The Raven and the Nightingale Page 7

  “Oh, right.” Elliot scurried into the dining room, as Miles Jewell, always the gentleman, jumped up from his armchair. I waved him back into it, and accepted the straight chair Elliot ungraciously plunked down next to me. Elliot returned to his seat on a black-and-white-striped couch and ostentatiously took up the pen and the lined yellow notepad he’d had to abandon in order to play host. Miles poured a glass of red wine and handed it to me.

  “As most of you know,” I said to the small group, “a recent bequest to the college of ten million dollars and the Meadowbrook estate in Eastfield—” I sipped my wine and told the group about Edith Hart’s will.

  I’ve always thought of myself as a teacher first and foremost, so I’d initially been reluctant to take on the administration of the Northbury Center. Eventually, however, I’d become enthusiastic about setting up an archival center where women writers would receive the same kind of loving attention that the major libraries have always paid to the canonical men. Because Edith’s will had been contested, no one had any idea when Meadowbrook and the money would become available so the center could get under way. It could take years, but that didn’t abate my zeal.

  “A reading room,” I told my colleagues, “a conference room, book stacks, archives of personal papers, classrooms, bedrooms for visiting scholars, perhaps even a fully restored nineteenth-century kitchen,” I said, really getting into it now, “so that researchers can reproduce material conditions of early-industrial domestic life.”

  “Poppycock.” Miles shook his head. “Great minds transcend mere household concerns. Literature has nothing to do with kitchens.” Translation: Men’s literature is the only real literature. He popped a cube of stale-looking Swiss cheese into his mouth.

  “It certainly does,” Harriet retorted, knitting needles clacking irritably, “if you’re an exploited woman trapped in domestic discourses—” Translation: You men don’t have a clue about the real world.

  “No, no, no,” Elliot interjected, jabbing his pen into his notepad. “A postmodernist theoretics demands the elision of such irrelevant biographical trivia as domestic life—” Translation: There is no real world. It’s all just language.

  “Ahem, Elliot, I was speaking!” Harriet asserted. Translation: You neosexist trend slave! Her needles clattered faster. “Unpaid domestic labor is an integral factor of hard and fast economic reality. Nineteenth-century marketplace conditions excluded most women from literary production. What we need here is not so much a center for the study of literature, as an Institute of Material Feminism. Karen, do you think—?”

  “That’s the problem with you feminists!” Elliot jabbed at the yellow pad again, and the rickety table on which it rested tilted to one side. “A slavish adherence to outmoded cultural materialism. What this money should be used for is an International Library of Epistemological Studies. Karen, when I become Palaver Chair—”

  “Palaver Chair!” Harriet croaked, and Miles jumped in hotly.

  “Epistemology be damned, Corbin! Puritan Spiritual Narrative is the wellspring of American Literature. For an Institute on Puritan Studies, ten million dollars would purchase numerous—”

  “But … but … but—” I interposed. “What about women’s literature? It’s supposed to be a center for the study of women’s literature.”

  In the next hour the battle raged. I left the meeting as soon as I could. Classes were suspended for the Thanksgiving vacation, and after the heated debate of the evening, I was more ready than ever for a few days away from colleagues. On my way out of the house, I glanced around once again at the shadowy, sparsely furnished hallway, bemused by the grimness of the place. Once again I thought, This is a house that needs a woman’s touch. Then, curiously, I noticed Amber Nichols, in the dining room, pawing through the collation of volumes on a table that looked as if it hadn’t hosted an actual meal in decades.

  “Oh, Karen!” she blurted, startled by my presence. Then, after an almost infinitesimal pause, “What a feast of books. I never can resist books.” Uncharacteristically, she was babbling. “How about you?”

  “No,” I replied, “I can’t.” But I didn’t find this bland-looking collection of what appeared to be scholarly tomes at all appetizing. In addition, I was suddenly struck by Amber’s docility so far this evening; I’d forgotten until that very moment her implied threat to Elliot at Sunday’s poetry reading. What was it she had said? Something about a revelation at the Tuesday night meeting? But she’d remained totally silent during my talk, her tight little smile stitched ineradicably in place, no shocking disclosures forthcoming at all. And thank God! After all the tongues hanging out and teeth bared for a bite of the Northbury Center, I don’t think I could have tolerated any further skirmishes at knife point.

  I went right from Elliot’s to the supermarket. Turkey, cranberries for sauce, bread for stuffing, potatoes for mashing, onions, yams, parsnips, peas, pickles: I was ravenous just thinking about it. I’d filled my cart and was rounding the dairy aisle, hustling toward the checkout counter, when I ran into a familiar-looking kid. I mean, literally ran smack-dab into him. It was the dark-haired little curly-head who had knocked me down with the skateboard on campus the day before. Now here he was, pawing through a sales display of sugared cereals. Unable to slow down fast enough, I bumped him hard with my grocery cart.

  “Ufff,” he said as we collided, and he staggered, sending a pyramid of Sugar Pops and Froot Loops boxes crashing to the ground.

  “Watch where you’re going, lady!” an irate mother-type voice commanded. A heavyset woman descended on me. “What d’ya think? Ya own the place?”

  I pivoted toward her, automatically defensive. “He shouldn’t have been—” Then I did a double take. “Monica?”

  “Karen?” Our department secretary seemed flabbergasted to see me, as if I had no right to a life off campus. Monica was dressed in gray sweatpants and a dark blue quilted jacket open over a gray sweatshirt. Around her neck she wore an odd pendant, a star enclosed in a circle, dangling from a black leather cord. Her short brown hair was rumpled, as if she hadn’t taken a comb to it all day. Her cart was piled with the same holiday fare as mine—turkey, stuffing, cranberries—only a great deal more of it, as if she were cooking for two or three dozen instead of the measly six I was expecting.

  “This is your kid?” I picked up a box of Sugar Pops and set it back on the display, bent over to snag another. The boy followed suit, glancing skittishly at his mother.

  Monica recovered her usual irascible aplomb. “Yeah, this is Joey.” She paused, and a complicated set of expressions flitted across her round face: pride, exasperation, wariness. The latter won. “Ya got a problem with that?”

  “No, it’s just that—” I was about to tell her how I’d met him on campus. But, behind her, Joey was frantically signaling to me, jumping up and down, shaking his head, desperately mouthing, Don’t tell her don’t tell her don’t tell her. I remembered how upset he’d been about his skateboard.

  “—that I didn’t know you had any children,” I finished. It was a smooth save. I could easily imagine what it must be like to have someone as overbearing as Monica for a parent. Behind his mother’s back, Joey took a histrionic breath of relief and mimed wiping the sweat off his brow. It was clear to me that a significant part of this child’s life was going to take place behind his mother’s back.

  I could see now that the boy did indeed look a great deal like Monica. He shared the close set of her dark brown eyes, the pugnacious jut of her jaw. That must be why he’d seemed so familiar to me when I’d first met him. But still, there was something else.…

  The three of us, Monica, Joey, and I, picked up cereal boxes and restacked them in an approximation of their original formation. A store manager bustled toward us, officiously ready to chastise these careless shoppers, but one glare from Monica was enough to send him on his way. As I was the tallest of the three, I replaced the final box of Froot Loops at the apex of the pyramid.

  “Looks like y
ou’re cooking for a crowd.” I gestured at Monica’s overflowing cart.

  She shrugged. “Just the usual,” she grumbled, and I realized that, whereas the secretaries were privy to all sorts of information about the professors—from phone calls and personnel files—I knew absolutely nothing about this woman’s life. I hadn’t even known she had a child. Was Monica a local woman, I wondered? Did she come from a large family? Did she have children other than Joey? Why was she buying all that food?

  As I pushed my bag-laden cart through the supermarket’s automatic front doors, Monica and Joey were loading their groceries into the back of a rust-eaten white Ford Bronco parked as close to the door as you could get and not be in a handicapped-parking zone. The car’s bumper was plastered with tattered slogans: SONIA JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT; GODDESS RULES; I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE; WILD WOMEN DON’T GET THE BLUES.

  “Enjoy your holiday,” I called inanely as I passed them.

  Monica rolled her eyes. Enjoyment obviously had nothing to do with it. Enjoyment was for people like me—privileged people. For Monica, it looked like, Thanksgiving was just another day of work.

  8.

  Over the river and through the woods

  —LYDIA MARIA CHILD

  THANKSGIVING TURNED OUT TO BE a turkey—emotionally as well as gastronomically. It started at supper on Wednesday night with Amanda, as she sat down at our kitchen table. “Remember on the phone the other day I told you I had plans for the holiday weekend?” she asked. Tall and slim, with cropped brown hair and dark-lashed hazel eyes, Amanda was garbed in her usual jeans and sweater. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, and she looked wonderful but exhausted, having just fifteen minutes earlier pulled her little red Volkswagen Rabbit into the driveway after an exam in the morning, and then a seven-hour drive home from school. She also looked nervous. This was not at all characteristic of my usually fearless daughter.

  “Yeah?” I set a pasta-and-bean casserole on a castiron trivet and plunged a serving spoon into the cheddary topping. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about something for a long time.” She twisted the spoon in the steaming casserole. “And I’m afraid you’re gonna hate it—what I want to do, I mean. I’ve been terrified to mention it to you.…” I had just slathered a cheese biscuit with butter when Amanda dropped this daughterly bombshell.

  I let the biscuit fall back onto my plate untasted. “What?”

  “Because I’m afraid you’ll be devastated.…” She dug out an oversize spoonful of pasta and beans, plopped it on her plate, went back for more. This seemed to require an enormous amount of concentration, so much that she was unable to look at me.

  “What!” I demanded. Ohmigod—she’s going to become a Hare Krishna. Or—Ohmigod—she’s going to have transsexual surgery. Or—Ohmigod—she’s going to take a job as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. “Tell me!” Or—Ohmigod—even worse—she’s decided to go into law enforcement, like Tony.

  “And if I go ahead and do it, that doesn’t mean I don’t love you—” Her eyes remained focused on the gooey mess on her plate.

  Oh! My! God! “Amanda! What is it? Tell me! Now!”

  Amanda dropped her fork with a clatter, sat back in her chair, took a deep breath, and looked directly at me for the first time in what seemed like millennia. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Now don’t freak out, Mom, okay? It’s just that … I’m going to try to find my father.”

  If she’d socked me in the gut, she couldn’t have hurt me more. I’d raised Amanda completely on my own from the time she was three years old. We hadn’t heard from Fred in seventeen years. Neither of us. Not a word. Never a birthday card for Amanda. Not a single phone call or check. And now my daughter was going to search for this man who’d resented her from the moment of her conception and who had completely disavowed her since I’d walked out on him after three-and-a-half years of calamitous marriage.

  “Sweetie,” I said to her, “Honey. Don’t do it. You knew your father was bad news when you were a tot. Don’t set yourself up for heartbreak.”

  Immediately after our hasty wedding, Fred and I had moved from the factory town of Lowell to the factory town of North Adams, clear on the other end of the state. Then he’d taken his truck back on the road, driving longdistance hauls for Eaton Paper. Fred’s occasional layovers quickly convinced me that his extended road trips were the best part of our marriage. At first I took abuse passively; given my family background, I thought that’s what marriage was. I stayed with Fred, because what else was I going to do? I was nineteen; I had no job skills; I had no education; I had no place else to go. But, on Amanda’s third birthday, when her father called her a “smart-mouthed brat who was gonna get hers,” I grabbed my daughter and my nearly empty wallet, and slammed out of the house. And that was it.

  “If my father is ‘bad news,’ what does that say about me?” twenty-year-old Amanda said now. “I want to find him, talk to him, because I have to know.” For the first time I allowed myself to notice that her long, delicate jaw could take on the same truculent line as her father’s. “First thing Friday, I’m going to Lowell, and I—”

  “Lowell?” The very name of the town made me queasy. “What’s taking you there? Is your fa—Is Fred back in Lowell? Have you heard from him?”

  “No.” She sounded impatient. “At least, I don’t know if he’s there or not. And you don’t have to sound so freaked out. I know you think he’s a creep. You’ve made that clear enough. But I’ve got to meet him—at least once. I’ve got to know where I come from.”

  “Oh, Amanda.”

  “I know you don’t like it, Mom, but you can’t stop me.”

  “I know that, Sweetie. I just can’t bear to see you get hurt.”

  That was the end of the discussion, but her father’s stubborn jaw remained in evidence for the rest of the evening.

  And this announcement was only the beginning of the holiday stresses.

  Thanksgiving afternoon, Earlene started in on me. The kitchen was redolent with the scent of roasting turkey, and the table was heaped with pies, towel-covered pans of rising dinner rolls, and a pile of yams, scrubbed and ready for the oven. Our appetites were whetted by the holiday aromas, the irresistible intimacy of kitchen talk had overcome discretion, and Earlene had decided I needed a man in my life. She didn’t realize how bad her timing was. The threat of Amanda’s reunion with Fred polluted my holiday like a noxious cloud; the last thing I wanted to think about was a man—any man. But I keep the disasters of my early life to myself, so, even though it was nagging at me like an abscessed tooth, I wasn’t about to tell Earlene about Amanda’s determination to search for her father.

  Earlene is a slender woman, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair, a long, thin, arched nose and high cheekbones. I don’t know how old she is. Mid-fifties, maybe, and gorgeous in that world-weary been-there-done-that-loved-every-minute-of-it way of certain mature women. She has two grown children and is long-divorced from their father, but never seems to suffer any dearth of male company. We are good friends. We share similar impoverished backgrounds, out of which has sprung a knee-jerk intolerance of pretension and wacky iconoclastic senses of humor understood by very few others at our prestigious institution. I know Earlene as well as anyone at Enfield does. With most faculty members she is pleasant, but reserved. I can understand that; she’s black at a white college—a college that waffled on abolition in the nineteenth century and jumped on the Civil Rights bandwagon only when it became imperative to do so in the 1960’s. Of course there are black professors now, and a carefully recruited population of minority students. Earlene is in an awkward position, however, as liaison between the students, faculty, and administration, but our joint concern for Sophia Warzek brought us together a couple of years earlier, and a friendship has grown.

  “You ever hear from that big cop?” Earlene asked, as we peeled Idaho potatoes for mashing.

  “Tony?” I replied, absently. “No. He’s married now.” I plucked the la
st remaining spud from the plastic five-pound bag, held it under running water, applied the peeler.

  From the living room I could hear cheers and groans as Amanda, Sophia, and Jill won huge fortunes at Monopoly, then squandered them recklessly. Agata Warzek, Sophia’s mother, had perched herself in front of the television upon arrival, and hadn’t been heard from since. Eloise slept soundly in her infant seat, oblivious to the pungent scent of a feast in the air.

  “I don’t mean Tony. I know that’s over.” Earlene plopped her potato in the huge green-and-white-striped plastic bowl. Salted water splashed over the side onto the Formica countertop. “I’m talking about that homicide guy. You know? That lieutenant who hung around so much last summer?” She ripped a wad of paper towels off the roll and mopped up the water.

  “Piotrowski?” I was paying only minimal attention: Amanda’s ill-advised wild-goose chase still preoccupied my thoughts. “Why would I hear from him? The Hart case is now in the hands of the lawyers.” I dropped the final potato in the big bowl, causing another tidal wave. “And besides, he didn’t hang around. He was working.”

  Earlene secured more paper towels. “Well,” she replied, drawing the word out coyly. “I always thought that big dude had a bit of a thing for you.”

  “For me?” Then I narrowed my eyes, remembering. “Earlene, are you and Jill up to something?”

  “Up to something? Uh, uhh.” Her dark eyes were so innocent you could have bathed a cherub in them. I wasn’t convinced, and concentrated on wiping the paring knife. “And besides, Piotrowski thinks I’m a pain in the ass.”

  “That’s the first step, isn’t it?” Earlene took a large pot from the cupboard next to the stove, placed it in the sink, and began filling it with water.

  “Earlene, you are so wrong.” Fragmented images of the lieutenant’s broad shoulders, his shapely lips, flickered through my consciousness. He was a man, all right. I stuck the knife ruthlessly in its block. I didn’t know why I was protesting so vigorously. “And, besides, I don’t want to have anything to do with cops, ever again. Living with a cop is hell: You never know when they’re coming home. You never know if they’re coming home. I can’t take any more of that.”