The Transcendental Murder

they were stored and let Homer pore over them. When the Town Clerk came back from lunch, he found Homer crouched over one of the big volumes, his enormous forefinger moving along a line like that of a child just learning to read, his lips mumbling the words over and over.

The Town Clerk examined him with sharp analytic eyes. Making instant character analyses was his specialty. Take this chap, now. Odd-looking fellow. Giant. Obviously illiterate. Stringy brown hair cut in big scraps. Horrible tie. And say, look at that forefinger. Spatulate. He should have guessed. A criminal type if ever there was one. 'What do you want, mister?' said the Town Clerk nervously.

Homer lifted his eyes and bored holes that went all the way through to the back of the Town Clerk's head with the keenest glance seen in Massachusetts since Daniel Webster's. 'Tell me,' he said, 'how long is the normal gestation period for human beings?'

Thrilling voice the fellow had. Come to think of it, he had very large prefrontal lobes. Obviously a fellow with plenty on the ball, a professor or something. Funny question though. 'I dunno. Nine months, isn't it? Nine and a half?'

Homer stared at the Town Clerk. His lips moved. Then he picked up his briefcase and whirled it around in the Town Clerk's office in a huge circle. 'Wahoo!' he said. 'Me plenty heap awful smart!' The Town Clerk had to rectify his character analysis all over again. The man was a dangerous maniac, he should have seen it right away.

But Homer was going down the front steps three at a time. He was out on the street, charging back to the library, his mind alive with a wild idea. He tossed his briefcase on a library table and started assaulting the card catalogue and snatching books off the shelves. After two hours of tearing the meat out of them, he left their scattered carcasses on the table and ran down the street to the College Drug Store. He found the phone booth in the corner and wedged himself into it by a technique he had worked out years before. (You backed in, squeezed yourself into the seat, lifted your right leg and planted it on the farther wall, and then, ever so gently, you shut the door.) He began to make a series of long-distance calls.

*55*

I am perfectly sad at parting from you. I could better have the earth taken away from under my feet, than the thought of you from my mind. —Henry Thoreau

Everyone was asleep except Mary. She had been up since four o'clock, working on her transcendental women. Now she was feeling sleepy again. She propped her head on her hand and looked out her bedroom window to where the elm tree branches made an armpit. In it the morning star hung dazzling. There were red puddles in the hollows of the pavement, like pieces of morning sky let into the road. It was time for some breakfast. Mary got up from her desk, watching the star. It followed her shuffling footsteps with a wobbling retrograde motion. All she had to do was set the pattern and the star fell in with the plan ... Pattern again! Why must she be so obsessed with pattern?

But they had all been obsessed with pattern, too, those Transcendentalists. They had all leaped from the particular to the general, looking for the pattern in the daily jumble. Why? What was the matter with the particular anyhow? Why couldn't she just be-there-and-how-do-you-do? Why did the bare bones of a simple act like walking to the stove with a pan of water have to flesh out into something alive and complicated, with skin and hair growing on it? (How many other women had carried water, in what vessels, from what source? Oh, forget it. This is my water, my pan with the nicked porcelain, my soft-boiled egg, and shut up to you. It's not part of any pattern, it's my breakfast.)

The trouble with the layers of meanings that grew like a fungus all over the little pieces of the particular was that the symbol might grow too huge, the stratification of meaning piled on meaning might become too ponderous, too heavy, too thick. One might start wandering in a forest from which there was no escaping; where every simple act and every trivial object became so much more than itself that one went mad. Mary shook her head and stared out the window. On this side of the house she could see the transparent moon. It was setting into a red horizon, looking angry and mottled, like a lump of amber with a dead fly caught in it. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. That's right, there was supposed to be a storm brewing. But now there was no wind at all. Even Freddy's diapers hanging on the line hung limp and still, as stiff and orderly as dentil blocks on an architectural molding—a pure pattern, rosy in the dawn-light.

... But if you went mad, then you wouldn't be a pattern any more, would you? You would be one-of-a-kind, unique, all alone by yourself, yourself-in-yourself, crying in the forest. Look at Mrs. Goss. She had been more patterned and stylized that anybody—until she had forgotten the pattern altogether and gone crazy. Now she was, indeed, one-of-a-kind, crying in the forest...

Mary sat down and looked at her breakfast. The dishes matched. She wanted to break them. She got up and found a bottle of ketchup and shook it on her egg. It tasted terrible, but at least it wasn't old patterned ceremonial salt and pepper. The blue willow plate had a crack in it. Mary looked at the crack and blessed it. Among the apples in the bowl on the table there was one with a spot on it. She reached for it suddenly and bit into the spot.

There was that letter from Philip, leaning against the sugar bowl, Mary didn't want to read it. She knew what it would say. It would be Philip's pattern, nothing surprising. Philip didn't have any spots, that was the trouble with him. There was poor Charley in jail, all covered over with spots like a bad apple. He had fallen away from the pattern. He had run away from the template. He didn't fit the jig, so the jig was up. The letter looked at her. Read, Mary, read. Jump, Mary, jump. No, thank you, I don't want to jump today.

Of course, that was her transcendental ladies all over. They couldn't jump. Emily Dickinson had refused to jump. Margaret Fuller had wanted to jump badly, but she didn't know how, and she kept blundering clumsily all over the rope. There were the Parcae, those grim women in the Grecian robes, turning and turning the rope, setting a pattern for you to leap and jump to, chanting it for you—

Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn out the light;

Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night.

Then snip, with their big scissors, and out go you. And sometimes it was Double Dutch they swung for you, and you had to hop and leap, frantically, between two ropes at once.

But you didn't have to jump. The little girl who was leaning in, getting ready, could just turn away and run, with her arms over her face. That was what Emily had done. She had run away. And that was what Henry Thoreau had done, too, after all, when he went to live in the woods. He had refused to jump.

Mary went upstairs and lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. The jumping rope disappeared. Instead there was that procession again, with the barrel-vaulted triumphal arch and the sublime figures and the glorious flags. She could see it clearly now, she could see it all so clearly! Now at last she could see what it was all about. It was a funeral, such a pretty funeral! Alice's? Teddy's? Ernest Goss's? No. There was the glass box, like Snow White's, with the little girl inside. It was herself, little Mary, the little girl who had refused to jump. She was asleep in there, she was dead in there—that's what the procession was all about.

Mary opened her eyes again, with the tears clinging top and bottom. Between the edge of the bed and the wall there was something wedged. It was Freddy's teddy bear. Mary picked it up and laid it against her face. Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night.

*56*

There was displayed a Titanic force, some of that force which made and can unmake the world. —Henry Thoreau

The wind was rising. 'Oh, boy,' said John, 'we're going to have one after all.'

'Well, I suppose it could have been a whole lot worse,' said Tom. 'We've got all the Macs and Cortlands picked. The Baldwins are what will get it.'

'Maybe it will go out to sea,' said Gwen.

The weather bureau had given everyone plenty of warning. At Vanderhoof's Hardware Store there were kerosene lanterns in the window and big bags of charcoal. Woolworth's did a land-office business in candles. People