Animal Appetite

tunnel around Larsen Hall was roaring, and a cold rain had started to fall. Instead of going home on foot, I walked to Garden Street and caught the bus, which was almost empty. Seated alone, I removed my gloves and opened the big manila envelope Claudia had given me. I was eager to see Skip. And Jack Winter Andrews, too, of course. The top photo in the pile was what I took to be a college graduation picture. It showed a handsome, affably smiling young man whose character was not written on his face. He bore no resemblance, I might mention, to me or to any of my paternal relatives. So far as I know, there’s not a single cleft chin in our lines, or if there is, it gets obscured by the Yankee lantern jaw that Jack Andrews had lacked. Also, mainly because of the thick eyebrows that predominate on my father’s side of the family, he and his kin appear far more ferocious than affable.
    Next, a blurry Polaroid showed an older version of the same pleasant-looking man with his arm around a woman I recognized as Claudia. Then, in a family picture taken by an amateur, Jack, Claudia, and two children posed against a background of rhododendrons. The boy was ten, perhaps, the girl four or five years his junior. Jack’s hands rested on the little girl’s shoulders. Her head was tilted backward, Jack’s downward: Father and daughter exchanged grins? Jack and the little girl were on the left, Claudia in the middle, and the boy on the right, next to Claudia, but his shoulders were angled away from her and he wore a grimace. He looked ready to flee the family group.
    The photograph on the bottom of the pile made me catch my breath. It was larger than the others, in sharp focus, and shot from close up. A man’s body lay awkwardly sprawled facedown on a wood floor. The legs were twisted. The right arm was extended, its fingers bent. Beyond the hand, a coffee mug lay in a puddle of liquid.
    Claudia Andrews-Howe had given me a crime-scene shot of Jack Andrews’s dead body.
     

Four

     
    Ever heard of McLean Hospital? Well, if you happen to be a famous Cambridge poet, a rock star, a billionaire novelist, or a Harvard professor, and if you also happen to have cracked up, it’s probably where you went to get patched together. McLean is in the Boston suburb of Belmont, conveniently close to Cambridge, and in the days before managed health care, the hospital looked like a cross between an exclusive country club and a ritzy college: golf course, riding stables, the whole bit. Rita, who did her internship at McLean, went out there recently for a conference about a patient. She returned sighing about such sad signs of decline as peeling paint on the woodwork and weeds in the gravel paths. Hard physical work, I reminded her, was excellent therapy. If the stables and putting greens were no more, the patients need not languish in idle madness, but could be put to work scraping paint and pulling crabgrass, thus building sound minds in sound bodies.
    Anyway, the more I thought about Claudia, the more
    I was reminded of a prominent sign located only a block from McLean that shows an arrow pointing toward Cambridge and reads, in really big letters, HARVARD SQUARE. My idea was that the heavy traffic in both directions called for a corresponding sign in the middle of Harvard Square with an arrow pointing toward Belmont: McLEAN HOSPITAL. Really, it’s a two-way street. A crime-scene photo of her first husband’s dead body?
    On Monday afternoon after I got back from seeing Claudia, I drove to the Brookline Public Library. The first thing I did when I got there was to go to a terminal and type “A = ANDREWS-HOWE, CLAUDIA.” She’d written a couple of books about child care policy, and when I found them on the shelves and skimmed through them, they appeared perfectly sane: She hadn’t slipped in any odd chapters about her first husband’s murder, and there weren’t any illustrations at all, never mind crime-scene photos that had nothing to do with her topic. The reference lists in both books contained numerous articles she’d published in scholarly journals. The bios on her dust jackets didn’t mention a psychiatric history, of course. What I learned from them was that after serving as the director of a Cambridge child care center, she’d gotten her doctorate at the Harvard Ed School. She’d been an assistant professor when the first book was published and was an associate professor by the time the second came out. My Cantabrigian