Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read Free

night, and now there were three or four doors for everything—even clerks’ offices were secured, and elderly dons retired because they spent half their working days trying to distinguish in a dour economy of light which of the cards or keys on their chains opened their outermost office door, which the second, which the third and so on. The coffee Maud had brought cooled on the cold stone while she knelt fiddling and jingling at Professor Brookman’s door.

2
    S TEVEN BROOKMAN HAD a particularly comfortable office in the oldest college building, Cortland Hall. There was a Persian carpet on the floor. The captain’s chairs, like the leaded bay windows, were inscribed with the institution’s motto:
Lux in umbras procedet.
The phrase referred to the college’s ancient determination to confront Algonquians with the prospect of eternal fire.
    On Brookman’s desk were piled the student assignments due to be graded and returned the following day. He had been awake all of the previous night evading any responsibility to them. Now they were neatly stacked against him on his green college blotter and there seemed nothing for it but to read them. He felt, on that particular morning, that he would rather die.
    It was true that most of the papers were fairly boring, but that was not Brookman’s problem. The real trouble was that they could be quite ingenious, experimental in style, original or contrarian in reasoning. These were kids whose high school teachers carried them to the airport on their shoulders—the preppie stars, the advanced-placement-class brains and scholar athletes, the alpha girls, the youths of destiny to be raised up or broken by time’s wheel. Some schools were said to instruct their students on the techniques for ruling the world. A revered visionary of the nineteenth century had said Brookman’s college thought of itself as examining the moral authority of privilege, which was far more high-minded, and exactly the same thing.
    He had been hearing Andean flutes outside since dawn, thin wintry sounds just the near side of tonality. The music had become a daily presence around the college. When he picked a paper from the top, whose should it be but young Maud Stack’s. It had not been on the pile the day before, from which he had to conclude that she had let herself into the building and his office, to which he had rashly given her a key the year before. Maybe, he thought, he could have the office lock changed, discreetly, at his own expense. An odd guilty thought, of uncharacteristic foreboding.
    Maud’s paper was too long as usual and also a week late. Maud’s assignments were always late. She turned in less than half of the minimum due, invariably borne on one of her fits of manic energy and insight. The results could be truly dazzling. Even on days when he was not particularly in the mood for Maud, he would take up one of her essays with a stirring of anticipation not untouched by dread. Dread of her winning her way inside him again, of threatening to crowd out the contoured life he had made himself, the devotions and sacred loyalties within it.
    The student papers that day concerned Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus.
Maud had no line on it; the bookish kids never did. It was low showbiz, they thought; it was vulgar and corny.
    The passage that had caught her attention was the one in which the Doctor asks Mephistopheles how he manages to wander about tempting obsessed intellectuals while doing time in hell.
    “Why this is hell,” says the Diabolus, “nor am I out of it.”
    “Shakespeare,” Maud had written, “would never be so impious.”
    Next to her line, Brookman wrote: “True.”
    This is the line that gets to her, an odd precocious insight for a spoiled college girl. In discussion, he will tell her this, if not in so many words.
    Maud was seriously, determinedly in love with him. Too young to know better, he would have joked, had it been a joking matter. Which it was not, because that was the