The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  A decent sear? I guess I’ve got a lot to learn about the culinary arts.

  While I got ready for work, Shamega sat cross-legged on the hard oak floor by the glass-front bookcase where I keep the old books I scout out at flea markets, estate sales, and antiquarian bookstores. The two shelves of Northbury novels intrigued her, and by the time I’d loaded my bookbag with corrected exams and was set to go, she was deep into the second chapter of The Abandoned Innocent. “Can I borrow this?” she asked. “I won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t find out what happens to Esmeralda’s baby.”

  “Sure. I’d love to know what you think of it.” And on the winding trip back to school I told Shamega about my visit to Meadowbrook and about meeting Mrs. Northbury’s great-granddaughter.

  “Wow. And she’s going to let you look through Mrs. Northbury’s papers?”

  “If she finds any.”

  “That is so fascinating. I’d love to do something like that.”

  “Well, maybe you could help. If there’s a lot of material, I’ll need an assistant.”

  “Cool.”

  I dropped Shamega off at her dorm and parked in the Dickinson Hall lot. When I entered my office, I stopped dead. The room looked as if it had been hit by a windstorm—books pulled off the shelves, file cabinets yanked open, papers strewn around. Weirdest of all, a bright array of women’s underwear had been spread across the surface of my desk. Colorful cotton briefs, flimsy pastel bikinis, flowered silk jockey shorts. The first thing I did was call Shamega. Then, after talking to her, I picked up the phone again and called Security. I could merely tell them about the break-in at my office; as Shamega had pointed out, I didn’t have to mention her.

  Six

  The note from President Avery Mitchell was brief and polite, but it packed a wallop. Dear Professor Pelletier. The Collegewide Curriculum Revision Committee and the President’s Office invite you to attend a planning dinner at the President’s House on Thursday, April 18 at 7 P.M. Cocktails will be served at 6. It was signed by Avery in his aristocratic, flowing script.

  “Damn,” I said. “Damn, damn, damn, and damn!” At its contentious luncheon meeting, the Curriculum Committee must have decided to throw a few junior faculty members into the volatile mix of department chairs and college administrators. Lots of entrenched animosity there; committee members probably thought fresh blood would diffuse the explosive potential. Fresh blood: a good metaphor; I’d been chosen as a lamb to the wolves. Oh, damn. I envisioned the interminable meetings ahead of me, the pious arguments, the ostentatious demonstrations of obscure knowledge, the patronizing attitudes, the small, mean, erudite digs. I dropped my head into my hands and groaned. But I had no choice. An invitation from the President’s Office meant a command appearance. I noted the date in my appointment book—in ink—and marched myself over to Greg Samoorian’s office. The least my good buddy could have done was to have given me some advance warning.

  Greg’s door was open, and he sat at his desk deeply absorbed in the contents of the small paperback book in his hand. He was so intent on his reading that he didn’t hear my tentative rap on his door frame. As he concentrated on the text, he ran his fingers through his curly dark hair. I knew intellectual problems could be all-consuming for Greg, but I had never before seen him quite so intent. I knocked again, cleared my throat, said “Greg?” He jumped—I swear it—six inches. The wheeled chair skittered back from the desk.

  “Karen!” He was as disoriented as a man waking from an intense dream.

  “Jeez, Greg, you’re in another world. What are you reading?”

  “Oh—nothing.” He dropped the book, covered it with the latest issue of Social Text, rubbed his eyes. It took a few seconds for his gaze to focus. “Long time, no see, Karen.” He motioned me into the room. “What’s new?”

  “You tell me. Why have you been keeping the good news from me?” I was just pissed enough about being on the Curriculum Committee to feel good and sarcastic.

  “You know?” His eyes widened. “How?”

  “I just got the note—”

  “The note?”

  “From Avery.”

  “Avery? … What the hell? … How does he know? We weren’t going to tell anyone until—”

  “Greg, I’m talking about the Curriculum Committee. What are you talking about?”

  “Oh,” he said, “ohhhh. The Curriculum Committee. I forgot. I’ve been so distracted by …” He let his voice trail off. His eyes slid toward the book hidden under his copy of Social Text.

  What could it be? I wondered. Pornography? Had Greg taken to indulging depraved sexual fantasies during office hours? A vision of scantily clad young blondes and vicious German shepherds, each wearing wide, brass-studded leather collars, encroached upon my imagination. Something that had seeped into my mind by osmosis, no doubt—probably while I was waiting for my car to be lubed. “Greg, tell me!”

  His expression was sheepish as he retrieved the book and showed me its cover: no dogs or scantily clad blondes; just a little blue-diaper-clad baby and a little pink-diaper-clad baby. Framed in blue and pink ribbons, the title read: Names for Your New Baby.

  He swiveled from side to side in his desk chair, smirking like a Cheshire cat on weed.

  “Ohmigod, Greg. That’s wonderful news.” I bent and kissed his cheek. Then I paused. “At least I think it’s wonderful news.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Oh, yeah. Karen,” he asked, glancing down at his little book, “what do you think about Clarissa? I mean, as a name?”

  The living room of the President’s House was festive with spring flowers. A vase of bright red hothouse tulips sat on a leather-topped mahogany side table next to a cream brocade-covered wing chair. The long table behind the sea-green sofa held an enormous bouquet: daffodils, poppies, tulips, iris. A few stems of white narcissus in a crystal bud vase decorated the piano top. I was early, having arrived at six, as the invitation said. Of course, no one else was there. You think I’d know better by now, but in Lowell, where I grew up, when you were invited for six o’clock, that meant the macaroni-and-beef casserole would be on the table at six sharp, and if you wanted it hot, you’d better get there on time.

  I wandered around the room, touching beautiful things—the gleaming crystal of a Waterford vase, the textured silk of the upholstered sofa, the warm, smooth ivory of the piano keys. There was no mistress in this house; Liz, Avery’s wife, had run off six years earlier with a junior member of the Music Department. But someone had chosen the furnishings with care, and the room, in spite of its elegance, had a warm and lived-in feel.

  “Do you play?” Avery stood in the doorway with a bottle of sherry in one hand and a cordless phone in the other.

  I was startled into indiscretion. “No. Music wasn’t part of my education.”

  “Really? No talent?”

  No money, I thought, but said, instead. “Do you? Play, that is?”

  In response, Avery handed me the wine and the phone, sat down at the piano, and lilted through the first bars of “Begin the Beguine.” “If you call that playing,” he said, as the last notes died away.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “You really don’t know music, do you? I play the piano as I do everything else, in a competent but facile manner. A consummate dilettante, I guess you could say.” He was smiling, but there was a wistful undertone to his words.

  “Well, we can’t all be Elton John,” I retorted inanely, immediately realizing I should have chosen a far more cultured example.

  But Avery laughed. “And it’s a good thing, too, isn’t it?”

  This was the first time I’d been alone with Avery since an awkward encounter one cold night the previous year. In the shadow of the library building he’d told me firmly that there was absolutely no future for a personal relationship between a college president and an untenured professor. Since I had never aspired to such a relationship—not outside my fantasies, anyhow—I’d been a little shaky around him ever since
.

  Avery is not my type. He’s a lady-killer—and I’m no lady. I’ve always gone for big, bulky men—like Tony. Real men. Working men. Not slender, effete intellectuals like our distinguished president. I’d despised Avery from the moment I’d met him until the moment he’d first turned the blue spotlight of his gaze in my direction. Then I’d despised myself—for being such an easy mark. But the man was irresistible. Sandy hair, cut conservatively, but not so short that a beguiling strand couldn’t flop now and then over his cerebral brow. Ice blue eyes, a long, slender face, and thin, expressive lips completed an inventory of features straight out of a Ralph Lauren advertisement. And he knew how to dress. Tonight Avery wore an off-white jacket over a black golf shirt, black linen pants, and oxblood loafers. And he reeked of Eau de WASP.

  Rising from the piano bench, Avery retrieved the wine and the phone. Placing the sherry on the antique sideboard that served as a temporary bar, he turned to me solicitously. “I understand you had a distasteful experience a week or so ago.”

  I paused, mystified. Then I blushed. Of course he would have heard about the intruder in my office. He was the president; he knew everything that happened on campus. And now he knew about the panties.

  I’d kept Shamega out of the account I’d given Security. They’d found my first-floor office window closed but not locked. In the semifrozen earth outside, they’d discovered several boot prints. “You know the kind the kids wear now,” Paul Dermott, Enfield’s security chief, told me. “Those heavy boots, with the ugly soles?”

  “Lug boots,” I said.

  “Yeah—lug boots. Well, two were full prints—not large, but not real small either. You have any idea who they could belong to?”

  I thought about Shamega in her street garb, the lug boots so incongruous on her small feet. Shamega? Could she have done it herself? Then I thought about all my other students. Who ever noticed what they were wearing on their feet?

  “Could be anyone,” I replied. And that was as far as it had gone.

  “Well,” I said to Avery, “these things happen. Probably some student who’d gotten a bad grade on the midterm or something.”

  “Security’s going to keep a close eye on your office.”

  “So they told me.”

  He started to say something else, but only got as far as “I hope,” when he paused and looked levelly at someone behind my back. “Thibault.” His tone was restrained.

  I turned, curious. I wouldn’t have recognized this man as Tibby Brewster’s father. Thibault Brewster had the same pale skin, but that was as far as the resemblance went. Where Tibby’s nose was prominent and his mouth soft, Brewster’s features were as chiseled as anything on Mount Rushmore—straight nose, square jaw, brown hair and thick eyebrows. Brewster wore his fifty-odd years well; the bulky frame had been well toned on the handball court, the thick hair streaked with sun on the eighteenth hole. Only the hard vertical lines adjacent to his mouth gave a clue to his age—and, I suspected, to his character. Thibault Brewster wore a navy blazer, khaki pants, and loafers identical to Avery’s. I was suddenly aware of the frivolity of the flowery blue dress and white sandals I had charged that very afternoon on my Filene’s card.

  “Tib, have you met Professor Karen Pelletier of the English Department? Karen, this is Thibault Brewster, Chairman of our Board of Trustees.”

  “We haven’t met. Karen.” Brewster’s two-handed grasp of the hand I extended was more of a courtly clasp than a handshake, as if he had been trusted with some infinitely precious, infinitely fragile object. “But I’ve heard a great deal about you—from my son.” His speculative gaze was as hard as the handshake was gentle.

  I’ll bet you have. “Thank you, Thibault,” I replied, ambiguously. “And it’s very nice to meet you, too.”

  Then Jill Greenberg came in, dressed in lime green paisley-patterned leggings and a long, baggy turquoise sweater, and I was released while Avery introduced her to the Board Chairman. I wanted to ask Jill if she was feeling any better, but when Brewster moved off in search of bigger game, Jill took Avery by the arm, and began flirting with him in her easy manner. I stifled an impulse to rip her gorgeous orange-gold hair out by its roots, slunk away, and watched the pair covertly from the sanctuary of the window seat. Avery was laughing at some outrageous comment, when my gaze suddenly focused, not on him, but on Jill. Something was different about her tonight, but what? I took a rapid inventory: same wild hair, in pigtails tonight; same slender, compact body; same wacky, mismatched clothes. What had changed? But my attention was deflected from Jill by the arrival of Miles Jewell and Greg. Let the games begin, I thought. As I rose and began to move toward Greg, my eye settled on Jill again, and a half-formed, nonsensical thought drifted through my mind: Jill doesn’t look quite so unfinished any more.

  Unfinished? What the hell did that mean? Jill still looked fifteen years old rather than the ancient twenty-five she actually was. And, if flirting with Avery was any indication, she hadn’t become a heck of a lot more inhibited since I’d first met her. The strain of the semester must be getting to me, I decided. I’m beginning to imagine things.

  We were quite a group around the dinner table. The committee had decided to go for inclusivity. Every element of college politics and population was covered—including students. I was surprised when Shamega showed up—seeming a little unnerved in this gathering of faculty and administrators. But, of course, they would need a student representative, and she fit the necessary demographics—black, female, and smart as hell. Over the appetizer of broiled, stuffed Portobelo mushroom, I surveyed my fellow committee members. Avery, of course, and Greg, both centerists, vs. Miles, his crony Phillipe Le Croix from Philosophy, and the senior Thibault Brewster to represent Tradition. Latisha Washington from Black Studies, Jill Greenberg, and I constituted the moderate left—all female, recent hires, and untenured. But I really hadn’t expected to see the infamous Professor Sally Chenille of T.V. talk show fame there—representing the Crazies, I guess.

  Sally was an exotic at Enfield College. Indeed, she’d be an exotic anywhere—except maybe in some high-fashion whorehouse. Bone thin, with the protuberant cheekbones that come with systematic self-starvation, Sally had dark hair, clipped severely close to her head. Today it was bleached neon yellow. But, then, Sally felt it imperative to keep up her appearance; she was, after all, a national celebrity. Her notoriety stemmed from shameless self-promotion and from her off-center notions about sex. Sally urged women to turn the tables on men: to blatantly exploit their own sexuality for advantage and profit in a masculine world.

  Sally’s latest book, Writing on the Body, had had a brief notoriety in the media as exemplifying everything that had gone wrong with postmodern intellectual discourse. She’d gotten an NEH grant to write this study of the textual significance of body piercing, tattooing, scarification, and personal branding, and now the Christian Right was up in arms about the debased use of their sacred tax dollars. With Sally involved, curriculum revision meetings were certain to be explosive.

  Conversation during dinner was guarded, as might be expected with such a polarized group. I sat between Greg and Miles, and my Department chair spent the entire meal glowering into his roast lamb. Obviously he hadn’t forgotten our little contretemps over the Dickinson seminar. The only comment he volunteered during the entire meal was when he overheard me telling Greg about my visit to Mrs. Northbury’s great-granddaughter.

  “She wrote trash,” Miles fumed. “Serena Northbury was nothing but a sappy sentimentalist, one of that ‘damn mob of scribbling women’ Hawthorne hated.” He thumped his fist on the table once: Bang. He had spoken; it was true.

  “Have you read any of her novels, Miles?”

  “Don’t need to; Hawthorne’s word’s good enough for me.”

  “But I don’t think Hawthorne ever actually mentioned Northbury—”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see Greg shaking his head. “Don’t confuse him with the facts, Karen,” he muttered i
nto my ear. “He’s on the losing side, and he knows it.”

  Fortunately, it was time to settle into the plush living-room chairs with coffee and petits fours. I chose a seat on the far side of the room from Miles. Sally Chenille had somehow maneuvered Avery onto a love seat, and she was possessively curled up next to him, buffing her acid green fingernails.

  “I see this meeting as exploratory,” Avery said, getting right down to business, “an opportunity to begin a dialogue about what the college considers to be the true meaning of a liberal education.” Next to me, Greg groaned softly. I squeezed his arm. This was going to be a scene.

  “Such a dialogue,” Avery continued, “is an essential preliminary to any informed decision-making. I know it will be difficult to reach a consensus,” he looked pointedly at Greg, “but re-drawing the college curriculum without such a discussion would be like shooting an arrow without a target.”

  “Well,” huffed Miles, “I would have thought the ‘target’ was perfectly clear—a solid command of essential knowledge.”

  “Yes,” his pal Brewster affirmed. “The college’s historic mission has always been to immerse students in the treasures of the humanistic tradition.” Mixed metaphor, I thought. “Socrates, Homer, Dante—”

  “Ahhh,” Latisha broke in, shaking her dreadlocks, “but there’s the problem. Who determines what constitutes essential knowledge? Or the humanistic tradition. Take the literary canon, for instance. Would you consider a ‘command’ of Native American oral narratives essential knowledge? Would you place them on a must-read syllabus for a course in world literature?”

  “Of course not—” Brewster looked appalled.

  “But why not?” I jumped in here. “Why are European classics any more essential than the myths and traditions of our indigenous forebears?”

  “Because they’re the fundamental basis of the Western tradition.” Miles was beginning to sputter. “And I am sick to death of all this talk about the canon. The scholarly world is being held hostage to trendy theoretical and political agendas. Literary tradition mandates excellence—”