by Lev Raphael
I showed up at 4:00 P.M. at the conference room of definitely unblessed memory, surprised by the number of faculty and graduate students in somber attendance. Everyone spoke softly, if at all. Even this assemblage of braggarts, egotists, careerists, and no-talents was humbled in the face of death, and that was somewhat heartening, I thought.
Like the lecture hall of an unpopular professor, the room was filling up from the back forward. Lucille sat in the very last row, and there weren’t any empty seats around her, so I just shrugged sympathetically.
Juno slunk in, head uncharacteristically down, her fire quite dimmed. She sat two seats away, and I felt sorry for her. Betty Malatesta made a dramatic entrance in black blouse and long black jeans skirt. Though she always wore black, today it made her look as if she was in mourning as Delaney’s wife, not Bill’s. She stopped in the doorway, raking everyone with her ravaged-looking eyes, and announced, “He didn’t do it.” Betty glared at me, and I half expected her to berate me for not helping Bill. I wondered what dire and disgusting fate she was wishing on me.
We all looked away, furiously but quietly attempting to act casual. Betty moved to the back of the room, leaning against the wall as if we weren’t good enough to sit with.
I was surprised to see Polly show up, also in dark clothing that made her seem frailer, older. She nodded at me, then caught sight of someone else, shook her head, and backed out of the room. Why was she there, and whom had she seen? I glanced behind me but wasn’t sure, and it didn’t seem that anyone else had noticed. Maybe I was just imagining it, given the stress of the last few days.
The mood had shifted in the crowded, uncomfortable room after Betty’s announcement; maybe Polly had left because she sensed something nasty in our collective aura. I wasn’t sure I believed that individuals had auras, but EAR certainly had some group psychic stink, thanks to the university administration. Over a decade back, the separate Rhetoric Department, which taught all the basic composition courses, was dissolved and its faculty moved into English and American Studies, over futile faculty protests from both departments. The budget-cutting move created a permanent rift between the two groups: The rhetoric professors were treated as inferiors, and that treatment stoked their historical resentment about low salaries and a high teaching load. This happened well before Stefan and I had come to SUM, but we were often stumbling across the wreckage of that academic cataclysm.
As the room filled up even more, I thought about Polly again. I realized that she had probably come to pay respects to a former history student, and I was sorry she hadn’t stayed. Gestures like that weren’t the rule at SUM—but that was speaking about faculty. Secretaries tended to be friendlier, and many of them knew more about the way their departments operated than faculty did. I often heard our own secretaries correcting misinformation professors had given undergraduates they were supposedly advising. For all her dizziness, I’d heard that Polly did her job well.
Coral appeared suddenly at the front of the room, as if stepping from behind a curtain. “We’re here to honor the memory of Delaney Kildare, one of our graduate students,” she began, droning on like a minister at a funeral who had never met the deceased and was just working from hastily written notes. It made me uneasy to think that this would probably be what happened to me if I were to die while teaching at EAR.
Coral’s remarks were very brief, and she asked if anyone wished to speak. Lucille rose, and there was a stirring in the room, as if people expected her to light into the faculty after how she’d been treated the last time we were all together. “Delaney was a student of great promise,” she said mellifluously, her glance shifting around the room, settling nowhere. “He was a thoughtful writer and would have made a charismatic teacher.” I was impressed by her steady tone and measured praise. If I were in her place, I might have been tempted to howl.
Perhaps Lucille was contemplating a moment like that, because she paused for a very long time, then shook her head, said “Sorry,” and sat down. Around me I heard approving murmurs that she had paid respectful tribute to one of her advisees. A few other professors rose and uttered banalities, more to fill the air, I thought, than because they had something important to say. Delaney hadn’t been in the department long enough to have a real history there, for anyone to tell poignantly funny anecdotes about him.
Ten minutes? Fifteen? The service was over quickly, and everyone trooped off without any real sense of grief or regret in the air. I pushed through the crowd to say something to Lucille. I didn’t want to do anything ostentatious that might set people wondering about her complex feelings for Delaney, but faced with her sad, set face, I had to give her an enormous hug.
“Stefan didn’t come,” she noted.
“He hates meetings,” I whispered. “Even ones like this.” As I said it, I wondered again what I, what Stefan, was doing here at SUM.
“And he gets away with it?” she said. “Must be nice.” I could understand her attitude—I often envied Stefan’s ability to avoid the mass meetings, though he did do his committee work with diligence. I noticed that she had her briefcase with her. She said, “I’ll see you later. I’m going home to drink as much of Didier’s unpronounceable Scotch as I can without brain damage.”
I took off for my office, and on the stairs, things that had been jumbled in my head started to come together. I slowed down, picturing Polly’s face earlier, and when we were talking to her about Delaney, and the last time she’d been at our house, in the sunroom. I remembered how she’d become subdued when I mentioned Delaney the first time, and how she’d recently sworn she wasn’t lying.
Upstairs on the third floor I was in luck. I ran into Polly coming back from the women’s room, and suddenly something started to click for me. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
She looked anxiously around as if I had laid some kind of ambush for her and the trap were about to be sprung, but then she nodded.
“My office?” I asked, and she followed me down the quiet hallway past the History Department office and a series of closed faculty office doors. For some reason, faculty up here tended not to leave their office doors open when they were inside, so you always had to knock to find out if anyone was there. Maybe they were trying to discourage students.
When she sat down, I pushed the door to but didn’t close it, so I could tell if someone was out there. I sat behind my desk and plunged right in. “Were you sleeping with Delaney?” It seemed to be the most obvious question, and one that might lead to clarity about others.
“You’re crazy!” she spat, but her eyes tightened.
“Last Sunday, you were all bubbly as usual until I mentioned Delaney across the street. It didn’t hit me right away.”
“Bullshit.” She glared at me, but she didn’t get up.
“And that’s why you were combative when Stefan and I talked to you at your house, isn’t it? Come on, he’s dead, what does it matter now?”
Shamefaced, Polly said an unexpectedly soft “Yes.” But then she raised her head and looked me squarely in the eyes, and before I could ask anything else, she went on as if she’d been waiting for someone, anyone, to unburden herself to. “On and off, from last year when he was finishing his master’s in history. He liked older women. At least he said he did. But he had a cruel spirit.”
“Physically? Was he abusive to you?”
“Not that way, no. He was terribly sarcastic about other women. You should have heard him joke about how fat Professor Mochtar was, and how Professor Dromgoole dressed like she was twenty years younger than she was. Not that I agreed with him,” she added loyally, even though both women had been her rivals in an odd sort of way. Both were downstairs at the memorial service, I thought.
“What else did he say about them?”
She sighed as deeply as if she were a medium trying to contact her spirit guide. “That they were eating out of his hand.”
“When did he tell you all this stuff?”
Surprised by the question, sh
e said, “In bed,” as if everyone shared such rude confidences there. I thought of Dangerous Liaisons and imagined Delaney as the contemptuous Valmont. How deep had his treachery gone, and what did he get out of it?
As if she’d heard the question, Polly said, “He liked showing off.” She closed her eyes, perhaps remembering some of the very particular ways he had showed off for her, and I let her have her moment while I considered Delaney’s perversity. “He told me things about other people, how he could make them do whatever he wanted. Like you,” Polly said, looking embarrassed. “He told me he was going to make you take him on as TA for your mystery course. And the dean would fund the course, too.”
“How was he going to do that—did he say?”
She didn’t know. “He was just sure he could do it.”
Well, he’d been right about the dean, but he hadn’t worked his dark magic on me enough to get me to agree to take him on as my TA. He had certainly tried—what other purpose could he have had for driving a wedge between me and Stefan? Was he planning to seduce me, too, even though he was supposedly straight, or was his game to get me to make a pass at him that he’d reject so he could have power over me?
“He also said he was going to fu—sleep with Lucille Mochtar, but first he had to make her depend on him completely.”
“How?”
“By scaring her,” Polly says. “Scaring her bad.”
Oh, God, I thought, it must have been Delaney behind the hate mail and breaking Lucille’s window with a brick. Delaney used all that to undermine Lucille’s sense of security, then offered himself as savior—and more, if she wanted it. Which she did.
Polly was peering at me curiously, so I said, “The racist postcard Lucille got here—you heard about it, didn’t you?”
She nodded ruefully. “He never told me what he was going to do—”
“But you knew it had to be him.” It chilled me to think that I might have ended up teaching with someone as twisted as Delaney.
“I guess.”
She was able to recount Delaney’s cruelty without condemning him—it was a terrible sign of how besotted she’d been.
“I didn’t want anyone to know about us,” she went on. “Delaney made me feel so good, and so bad. It was very confusing.”
I felt sorry for her, for everyone whom Delaney had come to know, including myself. I’d let him influence me, poison my thoughts not just against Stefan but against myself. As if the corrosive voice of self-doubt had assumed a human form—and what a form. Delaney had been beautiful enough to fool, to dazzle anyone.
“He was sick,” I breathed.
“But he was punished,” Polly pointed out. “And not in the next life, in this one.”
“Wait a minute. Delaney was murdered. Isn’t that extreme punishment for manipulating other people and lying to them?”
Polly shrugged. Clearly I was a spiritual Visigoth totally out of touch with the subtle harmonies of the universe.
I asked her, “Why did you act spooked downstairs? Why didn’t you stay for the memorial service?”
“I have to finish up for today,” she said, shutting me out completely.
I let her go and sat there puzzling over the whole situation, keenly aware that I only understood part of it. I took out a notepad and started doodling names. Delaney was in the middle, and I drew arrows out from that center to Polly, to Lucille and Didier, to me and Stefan, to Juno. Was there a pattern here, or just random malice? And wasn’t there something missing? Like a reason for someone to kill Jesse and Delaney. I sat there trying to figure what that was when I heard a soft knock on the door. I looked up and jumped from my chair. “Angie!” I rushed to her and gave her a hug, then broke away, embarrassed by my intensity. She blushed when I told her how worried I was about her after she disappeared. Then I apologized.
“What for?” she asked, as I waved her to the student chair and sat back down, drinking in her face, relieved that she was all right.
“Dr. Case tried your number up in Houghton but said it was always busy, and I didn’t try following up. It’s been so crazy here on campus.”
“I heard,” she said. “But I’m the one who should apologize for doing a Titanic.”
“What?”
“Sinking out of sight. I know we should have talked about the bridge and Jesse. To straighten it out, and stuff. But I didn’t leave campus because of what happened to Jesse, it was because right after he died, I got this hyper call from my parents saying we had this enormous family emergency I had to leave school for. But they wouldn’t tell me what it was! I started bugging, you know? I panicked. What if my mom or dad was diagnosed with cancer or something? I wasn’t thinking too straight, I jumped in my Escort and drove straight home. With only pee breaks and drive-through McDonald’s stops! Over twelve hours! I thought it was the end of the world I had to deal with.”
“What was the emergency? Can you say?”
She pursed her lips. “This is so not cool. Nobody’s sick or dying or anything! I mean, what a waste! My younger brother, he’s a senior in high school, he told them he was having an affair with his math teacher. She’s twenty-five years older than him, and he wanted to marry her.”
Jeez, I thought, what’s the deal with older women in Michigan? Was it the beginning of a regional trend? Then something tugged at me, but I couldn’t figure out what.
Now that she’d launched her story, Angie was in full swing, telling me how her parents freaked out about her brother and demanded she intervene. But Angie refused, and was so angry and mortified by her parents’ dragging her away from school when there wasn’t truly a crisis, she’d been too embarrassed to call anyone at SUM. She waited until the trouble sorted itself out at home, which it did when her brother failed a math exam.
“But what about Jesse? Why did you say you thought he would get himself killed?”
“We dated a few times, nothing serious, but it didn’t work because Jesse drank too much and I had to drive him back to his dorm plastered each time. One night Jesse said something about knowing a secret that could get him killed. It sounded serious, not like bullshit.” She blushed and started to smack her own cheek, but I stopped her by saying, “I’m not that delicate, I can take it.”
“Okay. So, when I saw him dead on the bridge, I knew he wasn’t joking. I was sure somebody was after him, and got him.”
“So you weren’t ever in danger?” I pressed.
“No way, never. Jesse was. He never told me why, but it had to be the truth.”
She was right about that, but what could have caused Jesse’s death? A drug deal? Gang violence? A cult? What?
“I gotta bail.” Angie shrugged. “But I wanted to see you because I felt bad about booking like that, and I knew you’d be weirded out.”
After she left, I tried Stefan at home, but the line was busy and call waiting didn’t kick in, so I figured he was on e-mail. I tried leaving a message on my own answering machine, hoping Stefan might hear that if I talked loud enough, but it didn’t work.
It was a little after 5:00 P.M., and I started gathering my stuff together. The copy of Adolphe I’d bought was still in my briefcase, which I’d left in the car all weekend, and I found myself drawn to open it. Back in college, Penguin Classics had been my passion; the bindings were so soft you never had to crack them open, and I liked the light beige paper they were printed on—somehow I never strained my eyes reading them. Each great novel had linked me through lists at the back to others, so that the year I read French literature extensively, I reeled in delight from Balzac to Zola to de Maupassant, Diderot, Flaubert. But for some reason I’d missed Constant.
I sat back in my chair, and twenty years seemed stripped from my life as I started to leaf through the introduction. And then I stopped, horrified, beginning to see what I’d left off my piece of paper mapping Delaney and people connected to him. Why hadn’t I looked at this book before? I’d sometimes sneered at moments in classic mysteries where something accidentally helps a
detective put a case together, something indirect but analogous. Yet here it was happening to me.
I shoved it back into my briefcase, sure I’d never have the stomach to read it now, locked up, and headed down the hall, chewing over everything I’d learned about Delaney that afternoon, and what Angie had later revealed to me about Jesse.
Harry Benevento was just locking the History office door. More good luck for me. I stopped him, asking if we could talk.
“Now?” he bristled, and I momentarily felt like a circus animal trainer unsure of his bear.
“It’s important.”
“Fine.” Harry nodded, then let us both in and took me through to his private office, which was identical to Coral Greathouse’s just a floor below but much more human and warm, filled with brilliant watercolors of Italian-looking landscapes. The office made me feel much calmer than I had in weeks, and Benevento now appeared far less formidable a man.
“Those are beautiful,” I said. “So much energy.”
“Thanks. My wife painted them.” He pointed to the chair facing his across the wide desk and settled behind it. In his boring dark blue suit, white shirt, and orange tie, he looked like an over-the-hill anchorman at a second-rate station. “She was very good,” he continued, “but never sold more than a few paintings in her life. The depression ruined her. Even Prozac didn’t help.”
Out of respect, I didn’t comment for a moment, then I said, reaching, “And Delaney made it worse, I bet.”
Harry Benevento’s mouth hardened as if fiercely keeping something back, and he tried staring me down, but I felt reckless and didn’t waver. Only finding out the truth about Delaney would finally purge his influence from my life. “Delaney Kildare was a very cruel boy. Or man, if you prefer.” I brought this out slowly, the ideas crystallizing as I spoke them. “Probably a sociopath. That smile. I should have taken it much more seriously. Like something inside kept bursting through the gorgeous facade. To warn people it was all a show. Or maybe even to dare them to find out.”