Morrison hesitated. “You mean, the names?”
“Yes.”
“What would you do with them?”
“I’d look them up in your little student directory,” Frank told him coolly, “and then I’d go talk to them.”
“That could be embarrassing.”
“One of their friends is dead,” Frank reminded him. He waited for this to sink in. Then he fired again. “She was pregnant, did you know that?”
Morrison winced. “Yes.”
“How?”
“Arthur told me,” Morrison said. “He felt Northfield should be warned.”
“About six weeks pregnant,” Frank said, “which would mean that she was pregnant at her graduation.”
Morrison’s eyes lowered mournfully. “Yes, of course.”
Frank leaned forward slightly. “Do you have any idea who the father might have been?”
“None at all,” Morrison said. He shook his head worriedly. “One incident like this can have a terrible effect upon a school like Northfield.” His lips curled downward. “All you need is one rotten apple.”
“Is that how you thought of Angelica?”
Morrison looked like a child who’d been caught using bad language. “Well, no,” he sputtered, “of course not. I mean, she was very—”
“Beautiful, yes,” Frank interrupted. “What else?”
“Odd, that’s all.”
“In what way?”
“She didn’t participate in school activities very much,” Morrison said. “We stress community life at Northfield. We like joiners.”
“And Angelica wasn’t one?”
“Hardly,” Morrison said with barely concealed disapproval. “She was very much to herself most of the time. I don’t think she ever attended a school dance, or any other school function for that matter.” He thought a moment, and something caught in his mind. “Except one.”
“Which was?”
“The senior play,” Morrison said. “She was in the senior play.”
“When was that?”
“You’d have to ask Mr. Jameson; he directed it.”
“Where could I find him?”
“He’s probably in the theater right now,” Morrison said. “We do have a summer theater program.”
Frank wrote it all down.
“She was quite good, actually,” Morrison added. “Everyone was impressed.” He shook his head. “I do wish we could have helped her more.”
“In what?”
“In life,” Morrison said. “When you teach children, you realize how unprepared they are for life.” He smiled gently. “We send them into a wilderness, Mister …”
“Clemons.”
“Mr. Clemons, yes. We do the best we can, but it’s not always enough.”
“Would you say that Angelica was withdrawn, moody, anything like that?” Frank asked.
“From the life of this campus,” Morrison said. “She was very withdrawn from that. Perhaps she had something else. Other people who were pulling her away from us.”
“Toward the Southside?” Frank asked.
“Well, that’s where she was found, after all.”
“How did you know that?”
“It was in the paper,” Morrison said. He took a folded newspaper from the table behind his desk and handed it to Frank. “See?”
Frank opened the paper. Angelica’s Northfield photograph stared up at him from the front page.
“She should have been in the paper,” Morrison said, “but not like this. As an actress, perhaps, or something else equally meaningful.” He shook his head. “But not this.”
Frank handed the newspaper back to him.
Morrison glanced at it again, then allowed his eyes to drift toward one of the Civil War portraits that hung on the opposite wall. It seemed to calm him, as if he had discovered something sweet and beautiful within it which the hectic world of upper-class education could not give him.
“I believe in tradition, Mr. Clemons,” he said, finally. “I don’t believe I should have to apologize for that.” He looked back toward Frank. “When I think of Angelica, I think of someone who was drifting, who had no traditions to stand on.”
“Maybe she didn’t like them,” Frank said.
“Of course, that’s possible.”
“Why did she go to this school?”
“It was not her choice.”
“Whose was it?”
“Arthur Cummings chose the school.”
“He made her go here?”
“He administered her trust fund,” Morrison said. “Part of it was allocated for Angelica’s education. Arthur elected to spend that money at Northfield.”
Frank wrote it down.
“And may I add that I think Arthur made a wise choice?” Morrison said. “He was trying to help Angelica. But some people simply cannot be helped.”
From the tone of his voice, Frank would have thought that he was talking about the kind of girl who ended up on her back, waiting for the next trick.
“What did Cummings want her to be?” he asked.
“Responsible,” Morrison replied. “A credit to her family. A woman of some standing in the community.” He looked at Frank sadly. “Isn’t that what everyone wants for his children?”
Frank said nothing, but in his mind he suddenly asked himself what he had wanted for his own daughter. It struck him that he’d wanted only for her to live through all the stages of life, and, at the end, to have had some sense that it had been worthwhile.
“If she’d just allowed herself to join in with the other people at Northfield, she’d have been all right,” Morrison said confidently.
For a moment, Frank actually tried to see the world as Morrison did, but he found that he could not comprehend his vision of a clearly divided world where a human being remained safe in one place and was imperiled by another. Instead he saw it as a constantly melding landscape, one in which there were no isolated lands, no insurmountable walls, no places so high that the tide could not rush in and sweep everything away.
“I’ll need copies of the student and faculty directory,” he said.
“I hope you’ll use them discreetly,” Mr. Morrison told him.
“And could you tell me where the theater is? I need to talk to this Mr. Jameson.”
“The building just behind this one,” Morrison said. He walked Frank out of the office and stood with him a moment in the corridor. “I am sorry about Angelica,” he said. “I hope you understand that.”
Frank nodded. There seemed nothing left to say.
11
As he entered the theater, Frank could see a tall, lean man who stood quietly on stage. He adjusted a microphone, then glanced up toward the back of the theater.
“All right, hit the spot,” he called loudly.
Instantly a shaft of bright light cut through the dark interior of the theater. It enveloped the man on the stage, and threw a dark shadow almost to the rear wall of the stage. The man looked at the shadow, studying it
