Honest Doubt

by Amanda Cross

  I went on my bike this time. Neither drinking nor late socializing was in the program, and I wanted to be able to get around on my own. Don was nice about offering rides, but independence is important. Besides, I might be able to give him another lift. I’d discovered that once I got over my anxieties about his sitting in back of me, I rather liked it.

  We met at the diner—I thought of it as “our place,” as in “our song;” I’m a great one for instant tradition, which I prefer to the long-lasting kind. I had breakfast, and he had lunch. I would eat breakfast for every meal if there were someone to fix it for me; nothing is better than breakfast.

  I told him I was going to see Antonia; I told him I felt they’d jerked us around long enough, and that I intended to ask some hard questions and get some answers— or determine what the avoidance of answers meant. I asked him if the police had done much of a check on the kids from the college who had come to serve and bartend at the Haycock affair. He said he had their names and records.

  “Tell me about them,” I said. “I just hadn’t known they were there.”

  “Scholarship kids and kids who need to earn money register with the employment office, which sends them out for parties, baby-sitting, lawn mowing, general kinds of help. A lot of people in the town use them. Faculty and administrators who give parties, as well as people in the town, hire them. It’s the usual thing. There were three of them at the Haycock party— one serving food, one in the kitchen, one tending bar. It’s the standard arrangement. All those who get work through the office are vetted, and records are kept of where they work, and complaints if any.”

  “Do people ever request certain students back again?”

  “Quite often, I gather, but that wasn’t the case with Haycock. He just called in—his wife being away—and left a general order for three helpers.”

  “Just trying to fill in the blank spaces,” I said. “Ever hopeful, that’s me.”

  “What are you planning to ask Antonia?”

  “A lot more details about life in Clifton’s English department and maybe elsewhere. If I learn anything, you’ll be the first to hear. I got a cell phone, by the way; here’s the number.” Octavia had had new cards printed up with my cell phone number on them, and I handed him one. I had objected that with these cards anyone could call me on the cell phone instead of at the office, which was far preferable. Among other advantages she, Octavia, could answer. She told me to keep both sets of cards, and only give the one with the cell phone number on it to those who might need to reach me in a hurry. The trouble with having an efficient assistant is that one stops thinking for oneself on practical matters. Well, Octavia was worth it.

  “Do you often have unsolved murders?” I asked Don.

  “We don’t often have murders,” he said. “Not like this. At the worst, hit-and-run drivers or husbands who batter their wives and children or the occasional robbery or mugging or fight that ends badly. There’s not much scope for detectives around here, and the police aren’t too eager to get in too deep with the college. There’s some resentment of it because it doesn’t pay taxes, and some recognition that the college brings in a lot more money than would be here without it. One of the reasons I’m glad that they hired a private eye—you—is that you can come in, do your work, and leave. We have to hang around when all the shouting dies down.”

  “But no one on the police force thinks I’m going to get anywhere. I know— don’t bother to contradict me. The point is, I’ll fail but all the right moves will have been made. The college and the police who cooperated with me can say they really tried to do the right thing.”

  “There’s probably some truth in that,” Don said. “Personally, I hope you’ll solve this thing, and I mean to help you if I can. I’m telling you more than my captain thinks I am, so you might say we’re in this together, in a manner of speaking. You’ll get the credit or the blame, no doubt of that, depending on how it comes out. I’m betting that you come through, but I wouldn’t count on any tokens of appreciation if I were you. This seems to be one murder no one wants solved, except maybe the family, and they want the killer found only if it’s the wife.”

  “Thanks for your frankness,” I said. “Anywhere I can drop you?”

  “I hoped you’d ask; I walked here.” We paid and left; we each paid for our own food and left our own tip. Don said it seemed better, if we were going to go on meeting this way, and I hoped we were.

  He slid behind me onto the bike as though we did this every day. I wish. When I dropped him off he said, “How about giving me a call on that new cell phone when you finish with the lady professor? You can tell me how it went.”

  “You’re on,” I said, “but don’t call her a lady professor; just like I’m not a lady detective. Plain professor and detective will do nicely.”

  “Got it,” Don said.

  Antonia lived in a large house, the way everyone did around here; it was a very big house with a lot of land around it. She said the college had, through some mortgage arrangements, made it possible for her to buy it, as they did for all the faculty, hoping they’d stay near the college and not commute. She told me this as she beckoned me in the door, down the hall, and into her study.

  “It’s the only room where I can shut a door with some assurance that I won’t be disturbed. The rest of the house is family territory. My husband, who’s a doctor, also has a study, but it seems to be more of a place where he and the children hang out. Any papers or computers connected to his work are in his office.”

  I liked her study, and I could understand why she didn’t use her office to work in. This room was where she belonged; anyone could see that. “How many children?” I asked, just to get started.

  “Two,” she said. “Teenagers.”

  “Is it as awful as they say, living with teenagers?” It wasn’t a warm-up question; I really wondered.

  “Yes and no,” she said. “Yes, because they have to break away and act as though their parents couldn’t and didn’t have the right slant on anything. No, because we had so frantically girded our loins in anticipation of nameless horrors that the actual experience seems mild by comparison—at least for the present. But how can I help you?”

  We both sat on chairs. She’d removed papers from one of them—visitors weren’t expected in this place. She probably was used to sitting in the other chair herself, which explained its availability.

  I settled back as though I intended to stay for a long interview, my notebook at the ready. I was trying to adopt an introductory pose. In fact, an introduction was what I couldn’t really think of so I decided to plunge right in.

  “Professor Lansbury,” I began.

  She waved and said, “Antonia, please. And you’re Woody.”

  “Antonia,” I began again, “as far as I can make out from what I’ve learned and what I’ve picked up in various conversations, you appear to be at the heart of, well, the department’s ill nature. I don’t for a minute mean,” I hastened to say as she looked ready to object, “that it’s your fault. Quite the contrary, I’d say. It’s just that, when I try to figure out why your name always comes up when someone sympathetic to you mentions the lack of harmony—”

  “ ‘Lack of harmony’ puts it sweetly but hardly describes the rank unpleasantness and resentment we all exist in. And yes, I can see why you think I’m the focus of all this. Because, in a way, I am. Through no fault of my own, as you say, except for being who I am, where I am, and at this time.”

  I nodded encouragingly.

  “Did you happen to see an article in the New York Times not long ago? I have it here somewhere,” she said, looking around as though she might be able to spot it from where she sat. “It was headlined: ‘M.I.T. Acknowledges Bias against Female Professors.’ The president of M.I.T. is quoted saying that he had always supposed that discrimination against women, while existing, was largely a matter of perception. He now admits that it is a matter of reality. The report, which got so much publicity because it com
es from a university famous for its science, and because the report was based on data, nonetheless recognizes that women are constantly being slighted, ignored, and blocked for promotion, grants, and important university work.”

  “What sort of data?” I asked. I really wondered how you could count facts in matters like this.

  “The data had to do with evidence that women are not often hired, and that when they get tenure they are increasingly marginalized by the male-dominated networks. But the report also mentioned smaller slights, less easily converted to data, such as—and any established woman professor can testify to this—that when a woman suggests something at a meeting she is unheard; later, when a man suggests the same thing, the suggestion is seriously taken up. And so on. The odd part about women’s problems in academia is that the higher you rise, the more the male networks and individuals fear you, and the more marginalized and hated you become. This isn’t universal, but it’s prevalent. Does that answer your question?”

  “You’re saying that because you are a tenured professor, you are treated badly and feared.”

  “That’s putting it baldly, but it’s not too exaggerated at the moment. The whole atmosphere in our department, as I’ve said, became really poisonous when an assistant professor, highly qualified and teaching modern literature, came up for tenure. She deserved it by every possible criterion, but full of fear of her subject; of her work, which might include gendered interpretations of literature about which they felt defensive; of her popularity with the students; and, perhaps most of all, of her friendship with me and our mutual support—well, they contrived to deny her tenure. The administration, little different from our department and close friends with many of them, went along. They had to do a good bit of nasty, dishonest work to keep her out. They know the department is too heavily male, but they fear change. The upshot was that things were not rosy before Catherine came up for tenure, but they’ve been hideous since.”

  I sat back to absorb this. Antonia realized she had become, not excited, but certainly less calm than she would have liked, and she looked to me as though she was about to make excuses. So I spoke.

  “Rick Fowler told me that there had been some huge ruckus about a play by Virginia Woolf that you wanted to put on, a play that Haycock decided was insulting to him and, I suppose, Tennyson.”

  Antonia leaned back and laughed. Her chair was one of those that tips over backward, and I expected her to struggle against falling, but apparently she was used to it. “ ‘She is coming, my dove, my dear,’ ” she said, chuckling.

  “Sorry?” I said. I wondered if one of her children had come in.

  “Tennyson: my dove, my dear. And really, you know, he wrote some good lines. Virginia Woolf especially liked his phrase ‘ancestral voices prophesying war.’ Woolf’s biographer tells us that she used to borrow from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, turning the voices on her radio into the voices of ancestral urges for domination and suppression.”3

  I must have looked unhappy.

  “That was during World War Two,” she told me. “Sorry about that. Woolf was describing the voices of Hitler, Mussolini, and others of that ilk. She thought Tennyson’s phrase appropriate. I only mentioned that to show you that I’m not on some sort of vendetta against poor old Tennyson. It’s just that Haycock couldn’t bear any suggestion that Tennyson was other than the perfect, the last, the only real poet; nothing, no one since. We have a chap in the department who thinks that way about Freud, which is even worse sometimes. That’s the problem, you see. They don’t realize or interpret their fear and disdain for women; they just think women aren’t as good as men and don’t belong. The young ones, of course, even the young professors without tenure . . . well, they’re cute, and any man worth his salt likes having them around, but when it comes to being a permanent member of the department . . .”

  I decided to put up some resistance, or at least some stiff questions, always a good way to encourage information that might otherwise be un-stated or only reluctantly offered.

  “God knows it isn’t easy for women in the police force; I’ve seen enough to know that. And even among lawyers there’s a lot of, well, disgusting behavior. And women don’t get the big positions, though they often deserve them, and it’s always assumed their bodies are always available for comment and judgment—I know all that. But there’s something here that’s, well, let’s say you’re helping but I’m not sure I altogether get it.”

  “Woody, don’t let it worry you. No one outside of academia ‘gets it.’ Any person in a position like mine—or worse, who tries to explain all the nastiness and details and disregarding of bylaws and principles—ends up sounding like a nut. It’s all so hard to pin down, to make clear, to demonstrate. That’s what made the M.I.T. report such big news. No one before, let alone a male university president, had admitted any such situation. So don’t worry if you’re just puzzled and a little anxious about me; subtle discrimination is the hardest kind to describe or grasp if you haven’t experienced it, and academic discrimination is the hardest to make explicable. The acts of discrimination are subtle and impossible to demonstrate. The New York Times had an editorial on the subject; I’ll show it to you if you like.”

  “Is this discrimination bad enough to account for Haycock’s murder?”

  “Probably not. It’s also worth remembering that Haycock was not widely, or even narrowly, loved by anyone. His male colleagues hardly thought him a prize, even apart from his Tennyson mania, but they knew they could control him. No one, no change they didn’t want, would get by him; they could count on that. And you know about his adoring family.” She sighed. “Forgive the sarcasm,” she said. “A stupid indulgence.”

  “But a tempting one. Professor Lansbury, Antonia, would you be willing to help me out a bit in understanding, or anyway getting a line on, the other professors in the department? I know that’s probably not the thing to ask, but I am investigating a murder, and I’m having a bit of trouble getting a fix on most of the members of your department.” I hoped I was sounding bewildered, and maybe a little helpless. I wanted her to help me— out of pity, if that’s what would do it.

  “Well, I’ll try.” She didn’t sound happy about it.

  “Let’s take the women: Eileen Janeer, and Janet Graham, who teaches the novel. I know they’re both assistant professors. What’s your take on them?”

  “They’re between a rock and a hard place. If they support me, or feminism, or even object to some ruling from above, they threaten their chance for tenure. Both of them try to offer me personal support, Janet more seriously than Eileen, but that’s probably because her field is nearer to my interests than are the Romantics. They’re both fine, really.”

  I must have looked puzzled and disappointed, which I was.

  “I know,” she said, “that isn’t much help. But one of the reasons we needed to hire someone, you, is because the whole mess is so incomprehensible. Look, if you want to know my personal opinion about my colleagues, here it is: Goldberg is a horse’s ass, and would never have gotten tenure if he wasn’t a sycophantic friend of the boys in power, which includes the administration and Haycock. He had and has half the qualifications of Catherine, who was turned down for tenure.”

  “I know who Catherine is,” I said sharply. “Do go on.”

  “Sorry about that. This whole mess since Catherine was turned down—and now Haycock’s death— it hasn’t helped anyone’s temper, certainly not mine.” She seemed to gather herself together. “Now you know what I think of Goldberg. David Longworth is in many ways a sweet old codger who’d like you to think he’s a whole lot dottier than in fact he is. He wants to be chairman, and I think he’s hoping that the others will put him in under the illusion that he’s a weakling they’ll be able to handle; I expect they’re wrong. Petrillo’s a sweetie; he’s incapable of swatting a fly, and is as close to sainthood as anyone I’ve ever met, which means, given the fate of saints, that all the guys think he’s a bit of an idiot. In their book
—in most of our books, I guess— anybody who isn’t utterly self-centered is either a liar or a fool.”

  “Daniel Wanamaker?” I asked. I’d recently talked to him for a short while and had the impression of a competent guy who thought that anyone not fluent in at least three languages was deficient and certainly no scholar. I’d asked him why, therefore, he didn’t vote to give Catherine Dorman tenure. He said the reason was that she was “too hipped on all this gender nonsense.” He had informed me that there wasn’t a major thinker in the last two centuries who even bothered to mention gender, or women if it came to that, except as objects of lust and reproduction. I hadn’t cared for Wanamaker, not that my sentiments on the subject mattered a damn.

  “Wanamaker’s a self-satisfied pedant,” Antonia said. “Sorry to be so mean about it, but the fact is, he’s the living proof that reading works in their original language does not necessarily mean that you are equipped to understand the text you’re working with. One of the great things about Catherine was that she could read modern texts in their original language, but she didn’t say that gave her any claim to having the only right interpretations. Language is important, but being a good literary critic, a good reader, is most important of all.”

  “So much for Wanamaker,” I said, smiling.

  “It really is a pretty dismal picture, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Well,” I said, consulting my notes, “that just leaves David Lermann.”

  “An angel,” Antonia surprisingly said. “An eternal assistant professor angel. He got tenure when no one was looking, de facto tenure. He’d been there seven years without anyone noticing the passage of time. He’s not the sort whom power-hungry types notice. They’re more careful now, but they weren’t quite so careful years ago. David’s never published anything; he couldn’t care less about politics or academic quarrels; he’s a born teacher; and he loves teaching. He’s told me that he can’t believe he’s getting paid for doing something he likes so much. He teaches huge required freshmen courses where they read the Bible, and other religious testaments, and the Greeks— drama or philosophy—and talk about values as they were questioned by the ancients. His classes get bigger and bigger, because some students take them over; they’re never quite the same, and he’s always buried under mounds of student papers, but teaching is a calling for him and he delights in it. If you haven’t talked to him, I suggest you do.”