Forty Martyrs Read online

  “Yes.” Yes, Lowell remembered.

  She stayed on her side, her back to him.

  Softly, she said, “And those Yale guys breaking in to the apartment to steal Cheerios?”

  “Yes,” Lowell said. He’d confronted them in his underwear, stomping down the hall with a baseball bat.

  “Do you remember where the mailbox was, at the condo?” The two of them had lived in many places, and in their folk history and oral tradition the places had shorthand names. “The condo” was a place where they lived for a year up in Freeport. “The apartment” was where they first lived, near the railroad tracks in Wheaton. “The white place” was an apartment they lived in just before he was drafted, second floor of a big white antebellum beauty, Geneva, on the Fox River.

  “There was a mailbox on the front porch,” Lowell said. “It was a wrap-around, remember?”

  “Right,” she said, deep in covers, staring away, her back to him. “I forgot that porch.” Quiet again for a few minutes. “Lowell,” she said then, turning back to him.

  “Hmm?”

  “I have a lot of questions about the Browns. Carol Brown—I like her, but I don’t know if I trust her.”

  “Trust her how? It’s not like you work with her.”

  Now Veronica was looking right at him. “You do.”

  Ah. There it was.

  “You’ve been seeing her for long enough, don’t you think? Doesn’t she need a female counselor to spill her pretty little guts to?”

  Lowell saw Carol Brown once or twice a week in therapy, group and one-on-one. He’d been seeing her for a long time, through her divorce, through her single years, and now into her time with Wally. In fact, Carol did not discuss much of this journey in therapy sessions. For her, therapy was a game, cat and mouse, hide and seek. She had mastered appearing to work at self-revelation, but it rarely happened. Sometimes, but not always, Lowell would push her, but forget it—there would be no throwing open the kimono from Carol Brown.

  “Besides,” Veronica said to him now, “you shouldn’t be going to the same AA meeting as these people, Lowell. You know that. It’s trouble. It’s a dual relationship.”

  Lying there, Lowell pictured Carol talking to him at the office, upright and straight-backed in Lowell’s most straight-backed client chair—how she performed, looking right at him, then averting her eyes, coyly talking away from him into an empty space in the room.

  It was a form of flirtation, for sure, but flirtation was a form of behavior. There was information in it. Lowell liked Carol, despite her cagey indirections. He looked forward to their sessions. She was a runner; she was an accomplished pianist; she was a good mother—most of her talk in therapy was about her high hopes for her wonderful kids, kids from the previous marriage. All available signs were she was a devoted spouse in her own dicey way. In therapy, her story was a little pat, but Lowell was thinking that his chance participation in this recent event could help launch a new frankness maybe.

  Veronica had nothing to worry about with Carol. He wanted to be a good counselor more than he wanted to court this small attraction. If there was a truer truth beyond that, Lowell didn’t want the thought coming into his head now.

  •

  Before the fire, he used to take the occasional glance through a peephole he installed in a painting in the waiting room of his office suite. He’d bought the painting for this very purpose at a student art auction. He fitted it to a hole he drilled through the wall. The peephole was similar to the ones in hotel room doors, only subtler. The tiny fish-eye lens allowed him to see the whole waiting room. His colleagues over in Child Development, in the new Education building, had conference rooms outfitted with one-way mirrors; this was Lowell’s jackleg version of that.

  Lowell’s office was a set of four rooms with a small foyer. He needed this space, because his private practice, by permission of the administration, was meshed with his teaching day and his psychology-related obligations to the school. In other words, he could use the third floor space for his small private practice, on the condition that the college community would have first access and free consideration.

  The office suite was in the big administration building at the college, as were most of the faculty offices. The building, one hundred and twenty years old, sometimes called “Old Main,” was the centerpiece of the campus. It was brick on the outside, oak on the inside, and if the floors were a little wavy and tended to creak, still it was a stately old thing, high ceilings, big heavy doors, a pretty red and blue domed skylight five stories above the matrix marble floor of the main lobby.

  Long ago, Lowell’s office had been the college president’s suite. It had a secret back exit. Behind his desk was what looked like the door to a small closet. Behind the door was a metal spiral staircase that plunged from Lowell’s office, with no other access, down three floors into the basement where there was a small, odd-looking door leading to the outside, padlocked and unused for the last fifty years. The staircase and the peephole made a professional life of stirring around in people’s fears and obsessions kind of interesting.

  Sometimes Lowell would watch James Kelleher, the local Catholic priest, pastor of Forty Martyrs parish, older, long-time resident of the town, wearing an open collared sport shirt, prayer book in his lap, glasses down to the end of his nose, waiting for his hour with one of the associates. Weekly, Lowell would take a glance through the hole at a Vietnam head-case named Howie Packer, who was hearing voices in his head, before having him for his hour. Once in a while Rachel Crowley would be out there, divorced, remarried, divorced again. Rachel was raising her little girl, reading, going to Weight Watchers, “doing” therapy, taking yoga, faithfully working her little job in the Dean’s office, and hell-bentedly engaging in a part-time live-in arrangement with a chiropractor from Arcola. In the waiting room, Rachel and Wally would ignore each other, even though she lived directly across Van Allen Street from the Browns and had for years. It was such a small town.

  Carol would be out there twice a week, though, by design, never when Wally was. Lowell would watch her, too. She’d sit right across from the little peephole, eyes down, legs crossed, one foot kicking with nervous energy. Michael O’Meara, Lowell’s new associate, might walk by her, say hi, and they’d talk and Lowell would watch them. It was interesting to watch Carol animate in her certain special way, because, after all, for her this wasn’t Candid Camera. She knew about the peephole.

  In the weeks after the Browns’ Car Debacle, Lowell managed to get Wally back into exercise. A phase evolved in which on many afternoons Wally would mosey down the hall to Lowell’s office and wait for him to get free so they could run or go to the gym. Through his little peephole, Lowell liked to spot Wally and study him a bit. There he was, Professor Brown, History, his compulsory copy of the New York Times in his lap. If he wasn’t reading it, he’d be staring out the window, closed posture away from the rest of the room. Overtly he’d bend, acting like he was real interested in someone down by the pond or passing on the sidewalk. He had a broad, gnarled way about him, a tight fist of a man, private in his soul. This could be mistaken for the standard posture of a professor in late mid-career, but it was way more than that.

  In that dark season, Wally’d had another spell. He’d passed out in the bathroom at home, landing on his face on the edge of the clawfoot bathtub. Concussion, broken nose. Carol did tell Lowell about this—Wally didn’t, because Wally had become Lowell’s running and racquetball pal, not a client. When Lowell asked him about these events, as a friend, Wally called them “episodes”—the car debacle, the bathroom disaster. He was plenty annoyed that Carol had told Lowell about the bathroom thing, like the condition of his face the week after didn’t require explanation. Staring at him through the little hole, Lowell watched and worried about Wally Brown.

  When they began their workouts, Lowell had coaxed Wally to schedule a physical, and that led to a prescription for Prozac and the doctor’s strong admonition for Wally to improve
his diet and get serious about exercise. Lowell had hoped to play a part in getting Wally going, then to ease out. They started varying the routine. They’d lift weights sometimes instead of running. In addition to racquetball, they’d do power yoga. Lowell told him to run alone more often. He told him to run sometimes with his own wife—Carol had been running for years. The main thing was, Lowell didn’t want Wally’s exercise routine to depend on anyone other than Wally. Sometimes it did seem like Wally had gotten more independent about it. Lowell might see him at the gym lifting weights alone. Once he spotted him running out in the countryside, no one else in sight. Lowell would rejoice for a few days, but then he’d look through the hole and there Wally’d be, in his usual chair by the window, waiting.

  By the fall after the summer after the late spring of the Browns’ Car Debacle, there wasn’t a single sign that Wally’s exercise was working, and one day Lowell happened upon a scene in the registrar’s office, first floor of Old Main. Dropping something off there, he saw Wally in the middle of a nasty argument with Ed Ewan, the rickety, white-haired registrar, over some lame class load issue, way too little a deal for such a big deal. Lowell stuck an arm between them, and as he did he saw that look on Wally’s face, like when Wally was about to pass out on the day of the debacle. Staring into Wally’s distracted, bloodshot eyes, Lowell said, “How’s it going, bro?”

  It took a few seconds for a response to rise up through the clouds. “Great,” Wally finally said. “It’s going great,” he said, and his red hand let go of Ed’s starched white shirt. He backed toward the door, looking around the office—then, head down, he retreated into the hall and was gone. Make a note, Lowell thought: Call the doc, switch the meds.

  “Your pal’s gone off his nut,” a ruffled Ed Ewan said. Then it was Lowell looking around the registrar’s office. The whole staff was staring at him.

  •

  Veronica and Lowell had a daughter named Monique who had always been called Misty. She was twenty and a student at the college. For a few bad years, Lowell and his daughter had been sideways. Lowell’s fault, midlife and booze. But then things started going right, and before long he and Misty were doing better. Sometimes on a weekend afternoon, they’d run together in the neighborhood. She was fast and he wasn’t, but she slowed down for him. After things got better between them, Misty seemed to enjoy mothering him, in a kidding sort of way. “Dad, you gotta drop some weight.” “Dad, please don’t wear black Levis anymore when my friends are around.” “Dad, do you ever watch Wayne Dyer on TV? You should, you could learn something.” Happily, she’d become a psychology major, which seemed to signal some faith in him. “Dad, don’t you think you might be slightly ADD yourself?” Admittedly, his edition of the diagnostic manual was older than hers, and he hadn’t looked at it recently, but Lowell was of the bias that ADD was a fad diagnosis created to expand the market for some drug that was used to treat it. Still, it did his heart good that his daughter was majoring in his field and testing her diagnostic mettle on him.

  She was a real runner, and she wore a heart monitor. The apparatus had two parts—a heart sensor that was part of a strap around the runner’s chest, and a watch worn on the wrist that was in communication with the heart sensor. Real runners could use this instrument to maintain their heart rate at a certain level for maximum aerobic benefit. Old guy runners, like Lowell, could monitor their heart rate while running and avoid overexertion and an unattractive death on a neighborhood street.

  “Dad,” Misty began to say to him from time to time as they ran, “a man your age should be wearing a heart monitor out here.” She probably said it because of how loud he was panting as he tried to keep up.

  Amazingly, one day she bought him one.

  He only used it once. That day, running by himself, he was well into his fourth mile, tired and hot, and suddenly realized all he had to do was look down at his wrist and he could see what his heart rate was. So he glanced down and, through sweat running into his eyes, he saw a pulse rate of 197. That didn’t seem too good. So he put away the heart sensor strap and used only the watch function, for timing his runs.

  Then one day that following spring he and his daughter were jogging on the streets near the house. He knew she was slowing down for him, but still he felt like he was doing well, strides long, breathing good, the rhythm right. Then his running watch started beeping. It had never beeped before. He didn’t know how to stop it. He put his hand over it to suppress the sound, hoping Misty didn’t hear it. After a while it would stop, then later while they were in the middle of some conversation it would beep again.

  “Damn.”

  “Watch your language, Daddy,” Misty said with a daughterly laugh. “It’s just your heart monitor”

  They ran on for a while. The beeping would relent. Half a mile later, for no reason known to science, it would beep again.

  “Just shut it off, Pops.”

  “I’m not wearing the monitor.”

  “What?” she said. They kept trotting along, beep beep beep. “Real nice. I bought it for you and you don’t wear it. Geez. A hundred bucks.”

  “Well, I’m not wearing the damn thing, and it’s beeping anyway.”

  Misty traded places with him, let him run at the curb while she ran on the side toward traffic. No more beeping. Down the street they went for a while, smooth as silk.

  Finally she spoke again. “It was my heart monitor, setting off your watch, case you didn’t notice.”

  “You mean your heart beat?”

  “Hard to explain.”

  “You mean my watch?”

  “Trust me.”

  “But shouldn’t there be some kind of privacy code or something, so our monitors don’t get crossed up?”

  “Shshshshshshsh. Settle down, Pops.” She was joking with him.

  “Couldn’t you find out all my secrets? Would my heartbeat show up on your cell phone?”

  “Yeah, right. Paranoid!”

  He loved her. It didn’t bother her at all to joke around and run too fast at the same time. Down the street they went, steady as can be.

  “This is pretty good,” he said. “I sort of like wearing a watch that’s in touch with your heart.”

  “Awww,” she said. By then they were in mile five, and it was all he could do to keep up with her. It didn’t seem one bit right. He’d watched her being born. And on they ran for a while. As they came into the last of it, they were both quiet and concentrating—lift the legs, steady the pace. And right about that time Veronica pulled up next to them in their Corolla.

  She spoke quietly but fast. “Hop in, you guys—it’s bad news. Old Main’s on fire.”

  •

  Lowell was getting a second doctorate at the time. He had a Ph.D. in Clinical, but after he stopped drinking he found new energy and now he wanted an Anthropology doctorate, too. He’d been at it a long time. His desktop computer, with dissertation on the hard drive, backup disks on the bookshelf, laptop with backup copy on its hard drive, backup tape system with desktop and laptop hard drives backed up, and zip drive backup system to make sure, were all in his office. As Veronica drove them toward the college he saw smoke from blocks away, rolling in a spark-filled black ball up into the sky and filling every downwind nook and cranny of the neighborhood. Old Main was five stories tall including basement and attic, and nearly a block long. As they got closer to the fire, Lowell was doing inventory on the things that would be gone. Twelve years of client files, his father’s Buck hunting knife, pictures, the Anthro dissertation lock-stockbarrel. A lifetime of books. Parallel losses for his associates. The great place itself, the comfortable familiarity of its spaces, the windows looking out over the lawn and the fountain, the peephole, the secret spiral stairs behind his desk.

  “Jesus,” Misty mumbled as they rounded the last corner. The south end of the building was engulfed top to bottom. Arcola, Tuscola, West Ridge, and the local chemical plant’s fire trucks were either already there or just arriving. Fire hoses stretche
d across the streets and across the grass, but police hadn’t yet stopped traffic.

  “They’ll never put this one out,” Misty said. From the back seat, she leaned forward and put her hand on Lowell’s shoulder. “Dad, the whole thing’s gonna burn.” His heart monitor watch started beeping. From all directions, the fire was being blasted by water. A paper brigade had been set up at the main door. Students, faculty, and staff passed records and files from the various administrative offices hand to hand a safe distance out onto the building’s big expanse of lawn. On the upper floors, people dropped things from their office windows. They were saving all they could. Police were blowing whistles and waving their arms. Everyone ran, all directions. Lowell could hear the fire crackling, big pieces of Old Main falling.

  Veronica pulled up on the drive at the north end of the building, amid a scattering of fire trucks. Lowell looked up to his third-floor office. It seemed fine, at the far end of the building from the fire. Actually, if one thought about it, there was a little time left. He got out of the car. Veronica said something to him, but he got the door closed just in time.

  He walked toward the building, glancing at the small defunct door that was at the foot of his private spiral staircase. A fireman stood guard at the north entrance. To get to him, Lowell had to walk under yellow tape just being strung by the police department and climb a set of steps to a concrete porch where the north door was. The fireman, a member of the Brotherhood of Tuscola Volunteer Fire Fighters, held a large ax on his shoulder.