Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  “I’m not quite certain”—Ned finally turned away from the large glass panes—”but I think she was in graduate school with me.”

  “You’re kidding!” Outside, the woman had stopped pacing and was silent, her head bent, her chin held between thumb and forefinger in a gesture of scholarly contemplation. With a shock I recognized her stance as a favorite classroom posture of my own.

  “I wish I were.” His thin lips twisted with bitter humor. “Do you suppose she didn’t get tenure? Do you suppose that’s what happens to you when you don’t?”

  “Ned.” I reached out to touch his hand. “Poor Ned. It’s so unfair.”

  “Yes.” He clipped the word off short, as if he was afraid to say any more. Then, “Yes. Yes, it is. Yes—it’s so unfair. It’s fucking unfair.”

  To my horror, and probably to his own, his face crumpled and he burst into tears. “Oh, God,” he sobbed, “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry.” Then he hid his face in his hands and cried, while I alternated between sipping my drink and awkwardly patting his arm.

  Two male undergraduates at the next table looked over at us. The one in blond dreadlocks said something to the one with a cap of brown curls on top of an otherwise totally shaven head. Both laughed derisively: Real men don’t cry. I couldn’t decide whether to snarl at them or to hide under the table. Around us, heads turned in our direction, then turned quickly away.

  Finally Ned accepted the wad of tissues I held out to him and wiped his eyes, one at a time. “Okay, I’ve got that out of my system. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you like that.”

  “It’s perfectly understandable. You’re under a lot of stress. Anyhow, I’m not embarrassed at all.” The latter was a bald-faced lie. I was hot with embarrassment to the tips of my fingers and toes; I hate being part of a public scene. Yet I was genuinely worried about Ned. Piotrowski had asked me if he was unbalanced. It was a good word. Ned was a man staring into a perilous psychic abyss; tears and sympathy were not going to be enough to pull him back from the edge. And I wasn’t at all certain about his balance.

  For academics, the tenure process is a rite of passage; survive it and you’re a full-blooded member of the tribe. Don’t survive, and you’re thrown to the lions. In other words, it’s a lousy job market out there, and you may be doomed to teach adjunct courses for the rest of your professional life. Or drive a cab. I don’t know which is the more dangerous occupation.

  Ned began to talk, in his highly emotional condition throwing discretion to the winds. He had come to Cambridge today to meet with his mentor, the professor who had supervised his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard. She was helping him plan his strategy. She had advised him not to accept the tenure decision, to appeal it to Enfield’s Tenure and Renewal Committee. Neither Ned nor I said it, but we both knew that an appeal was much more likely to be successful now, with Randy gone.

  I thought about the implications of that while Ned talked on. From what everyone was telling me, Ned’s scholarship, though not intellectually trendy, was strong. Without Randy’s influential opposition, Ned would have been an easy tenure, a shoo-in. Now, here he was, with a homemaker wife, two small children, and, after next year, no job. How badly did he want to stay at Enfield? To what extremes would he be prepared to go to keep his position at that prestigious school?

  Tainted by the miasma seeping from the Enfield rumor swamp, my imagination proliferated irrational, unwanted images—images of a desperate Ned choking the life out of his colleague. He was slender but tall, and—I looked—he had large, powerful looking hands. But, if so, if he had killed Randy, why kill Bonnie? Why ransack Randy’s office? It didn’t add up.

  But once these images had entered my mind I wasn’t comfortable sitting with Ned, even in such a well-lit, public place. I kept looking at his hands with their long, spatulate fingers. Until these murders were solved, even the most casual contact with my Enfield colleagues would be clouded with suspicion.

  It was dark when I left the coffee shop, parting from Ned at the door and pausing to pull on my wool-lined leather gloves. Our encounter had left me suspecting that Ned was a man with very few inner resources. To tell the truth, I didn’t want him to know which way I was going. He was, if anything, even more miserable than when I’d first run into him. I knew a good Japanese restaurant out in Porter Square, and, selfishly, I didn’t want a despondent dinner companion. I’d go back to Charlotte’s, unpack, shower, make my phone call to Piotrowski, have a late tempura dinner and an early bedtime. Tomorrow was time enough for my research. I looked down the street to make certain Ned wasn’t lurking about, waiting to follow me. Surely that was his tall, weedy figure at least a half-block away by now and moving dispiritedly in the opposite direction. Or was it? I shrugged and turned left to begin the trek back to Huron Avenue.

  The wild-haired woman sat slumped, silent now, on the stone bench, her eyes open, staring at me, the wool cap tugged down low over her curls. I found it impossible to pass her by. She watched me truculently as I approached. Equally silent, I reached in my coat pocket for my wallet, took out a twenty-dollar bill, and pressed it in her hand. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion as I nodded at her. Without waiting for the outburst I suspected would follow, I moved away.

  She looked familiar. Like Ned, I thought maybe I had been at graduate school with her.

  Like Ned, I thought how easy it would be to become her.

  Twenty-five

  THE GUARD at the desk of the Houghton’s bookcase-lined foyer was a lean and literate-looking man of about fifty wearing horn-rim glasses and a brown tweed jacket with elbow patches. He scrutinized my Enfield faculty ID and my driver’s license, registered me, and handed me a locker key, I took my coat and bag to the cloakroom with its secluded lockers. By the time I had disposed of everything but a yellow pad and two pencils and started back toward the brass-studded, red-leather-upholstered doors of the reading room, the library’s worshipful hush and the elegance of the beautifully proportioned oval foyer had gotten to me. I pressed the white button recessed in the wall by the reading room door with an almost reverent touch. Herein lay access to the past: to papers of Emerson and Hawthorne, poems of Emily Dickinson—actual manuscripts she had written with her own small, freckled hand. As I waited for the click that would unlock the doors from inside and allow me to enter, I experienced the brief shiver of religious awe library ritual always elicits from me.

  By the time I had pushed the door open and entered the reading room, however, my feeling of reverence had vanished. I was at Harvard, seat of power and privilege, whose wealthy imperialist library had ruthlessly pillaged the past. I reminded myself of what I had always known—I had no reason to feel like an interloper. Knowledge was far too important a tool to be left to the disposal of the rich.

  The reading room was as busy as I had ever seen it, full of academics taking advantage of the few short weeks of semester break to do that last little bit of research necessary to make this book, this article, this scholarly note truly the definitive word on the subject. Because all seats are arranged so that researchers are thoroughly visible to librarians sitting at the massive elevated desk, I had a full view of everyone as soon as I entered the room. To my surprise, I saw, hunched over a manuscript box in the far corner, the stocky form of Margaret Smith. God! Ned had been right—the denizens of Enfield headed for Cambridge with the homing instinct of spawning salmon.

  The only free seat was one at the table directly in front of the librarians’ desk. I sat down to establish a claim on the space, and the young woman seated next to me twisted slightly away, perhaps so I couldn’t see the contents of the leather-bound journal she was reading. Academics are irrationally territorial. Why she would think I had any interest in her work I couldn’t imagine. Leaving my notepad on the desk and my russet brown cardigan on the back of the chair, I went through the door into the long hallway that houses the Houghton’s card catalog. Forty-five minutes later, when I returned to the table after having given my small mountain
of tediously hand-printed call slips to the librarian, my neighbor had turned as far away from me as she could get and still remain at the same table. This, of course, had the effect of causing me to sneak covert glances at her as I awaited the delivery of thirty folders of Henry Ward Beecher letters and memorabilia.

  She looked vaguely familiar. Shiny red hair cut stylishly short and spikey, an ordinary face whose best features—shapely lips and huge green eyes—were highlighted by dark red lipstick and taupe eyeshadow, slightly overdone. She wore a loose black nubbly jacket over a black turtleneck. From her right earlobe dangled a huge silver hoop from which swung a dozen tiny coral and turquoise birds. Her left ear sported a half dozen or so small silver studs, hoops, and cuffs. Where had I seen her before? Had she been a student of mine at some point, now pursuing a graduate career? But if so, why the cold shoulder? Was it someone I had inadvertently offended at some distant point in the past?

  The librarian, a young man with the delicate features of an archangel, dumped a pile of folders and a gray pasteboard box on the desk in front of me. I turned eagerly to the material as his rubber-soled shoes squeaked away across the polished floor.

  The top folder contained two letters Henry Ward Beecher had written to the author and activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I pulled it toward me and opened it, groaning as I saw the handwriting. Beecher had a hasty and impatient hand, difficult to read—just what you would expect from an important, busy man with multitudinous claims on his time. Other folders held letters to friends accepting or turning down dinner invitations; letters to strangers, granting or denying some requested boon; letters to his banker, consistently adding to his comfortable bank account. I read through a sermon brief, amazed that the man could build such reputedly charismatic sermons upon such a skeletal outline. Evidently he worked with hackneyed truisms as a base, and made the rest up as he went along. I handled with befuddlement a printed ticket of admission to the 1875 Beecher/Tilton trial:

  ADMIT BEARER TO TRIAL

  Tilton Vs. Beecher

  At the City Court Room

  This much-coveted bit of pasteboard was addressed to an acquaintance in Beecher’s own hand, leading me to speculate that he may well have gloried in this, the most public dramatic role of an intensely public career.

  Although not ultimately illegible, all the documents in Beecher’s bold, sloppy, right-slanting hand required careful deciphering if I was to read them with the meticulous attention of a professional researcher. It was tedious and uncertain work, especially since I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for.

  As I made conscientious notes with my pencil on my yellow pad, I became increasingly aware of the tap, tap, tap of my table companion as she copied, seemingly verbatim, the contents of her leather-bound book into a really spiffy little PowerBook computer. From all around me came the tap, tap, tapping of other researchers on their high-tech electronic notebooks. With my pencil and pad I was back in the Stone Age, and, as I flexed my cramped fingers, all too well aware of it. I took a little break to figure out on my pad how many days I’d have to work for Piotrowski before I could pay off pressing debts and purchase a PowerBook for myself. Too many days, as it turned out—weeks, actually. I’d have to stick to my pad and pencil for another year or two.

  By the time the huge gold hands of the clock over the librarians’ desk pointed to noon, I was only too glad to close the folder I was working on and take a break for lunch. So far the files had held no surprises. They contained only the routine correspondence of a well-regarded public figure. The only intriguing item I’d found was in a folder titled “Recipient Unknown.” It seemed to be a conventional thank-you note. On a small sheet of thick, creamy paper embossed in the upper left-hand corner with a full-blown rose, Beecher had written an innocuous message: “Thank you, dear friend, for the most pleasant afternoon walk in the lovely countryside. It will, believe me, live forever in memory.—H. W. Beecher.” The note was dated July 1859 and had no address or salutation.

  What piqued my curiosity about this innocent communication was not its contents, but, rather, the marked contrast in the handwriting to Beecher’s usual hasty scrawl. The Reverend Henry had taken great pains with this note. His handwriting was clear, graceful and flowing—very careful calligraphy. Style, they say, is content, and the style here spoke to me of the precise attention to the details of self-presentation paid by a person involved in an affair of the heart. Was this one of Beecher’s attempts at dalliance?

  Suddenly, unbidden, a few lines from an Emily Dickinson poem sprang into my mind: “There came a Day at Summer’s full,/Entirely for me—/I thought that such were for the Saints,/Where Resurrections—be—” This is one of my favorite Dickinson poems, a poignant prelude to heartbreak.

  “A Day at Summer’s full …” Hmm. When is summer “fuller” than in July?

  Dickinson and Beecher? Could it be? At the very thought of this ludicrous coupling, I snorted with derision. I must have snorted aloud, because the young woman sharing my table shot me a rude, searching look, and seemed about to speak. I suppose I was being disruptive in the sanctum sanctorum. Unwilling to accept a reprimand from someone I perceived as a snippy upstart, I smiled an aloof apology, swept the folders up into one pile, took them back to the desk, and asked the angelic-looking librarian to hold them for me until after lunch.

  After a visit to the women’s room, located down a curving staircase in a corridor of library offices, I left the Houghton, wended my way across the snowy Harvard campus, crossed Massachusetts Avenue, and ordered a burger at Mr. Bartley’s. While I waited for my lunch at one of the crowded communal tables, I glanced around at my fellow diners—Cambridge always rewards people-watching. I was struck by the number of men with ponytails. Short thick blond ponytails, long wispy gray ponytails, otherwise bald ponytails, ponytails with earrings, ponytails with bare ears. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there are more male ponytails and earrings in Cambridge than in all other cities in the United States combined. I spent a few happy moments just perusing the scene.

  As the waitress slapped a hefty burger and fries on the table in front of me, someone jostled me in passing. I turned to see Margaret Smith push behind me without a word of acknowledgement or apology. She sat at a small table in the far corner. She neither looked at nor spoke to the young woman researcher from the Houghton, who was deeply immersed in a copy of the New York Times at the same table. I had taken an irrational dislike to my library tablemate. With any luck, I thought, maybe she’s completed her infernal tapping and will now go home.

  But no. Shortly after I returned to my batch of Beecher files, she was sitting next to me again, her body half turned away, tap, tap, tapping at top speed.

  The afternoon passed in much the same way as the morning. I learned a great deal about Henry Ward Beecher, some of it actually interesting, but none of it in any way possibly relevant to two cold-blooded murders that had taken place over a hundred years after he had shuffled off this mortal coil. Well, maybe not cold-blooded murders. From what Piotrowski had said, there was certainly some passion, however twisted or obscure, involved in this.

  Giving myself a little break for stretching, I rose from the table and walked over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the campus. Late sunlight illuminated the piles of snow that bordered the college paths. Watching a couple walk hand in hand toward the brick-arched gate, I thought again about Beecher and Dickinson.

  Ludicrous? Well—perhaps I was allowing my own erotic tastes to color my perceptions. And face it, the only sense I had of H. W. Beecher’s attractiveness came from grainy old photographs and a marble bust. It was certainly possible she might have fallen for him, I mused. After all, what did good looks count for, anyhow? Language was the chief passion of Dickinson’s life, and Beecher was reputed to have been a charismatic speaker who enthralled men and women alike with his spellbinding orations. At one Amherst College commencement—I seemed to recall it was 1862—he spoke passionately about
the Civil War as “the storm in the North, and the earthquake in the South.” Whether Dickinson heard him speak or not, she certainly must have seen or heard him quoted somewhere, because she uses the same metaphor; a poem from that very year refers to an “Earthquake in the South—/And Maelstrom, in the Sea—.”

  In addition, Beecher had a number of close associations with Amherst, where Dickinson lived. He’d gone to Amherst College—before Emily was born, of course. In later years he’d been a trustee of the college. As a great public man, he would have been invited to Edward Dickinson’s commencement receptions; Emily’s father, treasurer of the college, hosted notables and alumni at an elegant tea at the Dickinson home each July. While her mother and her sister Lavinia entertained the guests, the reclusive Emily was reported to have wafted down the stairs into the spacious front hall, nodding to the right and to the left as she made her silent way through the crowded double parlors, only to disappear as soundlessly as she had come.

  Well, okay. As distasteful as it might appear to me, I suppose it was possible that she was attracted to this charismatic man of the world. Love whets odd appetites. But what of it? It might bear looking into some day, but there certainly was no way in which such an ancient liaison could be brought to bear on the solution of two modern-day homicides.

  I stretched again, looked up at the clock—three-thirty, only an hour and a half to finish up here—turned from the window, and went back to my table. If I hustled, I could get through these folders today and move on to Yale tomorrow.

  At a quarter past four I pulled the penultimate folder toward me. Its title indicated that it was from a “Correspondent Unknown.” I opened the folder and then sat back in bafflement. It was empty. I closed it, picked it up, looked under it, put it down, opened it again. Nothing. My indefatigable neighbor ceased tapping for a moment to look over at me. My eyes caught hers, and she turned hastily away. I had seen that face quite recently, I was certain—or if not exactly that face, at least one almost identical. Puzzling. But not as perplexing as the missing document.