There was no answer.
A moments later: "Honey, come on down here."
A weak voice said, "I'm taking a bath, Mommy. I'll be down before supper."
"Honey, Mrs. Beiderson called."
Silence.
"Sarah -"
"I want to take my bath, Mommy. Can we talk about it, you know, later? Like, please?"
"Come on out. She told me what happened at school."
They continued this tug-of-war for a few minutes, Diane slowly edging up the stairs toward the girl's room. There was no lock on the door but Diane was reluctant to invade her children's territory. "Come on, honey. You can help me make dinner."
"I don't want to!" Sarah answered shrilly.
In these words Diane heard reason start to shatter. This was the time to back down. No hysteria, please. Not that. Sarah's attacks nailed her mother with tearful pity. And they also made her seethe; unable to distinguish between the moments Sarah was truly panicked and the times she was faking, Diane invariably backed down.
Coward…
The phone began ringing.
She glanced at it. "All right, Sarah, we'll talk later."
As she walked into the kitchen Diane noticed that it was five p.m. She knew who the caller would be.
She was married to him.
Bill would ask about the kids and how Diane's day had gone and then he'd get suddenly sheepish and tell her he had to work late. Again. Every other day for the past month he skidded home just as supper was landing on the table and on more than a few occasions he had missed the evening meal altogether.
And worse news: he now had a murder case.
She remembered seeing the thick black type of the headline in the Register and reading the scant words about that poor dead student and feeling a wave of utter regret – for herself as well as for the poor parents of the murdered girl. She knew she was going to see even less of Bill until the man was caught.
She picked up the beige phone.
It was not her husband.
She heard odd sounds in the background, like eerie electronic rock music, the sort she chided Jamie for listening to. She assumed it was one of his friends.
"Corde residence," she said, wholly polite.
"This's Mrs. Corde?" The voice was tenor-pitched but it seemed smoother than an adolescent's, more confident. She knew all of Jamie's friends and this didn't sound like any of them.
"Yes, this is she. Who is this? Say, could you please turn that music down?"
The volume of the music diminished. "You're Jamie's mother?"
"You want to speak to Jamie?"
"I'm calling from New Lebanon High? I'm the senior advisor of the freshman section of the yearbook and – this is really a hassle – but we lost a bunch of the bio sheets of some of the students, you know. We're way past the deadline and I'm calling people and filling in the forms over the phone."
"Well, Jamie won't be home for another couple hours."
"Could you just give me some information about him?"
"Well, I don't know…" Diane said. She knew the risks mothers ran making decisions for their teenage boys.
"Today's the last day we can get anything typeset."
"What do you want to know?"
"Who's his homeroom teacher?"
"This seemed harmless enough." She said, "That'd be Mr. Jessup."
"And is he on any teams?" the advisor asked.
"Wrestling. He also does gymnastics but he doesn't compete. And he's going to do the triathlon next year."
"Triathlon. So he's a bicyclist?"
"You can't hardly keep him off it. He'd ride it to the dinner table if we let him."
The boy laughed overloud at what he must have thought was a stupid joke. He then asked, "What kind of bike does he have?"
"It's Italian. A fifteen-speed. I don't remember the name. Is it important?"
"No, I guess not. What clubs is he in?"
"Science Club and Latin Club. He was in Photo Club for a while but he quit that to spend more time working out. Say, will he have a chance to look this over?"
"Not really, no. We're going to press tomorrow. But he wouldn't want just a blank space under his picture, would he?"
"I guess not."
"What's his favorite music video?"
"I have no idea."
"His favorite movie?"
"I couldn't say."
"How about his favorite groups?"
"Groups?"
"Music groups?"
Diane was disturbed to find how little of this she knew. She said abruptly, "Can you wait a moment?" then set the phone down and fled into his room. She picked up several handfuls of tape cassettes and hurried back to the kitchen. She read the labels into the phone. "Tom Petty… Uhm, Paul McCartney – well, I remember him of course."
"Ha."
"Then U2 and Metallica and Ice Cube and Run DMC, whatever that is. And he's got three tapes of this group Geiger. I guess they're from Germany."
"Everyone knows Geiger."
Well, excuse me…
She continued, "I don't know if those are his favorites. He's got a lot of tapes."
"Could you make up a quote for him?"
No way. "I think that'll have to be blank."
"I guess that's okay. You've been a big help, Mrs. Corde."
"When is the yearbook coming out?"
"Won't be long. Maybe I'll bring Jamie's by myself." The voice lowered a few tones. "I'd like to meet you."
Diane laughed but silently; she understood fragile adolescent pride. "Well, that would be very nice."
Hit on by a high schooler! Maybe you've got some of the old allure after all-even if it's just in your voice.
When he got the note he'd been saying:
"The phrase that some soldiers used was 'horizontal refreshment.' Medical records tell us that at the height of the war, nearly ten percent of Union troops suffered from some form of VD…"
Associate Dean Randolph Rutherford Sayles took the slip of paper from the teaching assistant. He recognized Dean Larraby's elegant scrawl, as distinctive as her ubiquitously disquieting choice of words summoning him immediately to her office.
Silence rose. He found he was looking past the paper, staring at the whorls and lines of the lectern, at an ink stain.
"… In Washington, D.C., the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue contained dozens of houses of prostitution – a locale where I believe a number of lobbyists now maintain offices…"
Sayles was in his trademarked posture: standing, both hands on the lectern, hunched forward. Sayles nurtured a classic professorial vogue, unkempt and preoccupied and tweedy, flaunting this style in the face of Brooks Brothers chic (passé on Wall Street but au courant in Cambridge, Hyde Park and Ann Arbor). He had sandy hair that he kept unruly and would grin like the absentminded scholar he had never been when it flopped into his face.
"… And more astonishing, there are hundreds of documented cases of women disguising themselves as soldiers and circulating among the men to provide sexual favors for a profit. Perhaps this is where the phrase 'military service' arose…"
These tidbits sounded frivolous but the students, who had waited in line since six a.m. on registration day to sign up for The Civil War to the Centennial, loved them. Sayles had worked hard at perfecting his lecturing skills. Nothing was more important to him than bestowing knowledge. He was tenured at thirty, two years after his doctoral thesis was published and one year after his book, the Economics of Freedom, garnered a favorable Times review and started its record six-month run as number one on the National Association of Historians' recommended list.
"As the war, which both Yanks and Rebs truly believed would last no more than six months, stretched on and on, the moral thread of the resoundingly Protestant and predominantly evangelical armies frayed…"
More problematic was Sayles's second job as an associate dean, which he did not enjoy at all. But he was sophisticated enough to know that he could not survive forever without the yoke of administrative duties and he had struggled to master the perversity of collegiate infighting. Besides, his bailiwick was the Civil War and what better metaphor could there be for a college campus? He was like Grant, marshaling forces and riding herd over a bunch of brilliant feisty generals – that is, students – who drank too much, whored too much (or who railed loud against drinking and whoring), while he somehow managed to fight a war. And like Grant, Sayles had happened to rise to this position at the most difficult time in the history of his institution.