looking cookies in front of Kate, and sat back in her chair, her feet dangling.
“This is a very pleasant place,” Kate offered.
“Do you think so? It belongs to friends of my niece, two pediatricians who are away for the month, so I’m house-sitting. Actually, I am beginning to find its unremitting cheerfulness oppressive, particularly in the mornings. I come out in my dressing gown and expect to hear parrots and monkeys. Fortunately, I don’t have to care for the jungle. They have a sort of indoor gardener who comes twice a week to water and prune—a good thing, because if I was responsible, they would come back to a desert. You wish to talk about the Fools movement.”
“Er, yes. Or about one particular fool, really.” Kate explained at length what she knew about Erasmus, his relationships with the homeless and the seminary, and his apparent unwillingness or inability to speak other than by way of quotations. She then gave a very general picture of the murder and investigation, ending up with: “So you see, the man must be treated as a suspect,- he has no alibi, no identification, no past, no nothing. The only thing he has said about himself that sounds in the least bit personal is that he thinks of himself as a fool. Now, he could just be saying that, or he may be referring to this organization or movement or whatever it is. Dean Gardner thought there was a chance he might be, so he referred me to you.”
“You are catching at straws.”
“I suppose so.”
“And even if he is a remnant of the Fools movement, it may have nothing to do with the man’s death.”
“That’s very possible.”
“But you are hoping nonetheless to understand the differences between the cultivated lunacy of Foolishness and the inadvertent insanity of a murderer.”
“Well, I guess. Actually, I was hoping that if he had been a member of this… movement, there might be records, or someone who might know who Erasmus is.”
“The Fools movement was short-lived, and fairly comprehensively dispersed. It was also never the sort of thing to have any formalized membership—that would have been seen as oxymoronic. If you will pardon the pun.” She chuckled, and Kate smiled politely, not having the faintest idea what the woman was talking about. “What you require,” she continued, sounding every bit the academic, “is background information. However, as I told you over the telephone, my day is fairly full. I’m afraid that I’ve loaned out my only copies of the book I edited on the subject, but may I suggest that I give you a couple of papers and you come back and talk with me when you’ve had a chance to digest them? This evening or tomorrow, or whenever.”
Without waiting for Kate to agree, she slid down from her chair and went out of the room and through a doorway on the other side of the hall. When Kate reached the door, she found Professor Whitlaw with her head in a filing cabinet. She laid three manila folders on the desk, opened the first two, and took out some papers, leaving a stapled sheaf of papers in each one. The third one, she hesitated over, then opened it and began to sift through the contents thoughtfully.
The doorbell rang. Professor Whitlaw glanced at her wrist in surprise, thumbed through two or three more sheets of paper in the file, and then snapped it shut and handed it to Kate along with the other two folders.
“I don’t have photocopies of the loose material,” she said, “and it would be very inconvenient if you lost it. But if one cannot trust a policewoman, whom can one trust? Give me a ring when you’ve had a chance to formulate some questions. The next two nights are good for me.”
The professor remembered the chain this time. Kate changed places on the doorstep with an anemic young man wearing a skullcap and went to do her assignment.
¦
“What are you doing home?” demanded Jon. “Did you get fired?”
“The teacher gave me homework. Ooh,
Her voice answered Kate from upstairs, and Kate followed it to the room they used as a study. Lee was in her upstairs wheelchair at the computer terminal. A scattering of notepads and a long-dry coffee cup bore witness to a lengthy session.
“Hi there,” Lee said. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
“I’m obviously getting too predictable in my old age,” complained Kate. “You and Jon can plan your orgies around my absences. I had some reading to do and it’s too noisy at work,” she explained, waving the folders. “Look, I don’t know if you want to go on with your search. Dr. Whitlaw—Professor Whit-law—is a real find, and if you’re getting tired…”
“Oh, I’m not working on your stuff. This is something else.” Feeling both piqued and amused at her sensation of being abandoned, Kate went to look over Lee’s shoulder at the screen, which was displaying a graph.
“What is it?”
“I had an interesting visit this morning from a woman I worked with on a project two or three years ago,- she said she’d seen you in Berkeley recently.”
“Rosalyn something?” Kate tossed the folders onto a table and sat down.
“Hall. She’s putting together a grant proposal for a mental-health program targeting homeless women, wondered if I might help with it. Remember that paper I gave at the Glide conference? She wants me to update it so she can use it as an appendix. I was just reviewing it, seeing how much I’d have to rewrite the thing. I don’t know, though,- my brain seems to have forgotten how to think.”
“You and me both, babe. It looks like you’ve been at it for quite a while.”
Lee picked up on the question behind the statement. “I did most of this earlier. I had a long session with Petra,- she thinks the tone in my right leg is improving. And then I had a rest, so I thought I’d work for a while longer.”
They talked for a while about gluteus and abdominal and trapezius muscles, about spasms and recovery and tone, the things that until a month ago had formed their entire lives, until Lee had seemed to make a deliberate choice to push back all the necessary fixations and passions of her recovery in order to allow a small space for the life that had been hers a year ago. Kate respected Lee’s decision and tried hard not to push for every detail of a muscle gradually regained, a weight lifted, in the same way that she had respected Lee’s choice of a caregiver, Lee’s decision to come directly home from the hospital with full-time attendants rather than enter a rehabilitation clinic, and Lee’s determination to keep some of the details of her care from her lover. Privacy is a precious commodity to anyone, but to a woman emerging from paraplegia, it was a gift of life.
So all Kate said was, mildly, “Well, don’t overdo it.”
“Of course not. What have you got?”
“Couple of articles by the expert on Fools. I was looking at one of them on the way here, and I swear it isn’t written in English.”
“Would you rather do my appendix to the grant application?”
“Tempting, but I think there’s going to be a quiz on this.”
Kate picked up the folder and Lee turned back to the terminal, and for the next hour the rusty gears of two minds independently ground and meshed. Kate looked over her two articles, decided to skip for the moment the one that used
HOLY FOOLISHNESS REBORN
The modern Fools movement began, as far as can be determined, in 1969 in southern England. Its earliest manifestation was on a clear, warm morning in early June, when three Fools appeared (with an appreciation for paradox that was at the movement’s core from the very beginning) at the entrance to the Tower of London, that massive and anachronistic fortress which forms the symbolic heart of the British Empire. And, lest anyone miss the point, they arrived there from the morning service at St. Bartholemew-the-Great, a church founded by Rahere, Henry I’s jester.
Had any of London’s natives been watching, the behaviour of the taxi driver would have alerted him to the extraordinary nature of what was arriving, for the cabby, unflappable son of a phlegmatic people, stared at his departing passengers with open-mouthed befuddlement. Interviews with that driver and with the American tour
