The Twisted Thread (26 page)

She had been counting on Fred to guide her through this last series of obligations. Her heart thumped a little painfully as she thought about him. He had been such a good counselor across the highly coded terrain of Armitage. But equally strong was her recognition that this was a potential relationship with few prospects; he was launching himself into another world. She knew better than to let her hopes run away with her. This was what it meant to be grown up, to see things within their correct proportions. It was sobering, it was sad. She really liked Fred, but she was almost positive he was heading out of her range, off to New York, following the scent of his ambitions. What do I believe in that is larger than love? Madeline thought, absently polishing the counter. Is there anything? Teaching might exert that kind of gravity for her. She hadn't, after all, offered to visit Fred in New York or followed Owen to North Carolina. She had, however reluctantly, been responsible only to her own sloppy self, her own future, which was, oddly, resolving itself at her sister's alma mater, this place where something truly unsettling had happened and where students led lives that the adults around them could not fathom. As she sat there, Madeline realized it was Porter she was thinking about. His ability to ride through unbearable events with grace and humanity intact.

None of it made sense. Even now, sitting in her kitchen, hands wrapped around her favorite coffee mug—commemorating Prince Charles and Princess Diana's wedding, salvaged from a Somerville stoop—she couldn't weave the events into a coherent narrative. Narrative had to make some kind of sense; that's what she had spent the bulk of the year trying to teach her students. There was such a thing as a fictional or poetic truth, but this story was resisting that. It didn't have any kind of logic, intuitive or otherwise, and stories had to, they had to have motive, underpinning, their own peculiar patterning. She couldn't for the life of her see the whole. At that moment, she burned her lip on her hot drink and blotted the pain away with a napkin. A beautiful, rich girl dead, her baby missing. Her former boyfriend questioned and released, several times. Her former boyfriend who refused to leave.

There was something important in Scotty's determination to stick through his time at Armitage. She had seen him yesterday walking across the Quad and been struck by his affect. He had looked older, his shoulders hunched. He'd looked like a man with many cares. He'd looked, she thought, like he had been working hard, and he never looked that way.

Madeline picked up her mug and wandered to her computer and opened her Armitage account. An e-mail marked urgent told her that Tamsin Lovell had been arrested for the assault of Jim French. Tamsin? Jim? What did they have to do with each other? Madeline stared at the note on her screen and felt energy siphon from her body. Right now, there was no digesting that news. Thank God she hadn't gone to lunch, where she would have been caught in a swirl of rabid chatter: faculty would have been tearing through that bit of news like a ravenous dog at a roast chicken. She was going to stay focused on her own worry, Madeline decided, and she logged in then to student records.

A few years ago, Porter had put student files online, and as usual, Fred had said, the old guard had protested. Privacy issues; hacking; why did every last thing have to be computerized? Fred remembered some of them had used the debate to chew on their worry that they would have to stop writing comments by hand and start typing them. But Porter had prevailed, arguing that greater access, carefully protected, increased awareness about students and provided teachers with highly useful information.

What it meant was that, with special passwords, teachers could open current student records and schedules. It was indeed helpful, Madeline had discovered through the year, to find out how kids had done in other classes, who their advisers were, and other pertinent information. You couldn't change grades or alter pages, but you could quite easily view a student's entire history at the school. What was Scotty studying this semester that had so taxed him? Madeline wondered. A bio class with Harvey—ugh, she thought; calculus with sweet old Alice; an English class; and Special Topics in Physics. Madeline looked at what that array of courses boiled down to, and it was almost immediately transparent why he'd chosen them. Nothing started before 9:30, and he was almost always done by 1:30, a senior's crafty use of timing to determine academic load. Something jiggled in Madeline's memory as she looked at Scotty's last class of the week. The science course. What was it? Where had she recently seen that course mentioned? None of her advisees was taking it; only seniors could enroll. Then she remembered. Claire had been enrolled in it, too. Special Topics in Physics, taught by the myopic Bruce Benton. Maybe that's why Claire had selected it; Mr. Benton was renowned for his gentle spaciness, though he was as hard a grader as anyone. Still, he would have been unlikely to notice Claire's condition, apparently having chosen some astral realm over the earthly many years ago. And what was the class's special topic? That would take a moment to find, but again, because of Porter's innovation, it was possible. The entire curriculum was online, for the perusal of prospective students, parents, other teachers. A way of maintaining transparency and encouraging high standards.

The computer flashed away, and then the page she wanted appeared on the screen. Optics. Claire and Scotty and a handful of other seniors had chosen to spend their last semester studying the properties of sight. From fibers to satellites, but starting, Bruce wrote on his rather short but elegant syllabus, with the simplest form of twisting light, which involved mirrors.

Madeline moved so quickly she knocked Charles and Diana to the floor, where the mug promptly broke into several jagged pieces. Well, it had ended that way for them, hadn't it? she thought rather sadly. But she was in so much of a rush that she didn't even bother to clean up the pieces or stop the flow of coffee. What she did, after jamming flip-flops on her feet, was rush at a breakneck pace to Claire's room.

She hadn't been there since the girl's parents had visited. The entire dorm felt hushed and empty as she stormed up the staircase, but that was, Madeline thought, because it was. It even felt dusty, though the custodians came through all the time, mopping, cleaning, putting small details to rights. All the doors along the corridors, usually festive and bristling with decorations and pronouncements of individuality, were empty, blond rectangles of wood. Her running feet echoed hugely down the halls. Finally, Madeline slowed as she reached the third floor and opened Claire's door.

On its back was the mirror that had triggered her memory. A full-length mirror, not standard issue for the rooms—no one wanted to encourage teenagers to look at themselves more than they already did—but easily and often bought at the Wal-Mart in Greenville. It had been off the door when Madeline first saw Claire's room, propped near the window. She had come back later that day, she recalled, to see if it was still there, and it hadn't been. A custodian, she'd assumed then, or the person dispatched by the family to pack Claire's belongings had returned it to its proper place. But what if someone else had wanted it returned to its usual spot?

Madeline lifted the mirror off the back of the door and, in her mind's eye, tried to remember where she had seen it. She stuck it by the window now, to the right of the net curtain hanging in front of the sash, and then she lifted the curtain and angled it closer to the glass. No, that still wasn't right. She moved it to the left side and angled it again and looked out. What she saw astonished her. Even though the day was starting to cloud over, the flash of light that traveled from the mirror's surface across the Quad was as vivid as lightning. It had channeled the refraction from another reflective surface, in a window on the third floor of a building across the lawn. Greaves, Scotty Johnston's dorm. The corresponding mirror was still there to answer a signal sent from Portland. And although Madeline wasn't sure, she could guess that the room across the Quad belonged to Scotty.

Shaking slightly, trying to get this new piece of data to fit inside the jumbled story, Madeline moved to rehang Claire's mirror on the door. As she carried the heavy object back, she could glimpse her own face working in its surface and knew that what she saw there was sheer adult worry. But she hadn't needed a mirror to determine that.

She ran as fast as she could back to her apartment and paused to throw a dish towel on the tan puddle that her coffee had created. Her hands were shaking as she pounded on Matt Corelli's highlighted name on her cell. He answered on the first ring and said immediately and with concern that he couldn't or didn't mask and that she heard, as directly as that beam of light that had traveled between the two mirrors, “Madeline? What's wrong?”

He was on campus, near Greaves as it happened, and Madeline watched him walk with quick, sure steps across the lawn, his hair tossing in the wind. She had just managed to put the pieces of the broken mug in the trash when he knocked on her door, but her hands were still covered in coffee.

“Sit down,” he told her and helped her to the futon. “Tell me everything,” and she did. She told him about Kate seeing Claire at Porter's in Maine in August. She told him about the flash of light traveling between Claire's and Scotty's rooms. He listened, made a brief phone call, and within minutes, he had men in Scotty's room. Moments after that, yet more of them led Scotty back to the station.

Matt had left as soon as Madeline finished speaking. When he was gone, she gathered the bits of broken ceramic from the trash. Although it seemed unlikely, she was going to be able to repair Charles and Diana. It would be a bit dinged, but it would be whole again. Her fingertips sticky with epoxy, she remembered watching the tall boy getting crammed into a squad car. He was shaking his head and smiling, with a kind of fierce irony, an expression of contempt. A look that even at a distance said nothing other than You just don't get it, do you?

“No,” Madeline said softly, gluing in the last large chip and staring at the cracks that warped their way now through the handle. “No, I don't.”

CHAPTER 21

S
aturday morning, Fred walked into his sun-spangled studio
to greet his first-period class. These were the same students Malcolm Smith had visited, and Fred reflected that they had made a lot of progress since that foggy day in April. He had brought with him the file, his letter, and a wide envelope, and placed them on a canvas-covered table marked with the ghosts of hundreds of hand-pinched clay pots and vases. When he was through with teaching, he would head to the post office and send the whole ugly package off. Quinn Foster peered at him and said, “You look rocky, Mr. Naylor. Are you all right?”

“Just a tough night, Quinn,” he said, “nothing to worry about.”

The girl settled back at her easel, clearly not reassured, and Fred turned around to see what the rest of the students were doing. They had thrown themselves into their work with energy, and their wobbly drawings of the chapel and the Armitage statue and one another had grown steadily surer and more competent. Only one or two of them had a real feel for the materials and process of making art, but all of them had improved at rendering the world around them more convincingly. They had had fun. They had learned something. They had functioned well as a group. And he saw now that they, too, were tired and frightened, listless and ready to end the horrible year. He had lost three kids from this class since Claire died, but the twelve left were some of the kindest and best adjusted he had taught in a while.

He watched Quinn struggling with her pastels and thought for a moment about how much he would miss his students' serious expressions and steady industry next year. He liked teaching. He liked feeling that he had a role, a reason to occupy the earth. It had been one of Llewellan's grand themes. To find work that sustained an individual but provided the world with something useful. Fred knew that his grandfather had looked askance at the making of art—he wondered now if Llewellan had considered it the province of “nancy boys”—but that Fred's choice to teach, and at Armitage, had been deeply reassuring to the old man. Fred had to admit, as he started to wander the studio and examine what the kids were shaping on the pads in front of them, he had done it for Llewellan's grudging approval, for his love. Which made it all the more important to take this break, to test himself against his own judgments.

None of the students was making any headway today. Llewellan had always encouraged steeling oneself against self-indulgence, and given his own son's terrific propensity for just that—Harrison drank, talked, and spent too much—this attitude, though palpably Victorian, had appealed to Fred. But today, he stood in the middle of the studio, the place he had first felt paint come alive in his hands, and said, “Stop, everyone. Just stop for a minute.” They all looked up at him.

“We have one day left of class, on Monday, but you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking we need to go outside, bring a few pieces of paper with us, and mess around. We only have forty minutes anyway. And I want to find out what kind of trouble you're going to be getting into this summer.” The kids looked relieved, one whistled, and within moments, they were stationed in the shade of a maple tree, chattering about camp and internships, trips to Africa and boring summers at home in Westport. He did the same thing with the next class, and told both not to bother coming on Monday. They had done well, he told his students. They had worked hard and improved. It was time to free them for the year.

Finished with classes, he strode to the post office and, with only a moment's hesitation, sent his package first class to Malcolm Smith. He imagined it bumping through the mail with all the other letters and boxes to Rhode Island, and he imagined, too, the man's spotted hands fumbling at the envelope, then spreading Fred's harsh discovery before him. For a moment, in the cool of the corridor where the P.O. was located, Fred stood still. He wanted nothing more than to go curl up in his bed and sleep away the next few days. But there was something else left to do.

She proved, especially compared to Edward Smith, remarkably easy to find. A yearbook from 1954 showed him that Naomi Beardsley had been Llewellan's secretary—and that had been her title; the administrative assistant hadn't been invented until the eighties. From the photo with the other office staff (prim, bespectacled women in dresses that might easily have passed for nuns' habits, they were that black and unrevealing), it was impossible to say what sort of person she was. She looked quite grim with her cat's-eye glasses, neatly pinned hair, and unsmiling mouth, all of which distinguished her from none of her colleagues.

The Internet even spat out her current location, about fifteen miles away, in an assisted living place called Fox Marsh, where, if the information on the screen was to be believed, she edited the community's monthly newsletter, signing herself quite often as Old Fox on Thin Ice.

On the drive over, he called his mother in Connecticut illegally, no headset involved, and told her everything: the discovery about Llewellan, his decision to leave Armitage, the move to Brooklyn. His mother, sensitive, serious, a potter and an elementary school teacher, at first said nothing. He drove along, listening to her long pause, before she said, “Fred, you are doing the right thing. At every level,” and in her words, Fred heard the release of years of frustration. “Come home before you go to New York,” she said. “There's lots more to talk about.”

Pulling in to Fox Marsh, he wondered what stories his mother might have to share. Reserved, collected in the face of her husband's excesses, Fred's mother had raised him and his younger brother with grace and care. But she had done so at a cost. Marrying a Naylor had brought drama into her life, and more than a certain amount of difficulty. He was looking forward to seeing her. Now there was Naomi to deal with.

A pleasant woman at the front desk told him Mrs. Beardsley could be found in the dining hall, but as he scanned the group of white-haired men and women, he saw no one who reminded him of that secretary in her black, enveloping clothes. He was conscious, too, of a kind of collapsed humanity that he noticed when groups of old people were gathered in one spot. It wasn't only the bent backs and wandering minds that gave him this feeling but the compression of all their abilities and the need for the culture of the young to herd them into one place and pretend that they, diminished, weren't really there. But the smell of institutional food was the same as that which floated through the Armitage Commons: cooking for too many at once bled out flavor and spice, no matter the age of those eating. Llewellan had had the luxury of avoiding this kind of residence; he had died in his own bed, of pneumonia, at ninety-two. But his mother's parents had been less fortunate, and Fred remembered dutiful visits to see them at what had then been called a nursing home, trailing down corridors of gray carpets.

Then all of a sudden, a tiny woman was at his elbow and she was saying, “My goodness, you look exactly like him. You must be his grandson.”

She barely came to his chest, and she still wore dark, shapeless clothes. Her hands trembled and her voice as well, but her eyes were a clear hazel and awake. She leaned on a wooden cane and looked sharply at him. Fred startled and tried to explain what he was there for, but Naomi stopped him. “I can hazard a guess as to why you're here. There's probably only one reason. Just tell me your name, and we can go and talk somewhere that's a bit more private. These old bats listen to everything.” She was right, Fred saw. Every head had turned in his direction and was busy now trading some speculation about who the new young man might be and what he had to do with Naomi Beardsley.

“I don't much like it here,” Naomi said as she walked him, quite briskly given her cane, out of the dining hall and toward a garden generously dotted with benches no more than twenty feet apart. “But I didn't want to smash my hip and wind up being a burden to my son. And if I don't have privacy, as least I have the knowledge I've spared him that.” She had been at the Swamp, as she called Fox Marsh, for two years, “long enough so that if I have some ghastly stroke, they have to take care of me.” It wasn't far from what family she had, and she admitted the staff were friendly sorts. No drinking allowed in the dining room, but it didn't mean you couldn't have your peg of Canadian Club in your own apartment.

She settled herself on a bench below a linden tree. She gave off no smell of the old, nothing mentholated or medicinal, just a fragrance of soap and health. Fred sat next to her, trying to guess her age. Given her general forthrightness, he didn't think she'd mind if he asked. “I'm eighty-seven,” she said, “but everyone in my family lives to be about a million years old, so I'm not ready to buy the farm just yet.” She looked at him more closely. “You're here of course about Edward Smith. I wondered if anyone would ever find that file. I didn't destroy it, but I didn't make it easy to locate, either. It really is striking how much you look like your grandfather.”

Fred thought of what he might say, but he reflected that he owed Naomi this moment to describe what had happened, what she had seen, and what she had done. “I always regretted not being more forthcoming about that poor boy. But I tried to convince myself that I'd done what I could,” she said simply. She was a widow with two children when she worked for Llewellan Naylor, she explained. Her husband had been killed in Europe, a member of a U.S. engineering team that had gone to France to implement the Marshall Plan. “Run over by a French truck. Not even a casualty of war,” she told Fred. But whether he had died through glory or mere happenstance, she still had the children to take care of. She had needed that job, she explained, and at the time, Armitage had paid better than anything else in the area. She had also looked after her aging parents. Her father had been a laborer in the Greenville mills, her mother a finisher of seams in a Westerfield factory.

She talked rather haltingly but with some small pleasure. Fred didn't think she had the chance to speak much about her past and to discuss how she had spent her life. He was struck, too, with the sober acceptance of her fate. The dedication with which she had earned her living. Her evident devotion to family. Her decision to eschew ambition in favor of doing what she needed to to protect and sustain those closest to her.

“But he fired me anyway,” Naomi continued, almost as if Fred weren't there, “because I'd typed those letters and seen what he had done, and he could tell, though I said nothing, that I disapproved.” And she had, she said. She didn't know if any of the allegations were true. It was such murky territory. Unimaginable in those days that someone would do that to a child and, even more, bring it to light. But given what had been revealed about the Catholic Church the last few years, abuse might have been rampant for all she knew. She had been acquainted and worked with all three of the men Edward's father named in the letter. “And to be honest, I never liked them. But the masters were like gods then. What they said had to happen, did. No one rebelled against them.” She paused for a moment. “So even having a feeling about them one way or another wasn't tolerated, and certainly your grandfather wasn't one to stand for that kind of independence.” Even now, more than fifty years after the event, she was evidently still bitter about what had happened, in somewhat the same way, Fred thought, as Malcolm Smith, though his loss was surely the more devastating.

Llewellan, whom she called Mr. Naylor even now, had sacked her in March 1955, and she had gotten a job as a manager at an electric plant in Greenville and never seen him again, though for the rest of their working lives they had resided no more than three miles apart. She had been ejected from that universe, and Armitage had closed its gates against her. “He wasn't always like that,” she told Fred. “I worked for him for seven years. He was usually honest when dealing with problems. He could admit that things didn't go as planned, that people didn't always behave as you'd hoped. But this stung him. He couldn't accept it.” She appeared to have finished, Fred thought. But he was wrong. “So on the day he fired me, I gathered up what I could of Edward's records, which were all in our office, and I got the carbon of the letter I typed and then I filed the entire packet in the archives, with one small card in the old catalog for someone to discover years from then. A time capsule of secrets, I saw it as. I decided I'd let history do the work for me. And it did.”

They sat for a moment without speaking. The linden released its honey-sweet smell, and bees buzzed among its leaves. A few of the other residents of Fox Marsh were shuffling through the grounds. Clouds were gathering for another burst of rain.

Then, slowly, Fred told her what had prompted his search. He told her how Malcolm had come to find him and how, at first, he had wanted nothing more than to ignore him. Naomi listened, her hands quivering. He told her that she had made it difficult to find the papers, but that eventually he had. “What are you going to do with them?” she asked.

“I've already sent the whole file to Malcolm. And I'm going to resign, too.” He started to shift, ready to leave now. He needed to find Porter immediately.

“Well, if you'd like to stay in touch, I would appreciate knowing if anything happens.” She pulled a pen from a pocket and asked if he had a scrap of paper. He offered her the back of an ATM receipt and noticed that the handwriting whose faint trace he had followed was almost the same. Not quite as firm, but just as distinct. She stood and steadied herself and then said, “Yes, that's wise to leave. I should think you need time out of his shadow. It was very long.” He walked her back to the entrance. He had one last question, he said. Why did she sign her editorials for the newsletter Old Fox?

She smiled then, the first time she had, he realized. “You're forgetting the second part. On Thin Ice,” she said. “It's from the
I Ching,
a symbol that means walk carefully. Exercise caution.” She turned then, wished him a quick good-bye, and walked back to the Marsh where she now presided.