have been, as it were, self-administered, but there were other reasons that the daughter fell under the strong shadow of suspicion, not only for his murder, but for her father’s as well. With the young assistant out of the way, she was now the sole heiress to her father’s works, published and unpublished, together with all the research materials gathered by both of them. Her public rivalry with the young man was well known, as well as her violent amatory relationship, which no doubt exacerbated what hostile feelings she might have harbored, and it was also no secret that she bore no natural affection for her father, a man so hermetically enclosed in his work, he had paid her, throughout her life, scant attention. I hardly need point out to you, m’um, the dismal consequences that so often attend the negligence of one’s paternal duties. Morever, it was she who had found her father’s body, in all crimes a suspicious circumstance, and it was now remembered that she had been wearing white gloves at the time, the sort worn by museum personnel when moving valuable displays, or by technicians handling film. It was altogether possible that the butler had surprised her at the conclusion of her murderous act such that she had had to, quote, discover the body sooner than she had intended, if you follow my drift. When, finally, one of her personal hairs was found embedded in the, admittedly, minuscule remains of the suppository inside the young man’s lower anatomy, the evidence against her, as you can imagine, was irresistible. Of course, it was possible the young man might somehow have swallowed the hair, but the means of doing so, in those days anyway and in such august circles, seemed quite beyond the imagination — as perhaps it is beyond your imagination now, m’um, in spite of the depraved times in which we live. At any rate, the Inspector gathered all the suspects together in the father’s library, scene of the prior and, as it were, primal murder, and — with the appropriate dramaturgical preliminaries — announced his suspicions. The young woman looked shocked, pained — but it was real pain as it happened, for in fact she was dying, poisoned it would seem by someone in that very room, her glass of cascarilla, as we soon discovered, having been laced with deadly aconite. It was at this point that I was brought into the case, a young lieutenant with a specialization at that time in forensic anthropology. I needn’t go into the details. The butler, who had been near the scene of the crime on all three occasions and who, by virtue of his service, had left traces of himself everywhere, including, as it turned out, his telltale footprints in the garden, seemed clearly to have been the ingenious perpetrator of this baffling triple murder, motivated evidently by a desire to revenge the ruthless pillaging of his nation’s treasures by these foreign intellectuals and perhaps to create thereby the legend of a curse upon these artifacts in order to encourage their eventual return to his people — but no sooner did we seem to have the goods on him than he too was suddenly done away with, in this instance by particularly brutal means: he was savaged, m’um, by the family’s pet lynx, believed to have been crazed by a fagot of rare tropical herbs tossed into its pen. And so it went, from one suspect to another — the historian’s semi-invalid wife, the young creole maid, a former student of the historian suspected of ties with an unfriendly foreign government, an elder colleague at the historical society — each in his turn found, a suspected murderer, murdered.’ The Inspector paused in his story. Mark, snuggled up around Peedie, was asleep at last and the traffic outside the door had subsided. It was a good moment to slip away, but I really didn’t know where to go — like Mark, I was feeling lulled by all this genteel violence and hesitated to make any move that might break the spell. ‘It was my first challenge, m’um, and I was failing. I’d … I’d even begun to wonder if our efforts were, in some bizarre way … well … I mean, it was almost as if we were selecting the victims …’ His voice broke slightly.