“Hi, Effie. Norman in?”
She ran a yellowed finger across her throat. “Our ‘benefactress’ Dina Sue Ludd chewed him out this morning, and now Norman thinks he’s passing a stone. He ran off to the doctor’s.”
“A kidney stone? That’s supposed to be the worst pain in the world! Did you call Tara?”
“It’s just nerves. Norman’s cracking up.” Tears streamed from the tiny old woman’s magnified eyes, but from smoke, not sympathy. “That bleeding heart can’t take the pace.” She pawed through papers. “Here’s your check. You oughta ask for a raise. And here’s a letter from some woman in England; tell her it was twenty-seven cents postage due.”
A jolt went through Theo as he read the sturdy up-tilted pen strokes of the return address.
Winifred ThrockmortonLark Cottage, Barnet-on-UrswickDevonshire, England
A letter from Dame Winifred, the Elizabethan drama scholar, retired from Oxford, and in Theo’s opinion shamefully disregarded by most of a newer, forgetful generation of critics. Dame Winifred’s many books had inspired his first one, and he kept all ten of hers carefully taped and patched on a special shelf above his desk. Recently, he’d published in a journal a long essay about her contribution to the field of Renaissance studies, but he’d never thought she’d respond so quickly, if at all. The sight of her name on the thin blue page thrilled him.
It was a short note, rather oddly capitalized, thanking Mr. Ryan for his “Generous words” about her, telling him that she’d read with interest his own “brilliant” book on Shakespearean clowns, “written with Marvellous Style and Power,” and noting that she had “a few Quibbles” about the argument. Should he be interested, she’d be glad to write them to him. Or, if he were ever near Devonshire (perhaps to “Visit Ralegh’s manor at Sherborne?”), she hoped he’d “feel Free to pay a Call.” She added that she was “on” to something “most Exciting” for which she had as yet only “tiny Bits” of evidence. “My God,” Theo said. “Isn’t that wonderful! ‘On to something.’ She never quits.”
“Brit girlfriend?” asked the old secretary.
“She’s a very old woman.” He smiled.
“So what? Am I dead?” Mrs. Fruchaff pointed her extra-length cigarette at him. “Now that you’re showing a little life again, Theo, little juice, take my advice. Stop mooning over Maude Fletcher—”
“What do you mean, mooning over Maude Fletcher?”
“Get somebody who’ll give you the time of day. Well, don’t put on that look. Who told you it wasn’t going to work out with that woman in Art History? Me.”
“It worked for three years.”
She shrugged. “Jenny Harte had a crush on you last spring.”
“Effie, come on! Jenny’s my student!”
“Student schmudent. She’s twenty-five next week, you’re so fixated on women’s ages. Okay, there’s plenty others. Hey, piece of beefcake like you could get just about any woman you wanted.”
“I don’t want any woman. I want the right woman.”
“So, pick one. You’d be surprised at the amount of sex up for grabs in this building. And you’re not getting any.”
The tough-minded Mrs. Fruchaff had no compunctions about nosing into the privacy of all who labored in what for nearly half a century she’d called “my sweatshop.” As she said, she’d seen them come and go. The philologist who’d run off with a male graduate, leaving the department’s first chair, Miss Mabel Chiddick, to tell his wife. The Americanist who had broken down and sobbed when Dr. Elsie Spence told him he’d been denied tenure, until they’d finally had to make him breathe into a paper bag. The Swift man who’d shot the windows out of the dean’s office when he hadn’t been promoted. The Romanticist who’d sold his novel to Scribner’s and quit the same day. The Victorian man who’d married the Tudor woman, and she’d had to leave and go teach in a community college because of nepotism rules, rules now abandoned in favor of hiring all the celebrity couples available on the market. Times changed. Effie Fruchaff had been there when professors taught for a dollar a year because gentlemen didn’t need salaries. She’d been there when graduate schools were crammed with draft dodgers, and Ph.D.s were lucky to find jobs selling Avon door-to-door. She’d lived to see English teachers earning six figures a year and driving Mercedes sedans with cellular phones. Triumphs, failures, friendships, bitter venom, she’d seen it all.
To Mrs. Fruchaff, Norman Bridges was a child and Theo Ryan a baby. She’d known Dee and Dum when they were pipsqueaks in baggy golf knickers, both with blond slicked-back hair and crazy about Greta Garbo, Ezra Pound, and the rumba. It was hard for Theo to imagine those two old men swaying their small behinds to the rattle of maracas, but Mrs. Fruchaff claimed to have danced with each of them the day Prohibition was repealed. Now she jabbed her cigarette in Theo’s direction. “There was a guy here in the fifties—a poet—he got two students pregnant in one year. This was before they ever heard of sexual harassment—”
“Or birth control either apparently.”
“Well, let me tell you, it caused some stink.”
Dismissing this gossip with a tolerant headshake, Theo asked, “Where’s Jonas?” as he carefully folded the blue note.
“The Madman’s down the hall teaching. Can’t you hear him? Most everybody else has gone home, or they’re over at Bleecker stirring up the masses.”
“Boycott Bleecker.”
“I’ve been boycotting Bleecker for fifty years, and beats me if they’ve cleaned the coffeepot once in that entire time. Listen, sweet-pie, turn in your ballot for chairman. Poll closes tomorrow at three.” The secretary’s ash dropped off her cigarette as she disappeared under a hillock of manila envelopes.
“I’ll do it now.” Theo took a page from her memo pad, wrote down a name, folded the paper.
Mrs. Fruchaff reemerged with a miniature bottle of Kahlua; in the past, she had collected a huge assortment of them from airplane trips taken by faculty members on boondoggles. After a chug, she sucked on her teeth as she opened his ballot. “Steve Weiner,” she said, unsurprised. “The Bronx bomber’ll have to pull it out hard in the stretch. So far, all he’s got’s your vote, Hood’s, Marsh’s, Jorvelle’s, and what little of the chicken-livered junior faculty’s not busy sucking up to the old farts. Marcus Thorney’s in the lead, plus he voted for himself. Vic Gantz voted for his wife, who’s not even on the ballot. Touching.”
No sense in making rhetorical remarks about weren’t the votes supposed to be confidential. He said, “Jane wouldn’t be a bad chair if she were ever around.”
“Big if. Jane’s what Dina Sue’s been on a rampage about. She’s heard N.-G.’s been up to something smutty with Emily Dickinson’s labia.” Mrs. Fruchaff snorted. “One thing’s sure; N.-G. hasn’t stuck around long enough to do anything smutty with Vic. Unless they do it in her Mercedes on the way to the airport.”
Clearing away a manuscript with “Unmitigated Rubbish!!!” scrawled on its cover, Theo sat on the desk edge. “Give Jane a chance. I like her.”
Another derisive snort. “You’re ’bout as discriminating as a whore with the rent due. But you’re sweet.” She slapped hard at his hipbone.
No point in taking offense; so he just gave her the finger nonchalantly, and she cackled. He said, “You’re the second person who’s called me ‘sweet’ and made it sound like an insult. And I don’t like everybody. I don’t like Marcus Thorney.”
Stabbing out her cigarette on something (an ashtray, one hoped) under a mound of papers, she muttered, “Then you’ll be sick to hear he won the Ludd Book Award this morning.”
He did feel sick. “You’re kidding! For that Chaucer thing?”
She chuckled. “Tell it to Ludd. The Grease-Man’s been playing her like a big bass fiddle. And don’t think Dina Sue’s not casting her vote for chairman too, and believe me, some votes are more equal than others.”
&nb
sp; Theo hopped off the desk. “I’m going. You’re depressing me. Hey, what about this Jorvelle-getting-a-Yale-offer rumor?”
The old secretary scattered folders. A miniature bottle of Cherry Herring rolled off the desk. “One-twenty-two thou.” Useless to ask her how she knew. “But five-to-one she says no. Her mom lives in Greensboro. Plus, she and Weiner got something going. A Jew dating a black woman, and he’s running for chairman down here in Jesse Helms country? The kid’s got chutzpah. All I did was marry a Jew—a white one—fifty-two years ago, and he’s been dead, God rest him, thirty-one of those and my family’s still not speaking to me.”
Theo handed her back the little bottle. “See yah. And pick up the tempo on my first number tonight.” He snapped his fingers at her in a rhythm, walking backwards as he left to find Jonas Marsh.
In the hall, Jane Nash-Gantz herself—tall, svelte, with striking spiked hair—was hurrying along with a leather suitbag over her shoulder. Her plump secretary raced along beside her taking notes.
“Jane, hi!” called Theo. “I hear Dina Sue’s breathing fire!”
“Hi, gorgeous.” She stopped, grabbed him, hugged him, and rolled her shrewd, slightly crossed eyes to the ceiling. “Theo, may the Great Goddess inflict that sex-crazed cow Ludd with the mange. She’s driving me nuts. I’m talking about poetry, and she thinks I’m talking about pussy!”
Her secretary tugged at her boss’s glamorous baggy silk jacket. “Jane, you’ll miss your flight.”
Jane rubbed her lipstick briskly from Theo’s cheek. “Hi, bye. Tell Steve he’s got my vote. Kiss Vic for me if you see him. Off to Barcelona.”
“Lecturing?”
“God, yes, if I can get the damn thing written on the plane. ‘The Anorexic Text: Minimalism as Sexual Politics.’ What do you think?”
“In Barcelona?”
“Oh, huge conference. ‘Reproductions of Oppression’ and, of course vice versa.”
“Jane…” Her secretary tugged at her again.
Jane waved. “You know what success is, Theo? Success is exhaustion.”
The two women clattered in their heels down the marble stairs.
At nearly three, the few classes in session on the fourth floor were just emptying. Students tiptoed thoughtfully out of the room where old Dr. Mortimer snoozed at his desk, his chin resting on his plaid bow tie, his volume of Romantic poetry open to Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” ode.
Only one teacher was still going strong. In front of the blackboard, on which was hugely chalked, for god’s sake, think! Jonas Marsh, in Liberty of London braces, a striped shirt, and a fuchsia tie, looked to be dancing the carioca. Through the propped-open door, Theo watched as students squirmed in their seats.
“Dolts! Dullards!” Marsh bellowed. “Have you no ears! Have you no souls, you lethargic progeny of Philistines? This is Herrick! This is poetry! How can you listen to that poem and not want to rip off every shred of your thoroughly undistinguished clothing!”
Giggles, one hoot, a shouted, “Go for it, Kevin!” as a young man in the front row made a pretense of pulling off his polo shirt.
Marsh raced over, squatted, grabbed the wide-eyed boy’s desktop and shook it back and forth. “You want a woman, Kevin. You want her to go to bed with you before you’re old, a decayed, rotting putrification. You want to get her in the mood. How, you somnambulistic blockhead? With rock ’n’ roll?” Marsh leapt up, flung himself into gyrations, shouting:
I want some sex! Who’ll be next? How ’bout you? Yeah, you’ll do!
Now general applause and a few Rebel yells.
“Isn’t that it? You play her your troglodyte notion of a sexy song! Well, Robert Herrick writes sexy songs!”
A young woman came half out of her seat, angry. “What’s sexy about having your virginity treated like a fort somebody’s charging at with a battering ram? Or a flower and here come the scissors, snip, snap? I’ll take Donne over Herrick any day.”
“Good for you, Laura!” Marsh shouted at her.
Cathy Bannister raised her hand. “Dr. Marsh. Do you think Herrick might be a repressed homosexual?”
General guffaws from the males.
Pacing the blackboard, Marsh knocked his head into his fist, once, twice, a third time. “I despair. Leave me. Go, go. ‘Go gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Old Time is still a’flying,’” He spun around on them. “Does that ring a bell, you imbecile lumpen?”
Some sheepish, some chortling, they left him.
In Jonas Marsh’s office (which resembled the reading room of a cramped but posh Victorian club—red leather wing chair, rolling library ladder, brass cuspidor, and elephant foot hassock), Theo sipped a glass of port while Jonas, after scrubbing his hands and face with Handi-Wipes, unwrapped for him a morocco-bound first edition of MacPherson’s 1760 Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland; sent on approval, he said, by his antiquarian bookseller. The Restoration specialist was an insatiable collector of rare books, holographs, and manuscripts, and apparently something of an expert on them. Theo and Steve had often speculated on where he got the money to pay for such rarities, as well as for his antique furnishings and his hand-sewn outfits. Jonas was always cavalierly dropping exorbitant figures into the conversation about the cost of that breakfront ($7,000) and this bottle of Bordeaux ($290), and if the figures were only half true, he’d still easily run through his entire annual salary in a month’s time. They’d decided it must be family money until Mrs. Fruchaff told them Jonas’s father had worked ’til he died behind a ticket counter at the Minneapolis airport. But even Mrs. Fruchaff couldn’t explain his income. “Drug pusher?” she suggested.
Theo had come to show Jonas Marsh his letter from Dame Winifred, and to tell him he should keep pressuring Norman Bridges about letting him run the London program. “If John can’t go, and you want to, why not?”
“Why not? Because my influence in this department is precisely nil. I do not stoop to conquer. And bent over is the preferred position.”
“Dammit, why should Thorney get everything his way? You hear about the Ludd Book Prize yet?”
“What about it?”
“Marcus won it.”
Marsh started a rapid shoe-kicking against his Marlborough desk. “Bugger him! And that’s a curse, Ryan, not a suggestion. Thorney a Medievalist! Rubbish! I showed him a manuscript page, thirteenth-century French. Couldn’t read it. Could not read it! Translation of Boethius. Didn’t know it from a bloody broadside ballad. That whoreson quack future chairman calls himself a Chaucerian!” Marsh’s hands were getting away from him, swatting at his leonine head. “Charlatan!”
“But you don’t think Steve’s going to lose?”
The slender blades of Marsh’s shoulders spasmed. “Of course Steve’s going to lose! Just because he’s published four good books, teaches the biggest classes in the department, and serves on ten university committees, you think he deserves to win? Why even Norman will vote for Thorney. The old boys will all stumble into a circle like smug, sluggish musk oxen, their flabby buttocks to the winds of change! Lose? Yes, yes, yes!”
“Well, I guess I keep hoping…Anyhow,” Theo added quickly to plug the flood of words, “I’ve been meaning to thank you again for supporting me on Dame Winifred, even if it didn’t—”
Marsh clawed at his tie. “Dame Winifred Throckmorton is a great scholar. A real scholar. That woman discovered and identified a Kyd play, a Marlowe fragment, and three Raleigh essays! If she’d done nothing else in her life but that and belch in public, she’d more deserve a bloody Ludd chair in this backwater hovel of intellectual pygmies than the rest of our miserable faculty put together and invigorated by electric prods! The cretinous swine!”
“Well, yes, I suppose.”
“You suppose!”
To distract him, Theo opened a leather portfolio lying on the desk. “Jon
as! This is a David Garrick letter!”
“Don’t touch it!” Marsh clapped his hands together as if at a child.
“Sorry.” Hands behind his back, Theo read the splotchy lines of faded ink. “Actors never change, do they? Garrick bitches just like my parents. Well, listen, if you do get to England in the fall, maybe I’ll come over and we could go see some plays together. Maybe we could even go visit Dame Winifred.”
Marsh was wrapping the MacPherson volume in cloth. “I’ll be in London all summer,” he remarked blandly. “I’m there every summer. And every Christmas.”
“You are?”
“Why on Earth would I stay here?”
“You know, Jonas, here I am teaching Shakespeare and I’ve never been to London. Isn’t that stupid?”
“Very.”
“Every summer?” Theo was struck by how little he knew about Jonas Marsh. His high-strung colleague had never been to his house; although invited to the half-dozen cocktail parties Theo had hosted over the years, he’d always sent his regrets on rich creamy notecards with his name engraved on top. Nor had Theo, or anyone Theo knew, ever been in Marsh’s own home, which was apparently in Asheville, twenty miles away from Rome. Presumably, he lived there alone. Steve said the old department joke was that Marsh had been slipping out of a mental institution daily for decades, showing up at Cavendish to teach, then returning at night to his padded cell.
“How much is that worth?” Theo pointed at the leather-bound Fragments of Ancient Poetry, which Jonas was then locking in a desk drawer. When the bibliophile named a sum in the thousands, Theo expressed surprise. “But it’s an eighteenth-century forgery!”
“Ah!” Marsh nodded cheerfully. “But a very famous forgery.”
Foolscap Page 11