Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. But I’m talking about you. Why don’t you wear your hair down like that all the time? And the makeup … I never thought you could look quite so—well—hot.”

  “Jill!”

  “Oh, I know, I’m embarrassing you. Sometimes I’m really indiscreet. But I’m just really interested in, you know, style. And I always thought that professorial look of yours was some sort of camouflage.” The wild red topknot flopped over her left eye. She tugged off the purple ribbon and shook her head. Curls fell about her face like a miniature firestorm.

  “Now, me,” she went on, “I like to be outrageous.” She flapped the purple ribbon in the air. “But you—restraint is super on you. Keeps ‘em guessing. Those innocent sleeves. That demure neckline. That clinging white silk revealing just—well, you know.” She nodded vigorously and popped a crabmeat puff into her mouth.

  I took the opportunity to change the subject. “Have you seen Greg Samoorian? I’ve been looking for him all evening.”

  “He’s around here somewhere. Over by the bar, I think. Getting soused.” Jill put the plate of hors d’oeuvres down on a small side table. “You know, I’m really happy for him, getting tenure and all, but I’m sick about the rest of them. Those motherfuckers on the Executive Committee …”

  I raised my eyebrows. I’m only thirty-seven but Jill made me feel positively middle-aged and staid.

  “Yeah, I know, indiscreet again. But, jeez, Karen. From what I hear, all four of the candidates were backed by their departments. Lots of publications,good service, but they were all blackballed by the committee. Especially by that asshole, Astin-Berger.”

  “That’s what I heard, too. That Randy opposed everyone, including Greg. But that he was especially hard on Ned Hilton.”

  “Yeah, so they say. It breaks my heart about Ned.”

  I think she meant it; she fell into an uncharacteristic silence.

  Ned was a colleague in the English Department, an English Renaissance scholar. His office was next to mine, but our schedules were so different, I hadn’t really gotten to know him. I’d looked earlier in the evening for his tall, stoop-shouldered figure, but hadn’t seen him anywhere. Maybe he hadn’t come. Prior to the tenure decision, missing the president’s party would have been a fatal omission. But now …

  “What I heard,” Jill burst out, “was that Astin-Berger said Ned’s work was adequately argued, and eloquently phrased, and did shed some new light on Milton, but it simply wasn’t exciting, wasn’t theoretically sophisticated, wasn’t on the cutting edge. Jerk! Who does he think he is, anyhow? The arbiter of all true knowledge?”

  I calmed Jill down and gratefully handed her over to Ralph Bottoms, the assistant chair of Sociology, her own department. “Behave yourself,” I muttered, as he approached. “You want to be tenured, someday, don’t you?” She shrugged, but turned toward Ralph sedately enough.

  I took the opportunity to survey the room. Academic chitchat swirled around me like a spring snow shower: dense and blinding, but never really sticking to the ground. Miles Jewell, current English Department chair and fuddy-duddy par excellence, was standing by the bar, a little unsteady under the influence of what looked like some very fine brandy in the balloon glass he held in a shaky hand. With flushed cheeks and bright eyes he resembled more than ever the elderly Robert Frost, a mop of white hair, bushy eyebrows. I smiled and nodded. Miles nodded back, but couldn’t get to me through the crowd. Good. I had no interest in hearing about Miles’s latest exploits of the intellect.

  I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone. If Greg didn’t materialize soon, I would leave.

  Instinctively, I looked again for Randy, half-expecting to find him bearing determinedly in my direction, his mouth already open to elaborate on yet another brilliant insight. Nowhere to be seen. Good, again. I didn’t think I could handle another encounter that evening with the Professor of Desire.

  When I did find Greg, he was drunk. “Why not?” he demanded, with boozy smugness. “I’m tenured, aren’t I?” Leaning against a nineteenth-century cherry-wood highboy, he was slightly disheveled. The knot on his sedate blue-striped tie was loosened and the tie itself hung askew. His grin, a roguish flash of white in a dark, bearded face, also seemed somewhat askew.

  “You’ve been tenured for about four and a half hours. I’m not sure it’s not revocable.”

  His grin faded. “It’s tough, you know. I didn’t think it would be so tough.” The pain in his eyes was a mix of whiskey and self-pity. Heavy on the whiskey.

  “What’s tough? Being tenured?”

  “Yeah.” He appeared puzzled. “Yeah. I thought I’d be thrilled, over the top with ecstasy. But instead I feel—contaminated. This whole thing has been so slimy, you know. Why me, for instance, and not Ned? Ned’s work isn’t flashy, but it’s interesting. I don’t particularly care for Milton, but Ned’s my pal so I read his book. It made me see the seventeenth century in a whole new light. He would have been tenured for certain if it wasn’t for that prick, Astin-Berger….” He paused, in something that obviously seemed to him to pass for deep—even pained—thought. To me it looked more like alcoholic stupor.

  “You’re really sloshed, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I should be. It’s my third Johnnie Walker Black in, let’s see”—he looked at his watch—”just under one-half hour.”

  “I think it should be your last.” Children of alcoholics are often prudish about booze.

  But even with his loopy grin and his inebriated self-pity, I found Greg charming. To be honest, I liked him partly because he looked so damn good to me. Oh, his vulnerability and quirky intelligence went with the package, but it didn’t hurt that, burly and bearded, he looked more as if he belonged on the docks than on a college campus.

  Academic men don’t usually appeal to me. I go for muscle and bulk—the Springsteen type: big, tough, and complex. My former husband Fred, the truck driver—long, long ago. My not-so-very-long-ago lover Tony, the cop. It’s not that I don’t like academic men. I do. I just don’t—well—fancy them.

  But Greg looked good to me, and I was very careful about it. He was married. That mattered to both of us.

  The string quartet segued from “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” into “What Child Is This?” and I decided I’d had enough merriment. Greg looked as if he needed a friend, a cup of coffee, and a designated driver—not necessarily in that order.

  “How about coffee at the Blue Dolphin? I’ll drive. Heck, I’ll even buy. This is your big day.”

  Our coats hung in the massive walk-in closet in the alcove under the left staircase. Knowing the gossip likely to be engendered by even the most innocent actions in this incestuous little community, Greg and I agreed to meet in ten minutes in the portico outside the front door.

  As Greg turned away from me, Magda Vegh sidled up to him and slipped her arm confidently into his. Greg’s face lit up like a lighthouse in a hurricane. Magda was one of the few exotic features of this stark New England scene. The décolletage of her peacock blue silk dress was striking. Green malachite earrings dangled dramatically to her shoulders. A dark-brown cloud of hair floated loosely around a voluptuous, expertly made-up face.

  Magda Czegledi Vegh, the celebrated Hungarian dissident poet, had come to Enfield this year from Budapest by way of visiting professorships at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. But she sure didn’t let her political commitments get in the way of her cleavage, I thought. Maybe I was just jealous. I couldn’t muster up half that cleavage, even with the help of a push-up bra.

  As I left Greg alone with the Hungarian Bombshell, I noticed Avery Mitchell, Enfield’s president, watching me with speculative attention. Shit.

  Avery Mitchell—Avery Claibourne Cabot Mitchell—was the epitome of certain things I had come to detest about Enfield men. He was blue-blooded, Ivy League, wealthy, impeccably attired, articulate to the point of glibness, and invariably charming. At our first meeting I had noted with smug distaste his fine-boned hands and
slender, sandy WASP good looks. The slight asymmetry of his long patrician nose. The almost chilling ice blue of his eyes. A prince of privilege, I decided. Women probably fall at his feet. Since that meeting I had gone out of my way to avoid him.

  Rumor had it that Avery’s wife had fled Enfield four years ago with an untenured member of the Music Department. College presidencies are hard on marriages.

  My heart bleeds.

  Now Avery was heading in my direction. Doing, I thought, what aristocracy is trained to do: wending his way through the adoring crowd of his subjects with a gracious word for all. No white gloves, no majestic wave. But then, this is America.

  “Karen,” he said, “how elegant you look this evening.”

  “Thank you, Avery. Lovely party.” I may be a working stiff, but I know my manners.

  He nodded in acknowledgement. “Have you had a good first semester here at Enfield?” He bent over me attentively, as if I were the only person in the room.

  “Lovely,” I said. Lovely! Oh, God! “I mean …” I was actually stammering.

  He smiled. “I’m glad,” he said. “If I can be of any help …” He moved on to his next vassal.

  I glared after him. Condescending son of a bitch.

  Chip on the shoulder? Who? Me?

  After several desultory encounters with other colleagues, I finally reached the closet. I wanted nothing more than to get out of the heat and noise of this party. My watch said 9:07. Yes, time to leave. Definitely.

  I scanned the room, plotting a tactical retreat. As far as I could tell, I had an all-clear. Randy was nowhere to be seen.

  The door of the closet was jammed, resisting my attempt to open it. Everything, I grumbled, seemed to be frustrating my desire to get out of this place. Odd, however, that the door should be shut quite so tightly. Some idiot must have slammed it. I grasped the ornate brass knob firmly in both hands and yanked.

  The closet door flew open, and Randy Astin-Berger found me for the last time, falling forward into my arms in a first, and final, embrace.

  His handsome face was contorted and swollen. The green and gold chrysanthemums of his trendy retro neckwear no longer flowed jauntily down the front of his rumpled cotton shirt. Whoever had killed him had turned his whimsical necktie into a particularly efficient lethal weapon.

  The quartet began “Silent Night.”

  Two

  THE KITCHEN of the president’s house was cheerful, high-ceilinged, and too warm. An enormous ancient combination gas and wood-burning stove dominated one side, and the walls were painted a sunny yellow. Seated on kitchen stools and on Chippendale chairs brought in from the dining room were Avery Mitchell; Maggie Maher, his housekeeper; Paul Dermott, the chief of Enfield College security; Sergeant White from the Enfield town police; and me. We were waiting for the State Police homicide investigators to tell us we could leave. Because I was the one who had found Randy’s body, I’d been detained by the police when other party-goers had been released. Was I a serious suspect? I was beginning to wonder.

  It had rained during the night, and the kitchen windows were nubbled with ice, distorting vision. As I sat on a high wooden stool, drinking tea from a heavy earthenware mug, the multicolored lights of the giant town Christmas tree reflected in the high window over the sink winked off. I glanced at my watch. Exactly three A.M.

  The two homicide detectives huddled together at a small table in the breakfast nook, going over notes from their interviews. From where we sat at the other side of the large room, their voices were audible only as a monotonous murmur. The detectives had been conferring for forty minutes, and any feeble attempts the rest of us had made at conversation were long over.

  I was trying to remain alert in the overheated kitchen but kept drifting into a kind of hypnotic stupor. My eye snagged on totally irrelevant objects: a display of Spode dinnerware behind glass-fronted cabinet doors; my own reflection in the ice-obscured window, sepulchral in the white silk dress; Avery Mitchell’s ice-blue eyes, turned for a moment toward me, inscrutable. Caught in what seemed to me to be the searchlight of Avery’s gaze, I unaccountably flushed. The heat of the room became momentarily unbearable, and I felt stifled, unable to breathe. I was in a very strange state, I decided; it really was time for me to get out of here.

  One of the detectives, a tall, thin, dark sergeant, whose name, I swear, was Jack Daniels, came over to the silent group at the kitchen counter. “Okay, we’re about to wind up here. Nobody remember anything else about the victim? He didn’t seem any different than usual? Worried about something, maybe?” Daniels was looking straight at me, his hard-eyed stare designed to intimidate. It worked.

  All heads swiveled in my direction.

  I blinked, and thought for a minute.

  “Maybe he was a little more talkative than usual.”

  Avery snorted with barely suppressed amusement. The lieutenant, a tall, heavy, silent man, appeared next to his colleague. Both policemen looked at Avery.

  “I’m sorry,” he responded, shaking his head as if to clear his thinking. “That was inappropriate. It’s just that Randy, ah, Professor Astin-Berger, was nothing if not voluble.”

  They continued to stare at him.

  “What I mean is, he talked, ah … a lot … all the time. It’s difficult for me to imagine him talking more than usual.”

  Avery was choosing his words very carefully, but Sergeant Daniels didn’t seem to notice, and the lieutenant was keeping his own counsel. Daniels slapped his notebook shut and shoved it in the pocket of his down parka. He hadn’t taken the coat off, even though the heat from the big stove was oppressive. In my silk crepe dress I was warm, and Avery had removed his jacket and tie. The latter hung over the back of one of the Chippendale chairs, dark red and tasteful even in this undignified position. I shuddered. I’d had enough of neckties for the evening.

  The detective capped his pen. To him, we probably all talked too much. That’s what we did for a living, right? Stood in front of a room and talked. Nice neat rows of respectful students writing it all down. Long vacations. Summers off. Pretty cushy.

  Enfield College clearly disgusted Sergeant Daniels. His sour attitude made it obvious he thought we were inhabitants of a world of ivory-towered privilege, sheltered from the hard realities of real life as real people lived it.

  To some degree, he was correct. Enfield College was definitely a privileged institution. Founded over a hundred and fifty years ago as a light in what the Congregationalist divines saw as the spiritual wilderness of nineteenth-century America, Enfield was designed to educate the sons of the pious. Then the sons and grandsons of the industrialist robber barons and New England haute bourgeoisie matriculated, endowing the college copiously and enduringly. That generous endowment eased the transition to coeducation in the early seventies, at the properly enlightened moment. Now it seemed that young women in white Nikes had always, along with their brothers and lovers, scuffed the pathways between Hearst Hall and Gould Commons.

  To Sergeant Daniels, I could tell, it was all pretty cushy. But the hard realities were not totally unknown even at elite Enfield. Occasionally, I mused, death climbed the ivy-covered walls. In my half-conscious daze I envisioned Death climbing a high brick wall, dressed conventionally in black robes and a green-and-gold chrysanthemum tie. He wore Randy’s Reeboks. He had Randy’s face.

  The sand truck went by on the street in front of the house. Its revolving yellow light turned the frozen window pane opaque with amber. It cleared, and then hardened once again into an amber sheet. Cleared and—

  “Okay,” said the lieutenant—Lieutenant C. Piotrowski, his card said. He seemed to be in charge, but so far he’d said very little. “We’re done here, at least for now. We’ll call you when we need anything else. We’ve got your numbers.”

  I’ll bet you do. As I jerked awake again from my near hypnotic state, I thought Piotrowski looked at me extra hard. This cop was someone I wouldn’t want to tangle with under any circumstances. Big and slightly u
nkempt, he seemed at first impression to be a bit of a buffoon. His brown hair was cropped close in a quasi-military style. His shoulders were massive in a sloppy wool sweater whose red and green squares did little to disguise the bulk of his belly. He wore blue polyester pants and leather lace-up boots the size of some compact cars. But his brown eyes above high, flat cheekbones were cool and observant, his sparse comments astute. He had with little seeming effort secured the site of the murder, supervised the examination of the body, seen to its removal, and turned the chaos of two hundred horrified and slightly inebriated witnesses into a cool and efficient question-and-answer period.

  As far as I could tell, they’d eliminated just about everyone but me. Randy, it seemed, had disappeared from sight as soon as I’d turned my all-too-eager back on him.

  Did I feel guilty?

  Well, yes, I guess I did. Guilty, and stunned. And more than a little sick.

  I was interested to notice that my hands were shaking. Interested in a kind of detached, objective way, as if they were someone else’s hands. I concentrated on steadying them by tracing with an index finger the single daisy hand-painted on the side of the brown earthenware mug. The tea was almost gone, or it certainly would have sloshed onto the scrubbed butcher-block surface of the worktable.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Piotrowski,” Avery said. He would remember the name. He stood up to shake the policeman’s hand. The same height as Piotrowski, perhaps even slightly taller, Enfield’s president appeared insubstantial next to the detective’s bulk. His slender, aristocratic hand almost disappeared in Piotrowski’s grip. Nonetheless, with the handshake he took control of the encounter, a host bidding farewell to a visitor of ambiguous status, half guest, half plumber come to repair a nuisance leak.

  “You can be certain that we here at Enfield College will do everything we can to help you get to the bottom of this unfortunate incident, Lieutenant. Call on us anytime we can be of assistance, day or night. I personally …”