The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  17.

  “From childhood’s hour I have not been

  As others were—”

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  HARRIET PERSON WAS LOOKING FOR a knife. I’d come into campus specifically for my afternoon office hours, but the holiday aura of the snow day seemed to have distracted students from anything and everything academic. After an hour at my desk without a visitor, I’d finished up some paperwork, and had impulsively decided it was a perfect time to clean out and organize my book bag, which was more choked than ever with the semester’s odds and ends. I’d just dumped the contents of the bag on my desktop, when Harriet stopped in my open door holding a sturdy book-size cardboard package.

  “Karen? I need something to pry these staples out with. Do you still have that big knife Monica lent you?”

  “Knife? No. Didn’t she take it back?”

  “She says you have it.”

  As I entered the department office to acquit myself, Monica was sorting what looked like Palaver Chair application folders into three separate piles. She placed the final folder, thick with letters, dossier, and writing samples, on the top of the shortest stack, then noticed us standing in the door. Instantly she hustled the piles off her desktop and into a drawer. “You’ve got my knife, right?” she asked me.

  “No. Are you sure you didn’t take it back, Monica? I don’t remember seeing it after we opened that box.”

  Monica sighed. “Let me look again.” She pulled out her canvas tote bag and began fishing through it. When a search of maybe a minute and a half didn’t locate the Swiss Army knife, the secretary abruptly dumped the entire contents of the bag. A battered leather wallet, clumps of used tissues, a pink plastic tampon holder, an address book, a half-dozen appointment cards, a dogeared paperback book entitled Xena: Warrior Princess, a pendant—a five-pointed star in a circle—on a black leather cord, a half-eaten Snickers bar, an emery board, a large bottle of Advil, a dozen pennies. No knife. “I told you I didn’t have it,” Monica said. “It must still be in your office.”

  I tried to recall the details of the morning we’d opened the Foster box. “Well, I don’t actually remember returning it to you. I just assumed you’d taken it back when you left. I’ll look through my office, but I honestly don’t think the knife is there.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, forget it.” Harriet tucked the package under her arm. “Maybe my scissors would work.” She grumbled her way out of the office: God damn inefficient staff, how was anyone supposed to get any work done?

  I ransacked all the logical places—desk drawers, bookcase shelves, coat pockets—with no luck. And, really, if I’d had Monica’s knife anywhere in my office, wouldn’t I have come across it when I was cleaning up after the break-in last weekend? “Monica,” I reported back, “it simply isn’t there. Maybe someone picked it up by mistake.”

  The secretary scowled. “I’ll be really pissed if somebody walked off with that knife. It was expensive—a gift from … a friend.”

  “Who was in my office that day—I mean, besides you and me?”

  “Harriet was,” Monica said, with a vituperative twist, “—Professor Pain-in-the-ass. And, let’s see, Jane Birdwort, and that Amber person who’s teaching Frosh-Hum, and, oh, yeah—Elliot.” Her voice quavered on the final word, then gained strength as a new thought struck her. “Joey! Jeez, I wonder if Joey swiped the knife.” Suddenly she got very busy with the stack of applications that had materialized back on her desktop as soon as Harriet had exited the office. “If I’ve told that damn kid once, I’ve told him a million times …”

  The pile of folders in front of her was the thinnest of the three she’d hustled away earlier, and I assumed it contained the applications of those who’d made the first cut. On the pretense of checking my mail, I walked by the desk and peered at the name on the top file folder—Professor Harriet Natalie Person, Enfield College. Hmm, looked like the Palaver Chair hiring committee had indeed placed Harriet on the short list.

  It was nearly dark by the time I left my office, and I bundled up the books, notebooks, file folders, and papers spread over the desk and jammed them back into my book bag without looking at them. Maybe I’d finally have a chance to go through the semester’s detritus over the weekend.

  • • •

  Instead, I spent the weekend going through the detritus of Elliot Corbin’s abruptly abbreviated life: Saturday in his office with the company of a uniformed state trooper, and Sunday with his computer files in an evidence room at state police headquarters. Aside from confirming my earlier sense that Elliot was a hardworking, but not particularly creative, scholar, who’d hit it big with the one book on Poe and who’d been riding the wave ever since, my search found nothing useful. I was dying to know about his marriage to Jane Birdwort and what the police had learned from her, but neither Piotrowski nor Schultz showed up, and the wiry little trooper who babysat me both days was deep in paperwork and had nothing to say.

  Monday was the final day of fall-semester classes. Tom Lundgren was in his seat front and center when I arrived in the classroom five minutes before the hour, but neither Freddie Whitby nor Mike Vitale showed up for the eight A.M. FroshHum session. I wasn’t worried about Freddie—the no-show was consistent with the rest of her semester—but Mike’s absence concerned me. He’d missed Wednesday’s class too, even though he had an otherwise perfect attendance record. I decided to speak to Earlene; maybe she knew what was going on with the boy.

  That afternoon I wound up my Emily Dickinson seminar by discussing a group of poems famous in Dickinson’s era: Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” Lucy Larcom’s “Hannah Binding Shoes,” Whittier’s “Snowbound,” and Poe’s “The Raven.” Dickinson hadn’t published her poems in her lifetime, and I wanted the class to think about her decision not to publish in the context of what she and her contemporaries would have been reading. This class met in a plush nineteenth-century seminar room with oak paneling and leaded windowpanes, and I asked my students to imagine themselves original inhabitants of the room, back when these four poems were first in print.

  “But Professor Pelletier,” Shamega Gilfoyle piped up, her dark, intelligent eyes bright with mischief, “I can’t possibly imagine myself here in 1850: Enfield didn’t accept black students then—or women, for that matter. And they certainly didn’t have any female professors—”

  “All right, Shamega, point taken. Forget the timetravel exercise; it was a bad idea.”

  “The Raven,” in particular, elicited a good deal of discussion from my seminar students, a savvy group of junior and senior English majors. “Poe wants the reader to think this is a poem about love,” Shamega said. “That he’s like this really sensitive New Age kinda guy whose heart has been pulverized by the loss of this woman—this Lenore. But, you know, I don’t think that’s it at all. Something else is going on here. Listen.” And she read a verse from the poem:

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;

  But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

  And the only word there spoken was the whispered word,

  “Lenore!”

  This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word.

  “Lenore!”

  Merely this and nothing more.

  Then Shamega went on, “The guy is terrified. I mean, think about it, he hears a scary sound in the night, and the first thing he thinks of is that the ghost of his lost girlfriend is coming back to haunt him? Is that supposed to suggest love? No way! The brooding atmosphere, the bizarre imagery, the haunting repetition of the refrain: That’s not love at all, that’s guilt! I mean, don’t you think?”

  “Well,” I responded, “Poe had a lot to feel guilty about. He was a destructive—and self-destructive—man.” Then I repeated what I’d told my freshmen about the poet’s drinking and fighting, his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, the accusations of forg
ery. “And at times,” I told the class, “he even seems to have been willing to claim other poets’ work as his own.” Sitting on the edge of my desk, I prepared myself for some juicy literary gossip.

  “Poe was the sole support of his young wife Virginia and her mother, his aunt Maria Poe Clemm, and he was desperate for money. When the prestigious Boston Lyceum invited him—and paid him—to compose an original poem to read to a large Boston audience, he accepted immediately, but then suffered a serious bout of writer’s block. The rumor at the time was that Poe asked Fanny Osgood—a popular poet with whom he’d carried on a very public flirtation—to write a poem he could read as his own. I’ve actually seen the manuscript she produced. It’s in the archives of the Boston Public Library.” My students were rapt. I continued, warming to the tale.

  “But for some reason, when push came to shove, Poe didn’t read Osgood’s poem in Boston. Instead, he showed up soused, read one of his own poems, then boasted at a reception following the performance that it wasn’t really a new work at all, but something he’d written before he was twelve. He later claimed his choice of that juvenile poem had been a hoax to ‘quiz’ the stodgy Boston audience, but it seems clear he’d hit a dry spell after the publication of ‘The Raven’ made him famous early in 1845, and really couldn’t come up with anything new. This performance, of course, made him extremely unpopular in Boston. Poor Poe,” I concluded, “wherever he went, scandal dogged his steps like a dark demonic twin.”

  That night I had a difficult time getting to sleep. Sometime around midnight I gave up thrashing around, and turned to my latest time-wasting diversion: the Internet. I collected a few e-mail messages, read through the accumulated Emily Dickinson list messages, then began surfing the net. Having Edgar Allan Poe on my mind, I idly typed his name into the search box. When thousands of matches surfaced, I scrolled bemused through the various topics. Then I came across a website called Raven, and clicked on the link. There in my dark study, at midnight, alone in my little house miles from civilization, I was practically knocked out of my chair by a portentous burst of organ chords and the black flapping wings of an ominous bird zooming toward me at a zillion miles an hour from somewhere deep within my monitor. A sonorous voice intoned the familiar word: “Nevermore …” Edgar Allan Poe had come to cyberspace.

  18.

  “All day, like some sweet bird, content to sing

  In its small cage, she moveth to and fro—”

  —ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH

  JANE BIRDWORT, IN PINK AS USUAL, looked nothing like a grieving widow on Tuesday morning as I tried hard not to gape at her across the conference table. Had the police spoken to her yet, I wondered, about her long-ago marriage to Elliot? If they had, she showed no particular signs of anxiety, spreading a hand of solitaire in front of her, then slapping cards on the appropriate piles as she waited for the FroshHum exam-preparation meeting to begin. I sighed in relief: My uncovering of her marriage to Elliot didn’t seem to have caused Jane any problems. One more worry off my mind.

  Miles Jewell had scheduled the meeting for ten. By 10:12 the fifteen professors who taught this collaborative course were seated around the gleaming mahogany table in the English Department conference room just off the main department office. We were attempting—with difficulty—to thrash out a common final exam that would satisfy everyone. All Enfield students began their college years studying the same literary texts, and we paid lip-service to the myth that all FroshHum professors taught exactly the same poems and stories in exactly the same way. In actuality, we each had taught the texts according to our individual literary and political interests. This made planning the final exam contentious. If the alphabet had been an assigned FroshHum text, we’d have disagreed over whether p really did come before q. Or, to put it in the current academic lingo, if alphabetic order was nothing less than the social construct of a patriarchal hegemony determined to maintain sole dominance over the medium of written expression.

  An atmosphere of unease—even distrust—had hung over the department in the eleven days since Elliot’s murder. Not only had our colleague’s brutal death broken the routine of academic life—piling extra work on everyone in the department as we took over his courses, his advisees, his thesis students—but a certain moral anxiety now pervaded all our interactions. Was there among us someone who had no respect for that essential human contract, Live and Let Live? Would the killer ever be identified and the violation of that crucial contract be redressed? And could we live with the horrific knowledge of man’s inhumanity to man when it was no longer a mere abstraction or poetic metaphor to be tossed around in the classroom, but rather an all-too-present reality in our daily lives? Among the hypereducated human beings gathered around this table, had Elliot Corbin’s death elicited any higher sympathy for our fellows, any heightened empathy or compassion? Not so far as I could see. The exam-preparation meeting was proceeding as all our meetings did: long stretches of mind-numbing litcrit assertion, followed by short spurts of red-faced rage.

  “Claptrap!” Miles Jewell exploded in response to Ned Hilton’s insistence that our collaborative FroshHum exam question on T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” should focus on questions of Eurocentric cultural imperialism. “Any idiot can see that the poem is about the loss of heroism in the modern world!” As Miles slammed his hand on the table, Amber Nichols glanced up briefly from the design of interlocking daggers she was penciling on the yellow lined pad in front of her. Her customary smile grew even more enigmatic as she gazed around, slit-eyed, at her colleagues.

  Struck by the knowing superiority in Amber’s smile, I, too, surveyed my associates, covertly attempting to assess just exactly what this adjunct professor saw in the oak-wainscoted room that caused her so much secret amusement. Sitting directly opposite me in the gloomy light that sifted through the wooden slats of ancient venetian blinds was Miles, our eternal department chairman, his normally rosy complexion watermelon-hued in indignation. Three fiercely sharpened yellow pencils lay catty-corner across his unmarked white Enfield memo pad. Under Ned Hilton’s thinning, dead-grass-colored hair, his strained features had taken on the flat white of a discarded computer printout. With infinite attention he bent and rebent a large paper clasp until its twin trapezoids became a single lethal-looking needle of wire.

  Harriet Person, with her white-streaked hair and jetblack eyes, wore a military-looking navy pantsuit with a white silk tee. “Pru. Frock,” Harriet said, enunciating each syllable separately. “The poem is best read in terms of the tyranny of female body image.” Size-ten knitting needles clicked ominously as she purled a new row of scarlet worsted.

  Jane Birdwort threw her a look of disgust. “You’re so wrong, Harriet. Eliot was no feminist. ‘Prufrock’ is about

  The Poet and his plight in a world devoid of passion.…” Jane dipped swiftly into her large brocaded bag, then applied a thin steel file ruthlessly to the broken nail of her right forefinger.

  The wrangling over the “Prufrock” question was winding down without me getting my licks in. “I’ve always liked to talk about the use of metaphor in ‘Prufrock,’ ” I said, striking right to the heart of the matter. “The kids just love the stuff about being skewered to the wall.” Why couldn’t I stop thinking about sharp objects?

  When I opened the door that leads from the conference room directly into the main office after the meeting, the first thing I saw was Monica, sitting ramrod-straight and pale-visaged behind her desk. She seemed to be staring through me at someone partially obscured by my presence. I glanced over my shoulder. Except for the inoffensive Jane Birdwort, there was no one immediately behind me. I turned back to Monica, puzzled by her uncharacteristic edginess. Then I saw the police officers and took a deep, involuntary breath.

  As Jane entered the main office behind me, Schultz nodded abruptly to Piotrowski. The lieutenant stepped forward smoothly and took Jane by the arm. “Ms. Birdwort,” he said, in a flat, controlled voice, “would you come with u
s, please? We’d like to ask you a few questions down at headquarters.”

  “Questions? About what?” Her round cheeks were very pink.

  “About the death of Elliot Corbin.” It had been a long time since I realized just how intimidating a figure the lieutenant could be, six foot three, an eighth of a ton, a face sculpted of New Hampshire granite.

  “Me? But I—” Then Jane abruptly went bone-white and ran out of words. Behind us, Harriet Person gasped, and Amber drew in a long whistling breath. I turned quickly to Piotrowski, but my knee-jerk objection died on my lips—this stone-faced individual didn’t seem to be the compassionate man I thought I knew. In fact, as far as the lieutenant was concerned, I wasn’t in the room; his attention was totally fixed on Jane.

  Miles Jewell bulldozed his way through the professors clustered by the conference room door and exclaimed, “What the hell is going on here?” Given his imperious expression, I half expected him to sputter, unhand that woman!

  At his words, Sergeant Schultz, the good cop here, turned to our outraged chairman. “We understand, Professor Jewell, that this must be unpleasant for you. But we have a number of questions we need to ask Ms. Birdwort.” Based on a faded thirty-year-old photograph of a hippie wedding? I opened my mouth to protest, but Schultz shot me a hard-eyed stare, the kind of hard-eyed stare that says quite emphatically: I know exactly what you’re going to say, Professor, but if you say it now you will immediately find yourself up to your eyeballs in duck excrement. I closed my mouth. Schultz had the law on her side.