The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  Then, as I turned down the walkway toward Dickinson Hall and the English Department, Mike suddenly stopped dead in his tracks—you could almost hear his Converse One Stars skid on the asphalt. He went silent, stared blank-eyed at the sober brick siding of the old building. Then, on the intake of his breath, he gasped “Gotta go,” and peeled abruptly away from me, heading in the direction of the student residences. Whattheheck? I watched him slouch away, a lanky, slightly disheveled figure in a tattered army-green fatigue jacket, cutting through the crowds of neat, mall-clad students and across the brown-edged winter lawns. From this distance I had a different perspective on Mike’s appearance, which suddenly seemed oddly altered to me, as if I’d seen the young man somewhere before I’d met him in my classroom. As if I’d known him in an entirely different context, sometime before he’d arrived at Enfield College as a freshman in September. I kept my eyes on him until he turned the corner between the library and the dining commons and vanished. Who, I wondered, did he remind me of? Then, noting a student from my Honors seminar heading in my direction, I geared my thoughts into grammatical autocheck: Of whom did Mike remind me?

  2.

  “Infection in the sentence breeds.”

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  IN MY SPACIOUS, BOOK-LINED OFFICE in Dickinson Hall a few hours later, I was reviewing an essay outline with another student from the freshman class when we were startled almost out of our seats by a furious bellow emanating from the adjoining office. “Why, you double-crossing, scheming, careerist bitch!” my neighbor Professor Elliot Corbin roared. “You’re going to WHAT?” Even on a quiet day, given Elliot’s normally booming orator’s tones, it was difficult to avoid eavesdropping on almost every word my colleague uttered in the supposed privacy of his sanctum sanctorum: Today the thick lath-and-plaster walls of this old building did absolutely nothing to mute the raw rage in every bellowed syllable. Much in demand on the academic lecture circuit, the eminent Professor Corbin did not spend a great deal of time in his office, and I had trained myself to filter out his orotund tones when he was in residence. But this particular outburst was impossible to ignore.

  “Bitch!” he bawled again. In the comfortable green vinyl chair I reserve for students, Penelope Richards flinched nervously. Penny and I had been discussing thesis development in essay writing, and the crude word tore through the bland subject matter like the jagged edge of a grapefruit knife. “We had an agreement, and you damn well know it!” Elliot blared. An unintelligible female voice mumbled in response, and I could hear Elliot choke in muffled rage. Then a chair scraped back, smashed against a wall, and a heavy silence was broken by the abrupt slam of a door. Footsteps tripped off down the hallway—unfortunately in the opposite direction from my open door, so I couldn’t tell whose they were—and then all was silent.

  Jittery little Penny gaped at me: What was the decorum for dealing with this shocking lapse of professorial dignity? I swallowed—hard—and continued determinedly with my interrupted sentence: “—the single most important cohesive element of a short essay.…” Her hand almost steady, Penny inscribed my deathless insights on her yellow lined pad.

  This was my third year as an assistant professor of English at Enfield College, snug in both the bosom of academic privilege and the encircling arms of the western New England mountains. How I, Karen Pelletier from Lowell, Massachusetts, ended up at Enfield is a mystery to me; I don’t really belong at such a cushy place. Nobody else seems to realize it, but I never forget it. I grew up in a gritty mill town, in a gritty house, on a gritty street, in a pretty damn gritty neighborhood, and became a mother at about the age of this student currently ensconced in my green vinyl chair. An elite academic position wouldn’t have seemed to be in the cards for me, but somehow I’d managed to beat the odds.

  My French-Canadian father had immigrated to Lowell just as the New England manufacturing economy began to skid downhill, and he swiftly discovered how sour the Great American Dream could turn for people with eighth-grade educations and not a hell of a lot of drive. But I’d had my ticket out of Lowell. Mr. Spiegel, my senior-year high-school English teacher, had insisted I apply to the University of Massachusetts and to every one of the elite women’s colleges known as the Seven Sisters. When Smith College offered me a full scholarship, my father went on a weeklong drinking binge that drove me out of the house and into the family of my girlfriend Linda. And while I was at Linda’s, her older brother Fred took it on himself to initiate me into the hazardous mysteries of sex. I was nineteen when my Amanda was born, twenty years ago—six months after I’d graduated from high school. Six months after I’d declined the Smith scholarship. Six months after the last shotgun wedding in the history of the modern world.

  After four disastrous years with Fred, I walked out, went to work waitressing at the local truck stop, and Amanda and I grew up together. When I signed up for night courses at the state college, I learned that my agile little brain could still be the passport to a life different from those lived in the narrow row houses of Lowell and North Adams. It was just going to be a whole lot harder now. Scholarships, more waitressing, teaching fellowships, and bone-wearying, single-minded determination got me through college and graduate school and into the ranks of the professoriat. And now Amanda was at Georgetown, and I was teaching at Enfield College. The American Dream still works, but it’s got a hell of a lot of rough edges. Still, no complaints: I have Amanda, and she’s great; I have my job, and—most of the time—I love it.

  Today, however, didn’t seem to be one of those times. I was exhausted. Nature’s days were getting shorter, but my workdays were growing exponentially longer. November is the armpit of the fall semester: classes, papers, committee meetings, frenzied students. Now this disturbing verbal eruption from Elliot’s office, which didn’t help at all. In addition, I should never read Edgar Allan Poe in any month when there are fewer than twelve solid hours of sunlight in the day; melancholia is contagious.

  I’d often puzzled over how any reader could take in a sentence such as “The Raven” ’s “leave my loneliness unbroken” without a massive infusion of gloom. Especially if that reader’s former boyfriend Tony is now married to someone else and happily expecting the child he wanted so long with that reader—okay, me—and that reader—I—had placed her career above home and family and accepted a job at Enfield College, necessitating a move so far away from Manhattan where Tony and she—I—had lived, and now she thinks maybe—

  “Karen.” Monica Cassale, the department secretary, interrupted my musings, shouldering past slender, insubstantial Penny as the latter left my office, and standing foursquare in my doorway. “Karen, you’ve got a delivery.”

  “A delivery?” I rose from the black captain’s chair by the desk, and met Monica at the door. “What kind of delivery? I wasn’t expecting anything.” Flexing my shoulders, I rolled my head to relieve the stressed muscles. I’d been talking to students all afternoon, and I wanted to go home.

  “How would I know?” Monica had been with the department for less than three months, but her lack of deference to the faculty was fast becoming legend. “It’s a humongous box, in the main office. The UPS guy said you had to sign for it personally.”

  Outside my door, Frederica Whitby groaned ostentatiously, leaned back against the wall and slid down until her skinny butt rested on the carpet. If there’s one thing more than any other that seems to characterize students at elite little Enfield College, it’s a heartfelt sense of entitlement to the utterly undivided attention of their professors.

  Entitlement is something I, personally, know very little about. I don’t take anything for granted, including the tenured professorship at Enfield I would be eligible for in a couple of years if everything went as I expected it to. But even the promised tenured position wasn’t enough of an incentive to make me kowtow to this rude student.

  “Excuse me, Freddie,” I said, and frowned.

  Frederica Whitby huffed like a skittish mare. She’d probably l
earned the eloquent snort from one of her stable of thoroughbred riding horses back home in Bucks County. Monica, a chunky presence in the doorway, shuffled impatiently, hurrumphed, and jerked her head meaningfully toward the main office. The UPS man awaits. I stepped over Freddie’s short, jodhpur-clad legs. No matter how privileged they were, most Enfield students were not spoiled brats, but so far this semester Freddie Whitby had given the term texture and dimension.

  “I shoulda been outta here an hour ago,” Monica grumbled as I followed her stocky figure in its khaki pants and white shirt into the department office, “but Miles wants the Palaver Chair applications on his desk first thing Monday, and it’s just been one interruption after another.”

  The Palaver Chair. The Enfield College English Department is habitually fraught with factionalism and professorial self-interest. This semester, the hiring for the Palaver Chair of Literary Studies was added to the contention caused by curriculum reform, course scheduling, and tenure decisions. A loyal alum had eons ago bequeathed a considerable sum to the department to endow a distinguished chair named after the donor: Paul Palaver, Class of ’29. The previous occupant of the Palaver Chair had died two years previously, and Miles Jewell, English Department Chair, had last month sent out discreet, and floridly flattering, letters of invitation to well-known scholars, soliciting applications for the position.

  It was no secret that my office neighbor, Elliot Corbin, wanted the Palaver Chair for himself. It comes with all sorts of perks, even beyond the distinction of a named chair: reduced course load, personal secretary, huge salary. The majority of my colleagues wanted to use the Chair to bring someone new into the department, but Elliot was lobbying zealously for his own appointment and had one or two influential department members in his pocket.

  Elliot’s furious words were still echoing in my mind: you double-crossing, scheming, careerist bitch! Could they possibly have something to do with the Palaver Chair?

  “Karen? Karen? Are you with us?” Once again Monica prodded me out of my abstraction. Monica Cassale was an enigma to me. She’d replaced a secretary whose retirement was long overdue, and there was no question but that she was well qualified for the position. But her rudeness was unprecedented in the department—except for certain members of the faculty, of course—and I couldn’t understand how she kept her job, much less, how she’d gotten it in the first place.

  “Sorry, Monica,” I said. I was annoyed by her attitude, but hadn’t intended the words to come out quite so curtly. Our new secretary cast me an evil look.

  Shit! The worst possible thing a professor can do is to get off on the wrong foot with the office staff: Letters get delayed, phone calls misdirected, memos garbled. I backpedaled: “I didn’t mean—” But Monica jerked her freckled hand toward a cart holding a cardboard box the size of a dorm-room refrigerator and thrust a pen at me.

  “You sure this is for me?”

  The dark-skinned deliveryman glanced down at the sheet on his clipboard. “You Professor K. Pelletier, Department of English, Enfield College?” The question was delivered with a Jamaican lilt.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then it’s for you, mon. Sign here.”

  I signed, squinting in a futile attempt to decipher the scrawled return address, then nodded my thanks to Monica and directed the handcart toward my office. I had the deliveryman unload the big box next to my desk. It was securely strapped with shiny reinforced packing tape; I could tell I wasn’t going to get into this surprise package without some kind of cutting tool. But, what? Someone had borrowed my scissors, and they’d disappeared into the same black hole as the rest of the department’s lost equipment. Nail clippers weren’t going to do the job on that tough strapping tape. I slid my desk drawer open: the letter opener? But that was a fragile-looking piece of balsa wood. I was itching to get into this carton, but the shuffle of impatient feet from the doorway recalled me to my waiting students.

  “Basically,” Frederica Whitby said, “I want to know what I have to do to get an A on this paper.”

  I was still pondering the illegible return address on the box. “An A?” I queried, turning my distracted gaze back to Freddie. Glancing down at my grade book, I noted the marks next to Whitby, Frederica L. Along with the D her first paper had earned were three C’s, and numerous x’s to indicate her numerous absences. “An A?” I repeated.

  “Yeah. I always got A’s on my English papers in high school.”

  “Really?” I recalled Freddie’s last essay. It began: Literature is alot like life. After that it got vague and unfocused.

  Frederica tossed her blond-streaked mane. “We never had to do poetry in high school, and I’m not very good at it, so I need some help. I just don’t get what you mean by metaphor.…”

  Ten minutes later, mind numb from repeated collisions with the impervious mass of Freddie’s intellect, I reminded her that someone else was waiting to see me and ushered her to the door.

  “You can do it,” I exhorted Frederica’s departing back as she pushed past Tom Lundgren and sulked down the hallway. “Remember what I told you,” I called after her, “focus, focus, focus.” She turned and treated me to a petulant frown. In spite of all my advice about concrete, coherent, to-the-point essays, I knew that come Monday morning I was going to be reading at least one paper that began, Poems are alot like life.

  When I turned back from ushering Freddie out, Elliot Corbin had materialized behind me and my one remaining student. Elliot was an attractive man in his early fifties, tall and slender, with very broad shoulders, clipped dark hair that would have curled if he’d let it grow more than a half-inch long, a high forehead, and well-shaped ears tight to a nicely contoured head. Small glasses with thin gold frames and a carefully trimmed goatee completed the mien of European Intellectual. “Karen,” he said, with some asperity, “could you please lower your voice.”

  My voice! Who’d been screaming at his lungs’ full capacity not fifteen minutes earlier?

  “I can’t have you chattering with students and disturbing me,” he continued. “I’ve got important work to do, and I need to concentrate.”

  “Chattering with students?” I was so pissed, I almost choked. “I was simply doing my job—”

  But he had headed back to his office without waiting for a reply. I turned to my waiting student.

  “Tom,” I said, swallowing hard. “Come in, please. How can I help you?” This was the pudgy, pink-cheeked, blond kid who had made the comment in class that morning about Poe’s broken heart. I glanced surreptitiously at my watch. Six-twelve.

  “Uhh.” Tom Lundgren stopped abruptly in the doorway; he’d seen me grab that peek at the time. “Uh, it’s really late, isn’t it. Umm, maybe I’d better come back another day.”

  I sighed. This was a conscientious young man who wrote dutiful papers. I hadn’t intended to hurt his feelings. “Don’t be silly,” I said, mustering my last reserves of professional dignity for a welcoming smile. “You’ve been waiting hours; come on in.” I gestured toward the green chair.

  Tom took one step into the office, balked again, and went pale. “Uhh-h,” he stuttered nervously. “It’s mu-mu-much later than I thought.” His eyes roved around my office, settled on the desk, the computer, the coat-rack, the unopened box, anywhere but on me. Then his gaze fixed on the green, nubby carpet at a spot just beyond the toes of his grubby Reeboks. “I sh-should go. You’re pr-pr-probably really bu-bu-busy.”

  “No, not at all,” I replied. I was exhausted. I was starving. I was livid over Elliot’s petty reprimand. I wanted nothing more right then than to drive the twenty minutes home, flop in front of CNN in my ratty old plaid bathrobe, and forget all about Elliot Corbin—and the entire Enfield College English Department. Supper? I wondered vaguely. Do I have enough milk for a bowl of Cheerios?

  “No, really, Tom,” I said. “Come on in.” The poor kid seemed to need a great deal of reassurance. “What can I do for you?” I touched him encouragingly on the arm. “Name it.�
�

  He glanced at me sharply, blinked, then blushed. It was a full-faced, crimson-to-the-hairline, complete-and-utter-giveaway, infatuated-student blush. Oh, God, I thought, recalling his lovelorn commentary on “The Raven.” “Oh God,” Tom Lundgren said, and spun around on a huge besneakered foot. Face half-hidden in his hands, he crashed out through my office door, then blundered away down the hall.

  “Tom?” I called after him. “Tom?” But the heavy outer door thudded shut, and he was gone.

  The mysterious box resisted all efforts to be opened. By the time I’d finished with Freddie and Tom, Monica must have gotten the Palaver applications sorted, because the main office was dark. Darn! That meant the scissors and other sharp instruments belonging to the English Department were unattainable behind a locked door. As predicted, my balsa-wood letter opener cracked in half as soon as I applied it to the carton’s strapping tape, and I broke two pencils and the tail of a comb before I gave up. The box would still be there on Monday morning. I was never the type to let curiosity overwhelm me; after all, look what happened to the proverbial cat. A ludicrous image of a black cat, stiff and belly up, plunked into my mind. I shuddered. To tell the truth, I often was the type to let curiosity overwhelm me.

  3.

  Come, get for me some supper,—

  A good and regular meal,

  That shall soothe this restless feeling,

  And banish the pain I feel.

  —PHOEBE CARY

  THAT WOMAN IS A WITCH,” Jane Birdwort hissed in my ear. The night was dark and cold as I left my office, and I couldn’t understand why Jane, this year’s visiting poet, was lurking outside Dickinson Hall, nearly hidden behind a marble column. Except for Ms. Birdwort, the campus common seemed entirely deserted, and both Jane and her odd greeting startled the hell out of me.