The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  “Would you?” My efforts had barely made a dent. “I could really use some help. But I’m a little unnerved right now—as you can probably tell. How about a trip to Bread and Roses first for coffee?” I didn’t know how much help Jane would be, but hers was the only offer I’d had, and I’d be a fool to turn it down.

  The drizzle had ended and a wan sun shone fitfully as we crossed campus heading for Field Street. I nodded to Avery Mitchell on the walkway outside Emerson Hall. Enfield’s president was in dress-down mode today: jeans, navy blue pea jacket, Rockports. In spite of the nasty weather, he was hatless, gloveless, and scarfless. Tall, lean, and sandy-haired, with the angular facial planes of the true WASP, Avery looked as good to me—damn it!—as he always had.

  “Karen?…” Avery said, when he saw me, as if he intended to speak about something that genuinely concerned him. Then he noticed my companion and instantaneously altered his tone. “… and Jane,” he added smoothly. “How are you?” It was a collective you—a phatic interrogative, as the linguists have it—no longer the kind of question to which either Jane or I was expected to reply. “I do hope you are both enjoying your Thanksgiving break.” He smiled, nodded, and passed us without slowing down for a response.

  “He seems like a nice man,” Jane said, turning briefly to gaze after him.

  “He is,” I replied, and repressed any urge to comment further. Avery disappeared down Field Street in the direction of the President’s House. Probably on his way home for a spot of afternoon tea. Or, for a spot of something a bit more stimulating, I thought enviously. Avery’s wife Liz had returned to him a few months earlier after several years of separation; they were probably still in the second-honeymoon stage.

  In the center of town, a crew with a cherry-picker lift was affixing giant non-sectarian electric candles to the faux-Victorian lightposts. Otherwise, the streets were almost empty as Jane and I waited for the traffic light to change at the wide intersection. Next to us at the curb, a slender young woman in jeans and a hand-knit Peruvian sweater fussed anxiously with the plastic stroller shield that protected her infant from the cutting wind. Across Field Street, two elderly women I recognized as faculty wives—faculty wives emeriti, if such a title is possible—descended the steps of the public library, each laden with a stack of brightly colored books. Suddenly, standing there, waiting for the green light, I had the uncanny feeling that someone was watching me. I spun around. A few students were scattered singly and in pairs on the sidewalk, but none of them was looking at me. Jane glanced at me quizzically. I shrugged: Just paranoid, I guess.

  Bread and Roses smelled of chocolate and coffee. With most students gone for the holiday, things were slow, and only a half-dozen shoppers occupied the round marble tables. Bread and Roses was a sixties counterculture coffee shop that had matured and flourished over the decades without going upscale in any way but price. Its coffee came in only two permutations—caffeine and decaf—leaving anything more ambitious to the new Starbucks down the street. Baked goods were Bread and Roses’ real claim to fame, and I secured a couple of sherried raisin scones as I ordered coffee for myself and Jane. Sophia Warzek, wrapped in an enormous white apron, emerged from the kitchen carrying a lemon meringue pie. I widened my eyes histrionically at the sight of the gorgeous pie, and Sophia grinned.

  “So,” I said to Jane, as I joined her at the table, “I assume you’ve heard about Elliot.”

  “Elliot?” she echoed, and her small face with its country-girl cheeks assumed a hedged expression. “What about Elliot?”

  I stared at her, amazed. The Enfield College gossip network prides itself on one-hundred-percent saturation, and I’d been on the phone all yesterday afternoon with people wanting to talk about poor Elliot’s horrid death. Plus, the Enfield Enquirer had gone for megasize headlines in both the Friday and Saturday issues. How was it possible the news hadn’t gotten to Jane? But, then, our visiting poet had been on campus only three months, and she wasn’t a particularly sociable woman. Maybe she didn’t read the local paper; maybe nobody had called her.

  “Oh,” I said, “I thought for sure you would have heard. Elliot Corbin is dead.”

  “Dead!” Jane’s hand jerked, and her milky coffee sloshed over onto the table. She concentrated on mopping it up with a Bread and Roses recycled-paper napkin. “Was it his heart?” she asked, her eyes still on the soggy napkin.

  “No—”

  “Well, then, what?” She looked up at me suddenly. Her lips had gone pale. “Was it an accident? He always did drive too fast.”

  “No, not an accident.” How would Jane be familiar with Elliot Corbin’s driving habits? Why would she seem so upset about his death? “Elliot was … murdered,” I said.

  “Murdered?” Jane slumped back in her chair, as if all her muscles had failed at once.

  “I know—it’s inconceivable.” I took a sip of coffee, and the caffeine went straight to the necessary brain cells. “He was killed at home,” I told her, “on Thanksgiving Day. Stabbed with a knife.” My report was factual, but, as I related the details, they sounded like elements of some nineteenth-century melodrama. “It’s simply incomprehensible,” I concluded. “I just can’t get my mind around it.”

  “Elliot?” Jane whispered. “Dead?” She sat motionless for a few seconds, then dropped the coffee-sopped napkin onto her untasted scone and abruptly pushed her chair back. “Karen, I’m very sorry, but I’m not going to be able to … I’ve just remembered … I … I have to leave.” She zipped up her bulky quilted jacket and slipped the strap of her book bag over her shoulder. “Sorry,” she said again, vaguely, and headed for the door.

  Sophia, setting out a tray of the infamous Bread and Roses fudge-frosted brownies, watched Jane’s exit from behind the glass-topped display case. When the door closed behind her poetry mentor, Sophia glanced over at me with a frown. I gave her a reassuring smile. Truth was, Jane Birdwort was the last person I would ever have expected to express any concern for anything that happened outside what some scholars call the life of the poem—in other words, in the real world. But obviously Elliot’s death meant something more to Jane than just another college scandal. But what?

  Emmeline Foster’s journal was gone. There was no longer any denying it, and I wanted to cry. George the janitor had come by toward the end of his shift and had helped me get the books back on my office shelves. My file folders and desk contents were back in an approximation of their original places, and I was once again packing the Emmeline Foster materials. But the stack of copybooks in which Foster had so conscientiously inscribed the happenings of her days and years had vanished. I stood by the repacked box and surveyed the office one last time. No ribbon-tied stack of journals to be seen anywhere. And no sign, either, of the little blue notebook that had inexplicably disappeared the day I’d first opened the Emmeline Foster box. Someone on this campus seemed to have sufficient interest in this virtually unknown nineteenth-century poet not only to filch an easily pocketable little book, but also to undertake a search of my office. But who? I thought back to the people who’d been present when the box had been opened: Jane Birdwort, who, that very afternoon, had shown herself to be fascinated with Foster’s poem manuscripts; Monica Cassale (again!); Harriet Person, who had her own ambitions for the Northbury Center; Amber Nichols, who, in her characteristically enigmatic manner had expressed an interest in the acquisition of the Foster papers; and—of course—Elliot Corbin. Who was now the late Elliot Corbin.

  I hesitated—was I simply conforming to the hoary stereotype of the hysterical woman? Well, didn’t I have good reason to be paranoid? I shuddered, and carefully closed and locked my office door; even in this deserted campus building, you could never tell what curious ears might be attending to your phone calls. Then I pulled a dog-eared business card from my wallet, studied the name and number written thereon, picked up the phone, took a deep breath, dialed the number … and asked for Lieutenant Piotrowski.

  11.

  To show the laborin
g bosom’s deep intent,

  And thought in living characters to paint

  —PHYLLIS WHEATLEY

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, AS I cracked the turkey carcass apart at the joints and shredded the remaining meat from the bones, I planned the soup. It would be a simple turkey-and-rice soup, with plenty of julienned vegetables: ribs of celery, strips of carrots, a small potato grated into the broth for body, onions, garlic—a welcome-back-Amanda-no-one-else-loves-you-the-way-I-do kind of soup. Once I had the turkey bones simmering in my largest pot, I began grading papers, anxious to get them completed before my daughter returned with whatever disturbing news she had for me. I’d slipped Freddie Whitby’s essay to the bottom of the pile again, and this time it had stayed put. Finally, I placed the next-to-the-last paper in the stack of graded essays, and again contemplated Freddie’s opening salvo: “Poems are alot like life.” With the green pen, I underlined the Focus I’d written in the margin earlier, circled alot, scrawled Spelling! “Many people write poems when they want to know about life,” Freddie continued. Ditto, I wrote under the Focus. “I think Edger Allen Poe …” Spelling!, I wrote under the Ditto. “… wanted to know about life alot so he wrote poems.” My pen hovered over the margin as I decided what to address here: Get to the point! “I think Edger was really, really, really upset,” she went on, “about the vast and empty caverns of existential ignorance that underlie our common life.” Whaaa? “As a case in point, the infamous bird in Poe’s ‘The Raven’ functions as surreal trope for a pre-modernist unknowing, as emblem of an existentialist angst prescient of post-Freudian, post-Christian poesis, as enigmatic metaphor for a poetics of the abyss.” Surreal? Trope? Poesis? Poetics of the abyss? Shit! This was the language of professional literary criticism. Freddie Whitby could not possibly have written this analysis herself.

  I finished reading the essay, which went on in the same vein for four and a half pages, scrawled your own language? in the margin, deliberated for two seconds about whether or not it would be inconsiderate to call Earlene at home on a weekend, then called Earlene. At home. On the weekend.

  “As the Dean of Students,” I told her without preamble, “you should know about the blatant plagiarism I’ve just stumbled across.”

  “Hello, Karen,” Earlene replied. “How are you? Nice to hear from you. Thanks for the wonderful meal on Thanksgiving.”

  “Hi, Earlene. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I know this could wait until tomorrow, but I’m just so upset. Listen.” I read Freddie’s opening paragraph.

  “Post-Freudian, post-Christian poesis,” Earlene said, and laughed. “My, but we do recruit a knowledgeable class of eighteen-year-olds these days.”

  “What do I do about this?” I was angry. How stupid did this student think I was?

  “Can you identify the source? I mean, we can make a charge of plagiarism based on the fact that the essay is written in a specialized vocabulary available to a college freshman only in the unlikely instance that she has graduate training in literature. But the college policy on academic honesty asks the professor to attempt to find the source from which the material was taken before making a formal accusation.”

  I groaned. “Earlene, do you know how many millions of words of litcrit have been written about Poe? Do you know how busy I am at this time of year?”

  “Just make an attempt,” she said soothingly. “Go to the library. Look at some books. You might be surprised, Karen. Sometimes the source just leaps into your hands. If you can’t find it, we’ll handle Ms. Whitby some other way.”

  I slipped the offending paper, ungraded, in a folder separate from the others and jammed it into my briefcase, then turned on the CD player with its resident Emmylou Harris albums. I was in desperate need of Emmylou’s good honest voice. To the background of “Goin’ Back to Harlan,” I piled carrots, celery, onions, and garlic on the chopping block, and filled a pan with water for the brown rice. Thank God for my own wonderful daughter. Amanda was such a good kid; I was going to make her the very best turkey-rice soup in the entire world.

  Amanda got home about two that afternoon, tired, hungry—and glum.

  “Did you find your father?” I asked, tentatively, setting a bowl in front of her.

  “No,” she replied, and, without further comment, began scarfing down the world’s best turkey soup.

  “Oh.” I slipped into a chair across from her. “Was anyone able to tell you where he is?” With a serrated knife, I sliced two crusty whole wheat rolls and placed them on Amanda’s plate.

  “No.” She continued to spoon up soup.

  “Oh. Well, did you—” Amanda’s deliberate refusal to meet my gaze jolted me into a realization that I was asking too many questions. She’d tell me all about it when she was good and ready. Absently I buttered one of her rolls and ate it.

  “Mom?” Amanda asked, when she’d finished her second helping of soup. She set the bowl to one side, and, over a cup of tea with honey, finally looked directly at me. “Mom? I’ve got something to ask you. Why don’t you ever talk about your family?”

  The light from the hanging frosted-glass globe over the table illuminated the angular bone structure of Amanda’s face, cast the shadow of long lashes over cheeks blushed only by her own high coloring. Her short brown hair shone with red highlights. Her eyes challenged me.

  My family? I hadn’t seen my family in years. The last time had been at my father’s funeral, when Amanda was only five. She and I had gone to the funeral, but I’d panicked and left before the coffin was carried out. My sisters never spoke to me again.

  “What’s to tell?” I replied. I toyed with the ceramic rooster and hen salt and pepper shakers, dancing them back and forth between my hands. The rooster and the hen did a frantic little jig, stopped dead, faced each other, beaks touching. “My family never wanted anything to do with me after I left your father, you know. When Fred started hitting you”—Amanda paled, flinched—“and I walked out, my father was deathly afraid he’d have to support me—and you. The last time I phoned my family, honey, my father called me a slut and told me not to come back home. I’ve never told you about that because you didn’t need to know. But, since you’ve asked … And we’ve gotten along without them, haven’t we? We’ve done okay for ourselves.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice had lost its tone of challenge. “But he’s dead now. He’s been dead for a long time. And Aunt Connie says …”

  Aunt Connie! My heart sank at the sound of my sister’s name. Amanda had looked up my family.

  “… she says you didn’t talk to anybody at the funeral. She says that now that you’re a big-time college professor you’ve got a swelled head. She says you think you’re too good for the rest of the family—”

  “That’s bullshit! When you and I were in North Adams, my family wouldn’t even send me the bus fare home. For all they cared, we could have starved in the streets. I had to go to the Salvation Army for housing.” My face burned at the memory.

  Amanda was staring at me, appalled. “I didn’t know any of this stuff. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I took a deep breath. “Why would I tell you? Total strangers at the Salvation Army were kinder to us than our own family. I’m not proud of that. The Sallies found us an apartment, got you into a day-care program, even made me an appointment with an admissions counselor at the state college. I think they saved our lives. Then I got a job waitressing and started going to school at night.”

  “I remember when you worked at the truck stop. That was in North Adams, wasn’t it?”

  “You remember that? You were just a tyke.”

  “You used to bring home pie.”

  “Yeah—we lived on stale truck-stop food, pie and muffins and stuff. I can’t believe you remember.”

  She shrugged, granted me a disarming smile, and gestured toward her empty bowl. “That was great soup, Mom.” I took another deep breath, let it out slowly. This wasn’t the end of it, I knew, but I had my daughter back; maybe the soup had helped. But Amanda wasn�
��t done yet. “Listen, Mom, I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I really need to know who I am. I don’t feel like I’ll be satisfied until I know my … my … origins.” She was being delicate with me. Amanda and I had been a family forever, stale-pie dinners and all. Now she wanted to explore beyond that bond. I held my hands tightly together in my lap so I wouldn’t give in to the impulse to reach across the table and clutch her to me. On the CD player, Emmylou moved into “Orphan Girl.”

  Amanda left for Georgetown at dawn on Monday, loaded down with turkey sandwiches, a plastic container of soup, and fresh molasses cookies, and I’d been up extra early to pack it all and say goodbye. I wanted to make certain I had time to photocopy Freddie Whitby’s plagiarized essay before I questioned her about it, so I got to campus a good half-hour early. As usual when I arrived in Dickinson Hall before the first class of the day, the corridors were dark and deserted. At least I assumed they were deserted, until a flick of the light switch caught a furtive shadow slipping around the corner in the general direction of the side door. I had the most extraordinary sense of déjà vu: Hadn’t this happened the last time I’d come into the office early? College campuses are heavily populated places, but I was hard put to think of a legitimate reason why anyone would lurk in the English Department hallways in the dark at seven-thirty A.M. on two Mondays in a row. When I got my office door open, I turned on all the lights in the room, including the little desk lamp. The fugitive shadow in the hallway was probably nothing but an anxiety phantom, a figment of my all-too-active imagination, but suddenly I had a yen for as much illumination as possible.