The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  “If Monica had anything to do with making this punch,” Jane muttered as I handed her the second glass, “it could have something a wee bit more exotic in it than the usual Christmas rum.” She raised a snarky brow. “Like maybe eye of newt, or—if newts are scarce on the ground around Enfield, then at least some powdered toe of frog.”

  I carefully set my unsipped-from punch glass on the acrylic end table next to the ice-blue chair and wiped my hands on the mistletoe-patterned paper cocktail napkin: Wasn’t mistletoe some kind of ancient druidic poison? “Tell me, Jane, am I the only one around here who wasn’t aware of Monica’s Wiccan affiliation?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. But my first day on campus I noticed that pentagram she wears around her neck, and I knew right away what it was. I used to be into that stuff.” She shuddered. “But that was a long time ago—in a different life.”

  I thought I knew which life, and decided on impulse to push her a bit. “Really? Is that where the red shoes come from?”

  “The red shoes?” She glanced hastily down at her feet, as if maybe bloody sandals had somehow magically replaced her staid pink pumps.

  “I’ve been reading your poems.”

  “Oh, those red shoes.” She looked relieved.

  “I just wondered about them, that’s all. How does the poem go? Here I come again, with my stiletto heels, my third breast, the snake that coils on my own split tongue.… Sounds pretty witchy to me.” I softened my words with a smile.

  “Well, yes, of course,” Jane said impatiently, as if to a particularly dense freshman, “that’s the whole point of the poem, isn’t it? The incongruous—even violent—elements of every woman’s life.” Every woman? I immediately flashed on my early marriage to Amanda’s father, then pushed the memory away. What had Jane’s experience with Elliot been like?

  “Umm. Speaking of poetry, Jane. I just found something extremely interesting. Remember the poet Emmeline Foster and the stuff in that box we opened?…”

  But to my disappointment, nothing in Jane’s expression suggested anything more than polite interest in my find.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about this job interview.” And indeed, Amber was so animated that for a moment I found myself almost able to tolerate her. We were seated in the blue chairs by the window, and I was on my second cherry meringue. “These’re good,” Amber said, picking up her own meringue. “Monica made them.”

  I set the unfinished confection next to the unsipped-from punch glass. The half-chewed sweetness in my mouth had turned to powdered newt eye. I swallowed hastily. “Yeah. Well, it’s really great that you got an interview—with the job market the way it is.”

  “Being an English professor is the most important thing in the world to me.” The punch was definitely spiked with something: Amber was downright chatty. “What more noble career could a learned person want?”

  “Umm.” I could think of at least a dozen.

  “You know,” she leaned toward me confidingly, “I grew up in a house with no books.”

  “Umm.” I could relate to that.

  She took a gulp from her glass. “They called me a loser—I read all the time. I’d have to go sit on the toilet with my book, because the bathroom was the only place in the house where you couldn’t hear the TV blaring.”

  “Umm.” I’d had a rough childhood, too, but hadn’t drunk nearly enough tonight to begin confiding my youthful deprivations to Amber.

  “As soon as I could, I got out of there, and I’ve paid my own way ever since—through college and grad school. It’s been damn hard.” She narrowed her eyes at me, assessingly. “But then, of course, you wouldn’t understand about that.”

  “Umm.” Just exactly what was in that punch?

  “But I’ll show them who the losers are.” Amber yanked down the sleeves of her fawn-colored pullover. “I’ll show them all.” Something in the ferocity of her expression diffused any empathy I might otherwise have felt.

  “So, Amber,” I said, more than ready to change the subject. “You know that box we opened? The one with the Emmeline Foster papers?…”

  But her condescending manner had returned, and Amber showed little interest in the journal’s recovery.

  I snagged Harriet as the party was beginning to break up. “About the Palaver Chair,” I asked, for lack of any other credible topic for an opener, “I wondered—have you heard how the search is going?”

  Harriet frowned. In spite of her bright red lips, there was no holiday spirit in her expression. “Miles refuses to talk about the search until after MLA. And Monica keeps those damned applications locked up tighter than Walpole Correctional Facility. I don’t know a thing.”

  I walked down the stairs with her to the first floor. As she glanced at the closed door of the department office, I saw something flicker in Harriet’s eyes—something like a comic-strip lightbulb. Both Monica and Miles were busy upstairs, and—she turned the brass knob—the office door was unlocked. She stood there with her hand nonchalantly on the knob while I told her about the recovered Emmeline Foster copybook. She, too, didn’t seem the least bit interested.

  “Monica,” I said, as I helped the secretary pick up crumbled napkins and sticky punch glasses, “do you remember that box? The one with all the old papers and books?” And I informed her of the reappearance of the final journal copybook.

  Monica slam-dunked a fistful of soggy cocktail napkins into a tall trash basket the custodian had dragged into the lounge. “Well, whoop-di-doo,” she said.

  24.

  “He looked within his very soul,

  Its hidden chamber saw,

  Inscribed with records dark and deep

  Of many a broken law.”

  —ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH

  MOM?” I WALKED INTO A house made cheerful by Amanda’s presence, a fire flickering in the stove, Willie Nelson singing “Silent Night,” the cinnamon smell of snickerdoodles baking in the oven, and a small, multicolored mountain of brightly wrapped Christmas gifts heaped on the coffee table. “Mom, I’m a little nervous,” my daughter said. “Have you been getting weird calls lately? The phone rang three times in the last hour, but when I answered, the caller always hung up.”

  “Probably a student.” I dropped my briefcase on the floor, shrugged out of my coat and hung it on the rack by the door. “Grades are due Friday, and the barbarians have been pounding on the gates to find out how they did.”

  She laughed. “Sometimes you talk about students as if they were some kind of hostile aliens.”

  “Toward the end of the semester it begins to feel that way. Oh, Professor, I know you assigned the paper six weeks ago, but I re-e-e-ally need an extension. Oh, Professor, I know the exam was only this morning, but have you got it graded yet? Oh, Professor—”

  She punched me lightly on the arm. “Don’t forget I’m one of those alien creatures.”

  I grabbed her in an affectionate headlock. “Yeah, but you, you’re perfect. You’re my kid.”

  The next morning I graded papers and exams in my office, and left the door ajar on the off-chance that someone might want to chat with me about Emmeline Foster’s journal. The deadline for submitting grades wasn’t until the next day at five P.M., but I was determined to get my grades in to the Registrar today. Christmas was just a week away and I hadn’t even begun to think about it yet, let alone done any actual, down-and-dirty shopping. The weather was ominous, murky and cold, but not cold enough to snow. Most students had already departed for the holidays, and Dickinson Hall was hushed. My phone rang only once, and that was a hang-up. I sipped cold coffee from the Bread and Roses environmentally-sensitive recycled-paper cup and checked my bluebook piles: The stack I’d already graded was beginning to gain on the yet-to-be-looked-at stack. Good. Then I heard a rustling noise at my partially open door, and something came slithering across the floor. I peered at the object from my vantage point at the desk: another paper. Must be from one of the students to whom I’d given an extensi
on. But why hadn’t the kid simply knocked on the door and come in with the paper? Odd. But, then, everyone was a little bit squirrelly this time of semester.

  Squirrelly: That was a word I’d picked up from Lieutenant Piotrowski. Hanging around with cops tends to add some kick to the academic’s vocabulary.

  I let the paper lie where it had slid to a halt—I’d retrieve the essay when I went out for lunch.

  At 12:09, when I rose from my desk and stretched, only five papers remained to be graded—two hours’ work. Then: final grade compilation. Then: dropping the grade sheets off at the Registrar. Then … freedom. I felt pretty smug: For once, I’d get my grades in early. I slipped into my jacket and scooped up the paper from the floor: Make that six papers remaining to be graded. Tugging at the industrial-strength zipper on my puffy new storm jacket, I glanced down at the paper in my hand. Across the top of the typed first page was scrawled in black ink: Michael Vitale. Final Exam, Freshman Humanities. PLEASE ACCEPT IT, PROFESSOR PELLETIER. PLEASE!!!

  I had to clutch at the essay to keep from dropping it: Mike Vitale! Mike had been outside my office door? If I’d gotten up right away to retrieve the paper, I might have been able to waylay him in the hall! I yanked the door open, as if I expected Mike to be lurking there still. No one was in the hall but Monica and Amber. The secretary was just emerging from the main office with a file folder in her hand, and the adjunct professor stood at the photocopier with a stack of books, their colorful spines neatly aligned. I shut the door, unzipped my jacket, lowered myself into the green chair, and stared at the paper. Mike Vitale’s final exam! I grabbed the Enfield College directory from the shelf behind my desk; if Mike was back on campus, maybe I could catch him in his room. The phone rang fifteen times in the empty dorm before I hung up and went back to my chair.

  Turning back to the essay’s scrawled-over first page, I read: My father died this month.

  Oh, Mike, I thought. The poor kid! He’d lost his father. That’s why he’d been so upset when he visited my office that last time. But why hadn’t he told me? And why hadn’t he informed the Dean of Students’ Office? I shook my head, and lowered my gaze back to the paper.

  His name was Elliot Corbin …

  “Whaaa!” It came out as a squeak. My head shot up. Elliot Corbin was Mike’s father? Oh, my God! I read on at warp speed.

  … and I have no memory of him. I grew up with my mother and stepfather and four younger siblings. It was okay, I guess. It’s just that people always did a double take; I don’t look like anyone else in my family.

  My mother was Elliot Corbin’s student at City College. He got her pregnant when she was eighteen—my age! I was born five months after their wedding. I haven’t seen him since I was two years old—except from a distance since I’ve been on campus, but he’s the reason I’m here at Enfield. As the child of a faculty member, I’m eligible for a tuition waiver. My father traded that waiver for all the child support the cheapskate never sent my mother anyhow. He was a jerk. I hated him. I shouldn’t even be thinking about him. But since his horrible death—I can’t help it. I never knew my father, but suddenly I’m obsessed with him. I can’t study; I can’t write; I can’t even take exams. (This last phrase was underlined twice, once on the computer, once in black ink.) I think I’m going out of my mind. Elliot Corbin’s face is in my head from the minute I wake up till the minute my brain finally clicks off at night. I can’t forget it: His face is my face. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m becoming Elliot Corbin! The personal preface ended there with an emphatic series of exclamation points. Following was an essay on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

  Reaching over to the shelf again, I pulled out the freshman “face book,” found Mike’s picture, and studied his image on the page. Elliot’s cutting-edge, intellectualmale beard had obscured the resemblance, but with Mike’s crisp curls pulled back in a ponytail, his sharply angled jawline, and close-set ears, he looked so much like Elliot, I was amazed I hadn’t pinpointed the likeness immediately. Then I flashed on a memory of my student standing by my classroom desk with an essay draft in his hand, imploring me to go over it then and there because he didn’t want to come to Dickinson Hall. So that’s why Mike wouldn’t consult with me in my office: He was terrified of bumping into his estranged father!

  Earlene wasn’t in, and wouldn’t be back until morning, the perky work-study student who answered her phone informed me. Did I wish to speak to Dean Johnson’s Administrative Assistant? No, I didn’t. I wished to speak to Dean Johnson. Now. I called Earlene at home and left a message on the machine. Then I dialed Mike’s dorm number again. No answer. I sat there with my hand on the phone, letting my distracted mind float over the myriad possibilities. What if?… His face is my face.… What if?… Sometimes I’m afraid I’m becoming Elliot Corbin.… Here I began to think like a literary critic: What was it I always taught my students about Gothic literary conventions when we studied Poe’s tales? The Doppelganger—that was it! The eerie mythic creature who assumed the shape and likeness of his doomed victim. His face is my face.… What if?… And the convention of the decrepit Gothic mansion, fated to destroy and be destroyed. What if?… I stared at the silent phone for hours and hours—maybe two minutes in all. Then I picked up the college directory and riffled slowly through its pages till I found Elliot Corbin’s home phone number. Pelletier, you have flipped for sure, I admonished myself. Calling a dead man on the telephone! The phone rang and rang in Elliot’s abandoned house. And then, on the twentieth ring, Mike Vitale answered.

  • • •

  Mike peered around the back door of his father’s house as I entered—almost as if he feared he was under some kind of surveillance. Then he pushed the door shut, and it closed with a resounding slam. He winced. “It does that all the time,” he said.

  In the days since I’d last seen him, Mike had gotten perceptibly thinner, and—obviously attempting to emulate Elliot’s trendy beard—he’d grown a scraggly goatee that barely extended beyond the cleft that defined his chin. A haphazard tower of beer cans on the kitchen counter probably accounted for his bloodshot eyes and pale, shaky appearance.

  I stamped my feet on the green-and-yellow daisy-print mat inside the kitchen door. My boots had accumulated a thick coating of muddy slush during the trek from the ramshackle wooden garage behind the house where Mike had insisted I hide my car. “Mike, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Did you bring sandwiches?” If he wasn’t such a well-brought-up kid, Mike would have snatched the plastic deli bag from my hand. When I’d informed him on the phone that I was coming right over, his only words were, “Bring something to eat—I’m starving.”

  I handed my student the bulging bag, and he ripped open the paper wrapping on the ham-and-cheese closest to the top. I remembered from Amanda just how much teenagers eat: I’d picked up four sandwiches and a six-pack of Coke.

  Wholly involved in scarfing down the sandwich, Mike didn’t immediately answer my question. I sat with him at the kitchen table and unwrapped my turkey on rye. The caraway-studded bread was so dry it curled at the edges, but the smoked turkey was edible. I tore the meat into long strips, picked up a strip with my fingers, and looked around me. Except for the accumulation of beer cans, nothing had changed in Elliot Corbin’s kitchen since I’d been there with the police two weeks earlier. The appliances were still avocado green, the light fixture was still brass and frosted glass, the cluttered, cat-shaped bulletin board still guarded the phone, the light from the windows over the sink was as storm-bleak as ever.

  Maybe a skilled psychotherapist could have told me what Mike was doing here, soused, in the home of the man who had fathered, then abandoned, him, but Mike himself didn’t seem to have a clue.

  As he finished the first sandwich, he gestured around at the outdated room. “This is my legacy.”

  “Really?” I responded, giving the pile of beer cans a deliberate glare. “You plan on being wasted for the rest of your life?”

  He wi
nced. “I stopped drinking two days ago. I wanted to write the paper for you.”

  “Mike,” I said. “Oh, Mi-i-i-ke.” Thank God I’d never had an alcohol problem with Amanda.

  “Yeah, I know—it was dumb. We had a keg in the dorm, and it felt so good to stop thinking about … him … for a few hours, so I thought I’d just come here and keep on going. Then I really got polluted.” His expression grew reminiscent. “God, do I hate barfing.”

  Thanks for sharing, I thought. Aloud, I tsk-tsked like a Victorian maiden-aunt.

  “It’s over, all right? It’s over! I don’t know how I could have been so stupid! I spent one entire night hugging the porcelain babe.”

  It took half a minute, but I got the metaphor. “Yuck!”

  “Yeah. But—when I said that about my legacy, I didn’t mean the booze. I meant the house.”

  “This house belongs to you?”

  He shrugged. “I think so. My mother didn’t talk much about him … my father … Corbin, the jerk, I mean. But when she heard he was dead, she said I was the only one left. He didn’t have other children—or any living relatives. So—I figure it’s all mine, right? That’s why I came here.” He paused, then announced, mock-melodramatically, “to claim my heritage.” The pickle slice dangling from his thumb and forefinger vanished in one crunchy chomp. He retrieved the second ham-and-cheese and popped the top on another can of soda.

  I glanced around, taking in the dingy harvest-gold fiberglass curtains and the worn linoleum floor. Some heritage. “How’d you get in?”

  “The window locks suck.”

  “Mike, don’t you realize how worried people have been about you?”