Death of the Black-Haired Girl

42

ELSA BEZEIDENHOUT BROOKMAN TAUGHT HER advanced anthropology class until June. Her husband had contracted for a book on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and he went to Seattle to prepare for the trip. In July Ellie gave birth to another daughter, whom she and Steve named Rosalind after the witty heroine of As You Like It. Brookman came east but missed the event itself, which occurred a little earlier than expected. He was not displeased to be the parent of another daughter. They spent three weeks together before Brookman returned to his operational headquarters. After that, he came back at least once a month before suspending his field research. At the end of the year Ellie moved out of the house the Brookmans had occupied.

Ellie kept her job and, to the disapproval of many at the college, kept Brookman too. They planned to move to Boston, whence she would commute and where they were no longer a component of Amesbury’s social scene. Steve worked on his book. Over time he grew steadily more obsessed with tigers and planned more Siberian adventures, sometimes taking Ellie and the children along.

Maud’s death, and the degree to which his illusion of love for Maud had been its occasion, filled him with remorse and regret. What he suffered most acutely was the sense of his own unworthiness, of the mediocrity into which life at the college, the position and privilege of it, had led him. And Ellie demanded of him something like a promise of connubial fidelity. Not in any formula, utterance, whispered verse or knitted motto. Something worse, something that racked him with shame because it forced him to understand that he had impelled a person such as she was to ask such a thing of him, when what he owed her was nothing less than the renewal of his moral existence.

It came to be that the love and admiration he felt for Ellie, the strength he drew upon to feel like a worthwhile companion to her, were greater than any threat to what bound them together. Something like the same thing was true on Ellie’s side as well. She was in fact a proud person who knew well what love was. No one close to her had ever suspected her of not knowing that. A woman with a sure sense of what she required in a man and who put up with nothing out of mere fond regard. Enduring each other’s strengths, they survived something more formidable than serial adultery, jealousy or naive disillusionment. Survive they did, though, and made do with arctic winters, with watching the aurora and the proximity of tigers.

For a long time Brookman imagined that he had come away intact from the things he had done and the things that had happened to him at the college. Then one day — a Siberian afternoon, while the trees in the forest around him crackled like rifle shots as their branches contracted and a shadow seemed to spread across the snow to darken it from soiled gray to nearly black, Brookman found himself lost. He was on familiar ground. The cabin he shared with Ellie could not have been half a mile distant. But the lay of the land made no sense to him, and nothing clued him to direction. In the next moment he fell. The fall was so violent it felt as though he had plunged downward from a fair height, and he was breathless when his shoulder met the frozen ground. When he tried to stand, the gloom around him seemed to grow deeper than before. He heard the violent snapping of the ice-bound limbs around him but there was not the slightest rush of wind, only frozen stagnant silence encasing the sounds. He had the sense there was a cat not far away.

Brookman’s arm was stretched out on the dry dark snow and he tried to turn it, elbow down, to get a purchase on the ground. But as he labored, breathless now, to turn the arm one way, it turned the other. The more force he brought to bear, gritting his teeth, the more it rotated oppositely on the joint, leaving him in agony. He stared down at the palm of his hand, the palm he was trying to rise on. He shouted. Screamed was more like it. The dark surrounding forest served to illuminate his shame.

Shame that he would never again elude. After that day’s fall the thought of what had happened would be a scourge to him as it had not been before, and every step he took thereafter would be edged with shadow. He had discovered the place to which his own capacity for excusing himself, his self-indulgence, could not penetrate.

He did not die there in the pain and the cold as he expected but found his way to the cabin and to Ellie. Sleep failed him. His arm for weeks remained useless to him. He was, in a way, never the same again, though only he and Ellie would understand that.

When he went to the nearest doctor, at a gold mine forty kilometers away, the Russian medic there manipulated his elbow joint with a triumphant smirk. “Nothing wrong with your arm, dude.” The Russians had lately taken to addressing people as “dude,” especially Americans, who they thought had no business being around.

“It hurts like crazy,” Brookman told him.

“Bummer,” said the medical man.

He talked to Ellie about it as the use of his arm came back.

“Things like that come over me sometimes,” she said. “Sort of fainting fits. I used to get them a lot when I was small. You must have caught it from me.”

“It had a content, you know,” he said. “That falling. It seemed to be about something. You know? Everything that happened at home.”

“Sure,” she said.

The driver of the car that had killed Maud Stack was a graduate of the college that fielded the visiting team for which his younger brother played. He was a decorated U.S. Army captain and a veteran of Desert Storm. Since his service, he had suffered problems with alcohol and pills. He had not wanted to go to the game. After the accident he had gone into a panic-driven fugue state and done all the dumb things — reported too late that his car was stolen, tried to do the body work on it himself, took it to a shop to attempt to conceal his own work. His girlfriend went to the police without his knowledge to confess to being the driver. When he found out, he walked into police headquarters and confessed to the crime. He had the court’s sympathy but got a year inside.

The weather continued erratic in the months after Maud’s death. Days dawned in murky spring-like warmth and turned frigid in the afternoons. Other days took opposite turns. On one of the cold mornings Jo drove down to a dead factory town called Old Brighton to see a psychiatrist friend of hers named Victor Lerner. Dr. Lerner was the son of a famous Hungarian therapist who had fled to Harvard during the Second World War. Victor had lost a coveted chair of his own by eloping with a student patient to an ashram in India run by his cultic mentor.

Since his dismissal Dr. Lerner had eventually regained his license and worked for the state on a contract basis. Most of his duty consisted in certifying applicants for disability benefits. He had an office out of which to conduct his sparse private practice, a crumbling nineteenth-century mansion that had belonged to an Old Brighton mill owner.

Jo Carr and Victor Lerner had been involved with radicals in South America, but in different parts of the continent. Their bond was that they had both attempted to subscribe to some of the totalist metaphysical fantasies that had thrived in the previous century. Jo occupied one of the rickety chairs facing his Goodwill Industries blond, maple-like desk. Across the dismal street behind him, visible through his office window, car after car of a freight train rattled by on the Boston & Maine tracks. The open cars carried stacks of empty wooden pallets secured by metal binders.

Victor and Jo had been talking about the death of Maud Stack. They had to suspend their conversation until the last freight car passed.

“And the dreams?”

“I dream about a place on the highest ridge of the Andes.”

“You’ve been there before in dreams.”

“Yes. And in the sky I see the stars. I see the constellation they call the Easel. Sacred in some places.”

“How does that make you feel?”

She almost laughed. He had asked her the same question many times before. “It’s a nightmare, Vic.”

“And the associations…”

“A corner of something constant, a spirit deep in history. A created order. And all of the notions we’ve both seen people lose their lives to.”

“Structuralist thinking,” Victor said.

“I dream of that terrible priest. I see him on the street. He belongs to the rest of it.”

“You don’t need me to explain these things, Jo. You’ve already explained them to me.”

“History… history is poisoned by claims on underlying truth. We’ve both been burned by people who think they represent them. Underlying truth. Do you think any of these things are objectively out there?”

“Jo, on a scale of yes and no, I would have to say no. Counterintuitive as that may be.”

“Why counterintuitive?”

“Ah,” Victor said as another freight took sound and shape behind him. “Because people always want their suffering to mean something.”

The rest of what he said was drowned out by the noise of the train.

Jo never stopped regretting that she had not been given more time to help old Stack somehow. How she might have found a friend in him, and of course whether she could have encouraged him toward survival. She had the feeling he might have been fun to know. As Maud would have been, Jo was sure, had the kid lived into knowability. And people had once considered Jo herself diverting company. Thinking about what she might have done for Stack, for Maud, helped her through the futilities of her job.

Stack died three months after his daughter. His ashes were placed with those of his wife and daughter in the crypt at Holy Redeemer.