Sewall protested, and tried to get the officer to take note of my threats, but the police were as disgusted as I was, maybe more so. They live on fifty or sixty thousand a year, but the cops I know, the ones I grew up with, scramble and scrape to care for their families. The idea that a wealthy man would cut his sister loose didn’t sit well with the men I was talking to. They sent Sewall packing. A few minutes later, they took off themselves, with the advice to go home and have a good stiff drink with “hubby.”
The evidence techs lingered a few minutes longer. When they finished with their photographs and measurements, I got up to go, but my legs didn’t want to carry me forward.
I sank onto the chancel stairs, head in hand. I’d been galloping from point A to point B all day, not having time to reflect on anything I was doing, from my meetings with clients, to chasing after Petra, to sprinting across campus in Leydon’s wake. If I’d stopped to think for one second, I could have done it all differently. Leydon would be maddening me with her chatter, but she’d be upright, alive.
I had been in the chapel choir in my student days. Leydon never came to the service. She despised church, but she enjoyed sitting in on choir rehearsals. (“Too many Sundays with Jesus after breakfast and ‘by Jesus, young lady, do as I say’ after lunch. The outside of the plate polished so you could see your reflection, the inside full of filth and mire, you know how that goes.”)
I found myself singing the alto line to a setting of Psalm 39 that Leydon had particularly liked.
“That’s Stravinsky, isn’t it?” A man had joined me on the steps without my noticing. “Let me know my end and the number of my days. I’ve always found that a troubling verse. Would you want that knowledge?”
If I’d known twenty-five years ago what the end of Leydon’s days might look like—that launch from the parapet—what would I have done? Tried harder, probably, to change the ending, but the day would still have come when I would have walked away because Leydon’s problems were too difficult for me to handle.
I’m not prone to unburdening myself to anyone, let alone a stranger in a darkening church, but I was so tired my usual filters weren’t in place. I spoke my thoughts aloud.
“It’s like reading the Iliad,” my companion said. “You want to reach into the text and tell Achilles’ mother to stick his whole foot in the river. You see the danger and want to avert it, but there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes events have a tragic momentum that you’re powerless to halt.
“I’m Henry Knaub, by the way, the chapel dean. The police called to tell me about your friend, but I was at a meeting on the North Side and couldn’t get back sooner.”
“I’m a detective,” I said. “It’s not my nature to be so—so passive in the face of events. I’ve been like one of those tether balls that we used to play with in school, getting batted round and round a pole, so much so that I can’t think!”
“I heard the end of your quarrel with—Leydon, did you say her name was?—with her brother,” Knaub said. “Crisis makes people behave oddly, but if that’s how her family typically responds to her, she was lucky to have you as a friend.”
I shook my head in the gloomy chamber; I hadn’t been much of a friend lately. “She has a phenomenal memory; when we were law students she could remember almost the page where she’d seen a citation or a case reference. If she started to argue with you, or most especially, with her brother, she’d start pulling poetry or legal precedents, or who knows what, out of her hat.
“I was on her side, always, but I didn’t blame her brother for getting wound up. For instance, her brother’s wife is called Faith, and Leydon always refers to her as ‘the Faith once delivered to the sinners,’ meaning Sewall and their parents—they live with Sewall’s mother.”
Knaub chuckled softly. “Oh, yes, that was a favorite line of the reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they were trying to recapture ‘the faith once delivered to the saints.’ Yes, I can see your friend could be trying. Brilliant, but trying.”
“The last few days, according to Sewall, Leydon was going on about a catafalque. She suffers from hypergraphia when she’s cycling high, and she’d written it over and over on a piece of paper I found in your gallery.” I pulled the crumpled paper from my pocket: I saw him on the catafalque.
Knaub squinted at it. “Portrait of the Artist; the child Stephen Dedalus is overhearing adults talk about the death of Parnell.” He was apologetic, as if he thought I’d be embarrassed at having my ignorance exposed.
“One of the differences between Leydon and me.” I smiled with difficulty. “We both read Joyce as undergraduates but his words stuck in her head and not in mine.”
“Could she have seen someone laid out on the communion table here?” the dean asked. “Is she delusional?”
I shook my head. “I can’t tell you; I got here when she was already on the floor. It’s all extremely—Gordian—in her favorite phrase.”