The Raven and the Nightingale Page 4

  “Isn’t she amazing?” Sophia whispered, her pale blue eyes aglow with adulation.

  Amazing didn’t begin to cover it. I sat riveted as Jane continued with her startling verses. After the third poem, as Jane paused for a sip of water, I glanced around, wondering how the audience was responding. Harriet Person sat catty-corner in front of me, beaming in approbation. Miles Jewell, next to her, as their seeming new-found alliance dictated, frowned in puzzlement. Both responses were predictable: Harriet was a feminist scholar of modern poetry and had written a number of articles on the poems of Sylvia Plath; Miles was most comfortable with the Puritans. Then my eyes lighted on another listener. Elliot Corbin had focused on Jane Birdwort a curiously contemptuous glare, one that seemed genuinely out of sync with the powerful poems she was reading. It wasn’t likely that any informed literary critic—and Elliot was certainly that—could despise these poems, I thought. But, if it wasn’t Jane’s poetry that elicited such a hostile reaction from Elliot, what could it be? The inoffensive-seeming Jane herself?

  As Jane Birdwort neared the end of her reading, Sophia began rustling restlessly through the sheaf of poems on her lap, anxiously scanning first one, then another. I sympathized. Jane would be a hard act for any poet to follow. The sweet melancholy of Sophia’s bird poem would surely be swamped in the wake of Jane’s passionate voice. But, when the applause had died down, and Jane called Sophia to the lectern, she went. For a few long seconds, she stood silent at the podium, clutching the chosen poem, and I feared she’d been struck mute by anxiety. Then she breathed in deeply, released the breath, and began. This was not the birdsong poem I’d seen earlier. This one was called “A Dream of Statues.” In a clear, high voice, Sophia read:

  I know this place, this tangle of old night, this clutch of dark.

  Rose trees sprung into a wilderness of withered hands.

  (What strength our ancients grip, our briers.)

  But, no matter. I float along this garden path more like a ghost, more like a whimsy, than a woman.…

  Sophia had chosen well. This was a strong poem, almost in dialogue with Jane’s startling work, and the applause was appreciative. My student remained at the podium for a moment after she’d finished reading, appearing overwhelmed by the approval. Then she nodded in thanks, and hurried back to her seat.

  Following the reading, I left Sophia to her well-wishers and headed for the Brie and chardonnay at the long table by the window; I hadn’t bothered with lunch, and my stomach was clamoring. As I spread a crusty slice of French bread with soft cheese, Amber Nichols sidled up to me. “Karen,” she said, “we never get a chance to talk.” That was true—mostly because I made it my business to stay out of Amber’s way. Something about Amber really put me off, something in her faint, sidelong smile that was annoyingly suggestive of secret knowledge. Don’t be judgmental, I admonished myself, you don’t really know this woman. Maybe she’s merely extremely shy.

  “Amber,” I replied, popping a fat green grape into my mouth, “how’s FroshHum going?”

  “Fine,” she replied, much too hastily. “Just fine.” Given Amber’s golden appearance, she should rightfully have been gifted with a rich, butterscotch voice, but instead she enunciated her words in a thin, pedantic tone that rendered everything she said just a little bit more academic than it needed to be.

  “Uh huh,” I said. FroshHum, with its semiweekly papers, was a killer to teach, and everyone knew it. But Amber was probably terrified she’d lose the job if she admitted to a full-time faculty member how difficult she found the labor-intensive course. And, for someone in her situation, not yet quite finished with her dissertation, good jobs were difficult to find. In the current academic job market, neophyte English teachers were caught up in a merciless round of exploitation, often teaching four or five courses a semester at two or three different colleges for salaries that could most generously be described as exploitative. My own graduate-school career was recent enough that I was deeply sympathetic to doctoral candidates, but every time I tried to empathize with Amber, she said something so obnoxious she put me totally off.

  Like right now, tossing back her silky hair. “Of course, bourgeois ideology in the neocanonical curriculum lends itself with particular immediacy to the deconstruction afforded by postmodernist pedagogy.” Amber flashed her supercilious smile.

  “Well, that’s good.” I responded, inanely. “As for me, I’m totally swamped. All those papers to grade!”

  The honey-colored hair fell in smooth waves along Amber’s cheek. If it weren’t for the faint, dark semicircles under her eyes, I would have assumed she had the key to all serenity safely tucked away in the pocket of her beige wool pants. There was a long pause. Then she asked, “Are you coming to the study-group meeting?” The nineteenth-century American Literature study group met monthly to share research and discuss developments in the field. Composed of scholars from several colleges in the area, meetings rotated from campus to campus, and often from home to home.

  “Sure. Tuesday evening, right? At Elliot’s.”

  Another long pause, then Amber replied, enigmatically, “Elliot’s. Yes, that’s right. Elliot’s.”

  And speaking of Elliot, I could see him over the adjunct teacher’s shoulder, refilling his glass with the fairly decent chardonnay I’d only gotten to take one sip of. “Elliot,” I called out, anything—even a chat with Elliot Corbin—to get me out of this awkward conversation. Amber’s countenance altered from enigma to chill blankness, an instantaneous negation of all expression. But, when Elliot appeared at her side, sipping his newly replenished wine, Amber turned to him with her customary knowing smile.

  “Professor Corbin,” she said, “how nice. We were just discussing you.”

  “Oh,” he replied, and his tone seemed hedged.

  “Yes. The meeting Tuesday? The study group?” Amber’s mask of civility slipped, and her voice abruptly took on so hard an edge that several nearby conversations ceased. “Karen reminds me that it’s to be held at your house, Professor. And I do expect it might be an occasion of genuine …” She paused. “… genuine revelation. Don’t you think revelation is an appropriate word, Professor?”

  Elliot’s olive complexion blanched. He opened his mouth as if to reply, closed it, stood frozen for a long wordless moment, then spun on his heel and strode from the room. With each step chardonnay sloshed from his plastic glass onto the pale blue carpet, as if he were a Hansel leaving a trail of wine puddles instead of bread crumbs. Her odd smile firmly back in place, Amber excused herself and followed after him.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Harriet Person demanded, abrasive as only a full professor can afford to be.

  I shrugged. “For once,” I replied, “Elliot seems to have found himself at a loss for words.”

  “Would that the loss were permanent,” Elliot’s longtime colleague replied, and reached for the cheese knife.

  At Amazing Chinese I picked up a carton of General Tso’s chicken and headed for home and class preparations. In the car, I kept remembering lines from Jane Birdwort’s haunting verses. I’d misjudged Jane, I mused. I’d thought of her as a chirpy little woman of the type Betty Friedan had killed off with the publication of The Feminine Mystique. But Jane’s poems were genuinely passionate—vivid and immediate—if a trifle raw. Then I realized I probably hadn’t read anything other than nineteenth-century poetry since I’d come to Enfield. That was the downside of being a scholar; I was living the most meaningful part of my intellectual life in the long ago and far away. The twentieth century had happened without me.

  Once again, the phone started ringing the minute I entered the house. I hastily twisted the thermostat to a temperature that would support human life, and grabbed the receiver.

  “Hi, Mom!” caroled Amanda. Although she was hundreds of miles away at Georgetown University, I could envision my daughter’s plucky grin. All by myself, in that chilly, half-lit house, I grinned in response. I was not a total, abysmal failure with y
oung people; Amanda had turned out pretty damn well. And in four—no, three—days, she was coming home for Thanksgiving break.

  “Can’t wait to see you, kid! You eating meat this month? We doing tofu for Thanksgiving?” Amanda’s vegetarian commitment vacillated, and I never knew where I stood with holiday preparations. “Or should I get a turkey?”

  “Sure,” she said, with resignation, “get a turkey. I seem to be into chomping flesh again. Just can’t free myself from my carnivorous instincts. And, besides, the stuffing’s never any good if it’s not cooked in the bird. And, Mom?…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could Sophia and her mother come for Thanksgiving? I was talking to her last night, and things seem pretty grim at her house. She hasn’t been able to get her mom to go out by herself since they put Mr. Warzek in jail, and now Mrs. Warzek spends most of her time in front of the soaps.”

  “Of course they can come. I should have thought of that myself. I saw her this afternoon.”

  “Great! It’ll be good for Sophia to get out, and Thanksgiving Day might be the only possible time for me to see her. On the weekend, I want to—” She broke off mid-sentence.

  “What? You want to what?”

  “Oh—nothing. I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  Probably none of my business. Probably something to do with a guy. “Tell me now,” I demanded.

  “Mother!”

  When I’d finished talking to Amanda, I shucked off my clothes, donned my bathrobe, gobbled the pungent Chinese chicken, and called Sophia. She answered with a thick, waterlogged sound in her voice that suggested she’d been crying, but eagerly accepted my Thanksgiving invitation. She even offered to bring the pies. Sophia had been a full-time student on scholarship at Enfield when I’d first met her. Now she worked full-time as a pastry chef at the Bread and Roses Bakery and Café to support herself and her mother. She’d been taking a course a semester, and was just about to complete her B.A. in English. With an ineffectual, emotionally fragile mother—an immigrant from Poland—totally dependent on her, Sophia was limited in her career options. As far as I knew, she intended to stay in Enfield and continue baking her delectable dainties at Bread and Roses. But I meant to keep an eye out for other possibilities. After today’s reading, I knew Sophia could make a name for herself in poetry even without leaving town. If she wanted to, that is.

  On impulse, I picked up the phone again and issued invitations. By the end of the evening I had more guests lined up for Thanksgiving dinner. My good friends Greg and Irena Samoorian had begged off. New parents, they were dying to get the family holiday train on track, and Greg had already laid in the groceries for a complete soup-to-nuts feast. I hoped their twin daughters Jane and Sally, now a whopping, toothless, two months old, were feeling especially hungry. But Earlene Johnson, Enfield’s Dean of Students, and Jill were only too happy to sign on for turkey day. It had been a while since I’d had a chance to cook a big meal, and I found myself looking forward to it. This was going to be a good time.

  5.

  Quoth the raven,

  “Nevermore.”

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  AT 7:51 MONDAY MORNING, AS I pushed open the heavy front door of Dickinson Hall, a shadow detached itself from the general darkness in the corridor as if in response to the intrusive wedge of misty daylight. I peered down the hallway and fumbled for the light switch. The shadow seemed to falter, then gathered momentum and slipped around the corner. I flicked the switch and illuminated the hallway. Nothing there. Hallucinating again. That’ll happen when you stay up half the night reading Poe in preparation for an early-morning class.

  An eight o’clock session with my freshmen was a challenge. Everyone was still groggy. Because I was all too often tempted to indulge in a few extra moments of sleep, I usually trotted directly from the parking lot to my classroom in Emerson Hall, the large administrative building in the center of campus. But this morning I’d stopped at my office first, to retrieve a photograph of Poe I’d filed away with other literary miscellanea. I was moving fast, because I hate to be late for class. Certain other professors, naming no names—certainly not naming powerful, full-professor names such as Elliot Corbin—will, without apology, stroll into the classroom five, ten minutes late, open their briefcases, open their mouths, and, without looking up from their notes, pontificate without ceasing until the bell rings.

  I don’t teach that way. The literature classroom is a seldom-again-to-be-encountered-in-one’s-lifetime opportunity for students to engage in thoughtful, informed dialogue about crucial human dilemmas. Dialogue is the operative word—not professorial monologue—at least, as far as I’m concerned. In later years, a student can always go back to a reference book and recover facts and scholarly opinions, but in my classes we talk. How often will a student have the occasion to figure out for herself that, when Walt Whitman refers to his poetry as a barbaric yawp, the image has something to do with snatching American poetry from the hands of the educated and privileged? Or, when Emily Dickinson refers to herself as Nobody, she seems to think that’s a good thing? Or, when Charlotte Perkins Gilman has her narrator peel away the yellow wallpaper, maybe, just maybe, that narrator is deconstructing centuries of male texts that oppress and imprison women? I like to leave my comfortable Enfield College students just a little bit less comfortable when they finish a course than they were when they began it.

  The big UPS box stood in the middle of my office, directly between me and the filing cabinet where I kept the Poe photograph. The box! If I’d been thinking a little more coherently when I’d gone to the town library yesterday, I could have brought a knife or something, proceeded to campus, and opened it then. But—there was no time now: four minutes to class time, and it would take me that long to get across campus.

  That morning I taught “The Raven.” Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore …, I read to my dreary—weary, bleary-eyed—students. In spite of my admonition at our previous meeting, nobody had come to class with anything particularly thoughtful to say about the poem. Including me. So I read aloud some more: Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow—

  “Why didn’t he try Prozac?” Today Mike Vitale looked like himself again, rather than like the ghost of someone I couldn’t quite identify. The bristling ponytail and gold earring gave a sardonic edge to the long jaw, intellectual forehead, close-set ears.

  I laughed. “What is it with you and Poe, Mike?” I teased him. “You haven’t been this unrelentingly critical of any other writer.”

  He slapped his hand down hard against the open pages of his poetry anthology, startling Tom Lundgren, who jumped almost as ludicrously as I did. “I think ‘The Raven’ is the stupidest poem I’ve ever read. I mean—Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Give me a break! That’s like a line from some kind of a third-rate computer game—something with a name like, oh, Avian Raptor!” And Mike went on to wax even more sarcastic about this poem than he had about Poe’s stories, almost as if he had some personal agenda in deflating the poetic reputation of America’s Poet of the Terminally Weird.

  Most of the other students, however, liked the poem—although they were relentlessly biographical in their discussion of it. I urged the kids to re-examine their direct equation of life and poem. “Edgar Allan Poe is such a compellingly bizarre figure that I know it seems impossible to separate his personal history from the art of his poetry,” I said. “Now, Whitman’s poems, and Dickinson’s, too, would doubtless survive on their own merits, even if we knew nothing about the authors. But would Poe’s?” I asked. “Without the legends of drinking, fighting, illicit romance, charges of forgery, Emmeline Foster’s purported suicide—not to mention his marriage to a thirteen-year-old cousin—would you still be interested in this poem?”

  They gaped at me: Was I kidding? Drinking? Fighting? Suicide? Teenage sex? Who n
eeded poetry? And besides, it was the final day of class before the Thanksgiving break; nobody wanted to think about poetry.

  After class, I stood in the doorway and collected essays. As Freddie Whitby handed me hers, Elliot Corbin pushed through the double doors that lead from the administrative offices. I nodded at him as he passed by in the hall, and slipped Freddie’s paper to the bottom of the stack; the sight of Freddie Whitby’s prose wasn’t bearable quite so early in the morning. As my colleague disappeared down the corridor, I couldn’t help wondering what Poe expert, Professor Corbin, would have made of my class’s discussion of “The Raven.” There had been nary a mention of transvestism; Elliot probably would have thought the discussion was hopelessly banal. With difficulty I jammed the freshman essays into my book bag. I really had to take a few minutes and go through this bag; it was so overloaded I hardly knew what was in it any more. One of these days I was going to lose something—probably a student’s paper; then I would really be in trouble.

  “Here, let me help you carry that.” For some reason Mike Vitale had again lingered in the classroom after the others had trooped out for their breakfasts. “It looks heavy.”

  “Thanks, Mike, but I can manage. Did you want to see me about something?”

  “No,” he replied. “Not really.” Cautiously he poked his head out into the corridor and looked around. Then, giving me a breezy goodbye, he departed.

  The campus seemed soaked in a clammy late-fall miasma as I headed for the coffee shop after class. Brick and stone buildings wavered in the mist as if they were emanations of the air itself. Students and colleagues wafted by, as indistinguishable from one another as if they were phantoms. I shivered in my heavy wool jacket and pushed open the door of the coffee shop. The pungent scent of dark-roast Colombian roused me from my own personal fog. Dumping my heavy book bag on a table in a sequestered window nook, I slid my tray along the stainless-steel counter, reached behind the bagels to retrieve a pumpkin muffin, then poured coffee into a white ceramic mug and sipped it as I waited in line to pay. Round tables hosted a mix of students and between-classes professors. Wan light slanted through the mullioned windows and illuminated the white stuccoed walls and ceiling, casting faint, narrow shadows next to faux half-timbered beams. A good place for a few moments of quiet reflection before the FroshHum staff meeting later that morning.