by Jane Haddam
“I really don’t think I know what you mean,” Neil said.
He was stiff now. She could feel it. She got up and began to walk around the office, doing the unthinkable, the one thing she had been told by everyone, even Drew, that she was never to do. She started picking up the brica-brac. It was ancient and venerable bric-a-brac: a painted wooden duck decoy that had never been in the water; a picture of a woman in a shirtwaist dress in a thick silver frame; a little canoe made out of birch bark and tailored into a perfect miniature. She could feel him flinching every time she picked up something else. There were no Steuben glass crystal hand warmers here, and there never would be.
“You know,” she said, “I know you think I’m stupid, and it’s probably true. I’m not very quick at a lot of things, and there’s a lot I don’t understand. But I understand this. All those people you can’t stand have rights, too. They have the right to be heard. They have the right to be taken seriously.”
“Nobody has the right to be taken seriously. You earn that by the content of your ideas.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. But maybe you don’t, so I’ll let it pass. The thing is, I’ve thought it all out, and I’ve decided that I’ll be a lot better without you than with you. And that goes for Drew’s staff. There have to be people out there who can run an office without thinking their shit doesn’t stink because they got their degree from Mount Holyoke. There have got to be people with skills that I can actually work with.”
“You’ve never had any problem working with me,” Neil said.
“That’s because I’ve never had to work with you. You could ignore me while Drew was alive. You can’t ignore me now. I don’t want to spend my time meeting in offices surrounded by all your dead partners who probably thought the Irish were the next worst thing after refrigerator mold, if they even knew what refrigerator mold was. I don’t care if people hate me for being Catholic, but I care when they laugh at me for it.”
“I’ve never laughed at anybody for being Catholic.”
“Not in public, no. But you do. At least, you laugh at my kind of Catholic, at rosaries and scapulars and pictures of us making First Holy Communion in a white dress and a veil like a make-believe bride. I didn’t make that one up, either. That was one of the women at the office. I want the will read, and settled, and then you’re fired. You never wanted Drew’s business anyway. Now you’re rid of it.”
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Neil said. “You think I’m too stupid to think for myself,” Ellen said, “and that could be true. We’ll just have to see. As soon as we get the will read and it becomes official that I’m taking over the franchise, I’m going to fire the office staff. All of them.”
“But they know where everything is. They know things you can’t possibly know, that even Drew couldn’t possibly know.”
“I’ve got a friend from home who’s been a secretary all her life. I’m going to bring her in to run things. I’ll bring her in a couple of weeks early so they can show her what she needs to know. And no, Neil, I’m not so stupid that I don’t know that they’ll probably sabotage her—or is it that I think they’ll probably sabotage her that’s the stupid part? That’s something I heard once, too. That people like Drew think the things they think because they’re just stupid enough to know they don’t get it, so they suspect everybody all the time of trying to pull one over on them. But Drew wasn’t stupid, you know. No matter what you thought.”
“I didn’t think he was stupid.”
“Maybe not. Maybe you only thought he was vulgar. I don’t see where it matters. After I get Janice installed at the office, I’m going to take off for two weeks and take my nieces to Disney World. No fancy restaurants where I don’t know how to pronounce the food. No being stuck with mineral water and a salad because that’s what everybody else is eating and I’m afraid to look like an idiot having a hamburger. I’m going to drink Coke, eat pizza and Tex Mex, and go on rides. And you’ll never hear from me again.”
“I don’t think you can just take off for Florida like that,” Neil said. “You’re a suspect in a murder investigation. You may have to get permission from the court.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ellen said. “The only reason I’d need that is if I’d been arrested and I was out on bail, but I’m not going to be arrested, and you know it. Nobody suspects me of killing Drew. Not even Gregor Demarkian suspects me of killing Drew.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“But I do know it,” Ellen said. “And do you know how I know it? Because the person he suspects is you.”
2
It had been bothering her since Gregor Demarkian had come to see her the night before, and now it was impossible to keep out of her mind on any level. Alison wasn’t even able to keep it out of her mind while she was teaching, and usually teaching was better than a memory drug. She found it all too easy to retreat into the Middle Ages and to experience that as more real, and more immediate, than anything in the present. Maybe that was because the Middle Ages were more real and immediate than anything in the present. The passage of time did a lot of good things for whatever cultural periods it didn’t completely destroy. It washed away the trivial and the dross. It eliminated the extraneous. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Hildegarde von Bingen’s music stood out like shining beacons of culture, taste, erudition, and sanity next to the violent confusion of a world full of Madonna and Beethoven, Steven Spielberg and Shakespeare, The Weekly World News and The Portrait of a Lady. But Chaucer’s world had been a violent confusion, too, and on every level. It was a world where people died young of diseases we didn’t have the names for anymore, where maiming and mutilation were par for the course in war, where the cultural landscape included hundreds of truly execrable morality plays and drama from traveling troupes with no more thought to the artistic integrity of what they were doing than for the feelings of the playwrights whose works they were plagiarizing. Then there was the really gruesome: the art of religious relics, manufactured wholesale from bits and pieces of dead animals and, yes, dead human beings. There was the art of the Chapel of Bones, with its facade made of human bones stacked one on top of the other and, in the sanctuary, the bodies of a dead man and a dead child hung by hooks over the congregation, to remind them of the fleetingness of life. There was the Plague, and there were the flagellants, monks who walked through the streets of towns and cities in formation, scourging themselves with metal-tipped leather whips until their upper torsos spurted blood. Hell, Alison thought, give me World Wrestling Entertainment anytime.
She looked up now at the building she thought was the one she wanted, and tried consulting the visitor’s map one more time. It was astounding that she had managed to be at Penn for all these years and still not know where the Math Department was, but she wasn’t in the Math Department, and she didn’t usually need them for anything, so that was the way that went. The visitor’s map was more than a little surreal. It showed the university buildings as if they were made of Lego blocks, but it didn’t show anything of the city that not only surrounded the campus but interweaved with it. It was disorienting. People who came to visit here must feel as if they’d entered a virtual reality game, or exited from one.
This looked like the right building. She went inside and looked at the information board just inside the door. Not all buildings had them. She was glad this one did. Maybe it had something to do with this being a science building, and committed to modernity and reason. Or maybe not. The information board didn’t give much in the way of information. It didn’t list professors’ offices. It did say that the Math Department was in “Room 217,” by which Alison supposed it meant that the office with the Math Department’s secretaries was there. She wondered sometimes why academic departments always wanted to make having to deal with them something that was very hard to do.
She found the stairs and ran up them. This building might have an elevator. It was hard to tell which ones did and didn’t. On the
second floor, she went down the corridors counting doors, looking for Room 217, and then she got lucky. She heard his voice, sailing out into the corridor as clearly as if he had been speaking into a microphone.
“No more hegemonic discourse, Delmore,” he said. “I’m very, very serious.”
Alison was startled for a moment. She didn’t think math people talked about hegemonic discourse. She got tired just hearing literature people talk about hegemonic discourse. She slowed down a little and tried to listen, but whoever Delmore was, his diction was deplorable. All she could catch was mumbles.
“The revolution won’t be destroyed because you learn to speak in plain English,” Jig Tyler said then. “It might be destroyed if you don’t.”
Alison went up to the door and looked inside. Jig was sitting behind his desk, with his legs up, wearing a ratty old crew-necked sweater over even rattier khaki pants. “Delmore” was wearing jeans, but he shouldn’t have been. He was too fat, too round, too soft, and far too earnest-looking.
Alison was just wondering if she should clear her throat, and knock, when Jig saw her there. He put his feet down and sat up straight. “Dr. Standish,” he said. “Get yourself together, Delmore. This is Dr. Standish. She teaches in the English Department and writes articles about the development of vernacular poetry and heresy.”
“Heresy is good,” Delmore said earnestly. “Heresy is inherently transgressive, and because of that it almost always has subversive and underminic effects on the hegemonic—”
Jig cleared his throat. Delmore shut up. He had thin hair pulled awkwardly across the top of his head, over what was becoming a bald spot.
“Well,” Delmore said. “I’ve got Dr. Markham’s seminar in about twenty minutes. I should go.”
“Good idea,” Jig said.
Alison watched Delmore leave the office and go down the hall. He looked dejected. She thought the oppression he most needed to alleviate was his own.
“Do you always behave that way to him?” she asked. “Is it—I don’t know—some sort of tradition in the Math Department, like it used to be at Chicago, when people said you were presumed guilty of stupidity until proven innocent?”
“I’d never presume anybody guilty of anything until proven innocent,” Jig said. “Delmore proved his stupidity long ago. He’s an entirely mechanical actor. He’s flawlessly conscientious. He comes to every class. He does every assignment. He studies for every test. He’s always prepared. It’s taken him this far, and that isn’t a small thing. Getting admitted to the graduate program in this department these days makes getting elected God look like a piece of cake. But the mechanics are all Delmore can do. He has no imagination, and he has less knowledge of the real world and how it operates. You don’t want to begin discussing his problems understanding people.”
“Is that necessary in a mathematician? That he understand people?”
“Probably not. Lord only knows there have been enough mathematicians who don’t. And in some highly technical fields, a lack of understanding and empathy could even help. You wouldn’t want a surgeon standing over you with a knife and feeling your pain. But it’s necessary to a human being that he—or she, excuse me—understand people, and I’m afraid Delmore isn’t ever going to be much of a human being.”
“But he does what you tell him to do, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, yes,” Jig said. “Delmore tries to compensate for his lack of interrelatedness with people by committing himself to what he thinks are left politics and hero-worshiping me. In the beginning, I thought the hero worship was what bothered me. Lately, it’s been the left politics.”
“I thought you had left politics.”
“I do,” Jig said. “I have real left politics. Delmore is sunk up to his neck in the intellectualized crap that’s become the security blanket of the embattled academic class. A transgressive hermeneutics of grammar. Ad infinitum.”
This room, Alison thought, was exactly what you would expect the office of a two-time Nobel Prize winner to be like. There were books everywhere, and not only books related to his field. There was Aristotle and Kant and Heidegger. There was Jane Austen and James Joyce. There was a copy of Einstein’s essays on society and politics. If they gave you something besides a check to mark your Nobel Prize—a plaque, or certificate, or a statue— that wasn’t here. She folded her arms across her chest and looked back at Jig. He was exactly what you would expect him to be, too. The intellectual giant as Brahmin WASP. The genius as preppie.
“I came,” she said, “to find out why you told Drew Harrigan I was discriminating against my students with conservative views.”
Jig didn’t even blink. “Why do you think I did that?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure you did. I don’t think you went to the administration, or the department. Once the accusation is made, it takes on a life of its own. But I think you told Drew Harrigan that. I think you fed him the original story. That’s why you came to my office the other day.”
“I came to warn you about Ellen Harrigan’s list.”
“I don’t think so,” Alison said. “I wasn’t in danger from Ellen Harrigan’s list. If I’d thought about it for two seconds, I would have realized that. Gregor Demarkian came to see me. The police are no more interested in me than they are in the Easter Bunny. And why should they be? I never met the man. Either man, I suppose it is now.”
“I was trying to be helpful to a fellow sufferer from Drew Harrigan’s allegations.”
“I don’t think you ever suffered from Drew Harrigan’s allegations,” Alison said. “You’re untouchable, really. You’d have to rape a child to get into any real trouble on this campus. You’ve got the two Nobel prizes. You’ve got tenure. You’ve got the political books, and they sell, which means they probably also make money. I went on the Internet and paid twenty-nine ninety-five to join Drew Harrigan’s Web site. Then I listened to a bunch of the archived programs. It wasn’t just me. There was a woman in the Spanish Department who got accused of teaching the Inquisition from a Marxist perspective, a man in the Philosophy Department who got nailed for supposedly having said that the United States was the greatest danger to human life the world has ever known, a man in the Sociology Department who was called out for supposedly saying that the family was obsolete and ought to be abolished. Do you know what they all had in common?”
“What?”
“They were all pretty obscure, and the complaints came from their upper-level and graduate courses. In other words, the courses with the fewest number of students in them.”
“So?”
“So the probabilities are low that it would have happened that way that many times,” Alison said. “The more you look at just who Drew Harrigan went after at Penn over the last year and a half, the more it looks like an inside job. We had Angela Davis come and speak at this campus not six months ago, and Drew Harrigan never mentioned it. Do you want to tell me what it is you were trying to do?”
“Why do you think it was me who was trying to do something? Even if your analysis is correct, and in my opinion it’s logically weak to the point of feebleness—”
“—Oh, stop,” Alison said. “Nobody else came to me. Nobody else ‘warned’ me. Nobody wanted to find out how I was feeling. Of course it was you. The question is, why was it you?”
“I was a victim, too, you know,” Jig said.
“Nonsense,” Alison said. “You throw your ideas out there for all to see and somebody attacks them; that’s not being a victim, that’s being a part of the debate. I was damned near a real victim. I had an inquiry launched into my teaching, into my integrity—”
“—A secret inquiry,” Jig said quickly.
“I know.”
“But don’t you see, that’s the point,” Jig said. He got up so suddenly, Alison flinched. “Secret inquiries. Speech codes. Star Chamber proceedings where the accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent and isn’t even allowed to know who is testifying against him. Do you know how that loo
ks in the outside world, how it looks to our students?”
“Yes, it looks terrible,” Alison said. “The speech codes should be abolished. More professors should do what I did when faced with secret inquiries and threaten to sue. Why does that justify giving Drew Harrigan lies to spout on his radio program about people who’ve done nothing wrong in the first place?”
“How do you know that they’ve done nothing wrong?” Jig said. “Cavellero, the man in the Philosophy Department, was one of the principal architects of that speech code you think should be abolished. And during the water buffalo thing, he was one of the biggest advocates of expelling the kid outright for daring to cause trouble. The woman in the Spanish Department helped design the ‘Orientation’ program all new faculty hires are required to take. That’s after your time. Do you know what that’s like?”
“I’ve heard rumors,” Alison said.
“Re-education camp,” Jig said. “Emotional bullying in the name of antidiscrimination. It’s insane. Do you know what we’re doing, on campuses like this across the country? We’re raising a generation of Republicans, because we’re raising a generation of kids who think it’s the Republicans who stand for freedom of speech and of the press. And do you know why that is?”
“Why?”
“Because on college campuses, it is the Republicans who stand for freedom of speech and of the press. It’s the Republicans who fight against the shouting down of speakers, and against censoring campus newspapers, and against criminalizing speech. The Campus Republicans are the single strongest force for civil liberties at Penn. What are we doing to ourselves? What are we doing to the world when we send kids out of here determined to vote for right-wing nutcases because they mistake the campus reality for reality in the real world?”
“And that justifies giving a nationally syndicated radio talk show host false information about my teaching and grading practices so that he can call me a Communist and get me investigated by my department?”