The Raven and the Nightingale
Page 1
Lavish Praise for
THE RAVEN AND THE NIGHTINGALE
featuring Professor Karen Pelletier
“As usual, Dobson delightfully skewers the pretensions and politics of academic life while respecting the importance of education.” —Booklist
“College politics and savvy plotting make this new series a contender for the Amanda Cross chair which, sadly, appears vacant.”
—Booknews from The Poisoned Pen
“As Pelletier’s life continues to expand, so does the possibility of this series being around for a long time.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Will definitely be a favorite among those readers who love academic mysteries.” —The Snooper
THE NORTHBURY PAPERS
“Dobson has created an attractive heroine with the courage and wit to take on the toughest adversaries.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Dobson moves easily between impassioned evocations of forgotten women writers and catty contemporary shafts at familiar ivory-tower targets.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Few are better than Dobson at recording the minutiae of academic committee-speak, power plays in body language and jargon, and what ignites a classroom.”
—Booklist
“An intriguing mystery with excellent secondary characters.” —Rendezvous
And Joanne Dobson’s Agatha Award–
nominated debut mystery
QUIETER THAN SLEEP
“A white-knuckle ride through the hallowed halls of higher learning and through the dangerous rapids of personal conflicts with a delightfully funny heroine who gives as good as she gets.” —Rendezvous
“A genuinely good read.” —Time Out New York
“A literate and absorbing novel with an ingratiating main character and intriguing setting … a smashing debut. Don’t miss this one.” —I Love a Mystery
“A superior academic mystery that reminds me of early Amanda Cross.”
—Booknews from The Poisoned Pen
“Deftly balancing its literary and mystery elements, Dobson’s debut sparkles with wit and insight into college politics. Readers academic and otherwise will look forward to the next adventure of the smart and scrappy Karen Pelletier.” —Publishers Weekly
“A truly stunning academic mystery … You’ll be all the richer for this nineteenth-century view of a very modern murder. A literary and intricate mystery with connotative power. Watch this one.”
—Mystery Lovers Bookshop News
“Emily Dickinson scholar Dobson’s first novel has an appealing heroine, a nifty payoff, and a beguiling way with the extracurricular entanglements of her teaching stiffs.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Anyone who thinks the word ‘academic’ is synonymous with ‘detached’ needs to read Professor Dobson’s tale of seething passions and deadly animosities within the English department of Enfield College. It’s a cutthroat world, academia, polished and elegant though the blades may be, and the author captures all the nuances of jealousy and fear that lie beneath the foundations of the ivory tower. Emily Dickinson, shall we say, with a stiletto in her hand.”
—Laurie R. King, Edgar Award winner
“A witty and fast-paced adademic mystery. Joanne Dobson has a light touch.”
—Joan Hedrick, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
“An intriguing plot with a motive for murder that’s as old as human nature. Good characterizations and fast-paced action make Quieter than Sleep an entertaining novel.” —The Chattanooga Times
“An engaging story … a tense confrontation … will have readers rapidly skimming pages to see how it ends. An entertaining read.”
—Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph
ALSO BY JOANNE DOBSON
Cold & Pure & Very Dead
The Northbury Papers
Quieter than Sleep
Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence:
The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America
This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
THE RAVEN AND THE NIGHTINGALE
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Doubleday hardcover edition / 1999
Bantam mass market edition / September 2000
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Poems by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 by Joanne Dobson
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79691-2
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.
v3.1
IN MEMORIAM
Walter Kendrick
Acknowledgments
Colleagues, friends, and family have assisted in making the writing of this book possible. My thanks to Frank Boyle for his pursuit of a manageable teaching schedule, and to Connie Hassett for her always-savvy professional advice. To Phyllis Spiegel and Vicki Saunders I owe much, including good health. Sandy Zagarell and Eve Sandberg read The Raven and the Nightingale in manuscript and provided that most invaluable of reader response, confirmation of the writer’s own instincts. Frank Couvares gave me one of Piotrowski’s best lines. Kate Miciak has been a dream of an editor, and Deborah Schneider a model agent.
I wish to acknowledge scholarly debts: to Cheryl Walker for her groundbreaking study The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900, which, along with Perry Miller’s classic The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, inspired my title; to Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson for their exhaustive historical-biographical compilation The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849; to Kenneth Silverman for his biography Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance; but most of all to Edgar Allan Poe himself for a life so bizarre and fascinating he made it effortless for my imagination to take that one further, fatal, leap.
Dave Dobson knows how much he has brought to this novel—and to my life and writing career—time, energy, endless encouragement, and absolutely vital contributions to the plot. Other members of my family—Lisa Dobson Kohomban, David McKinley Dobson, Rebecca Dobson, Jeremy Kohomban, Myriam Denoncourt Dobson, Bill Cosgrove, Nicky, Serena, and Shea—provide love and laughter and continual interesting developments.
Thank you all.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9<
br />
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
No man had ever heard a nightingale,
When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
To study and define—what is a bird,
To classify by rote and book, nor fail
To mark its structure and to note the scale
Whereupon its song might possibly be heard.
Thus far, no farther;—so he spake the word,
When of a sudden,—hark, the nightingale!…
EMMA LAZARUS, “CRITIC AND POET”
1.
Deep into that darkness peering,
long I stood there
wondering, fearing …
—EDGAR ALLAN POE
SHE WHO HAD BEEN DEAD once again stirred …, I read to the freshmen slumped at their desks in standard eight A.M. curved-spine classroom posture. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance—the limbs relaxed.… It was the perfect day for studying the horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe: November, cold and damp, with an ominous threat of snow. My mood matched the weather: cold and dismal with an ominous threat of—whatever; I didn’t want to think about it. I read on, adjusting my voice to the desolate rhythms of the story: … arising from the bed, tottering with feeble steps—
“The guy was a necrophiliac!” Mike Vitale called from the back of the room. I glanced up, startled. The other students in my Freshman Humanities class tittered. As an English professor at Enfield College, an elite institution of higher education tucked away in the green hills of western New England, I wasn’t used to Mike’s type of classroom irreverence—most of my students were all-too-serious about their thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year educations.
“Sorry, Professor Pelletier.” Mike apologized, paused, then blurted, “It’s just that I do think he preferred his women dead.” His gold hoop earring and crisp, dark curls springing from a tightly pulled-back ponytail gave my student a street-smart appearance. “You know what I mean? He gives these really detailed … you know … erotic … portraits of their corpses. And even when the women are still alive, they look like they have rigor mortis! Listen to this.” He glanced down at the page and read, “ ‘She placed her marble hand upon my shoulder.’ I mean, marble hand, yeeech!” He glanced around at his classmates, grandstanding, “I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but this does not turn me on.”
I laughed. In twenty pairs of dutiful eyes I could see the question: Was it really okay for Mike to make fun of Great Literature? They stared at me, and I could well imagine what they saw: A woman, if not yet exactly dead, at least on the cusp of old age—thirty-five, maybe—tall, with straight dark hair caught up in a wide silver barrette, dressed in the height of what was probably last year’s style, a long cobalt-blue sweater over black leggings and polished black lace-up boots. A woman long past her sell-by date and feeling, this gloomy November morning, every second of it.
“Well,” I said, “maybe it turned him on. Poe wasn’t the most emotionally balanced of men. In one of his essays, he says that the death of a beautiful woman is ‘the most poetical topic in the world.’ But, you know, he deliberately intended the weird effect. Melancholy—that’s what Poe was after—at least in his poems. He believed that melancholy was, what he called, ‘the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.’ ” I related Poe’s account of having chosen the word nevermore as the refrain for his famous “The Raven” based on what he presented as a near-scientific analysis of the emotional impact of its vowel and consonant sounds.
“I think he was melancholy because his heart was broken,” supplied a pudgy eighteen-year-old with lank blond hair and a fair complexion, far more loudly than he seemed to have intended. Still, if Tom Lundgren hadn’t been sitting in the front row, practically under my feet, I wouldn’t have caught the words—he’d practically whispered them. Sharp-eared little Frederica Whitby heard him, though—Freddie always sat front and center.
As Tom blushed fiercely upon hearing his words repeated, Freddie informed the class; “Tom says Poe’s heart was broken. And he’s right. Edgar Poe had lost Ligeia, his one true love,” she bemoaned, “and all the happiness had leaked out of his life. Nevermore would he find joy. Nevermore—”
Leaked out of his life? Jeez!
“Ligeia,” I said, “was not Poe’s wife. His wife was named Virginia.” For some unfathomable reason this morning I really couldn’t handle a classroom discussion about the loss of love. “Ligeia was merely a character in one of his short stories. In fact, in creating this tale of a dead woman who takes over the body of another dead woman, Poe was working in the well-established Gothic literary tradition of the Doppelganger—”
“What’s a Doppelganger?” Freddie demanded, predictably.
“It’s a double, of course,” Mike responded, as if this piece of arcane information was something every literate person ought to know.
“Yes,” I elaborated. “Mike’s right. The Doppelganger is a sinister double—a mythic creature who assumes the physical or spiritual likeness of his doomed victim. Along with other literary conventions—the dark, brooding hero, the entombed maiden, the decrepit mansion—Poe borrowed the Doppelganger from the Gothic horror tales of Europe.”
Tom raised his plump hand and waited for me to acknowledge him. “But didn’t his wife really die?” He gestured toward his anthology. “It says here in the head-note—”
“Virginia did die,” I replied, “very young, of tuberculosis. And there were other dead women in his life as well—real ones, not simply fictional ones.” My students listened intently as I recounted the tale of Poe’s beautiful actress mother, who died when he was only two years old. “And it’s been rumored that Emmeline Foster, a ‘poetess,’ as women poets were often called in those days, committed suicide out of love for Poe. There’s no hard evidence to prove either that it was suicide, or that it had anything to do with Poe, but Foster’s death by drowning in the Hudson not far from Poe’s New York home has become a powerful element of his dark mythology. After Foster’s body was found near the docks on a cold February morning, one Manhattan newspaper even called Poe ‘The Demon Lover.’ But,” I concluded, “the truth is much more mundane: Poe was depressed and alcoholic, and he was overly susceptible to women. Women, much to their disadvantage, were also susceptible to him.” I thought briefly about Poe’s romantic involvements with such women poets as Frances Osgood and Sarah Helen Whitman, but didn’t mention them; I wanted to get back to discussing the literature. “But nothing worked out for him. His life was as unhappy a story as any of his tales. Now, turn in your books to—”
The slap, slap, slap of notebooks closing alerted me to the time. I glanced at my watch: 8:50 A.M.; FroshHum, the required freshman seminar in Literature and Humanities, was over for the day. I held up a hand to keep my students in their seats. “Remember, class, your papers on ‘The Raven’ are due Monday morning. For anyone who wants help or advice, I’ll be available during office hours this afternoon. If you haven’t found your way over there yet, the English Department’s in Dickinson Hall, and my office is on the first floor, catty-corner from the main office. Any questions?” Twenty blank faces: No one wanted to stay in the classroom an instant longer than absolutely required—especially on a Friday. “No? Okay, then. I’ll expect you all to have thoughtful things to say about the poem in class on Monday. See you then.”
“Professor Pelletier?” I glanced up from attempt
ing to stuff too many books into an already overloaded canvas book bag. The classroom, with its high ceilings and dark oak wainscoting, was now empty except for Mike Vitale, who stood before my desk clutching a sheet of cantaloupe-hued paper. “Can I talk to you about my paper?”
“Would office hours be okay?” I had an urgent need for coffee; I’d gone cold turkey too long this morning. “I’ll be available from two to four this afternoon.”
“Well …” Mike seemed oddly tentative for a young man who was so outspoken in the classroom. “It’s just that I … I would rather stay out of Dickinson Hall.”
“Oh?” Stay out of Dickinson Hall? How odd. “Why?” I looked at him more closely. His usually animated brown eyes had taken on a guarded expression.
“I … I’d rather not say.” He’d placed his sheet of paper on the desk, and now he nudged it toward me. “I just want to show you my essay outline. It’s real short. Does this look okay to you?”
I gave Mike’s outline a quick once-over. “This looks fine, Mike—as I would expect.” Then I smiled at him—the poor kid looked so earnest. “You’re doing terrific in this course, you know. Have you ever thought about becoming an English major? You’re a natural-born writer.”
Mike broke out in a grin so resplendent with sudden joy, you might have thought I’d just awarded him a Pulitzer prize. “You think so?” he replied.
He accompanied me down the path from Emerson Hall, eagerly outlining in meticulous detail his proposed career path as the pre-eminent American novelist of the first half of the new century. I nodded and smiled; if I were the type of professor who went in for having a teacher’s pet, this smart, lively kid would have been it. But, as I walked with him, I noticed for the first time something behind Mike’s infectious enthusiasm that hadn’t been apparent in the classroom, a darkness like a psychic bruise shadowing the brown eyes. Was this young man more complex, more pained, than one would assume from the naive schoolboy manner? But—no—I assured myself, you’re probably just imagining it, Pelletier; you’re not in such high spirits yourself these days.