by Kluge, P. F.
“My name is Mark May,” he began. “and this is Warren Niles. Dr. Niles is the president and I am a professor at the college where Amy lived...and died.” Pause, rest. “Okay, she wasn’t a great student. C plus, B minus tops.” Heads turned. What goes on here? Isn’t it enough, she got shot on your picture-pretty country club campus? On your watch, Mr. Asshole President, on your own damned lawn? I was about to intervene. This was madness.
“I’ll go further,” Mark said. “It’s as though the mistakes she made were what brought us together, something we shared, so she kept making them. A lot became one word: alot. Conscious and conscience were interchangeable. And as for punctuation, well, let’s just say that in Amy’s world, apostrophes were unidentified flying objects. You never knew where they came from or where they’d land. I’m almost done and if I linger, it’s because these are fond memories. I can’t count the times I showed her why hopefully was almost always misplaced at the start of a sentence. I diagrammed sentences in front of her, again and again. Still, Amy said hopefully the way Hawaiians say aloha, meaning, hello, meaning goodbye...” Now he stopped and faltered. He choked up. Had he planned it that way? Was he that good? Make them laugh, make them cry? He was doing both at once. Doing it to himself, besides.
“She was the sort of student who made me question whether it was worth my time, being a college professor,” he continued. “Whether the things that mattered to me—books, ideas, ironies, paradoxes, the rest of it—would matter to her. Not a great student. I read her last paper last night. I had to laugh. I hope for Amy’s sake there are spellcheckers in heaven. But a great, great kid. Whom I am going to miss forever. I don’t know if I changed her life. For sure, I didn’t save it. But she changed—and maybe she saved mine. I’m a writer and most of the stuff I write is poetry, which means I have to do something else to earn a living. So I teach. This isn’t only me, this is every poet in America who isn’t born to or married to money. It’s inevitable, but that doesn’t stop you from hating it. And yourself. When Amy showed up in my class, I was coming off a bad year, wondering whether a teacher had any business being a poet or a poet being a teacher. And Amy saved my life...”
He wasn’t so much delivering a eulogy as telling a story. And the story was working. He was around forty, still fit, a head full of curly black hair, a handsome face in which you could just discern the old man he was going to be, the long nose and bushy eyebrows and dimpled jaw that would make him an easy target for caricaturists, if he ever became famous.
“She liked my class,” he said. “She read my poems. Well, so she said. She dropped by to talk. She told me something ‘grabbed me’ or ‘passed me by.’ She winked and smiled and high-fived me on my good days. She rolled her eyes and made faces on my bad ones. She liked me, more than I liked myself. She thought I was worth knowing. She thought, before I did, that a teacher-poet, a poet-teacher, was a good thing to be. So she saved my life. And...somehow...lost her own. That’s the worst that can happen, to her, to you...to me. We can kid about our children, compare them to what we were, once. We can joke about our students, the funny mistakes they make—penmanship, grammar, spelling—going, going, gone—the whole world going to hell. But we cannot...I cannot bear...the loss of her...of...let me just say the name aloud...of Amy Plimpton.”
Another rest. Gathering himself for the finale, I supposed. No need for me to speak. I was grateful for that. Also resentful.
“And her life is over,” Mark said. “Abruptly. Brutally. That, as Amy herself would say, is ‘something I have a hard time wrapping my brain around.’ I’d like you to know that, in the end, Amy would have been just fine. She had spirit and humor. She was sly and, in some bottom line way that never shows up in transcripts, she was wise. I wasn’t worried about Amy, not one bit. I wish it had been me sitting on a bench that night. Me or...” Now—what nerve!—he gestured my way—“...or him. All I can say is that she was one of those students I expected I’d be hearing from in years ahead. I will miss her. And I won’t forget her. Thank you.”
Later that day, on the short plane ride back to Columbus, I complimented Mark on the performance he’d given in Manhattan. And I couldn’t resist asking him, as one professional speaker to another, whether what he’d said was true. Or, if he had not exactly lied, had he ‘pumped it up a little.’
“Christ, Warren, she died with a book of my poetry in her bag,” he said. “That’s a first, as far as I know.” He shook his head and glanced out the window, down at the hazy farmland checkerboard. Natural haze, we tell ourselves, wondering meanwhile if the world isn’t wrapping itself in a shroud as it spins through space.
“One of the things I like about a college our size is faculty can get to know students, outside of class,” I said. He didn’t reply. “Did you get to know her well, outside of class?”
“Sure,” he said. “She dropped by all the time.”
“How well...how close were you?” Now my intent was clear, even to me. These things happen. At worst, they involve sex and grades, quid pro quo. Sometimes they end a marriage, sometimes they end in marriage. One rule doesn’t fit all cases. But if it lands on my desk, I deal harshly, with a predisposition against the faculty member, the presumed adult. Inviting Mark May to confide in me—two gents chatting between funerals—I was angling for a confession that would enable me to reassert myself over him. When you discover quality in another person, it’s helpful to acquire an offsetting sense of what is bad; for every positive, a negative—a double entry bookkeeping that keeps accounts in balance.
“Mr. President, are you asking me if I fucked that poor girl whose funeral we just attended?” He took my embarrassed silence for assent. “If so, shame on you. And no.”
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “Sorry.”
“It was there for me if I wanted it,” he continued. “We talked about it, even after she knew it was a no go. She’s sitting in my office one afternoon. It was right after school started. Summer weather, still. Humid, hot. I say, ‘I’ve got to go home now and take a nap.’ ‘You take naps?’ she asks. ‘Every day,’ I say. ‘It’s why I became a professor, because there aren’t too many other jobs in the English-speaking world, allow you to take a nap every afternoon.’ ‘I love naps too!’ she exclaims. ‘They’re the best! I love my naps. That makes two of us.’ I arrange piles of papers on my desk, check e-mail while she waits for me at the door, stretching, yawning luxuriantly. ‘Hey, Professor May,’ she says. ‘In connection with your naps do you ever...get after it?’ ‘Not lately,’ I say. ‘Bummer,’ she responds as we walk across campus, cutting in back of your so-called cottage. Right then it seemed like the nicest thing in the world and no harm done, if she and I curled up together. I don’t know what you think, Warren, if you’ve got a presidential opinion on this...”
“Chances are, you’d have regretted it later.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, there are a lot of things I’ve done I regret. Some you know about. There are memories, make me wince. I wake up at night and say, what an asshole...” That word again: the killer’s name for me, in my hair like a horsefly buzzing around.
“But at the end of the day,” he repeated, “it’s the things I didn’t do I regret most.”
“Amy?”
“Top of the list.” We’re now on our slow descent to Columbus. “Mr. President? Warren? Do you have a list too? The things you didn’t do?”
The second funeral was altogether different, a ceremony in a charmless, metal-roofed rectangle of a church set in an unlandscaped field five miles from the farm where Jarrett Stark lived, until his parents consigned him to our care. At the Ethical Culture Society, Amy Plimpton’s mourners were familiar with ceremonies. Jarrett Stark’s death stunned a congregation of farmers and small-town shopkeepers. There was shock and anger in the air. They had doubts about colleges like ours and now those doubts were confirmed. To them, the liberal arts were a course in manners, not necessarily good manners. When May and I stepped into the church, heads turned. We
were not invited to say anything and, between the lines of other people’s remarks, their pointed references to Jarrett’s death away from home, I heard accusation. They sent us a student and we returned to them a corpse.
“Tell me about this one,” I said after the interment, as I pointed our rental car towards a reception to which Jarrett’s grim-faced father had summoned us.
“Jarrett? I’ll bet he was the town freak before he left. Long hair. A ring through his eyebrow. Dressed in black from head to toe. Not your 4-H club type.”
“A poet?”
“Poetic, anyway,” Mark replied. “A good kid, underneath it all. He liked to read and he liked to write. You know something? That... just that... made him special...”
With that, he put his face in his hands. Genuine emotion startles me. I have a hard time with it. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” he said. “I’ll miss him. He dropped by my office all the time...to talk about books...get recommendations from me...opinions...and he’d come back wild-eyed after reading what I told him to read—discovering things for the first time, lighting up. Everything he wrote was influenced by the latest book he’d read...but that’s okay. He was coming along. He was a work in progress...”
“Was he...talented? Jarrett?”
“It’s not the talent, Warren. There’s always talent around. The thing is, he wanted it so badly. To be a writer, to be known as a writer.” He took a deep breath, stared out the window, stayed quiet for a while. “But, yeah, he could write. He had talent. And...speaking of talent...”
“Yes?”
“And considering the sudden rapport between us...”
I nodded, even as I could feel myself contracting, like a fresh oyster squirted with lemon juice.
“Do you think my wife will ever be a college president?”
I can’t say. Three magic words. I could feel them coming. But, having seen Mark May take chances at the Plimpton funeral, I decided to return the favor.
“Not at our place,” I said. “It’s not about gender. Not about ability, really. It’s about the lack of a certain...gravitas.”
He nodded, as if that were what he’d expected, possibly hoped, to hear. If he’d pressed me, I’d have expanded on gravitas. Local gravitas. What you missed in Caroline Ives—what college missed—was commitment. Ours was a place that required a commitment that went beyond shrewdness. And Caroline was, at the end of the day, a mercenary.
“Will she be a president anywhere, then?”
“Oh, I suppose. Someplace will want her.”
“Shit.”
“Which answer did you not like? That she would not be president at our place? Or that she would be president someplace else?”
“Both.”
The Stark farm was surrounded by cars and trucks, shining in the afternoon sun. Picnic tablecloths stirred in the breeze and, as we parked, I glimpsed farm wives carrying covered dishes out of the house. We waited at the edge of the party, glancing around for someone to acknowledge us. Eventually, a boy came across the lawn, on someone’s orders.
“The other college fellow is over there,” he said, pointing to where some men were sitting in folding chairs on the shady side of the house.
“Was anybody else supposed to come?” Mark asked.
“Not that I know of,” I said. We wove around picnic tables, past a rock-bordered fish pond, to the men who were gathered at the edge of a horseshoe pit. They weren’t playing, but you could tell they wanted to.
“Hey, Mr. President,” someone said. It was Billy Hoover, the security officer we’d given Graves to use for errands. “Hi, Billy,” I responded. I started to introduce Professor May, but it turned out they’d met. We stood, silent and awkward, around the horseshoe pit. Jarrett’s father was there, red-eyed. I felt I was supposed to speak.
“I’d like you all to know,” I said, “that Jarrett was a special young man. We thought the world of him. Mark May here was just telling me about his talent. As a poet.” I signaled to Mark but he hesitated and missed the opening. Now, as the silence lengthened, I realized that my little elegy hadn’t worked at all. A total misfire. They weren’t out to produce poets.
“He marched to his own drummer, that’s for sure,” Billy Hoover said, breaking the silence. “I worked nights a lot and we used to shoot the shit at three in the morning, pardon my expression. Hey, Professor May, what’s the name of that character, always went to bed at dawn?”
“Dracula,” someone volunteered before Mark could speak. I admit, that was my guess too.
“No, not him. Played music.”
“Orpheus,” Mark said.
“That’s the guy. That was Jarrett. I went into town at three in the morning, he came along. The night watch, we called ourselves. Talked about everything under the sun. And the moon, too.”
“He died bravely,” I said. “He heard a shot. He saw a fellow student on a bench. He rushed to her aid...”
“I guess,” Billy Hoover agreed but I saw a flicker of doubt cross his face, and Mark’s as well. I had sounded a little too sure of myself. The official with the official story. What a relief when we were summoned to eat, to feed: corn on the cob, slabs of ham and chicken, macaroni and cheese casseroles, jello rings, salad that involved marshmallows and—it has the force of law in Ohio—leave room for pie. I foresaw correctly that I would be asked to take the first plate: that way everybody could see what I took and how much.
“At least it was over fast,” someone said as we neared the tables.
“I guess he never knew what hit him,” his father agreed.
“That’s the problem,” I heard Billy say to Mark. “Neither do we.”
Twenty students withdrew from campus—a damaging but not mortal loss—and some of these might return. Since tuition and fees are paid a semester ahead, October withdrawals entail no immediate loss of cash. We worry more that students may not return from Christmas vacation, but time, we tell ourselves, is on our side. It’s over, it isn’t over. It’s over. A maniac landed and killed and moved on. A terrible but transient event at one college, one autumn, a certain time and place. But what a difference a month makes! Except for oaks, the leaves are gone, the fields are vacant, the hills across the river stand out in sharp gray lines. You see further over the land, into the land. Maybe what happened here was one of those freak conjunctions of geography and climate, the sort of timing that churns up El Niño or brings locusts out of the ground…but it is over now, over because the weather’s changed. The place doesn’t look the same. Passionate crimes need heat, don’t you see? A killer likes cover. It’s over.
Over. Amazingly, college routines assert themselves, job searches in half a dozen departments. People still want to work here. A tenure denial going to court. People still want to stay. There’s a review of the college’s curriculum, an agony marathon we go through every now and then, replete with meetings, forums, consultations and this year, posters which show a group of students, one oriental, one black, two male, two female, above the headline: WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW? I sympathize with the uncaught student who scrawled WE NEED TO KNOW WHO KILLED THEM. But doesn’t our tenacious silliness and self-interest suggest that the college is returning to normal patterns? It’s over, I tell myself, it’s over. All day long, I say it to myself. But at night, it changes and the worst fears come to me. I fidget, I pace. Things occur to me. And, one unbearable night, I called on Averill Hayes.
“Warren,” Ave said, as soon as I stepped out of my car. “Welcome.” He was holding a drink. Never drunk but almost always sipping. “Come on in.” I followed him onto the porch, into his gazebo. Not many nights left for him to sit out here: it was nippy, flannel shirt weather. I glanced across the lawn, where a deer trail skirted the woods. Beyond, on the hill, I could see the lights of the college through the trees.
“Fog rolls in,” Ave said, handing me a gin and tonic, “and up there looks like a ship. You half expect to hear foghorns.”
“Listen, Ave,” I said, sk
ipping preliminaries. “I had an idea tonight that I can’t let go of. So I need to run it past you.”
“Okay.”
“Our Mr. Graves says these murders aren’t individual crimes. They are part of an attack on the college. Which of course gives him a license to review twenty years of God knows what. It’s like an autopsy on a patient who’s still alive.”
“He does get into it, I hear.”
“He loves it. He’s having the time of his life. Ask me who has benefited from these crimes, he tops the list...”
“You don’t mean to imply...”
There came an odd silence and all sorts of thoughts were in the air between us. Or perhaps just one thought. Could it be that Sherwood Graves was the killer, returning to avenge himself on the college that destroyed his father? Ave suggested it. Or said it was what I’d suggested. Anyway it was there, hanging in the air, untouchable.
“No,” I said. The idea was more than I could deal with. “It’s just that he’s made a mistake. He jumped from considering individual crimes to considering a crime against the college. He jumped that way...because that’s the way he wanted to jump. But he missed something in between. Another individual, another victim.”