The Edith Wharton Murders

by Lev Raphael

  Also by Lev Raphael

  Fiction:

  Dancing on Tisha B’Av

  Winter Eyes

  The German Money

  Secret Anniversaries of the Heart

  Mysteries:

  Let’s Get Criminal

  Rosedale in Love

  The Death of a Constant Lover

  Little Miss Evil

  Burning Down the House

  Tropic of Murder

  Hot Rocks

  Nonfiction:

  Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame

  Journeys & Arrivals

  Writing a Jewish Life

  My Germany

  The

  Edith Wharton

  Murders

  A NICK HOFFMAN MYSTERY

  Lev Raphael

  Copyright © 1998 by Lev Raphael.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  First Ebook Edition: June 2011

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  Part Two

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part Three

  8

  9

  10

  11

  For my sister

  “I hate authors. I wouldn’t mind them so much if they didn’t write books.”

  —Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

  Prologue

  THE FIRST TIME I heard some Men’s Movement honcho say that men desperately needed to get in touch with their Inner Warrior, I laughed because I was congested, couldn’t hear that well, and thought he said Inner Worrier.

  Hell, I didn’t need any amateur-night shaman with a Kmart drum to draw me any maps for that kind of journey. I knew the way in my sleep.

  Stefan says that what I do is catastrophizing. I call it planning ahead. But even I couldn’t have predicted the Edith Wharton Murders.

  My trouble began the very first day of fall semester when the entire Department of English, American Studies, and Rhetoric (EAR) held an “emergency” meeting in the conference room across the hall from the main office in Parker Hall. It was an old classroom remodeled sometime in the fifties or early sixties, when there was a lot of building activity here at the Michiganapolis campus of the State University of Michigan. The room might once have been pretty, but you could no longer tell. The ceiling had been lowered and was covered with those grainy off-white ceiling tiles extruding huge banks of fluorescent lights that flickered and hummed and would have been more appropriate in an operating room or a morgue. Ugly beige Venetian blinds obscured the filthy casement windows, hanging in dusty and uneven folds. The wainscoting had been heavily painted over and a metal-rimmed blackboard installed, the kind with the livid green writing surface.

  Worst were the seats: horrible pedestal chairs with tiny curved arms that spread out into almost unusable gray-green mini-desks. The seats were very hard, their lack of comfort exacerbated by fifty seats being crammed into a room that should have held no more than thirty. Not only was the fit too tight, but the chairs were bolted down—in case of earthquake, I suppose—so that if you tried turning around in one, you risked being disemboweled. The whole room had a grim authoritarian feel, with students forced to face the front, unable to interact with each other. You could almost imagine each seat linked to some electronic system of remotely delivered shocks for punishment and control.

  We faculty members seemed foolishly out of place at the cramped and tiny combination chair-desks our students routinely suffered in. The air of crisis was heightened by the extra seats brought in to crowd the back of the room.

  My partner Stefan, the department’s writer-in-residence, hadn’t come, because he had the luxury of skipping meetings now and then. It was an unspoken perk of his position, and one I envied, especially since EAR was divided into rival camps.

  The department of nearly eighty had a core of twenty faculty who had once constituted the independent Rhetoric Department, which had been forced on English and American Studies about fifteen years earlier in a budget-cutting move. It was a transplant that had never really taken. The Rhetoric professors—surly, querulous, and under qualified—were consistently treated badly in EAR: their offices were smaller, their schedules less convenient, and their complaints ignored.

  These professors acted like captives forced into servitude by the conquering armies of a brutal empire that had burned their capital city to the ground and sowed salt into the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again. They were beyond hope, beyond dreams, beyond nostalgia. Occasionally, though, they’d launch into bizarre self-immolating tirades at department meetings, making suggestions and claims that showed they had no grasp of university reality whatsoever.

  The other faculty despised them, and the Rhetoric people didn’t especially like me. Even though I taught composition, as they had been doing for years, I was an anomaly: I enjoyed it. But I also had a specialty in Edith Wharton and was likely to teach a Wharton seminar soon in addition to my other classes, whereas they were trapped teaching the same course semester after semester, year after year.

  Standing at the front of the room, Coral Greathouse, the new chair of EAR, called the meeting to order in her diffident, disembodied way. Slim, blond, wide-eyed behind enormous thick red-framed glasses which highlighted her somber blue nun-in-mufti suit, she was pale, serious, intense—with the quiet conviction of a small-town librarian who knows where every one of her books is. Our last chair had been a blustering, loud, clumsy man, so it was also no surprise that the department had settled on a woman who was a bit of a cipher. Coral was almost affectless; her face barely changed expression and her small round mouth moved very little when she spoke. Was she tough, or a softy? Did people pay attention to her out of respect, or because they didn’t think she mattered? It was too soon to tell.

  “What poise that woman has,” Serena Fisch muttered in the chair-desk to my right as we waited at the meeting for Coral to begin. Serena was Coral’s opposite—extravagant of gesture, phrase, and looks. She was the department member most firmly rooted in the past, specifically the forties. I liked to think of her as the Lost Andrews Sister. That day, Serena’s glistening dark hair seemed even blacker and shinier than usual, as if she had slathered on polyurethane sealer. Heavily made up in blocks of white and red, she had a sort of Kabuki-A-Go-Go look. She wore black sling-backs, seamed stockings, and a wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted black coatdress. A rhinestone peacock pin spread its tail up to wards one shoulder, and all she needed was a snood.

  Coral plunged right in: “You’re all aware of the faculty complaints across the university that SUM is the State University of Males, that we don’t have enough women faculty, that we don’t hire enough women graduate teaching assistants, that we don’t take women’s issues seriously. Some of the state legislators have been echoing these remarks, and now the governor’s chimed in.”

  There was facetious muttering and a great deal of eye-rolling. No matter that every year the legislature reminded us of its power to cut funding for SUM, which it almost always did, faculty members sighed wearily whenever the subject of the legislature came up, like employers dealing with importunate job-seekers. As if living a supposed life of the mind made them superior in every concei
vable way. It was bizarre, high-handed, and self-defeating. But it never changed.

  Coral almost smiled encouragingly, seeming to feel her very presence was proof of the stupidity of our legislators a few miles away in the capitol. Then she settled down. “How do we in EAR respond?”

  Well, right then, EAR responded with a snarling roar of voices, demands, denunciations. Everyone had something to say now and they all started saying it. I tuned out because I knew this outburst would take a while to contain. I imagined I was watching a TV program with the sound off, and I just observed my colleagues around the room. Most fell into some clear categories. The older faculty looked as devoid of energy and life as week-old flattened road kill. Too many student papers? Too many department meetings? Too many lies from the administration?

  About half of the EAR faculty, forty in all, and mostly men, was given to decrepit tweed jackets and well-worn corduroy pants, in what I suppose they thought was deliberate self-parody. But their outfits had deconstructed themselves once too often. Balding, or with bad haircuts, it would have been a kindness to call them shabby. Their dowdiness was so oppressive and inescapable that the younger, more fashionably dressed faculty members came off as showy and inappropriate—as if they were reeking of perfume at a funeral.

  Facing the raucous, clamoring crowd, Coral made a controlled moue of distaste. She could have been changing a particularly nasty diaper, and I started laughing. Serena joined me, and Coral nodded her gratitude at us as people shut up, trying to figure out what was funny.

  “One at a time,” Coral muttered. “Please.”

  The idea of including more women writers in syllabi was shot down by a curriculum committee member who said we’d done enough in that direction.

  Les Peterman, the department jock, said, “How about some men secretaries to show we’re not sexist?” He was booed and applauded. His field was the Sixties, and for some reason he always joked about equal rights for women.

  A new hiree asked, “How about a conference on Gender?”

  There was a tentative silence as people looked around, trying to gauge each others reactions. “Gender”—along with “PC”—was one of those terms that could ignite true and lasting hysteria on campus.

  Serena drawled, “Lovely, then we could pay people to talk about their private parts.”

  Coral hushed the outburst of hilarity by simply shaking her head. “A conference,” she said. “Why not have a conference? I don’t mean on Gender, but on”—she hesitated—“a woman writer. An American woman writer. The alumnae would approve, we could get Women’s Studies to co-sponsor….”

  It made so much sense that you could have imagined everyone in the room was on time-release Valium, falling in with Coral’s mood. We all nodded in slow motion, quiet now, trying to decide on whom to suggest.

  “Anaïs Nin,” Serena threw out.

  “Oh, please!” That was Larry Rich, the shabby ex-hippie in stained cords and baggy sweaters. He taught Renaissance drama and poetry. “She’s so passé.”

  Martin Wardell, the Victorian specialist who always returned his student papers late, seconded that. “Too much heavy breathing, too much straining for effect.”

  “She’s not passé—she slept with her father,” Priscilla Davidoff said reasonably, from over by the door. Priscilla taught genre fiction. “Incest memoirs are really hot right now.”

  There were shudders in the room, as if the suggestion was to put the whole department on the Geraldo Rivera show. Nin was clearly out of the question.

  The predominantly male room similarly demolished Gertrude Stein, because she was a lesbian and therefore too controversial, and besides, “The Italians appreciate her much more than we do”—whatever that meant. Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers went down in flames as “too weird.” Willa Cather was out because she was being done next year at that “other school” in Ann Arbor. Toni Morrison appeared to excite some interest, but was quickly dumped—though no one said it aloud—because there weren’t any Black faculty members in the department. Cynthia Ozick likewise was axed because SUM didn’t have a Jewish Studies program; the last thing EAR needed was to highlight the university’s deficiencies. Besides, she was coming to campus in the President’s Lecture Series in the winter.

  The back of my neck suddenly felt cold, and I wondered if people were looking at me for some reason. I was right. Someone near the door called, “How about Edith Wharton?”

  I whirled around; it was Carter Savery, the department’s most colorless professor. One of the ex-Rhetoric faculty, he was a drab, bald, chunky, gray man whose face was consistently devoid of affect. The kind of man you see neighbors talking about on TV after a mass murder: “But he was always so quiet.”

  Coral pressed her lips together as if possessed by the idea. Had that been her plan all along? “Comments?” she asked, looking like Lily Tomlin’s phone operator with her pursed lips and squished smile. I shuddered while my colleagues blundered to comply with her request.

  Listlessly, Carter said, “Ethan Frome,” as if that title explained everything.

  People around the room nodded in dim recognition as their memories of being bored in high school by Ethan Frome drifted back.

  “And look at all the movies they’re making of her books!” someone else said, as if Hollywood’s distant glamour would reflect on all of us.

  “Wait—this is crazy!”

  Silence. We all turned to Iris Bell, a tiny, red-haired woman with a loud, grating voice, whose every comment was so filled with roiling emotion you expected a breakdown when she said good morning. The corners of her mouth seemed to be yanked down by perpetual sorrow, as if she were possessed by the Mask of Tragedy. She was, of course, also a former Rhetoric Department professor.

  “It’s a fraud!” Iris leapt to her feet, her battered, elfin face twisted with passion, her hands clenched and arms outstretched as if she were begging us to see sense. “We should march to the president’s office right now and protest this charade. We should demand real action, real attention to women’s issues on this campus!”

  In the silence that greeted Iris’s remarks, you could almost hear the non-Rhetoric faculty thinking, “Yeah, right.” And someone muttered, “Why don’t they ever shut up?”

  Coral Greathouse said smoothly, “Shall we vote on the conference?” and Iris sank back into her chair, meager shoulders hunched, her wan face clawed by defeat.

  Like the moment in Bringing Up Baby when Cary Grant knows the dinosaur is going to collapse on itself, I realized there was definitely going to be an Edith Wharton conference at SUM—and I would be responsible, whether I wanted to or not. A vote went through before I could think of any way to stop it or protest. What could be better? Wharton was a popular but bland and uncontentious woman writer.

  “And,” Coral Greathouse summed up, with more than usual enthusiasm, “we have our very own Wharton scholar in this department.”

  “I’m just a bibliographer,” I blurted.

  But Coral waved that away: “We’re so proud of you.”

  In the rush to escape, a decision about dates for the conference and actual planning was deferred, and people came over to slap my shoulder or shake my hand on their way out as if I’d won a prize, as if the department had honored me.

  “Oh God,” I muttered, as the room thinned out.

  Coral Greathouse sailed up to me, her hand extended. I had to rise and shake it, feeling as if I were posing for a public portrait, with the photographers and press eager to capture my feelings and my face.

  “I’m very pleased,” she said in her faltering voice. “Very. It’s the right choice. I know Dean Bullerschmidt will approve and support us. And you certainly have all the connections in the Wharton community.”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “There is no Wharton community.”

  She cocked her head at me as if she were a puzzled parrot trying to learn a difficult new word. “Sorry?”

  I tried to think of a short way to explain
what was a very complicated situation. “There are two rival Wharton organizations—and they hate each other. They hold separate conferences, they have separate journals. Whichever one we hook up with, the other will be outraged.”

  Coral considered that. “If there are two societies, invite them both.” And she left, clearly buoyed by the idea of massive registrations.

  I knew then that I was doomed.

  Serena Fisch shook her head, surveying me with a wry smile. “Coral intends to make her mark with this shindig.”

  “You think so?”

  Serena swung out from her chair, crossed her long legs. “I’m sure of it. If it flies, she’ll claim all the credit.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Good luck, dear. I hope you live through all the people phoning you because their names are misspelled on the program—that is, if your keynote speakers aren’t stranded by an airline strike. Then of course there’s always attempted rape at the cocktail party. Conferences are such fun.”

  “You ran one?”

  “Yes,” she said grimly. “I came down with walking pneumonia and bronchitis before it was all over.”

  “Carter did this on purpose!” I said through clenched teeth, and then I flushed. Serena Fisch was the former chair of the Rhetoric Department, and though she bore herself like a deposed (and jazzy) monarch, I was never entirely sure how she felt about her former subjects.

  Serena shook her head. “I doubt that, Nick. Carter was just trying to be helpful.”

  “This is a disaster,” I said, so only Serena could hear, even though we were alone in the room.