We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Jim at Tepe Yahya.

  When Jim sank into one of his depressive funks, Jane could talk him out of it. One morning when she noticed Jim was particularly withdrawn, Jane made sure that she walked alone with him to the site. “Hey, if you’re not doing anything next week, let’s have a kid?” she asked. It yanked him from his reverie. “What do you want to call it—Ali?” “No, I had more in mind something like Sherman,” she said. They were back in rhythm again.

  Jane had a dream where she and Jim were married, but no one could find him. It wasn’t urgent, though. Even though she didn’t know where he was, there was a feeling that he was right there all the time.

  * * *

  Over the weeks, as sickness and the lack of sanitation lowered the threshold for irritation, even the smallest slights lost all sense of proportion. The pressure that everyone felt to perform well didn’t help matters any. Jim, as the oldest student on the dig, was the site supervisor, and he felt bad that Arthur Bankoff had been passed over despite a longer tenure in the department. Jim worked extra hard to live up to the appointment. Jane’s impression was that while Karl was busy “playing professional Central European barbarian-aristocrat,” walking around and criticizing other people’s trenches and archaeological conclusions, Jim ended up doing nine-tenths of the work. Jim was the one who ran the medical clinic on the site. It was meant for the workers, but locals got word of it, and Jim became the one who patiently and skillfully cared for local children burned by cooking fires and suffering from diarrhea and toothaches. Jane found herself wishing that she could tie him down and force him to rest. “I’ve never seen you stagger before, even from fatigue,” she wrote in her journal.

  Jane felt a similar pressure because she knew that Karl had been unsure about her when he selected her for the dig. If she was going to complete her PhD, in addition to passing Generals, she needed field opportunities for dissertation research. After Movius’s departure, Karl had become Jane’s lifeline in the department. “She felt everything academically depended on her doing well and impressing Karl,” Andrea Bankoff later explained to police.

  But, despite Jane’s best efforts, she was completely lost in her trench. While other crew members were pulling up interesting pottery sherds, all Jane was finding were bricks and rodent holes. She was terrified Karl knew she was making a mess of the excavation. More than once, Karl told Andrea Bankoff that he was pleased with everyone’s progress except one person. Andrea, who was concerned that Karl was referring to her husband, Arthur, didn’t dare ask him to specify.

  In the afternoons, after he finished his work for the day, Jim would climb into Jane’s trench. Together, they’d try to make sense of it until the light grew too dim to see anything.

  * * *

  By late July, goodwill and patience were being gnawed away by the dust storms and the sand flies. Airmail stationery, their only connection to the outside world, was rationed, as was their food: A can of tuna was to be split among three people for lunch. A jar of peanut butter was supposed to last for two weeks. People hallucinated visions of gingerbread and whipped cream and Hershey bars and steaks and green vegetables. They longed for the cold. Jane had so many fly bites it looked like she had a rash. When she was stuck in bed, too sick to supervise her trench, a chicken walked into her tent, crapped, and walked out. Another time, a centipede crawled into her underwear.

  Almost everyone––other than Karl and Richard Meadow (“bless his little antiseptic heart”)—was sick. Jane had been violently ill on and off since week one. Jim had pink eye and the runs and a case of hemorrhoids so severe that he couldn’t sit down. The rest had grumbling, dysenteric stomachs. “We are so frail, all of us, and without the faith or fatalism to meet this place on its own terms,” Jane wrote. Coping with it, she said, required either masochism or hyper-attention to duty, which, she suspected, only Jim was capable of. Eventually, even Richard got sick.

  Sometimes Jane could no longer talk Jim out of his moods. She told him about the dream she had about their marriage—when she knew where he was even though she couldn’t find him—and the next night, he moved his cot away from hers without saying anything. His “I love you” in London changed to “Yes, I probably do.” Jane found herself thinking, It’s going to be just like the past, after all.

  “I probably should have waited until I was sure before shooting off my mouth about Humph. I mean everything’s OK + all but I doubt me if there’s a future in it. In spite of his being a nice guy and all. Which he is. What the hell,” she wrote to her parents.

  There was still more than a month left on the expedition, and she was already emptied out. Jane wrote to herself: “I think maybe I’d like to be dead so I wouldn’t have to see it end, wouldn’t have to keep reading between lines to maintain my precarious hold on what’s real.”

  The Loop

  “IF THIS WERE A MYSTERY novel, I don’t see any really good suspects other than Karl,” Arthur said, still on the swivel chair in his office. I asked if he had any concrete reason to suspect him. He didn’t. It was all speculation. “It looked to me like Harvard was kind of closing up behind its threatened professor. I always connected his getting tenure with Jane’s being murdered.”

  The timing of Karl’s tenure had felt too significant to be random to me, too. And a few other mysteries dangled in close proximity: Jane and Karl’s relationship had started out well enough, but, if Boyd and Arthur were right, it soured, and I didn’t know why.

  Also, if Jane’s killer was someone in the department, I found it hard to believe that her murder on the morning of Generals, a pivotal moment in her academic career, was simply a coincidence.

  And, finally, I was intrigued not just by the timing of Karl’s promotion, but also by the fact of it. Until 2005, when Harvard made all junior professor offers automatically tenure-track, it was rare for a junior professor to get tenure at the school. Instead, the university brought in outside scholars who had already made names for themselves elsewhere. Karl was the last junior professor of archaeology to be tenured from within for the next forty-three years. A few former members of the department told me that 1969 had been an exceptional time. (David Maybury-Lewis, then an assistant professor of anthropology, was also given tenure that year.) For some reason that they couldn’t explain, a window apparently opened up that year that allowed junior professors into the castle, creating a mad urgency to get tenure before the window shut.

  Even so, for Karl to get the promotion, he had to have been exceptional. Karl credited his rapid ascension to his field experience, the recommendation letters his UPenn mentors wrote, and his publication record before coming to Harvard. And Tepe Yahya was a landmark discovery. But would the 1968 season and the survey of the site from the year before have been enough? It certainly wasn’t Carmania, as Karl had come back contending. But the tenure committee may not have known that the site’s connection with Carmania had been misjudged––or even if it had, that it might not have cared. (Less than two years later, in 1970, the Tepe Yahya progress report made no mention of Carmania.)

  Carmania was a good story, and the newspapers had already done their work of amplifying it. In November 1968, the Boston Globe celebrated Karl as the man who had unearthed Alexander the Great’s lost citadel: “For centuries, scholars have been aware that Carmania once existed. Yet they have never been able to find the fabled fortress. […] But this past Summer, the Harvard team headed by C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky […] dug out the ancient fort.” The evidence was scant: supposed elephant teeth found at the top of the mound, and the fact that Tepe Yahya, like Carmania, according to an ancient Greek historian, was located a “five days’ march from the sea.” But that didn’t stop Karl from confidently declaring to the Globe: “I am positive we have discovered Carmania.”

  I was starting to believe that there were two kinds of archaeologists: the scholars like Jim Humphries and Richard Meadow, who were meticulous and bound by data, and, as I’d seen sitting in his class, the storytellers like Karl. I wa
s also starting to believe that the storytellers always won. We seemed to value memorability more than accuracy as long as no one forced us to look too closely. As Arthur had said on the call before we met, “If you can tell a real good story about what your site was and what it was doing and why it was there, and so on, that’s what the truth is. The best story? That’s the truth. Whether or not it actually happened.” Perhaps the only people who could have forced the tenure committee to examine the truth behind Karl’s claims were some of the people who had been on the dig that summer.

  But proximity, I scolded myself, didn’t equal causation.

  “I don’t know how to close that loop,” I told Arthur.

  He said he didn’t know how to close the loop, either, and added, “Yeah, well, look. If he did it, it’s been a long time, but it would be good just to clear it up. As I said, I wish he did, but wishes don’t necessarily reflect reality.”

  General Exams

  AS POLICE CONTINUED QUESTIONING JANE’S friends, the timing of Jane’s death emerged as something salient.

  Don Mitchell told the cops that the last time he saw Jane—when she dropped by for a glass of sherry—she had talked about “this Lamberg-Karlovsky person, and whether he was going to pull a fast one on her about the exam.” Jane had been sure that Karl didn’t like her, but she didn’t know why.

  Talking to police, Jim recounted similar conversations with Jane about her worries that she would not be graded fairly on this exam. She felt the same thing had happened to her the year before. Jim prefaced his comments by saying that he didn’t know the full story because he hadn’t been taking Generals that year, “but from what I understand…she should have passed, but it was thought that the people marking the exam had refused to pass her.”

  Ingrid Kirsch said she knew more, and she didn’t hold back. She explained to police that Jane had been failed on all three sections of her general exams, even though she’d technically passed the archaeology section of the test. According to Ingrid, Jane somehow knew that Karl, one of three people grading her exam, had suggested to the grading committee that they should just fail her across the board. Apparently Karl had added that if Jane continued performing so poorly, he would see to it himself that she’d have no future in the department. Karl would later deny this allegation: “That one person could decide to pass or fail a person is absurd. It’s a lie.”

  Stephen Williams tried to assure police that it was impossible to grade the Generals unfairly. He said the marking procedures had been designed precisely to avoid bias. The exam was always graded by a committee of three so that two professors read the response to each question. And each exam was attributed to a number—not a person—ensuring that the graders wouldn’t know whose exams they were marking. “We take the precaution of making darn sure that we don’t know.”

  He was adamant with Detective Davenport that he couldn’t recognize any of the students’ handwriting.

  But Stephen Williams’s assurances felt thin in light of the fact that Jane wasn’t the only one who thought she had been graded unfairly. Students blamed Williams himself for failing another woman the year before: Kitty Caruthers.

  The day that Jane had tracked Jim down to his room and asked how it felt to be chased by Sarah Lee Irwin, they’d been gathered in the student commons because they were upset by how unfair Kitty’s situation was.

  One student wrote a complaint to Karl. On the basis of Kitty’s grades––A’s and B’s––the author of the letter didn’t understand why Kitty hadn’t been given a second chance to pass generals, especially since two other students had been allowed to make up for failing marks. It was the author’s belief that Stephen Williams, who had been consistently rude to Kitty, hadn’t given her a fair shot. Williams, the letter alleged, may even have been out to get her. The author appealed to Karl’s empathetic side: He, like Kitty––who was in a terrible state, needing to hold herself together with sedatives––should understand what it feels like to have so little recourse. Kitty didn’t deny that she failed her exams; she just wanted the chance to try again.

  Kitty was never given that second chance. She left Harvard with a terminal master’s in the spring of 1968.

  Contrary to Stephen Williams’s protestations, students felt that the structure of general exam grading left a lot of room for personal biases to prejudice the outcome. Generals, as much as they were a test, were also a subjective checkpoint: After grading the exam, the faculty discussed whether the student’s performance in the department merited continuing on. According to one student in Jane’s cohort, the amount of power a professor’s opinion had in those deliberations depended on that professor’s standing in the department, as well as on how closely that professor worked with the student.

  Karl would later call this a “fundamental misunderstanding of the rules and regulations that guide the general exam.” Though he acknowledged the faculty-meeting phase of grading, he reiterated that one person did not have the power to sink a student, citing a thwarted attempt by Stephen Williams to fail a different female student. In his entire fifty-one years of teaching, Karl remembered only one person failing Generals, and that was Kitty.

  But the student insisted: While the withdrawal of support from a professor who played a negligible role in a student’s academic life might or might not be damning, a no vote from a principal adviser could be enough to torpedo the student’s intended career.

  Ever since Movius had abandoned her for Les Eyzies, Karl had been Jane’s principal adviser. And just like the previous year, he was one of three people on the grading committee. Jane might have believed that it wouldn’t matter how well she actually performed on the test. Her destiny was in Karl’s hands.

  Ingrid Kirsch Police Interrogation

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: And what is your name, young lady?

  Ms. Kirsch: Ingrid Kirsch.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: I’m going to ask you some questions, and I’m just asking them for the sake of getting an answer, regardless of what the answer is. We are investigating the staff also because we’re thinking along the lines of these tests, and she was definitely scared to death of one test.

  Ms. Kirsch: She was.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: And we have a feeling that it’s this Karlovsky’s.

  Ms. Kirsch: Yes, it was. I’ll tell you what I know about that. When she took her examinations last year, she flunked them, and I talked to her after that. She was extremely despondent. She was despondent before she took them and despondent afterwards. And afterwards she said, “Look, I’ve been screwed. I have been given the end of the stick.” And I said, “Well, look, who?” And she said, “Karlovsky has really screwed me.” And I said, “Well, not Movius?” And she said, “Eh, Movius.”

  Movius thought she was an excellent student. Apparently, the recommendation he wrote for her graduate entry was terrific, and the reason she knows this is because she opened it up once. I don’t think Movius lost faith in Janie’s ability as an archaeologist. She was bloody good. There’s no question about that.

  But there was something about Lamberg. I don’t think that he was tolerant, for example, of the fact that emotions, emotional contingencies, made a difference in her work, a tremendous difference. If she was upset about something, she blew it. Now, around Christmastime, which is about the same time that she took Generals last year, she was breaking up with Franquemont, and boy, this just blew it for her.

  So on the examinations, her board sat down and said, “Look, on social anthropology, she has not passed. On physical anthropology, she has not passed. We could pass her on archaeology.” And Karlovsky said, “Forget it.” He said, “Look, if she continues working this way, I’m going to see that she gets kicked out of the department.”

  […] But Karl also, you know, had this argument with her one night. They were over at a party at Karl’s and they apparently were both pretty loaded. And Karl lit into her about something, and she lit into him back. And he said to her, �
�Look, you’re just a student in this department, on my grace. And you know, if I can keep you from going on the dig, I would.”

  Unidentified Male: How long ago was that?

  Ms. Kirsch: That was last spring. And what she said was he presented the case to her this way: “Jane, if you do well on this dig and work your ass off, maybe I’ll let you stay in the department. If not, I’ll see that you get your head chopped off.” Well, no wonder she was scared about her exams. She was terrified.

  Detective Lieutenant Davenport: So this was prior to the dig.

  Ms. Kirsch: This is prior to the dig, but I think that her attitude on the dig towards Lamberg-Karlovsky was colored a great deal by his antagonism towards her. She did not like him, and I think he loathed her, and I don’t know why.

  Such a Toad

  I PHONED DOZENS OF PEOPLE who worked in and around the Peabody Museum—custodial staff, assistant directors, secretaries, registrars, publishers, conservators—as well as graduate students, teaching fellows, and assistant professors, and I quickly learned that there was no unbiased opinion about Karl.

  Through my conversations, Karl emerged as a complicated, mercurial man: brilliant, imposing, hot-tempered, ambitious, inspiring, flamboyant, charismatic, exploitative, even paranoid. Some knew to stay away from him, some admired his charisma. But one way or another, he inspired intense reactions, like from Barbara Westman, the museum’s in-house artist. Barbara, eighty-eight years old when I spoke with her, kept her comments about the museum anodyne. “Everyone was so nice,” she said. “We used to drink coffee on the street.” But that changed when Karl’s name was mentioned. “He and his wife were so pompous. P-O-M-P-O-U-S, pompous.” She laughed, pleased with herself. “He was such a toad.”