Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT (A Harvest Test Preparation Book)

by Charles Harrington Elster

  Martext’s package contained a rare, early-nineteenth-century translation of the great Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes’s epic romance Don Quixote, with a card that read, “To Bart, whose iconoclastic genius revels in slaying windmills. May you always dream your impossible dreams and never wake up.”

  “I suppose I should follow my prestigious colleague’s high moral example and take that as a backhanded compliment,” Martext said with a grin, eyeing Bibb.

  “As you wish,” Bibb replied, “but I should think that the seventy-five-hundred-dollar price tag on the book makes the compliment more of an openhanded one.”

  Next came Carmen Torres, and when she saw her gift she could barely contain her delight. “It’s the Bristol edition of Lyrical Ballads,” she cried, proudly displaying the cover to the group. Printed in 1798, the book contained poems by the great English Romantics William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most notably Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Bibb, who was clearly relishing his self-appointed role of assessor, calmly apprised Torres that this new addition to her library was worth no less than fifteen thousand dollars.

  “Maybe I’ll use it as collateral on a loan for a snazzy foreign sports car,” Torres quipped.

  Finally it was Leo’s turn. Carefully he unwrapped the small package that Burton-Jones handed him. Inside was a paperbound volume entitled The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, so slender that it seemed more like a pamphlet than a book. The cover was stained, the binding was chipped, and not a few of the forty pages were foxed.

  Tucked inside the front cover was a sealed envelope with Leo’s name typed on it. Parting words from Prospero, he presumed. He decided to read the letter later, in private.

  Leo couldn’t help feeling disappointed that the other executors had received more valuable books than he had, for even Hargrave’s Bible, despite its defects, was an awesome literary artifact. Was it because they were all professors, colleagues of Prospero’s, and he was only a student?

  He wondered if perhaps the old man hadn’t had such a high opinion of him after all and had simply regarded him as a resourceful helper, nothing more. Try as he might, though, Leo couldn’t bring himself to accept that conclusion. Prospero had always treated him like a trusted friend, almost a confidant, and in turn he had always regarded the old man with the utmost respect. Then another possibility struck him. Could this gift, or something about it, be part of yet another one of Prospero’s infamous practical jokes, played out posthumously at the expense of an unsuspecting student?

  Seeing the ambivalent expression on Leo’s face, Torres leaned over and patted his shoulder. “You look worried. Is something wrong?”

  “No, it’s nothing,” Leo said. “I was just thinking about Professor Prospero, about how he gives—gave so much.”

  “May I have a look at your book, young man?” asked Bibb. Leo nodded and passed it across the table. Bibb examined the cover, thumbed gently through the pages with his pudgy fingers, and scrutinized the information printed on the title page. Then he handed the book back to Leo.

  “That text is extremely valuable, you know,” he said, stressing the word extremely. “From what I’ve read, there are only fourteen extant copies of it. It was published obscurely in Philadelphia, by William H. Graham, in 1843, and its original selling price was just twelve and a half cents. Today it is the rarest and most coveted of all Poeiana.”

  “Even in this condition?” Leo asked.

  “Even in that condition. Of course, if you have it professionally repaired—and I can recommend some fine artisans—it’ll be worth a pretty penny indeed. In 1990 a restored copy sold at auction for sixty thousand dollars. As is, it’s still probably worth at least half that sum.”

  “You’re kidding me!” Leo practically shouted. Beyond those three words, he was dumbstruck. What a fool he was! He had allowed his disappointment to deceive him into doubting Prospero, only to feel chastened when he learned that the old man had given him a gift worth more than all the others combined. Suddenly it hit him.

  “Of course!” he cried, and burst out laughing.

  Hargrave frowned. “What on earth is so funny?”

  “I just got the joke.”

  “Whose joke?” asked Torres.

  “Professor Prospero’s.”

  Martext smirked. “How can a dead man play a joke on you?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past the old codger,” Bibb mumbled.

  “It was as if he could read my mind somehow,” Leo explained. “I think he wanted to teach me a lesson.”

  “And what lesson is that?” Torres asked.

  Leo studied his book for a moment and then looked up at Reggie, who was smiling from ear to ear. “It’s a familiar adage: Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

  Hargrave stood up, looking at his watch. “Well, I’m afraid our time is up. At our next meeting we need to discuss preparations for the Prospero Library dedication ceremony and form subcommittees to handle the various aspects of managing the collection. I will also update you on any developments concerning the imminent lawsuit. Any objections to meeting next Saturday at noon over lunch at the faculty club?”

  Martext, Torres, and Leo voiced their assent and began rising from the table. Bibb was already scurrying toward the door.

  “Hear, hear!” he cried, clutching his briefcase and cane in one hand and his precious Beardsley in the other.

  Chapter 10

  Opportunity Knocks

  Caitlin stood outside the South Quad entrance to the Student Center, a nondescript sandstone edifice that housed the college bookstore, post office, canteen, game room, coffee shop, and various other recreational facilities. To her right, a steep flight of concrete steps led to a basement. At the bottom of the steps was a heavy steel door on which the words Holyfield Herald were stenciled in faded black letters.

  Caitlin had expected something more distinctive, or at least more conspicuous. After all, the Herald was one of the few college newspapers that still operated on a daily basis, and the opportunity to work for a quasi-professional paper was one of the factors that had led her to apply to Holyfield College.

  Somewhat disappointed, she descended the steps and tried the door. Locked. She looked for a buzzer, but there was none, so she rapped on the gray metal and waited. No answer. She checked her watch: 10:50 A.M. Ten minutes to kill.

  Caitlin sat down on the steps and opened her portfolio, wishing she had a magazine or something to keep her from worrying about the interview. As she looked at the articles she had written for the Spotlight, her high school’s biweekly newspaper, she wondered if she had picked the best ones to show Bill.

  There were three profiles of influential professionals who had visited her school—a novelist, a Broadway director, and a reporter for The New York Times. These were followed by an editorial and two reviews of theatrical productions that she felt were articulate examples of her ability to write a formal, objective critique.

  Then there was a report from her early days with the paper on a stunning victory over Peter Cooper High in boys’ basketball. The writing was vivid, though maybe a bit verbose. At least it would help show her diversity, she thought.

  Finally there was the feature on the challenges that Tim Owens, one of her classmates, had faced trying to set up a soup kitchen for the homeless. Caitlin had been quite taken by Tim’s altruistic zeal, and they had gone out together for most of her junior year. She knew the tone was somewhat biased and preachy, but overall it was a poignant story and she was proud of it.

  A cheery voice called out from the top of the stairs. “Good morning! Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  Caitlin turned and saw an ebullient Bill Berkowitz descending the stairs with an unwieldy set of keys in his hand. With each step he took, the keys jangled in accompaniment to the bouncy movements of his lanky frame. Caitlin glanced at the sky. It was overcast and the air felt cool—much cooler than September in New York. The day didn’t look
so beautiful to her, but Bill’s sunny manner was reassuring.

  “It should be all right,” she replied cautiously, putting her articles away and standing up to give him room to get by.

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” Bill said, fumbling for the key to the door.

  “No, not at all. I just got here.”

  “Caitlin Ciccone, right?”

  “Right.”

  Bill unlocked the door, gripped the knob, and pulled hard. The metal grated harshly against the concrete.

  “Well, come on in, Caitlin,” Bill said over his shoulder.

  He reached to his left and switched on a row of fluorescent ceiling lights that ran down the center of the room.

  “Shall I give you the twenty-five-cent tour?”

  “Sounds great.”

  “This is the newsroom. Mornings are generally pretty light in here—a few phone calls, some copyediting, maybe a meeting or two. After lunch it gets busy, and most of the work gets done from the late afternoon, after classes, to midnight—or later.”

  Caitlin looked around the room. Stacks of back issues of the Herald were piled against the far wall between several file cabinets and a makeshift bookcase with sagging shelves. In the middle of the room, two long worktables sat end to end. On their surfaces lay the paraphernalia of graphic design: pencils, markers, scissors, tape, razor blades, rulers, protractors, erasers, glue, correction fluid, and bits and pieces of galley proofs and newsprint. An empty pizza box and four abandoned cans of soda indicated a hasty repast at a late hour.

  Two workstations with computers and laser printers occupied the left side of the room. On the right side sat two metal desks, one practically bare except for a typewriter and a telephone, the other burdened with a computer, telephone, fax machine, vertical file, and several piles of paper. The wastebasket beside the desk was overflowing.

  “The messy desk’s mine, of course,” Bill said with a grin. “The assistant editors and reporters share the other one.”

  Caitlin looked around at the walls. Nearly every inch of space was taped, glued, and tacked with clippings, photos, cartoons, and headlines. She scrutinized one particularly dense section. Many of the items were old and yellowed, with new ones simply pasted over them, giving the effect of a burgeoning mural or collage.

  “It’s a kind of tradition,” Bill said, seeing Caitlin pause to study the wall. “When you find something interesting in a newspaper or magazine, you’re welcome to tack it up. That way we’re surrounded by examples to emulate.”

  “How do people know where to look?” Caitlin asked, wondering how one would find anything in such a chaotic array. “Is there any system to it?”

  Bill laughed. “No, it’s totally random. But you’d be surprised. After a while you absorb a lot of it.”

  “What happens when you run out of room?”

  “That’s happened only once since I’ve been working here, when I was a freshman. There wasn’t an inch of wall left, and the clippings were seven or eight layers deep. Francine Kendall, the editor that year, was sick of it. She said it was like some kind of noxious fuzz growing on the inside of a cave. Anyway, one night we took it all down. There’d been stuff up there for ten years.”

  Bill led Caitlin to the end of the newsroom, where a set of swinging doors opened into the print shop. The Spotlight had always sent its copy out, so the sight of printing equipment and the pungent smell of ink and solvents were new to Caitlin.

  The two offset machines in the middle of the room could crank out the eight tabloid pages of the Herald in a couple of hours, Bill explained. To the right was a binding machine that could collate, staple, fold, and trim eighteen hundred items an hour. Metal shelving units for inks, papers, tools, and whatnots lined the walls. A large, pneumatic guillotine for cutting down stock and a bulky photocopier dominated the back of the shop. And to their left, crowded in the corner, stood two archaic letterpress machines—a Washington and a Heidelberg, Bill noted.

  Caitlin marveled at these relics from a bygone era, with their ornate iron legs and feet and their heavy bolts, levers, and gears. “They’re beautiful,” she said.

  “Sure, they’re beautiful. They’re also in the way. I wish I could get them out of here, but they weigh a ton, literally.”

  “You don’t use them?”

  “No way. It takes forever to set type. Once in a while somebody comes down here and fools around with one—maybe an art major doing something creative or someone printing invitations to a poetry reading. Other than that, they just collect dust.”

  Bill led Caitlin back to the newsroom. He placed a folding chair beside his desk and then sat down in his own chair behind the desk. “Well, let’s get the show on the road,” he said. “Have a seat, Caitlin, and tell me why you want to be a writer.”

  Caitlin had anticipated the question, but as she sat down the smooth answer she had carefully prepared suddenly eluded her. She realized she would have to wing it.

  “I guess it’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” she began. “In ninth grade we read All the President’s Men in American history, and for a while Woodward and Bernstein were my heroes. I wanted to do something that would have a beneficial effect on society, so I decided I’d become an investigative reporter and expose lies and corruption. I’m still interested in journalism, but I also want to study other kinds of writing. I’d like to write poetry, plays, novels—stuff in which I express my insight and perception of things and not just the facts.” Caitlin paused. “I’m sorry. I guess that sounds kind of pretentious.”

  “No, not at all,” Bill said. “Your attitude is refreshing. Most people are afraid to admit what they’re serious about, or else they pretend they’re serious because they want to make a good impression. Do you write every day?”

  “I try to. I keep a journal.”

  “What kind of journalism experience do you have?”

  “I’ve written lots of reviews and features, and senior year I was editor of my school paper.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I have some clips here if you’d like to see them.”

  “You bet.”

  Caitlin reached into her portfolio and handed Bill the neatly bound set of photocopied articles. He leaned back in his chair and took his time perusing them, now and then raising his eyebrows or chuckling to himself.

  Caitlin couldn’t help interpreting every change in his expression as a sign of disapproval. She tried to look at the walls instead, preparing herself for the worst.

  “Well, I tell you what,” Bill said finally. “Would you like to start right away?”

  “What? I mean, yes, of course. I’d love to.”

  “Okay. There’s a panel discussion on Shakespeare at KHCR, the college radio station, today at two o’clock. It’s part of the Elizabethan Festival. The station’s in the Calhoun Humanities Complex. You know where that is?”

  “If it’s on the campus map, I can find it. No problem.”

  “Good. Then check it out and give me five hundred words. We’ll run the article in tomorrow’s edition.”

  “Are you sure?” Caitlin asked, immediately aware of the stupidity of the question.

  Bill laughed. “Of course I’m sure, Caitlin. I’m the editor, remember? Now, do you have a computer?”

  “I don’t, but my roommate does. I could probably—”

  “Don’t bug your roommate. You hardly know each other yet. Just get the story down—either typewritten or in longhand, it doesn’t matter—and I’ll show you how to use our software, okay?”

  “Okay, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Don’t I need an angle?”

  “I don’t usually tell my writers how to approach a story. Just follow the fundamental rules—who, what, where, when, why—and then report what seems noteworthy to you. If it interests you, it’ll be interesting to your reader. But make sure you get everyone’s name and title, and I’ll want some quotations.” Bill paused and waved a bony hand at Caitlin.
“Ah, forget it. I don’t have to tell you how to write a story. It’s obvious from your clips you know what you’re doing. I’ll see you back here after dinner. Around seven, okay?”

  “Okay,” Caitlin said, rising and extending her hand. “This is great. Thank you so much. You don’t know how grateful I am.”

  “No, thank you, Caitlin,” Bill insisted. “I’m not going to write the article. You are.”

  They shook hands and Bill walked her to the door. Halfway up the steps she turned and looked back at him.

  “By the way,” she said, “I saw your piece on the Prospero Library in yesterday’s paper.”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought it was really good. I was thinking maybe I could do a follow-up on it.”

  “Did you have something specific in mind?

  “Yes. At dinner last night I met Carmen Torres, who said you were one of her best students.”

  “That’s nice, but hardly worthy of an article.”

  Caitlin laughed. “I also met a guy last night, a freshman, Phil McKnight.”

  “I know Phil.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, my roommate is his freshman counselor.”

  “Leo Kabnis, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, Phil told me that Leo used to work for Professor Prospero, and Professor Torres told me she’d be willing to let me interview her. She also said she’d introduce me to the other executors of the collection. From what you wrote and what Phil told me I gathered that Prospero must have been a really interesting man. I thought I could write a profile of him—sort of a man-behind-the-books piece—that might tie in with the dedication of the new library. How does that sound?”

  “Interesting,” Bill said. “But let’s talk about it after you do this piece, okay?”

  “Okay,” Caitlin said. “Thanks again,” she added, smiling.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Bill watched Caitlin climb the rest of the stairs and disappear from sight. Something tells me that young woman’s going to be one heck of a good reporter, he thought.