The School of Night by Louis Bayard

“Thomas Harriot would never have used those words. They were Shakespeare’s coinage, not his.”
    â€œHarriot couldn’t have taken the name for himself?”
    â€œWhy would he? By the time Shakespeare wrote his play, the School—if it ever existed—was almost certainly finished. They wouldn’t have called themselves anything.”
    She turned around. Stared at me.
    â€œSo you’ve been indulging me, Henry.”
    â€œNo. I’ve been contextualizing you.”
    She leaned back against the window frame. “Fuck your context,” she said.
    It was the first time I’d heard her swear. But what struck me most was her tiredness. Her body was shutting down, just as it had yesterday in Stanton Park.
    â€œIf you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I’d like to take a nap.”
    I might have pointed out that she was in my room. Instead, I strolled down to what the motel called, with a certain wistfulness, its ocean veranda. The air was choked with salt, and just to the north of me, in an Adirondack chair, sat a blanketed Maltese dog, gazing out to sea like the doyenne of a sanatorium. We sat there, the two of us, for a good hour, I’d guess, watching the sea oats. And every time my attention flagged, there was Lily Pentzler to snap me back. Lily, with her Alice-blue face.
    When I got back, Clarissa was still awake, looking up at the ceiling fan.
    â€œ Washington Post ,” I said, tossing the paper onto the square of bed by her head. “It’s got Lily’s obit.”
    â€œWhat does it say?”
    â€œI don’t know, I haven’t read it.”
    Clarissa snatched up the paper and riffled to the back of the Metro section.
    â€œHey, wait a minute,” she said. “You said she didn’t have any family.”
    â€œShe didn’t, as far as I know.”
    â€œWell, according to this, there’s a cousin. Joanna Frobisher. Of Hyattsville, Maryland.”
    Hyattsville was a twenty-minute drive from Lily’s apartment. But it wasn’t the proximity that was butting up against my brain.
    â€œRead me that name again,” I said.
    â€œJoanna Frobisher. You know it?”
    â€œI know it.”

13
    M ORE THAN ONCE , in the days since Alonzo’s death, I’d asked myself the same question: What if nobody had seen him jump?
    His suicide note could have blown away. The watch and shoes would have been easy prey for thieves. The coat that washed up a few days later on Bear Island? Just another piece of flotsam, not worth mentioning to anybody.
    Yes, Alonzo Wax could have gone to his end entirely unnoticed if fate hadn’t granted him a witness.
    A forty-six-year-old Hyattsville woman who had gotten lost while taking a late-afternoon hike on the Gold Mine Loop and who, unable to get a cell signal, had decided to tack toward the river in hopes of finding help.
    As she later told the police, all she saw when she approached the Washington Aqueduct Observation Deck was a khaki raincoat, flaring out of the darkness. The human form that stood inside that coat … this came to her only as she got nearer. And then, before she knew it, she was running toward the silent figure on top of the platform. Who was already jumping.
    Stunned, she peered into the torrent of water where he had disappeared. But the night was cloudy, and she had no flashlight. Whoever the man was, whatever his sorrow had been, he was gone.
    *   *   *
    Testifying weeks later at Alonzo’s inquest, she told the court how the whole experience had taught her to value life and never take anyone or anything for granted. You couldn’t, I remember thinking, have scripted a more empathetic witness.
    â€œAnd her name was Joanna Frobisher?” Clarissa asked me.
    I nodded.
    â€œSo what are the chances there could be two Joanna Frobishers in Hyattsville?”
    â€œBoth tied to the same dead man? Not great. Not even particularly