Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates
But there was the please, that mitigated.
“Yes, sir.”
SOON THEN THE INTERN KNEW more of the Investigator than the Investigator could have guessed she might know.
She knew his name(s). His birth name, his early professional name, the “Investigator”-name(s) under which he published. And his bank-account name(s).
Not only could the Intern forge the Investigator’s signature(s), it was her task, as the Investigator bid her, to forge these signatures when he was too busy to be interrupted for such mundane tasks.
“The only thing we can’t ‘forge’ is a legal document. For that, we need witnesses and a notary public.”
Here was a surprise: for all that the Investigator was famously secretive and reclusive, “impossible to interview”—(as the author of the Shame! series was described on the Internet, for instance)—contacting even his distinguished New York City and London publishers and his agents through a maze of fictitious email identities, he was astonishingly casual with the Intern once he’d determined that he could trust her.
He’d seemed to know, by the set of the Intern’s impassive little face in which her eyes appeared large and stark and shrewd and yet uncertain, that she was guileless as she appeared, and could have no motive for betrayal. And perhaps he took for granted that, like previous young female interns in his employ, she adored him.
The Intern was not one to adore. Not for a very long time.
Neither would have acted upon this adoration. It was just there—like a talisman dangling about the Intern’s neck which you could choose to see or not-see.
The Intern had been surprised to learn that the Investigator, born Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr. in St. Paul, Minnesota, on March 1, 1938, had been a seminarian at the Jesuit seminary at Rockland, Minnesota, from 1958 to 1959; he’d dropped out of the seminary to attend the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1963 with a B.A. in psychology and anthropology. Ever afterward the Investigator was known to say that he’d never abandoned the Jesuit imperative—Love God, and do what you will.
God he interpreted as the “most exalted” of all human projects—as the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach had believed. Human will, human love, human hope, human desire—a gigantic image projected upon a screen, a sky-screen of blue opacity.
The Intern supposed that this must be so. She had no religious beliefs of her own.
The Investigator had been a scornful unbeliever—a “militant atheist”—after he’d left the seminary and the Roman Catholic Church; now, decades later, he was still contemptuous of religious institutions, but sympathetic with individuals for whom religious faith was a necessity of life.
The Investigator had abandoned the Midwestern Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr. sometime in the 1960s.
Soon then, there appeared Cornelius Hinton, with advanced degrees from Harvard, Cambridge University, and Columbia University.
Hinton was an energetic and seemingly ambitious academician. His fields were semantics, social psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind—the least penetrable of disciplines. In the 1970s Hinton began to be published widely in academic journals and to be offered professorships at distinguished universities—Columbia, Duke, Yale, Cornell. He moved about as a visiting professor. As a visiting fellow at research institutes. He had no interest in academic rank or in tenure—often, he stayed at a university for only a single semester. He lived in the (rented) homes and apartments of professors on leave. In Ithaca he’d lived much of the time at a campsite in Lebanon State Park a half-hour’s drive from the Cornell campus. He wore his hair long. He ceased shaving. He leased cars, when necessary. He preferred bicycles even in cold weather which, in upstate New York, can be very cold, blustery and snowy indeed.
In 1991 he accepted a fellowship at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia. Soon after that, a permanent and high-paying position at the Institute for Advanced Research at Florida State University–Temple Park where multi-millionaire Fort Lauderdale donors were hoping to establish a world-class research institution. Yet, strangely, Cornelius Hinton seemed to have ceased publishing at about the time he arrived in Temple Park.
The Investigator’s first, controversial bestseller in what would be the SHAME! series had actually been published in 1979: this was SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 1977–78, a vividly narrated undercover account of the largest state-run home for mentally ill adolescents in Pennsylvania, Arcadia Hall in Philadelphia. This was a psychiatric medical facility in which attendants routinely harassed, beat, and sexually abused their charges while medical staffers and administrators ignored complaints until serious injuries and a death occurred. SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 1977–78 was presented in diary form by the Investigator who remained anonymous within its pages; according to the book cover, the author was “J. Swift”—the Investigator’s homage to his great predecessor Jonathan Swift. From a brief biographical note on the book’s dust jacket you learned little of “J. Swift” except that he’d been born in the Midwest “at the end of the Great Depression” and had “traveled widely, and deeply, within U.S. borders”; there was no jacket photo. From the diarist account itself you surmised that “the Investigator” was an impassioned individual who had once intended to become a Jesuit but who’d dropped out of the seminary to become involved in the civil rights movement. Preparing to write SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 1977–78 the Investigator had trained as a medical attendant at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing; he’d worked twelve-hour days for nine increasingly stressful months at Arcadia Hall, recording and photographing his experiences, until he was fired for “insubordination”—trying to intervene between patients and fellow attendants.
It was a part of the controversy of SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 1977–78 that the author had been beaten, injured, and hospitalized himself; his assailants had eventually been arrested, tried and found guilty of criminal assault and battery. His life had been threatened numerous times but by the time SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 1977–78 was published, and climbing bestseller charts following a sensational front-page review in the New York Times Book Review by the distinguished psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, the mysterious “J. Swift” had disappeared from Philadelphia with no plans to return.
In 1979, this had occurred. Not until seven years later would the Intern be born.
Of course, already in high school she’d heard about the SHAME! series, which eventually included nine books, each a blunt, shocking, and meticulously researched diarist account by the individual who called himself “the Investigator”; on book covers, the author remained “J. Swift.” Over the years, J. Swift’s biographical information scarcely expanded except to include an ever-growing list of awards—National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Anisfield-Wolf Award, Pulitzer Prize. The Investigator/J. Swift seemed to have no private life—no wife, no family, no fixed place of residence. And no photo.
The zealous Investigator had gone undercover to visit horrendous factory farms in the Midwest, and dispiritingly understaffed V.A. hospitals in New England; he’d infiltrated slaughterhouses supplying fast-food chains—(in forthright homage to one of his heroes, Upton Sinclair, of The Jungle); he’d infiltrated medical research laboratories experimenting on chimpanzees, dogs, and cats—(managing to take terrifying photographs, released on the Internet to much protest and outrage). Under a name other than “J. Swift” he’d been arrested in San Francisco as an animal rights activist—(“terrorist” was the official charge)—and as an “eco-terrorist”—but charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. (The Intern would learn, when going through the Investigator’s finances, that he’d been a generous donor to such animal rights organizations as PETA, Animal Rights Liberation Front, and Animal Rights Militia, as he’d been a generous donor to leftist-activist organizations like Code Pink and feminist organizations like Females Without Borders.) The Investigator’s most recent best-selling book was SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR, published in 2009, a harrowing exposé of several co
Before the book was officially published, the Investigator had turned his findings over to the Nassau County prosecutor and the New York State federal attorney general; excerpts published in The New Yorker had stirred a national firestorm of protest and outrage.
Eventually, the corrupt judges pleaded guilty to charges of accepting bribes, lost their positions and were sentenced to prison terms varying from seven to fifteen years.
Seven to fifteen years! With time out for “good behavior,” in moderate-security (state-run) prisons, the ex-judges would serve just a fraction of their sentences.
With the bribes from the private-prison facilities they’d bought expensive cars, a yacht, new homes; they’d built swimming pools, taken luxury cruises to the Bahamas, sent their children to expensive private schools. (None of the bribe-money had been returned.)
So far, the private-prison facilities hadn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.
In totalitarian China, government officials like the corrupt judges might have been executed.
Out of disgust with the Nassau County judiciary, the Investigator was turning his attention to capital punishment in the United States in the past several years following the highly publicized successes of the Innocence Project—specifically, to those states in which the frequency of executions had not slowed despite revelations of wrongly convicted individuals on Death Row, through DNA testing. While states like Illinois, New York, and New Jersey had acted immediately to suspend all executions pending further investigations, such states as Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida had hardly reacted to the disclosures of the Innocence Project at all. “It’s as if they don’t give a damn, whether a convicted person is ‘guilty’—once he’s been found ‘guilty’ by a jury or a judge. Whether a person is innocent isn’t a factor in whether the state kills him.” The Investigator was incensed, indignant.
It was for this project that the Investigator had hired the Intern.
He’d warned her that it could be “stomach-turning”—“possibly even dangerous.” They would try to be admitted into maximum-security Death Row prisons in disguise as lawyers, criminologists, or university professors in sociology, psychology; if prison officials knew who the Investigator was, the muckraking author of the notorious SHAME! series, he would never be granted admittance. The Intern would be less carefully scrutinized, he was sure—“As my assistant, you can go virtually anywhere I can go. No one will look at you.”
“MCSWAIN! DEAL WITH THESE.”
A stack of envelopes, not-yet-opened.
It was one of the Intern’s tasks to cash the Investigator’s checks and to pay the Investigator’s bills for him, for the Investigator had a fastidious dislike of what he called finances.
Envelopes containing the Investigator’s royalty checks—(to “J. Swift” as well as “Cornelius Hinton” and several others)—he could not bring himself to open, or, if he did, he could not bring himself to glance at the figures, as if to see the extent of his income might be an act of immodesty. Even “Cornelius Hinton’s” monthly checks from the Institute, he could barely bring himself to examine.
Such tasks, as well as paying bills, the Investigator gave over entirely to the Intern, surprisingly soon after the Intern came to work for him. (Not at the Institute but in the Investigator’s stucco town house on the Rio Vista Canal connecting Temple Park with Fort Lauderdale, which the Investigator was leasing from a colleague on leave at the university. As if incidentally, the town house had a two-storey living room mostly glass-walled, with a view, dazzling in the morning, of the Atlantic Ocean and the misty sky above the ocean a mile and a half to the east.)
So this is what bestseller means!—the Intern whistled thinly through her teeth.
“He’s rich! Money spilling out of bank accounts, he doesn’t know what to do with.”
And there were translations and foreign sales, reissued paperback editions of old titles, as well as new titles; adaptations of several of the SHAME! titles into TV and film documentaries, in Europe; even, in Sweden, a proposed stage adaptation of SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR to be produced by a major Stockholm theater.
The Investigator dressed well, in a gentlemanly fashion, when he wanted Professor Cornelius Hinton to present a convincing image to the public; but overall, so far as the Intern could determine, the Investigator lived well within his means, owned no property and only grudgingly leased a high-end vehicle, in the late winter of 2012 a steel-colored Acura MDX, of practical use for his trips by car to Death Row prisons.
(The Intern had not been misleading when she’d assured the Investigator that she had a driver’s license—somewhere. Since she’d been hired by him, she had managed to acquire, through a Fort Lauderdale acquaintance with a contact in the Broward County Motor Vehicle Department, a laminated driver’s license with a photo ID issued to Sabbath McSwain born 8/15/86. For the Investigator would not drive any vehicle, for any purpose, if he could avoid it.) Along with routine bills—gas, electricity, insurance—the Intern paid bills to a number of services each month, one of them a long-term-care hospital in Minneapolis called Mount Saint Joseph. Also, a check for fifteen hundred dollars went out each month to F. J. Mackie, of St. Paul; another, for a slightly lower sum, to Denise Delaney, of Chicago; still others, for varying amounts of money, to a dozen individuals of whom most lived in the Midwest. (Relatives, former spouses, children? Did the Investigator have children? Grandchildren?) One of the accounts, to which the Investigator had paid more than thirty-five thousand dollars between 2005 and 2011, to a party named Hollis Whittaker, resident of White Plains, New York, had been closed in 2011; in red pencil, the Investigator had written F I N I across the name in his handwritten bank account record.
At several colleges and universities including the University of Minnesota, Wake Forest College, Ithaca College, Loyola College of Chicago, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Temple Park, Florida, the Investigator had established scholarship funds for undergraduates with endowments ranging from $500,000 to $900,000. At Cornell University, in addition, there had been established, in 2007, the J. Swift Fellowship in Bioethics and Investigative Reportage, with an endowment of $900,000, for graduate and post-doc students.
Which meant, as the Intern rapidly calculated, that the Investigator had given away several million dollars within the past decade—a fact no one else could know since no one had tabulated and made a note of it and very likely, the Investigator couldn’t have named the numerous scholarships he’d endowed.
In a spare room of the rented town house, on a white Parsons table that stretched the length of the room, were accordion-files of letters: typed and even handwritten letters. Hundreds of these dating back to the late 1960s. (A note from a previous intern, on a Post-it, sta
And there were files of more recent, email letters. Most of these were from editors, some were from readers, a scattering were from friends and acquaintances, former academic associates of the Investigator, students. Salutations were to J. Swift, Cornelius Hinton, “Andy.” (Could “Andy” be an affectionate diminutive of “Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr.” who’d disappeared decades ago?) The Intern skimmed this miscellany, alert to such phrases as Love, Much love, Love always.
Mixed with letters were cards. Savage-beautiful art postcards, reproductions of paintings by Matisse, Derain, Rousseau . . . The most gorgeously gaudy cards appeared to have been sent by the same individual whose scrawled name might have been Isabel, or Inez.
The last of these cards was dated 2/22/08 and the postmark was Brussels, Belgium.
The Intern had been instructed to “tidy things up”—“identify, with labels”—“dispose of duplicate books, galleys, etc.” in the rented stucco town house. Less than a year’s lease remained on the town house and the Investigator hadn’t given a thought—of course—to where he might move next. (The Investigator was notoriously careless about planning for an immediate, domestic future: his concentration was focused upon the current project.)
Previous interns had sorted, filed and labeled much of the Investigator’s materials. The Intern discovered, in cardboard boxes neatly labeled by years—(1970–1980; 1980–1990, etc.) –publications in which the Investigator’s work had appeared, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper’s and TLS; copyedited manuscript pages and galleys for the SHAME! books; print interviews with the Investigator, under the name J. Swift; swatches of reviews, some laudatory and some not. In a folder marked SUMMER 1981/ASPEN were photographs of a festive outdoor wedding in which the Investigator, in his early forties, didn’t appear to be the groom but—possibly—the best man. He was wearing a tie-dyed suit of some eccentric material like burlap; on his feet were sandals, and on his head dark bristling snaky braids like dreadlocks; his beard wasn’t close-trimmed as it was now but wide, dark, and curly. He didn’t look so much like himself—rather more like a ruddy American-simulacrum of the revolutionary Che Guevara.