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There was never a time when I was not in love with Mr. Fox. There was never a time when Mr. Fox was not my life. Because before Mr. Fox came into my life our souls knew each other in the time before where there is no time.
It will be no ordinary morning.
Wieland Pond, many acres of wetlands designated by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as the Jorgen Bird Sanctuary.
the Langhorne Academy is one of the most selective private schools in the country, catering to parents ambitious for their children, and a record of “activities” is considered valuable.
Most of the region is uncharted, uninhabited, like the Pine Barrens. If you had a fantasy of disappearing—or causing another person to “disappear”—where would be more inviting?
Venomous snakes, black bears, quicksand. A wilderness in which cell phones are useless.
There is no place in the pinelands wo cell service
Picking him up at Kroger’s after his shift,
There is no Kroger in Atlantic county
for in 1937 the United States and Nazi Germany were not (yet) at war, and were not enemies; indeed, sentiment in much of southern New Jersey, a bastion of the Ku Klux Klan, was likely to be pro-German.
there was something of the dreamy Balthus prepubescent in the elusiveness of Mary Ann Healy’s gaze; yet,
If an animal, has to be a black bear, plentiful in South Jersey.
mean—I would assume yes. It would be difficult for anyone to take public transportation from Wieland, he’d have to drive to Lakehurst to get a train to New York.”
So accustomed to “historic” private school campuses, Francis Fox scarcely sees them any longer. His habitat, where a fox is as camouflaged as a lion amid tall sere grasses in the African plain.
Never does Francis Fox socialize with students. Not a good idea even if they beg you. For it is not in gatherings that Francis Fox comes most alive. That is strictly in private.
dreamily Francis is recalling exquisite passages in Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, or summoning to his ardent inner eye the coolly erotic jeunes filles of Balthus, his pantomime of rapt attention to the bright-dazzling repartee around him is so skillful that no one notices.
fifty-one-year-old virgin Pallas Athena led to assume that anything she does, or says, or believes is beyond doubt or reproach.
Imogene mentions that one of the upper-level instructors has put Nabokov’s Lolita on a recommended list for advanced placement English students, to which revelation Francis flares up at once, indignant. “What! Lolita! That’s ridiculous. Lolita isn’t fit for high-school students. That novel is pornography!”
Imogene tries to explain: “It’s a work of literature, a ‘classic’—don’t you think? Notable for Nabokov’s style. The story is titillating but the prose is actually somewhat dense, for most readers, especially teenagers. It’s the wit that makes it palatable.” Francis Fox is frowning, scowling. Imogene is astonished that he seems personally affronted. “Humbert Humbert is a pervert, and the novel is indefensible. A man of, is it forty, forcing sex on a girl of eleven, disgusting! Also, anatomically impossible.”
Lolita was obviously based on a young boy, Francis says, and Humbert Humbert was a homosexual in the mode of Aschenbach of Death in Venice. Nabokov himself may well have been a homosexual, which would account for the homophobia in his fiction. But Nabokov hadn’t the honesty to confront his homosexuality, in the tradition of Marcel Proust, who created his fictional Albertine, a gay man’s notion of a girl, in Remembrance of Things Past. There is a reason, a very good reason, Francis says, why Poe’s marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin was a mariage blanc. Sexual relations with a girl so
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Slantwise he looks again, of course this twelve-year-old sylph isn’t Miranda Myles returned to him from the dead like Poe’s Annabel Lee embalmed, perfect and unyielding to mortality, crude decomposition.
In fact, she bears an eerie resemblance to Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming except that her legs are not luridly bared but chastely obscured by the pleated skirt of her school jumper.
Twelve years is the prime age, Fox has found. Thirteen can be exquisite. By the age of fourteen often the fatal mammalian coarseness has set in, inexorably: tiny breast-buds begin to thicken; hips, thighs, legs of even the most lithesome prepubescent girls begin to fill out.
Francis Fox’s favorites—Sleeping Beauties, as he calls them. (In homage to Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, a tenderly erotic novel Francis has read so many times that pages in his paperback edition have fallen out.)
By the time Demetrius starts working at the Langhorne Academy at five p.m. he has already put in a full shift at Kroger’s. Six a.m. unloading trucks at the rear of the store, stocking shelves, bagging groceries.
Could kill him, for you. No one would know. This thought has come to Demetrius out of nowhere like an arrow plunging into his breast.
In his bedroom at the rear he has begun to hang reproductions of his favorite Balthus paintings, which he has no intention of hanging in his living room.
is not likely that such a consuming and dangerous obsession will prevail for decades as it is depicted in Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties: a world in which elderly Japanese men pay exorbitant sums for the privilege of merely lying beside young girls while the girls sleep—a pitiful fetish.
which is fundamentally a yearning for beauty, and innocence, and purity of heart, of a kind so powerfully expressed by Edgar Allan Poe in his adoration of his young cousin. Yes, it is Eros, but it is not mere frank crude sex.
Such a scrawny girl! No dreamy Balthus like Genevieve Chambers, no fleshy little rosy-cheeked Renoir like the Healy girl, rather a scribble-sketch of an androgynous female by Giacometti.
“Mr. Fox” in J. Press blazers (navy blue chambray, russet-brown linen), fitted shirts, and designer denim takes pride in charming whoever speaks with him, as a skilled tennis player might take pride in playing with amateurs in such a way that, though he defeats them effortlessly, they imagine that they are near-equals: this requires a very special tact, which few have.
Fox certainly has a high opinion of himself
There must be something in “Mr. Fox” that he cannot see himself, that elicits such responses, primarily in women, as well as in girls. (Not all girls. But most.) As if, being hollow at his core, empty, “Mr. Fox” somehow attracts the fullness of others. That must be it: sincere and ardent emotion flowing into an empty vessel, under the (mistaken) assumption that the vessel will nurture and not poison it.
Wan afternoon sunshine slants through the single window in the basement office illuminating one of the O’Keeffe posters on a wall. Giving an eerie life to the lusterless blind eyes of the bust of Edgar Allan Poe prominent on the edge of the desk.
Pfenning perusing his award-winning poem—an ingenious bricolage of images, phrases, and mordant cadences purloined from a miscellany of poetic forebears from Poe to Frost, Eliot, Roethke, Lowell, Plath, so finely enmeshed no unsuspecting reader could identify them; nor does he want the homely girl lingering in his office, where, in forty-seven minutes, Genevieve Chambers is expected to knock the “secret knock” at his door, which will be discreetly closed at that time.
“All I can say, Officer,” P. Cady tries to speak with care, not wanting to challenge Zwender, let alone seem to be defending Francis Fox, “—is that we had no idea. I had no idea. No one came to us complaining of him. No student, no parent. This poor girl Genevieve…Did she tell anyone?” “It’s common that abused children don’t know they are abused. The girl thinks she loves him—loved him. She thinks he loved her.”
Zwender assures P. Cady that she is hardly alone in being victimized by Francis Fox. Pedophiles like Fox depend upon the naïveté of people around them. They are like parasites boring into living things, hiding in their guts while they devour them from the inside. By the time the victim realizes it’s too late. The serial pedophile is like a serial killer: hiding in plain sight. He’s usually a nice guy, everyone likes him. It’s rare that a young girl isn’t in love with her abuser, that’s how the abuse is possible.
Never before has P. Cady slapped or struck at her beloved Princess Di. Never has she screamed, shouted at the dog in such panic.
P. Cady was warned, when she became headmistress of the school. Local residents resent the Academy and its staff though the school is one of the largest employers in Atlantic County and brings in a large amount of revenue; Zwender is a local resident, and not above personal bias.
P. Cady has directed the dean of students to plan a memorial for Francis Fox as soon as possible, in the largest auditorium at the school, hoping to stave off unsupervised student gatherings and further self-destructive behavior. A beautiful ceremony in Francis’s honor with music performed by the school orchestra, the choral society, poetry recitations, eulogies by Mr. Fox’s students…
Feeling as if the walls are closing in. P. Cady and her niece are too much alike. High-achievers, addicted to work, restless when not at work. Inclined to fret, like birds pecking feathers out of their own breasts.
Impossible to speak of Francis Fox as Zwender spoke of him. Such ugly words as sexual abuse, child pornography. No one at the Academy must ever know!
Any longtime law enforcement officer understands that there are individuals so loathsome, they deserve being murdered, as there are those hapless others who, in the exigency of the moment, as if fulfilling an unvoiced wish of the community to expunge evil in its midst, rise up as angels of wrath, self-sacrificing as Jesus Christ on the cross: if not the father of the abused and denigrated Mary Ann Healy, then who?
All of Fox’s students have been affected. They are obsessed with him. They have prayer vigils at night in the residences. Some students don’t even believe that he is actually dead, they think that someone else’s body was in the ravine. Or, they are haunted by him—they ‘see’ his ghost.
Anything related to new tech / pharmaceutical executives like those working for Bristol Myers Squibb evokes local calumny, a kind of choked rage among longtime Atlantic County residents.
As serial killers are drawn to a similar type of victim, so the pedophile Fox was obviously drawn to a distinct type of victim: slender, petite, pale-skinned, with delicate doll-like features, inclined to passivity, trust. The dreamy girls in the Balthus paintings—(Zwender has researched the French-Polish painter, the very epitome of European decadence!)—wan, with sleepy eyelids, incapable of pushing away an ardent predator-lover.
Worse kind of sex abuse, forcing the victim to feel intense pleasure. Linking the victim to her abuser in a way more insidious than rape. Fox imprinted his helpless victims in a way too deep to be exorcised for they would remember him always as a lover, not a rapist; their first lover.
He didn’t give a damn about the Langhorne Academy though it reputedly brought in a substantial proportion of Atlantic County’s operating budget and he’d come to—personally, privately—respect P.
How Fox had fumed against the novel Lolita! Proof that he couldn’t possibly be a pedophile himself.
“The strange thing is,” Quilty says, as if he has just thought of it, “—Francis was really something of a prude. He became sincerely upset if anyone spoke of Lolita—he thought the novel really was obscene, and shouldn’t be sold.
As if Francis Fox hasn’t brought destruction to both girls’ lives. How many girls’ lives. The most insidious destruction, that is invisible, immeasurable.
All Mary Ann really liked, was reading—here on her bed, she’d cuddle with one of the stuffed animals, that was her favorite time. She said, a book is like a little door, I can open the door and climb through, and nobody can follow me.”
illuminated by the car’s headlights with oneiric over-clarity;
