Quieter than Sleep

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Quieter than Sleep Page 19

by Joanne Dobson


  “Lucky Miles.”

  “Greg!”

  “Hey—I’m only human! But you may be on to something. Could be Magda’s got a better future here with Miles in charge of the department than if Randy had taken over.”

  I let Greg talk on about the latest complex maneuvers in the attempt to remove Miles from his stranglehold on the English Department. We all knew the Dean of Faculty had had Randy in mind for the position of department chair, and I’d offered up several little prayers of thanksgiving that now he would never be my boss. Sometimes I can be such a coldhearted bitch.

  My mind wasn’t really on the English Department, however. I was thinking about Greg’s account of Avery’s marriage. That explained Avery’s reaction the night of Randy’s death. I was pretty hazy about the ride home in his car, but even in my tranquilized stupor I’d noted that Avery was brooding. And hadn’t he told me he detested Randy? Now I understood why. Detest would surely be too cool a word to describe the feelings of betrayal and loss Avery must have harbored for years. My God, the man screwed Avery’s wife and then dumped her. Hate would certainly be a more precise term for Avery’s feelings. If it were me, anyhow, hate would be the right word, but Avery was such a civilized human being….

  I began to speculate about the day he had called me into his office. What was that all about? He had asked a number of pointed questions. Was it possible that the real purpose of his summons was to see if I knew anything that would incriminate him? I couldn’t believe I was thinking that. The implications … No! Avery couldn’t possibly be the killer. I couldn’t have been so naive as to trust a murderer. Could I? I knew there was something seriously wrong with that reasoning.

  Greg was going on about Miles’s tenacious grip on the English Department chairmanship. It was not solely an Enfield College eccentricity that people identified themselves so intensely with their role in the hierarchy, but—

  “Greg,” I interrupted, “speaking about Enfield eccentrics, you mentioned Margaret Smith before. What do you know about her? I had a very unsettling experience with her the other day.” I told him about our encounter in front of the Y.

  “Sounds just like Margaret. I wouldn’t worry, Karen. Don’t be afraid you’ve done something to offend her. She treats everyone like that, even her students. She’s got the lowest course enrollments of anyone at Enfield. The Religion Department keeps assigning her the required courses—then the poor saps don’t have any choice but to take her. Can’t get rid of her, of course; she’s been tenured since, oh, the New Deal.” He grinned in conscious exaggeration.

  “Did I hear she has a publisher interested in reading her book manuscript?”

  “So she says. She’s been working on that thing for generations, but nobody’s actually seen it. She doesn’t even give talks from it at professional conferences. Word is that it’s a study of Emily Dickinson and God.”

  I groaned. Just what we needed, another attempt to skewer, categorize, and embalm Dickinson’s multifaceted, ever-shifting—even comic—metaphysical inquiries.

  “From what her students say,” Greg went on, “it seems that she’s prefeminist in her theology, so God knows what retrograde readings she gives to poor Emily’s poems. And what she must do to Dickinson biography … It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  “Well,” he added, as he rose and stretched. “I always love our little natters; I never know where they’ll take us. But I’d better get on over to Giovanni’s and get my shopping done if we’re going to eat tonight. See ya later, kid. You really look washed out. You could use a good feed.” He kissed me on the cheek, squeezed my arm and left.

  I locked the door behind Greg, walked slowly back to the desk, sat down, and pulled my list of names out of the center drawer. It made no more sense to me now than it had an hour ago.

  Later that afternoon I had an appointment with Miles to discuss my courses for the next fall semester. He was in his lair when I entered the English Department office; although I couldn’t make out any words, I could hear his ponderous tones through the closed door. Magda’s accents, too, emanated from the room, lilting coquettishly in the heavy academic air. Although the students wouldn’t return for two and a half weeks, the department office was bustling this first day back from the Christmas holidays. I poured a cup of coffee and gossiped with the secretaries while I waited for Miles.

  It was painful to have to think about next September’s courses when I hadn’t even begun to teach January’s yet, but everything had been complicated by Randy’s death. He and I together had covered the teaching of American literature to 1900, and now the English Department was short a crucial member of the team. Miles would know better than I what courses should be offered next fall, but I was also concerned about this upcoming semester’s courses—and for purely selfish reasons. The students registered for Randy’s Transgressive American Texts and American Sexualities courses would now be flooding my Survey of American Literature class and my course in Literary Realism in order to fulfill their Amlit requirements. I was about to be swamped.

  After fifteen minutes, I’d exhausted department gossip and the current issue of PMLA. I’d begun to think about walking out when Miles’s door opened, and Magda emerged. Today she was disguised as an American—form-fitting jeans, an unbuttoned-to-where-it-mattered white silk shirt, and gunmetal gray snakeskin cowboy boots.

  “Darlink,” she said, on seeing me, “zuch good news. Dearest Miles hass given me Randy’s American literature courses; ve vill be colleagues, you and I.” Her dangling silver-and-turquoise earrings jingled as she threw back her head and laughed with delight.

  “What?” I was astonished. Magda’s specialization was poetry writing, not American literature. “What about your writing courses?”

  “Ach. Zo few students zigned up, I vas hafing to cancel. I vas afraid … But, nefermind—now I teach zis delicious Zexualities course. Und American Dransgression.”

  “But you don’t have a degree in American lit—”

  She shrugged, her hands spread wide. “Ze vicked little zgarlet letter. Ze naughty little Huck und Chim. How hard can it pe?”

  Miles knew he should be ashamed of himself. His gaze was slippery as I perched on the edge of the straight chair next to his desk; rather than look directly at me, he fixed his eyes on a large metal clip holding together the sheaf of papers he kept fiddling with nervously.

  Our discussion of the fall courses was brief and guarded. He didn’t tell me if Magda would be staying over until September, and I didn’t ask. His fixation on the manuscript—or whatever it was—in front of him drew my attention to the cluster of yellow, lined pages. Covered with a bold, left-slanting handwriting, they looked familiar. When Miles saw me scrutinizing the fascicle of pages, he dropped it on the desk, as if it suddenly had become thermonuclear. Then, somehow, it went missing under a pile of colorful English Department course-offering booklets. Miles was too late, though; I had already recognized the distinctive penmanship on the sheaf of papers I’d last seen on the floor of Randy Astin-Berger’s office.

  I was puzzled. Randy’s radical politics had threatened everything Miles held dear about literary study. Miles had despised him. What use would any of Randy’s unintelligible jottings be to him? One thing was certain, though: I had learned my lesson; I wasn’t about to break into any offices to find out.

  Twenty-one

  IDO NOT LIKE the Enfield College library at the best of times. Even when sunlight streams through the narrow medieval arches of the leaded windows, gloom prevails. The library’s dark corners, oddly sequestered oak benches, desks and carrels in out-of-the-way nooks, and eccentric circular staircases seem straight out of some deranged gothic imagination.

  At four P.M. on a midwinter afternoon, sinister shadows abounded in the vaultlike chamber that housed the American religion stacks. I half expected to see Poe’s raven leering at me from one of the dozen or so marble busts of American clergymen the college fathers had seen fit to commission for this room.


  The religion stacks were lit only by fluorescent strip lights on the two side walls and the red Exit signs at either end of the room. This eerie combination cast a feeble and bloody glow over the high shelves and the marble busts in their secluded niches. So few people visited the library during the semester break that individual stacks were lighted only as people used them. Each row of books had its own switch. Cost-efficient, perhaps, but a nuisance. I fumbled along the end of the shelving for the first light switch, then walked down the stacks, searching for the BX section, switching on lights here and there as I went.

  The last time I’d been in this section of the library was when I’d visited Randy’s carrel a week earlier with Piotrowski and a security guard, so my dead colleague was doubly on my mind as I made my way through the stacks. When the door to one of the carrels at the far end of the hall opened, I couldn’t tell in the dim light who it was that emerged. My mind had only enough time to register tall, male, and not Randy before the figure vanished through the door at the top of the library’s west staircase. Was it Randy’s carrel this shadowy library patron had exited? And why hadn’t he bothered to turn on any lights?

  After I’d left Miles’s office, I’d gone back to my own and had taken another look at my investigative notes. Then I’d put them away with a sigh. There was nothing more I could do with the sermon stuff until I actually got my hands on some manuscripts. Also, I needed to read the book, a history of nineteenth-century women’s magazines, I’d agreed to review for American Quarterly. In a couple of days I would head for Cambridge, the closest research library being the Houghton at Harvard, but now I would do my own work. I picked up the history and began to read, but the words made no sense, were merely black ciphers on a white field. I couldn’t keep my mind off the Reverend Mr. Beecher.

  Other women had evidently had the same problem, but they’d all been dead for a long, long time.

  I’d closed the book and stared at the cover. The jacket featured a Godey’s Lady’s Book fashion plate from the 1860s—a fragile blonde with a rosebud mouth wearing a full-skirted, multitiered magenta silk evening dress, her hair caught back in a black snood. She drooped fetchingly against a grand piano. Was this the type of woman whom dear Henry Beecher would have found attractive?

  Goddammit. I might as well forget about doing anything else and see what I could find out about Beecher right here at Enfield. Surely the college library would have a study of this illustrious American.

  BR, BS, BT—BX: Here it was. I flipped the switch and searched the shelves. Ah, yes, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher. Hmm. I pulled the volume off the shelf, blew a twenty-year accretion of dust from it, and settled down at a desk that had not been designed for a twentieth-century female anatomy. I tried hard to concentrate. Really, I did. But once again my attention wandered. Nothing I was reading here was of any possible relevance. My uninspired hands let the book fall shut of its own weight. My uninspired mind began a series of speculations, mostly involving the erotic misadventures of men in high places. My uninspired eyes roved aimlessly around the room, hesitating at one particular marble bust, and then moving on. When I found myself ruminating about Avery Mitchell and his love life, I pulled my imagination up short and gave it a rap on the knuckles. This day was undeniably shot. I might as well abandon all pretense of work.

  I replaced the Beecher book where I’d found it, on a lower shelf that required awkward bending. As I rose from my crouch and turned to leave the room I suddenly, incomprehensibly, came face to face with Henry Ward Beecher. Nose to nose we came, eyeball to eyeball. His countenance was ashen, his eyes stony and unseeing. A lurid red glow from the Exit sign above his head bathed the white shoulder-length hair in a wash of pink. I gasped.

  The marble bust did not respond.

  When I recovered from my shock, I took a closer look at the statue. Squinty, hooded eyes, prominent nose, girlish mouth, heavy cheeks, long straight hair—surely this was not a face that could possibly have launched a thousand amorous fantasies?

  This place was really starting to get to me. Here I was, a rational, highly-educated, late-twentieth-century scholar speculating on the erotic attractiveness of a marble bust. It was time to get out. I headed toward the door and down the stone steps, worn concave by generations of book-laden students. The lighting in the stairwell was dim and the stone walls rough and pockmarked. I knew they weren’t damp, cobwebbed, and menacing, but I was in the mood to see them that way. Picking up speed as I rounded the half-landing from the third floor to the second, I sprinted down the steps, rounded the landing from the second floor to the first—and collided full-length with Avery Mitchell.

  Avery staggered and grabbed the banister to prevent himself from falling backward down the stairs. His armload of books went flying. I plopped down unceremoniously on the steps. He loomed above me, his face shadowed in the dim light. Unable to catch my breath, I fluttered a hand to my throat in a particularly feeble manner. We must have looked like heroine and villain in a 1930’s horror film.

  Avery reached out a hand to grab mine. “Are you okay, Karen?” His grip was strong, even for such a slender hand, and before I could protest that I’d rather get up by myself—thank you kindly, sir—he’d pulled me to my feet. A lock of sandy hair had flopped forward on his forehead, perhaps with the impact of our collision. As I resisted an impulse to reach out and push it back in place, he did so himself.

  “You’re very pale, Karen. Is everything all right? You know, you really are white. You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “Maybe I have.” I put some feeling into my reply.

  “Maybe I have.” Then, in an attempt to regain some semblance of dignity, I began to apologize. “I’m so sorry, Avery. I don’t usually go crashing into people. You must think …”

  “Well, Karen, to tell you the truth, if I had to choose someone to collide with—Listen, I never know anymore when I’m in danger of making a sexist remark, so just forget I said that.”

  I smiled, wanly, I imagine. I have trouble myself with the fine line between the sexy and the sexist. To smooth over the awkwardness I bent to retrieve his books. Of course, this was the moment he chose to do the same, and our fingers clasped on a large red volume. I yanked my hand back immediately.

  “Avery.” I stood up bookless. “This has simply not been a good day for me. I think I’d just better go before I make things any worse.”

  “Don’t worry about it. My day hasn’t been terrific, either. You know what? How would you like a drink?”

  Astonishment is not good for the brain. I looked around, stupidly, for a drink. Was he offering me a glass of water? A soda from a machine? What?

  “I don’t know about you,” he continued, “but I could really use a stiff scotch.”

  “Oh, a drink.”

  “Yes. We could go to Rudolph’s.”

  “Well, I’d like that. But—I have a dinner date.”

  He glanced at his watch. “It’s only five. Surely you have time before dinner.” Was it possible he was a little hurt? “But don’t worry about it if you don’t have time. I’ll survive sober.”

  “Oh, it’s only five?” What had I gotten into here? This was a no-win situation. I shouldn’t spend any more time than I had to with a man I couldn’t be rational about, but I certainly couldn’t turn down a casual drink with my boss. “Five? I thought it was later. Sure, I’d love to go for a drink.”

  “Good. Let me put these books in my carrel and I’ll meet you by the desk.” He smiled, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners in a way I’d never noticed before, and bounded up the stairs, lean, athletic, and—dammit—fascinating.

  Rudolph’s, with its tropical murals, thatched roof over the bar, and bar stools with high chrome risers and caned seats, was crowded with the usual happy-hour denizens. As in any other upscale Northeast watering hole, the younger group was now health-conscious, sipping Perrier or wine spritzers. The older drinkers remained faithful to their martinis and manhattans. No one was smoki
ng.

  College types filled the bar. Miles Jewell and a couple of his henchmen conspired over tall glasses of dark beer. Magda Vegh was just leaving them. She had a senior member of the religion faculty in tow. Her soft hair dipped beguilingly over one eye, and she had added an oversized brown leather jacket to her jeans and cowboy boots. The theologian couldn’t take his eyes off her. Her own eyes flickered in our direction when Avery and I entered the room, then swiftly slid back to her latest conquest. I watched her glide out of the bar with a sense that I was missing something significant, that some odd detail had just glanced off my consciousness. Then my attention was caught by Ned Hilton, who sat at a small table by the window talking to Jill Greenberg. Shoulders slumped, face drawn, he was waving his hands distractedly and monopolizing the conversation. Jill’s fiery hair was pulled back in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Any errant strands had been severely disciplined with mousse and barrettes. She wore no makeup. In a white turtleneck and black sweater, she looked demure and innocent, like a little Jewish nun. The total effect was delicious. I doubt Ned even noticed.

  Avery’s trip to his carrel to dispose of his books had allowed me time to recover my self-control, and as we elbowed our way up to the bar, standing for our first drink, sitting for the second, we had a genuinely enjoyable conversation—light, witty campus gossip; light, erudite book talk; light, circumspect personal disclosure. I completely forgot the possibility that I might be drinking with a murderer.

  Avery orchestrated the conversation, in the way that only the truly sophisticated can, to touch exclusively on unproblematic issues. As a conversationalist, he was a virtuoso, banishing my embarrassment and confusion with humor and self-deprecation, causing the spotlight of his attention to shine only on my very best verbal plies and pirouettes. Then, concluding a witty commentary about fellow party-goers at Greg’s New Year’s Eve party, he startled me. “And you …” he reached out and squeezed my hand gently before relinquishing it almost immediately, “you looked absolutely stunning.”

 

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