When The Bough Breaks

"He'll see you. As long as I come along, and quote: Give me a brisk massage, young lady. You'll be prolonging the years of a living fossil, unquote. The old lecher," she added affectionately.

I asked her about Towle's name on Kruger's card.

"REL - F - related family. Apparently your two subjects are cousins of some sort."

"Why isn't that listed on Towle's card as well?"

"The heading was probably added after he graduated. Rather than go back and mark each card they simply used it on the new ones. DLT, though, is more interesting. He's been deleted from the file."

"Why's that?"

"I don't know. It doesn't say. It never would.

Some transgression. With his family background it had to be something big. Something that made the school want to wash its hands of him." She looked up at me. "This is getting interesting, isn't it?"

"Very."

She put the cards back in the envelope and locked it in her desk.

"I'll take you to Van der Graaf now."

22

A gilded cage of an elevator took us to the fifth floor of a domed building on the west side of the campus. It relaxed its jaws and let us out into a silent rotunda, wainscoted in marble and veneered with dust. The ceiling was concave plaster upon which a now faded mural of cherubs blowing bugles had been painted: we were inside the shell of the dome. The walls were stone and gave off an odor of rotting paper. A stationary diamond - paned window separated two oak doors. One was labeled MAP ROOM and looked as if it hadn't been opened in generations. The other was blank.

Margaret knocked on the unadorned door and, when no answer was forthcoming, pushed it open. The room it revealed was highceilinged and spacious, with cathedral windows that afforded a view of the harbor. Every free inch of wall space was taken up by bookshelves crammed haphazardly with ragged volumes. Those books that hadn't found a resting place in the shelves sat in precariously balanced stacks on the floor. In the center of the room was a trestle table piled high with manuscripts and still more books. A globe on a wheeled stand and an ancient claw - footed desk were pushed in a corner. A McDonald's take - out box and a couple of crumpled, greasy napkins sat atop the desk.

"Professor?" said Margaret. To me: "I wonder where he's gone."

"Peek - a - boo!" The sound came from somewhere behind the trestle table.

Margaret jumped and her purse flew out of her hands. The contents spilled on the floor.

A gnarled head peeked around the curled edges of a pile of yellowed paper.

"Sorry to startle you, dear." The head came into view, thrown back in silent laughter.

"Professor," said Margaret, "shame on you." She bent to retrieve the scattered debris.

He came out from behind the table looking sheepish. Until that point I'd thought he was sitting. But when the head didn't rise in my sight I realized he'd been standing all along.

He was four feet and a few inches tall. His body was of conventional size but it was bent at the waist, the spine twisted in an S, the deformed back burdened with a hump the size of a tightly packed knapsack. His head seemed too large for his frame, a wrinkled egg topped by a fringe of wispy white hair. When he moved he resembled a drowsy scorpion.

He wore an expression of mock contrition but the twinkle in the rheumy blue eyes said far more than did the downturned, lipless mouth.

"Can I help you, dear?" His voice was dry and cultured.

Margaret gathered the last personal effects from the floor and put them in her purse.

"No, thank you, Professor. I've got it all." She caught her breath and tried to look composed.

"Will you still come with me on our pizza picnic?"

"Only if you behave yourself."

He put his hands together, as if in prayer.

"I promise, dear," he said.

"All right. Professor, this is Bill Roberts, the journalist I spoke to you about. Bill, Professor Garth Van der Graaf." /

"Hello, Professor."

He looked up at me from under sleepy lids.

"You don't look like Clark Kent," he said.

"I beg your pardon."

"Aren't newspaper reporters supposed to look like Clark Kent?"

"I wasn't aware of that specific union regulation."

"I was interviewed by a reporter after the War - the big one. Number two - pardon the scatological entendre. He wanted to know what place the war would have in history. He looked like Clark Kent." He ran one hand over his liver - spotted scalp. "Don't you have a pair of glasses or something young man?"

"I'm sorry, but my eyes are quite healthy."

He turned his back to me and walked to one of the bookshelves. There was queer, reptilian grace to his movements, the stunted body seeming to travel sideways while actually moving forward. He climbed slowly up a footstool, reached up and grabbed a leather bound volume, climbed down and returned.

"Look," he said, opening the book which I now saw was a looseleaf binder containing a collection of comic books. "This is who I mean." A shaky finger pointed to a picture of the Daily Planet's star reporter entering a phone booth. "Clark Kent. That's a reporter."