Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Page A

Clammer. Why do I have this feeling it’s not an altogether good thing?”
    “Well, there’s this man and he’s a preacher and his name is Dr. Russell Fumes. Dr. Fumes used to be the chaplain at that whole place when it was the great ol’ state asylum, it was, and then of course it’s just a teeny tiny place now and his cure of souls got just smaller and smaller. So Dr. Fumes was telling people, Now y’all be sure and tell the doctors that you need my coming round and how important it is. And they, I guess, they just didn’t, or not enough of them did. So you know what was on his mind, he was thinking the hospital would stop paying him if he had no customers.”
    “I’m with you, Mom.”
    “Well, then he got John Clammer to accept the Lord as he sees ’um, and John told them he had to have this man Fumes. So Fumes come forward and says he’ll take this man under his pastoral care and I guess they said cool because he’s goin’ aroun’ with Dr. Russell Fumes.”
    “Goin’ around with him? Where the fuck they goin’ around to? Don’t the court know I got a restraining order on that boy?”
    “Well shit, honey, you don’t see him around anywhere, do you?”
    “I want you to make sure you know where he is, you hear! I know you can do that. Every couple days I wanna be reassured I can rehearse and perform and like that without having to shoot that sucker.”
    “Call your lawyer.”
    “I mean, that would look like hell, wouldn’t it? I gotta shoot my crazy husband? Probably gotta shoot old Dr. Fumes too. Cute onscreen no more, Mom. I’ll be a Fatty Arbuckle.”
    “Be what you gotta be, sweetie. He probably ain’t interested in you no more. Everything ain’t all about you no more.”

14
    O NE COLD MORNING, AFTER Maud’s piece had appeared and protest demonstrations against it had begun, Jo Carr walked up College Hill to take a shift at Whelan Hospital. The wind at the top of the hill blew hard and the demonstrators had not arrived, but the Indian flute players were huddled near the glass hospital doorways cradling their instruments. With them was a man Jo thought she recognized. She had been trying to put the sense of recognition beyond her awareness. The sight of him brought her a thrill of fear that reached over time, distance and agonies of spirit.
    He reminded her for all the world of a former priest who had called himself the Mourner. That priest had been one of her own order, a Devotionist in South America. She had known him only briefly then, and though she had not seen him for many years, she heard from time to time about his street theater. His movement raised money through the street performances of Andean music. He was the person she had been reminded of in the dark eyes of the young woman who sang with the montañeros.
    A few days later, on a weekend evening, she was reading alone in the counseling office. The office was mainly below the sidewalk, but the upper third of the window commanded a view of the pavement, a drain full of frozen leaves and the footwear of passersby. When she had first taken the job years before, she had thought the office a strange place: a rather cast-down room in which to rouse depressed, confused or homesick students from their misery. For a while the counseling office had occupied the lobby floor of a downtown office building, sleek and sixties-modern. Now it had been shifted to this cellar of improvisatory afterthought. Owing to a confluence of ironies, counseling had been downgraded in the ranking nomenclature of the college.
    There had been a time when students were simply expected to follow the rules and keep their own counsel. At the end of that era, the introduction of a dozen therapies, from gestalt to transformational breathing, collided with a crisis of confidence in these therapies, with extended individual rights and with the disappearance of in loco parentis as a defining relationship between institution and student. Then there was the expansion of