“Never apologize.”
“Sorry.”
“Tell me about your academic self,” he continued. “I would like to know what interests you, besides run-on sentences. Why did you come to Oxford?”
“Everyone’s got to be somewhere.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“I don’t know, was it?”
I gave an awkward laugh, which fell flat. I envied people who could talk to important people like normal humans. I had never been particularly smooth. Orville’s face was expressionless in the pale light.
I said, “I came here to study English literature.”
“And why was that?”
“I like books.”
“You like books.”
“I’m good at reading?”
“I did not ask whether you are literate. I asked why you are studying English literature. What do you imagine it will provide you?”
“Unemployment?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Joke,” I said. “Joke.”
My cheeks were burning. Suddenly, he leaned forward across the table, resting his entire weight on his forearms. He looked like a surgeon who, in the midst of a routine operation to find someone’s soul, had discovered it just wasn’t there.
He was frowning. “What is the purpose of literature to you?”
He might have been asking me if I believed in God.
“English is the study of what makes us human,” I said. It was a phrase I had learned from standardized tests.
“Human biology is the study of what makes us human,” he said. “Try again.”
“English is the study of civilization.”
“History is the study of civilization,” he corrected.
“English is the study of art.”
“Art is the study of art.”
I let out a flush of air. “English tells us stories.”
“If you can’t think of anything intelligent to say, don’t say anything at all.”
I shut my mouth. Orville leaned back in his chair. The waiter named Hugh returned and dumped two plates in front of us. On each one was a fish that looked like it had died tragically by drowning in its own fat. The scent was something savage—salty and prehistoric, wrought from an age in which people still ate each other. Hugh shoved a pint of ale on the table in a final act of punctuation.
Orville unfolded his napkin in his lap. He had a strong chin and thin lips that cut across it in a straight line. Right now, they were pursed to the point of invisibility. He did not seem like the sort of person who would frequent dimly lit pubs before noon. The entire place reeked of ale and centuries of smutty assignations.
“Perhaps we can try going about this a different way,” he said. “What sort of authors do you admire?”
I said, “Name a few and I’ll tell you if I like them.”
He raised his eyebrows, and I wondered if I had been rude. He severed the head of his fish with one thwack of his fork.
“Milton,” he said. “Do you like John Milton.”
“No.”
“Chaucer?”
“No.”
“Thoreau?”
“Oh, please.”
There was a bit of a pause. Orville seemed to be considering whether I was, in fact, a criminal. He took a small, well-proportioned bite.
“T. S. Eliot?” he said. “Jane Austen?”
“No, and no-but-nice-try.”
“Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth?”
“No, sort of, and no.”
He paused. “Brontë?”
I paused. I had been right. Orville did, in fact, want to discuss my relatives. How could he not? We stared at each other in a moment of mutual understanding. He knew who I was; I knew that he knew; he knew that I knew that he knew.
I crossed my arms in a way that felt childish even to me. “That depends. Which Brontë?”
“Charlotte.”
“Hah.”
“Is that a no?”
I didn’t respond. The name Brontë had, predictably, changed everything. He was still frowning, but it was now a curious frown. From across the room, the man with the pterodactyl laugh let rip another roar.
“Can you appreciate no authors?” Orville asked.
“I appreciate them,” I said. “I just don’t like them.”
“Why?”
“Personal reasons.”
“Which are?”
“I thought you weren’t my therapist.”
Orville placed his napkin back on the table. He almost smiled. Almost. The trajectory of the academic year was now spanning out in front of me, and it looked like one blackened stream of intellectual dictatorship. The more time Orville and I spent together, the more I would become one of those pale-faced vampire children in films who emerge only to say something unsettlingly prophetic in a half whisper.
“Won’t you tell me a little about yourself now?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow again. I half hoped he would say nothing, or snap at me. But to my surprise, he became quite friendly.
“What would you like to know?” he said. “I was born in London to two academics, matriculated at Cambridge when I was fifteen, graduated when I was eighteen, earned a graduate degree in the States, and for the past eight years have been a fellow at Old College, where my research focuses on the structural and grammatical integrity of texts, and contends that a perfect novel is proof of authorial invisibility.”
I said, “That sounds riveting.”
“I dislike still water and raw fish, never exercise except in the early morning, and find A Separate Peace to be one of the most singularly moving works of the twentieth century.”
I nodded. I had a feeling that he had given this autobiography many times before, and to many students. I wondered how many he had taught, exactly, and how many of them had at some point been undone by his hellish beauty.
“You attended Cambridge at fifteen?” I clarified.
“Yes.”
“What—you couldn’t get in any earlier?”
He took another bite of fish. “Why don’t you tell me what you hope to study this year.”
I answered, “Postmodernism.”
“That is a very small swath of literature.”
“With a great overall concept: books don’t have answers because life has no meaning.”
His eyes flicked from one side of my face to the other, as though he were skimming an empty book.
I continued, “For example, have you ever read White Noise? It’s—”
“Yes, I’ve read it.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” he said. “Do you honestly believe that life has no meaning?”
I said, “Is that a problem?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
A small silence. He leaned forward; instinctively, I leaned back. I thought he was about to question why a first-year was twenty years old instead of eighteen, but all he said was:
“I imagine you think you are very complicated.”
“Meh.”
“Excuse me?”
I didn’t respond.
“You have misread White Noise—and, I wager, all of postmodernism,” he said, dabbing his mouth once with his napkin. “What appears to be a lack of meaning is in fact an example of authorial craft. DeLillo illustrates the inability to communicate through a medium of communication; he asserts that the world is too complex to understand in language that is unusually simple. He demonstrates significance precisely through a lack of overt significance. I imagine you cannot find its ‘meaning’ because you lack the passion to try.”
Passion. There it was, my least favorite word. It was the elusive—yes, meaningless—term people used when they wanted to believe they were more human than other humans.
The lamp nearby sputtered, leaving Orville’s face shrouded in a half light. I was silent. He reached for the blue file in front of us—my application?—and flipped through it like it was one of those pict
ure books that tells a story if you run through the pages fast enough.
“Our meeting times will be on Thursday, from half eight to half nine in the morning,” he said. “By next week, you will have read the Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures, which you will find in the post in a few days. You will also have prepared an analysis of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover.’ The highest mark any late assignment will receive is fifty percent. If you do not complete the reading, do not bother coming to see me.”
I nodded. “Sir?”
“What.”
“Browning was not a postmodernist.”
“I never said he was.”
He tossed me my academic file and told me to have a nice day.
CHAPTER 2
My father and I had only discussed my inheritance once. I remember it well. I was fourteen. My mother had walked out on us a year earlier, and the only other woman in my life was Rebecca, my math tutor, who came on Wednesdays and Sundays. This particular Thursday, my father and I were sitting in the Heights. That’s what he called his library, which he had modeled after Heathcliff’s bedroom in Wuthering Heights. It was his personal sanctuary, and as such, it was filled with mountains of crap: excess gravy boats, turtleneck sweaters, spare copies of The Republic, and a Hemingway voodoo doll. Hanging from the one visible window ledge was a collection of upside-down dried roses. Dad said that each one represented one of his early rejection letters from major publishing houses. To me, they just looked like unlucky parachuters.
That morning, we were having breakfast on the carpet. He generally used the mornings to explain something he thought I should know: the evils of adverbs, the benefits of cremation, the legal ways to avoid taxes. At the time, he was forty-one, six foot six, and drinking whiskey in his coffee. I was five foot eleven and impossible.
“Sammy,” he had said.
“Dad.”
“I’m going to die someday.”
“Pass the syrup.”
There was a plate of home-cooked pancakes on the floor with us. I remember because Dad had left them on the stove too long, and the bottoms were dotted with charred circles, big and brown like the spots on a cow. He handed me Vermont’s finest.
“When you’re older, you’ll inherit the Warnings of Experience,” he said.
“The Warnings of Experience?” I clarified.
“Correct.”
“Why when I’m older?”
I should have asked him, Why the Warnings of Experience? but when you’re young, you never think to question the absurd.
All he said was “Fourteen is an ugly number.”
And that, right there, had been the extent of our conversation. I asked him not to talk like that anymore, because losing my father was an old and very terrible nightmare of mine. With my mother living in Paris at the time, designing wedding dresses, my dad was all I had left. And he was great. He had soft, sloppy hair, and all that hair complemented an out-of-shape writer’s body, just fit enough to be able to lift me up when we hugged. He had square glasses and only two wisdom teeth, a bald spot on his right calf, and eyes like an eagle. He was great in the ways that only dead fathers can ever truly be great.
As far as I knew, no other living person was familiar with the Warnings of Experience. I wanted to keep it that way. The outside world had long suspected my father’s family of hiding something, and the constant media attention was growing tiresome. Historians liked to point to the fact that an enormous number of Brontë “artifacts” had gone missing over the years, or were otherwise unaccounted for: the girls’ old mugs, paintings, notes, sketches, letters, and a few early novel drafts. Somehow they had been “lost.” Where else could they be, people said, but with my father? Dad was the only living relation of Patrick Brontë, the father of the illustrious Brontë siblings, who outlived all of his children (and wife) and, legend had it, had preserved the Brontës’ most precious belongings for posterity. One of Patrick’s siblings gave birth to one of my great-several-times-over-grandfathers, whose spawn ultimately ended up producing my lovable and rather eccentric dad.
Public speculation about the Missing Brontë Estate had reached an all-time high in the last twenty years. Its mystery incited a dangerous curiosity within the strangely large world of Brontë fanatics, who had all likely read the novels as children and loved them for the rest of their lives. These people were far too easy to convince that since the Brontës were Romantic and Passionate people they had something Romantic (and more importantly, Lucrative) hidden in their past. Journalists did nothing but feed the flames. Headlines grew more and more sensational (10 Mind-Blowing Reasons Charlotte Brontë Was Secretly Loaded) until the rumors began infecting the minds of normal people, people who had never even heard of the Brontës before. Instead of believing that my father was hoarding old mugs and sketches, the average uninformed gossip columnist was quick to believe that Tristan Whipple was hiding gold mines, ruby rings, and Gutenberg Bibles. The Brontës themselves became somewhat irrelevant.
All of this taught me only two things: First, when you’re one of the last Brontës, you unwillingly inherit an extraordinarily large and peculiar fan base. Second, when you are a handsome and reclusive single father, you inherit an even larger and more peculiar fan base. As a child, I had always found my father’s fame perfectly normal, like one of those standard life facts you learn at five years old: the sky is blue, the sun sets in the west, fathers are always in the news. But the media attention drove my poor dad crazy. He started refusing interviews, and avoided public appearances when possible. His novels became even more cryptic. He locked himself in his study for hours on end. He started to leave strange trinkets all over the house, so that in case any reporters did break and enter someday, they would find lots of confusing story material. To the outside world, I’m sure my father was a madman.
The irony was that in all those years, I never saw him whip out any hidden Brontë memorabilia. There were no mugs and there were no ruby rings and there were no gold mines. My father cared only for the novels themselves—Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, and Villette—which, last time I checked, were still in the public domain. Dad spent his entire life studying these books, picking them apart and analyzing them word by word. He was in awe of them, the kind of awe most people reserve for dark and mysterious women. These novels are alive and all other books are dead, he would say. Do you understand? He used to give me lessons on them, reading from his worn copies as he made incomprehensible margin notes. I’m sure he knew something the rest of the world did not. But when I’d ask him what it was, all he’d say was: Sammy, I’m just trying to teach you how to read.
For a time after his death, the Brontës became my true love too—but only briefly, and only by default. I figured that if deconstructing the Brontë novels had been my father’s life project, I would finish his work. Perhaps there was something important that I had been missing, and perhaps it was my job as Last Heir to figure it out. From age fifteen to age fifteen and a half, I spent an inordinate amount of time researching the Brontës, re-creating their lives, trying to know them the way my father had—as relatives. I pored over the few history books in my father’s library that had survived the fire; I wrote poems and stories in a morbid Brontë style; I developed imaginary friends in the form of Anne, Charlotte, Emily, and even Branwell, the drunk brother. I suppose I thought it might, in a way, bring my father back to life.
It all came to nothing. To this day, I still did not understand what made my father so impassioned on the subject of his three long-lost cousins, or what he might be looking for. Now, I was cursed with all the knowledge I had acquired about them. I felt like an Olympic athlete who hadn’t worked out in years and was stuck with the muscle-turned-to-fat around her shoulders. I still knew Charlotte, Emily, and Anne like no one should ever know anyone. I knew their shoe sizes and their height; I knew their stupid little secrets; I knew what they fought about and what they laughed about; I knew about the
mole on Emily’s right foot. Love always came with scars, and this was mine: the knowledge that the friends I knew best were those I had never actually met.
It wasn’t until boarding school that I studied the Brontës in an academic context. Starting high school at sixteen years old meant that I was two to three years older than all my classmates. I had fought to be placed with the rising junior class, but when my mother enrolled me, she explained to the administration that my father’s homeschooling experiment had been an “unmitigated disaster,” and recommended that I start with the freshmen so I could recover from all the academic damage that had been unfairly inflicted upon me.
My hope was that my first formal English class on the Brontës would help me understand my relatives better—or at least shed some light on what my father had spent his life trying to figure out. But I was disappointed. Mr. Martin’s class was the first time that I saw how the rest of the world knew the Brontës: not as moles and shoe sizes but as dramatic Hollywood films, badly made PowerPoint presentations in class, dolls for little girls. They were everything but human beings.
Mr. Martin boiled down each sister’s character so that they lost all taste, flavor, and flair. We learned that Charlotte was the eldest, the most famous, and the ringleader of the family. Four foot eleven. Strong, opinionated, admirable. The entrepreneur. A real nineteenth-century ballbuster. Jane Eyre was her brainchild. Mr. Martin didn’t bother mentioning that it was the sort of novel you adored as a child and then misunderstood for the rest of your life.
The second sister, we learned, was Emily—intensely passionate, wild, and imaginative. She was the action figurine with windswept black hair, a heaving bosom, and a petticoat drenched from her wild traipses across the stormy English moors. Her greatest work and only novel was Wuthering Heights, considered the most romantic book ever written by those who had never read it carefully.
And then there was Anne. Quiet, forgotten Anne. The last Brontë. The youngest. The failed social reformer. Meek. Moralizing. Sweet. Author of the most boring book, Agnes Grey, the one that never made it to SparkNotes. She was the Brontë who had been overshadowed by her infinitely more talented sisters. In other words, the Loser.
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