The Raven and the Nightingale Page 12

  I broke into an uncontrollable—and utterly unprofessional—fit of giggles.

  “What was that all about, Doctor?” Piotrowski rose from the green chair and began donning his overcoat.

  Still snickering, unable to speak, I waggled a hand at him helplessly. He gazed at me with a bemused smile on his broad face as he pulled buttons through their holes. When I’d composed myself, I wiped my eyes with a tissue from a pack the lieutenant held out to me. “What was that all about? I couldn’t begin to explain it, Lieutenant. Just think of yourself as an a gent of intellectual justice.”

  Tom Lundgren was lurking outside as I opened my door again. Yep. It was office hours all right. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Tom,” I told him. He blushed. Jeez. I escorted Piotrowski to the photocopier so he could make a copy of the Emmeline Foster poem. When the lieutenant followed me out of the copy room, he nodded at Monica, who gaped at him from the doorway of the English Department office across the hall.

  A memo from the President’s Office was waiting in my mailbox as I headed toward the college pool late that afternoon. Avery was every bit as smooth and reassuring as his job demanded that he be:

  As I am certain all members of the Enfield College community are aware, the tragic death of Professor Elliot James Corbin of the Enfield English Department on Thanksgiving Day at his home has been ruled a homicide. Professor Corbin was a distinguished member of the Enfield faculty for well over two decades, and his scholarly expertise, his collegiality, and his pedagogical presence will be sorely missed by all. A memorial service is being planned for a later date.

  The President’s Office wishes to assure students, faculty, and staff that the College is cooperating in every possible way with law enforcement officials to identify the perpetrator of this heinous crime. Although the assault on Professor Corbin did not take place on the Enfield campus, I feel it incumbent upon me as President to assure all members of our community that customary security measures have been reviewed and enhanced, and that the Enfield College campus is, as usual, a safe environment for study and residential life.

  13.

  Earth is raw with this one note,

  This tattered making of a song

  Narrowed down to a crow’s throat,

  Above the willow-trees …

  —LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE

  JANE BIRDWORT PADDED AROUND the locker room naked. I dropped my gym bag by the end of a bench, shrugged out of my heavy jacket, sat down to remove my boots. Since my early-morning encounter with the jammed photocopier, I’d had a long, exhausting day—a freshman class, the session with Piotrowski, office hours, an intense three-hour senior seminar, and, in between, all sorts of prurient gossip on the part of my colleagues about Elliot’s murder. I desperately needed a swim. Jane had just showered; her usually tightly curled hair was wet and sleek, and she was gazing intently into the long mirror, rubbing moisturizer into her rosy face. Seeing my reflection in the mirror, she turned. “Karen,” she said, “I have a question for you.” She grabbed a towel from the chrome hook by the mirror, wrapped it around her wet hair and walked toward the lockers.

  The women’s locker room is a place of green walls, cream-painted metal lockers, long battered benches, and a heady aroma of chlorine. At 6:03 P.M.—dinnertime for students and domesticated faculty—the place was, as I’d expected, deserted, and I looked forward to a long, unobstructed swim. When I was a little girl, I’d had a childish notion of heaven—angels, harps, fluffy white clouds. Now, as a grown woman, I knew exactly what heaven was: eighteen laps in an unshared lane of Enfield College’s heated, Olympic-size pool.

  I pulled off a boot and looked up at Jane inquiringly. Naked, she was standing right in front of me and her breasts were practically in my face. From a perch just above her left nipple a tiny tattoo of a blue-black crow regarded me with raptor insolence. For a woman in her fifties—as I assumed she was—Jane was in splendid shape, hardly an ounce of fat or a ripple of flab on her compact, slender frame. I was close enough to notice. Aside from the faint striation of stretchmarks on her abdomen, Jane could easily have posed for the bikini edition of Modern Maturity. Maybe even—given that crow tattoo—she could have posed topless.

  I really didn’t know how to read Jane Birdwort. She seemed to be two different people: the frump of the pink suits and outdated hairdo and the surprisingly sexy woman of the carnal poems and the almost perfect body. Sitting down on a bench opposite me, she opened a locker, rooted through it for a faded pink Mount Holyoke sweatshirt, retrieved a package of Camel cigarettes and a Bic lighter from the pocket, dropped the sweatshirt on the bench. “We’re the only ones in here, aren’t we?” she asked. Then without waiting for a response, she tipped out a cigarette and lit up.

  “You know you’re not supposed to—” The “good girl” in me pays attention to house rules.

  “Yes, yes, I know: no smoking in college buildings.” She inhaled luxuriously, held it for a few seconds, breathed out a long, thin stream of smoke. “But who’s going to tell?” Her gaze was cool and straight and challenging.

  Not me, obviously. And I wanted to talk to Jane, so I wasn’t about to antagonize her by objecting to the carcinogens she was at that very moment blowing in my face. Jane’s stunned reaction when I’d informed her of Elliot’s death intrigued me. In the interests of “nosing around” for Piotrowski, I’d try to follow up on that. “So,” I reminded her, “you had a question for me?”

  “Yes, I do. Monica told me the very large man I saw coming out of your office this morning was a police detective?”

  “Yes. Yes, he was.” I removed my suit pants, carefully avoiding puddles on the tile floor. Then I hung them on a wire hanger with the coordinated blouse and jacket. I’m much more comfortable in a sweatshirt and jeans, but try to dress like an adult when I spend the day in the classroom.

  “I assume he was here about … ah … Elliot Corbin’s … ah … death. Why was he talking to you? Nobody came by to ask me any questions.”

  “No? Well, consider yourself lucky, Jane.” I stripped off my bra and panties and stepped into my black tank suit.

  “Well, it’s not that I’m fond of the police, you understand, but when I heard they were in the building, I was surprised not to be interviewed.” Another greedy drag on the cigarette.

  “I’m sure they’ll get to you sooner or later. I got the impression they will be talking to all of Elliot’s colleagues. Maybe they began with me because my office is next door to Elliot’s.” Yeah, right. They began with me because I’m a police snitch. “Umm … they probably thought I’d seen or heard something that would be useful to them.”

  Jane breathed out another volley of smoke. “Had you?” she asked impassively.

  “Not in the least.” I said it quickly, remembering the nasty argument in Elliot’s office.

  She took a short puff: in, out. “Just tell me—did they ask any questions about me?”

  “About you?” What an intriguing inquiry—an absolutely ideal entree for some sleuthing. “No. No, they didn’t. Why do you ask, Jane? Did you know Elliot well?” I suffered a qualm about this covert interrogation of a colleague, but fought it back by reminding myself that another colleague was dead, and that Jane, all unbeknownst to herself, might let drop a piece of information that could help the police identify the killer.

  “Not really. I only met him in September, when I arrived at Enfield.” She held her cigarette very still in a steady hand.

  “You seemed so … disturbed when I told you he was dead.”

  She gave a nervous little trill of laughter. “It’s just that we poets tend to be very … ah … emotional … people. The … ah … membranes are very thin.”

  “Membranes?” I stuffed my gym bag in the locker and slammed the door. I had to slam it twice before the lock would catch.

  “Between other people’s pain and our own. The shrinks would say we have boundary problems.”

  “Really?” Membranes!

  “Yes,” she r
esponded, “all that psychic navel-gazing. I don’t like poets much, you know. Including myself.” She jumped up from the bench, strode over to the sink, stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. Then she sauntered back to her locker and plucked out a pair of khakis. I watched in fascination as she stepped into them, then pulled on the faded Holyoke sweatshirt. No panties. No bra. I had a decade or so to go before I reached my fifties, but maybe it wasn’t going to be the stodgy time of life I’d been led to believe.

  The coffee shop was moderately busy when I stopped by for a quick supper after my swim. At the tables, students hunkered over dried-out pizza slices on paper plates and foil-wrapped cheeseburgers with soggy tomato slices, as if they had no other option but to use their meal cards on the fast food available here. Perhaps the limited selections of the coffee-shop menu were easier to manage than the stress of having to choose among the profusion of healthy entrees available in the cafeteria. As I proceeded along the food line, a burger, fries, a brownie with thick, gooey icing, and a container of coffee somehow got onto my tray, instead of the chef’s salad and two-percent milk I could have sworn I’d reached for. Well, no problem: I had a twenty-minute drive home; I’d burn up the calories. My lovelorn student Tom Lundgren was seated by himself at a four-person table. When I walked past with my tray and said the most unprovocative thing I could think of—“Hi, Tom”—he choked on a bite of his meatball wedge. But I didn’t pause to assist him; it would simply have made things worse.

  I spotted Harriet Person, half-hidden from sight at a table in a far corner of the room. Harriet sat alone, a tray full of empty dishes pushed to one side of the table, and scribbled furiously on a yellow pad centered squarely in front of her. As I was already in sleuth mode—although I’d learned nothing much from Jane other than that she had a great body and thin membranes—I decided I might as well take advantage of Harriet’s presence to ask a few more questions about Elliot Corbin. She was as much a suspect as anyone else in the department.

  “May I?” I queried, gesturing to the chair across from her.

  “Of course.” She hustled the tray of dirty dishes onto the next table just as two freshmen I recognized as new advisees of mine were about to sit at it. The girl with the buzz cut and the nose stud gave Harriet an indignant glower, but her friend sagely counseled discretion, and both veered toward a cleared-off table across the room.

  “Listen, Karen,” Harriet said, “I wanted to ask you: Are you on the hiring committee for the Palaver? I know the committee intended to include at least one member of the junior faculty.” Academic departments are fond of the appearance of democracy, but in reality they are as hierarchical and class-bound as any medieval fiefdom: Full professors make all the important decisions, associate professors do all the work, assistant professors curtsy whenever the lords of the manor pass by.

  “Miles asked me, Harriet, but I turned him down. I just couldn’t do it; I’m on overload, what with the Curriculum Revision Committee, the Library Acquisitions Committee, the plans for the Northbury Center.” Not to mention, yet another homicide investigation. “Are you? On the Palaver committee, I mean,” I asked, and immediately remembered that she wasn’t. Hadn’t Jill told me that Harriet, herself, was a candidate for the position?

  My tablemate ignored the question. “Damn. I’m desperate to know who’s applied for the job. Now that Elliot’s … gone—and to be truthful with you, I really can’t say, God Rest the Dear Man’s Soul—the playing field has changed. Dramatically. I keep trying to get a peek at the applications we’ve received, but Monica’s got them under lock and key. Miles doesn’t want anyone looking at them until the committee has had a chance to sort through the dossiers, she says, and she’s being a real witch about it.”

  “Don’t take it out on Monica, Harriet. She’s just doing her job. Miles is the one who made the policy. You ought to discuss it with him.”

  “Miles! Humph! For a while I thought I could depend on Miles to be reasonable about this hire, but I was wrong. That man is so reactionary! You know what his agenda is, don’t you, Karen? He intends to weed out all the feminist applicants before the committee gets a chance to even look at their dossiers!”

  A ludicrous image invaded my imagination: Miles, locked in his office, hunkering over his desk, muttering hideously into his beard, sorting out all the applications from women—and running them through the department shredder. “Miles wouldn’t do a thing like that, Harriet!” I protested. “Not only would it be shoddy, it would also be illegal.”

  “Hah! Don’t count on Miles’s ethics, Karen. You haven’t been around this retrograde, sexist department as long as I have. But, God damn it, I’m determined that if the hiring committee blackballs my application, we’re going to get another nationally known Women’s Studies scholar in the Palaver Chair, no matter what it takes to get her there!”

  “Really?” No matter what it takes? And now Elliot Corbin, male, rumored to be the lead contender for the position, was dead. Hmm.

  And, me, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “So tell me, Harriet, did you know for sure that Elliot had applied for the Palaver?”

  “If he hadn’t, he was about to. Elliot was so damn unscrupulous, he’d have gotten himself the Chair by hook or by crook.” Then she seemed to hear herself. No matter what it takes. By hook or by crook. Not much ethical difference there. Harriet straightened the lapels on her navy-blue suit jacket, and cleared her throat. “What I mean is, Elliot wanted the Chair merely for reasons of personal aggrandizement. I want it for political reasons, to help ameliorate the stranglehold of white hegemonic masculinities on the academy—and I intend to do that through a series of organized disruptions of institutionalized sexist, heterosexist, and racist binaries—”

  “You forgot classist.”

  “And classist.” She gave me a sidelong glance: Was I being a wiseass? I donned my most earnest non-tenured-professor expression, tugged at my metaphorical forelock—and got away with it. This time. I’m as much a feminist as any scholar who’s thought seriously about the historical—and contemporary—imbalance of power between men and women—and whites and blacks, and gays and straights, and the rich and the poor—in all areas of society. What I can’t stomach, however, is the knee-jerk ideological jargon, the rigid partisan thinking, that passes for serious reflection on the subject.

  “You see this list here?” Harriet asked, carried by her fervor past any momentary doubts about my response. She turned the scribbled-on yellow pad toward me. “On this page, I’ve noted every feminist literary scholar of any repute, and I intend to go back to my office and begin making phone calls. I’ll show Miles Jewell! He’ll be so deluged by applications from Women’s Studies scholars he won’t know whether he’s coming or going!”

  • • •

  It was peaceful at my house that evening. I put Emmylou on the CD player, ran a long, steamy bath, poured a jelly glass full of red wine, selected a paperback mystery novel from my pleasure-reading pile, and soaked for half an hour. When I emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a white bathsheet, a message from my student Mike Vitale waited on my answering machine. “Professor Pelletier, I want to let you know why I wasn’t in class this morning. Over the holiday I had a … a death in my family, but I’m back on campus now. I’ll see you on Wednesday.” It was truly extraordinary, I thought, as the machine rewound, the number of grandmothers who chose the most stressful part of the academic semester to drop dead. One student I’d heard of had three grandmothers die—all in the same semester. Then I chastised myself for my cynicism. After all, Mike hadn’t given me the grandmother line. He was a good kid, and he wasn’t trying to bullshit me. I’d offer him sincere condolences when I next saw him.

  14.

  Though skilled in Latin and in Greek,

  And earning fifty cents a week,

  Such knowledge, and the income, too,

  Should teach you better what to do:

  The meanest drudges, kept in pay,

  Can pocket fifty cents a d
ay.

  —PHILIP FRENEAU,

  “TO A NEW ENGLAND POET”

  TUESDAY MORNING I SLEPT LATE. I had no classes, and, blessedly, no meetings. At 9:23 by the luminescent numbers on my bedside clock, I stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen to retrieve a New York City bagel from the freezer. Then I showered leisurely, watched CNN in my old plaid bathrobe, munched my buttery toasted bagel. As I finished my second coffee, the phone rang.

  “Karen? It’s Earlene. You going to be on campus today?”

  “Yep. Sure am. Gotta go to the library, hunt down Freddie Whitby’s source—among other things.”

  She paused for a second, then said, “Good. So how about lunch?”

  “I’d love it. I need to spend some time with a friend. You have a place in mind?”

  “Rudolph’s? One o’clock?”

  “Sure. See you there.” I moved to hang up.

  “Karen, wait a minute. How’d Freddie respond when you confronted her with the paper?”

  “I haven’t. She didn’t show up for our appointment. Well—she did, but I couldn’t see her right then, and she didn’t come back.” At the memory of my student’s reaction to Piotrowski’s substantial presence in my green vinyl chair, I chortled. Earlene laughed when I told her the story. “Integrity cop,” she said. “That’s supposed to be my job. Maybe I should get myself a badge and a uniform.”

  “You’ll have to bulk up a bit first.”

  The college library was bustling. In the main reading room with its Gothic arched windows, students cluttered the long tables with stacks of books, laptop computers, photocopies, notebooks, and illicit bags of corn chips squirreled away in bulging backpacks. Late November is a grueling time for anyone connected with an institution of higher learning, whether student or faculty: final papers to research, write, and grade; final exams to put together, study for, take, grade. Because the fall semester is tight, crammed between Labor Day and the Christmas holidays, the pace is brutal. More than one face poring over some obscure reference tome was tight with anxiety.