flowers at the end of the first week in May, when the Green would be thronged with visitors photographing madly. Holloman Green was a “must” for spring tourists.
The other side of North Green Street belonged exclusively to Chubb University, whose campus was Princeton’s only rival. In between gardens and grassy knolls stood the colleges, with the gothic cathedral bulk of the Skeffington Library dominating the far end. Most of the oldest colleges were at the top end of the Green, an orderly array of eighteenth-century buildings smothered in Virginia creeper. Here, along this side, were the frat houses and secret societies as well as the later colleges, some Victorian gothic, some the imitation Georgian so popular as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and some the modern wonders belonging to the twentieth century. He passed the sprawling X of Paracelsus College with a grimace, quite forgetting that two months ago he and Desdemona had stood admiring its austere marble facade and the Henry Moore bronzes flanking its entrance.
Dante College was old, its anonymous architect unconcerned with the prospect of immortality; he had built gables and a profusion of dormered windows, absolutely dying to have his work buried under Virginia creeper. However, it had been modernized with ruthless skill and now boasted a plethora of bathrooms, an adequate kitchen and in-college laundry facilities way above the usual. Its student rooms were not as large as Paracelsus’s, but they didn’t need to be; Dante’s rooms were all singles. As it was coeducational (the first of Chubb’s colleges to take the plunge into mixed bathing), Dean John Kirkbride Denbigh had decided to divide his accommodation by floor, and put the women undergrads in the attic.
“We have a hundred boys and only twenty-five girls,” said Dr. Marcus Ceruski, deputed to receive Captain Delmonico. “Next year we’ll have fifty girls and only seventy-five boys, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. There has been a huge reaction against women students among the alumni, as you can imagine, and what frightens us is a significant diminution in alumnus funding. Many just cannot stomach a coeducational Chubb after two hundred and fifty years of men only.”
Carmine listened as if he had never heard any of this before, wondering how Holloman’s Gown segment could be so divorced from Town that they automatically assumed no townies would be interested in this new social convulsion-or be aware of it.
“Paracelsus is due to take women next year,” Dr. Ceruski went on, “but they’ll find it easier, as they’re able to put half of the students upstairs and half downstairs.”
An arrangement that wouldn’t please the feminists, Carmine reflected; they wanted real integration, men and women on the same floor. Quite why, he hadn’t worked out, though he suspected the object of the exercise was to make life as uncomfortable for men as possible.
“I believe that Cornucopia has endowed the building of an allwomen’s college,” he said, straight-faced.
“Correct, though it won’t be finished until 1970,” said Marcus Ceruski, whose doctorate was probably in medieval manuscripts or something equally esoteric; Dante had a reputation for scholars of unusual bent. He opened a door, and they entered a large room paneled in some dark wood, most of its walls occupied by books in custom-made shelves-no higgledy-piggledy sizes in here! “This is Dean Denbigh’s study.”
“Where it happened,” said Carmine, gazing around.
“Correct, Captain.”
“Are the four students who were present here today?”
“Yes.”
“And the wife, Dr. Pauline Denbigh?”
“Waiting in her study.”
Carmine consulted a small notebook. “Would you send in Mr. Terence Arrowsmith, please?”
Dr. Ceruski disappeared with a nod, while Carmine prowled. The big leather host’s chair closest to the desk was clearly where Dean Denbigh had sat; the Persian rug around it was ominously stained, as was the chair seat and one arm. When the door sounded, he looked toward it in time to see the entrance of a genuine scholar-in-the- making: round-shouldered and stooped, thick-lensed glasses over pale eyes, a full-lipped crimson mouth, an otherwise nondescript face. His breath was coming fast, the hand on the door trembling.
“Mr. Terence Arrowsmith?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Captain Carmine Delmonico. Would you please sit down in the chair you occupied when Dr. Denbigh died?”
Terence Arrowsmith went to it dumbly, sat gingerly on its edge, and stared up at Carmine like a rabbit at a snake.
“Tell me everything as if I’m in complete ignorance of what happened. The whole story, including why you were here.”
For a moment the young man said nothing, then he licked his impossibly red lips and began. “The Dean calls them Monday Fortnight Coffee-we all drank coffee except for him. He drank jasmine tea from some shop in Manhattan, and he never invited us to share it, even if someone said they liked jasmine tea. The Dean said his was very expensive and we shouldn’t acquire a taste for it until we were at the very least senior fellows.”
Interesting, thought Carmine. The Dean rubbed his preference in as exclusive, and his student guests didn’t appreciate it. Though Terence Arrowsmith had scarcely begun his story, Carmine was getting an impression that the Dean hadn’t been liked.
“You have to be a junior or a senior to be invited,” the young man went on. “I’m a senior, and a fairly regular guest, which isn’t unusual. It was more like a coffee klatch for favored people. The Dean was an authority on Dante himself, and those of us doing Italian Renaissance literature were his pets. If you were studying Goethe or moderns like Pirandello, you didn’t get invited.”
He’s meticulous, thought Carmine. He’ll give me the lot.
“I’m writing a paper on Boccaccio,” said Terence Arrowsmith, “and Dr. Denbigh liked my work. He held his sessions on a Monday, every second week. The worst of it was that he ignored the time, so those of us who had a class straight after coffee break were sometimes so late we weren’t let in. If the lecture was important, it was terribly frustrating, but he’d never let any of us leave until he was finished with whatever he was talking about. He expected give and take, so we knew it was useless to try to speed him up by letting him have the floor.”
“Was there anything different about yesterday’s session?”
“No, Captain, not that any of us noticed. In fact, the Dean was in a really good mood-he even told a joke! The routine was strict. We’d come in on the dot of ten and go straight to the cart, pour ourselves coffee and take one pastry. While we did that, the Dean went to a cupboard and got out the little box that held his jasmine tea packets. I remember that he was annoyed to find only one packet in the box-he said there should have been three. But I guess we all looked blank enough to pass inspection, because he didn’t blame one of us. As we were sitting down, he took his packet across to the cart, where there’s a special carafe of boiling water for him.” Arrowsmith shivered, started trembling again. “I was watching him-after the business about the missing tea, I think we all were. He tore the packet open, dropped it on the cart, and put the tea bag in his mug.”
“Is there any mistaking his mug?” Carmine asked.
“Not a chance. For one thing, it’s made of fine china-the rest are ordinary thick pottery mugs. And for another, it’s got ‘The Dean’ on both sides in German Gothic script. I guess the writing of fifteenth-century
Italy wasn’t florid enough, but his story was that his wife gave him the mug. He poured boiling water into the mug, carried it to his chair, and sat down. His smile was so-self-satisfied! We knew we were in for a long morning, that he’d found something fresh to discuss.
“Sure enough, ‘I’ve found out something extremely interesting I wish to share with you, gentlemen,’ he said, and stopped to blow on the surface of his tea. Funny, how vividly I remember that! He snorted and said something none of us really heard-about the tea, we all think in retrospect. Then he lifted the mug to his mouth and took a series of little sips-it had to have been scalding hot, but he made a real production of those sips, as if he was telling us we didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to drink such hot liquid. Next I think was the noise, though Bill Partridge says the change in his face came first. I don’t honestly think it matters much either way. He started to make a strangling, gurgling kind of noise, and his face went a bright red. He seemed to stretch out from the top of his head to his toes, stiff and straight as a board. Foam gushed out of his mouth, but he didn’t retch like a vomit. His hands flailed about, his feet drummed on the floor, the foam flew around as his movements grew wilder, and we-we just sat there paralyzed and looked! It must have been close to a minute before Bill Partridge-he’s the most scientific of us-suddenly jumped up and shouted that the Dean had had a seizure. Bill ran to the door and yelled for someone to call an ambulance, while the rest of us backed away. Bill came back and checked the Dean’s pulse, looked at the
