The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  I had two compelling reasons to be here: There was, of course, the vexing problem of Freddie Whitby. I reviewed in my mind some of the language of her essay—surreal trope, existentialist angst, post-Freudian poesis—it should be fairly easy to identify such a source. It was just as well that the young plagiarist hadn’t returned to my office yesterday: By Wednesday’s class, I might actually have solid evidence with which to confront her. In addition to dealing with Freddie, I also needed to read up on Poe. Piotrowski’s reminder that Edgar Allan Poe was “big time,” even in the “real” world outside academe, and his speculation that there could be a profit motive involved in the disappearance of Emmeline Foster’s journals and poems had booted me into action. I didn’t know as much about Poe as I should—his melodramatic stories and agitated poems had never appealed to me—but a good browse through the scholarship should enlighten me about the relationship between him and Foster. Conceivably her journal held some previously unknown information about Poe that might render it valuable. If there was a connection to be made, I was the one to make it.

  I glanced around the reading room one last time before I headed up the worn stone steps to the American Literature section on the third floor. The college desperately needed a new library. For a top-notch school in the final decade of the twentieth century, this was a surprisingly crowded and gloomy building. For over a decade, sentimental alumni had been battling the administration’s plans to replace this beloved but outmoded building with a state-of-the-art, twenty-first-century computerized information center. At the most recent faculty meeting, Avery Mitchell had heatedly informed assembled professors that the current building was an embarrassing anachronism. Administrators and faculty should work together, he’d argued, to convince influential opponents that a nineteenth-century building and twenty-first-century information technology were incompatible. I could see, just by glancing around me, that fluorescent strip lighting placed high on vaulted ceilings did little to illuminate either dark nineteenth-century corners or twenty-first-century computer screens in this cathedral-like room. At a table by a pillar, Mike Vitale squinted at the screen of his laptop. He must be back in the swing of things after his family bereavement. I knew from experience that if he stayed in the reading room for more than an hour, he’d come out with severe eyestrain and a raging headache.

  On the third floor, at a small out-of-the-way desk in the American Literature stacks, Amber Nichols sat hunched over a pile of books, her smooth, caramel-colored hair falling across her face. The lighting in this area was so bad, I was amazed she could see to read. Amber glanced up at me irritably as I brushed past her to get to the Poe section. Then, when she saw who I was, she deliberately closed her book, without marking the place, and set it down in front of her. “Karen,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, but you’re always so busy. Do you have a few minutes now?”

  I repressed a sigh; I was increasingly anxious to get to my research. “Sure, Amber,” I replied, and lowered myself into the chair across from her. Automatically, my eyes slid over the titles of the volumes on the table. I’m a book person; print attracts my gaze the way Hester attracted Dimmesdale, the way Rochester attracted Jane, the way Poe’s lovesick scholar attracted his fateful raven. Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, I read; The Poe Log: A Documentary Life; Edgar A. Poe: A Biography. Of course … FroshHum worked off a common syllabus; Amber was teaching Poe too. Damn, these were the books I needed, and Amber had already laid claim to them. Casually, I picked up the heavy Poe Log from the table and leafed through it. Yes! The log listed in chronological order every extant contemporaneous document that had anything to do with Edgar Allan Poe, from before his birth in 1809 until just after his death in 1849; this was exactly what I needed. I noted that Amber was watching me page through the book, so I closed it nonchalantly and placed it next to my briefcase. With any luck, she’d forget about it and I could scoop it up and check it out on my own card. To distract her attention from the book, I gave her a conversational nudge. “What’s up?”

  She wriggled in her hard chair until she found the most comfortable position, then, with a conspiratorial smile, asked levelly: “Karen, what did you have to do to get here?”

  Huh? “Well, I walked up the stairs from the reading room, but I assume that’s not what you’re asking.”

  “Of course not.” She looked around, warily, and when she’d ascertained that we were alone in the stacks, she leaned toward me cozily—just us girls together—and continued: “No aspersions on your ability, Karen, but you must have pulled some strings, or—ah, you know—made some, ah, connections, to get a tenure-track teaching position at a prestigious institution like Enfield. I mean, let’s face it, with the academic market as bad as it is, nobody, but nobody, gets a job like yours without—you know—some … some associations. And you’re young, and attractive—” Her pedantic tone belied the offensive implications of her words.

  Nevertheless, I sputtered. “I didn’t sleep my way into this job, Amber, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” I glared at her, sorely tempted to stalk righteously away. Then, once again, I recalled the lieutenant’s request. Who knew what casual piece of information Amber might be in possession of? Might she know some little factual iota that could unlock the mysteries of Elliot’s violent death and the disappearance of the Foster journals? Reluctantly, I swallowed my outrage and smiled.

  “Well,” Amber said, oblivious to my inner conflict, “there have been rumors about you and Avery Mitchell.…” Her enigmatic smirk was still in place.

  I longed to slap her face. God damn this nosy, meddlesome, gossipy little hellhole of a place! But I continued to play Amber’s game. “Don’t I wish!” I wasn’t sure how convincing my lascivious little snigger was, but she seemed to buy it.

  “I’m asking,” Amber elaborated, “because my dissertation is just about finished, and I’m on the job market. This adjunct work is killing me. Along with the course I’m teaching here, I’ve got two at the university, and two at Holyoke Community College.”

  I winced in very real sympathy.

  “I’m working sixty hours a week and making peanuts. And aside from the exhaustion and the poverty, there’s the humiliation. No office, no benefits, no respect: I’m treated like a second-class citizen.” She paused, and narrowed her eyes. “I resent having to scavenge for a professional career like this.”

  I commiserated: “Of course you do.”

  “I’ve got to land a tenure-track job, Karen. I can’t keep this up.” She studied me from under carefully shaped honey-colored brows. “And, you”—she appraised me, head to toe, or as much of me as she could see above the table—“you’ve got yourself this … this enviable position. How’d you make it happen?”

  “Connections,” I said, and looked discreet. And brains, and talent, and a hell of a lot of damned hard work!

  “I thought so,” she replied, smugly. “Some people have things handed to them on a silver platter. But some of us have to do, well, whatever it is we have to do, for everything we get. Know what I mean?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Hand me a martini and a cigarette, and I might pass for a worldly woman. An awkward silence ensued. Obviously the conversation was terminating. If I was going to do any sleuthing, now was the moment.

  “I imagine you’ve heard about Elliot Corbin?” I asked it casually, as I hefted my book bag and rose from my chair.

  “Yes?” Amber’s uncharacteristic garrulousness ceased.

  “A terrible thing,” I said. “But, then, I didn’t know him at all well. Did you?”

  Amber considered her response. “I took a course with him.”

  “Really? At the university?”

  “Yeah. Three or four years ago.”

  “Elliot told me he’d taught there. Was he a good teacher?”

  “He was okay.” Something wasn’t being said, but Amber’s abruptly shuttered countenance let me know I wasn’t about to find out what it was.

  The Poe Log was
tucked casually under my arm when I’d finished searching the shelves—with no success—for Freddie’s source. I murmured a goodbye to Amber and moseyed toward the east staircase. Amber suspected me of much worse dishonesty than the uncollegial appropriation of a library book; might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Or vice versa.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Karen,” Earlene said, over Caesar salad, foccaccia, and bubbly water, “and not that it makes any difference, but it has come to my attention that Freddie Whitby is the daughter of a major donor to the college.”

  Ah. “So she informed me on the first day of class. Whitby Field House, I believe.”

  “She did?”

  “Oh, yes. In front of several other students, she let me know that the Whitbys had a century-long affiliation with the college, and that the new field house was the ‘typically generous’ donation of her father and uncles.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Yes. Enfield College, she went on to say, had always deeply appreciated the beneficence of her family. The italics were there in her voice, and I was meant to hear them. Her first essay got a D anyhow. A well-deserved D.”

  Earlene shook her head. “That kid is some piece of work. All the more reason to have evidence in hand when you make an accusation of plagiarism, Karen. You could have a fight on your hands here.”

  “You telling me to back off?”

  “No!” Earlene reached over and briefly squeezed my hand. “Don’t even think about it. I’ll say this for the administration: Never in my ten years at this school has there been pressure to provide special consideration for a well-connected student. But I’m just letting you know—also out of my long experience—it can become nasty. Some parents will sue. Get the source in your hands, if you can. Of course, Freddie may have gone to one of those mail-order term-paper mills that advertise all over the place, and that would make it harder.”

  “Yeah, I know. One of them slapped stickers on the insides of the bathroom stalls in Dickinson Hall. I scraped the damn things off. At least I did in the women’s room. I imagine Miles took care of the men’s room.”

  “You know, if she hired someone to custom-write the essay, it’ll be virtually impossible to pin down the source.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, but I don’t think the paper was written recently. Its language is outdated in such a particular way, as if it had been written, oh, say, thirty years ago, when psychoanalytic criticism was all the rage.”

  “You can date it that closely? Just by the language?”

  “Oh, sure. Literary criticism does have its trends. But I leafed through every Poe critic on the shelves this morning and couldn’t find the source. Of course, Freddie may have the book checked out of our library. Tomorrow I’ll take a jaunt over to the university; maybe I’ll run across something there. Or in one of the older scholarly journals. Until I find it, I’ll just ask questions; I won’t make any accusations.” Then it hit me, what this kid had gotten me into. I dropped my head into my hands. “Oh, God. I … don’t … need … this!”

  “Sorry, Karen.” Earlene patted me on the arm. “Just thought you should be forewarned.” She beckoned to the waiter for coffee, then turned back to me. “So … that big cop … he turned up again, huh?”

  I jerked my head up and glared at her. “Earlene!”

  Back in the department office, Shirley, Monica’s parttime assistant, informed me Monica had taken a sick day. Leaning toward me confidentially, Shirley whispered, “She’s been under a lot of pressure lately, you know.”

  I nodded. Honey, you don’t know the half of it.

  Piotrowski’s request for help had co-opted my time and energies at a time when I was already overworked. Among other things, I realized I could no longer allow the remaining Foster papers to languish unexamined in my office. What if there was a connection between Emmeline Foster’s life and Elliot Corbin’s death? That afternoon I made an inventory of the contents of the Foster box. I’d grown fond of Emmeline Foster merely from what I’d read in my brief glimpse of her journals: the excited little girl looking forward to reading her first Jane Austen novel; the meditative woman, focused on her poetry. I was beginning to fear that her carefully kept handwritten books might have vanished forever, and that possibility made me angry. It was bad enough that women poets like Foster had been ridiculed and ignored, to the point that they virtually had disappeared from the awareness of modern readers. Now this one poet’s life had miraculously been resurrected, only to vanish again. But my sympathy had been aroused and my curiosity had been whetted. Emmeline Foster had cared enough about her world to record it meticulously in poems and in journal entries, and I owed it to her to bring those glimpses of a long-vanished woman’s spirit back to life again.

  I found the letter tucked between the pages of Foster’s volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems. It was addressed in the handwriting with which I was now very familiar: Mr. Edward Cummins, Cummins and Sons, Publishers, Broadway, New York City. But here the prim hand was sloppy, as if the missive had been scrawled in a hurry. I removed the letter from its envelope. Dated January 31, 1845, it read: My Dear Mr. Cummins, the language of my Soul means more to me than the Soul itself. I enclose herewith My Own Poem, which you have previously seen. You will have noticed certain Verses in this week’s Mirror. May I trust you to prove yourself a more Faithful Custodian of my words? The signature was clear: In haste, Emmeline Charlotte Foster. Other than that little note, the envelope was empty. Mr. Cummins had proven himself faithful to a certain degree, but Karen Pelletier had carelessly allowed Emmeline Foster’s words to vanish once again from sight.

  • • •

  The knock on the office door brought me out of my funk. “Hello, Professor,” Mike Vitale said. A dozen or so snowflakes on my student’s crisp, dark curls informed me that it was snowing out. Mike had wound a black, hand-knit scarf around the collar of his army-green military-surplus jacket, obscuring his chin and emphasizing well-shaped ears tight to a nicely contoured head. “I saw you in the library,” he said in a flat tone. Then a fat tear rolled over his dark eyelashes and down his cheek.

  “Mike,” I exclaimed, “whatever is the matter?” I pulled my student into the office by his army-green elbow and deposited him in the vinyl armchair. Then I cleared the textbooks off my Enfield-crested captain’s chair and positioned it so we were sitting practically knee-to-knee. Mike slumped into the chair, offering only monosyllabic responses to my concerned questions.

  I usually avoid pressing students to tell me about their emotional problems: It ends up involving me far-too-deeply in their far-too-messy lives. But this young man’s distress was getting to me. “Mike, is this about the death in your family?”

  He choked on a half-articulated word, then shook his head—unconvincingly.

  “Mike, this isn’t like you. I’m worried. You have to tell me. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” he croaked, and immediately began to bawl.

  I suppressed a groan. I hate this stuff. If I’d wanted to become a psychotherapist, I’d have gone to psychotherapist school. I jumped up, pushed the door nearly shut for privacy—all the way shut could invite a sexual-harassment lawsuit—then patted Mike on the shoulder, and provided tissues. Amazingly, when he’d finished crying, wiped his eyes and blown his nose—and looked me in the eyes for the first time that afternoon—Mike rose from his chair without saying a single word about what was upsetting him.

  “Thanks, Professor,” he said, and squeezed my hand firmly, “I really appreciate you being so understanding. Now I know what I have to do.” Then he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, let it out in a huff, and marched manfully into the hall.

  I stood by his empty chair with my mouth hanging open: I hadn’t understood a thing. If Mike Vitale had been one of my female students, I’d have known by now all the painful intimate details of his—or, rather, her—personal problems. But he was a guy, and at Enfield College, guys suck up the pain. It’s part of the WASP ethos—even if your na
me is Vitale.

  Maybe the opportunity to cry had in itself been relief enough for Mike. I could identify with that. When I was little more than a girl, my tears had been driven permanently underground. As an adult, the once or twice a decade I let that underground river flood over, I didn’t need to add insult to humiliation by babbling on and on about it.

  It was mailtime, and I trudged to the department office. My box yielded the usual uninspiring collection of memos and publishers’ catalogs. The one handwritten—hand-printed, really—envelope disclosed a folded sheet of good-quality letter paper. In extremely neat, if immature, letters—also hand-printed—a love poem awaited me. A stolen love poem.

  To Karen

  Karen, thy beauty is to me

  Like those Nicean barks of yore.

  That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,

  The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

  To his own native shore.…

  The verse was unsigned. My involuntary snort was part laugh, part groan. Tom Lundgren! Oh, no! But I knew how to handle this; this wasn’t the first time I’d been the object of communications from a lovelorn eighteen-year-old. Ignoring them was the best strategy. Any acknowledgment, no matter how discouraging, seemed only to seal the attachment. I folded the purloined Poe lyrics and the envelope, intending to rip them in pieces and throw them in the trash. Then, with an irrational fear that Tom might somehow learn that I’d coldheartedly discarded his poem, I slipped it in my book bag; I’d throw it out when I got home.