The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  I’d scarcely had a chance to take a bite of my muffin when Elliot Corbin plunked his mug of black coffee and plate of unbuttered whole-wheat toast down on my secluded table and plopped his gym bag on the floor next to my feet. “What are you doing way back here in the corner, Karen?” he asked, sliding into a chair. “Hiding from students?”

  And colleagues, I thought, but I laughed at his sally, nonetheless. Being untenured weasels an assistant professor into all sorts of petty hypocrisies.

  “That’s not a very healthy breakfast,” Elliot commented, gesturing toward my muffin with a virtuous triangle of dry toast.

  I smiled noncommittally, broke off a big muffin chunk, and stuffed it in my mouth. None of your business, big boy, I thought.

  “So,” my companion continued, munching his toast, “you’re teaching Poe, are you? I was walking by your classroom this morning and heard a few snatches of the discussion.”

  “Oh, really?” Damn. Why hadn’t I remembered to close the classroom door?

  “I suppose it’s none of my business,” Elliot said, “but I do think biographical analysis is a markedly wrongheaded approach.”

  I sighed, and tried to hide it in a gulp of coffee. What the hell was Professor Elliot Corbin doing lurking outside my classroom long enough to get the drift of a class discussion?

  “But, then, of course, it’s understandable that I would have developed a far more sophisticated pedagogical approach than you, Karen, immersed as I am in Foucauldian theory.…” I nodded, swallowing my sudden hot irritation along with my coffee. Tenure, I consoled myself. Tenure. “And also seeing as I have some not inconsequential experience with graduate teaching.” He paused. I was supposed to be impressed.

  “Really?” It was all I could manage.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve taught several graduate seminars at the state university over the past few semesters. They’re only too happy to avail themselves of a scholar of my reputation.”

  “How nice.” I got the words out, but the admiring smile died somewhere between my servile untenured status and my integrity.

  Elliot was off, in full lecture-hall mode. “As I advise my grad students, when we literary critics speak of an author, we have an obligation to address, not some putative human being, but, rather, the author function. When I say Poe, for instance, my reference elides the man as an independent historical or biographical entity, and contemplates Poe, the discursive function, the ‘author’ as a body of language operating within a social and cultural field, a published, circulated, and commented-upon compilation of words and works generated by and functioning within cultural discursive formations. And thus …”

  I stopped listening; I’d heard it all before. I’ve read Foucault; I am, after all, a late-twentieth-century literary critic and my thinking has been indelibly impacted by postmodernist theorizing. But I wouldn’t want to imagine the response in a freshman classroom to the bloodless suggestion that we discuss the badly behaved and deliciously fascinating Edgar Allan Poe as a discursive function. I’d rather talk about anything else, even the ways in which all the love was leaking out of his life—or whatever it was Freddie Whitby had claimed. In spite of my impatience with the emotional hyperbole of eighteen-year-olds, I do understand a little bit about the loss of love.

  I banished the thought of Tony immediately; he was married now, and gone, gone, gone. Another image flitted by: Avery Mitchell, Enfield College’s president. Since an evening last spring when he’d kissed me on a lovely New England mountainside, we’d had only fleeting, and awkward, encounters—mostly over the establishment of a research center recently donated to the college. I bit my lip to subdue my wayward imagination. My elegant and handsome boss was reconciled with his wife and living an exemplary college-presidential life.

  “The positionality of authorship within a systemics of race, class, and gender …,” Elliot droned. I think he was boring even himself; we both started as his watch beeped. “My God, handball,” he exclaimed, jumping up from the table. Elliot’s daily handball game was a big deal. He designed elaborate computerized handball schedules around his classes and the classes of the colleagues he bullied into playing him, then posted them on the bulletin board in the department hallway and on the department’s Internet website. Elliot allowed nothing to come between himself and handball. Without saying goodbye, he grabbed his gym bag and pivoted toward the door, bulldozing between Earlene Johnson and the student with whom she was in earnest deanly conversation. Earlene glared after Elliot, then turned, curious, to investigate his trajectory. When she saw me in my corner, she raised her eyebrows: What now? Handball, I mouthed. Earlene slumped her shoulders dramatically—Jeez—and turned back to the student.

  I sipped at my cold coffee, and brooded. Guys like Elliot, arrogant, with super-organized lives—and super-organized intellects—get to me. I didn’t know Elliot Corbin very well; he was too busy being an academic celebrity to have much time for the junior faculty. But he seemed to be a man who had it made: full professorship, hefty salary, clearly theorized intellectual life, no personal encumbrances—at least I’d never heard of any wife or children. I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting at his place tomorrow evening. I could picture the house a man like that would live in: white walls, blond wood furniture, leather and chrome chairs, cool, light, uncluttered space. Just like his mind: fashionably furnished uncluttered space. The author function, I thought, sarcastically. How disinterested. No need for Professor Corbin to consider messy human lives and messy human needs: All he had to do was deconstruct a body of language constituted within a cultural field.

  But surely there was something just a little bit smarmy in Elliot’s need to eavesdrop outside a colleague’s classroom?

  “What’re you doing back here in the corner, Karen?” Earlene slid into the seat Elliot had just vacated. “Hiding from students?”

  I laughed, with genuine humor this time. “Earlene, I’m not going to tell you who else just asked me that very same question.”

  “If it was Saint Elliot of the handball court, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to share the same language as that man. I can’t begin to tell you how many students have—Well, Karen, you know I can’t talk about the problems students bring to me. But, you can imagine.…”

  An icy drizzle rendered the campus walkways slippery and treacherous. When something slammed into me from behind, I went down hard, my overloaded bag flying, books, pens, and class notes scattering. I hit the ground with a thud and an uffff as all the air in my lungs was forcefully expelled; then I lay dazed on the ice-slick concrete.

  Sprawled near me on the frosted grass, a young boy, a kid of about ten with a cap of tight black curls, lay pale and frighteningly motionless. Five yards away, an overturned skateboard spun its lethal little wheels. I scrabbled to my knees and knelt over the inert child. Open eyes stared blindly at an empty sky. My indignant rebuke died on my lips. “Ohmigod, kid,” I gasped, “are you okay?” No response. “Ohmigod!” I shook him. The small body was limp; arms and legs wobbled bonelessly; the open eyes snapped shut.

  “Professor Pelletier,” Tom Lundgren cried, rushing up frantically, “what happened? Are you okay? Oh, my God, are you okay?” He grabbed me by the arms and tried to lug me to my feet. I pushed him away. The last thing I needed at this moment of crisis was a white knight smitten with a terminal case of puppy love.

  “I’m okay, Tom. Don’t worry about me. But this poor kid—I think he’s … unconscious.” I bent more closely over the boy. Not a notion of a breath emerged from between his parted lips. “Or, Ohmigod, maybe, he’s …” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. In my oblivious haste to get to my FroshHum faculty meeting on time, I’d become an unknowing obstacle to this child’s innocent play, and now he lay sprawled lifeless at my feet.

  “Don’t move,” Tom cried, not even glancing at the boy. “You’re probably concussed. I’ll get the EMS! I’ll get an ambulance! I’ll get the cops!” Attracted by the eruption of misadventure into an othe
rwise routine day, a small crowd of students was beginning to gather. They hovered, buzzing with excitement. Amber Nichols, on her way to the same meeting I’d been heading for, joined them, but, in her usual disengaged manner, she lingered at the edge of the swarm.

  “Hurry,” I exclaimed to Tom, and he leapt to his feet. From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the child’s eyelids flutter. Then he gasped involuntarily, as if his lungs were starved for breath.

  “Wait,” I yelled at Tom’s departing back. I bent over the child again. One eye opened, then the other. They were brown and sly. They closed again. Why, you little faker! I thought. You … you little phony! I’ll teach you …

  “Tom,” I commanded, “there’s no time for an ambulance. He’s … he’s not breathing! I’m going to have to do a … a … an emergency … ah … tracheotomy!” I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word. I winked at the gaping crowd. “Does anyone have a sharp knife?”

  The little fraud’s eyes popped open like chestnuts on hot coals. “I’m okay, lady!” He jumped hastily to his feet. “Really, really, I’m fine! Just …” He paled for real this time. “Just don’t tell my mother. She’ll … she’ll kill me if she finds out I ran into you!”

  I tried not to laugh. His consternation was so comical my irritation with his rotten little play for attention had instantly vanished. “I’m not hurt,” I reassured him.

  “I mean—she’ll kill me if the skateboard’s broken,” the boy clarified, examining the painted board minutely. “I just got it last week, and if it’s wrecked, I’m dead meat.”

  “Oh,” I murmured, chastened. My throbbing wrist and scraped knees were obviously of no concern in a world where skateboards were so highly prized.

  “Oh, crumb. Look at this! It’s got a humongous scratch!” The words were accusatory. As I struggled to my feet, I studied the boy, but not as closely as he examined his precious board. This kid looked familiar—the close set of the eyes, the pugnacious jut to the chin, the dark curly hair—quite familiar. Had I seen this child—or someone very much like him—recently? Was he maybe a faculty kid or the brother of one of my students?

  By the time I collected my belongings and turned toward Dickinson Hall and the FroshHum meeting for which I was now very late, the small crowd had dispersed, Tom Lundgren had retreated once again into mumbles and blushes, and the curly-haired little kid and his skateboard had vanished.

  6.

  Clasp, Angel of the backward look

  And folded wings of ashen gray

  And voice of echoes far away,

  The brazen covers of thy book.…

  —JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

  MONICA, DO YOU HAVE A KNIFE?” I asked. After the FroshHum planning meeting, my colleagues and I exited the departmental conference room into the central office. Monica was sorting mail into the professors’ pigeonhole mailboxes. Harriet Person strolled over to the secretary’s desk and began to shuffle through an uneven stack of correspondence.

  “The meeting was that bad?” Monica’s expression remained deadpan. I checked for a glint of humor in her dark brown eyes. Nope. She was her usual crabby self. Today she wore an acid-yellow cotton shirt with her khaki pants. The color didn’t work at all well with her sallow complexion.

  “Almost,” I replied, and inspected my mail: two letters, a memo, and a publisher’s catalog. “It’s for that big package, you know, the one UPS delivered Friday afternoon. I need something sharp to open it.” I slipped the letters into my book bag. The memo and catalog, like eighty percent of my professional mail, went directly into the trash. Monica turned from her sorting, noted Harriet at her desk, and stiffened. “Excuse me, Professor Person,” she snapped. “Excuse me. That material is confidential.”

  Harriet jumped, as if Monica had jabbed her with one of the lethally sharp number-two pencils poking out of her pencil cup. “These are applications for the Palaver Chair, aren’t they?” Monica had just snatched one from her hand.

  “Yes. And like I said, they’re confidential.”

  Harriet’s expression hardened. “But—”

  “You are not on that committee, Professor.” Monica shoved the pile of applications into a desk drawer and twisted a key purposefully in the lock. Then, snubbing Harriet, she turned to me. “Karen, you haven’t opened that box yet? Jeez, you were so hot to get into it when it came, I thought you’da ripped it open with your teeth if you had to.” She pulled a brown canvas bag from a desk drawer and rooted through it, came up with a large Swiss Army knife, and flicked out an efficient-looking blade. “This oughta do the trick.”

  “Thanks.” I took the open knife carefully. “I’ll bring it right back.”

  “What box is that?” Harriet asked, withdrawing her furious gaze from Monica for a moment. At a small college, everyone wants to know everyone else’s business—as evidenced by my senior colleague’s unauthorized perusal of the job applications.

  “Just some big package that came the other day.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s in it.”

  “A mysterious package? How exciting,” Jane Birdwort said, trailing out of the central office behind me. Damn, is there no privacy on this campus? A person can’t even get a package! What do they think I’m expecting? A male stripper in a birthday cake?

  The big box stood exactly where I’d left it, halfway between my desk and the captain’s chair. I removed the key from the door lock and dumped my book bag on the green vinyl chair. I had attracted a retinue. Along with Harriet and Jane, Amber Nichols and Monica had followed me into my office.

  “You really don’t know who sent it?” Harriet admonished. “Then, for God’s sake, Karen, don’t open it! You remember we got that memo from the security office?”

  I did remember. Professors had received a “security alert” memo warning us to be on the lookout for suspicious packages in the wake of exploding parcel bombs at several colleges. The idea of a parcel bomb on a bucolic little campus like Enfield’s had seemed ludicrous to me, and that memo, too, had gone into the trash.

  “Harriet,” I replied, “they’ve caught the Unabomber. He’s in prison.”

  “Yeah, but who knows what other crazies are out there—”

  “Can’t be many more than there are on this campus,” Monica muttered.

  “Karen, I’m serious,” Harriet persisted, scowling. She ran a hand distractedly through her short, white-streaked hair. “You can’t be too careful. Right-wing conspirators will do anything to derail the feminist project—”

  “Fuck that! I’m curious. Let me at it!” Jane grabbed the open Swiss Army knife from my hand and plunged it into the box. Along with everyone else in the room, I jumped back at least three feet. No explosion ensued.

  “What are you all up to in there?”

  The abrupt male voice startled us, and Jane’s blade tore a long, jagged zigzag through the cardboard. I knew just how she felt; the gruff query just at the moment of penetration had set my heart racing. Elliot Corbin loomed in the doorway, an officious expression on his face. Handball was done for the day, and Elliot was showered and groomed, and once again ready to stick his nose into his colleagues’ business. It occurred to me that this was the second time today this man had surveyed me from a doorway.

  “You might as well come in, Elliot. Everyone else is here.” Along with my rather cool regard, four other sets of female eyes watched Elliot enter the room. Odd, I thought, when he’s such an attractive man, that these women should all look so … so, unwelcoming. Jane’s eyes held a spooked expression. Amber’s mien could only be described as calculating, eyes narrowed, facial muscles immobile. Harriet’s countenance had taken on a stony aspect, like marble chiseled in sharp planes. And Monica—Monica’s expression was perhaps the least complicated of the group: Monica was furious, plain and simple furious. Puzzling, all this ill will. But it wasn’t Elliot who interested me at the moment: It was my box.

  I plucked Monica’s knife from Jane’s suddenly limp hand. Slitting the packaging tape, I rippe
d open the top of the carton. Thick bubble wrap obscured the contents, but an envelope addressed Professor Pelletier was taped to the top layer, the handwriting the same almost illegible scrawl as that on the box’s label. I held the envelope up to the light and squinted at it.

  “Open it, Karen,” Monica grumbled. I did. Gingerly. No explosion.

  Professor Pelletier, the enclosed typed letter read, Recently, in clearing out the attic of my late uncle’s home in Greenwich, I came across the old books and letters I’ve enclosed here. They are signed with the name Emmeline Foster—Behind me Amber exclaimed, “Emmeline Foster? Really?”

  Harriet, too, peered over my shoulder. “Who’s Emmeline Foster?” she asked.

  “She was a poet,” I replied distractedly. “About a hundred and fifty years ago.” Emmeline Foster? Hadn’t her name just come up in class? She was the New York poet who’d drowned herself in the Hudson—or North River, as it was then called—when Poe was living in lower Manhattan.

  I continued aloud: “Since inquiries at the New York Public Library have disclosed that Miss Foster was a New York poetess whose writing had a brief vogue during the middle of the nineteenth century—”

  “Is that Poe’s Emmeline Foster?” Elliot interjected. I had forgotten he was in the room.

  I glanced up from the letter. “Well, I think she belonged to herself, not to Poe, but, yes, I imagine it’s the same Emmeline Foster.”

  “… I have decided to forward this substantial body of papers to you. Having read in the Enfield alumni magazine about the bequest to the college of a Center for the Study of Women Writers to be instituted under your direction—”