Calista had really been too shy to ever go up and initiate conversation with any man she found extremely attractive. However, this evening her boredom with her own date had reached a critical mass so that when Tom at last did walk into the room she blasted out of her seat and introduced herself. He smiled slowly. She watched ecstatically as the vertical dimples cracked the face. She would draw that face over one thousand times in the years to come. They left the party together for a sandwich and beer in town. Later, while she was adjusting her cable-knit tights in the empty reflecting pool by the Woodrow Wilson School, just behind the sculpture, she turned to him and said, “You know I’ve never done that before.”

  “What, made love in the snow?”

  “Well, that, yes, but on the first date.”

  “But I’m not your date, remember? He’s back at the club.”

  She had to stop thinking about this. She got out of bed and went into the bathroom to the medicine cabinet. She took a Dalmane, and returned to bed. She stared into the darkness and tried not to think about Tom, tried not to think at all, but the dark fluid wave of human voices that had brought the death words rushed over her again. She remembered so well gripping von Sackler’s arm with one hand and with the other hand the display case. She remembered the Scroops stonelike, unbreathing, in front of her, their faces like death masks. Had hers been that way too?

  Chapter 12

  Janet Weiss sighed and slumped down in her chair—slumped as much as decency would allow in a metal folding chair and an auditorium with hundreds of people. The inevitable question had occurred after Calista had given her slide talk on children’s book illustration:

  “Miss Jacobs, after illustrating and writing more than twenty books for kids, do you ever . . .” The young man paused to scratch his head. “Well, do you sometimes feel that maybe you’d like to try something more challenging—well, I mean not more challenging really, but . . .” There was a pause while the questioner groped for a tactful way in which to suggest what he obviously considered to be the superior art form of the adult book. One could easily imagine him toiling away on his Great American Novel in between correcting freshman composition papers with the vengance of Attila the Hun. Calista, accustomed to the question, waited patiently for him to finish. “I mean you are such a distinguished author and illustrator of children’s books and fantasies, don’t you ever . . .” He paused and smiled slightly, then lurched ahead more confidently. “Don’t you ever have fantasies about writing an adult book or doing adult literature? I mean, maybe you could be another John Irving with your sense of fantasy.”

  Calista cut him off. “Oh, yes! I do have fantasies about John Irving.” She paused luridly. “All the time. I find Updike very attractive, too.”

  The audience roared and Janet Weiss slumped. Why the hell couldn’t she have made her usual bitchy remarks about the best writing today being done in forty-eight-page picture books for children? That the illustrated children’s book offered the most challenging and demanding of formats, as intricate as any poetic form? Why couldn’t she have made some of her snooty comments comparing picture books to symphonies? Why couldn’t she have said the bit about picture books being visual poems? Why the fuck did one of America’s most beloved children’s book illustrators have to draw a picture of herself clear as day in the sack with John Irving or John Updike?

  “Be happy I didn’t say Sidney Sheldon or, worse, Janet Dailey, Janet. At least I’ve got taste and I’m not gay,” Calista said as she began her second order of oysters. During the thirty-minute wait for their table at Legal Seafood they had not discussed anything about the talk that morning at the book fair. Janet Weiss, her editor for fifteen years, had shown considerable restraint up until the time she had forsaken her usual wine spritzer and ordered a martini straight up. “You’re upset?” Calista asked ingenuously.

  “I’m your editor. I’m the one who first gets to look at all those letters from Looney Tunes like the Reverend Falwell and the League of Decency who complain about your drawings of naked four-year- old boys. Remarks like this morning’s don’t help.”

  “Guess not. I’m sorry.” She looked down and raked the fork lightly over the oysters.

  “Forget it,” Janet said. “It was awfully funny.”

  “Maybe I’m getting horny in my widowhood.” Calista chuckled.

  “Well?” Janet smiled.

  “Well?”

  “We could sit here saying ‘well’ all through lunch.”

  “Well, there’s not much more to say.”

  “Oh dear, too bad.”

  “Not that bad.” Calista twirled the oyster fork and looked down.

  “What’s wrong, Cal?”

  She sighed. “I think ...” She started and then stopped. She didn’t know how to say it. “I think,” she began again, “that there is a possibility that Tom’s death was not accidental.”

  “Not accidental?” Janet Weiss put her martini down. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” she said quietly, looking straight at Janet.

  “But why?”

  Calista began to tell her about Peter Gardiner’s death.

  Just then the waiter came to take their order. Calista realized suddenly that if one had to pick a restaurant to discuss murder in, Legal’s was not bad. It was rather noisy with good spacing between tables and had no-nonsense efficient waiters who did not hover or feel compelled to introduce themselves by name—“Hi, I’m Bob and I’m your waiter today”—a practice Calista found especially annoying. It seemed to suggest that more was expected than just food service. “I’ll have the grilled halibut,” Calista said.

  “Onion strings, french fries, baked potato, or rice pilaf?” “Onion strings, please.”

  “On your salad—french, thousand island, oil and vinegar, or house?”

  “House.”

  He then turned to Janet. “I’m debating between the finnan haddie and the swordfish. Any suggestions?”

  “The swordfish is fabulous. I had it before I came on duty.” “That settles it,” said Janet, closing the menu. “It’ll be swordfish, rice pilaf, and the house dressing.” The waiter did some quick figuring on his pad. “That’ll be twenty-one fifty.” It was the practice at Legal’s in their relentless efficiency to present the check upon ordering. There was a little explanation for the reason behind this on the paper placemat. Calista read it each time she came and failed to understand how exactly this speeded up service, but the service was always excellent and the food hot. She reached for her bag.

  “Come off it, Cal. Let J. T. Thayer and Sons do it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. When you come to Boston I pay. When I go to New York they can pay.”

  “No! No!”

  “Shut up. It’s my treat. When I want them to redo Rapunzel because the printer messes up the color, remind Thayer and Sons how lavishly I wined and dined you in Boston.” She decided to pay with cash instead of a credit card, which would have necessitated another visit from the waiter, another interruption of their conversation on murder. “I’m not sure Gardiner’s death was accidental,” Calista said as soon as the waiter left.

  “Why not?” Janet said. “Maybe it was suicide?”

  “With a snake?”

  “Oh yeah, I guess that would be hard.”

  “I don’t know why Peter Gardiner would want to commit suicide anyway. I mean he had everything going for him. He was the golden boy of the department. The stuff he was discovering was great. I mean he had it made.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “That was a rather suggestive ‘hmmm.’ You see a motivation? I sure don’t.”

  “No, not a motivation, but golden boys who supposedly have it made can also be under a lot of stress. I mean it all sounds rosy and lovely and golden, but you can’t ever tell. How was his personal life?”

  “Lovely and rosy and golden. He lived with Diane Rudolf. She’s the director of the museum loan sharing program. I think they were planning on getting married sometime in the spring. I don’t really know that much about him. He was a little old to have just finished his doctorate. You know, not much younger than Tom, but I think he had been a student activist in the sixties, went to Columbia, and was involved with the strike back then and dropped out of school for a while. He might have been head of that group SDS. Remember them? Students for a Democratic Society. But then he came to Harvard and just did awfully well.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Cal. I mean I can certainly understand how all this is awful for you. Reawakens everything.” Calista wished people would not use that verb. It was not as if she had put the idea of Tom’s death to sleep for the past year. “But if it wasn’t accidental, are you thinking that, uh . . .” Janet scratched her head. She wasn’t searching for a word. Calista knew that. It was the same hesitation she had felt when she first said to Janet that she thought that Tom’s death was not accidental. “You mean . . . uh . . .” Calista nodded, not so much in assent as to help Janet articulate the word. “Cal,” Janet paused. “You mean murder?” Calista closed her eyes tight and nodded her head again, this time in assent.

  “Yeah,” she whispered.

  “Halibut for you, ma’am, and swordfish for you.”

  “Right here,” Janet said almost gaily.

  He set down the plates. “Anything else?”

  “No, we’re fine,” they both said in unison, then laughed.

  The waiter left. “How’s your swordfish?” Calista asked.

  Janet looked rather startled by the question. “I haven’t tasted it yet.”

  “Well, try it. It looks great.” She took a bite of her own. “Oooh, this is terrific.”

  “Talk about non sequiturs, Cal. Weren’t we just talking about murder?”

  “We were.” Calista put down her fork and knife. “You know it’s just really weird—so strange. The same thing happened last night.” “What happened?”

  “After they announced Peter’s death, I was so stunned. I was a wreck really, and this very nice gentleman from the Altertumskunde Museum in Berlin was there. He and I had been talking and I guess he was so concerned about me that he invited me to have a drink with him at the Ritz, where he was staying. Well, Janet, would you believe that for the first quarter of an hour we talked about my gray hair and the fact that I don’t dye it. We never mentioned Peter Gardiner’s death!” Calista widened her eyes in self wonder. “I guess one might be tempted to say that I have a heavy denial mechanism going.” Cal shook her head in disbelief. “God! That I can talk about gray hair, ask you about your swordfish. I even cracked jokes.”

  “It’s not that weird, Cal. It’s just that we’re not used to it.” “To what?”

  “The big tragedies. Look, Calista, we’re sitting here discussing murder or the possibility thereof, your husband being the victim. It is rather strange. And when you were asking me about the swordfish, and the bit with your gray hair last night. Well . . She stopped suddenly. “I’m just reminded of something I read in a Barbara Pym book. It was something about how life for most of us is the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies, ‘the useless longings rather than the great renunciations.’ ”

  “That’s nice,” Cal said. “Yes, really true. I guess.”

  “Except now—you’ve had the great tragedy.”

  “And murder seems worse than tragedy—regular tragedy, if it’s possible.”

  “But you don’t know it’s murder, Cal. I mean why do you think

  so?”

  “Well, I can’t think of why anyone would really want to kill either Tom or Peter. I don’t know.”

  “A jealous academic type?”

  “Maybe for Peter, but not Tom. Tom was already at the top. But Peter was a rising star.”

  “And rising stars are more vulnerable, Cal, especially in academia, aren’t they?”

  “I suppose so. He was certainly young and on his way up, making new discoveries in an area where people had thought things pretty much tied up with a neat archaeological bow years before. He was getting money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Geographic, you name it. He was sure to get tenure.”

  “I don’t know, Cal,” Janet said, her voice full of doubt.

  “I know all this seems rather farfetched and it certainly doesn’t explain Tom’s death. But two Harvard guys die from rattlesnake bites! It’s a bit much.”

  “Yes. It does fire one’s imagination. But Cal, I don’t see too much you can do about it.”

  “No. You’re right. There’s nothing really I can do. I don’t know —maybe we’ll find out a little more about Peter Gardiner’s death in the next few days. I can’t really ask Diane about it. Poor thing. But things will leak out. The Peabody Museum is a veritable sieve— literally and figuratively.” She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Want another drink or something? I mean, shouldn’t we extend this just to maintain the notion of the infamous three-martini publishing lunch?”

  “No. I don’t need anything more. Remember we’re supposed to stay sober enough for me to look at the Rapunzel sketches.”

  “Oh Rapunzel! Rapunzel!” Calista trilled. “Listen, I’ve got to stop at the fish counter on our way out and pick up something for dinner. You’ll get to meet Herr von Sackler tonight. I figure you and I will need a break, and, who knows, I might even need a chaperon as well as an editor.”

  “I hope so. He sounds very attractive.”

  “He is, but I just have this hang-up about his Germanness. His being a Nazi.”

  “Oh Cal!”

  “Well, he’s at least fifty-five and couldn’t have been a baby during the war.”

  “Now Cal!”

  “I know. But I can’t help it.” She paused and raised her eyebrows slightly in a bemused expression, then in a very matter-of-fact tone added, “He is terribly good looking. I was about to say superior good looks. Achtung!”

  “Now, now, Cal!” Janet laughed.

  “I know it’s silly but did you ever read that Anne Sexton poem The Lover’—‘my Nazi’ she calls him, ‘with his s.s. sky blue eye.’ ” “Cal, I think you’re having approach-avoidance problems.”

  “I know I am—and denial of sexual something or other. More mine than his.”

  “You said it. I didn’t.”

  “I know. And I’m the one who said I might be horny, too. Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter 13

  It was more of a study than a studio. The windows faced south, not north. The dark walnut walls were lined with books. The single plaster wall displayed pictures—two original Beatrix Potter drawings, several early crayon drawings of Charley’s from his nursery school and kindergarten days, a poster from the San Francisco Opera Company’s production of Hansel and Gretel for which Calista had designed the sets. There was also a picture of her parents taken on a beach in 1924. Her father was wearing the old-style men’s bathing suit with a top. Her mother looked trim and oddly playful in a pale jersey swimsuit belted at the waist with two diamonds on the rib cage pointing toward a very flat bosom. On the shelf by her drawing table were more family pictures—Tom, herself and Tom, Tom with a newborn Charley, a picture of Tom kissing her just after she had won the Caldecott Medal for Winter Dreams.

  In and among the pictures on the shelves were numerous small toys —a painted wooden Jack in the Beanstalk with a clever mechanism that allowed Jack to climb the beanstalk and a giant’s head to pop out at the top; a plastic fish on a tricycle that moved when a key was wound; three or four of her favorite trout fishing flies including a couple she had invented herself, one of which had performed admirably the last time she had gone fishing. A large wine-colored Heriz rug covered the dark green lacquered floor. Under her drawing table in a trompe l’oeil gesture Calista had painted on the floor a replica of a Meles prayer rug design that she had seen in a book on oriental rugs. In one corner of the room was a severely elegant eighteenth-century wing chair. It was actually an amazingly comfortable chair for sitting despite the rigid angles, which seemed more suitable for the rectitude of John Calvin than Charley Jacobs, who now sat in it and somehow managed to sprawl within its winged confines while he read a computer magazine. Diagonally across from the chair was a piece which Calista considered, in terms of furniture, the chair’s alter ego. It was a Victorian love seat upholstered in crimson and white velvet candy cane stripes. The love seat to Calista seemed not merely suggestive, but redolent of hurried adulterous encounters involving paraphernalia such as garter belts, corsets, and condoms of sheep’s viscera. Calista thought it might have been the kind of furniture that had perhaps inspired Lady Patrick Campbell, when she finally married her lover, to extoll the “peace and quiet of the double bed after the hurly burly of the chaise longue.”

  The love seat, since being in Calista’s possession, had enjoyed only moderate amounts of nonadulterous hurly-burly—most noticeably after the once- or twice-yearly functions at the faculty club. Tom Jacobs avoided the club as diligently as possible other times. For some reason these rather tepid gatherings seemed to have an aphrodisiac effect on both Tom and Calista. She would usually wear something austerely chic as opposed to the drop-dead drab of the other women. She had a few favorite people she always hoped she would see. There was always a quick exchange with the president and his inquiry about her most recent work. They would have a couple of glasses of sherry, avoiding the truly atrocious canapes. She had tried them their first year at Harvard and realized they tasted exactly like the canapes she and her Brownie troop had made back in Indiana in 1952 for a mother-daughter tea. If their good friends Herb and Ethel Goldman were there, they would repair immediately to the Hunan Cafe in Central Square for Szechuan food. Otherwise Tom and Calista usually went straight home. If Charley was at a friend’s house, Tom would often come into Calista’s study with a bottle of Mount Gay rum, soda, and ice. “Just something to chase the sherry taste away. You’d think they’d get better sherry at the faculty club.” Calista would usually remind him that “it,” meaning Harvard, was basically a goyische operation, so what did he expect. She would drop her skirt, step out of her underpants, and hurly-burly would commence.