A Butterfly in Flame Page 5

  The apartment was still as vacant as it had been, with no further sign of its indignant tenant. Fred was so wet that he stripped, wrung his clothes out over the kitchen sink and hung them over the pipe from which the shower curtain was suspended. No source of clean towels being apparent, he made do with Morgan Flower’s slightly rancid towel, taking it from its hook behind the bathroom door. When it had done its job, he spread it to dry over one of the chairs at the dining table. It would have a better chance there. The apartment’s air was chilly. He pulled dry clothes from the overnight bag and put them on.

  The students in the café had been talking about someone they called “Hag Harrison.” That was presumably his downstairs neighbor. Morgan Flower was, not very inventively, “weed.” Should he give the impending requirements of pretending to be a teacher any thought? Anyone could do English Lit he’d been assured. As far as that went, to start with, he might have to throw himself upon the mercy, if any, of his students. The course called Writing About Your Problems couldn’t be prepared for. Should he take the five minutes it deserved to inform his students that to him the subject seemed lazy, cynical, and cavalier? A gut course from the instructor’s point of view.

  That left Lives and Loves of the Artists. So-called. There’d been a folder in the top drawer of the file cabinet that looked helpful, labeled “Course Syllabi.” That hadn’t been what Fred was looking for on his first examination. When he went back and pulled it out he found the Manila folder woefully thin. Nevertheless, he sat in the armchair of his choice before opening the folder to study.

  It gave him all of a single yellow sheet, folded, on which were notes in Flower’s now familiar hand: Lives and Loves of the Artists. Term One. 1. Da Vinci, 2. Michelangelo, 3. Titian, 4. Holbein, 5. Rubens, 6. Rembrandt, 7. Velasquez, 8. Goya, 9. Hogarth, 10. Blake, 11. Turner, 12. Audubon, 13. Daumier, 14. Review and final. Term two. 1. Manet, 2. Lautrec, 3. Van Gogh, 4. Cézanne, 5. Bellows, 6. Burchfield & Benton, 7. Wood & Curry, 8. Marsh & Gauguin, 9.—13. The Nude, 14. Review & final.

  “A strange parade,” Fred said, running his eye over it. “Can this joker really be giving equal weight to Rembrandt and John Steuart Curry? Gauguin and Reginald Marsh in the same week? Where’s Balthus? Where’s Matisse? Tintoretto? Lives and Loves of the Artists? What’s Audubon doing in the lineup anyway, unless there’s something I don’t want to know about between him and some hen turkey?”

  Judging from the evidence at hand, a term must be fourteen weeks. Figure they might be about seven weeks more or less into this second term, the grand disjointed progression might have reached Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Burchfield. If Fred had ever had a friendly word to say for either of these unnecessarily muscular and twisted American painters, he couldn’t remember what it was. “In which case, maybe my job, as a ship passing in the night, is to unload scorn,” he concluded.

  The Timex said 9:45. He was fed, rain-washed and dry, not to mention clothed. He dithered a minute before he decided, put his wet shoes on again and went downstairs to tap at Meg Harrison’s door, once he had assured himself that the sounds of her TV gave him a right to conclude she was awake.

  She called out, “Who is it?”

  “Fred. From upstairs.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Fred gave her five.

  She opened the door wearing a large loose blue garment somewhere between a smock and a caftan.

  “Not borrowing sugar,” Fred said. “Looking for guidance, really, if you have a minute. And, do you mind? Since I see you have a phone. Land line. May I use it? Collect, obviously. Molly’s in Florida.”

  Meg nodded him in.

  Chapter Eleven

  The room he entered—through an untidy version of a kitchen like his own—was sparse, even barren. Other than the red telephone he had spotted from the doorway, there was nothing on the walls. You might guess that a nun lived here except, where was the crucifix? Wouldn’t there be a calendar with pictures of Saint Theresa and the perennially blessed Mother Seton? And what did a nun want with the full-length mirror propped against what should be a closet door?

  “Whatever you want, as long as I’m in bed by ten-thirty,” Meg said. “Early day tomorrow.” She had no sofa but three yard-sale armchairs. She sat in one of them and gestured toward the phone—a portable. Her layout was the same as Fred’s. The doors to her bedroom and closets were closed and without ornament. The TV sounds, continuing, came from the bedroom.

  “This happened so fast,” Fred explained. “Molly won’t have a clue how to find me.”

  Molly was brisk once Fred had gotten past her eager daughter Terry, who wished to describe each one of the shells she had found. Fred had dropped the code word “perfect”—a word not otherwise called for in his daily parlance—which Molly recognized as the signal that this particular phone call couldn’t do much more than to assure her that Fred was alive and well. More information would follow when it could do so in a less public way.

  Fred replaced the phone and said, “I have to say, Meg, I’m going to be flying blind tomorrow and that’s about the total of what I know. Beyond the names of the classes and the names of the students in them, I am in the dark.” While he spoke Meg was gesturing him toward another, and the worst, of the three armchairs. Her feet, still bare—her legs being crossed—exhibited a tension well suppressed in the rest of her demeanor.

  Meg started slowly, “I can’t say I pay attention to what he’s doing, and the kids—the students—don’t talk about Flower’s classes. If they have to write something they grumble. Beyond that, I don’t hear.”

  “This lineup of artists he assigns in, what is it, a second-year course? Lives and Loves of the Artists. Does the rest of the faculty have anything to say about who he puts in front of his students? I mean, Burchfield? When you can have Matisse? Or, I don’t know, Copley?”

  Meg looked at her watch. “People are going to ask, so I might as well. You said that you came as a favor for a friend of a friend of a friend. Never mind they’re acting pretty fast for a guy who’s been missing such a short time, unless they know something. Never mind. What I want to know is, who is this friend of a friend of a friend? Who is the friend of a friend? Who is the friend? And how come, if you have Morgan Flower’s keys from Elizabeth Harmony, you had to look her name up on a piece of paper?”

  She crossed her legs the other way and her knobbed feet twisted.

  Fred said, “For example, if I found I was going to do the job for real, and I was designing a course about painters, I’d ask you and the other members of the faculty which painters you want your students looking at. Who do you care about? Burchfield? Who’s going to learn anything useful from Burchfield?”

  “Another time,” Meg said. “You want to play employment interview? Theoretical? It’s my turf. I start with the question—say I come in late, I never bothered reading your résumé or application letter, all that—I’m an artist anyway so I don’t read—I ask, ‘So, Fred, where have you been teaching until now? What courses? While we’re at it, what’s your last name?”

  “Fair question. Taylor,” Fred said, and let his mouth close in a deliberate way.

  “The other questions?”

  Fred rested mute. Meg twitched, and scratched the side of her face, and studied him. “If I get my friend to Google ‘Fred Taylor,’ there’ll be eighteen or nineteen million possible matches,” she said.

  “Thought I might see some examples of your work,” Fred remarked. “Since you live here.”

  “I don’t shit in the nest,” she said. “Or to say it cleaner, I don’t bring work home. At home, if I want to think, I want to think about something else.”

  “Does Stillton Academy have a catalogue I could look at, get my bearings a little bit?”

  Meg stood. “We’re done. I don’t bring my work home. Period. Looks like that includes you. It’s been real.”

  “I guess I’ll see the rest of the faculty here and there,” Fred said.

  “Faculty meeting t
omorrow. Four-thirty,” Meg said. “If it’s true you’re here for a week, I’d skip it. If it’s true.”

  “Meaning that in your experience sometimes a temporary gesture slides imperceptibly into an unintended permanence?” Fred said.

  “Meaning if I see you at that faculty meeting, I’ll have a good idea how temporary you are.” She paused, deliberating the next gambit. “If those are Morgan’s keys you got in with, if he sent you as his ringer, how come his car’s still on the street?”

  Fred spread his arms in the universal gesture that means whatever that universal gesture hopes to mean at the time.

  After she had closed him out, Fred heard, from the other side of the door, Meg’s raised voice, “They’re all such liars!”

  “Time we considered sleeping arrangements,” Fred decided, once back in Morgan Flower’s apartment. He’d replayed the inconclusive conference with Meg Harrison while climbing the stairs, and registered the fact that what he knew best, now, was that she bristled with a suspicion that amounted almost to paranoia. If she decided that Fred was acting for Morgan Flower, or in collusion with him, Meg Harrison wanted no part of him. Since Fred was an unknown quantity to her, that seemed a vehement response on first acquaintance.

  “These academics,” Fred said.

  The few grains tossed into the coop make trouble among the chickens.

  No lamp next to the bed. Did Morgan Flower not read before he slept? No. There was no bedside table with a dog-eared book. No radio. He didn’t read, he didn’t smoke. What did the man do, just lie down and turn off?

  Do we give the man a shock, letting him stagger in late and find himself at the climactic scene in Goldilocks—there’s Intro to Lit for you—with Fred in the role of the heroine? Fred turned down the blue chenille coverlet—checking for sperm?—to reveal the splotched pillow and then, progressively, but gingerly, the continuation of the interior of a bed whose owner’s mother would have recoiled in dismay.

  Not that he hadn’t slept in worse. Still, Fred pulled the coverlet up again as it had been, and smoothed it gently into place. Not for the first time in his life, he stretched out on an inadequate couch and considered the vagaries of sleep.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Wait in my office, would you, Professor Taylor?” Elizabeth Harmony soothed. “Tom” –-to the student at the reception desk—“if Professor Taylor wants coffee, would you arrange it?”

  Fred held out the cup he had brought with him—bad black coffee from the Stillton Café. “It’s Fred,” he said.

  Elizabeth Harmony turned and moved off with swift purpose, as if bent on reprimanding a delinquent caddie. Tall and broad hipped, her white hair clipped into a Prince Valiant helmet, her perfunctory greeting had hardly rippled heavy features that revealed that she had gotten the better of many encounters with the Demon Rum.

  Fred had found her in the small cottage marked Administration, engaged in a conversation with Tom, whose desk, on which were a telephone, a typewriter and a sign saying Reception, occupied a space that would otherwise be called the front hall. The sign on the door behind him, which was ajar, said Director.

  “I’ll hang out with Tom,” Fred said to her striding back.

  “My name’s not Tom,” the young man said. “Tom Meeker sits here sometimes. As far as she’s concerned, we’re all…”

  The desk telephone rang. The man whose name was not Tom noted which light was blinking before he told the receiver, “Stillton Academy. Admissions.” A pause while he noted some information from dictation—a name and address—before he continued, “The new catalogue is in preparation. What she’ll need in the meantime is the brochure, and an application form. Have her return the form, with the deposit, and the next thing is the admissions interview and portfolio review.” A pause. “Yes, that will be with one of our studio faculty. The admissions director is presently…excuse me, may I put you on hold?”

  He switched to another line, told it, “Stillton,” listened and continued, “No, he’s here. At least, there’s another guy. So it’s meeting…I don’t know. Professor Taylor. Search me.” He switched back to the earlier line, failed to get a response and told it, “Shit!” before he hung up. “I probably cut them off,” he said.

  “‘Meeker,’ Fred said. “That rings a bell. Something I heard in the café. “I know, ‘The Meeker Method.’ What’s that?”

  The question got a grin, but no response. “I go by Fred,” Fred said. “If I let them call me Professor, I have to get new shoes and everything. Can I see one of the brochures?”

  Not-Tom fiddled with the Reception sign on his desk. It was one of the triangular bars which, after he had played with it, exposed a second side: Admissions.

  “You’ll have to wait,” not-Tom said. “Let me put this in the pending file or I’ll forget.” The slip of paper on which he had recorded the name and address of the prospective student went into a folder, along with several others.

  “No brochure?” Fred prompted.

  “She’s having a new one printed.”

  “I’ll settle for an old one.”

  Not-Tom shook his head. “Recycled,” he said. “It had the name of the old director. President Harmony didn’t want…”

  “President Harmony?”

  “She says, if this is supposed to be a college, and if she’s supposed to be…” his face went blank. Elizabeth Harmony’s reappearance had been as quick as it was stealthy. She placed on not-Tom’s desk a sign that read ELIZABETH HARMONY, PRESIDENT and instructed him, “Have Milan put this on my door, Tom, would you? As soon as he can. Have the other one taken down. It’s confusing. Also, I’ll have coffee. In the china cup, please. Cream and sugar beside it. On a tray. With a napkin. You are sure you won’t…?” she asked Fred. He shook his head. “Knock before you come in,” she instructed, leading the way into an office that had almost nothing in it but a desk, three chairs, a memo pad, a telephone, a file cabinet. “I hate a cardboard cup,” she continued, closing the door. “It sets such a poor…” Taking note of Fred’s cup, she did not finish her thought aloud, but took a detour. “We’ll give you a coaster,” she promised doubtfully, as if speculating whether she would be obliged to instruct him in its proper use.

  “Where were we?” she asked, as they sat down. “I appreciate your joining us at such short notice.” She spoke as if she was used to having her whims made flesh. They sat, she gaining credibility as she took her position behind the desk.

  “I haven’t joined you,” Fred pointed out. “Your attorney asked me to gather some information, Mrs. Harmony, in the guise…”

  “President,” she demurred. “Speak softly. The walls…”

  “And there’s a problem,” Fred continued. “First a question. Everyone seems to assume that Morgan Flower is gone for good. Why?” He took a sip of his coffee and held onto the cup, disregarding the coaster she had placed on the edge of her desk. “The way I work, I like to be direct. Ask questions straight. The way this situation ties me up, me pretending to be…”

  A knock on the door was followed by the entrance of the man she called Tom, carrying a tray on which objects in flower-sprigged china clinked furtively, although he was walking as evenly as he could manage.

  “On the desk,” President Harmony instructed.

  She made the student stand in abeyance while she reviewed the tray’s contents—coffee, two cups, sugar, creamer, cloth napkins, silver spoons. “Very well,” she dismissed him. “Tom is a work-study student,” she explained as he was making for the door. “Our tax money at work,” she finished in a whisper as the door was closing. She got busy serving herself as Fred continued.

  “…me pretending to be a member of the faculty. It means I’ll be wasting a lot of time. With students and faculty I have to back in to the questions I need answers to. For example, what kind of car does Morgan Flower drive?”

  “Good heavens, I don’t know,” Harmony said. “I should think a Mercedes, wouldn’t you? Green. Yes, that would suit him.”

/>   “That was a for instance,” Fred said. “My point is, with everyone else around here…”

  “We can’t take chances. Can’t let any trouble start,” Harmony interrupted. “In terms, you asked, why do we assume he is not coming back? What I assume, since you ask, I won’t have him back. After what I think he’s done. I have no interest in finding him at all. The man, I could care less. The thing is the girl. Find the girl, that is the essential thing.”

  “Moving on, my point is,” Fred said, “with everyone else, I have to pull my punches and not show an interest in anything beyond what a substitute teacher wants to know. On the other hand, with you I can be straight. There’s twenty minutes before my first class starts, next door. Let’s use it. When did you last see Morgan Flower?”

  “You are sure you won’t have coffee?” she asked, raising her cup. “It’s my own service from home, naturally. The college has nothing appropriate. I’m petrified they’ll break it. They are so…”

  “How large was Missy Tutunjian’s father’s gift? This past year. He is said to be a significant contributor.”

  “The treasurer would have that,” President Harmony said. “The treasurer is a board member.”

  “How large is your board? Who is on the board? How selected? Aside from the suspicion, is there evidence that Morgan Flower and this student had a sexual relationship? Who knows? Who knew? What is the school policy about such relationships? How does Flower get along with his colleagues? Where is his personnel file? I want to see it. Missy Tutunjian’s records. I want the name of her roommate, the address…”

  The telephone rang. Harmony pressed a button, told it, “I am in conference,” and pressed the button again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “We don’t need all this hoo-hah,” Harmony interrupted. “What are you thinking? What we want and need is simple and straightforward.” She gazed at Fred severely across the top of her flowered china cup. “Find that girl. Deal with it. Deal with her. Find her and report back to me. She must be protected, before…”