The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  That seemed to be a cue for me to do the mustering. I located tea in a white enamel canister with a red cover and filled the kettle with tap water. Avery perched on a tall kitchen stool; his khakis stretched fetchingly tight over muscular thighs. I set out two porcelain mugs and busied my hands with spoons and loose tea. My companion was silent. He appeared tired and stressed. Although he followed my movements while I prepared the tea, I had no idea what he was thinking. Even though he was usually a fluent conversationalist, Avery was always a difficult man to read. This time when he spoke, his words were slow and deliberate.

  “As you can imagine, Karen, when ten million dollars and a property such as this one are at stake, people can get a little … exercised.” Translation, I thought, the jackals have begun to gather. “And, in addition, there’s not only money involved here, but … ah … philosophies, as well.” Translation: the old boys are freaking out over a center devoted to women’s issues.

  I nodded, and poured boiling water over Darjeeling leaves in a fat brown earthenware pot. It was dark enough now for me to need a light on over the sink. I hesitated a moment before I flicked the switch; it was cozy in this homey room. In the twilight. With Avery across the table. It had been a long time since I’d been alone in a kitchen with a man. Kitchens can be—I flicked the light switch and shattered the spell.

  “I received a copy of Miles’s letter, Avery, so I know what ‘philosophical’ differences you’re talking about, but …” I let my voice trail off. The ball was in his court.

  He fielded it skillfully. “You know, of course, that you have my full support as regards the focus and function of the center. Although Miles’s concerns are understandable given the … ah … traditional perspective he brings to literary … ah … traditions.…” Avery was the consummate diplomat; I was not going to come away from this conversation with any sound bytes slamming Miles or his reactionary views. “Recent epistemological speculation affirms a more … differentiated … and … ah, relevant … field of investigation for advanced scholarly study.…” Translation: Don’t sweat it, Karen; the fogey is mired in the intellectual Stone Age. We’re going ahead with this center. “So,” Avery concluded, “Miles’s caveats would not seem to pose a significant barrier to the affiliation of the college with a Center for American Women Writers.”

  “Good,” I responded. Damn well better not.

  “However—”

  “I thought there was going to be a however.”

  Avery granted me a weak smile and took the mug of tea I handed him. “Oh, yes. There’s a big however.” He stirred sugar. I followed suit. It was quiet for a long, long time—maybe sixty seconds.

  The sound of a car motor broke the silence; lights swept the kitchen window, then dimmed, disappearing in the direction of the barn. Must be Gerry Novak coming home to the tenant house Edith had willed him lifetime use of. Was he returning from seeing Jill? I wondered if they were still an item. She was almost five months pregnant; she wouldn’t be able to hide her condition much longer. Soon the only secret would be the identity of the father. I lifted the mug. Sipped. Turned my attention back to Avery.

  That wasn’t hard to do. In his navy blue golf shirt, khakis, and boat shoes, Avery was dressed for a casual evening in the country, and the attire became him. But, then, any attire would become this man: the long elegant bones of his body, the aristocratic contours of his face, the thick, floppy, light brown hair. Tony had been so different, with his stocky frame and dark Irish coloring. They both had blue eyes, though. Tony’s were a warm blue, like an August sky. Avery’s were—I examined them dispassionately, just to make sure—fjord blue. Yes—like a Norwegian fjord in April. Or, like I imagined a fjord would be—deep, cold, and invigorating, full of submerged life. Just like a picture in National Geographic.

  A car door slammed in the distance.

  “I wonder exactly what Novak’s place is in this petting zoo?” Avery’s unexpected comment startled me.

  “Jill thinks—” I bit my tongue to shut myself up.

  “Jill Greenberg? I wanted to ask you about that, Karen. She was sitting with Novak at Edith Hart’s funeral. How does Jill know Novak?”

  “Oh,” I waffled, “she heard him read his poems at some club, and they became friends.”

  “Oh?” Avery waited, head cocked, for me to finish my statement. When I didn’t, he prompted me. “Jill thinks …?”

  “She thinks … he’s … a brilliant poet.”

  “Humph. I didn’t think much of that—er—poem—he read at the funeral.”

  I shrugged. Neither had I.

  It was dark now, and my tea was cold. Suddenly I was ready to leave. I slipped off my stool, gathered up the cups, took them over to the sink.

  Avery watched me in an abstracted manner. As I dried the cups, he finally spoke. “But, Karen, here’s the real problem for the center—not Miles Jewell, but Thibault Brewster.” His sandy eyebrows were raised in the classic “it-couldn’t-get-much-worse-than-this” elevation. I waited him out. “I am telling you this in strictest confidence, Karen; you understand that, don’t you? You can imagine how bad it would be for the college if word got out that the Chairman of the Board of Trustees was about to institute a lawsuit against the school.” His lips were tight with—was it anger? “Anyhow, Brewster claims Dr. Hart’s estate by rights belongs to him; as closest living relative, he’s threatening litigation.”

  “I’m not surprised.” I told Avery about my nasty encounter with Thibault Brewster in the library. He listened without interrupting, nodding at certain of Brewster’s more outrageous statements.

  “Then it won’t come as a shock to you, Karen, when I tell you he’s claiming that you, as an agent of the college, exerted undue influence on his incompetent elderly relative.”

  “Uhh.” I dropped like a stone into a rocking chair in the corner. “You mean he’s going to sue me?”

  “And the college—unless we renounce the bequest. He told me he’s going to take us for every penny we’ve got.” Avery’s eyes were hard.

  My laugh was short. “In my case, that wouldn’t amount to much.”

  A sound from the dining room—as if in the dark someone had bumped into a chair—startled both of us. I jumped up from the rocker; Avery slipped off his stool. The scuff of Gerry Novak’s feet heralded his entrance. Avery’s eyes sought mine: Had this guy been eavesdropping? Had he overheard our conversation?

  “Thought you people’d be gone before this.” Aside from his poem at the funeral, this was the longest statement I’d ever heard from Gerry. He pulled out a chair from the end of the table and plopped down in a proprietary manner.

  “We were just leaving,” I said, gathering up the clean cups and restoring them to the cupboard. “We were discussing options for the center while the tour was fresh in our minds.” Why did I feel the need to explain to him? This wasn’t Gerry’s house. He was only a factotum; he’d made that quite clear. But his attitude made our presence here extremely awkward. I felt a bit like Goldilocks, caught in the act by the three bears.

  “Oh, izzat right?” Novak’s laconic manner seemed designed to insult, but I couldn’t tell why. Then I remembered what I had almost let slip to Avery—that Gerry believed he was Edith’s out-of-wedlock son. Good God—would there be yet another claimant to this estate? Startled by the thought, I glanced up at Avery. He was watching Gerry with a mystified, but not overly concerned, expression. But then, of course, he didn’t know what I knew.

  As we left the house, Avery and I were quiet, both preoccupied, I thought, with the complications of what had initially seemed to be a trouble-free windfall. It was full dark now, and the air had a chill to it. My chambray shirt was sleeveless, and I hugged my arms to preserve a little warmth. My car was parked closer to the house than the Volvo, so Avery stopped and stood with me as I opened the door. This high on the mountain, the stars were clear and bright in a perfectly black sky. A thin rim of moon hung just over the horizon. What was that song I used to
sing to Amanda? The moon is the North Wind’s cookie. He bites it every day. Until there’s just a rim of scraps, that crumbles all away. I smiled at the memory, and turned impulsively to share it with Avery. He was standing next to me, hands stuffed in his pockets, staring at the ground. He looked like a worried man.

  “You must be sorry I ever got us into this situation.” I laughed, hoping he would deny it. Avery glanced up at me, without responding. His aristocratic features were strained and he suddenly looked enormously exhausted. Impulsively I reached out and placed my hand on his arm. “Avery,” I said. His skin felt warm to my chilled fingertips. What the hell did I think I was doing? This man was in a position to destroy me. Emotionally and professionally. I moved to snatch my hand back, but Avery grabbed it, pulled me to him. My elbow jabbed him but that didn’t seem to matter. He kissed me long and hard, then held me away, breathless, at arm’s length. He gazed at me enigmatically for an endless moment, then dropped his hands from my arms. “That was stupid, Karen,” he said. “On both our parts.” His expression, in the dim light spilling from the car interior, was infinitely sad. “Do you think maybe we could both just go back five minutes in time and erase that impulsive act from our memories?”

  “I don’t think it works that way, Avery.” Tears stung my eyes; I was so lonely.

  “Then we’ll just have to work around it, Karen.” His expression was resolute. “Because it’s not going to happen again.”

  He opened my car door wider. I got in. He slammed the door shut and strode over to his own car. I started the Jetta and began the long descent to Eastbrook. All the way down the mountain, I watched for Avery in my rearview mirror. It was a wonder I didn’t go barreling off the edge on one of the hairpin turns. At the stop sign, I even turned my head around to check for his automobile somewhere on the long road behind me. But in all that darkness, the lights of the Volvo were nowhere to be seen.

  The words of the Springsteen song kept running through my head: Well, I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me-ee.

  Eighteen

  The attic room was sparsely furnished, I wrote, but immaculately clean. Emmy closed the door behind her and stood for a brief moment, the glass knob cold and solid, like an immense diamond in her hand. It was the only solid fact in a world that seemed to be dissolving around her. Another pain assailed her, began as a tight, hot fist in the center of her bowels, seized and spread until her entire being was contracted in agony. She groaned, dropped the carpetbag, fell to her knees. Thank God she had managed the stairs; now, at least, the culmination of her shame would be concealed from the eyes of any who might have thought they were acquainted with a good woman, a woman who knew the boundaries between pleasure and decency, between love and the marriage vows. With a clatter of brass rings, a dark-eyed young girl pulled the curtains back from around the bed. “Mrs. Westfall,” she cried, “your time has come.” “Call me Emily,” the afflicted woman gasped. “For who but you should have that right?” Then she fell, insensible, to the floor.

  I threw the pen down in frustration. That wasn’t right, and I knew it. If only I could remember the opening pages of Northbury’s novel, I might be able to piece together a rudimentary version of the story. But this attempt was nothing but trash; it didn’t even sound like nineteenth-century language. I ripped the page off the pad, crumpled it up, tossed it at the wastebasket. Missed. Jeez, I couldn’t even do that right.

  Okay, I’d try again, using words that sounded as if they might have been penned a century and a half earlier.

  The attic door was heavily timbered with oak and studded with iron spikes. The rust on the ponderous ironwork looked more antique than anything else in the new world. Rooted almost at the threshold was a wild rosebush—a rosebush? In an attic? Pelletier, you are definitely losing it. Rip. Crumple. Toss. Miss. I am dangerous, I thought; I should not be licensed to carry a pen.

  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary—Rip, crumple, toss, miss.

  I had returned from Meadowbrook hours before, and it was now well after midnight. I couldn’t sleep, and was setting myself the task of reconstructing Mrs. Northbury’s mammoth of a novel from a few leg bones and a sliver of tusk. Anything was better than lying sleepless in my bed going over and over Avery’s kiss in my memory. What had he said? Couldn’t we just wind back the clock? Pretend it never happened? No way! Yet he was right; it would be better if it had never happened. Anything other than a totally professional relationship between Avery and me would be a disaster—for me, especially. He was the president of a prestigious college; I was a second-year untenured assistant professor. He was a scion of the WASP aristocracy; I was a half-Canuck mill-town girl. He was a man; I was a—

  My pen moved over the lined yellow sheet again: I’s wicked, I wrote—I is. I’s mighty wicked. I can’t help it.

  Avery called three days later at nine A.M. He was all business. Would it be possible for me to come in that afternoon to discuss my intentions regarding the directorship of the Northbury Center? Good. Would four P.M. be convenient? Good. He and Marc Compton, the college attorney, would be waiting for me then.

  An attorney? Good, I thought, in turn. He was interposing a lawyer between us; there would be no opportunity for any awkward scene. God, but that man was smart.

  A warm rain fell fitfully as I left the house, and I threw a hooded yellow rain jacket on over my jeans and white cotton knit shirt. My sneakers skidded on the flagstone path, and I would have gone down if I hadn’t grabbed a sturdy branch. I should have worn my reliable old Nikes, but the retro red-and-white Keds were brand-new. Aside from that one smidgeon of vanity I hadn’t given a single thought to my appearance.

  I rubbed the Terrifically Tawny blusher more deeply into the skin over my cheekbones, and shook the spill of newly washed hair back off my shoulders.

  The clouds were beginning to rise from the Enfield valley as I approached the town. By the time Lonnie, Avery’s secretary, greeted me in the president’s outer office, a pallid ray of sun fell wanly across the thick green carpeting. “Karen,” Lonnie told me, “Avery will be just a few moments. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Some mineral water?”

  He kept me waiting twenty minutes. This from a man who was noted for his promptness. Was he making some kind of point? At four-seventeen I checked my watch and decided I’d give him until four-thirty; then I’d be out of there. But three minutes later he emerged from his office effusive with apologies. “So sorry to keep you waiting, Karen. Marc and I were just considering certain contingency plans.”

  Marc Compton was a medium-brown black man with crisp, dark hair and a well-trimmed graying moustache. He stood examining a group of black-and-white nature photographs in the alcove behind Avery’s desk as I entered the room, but turned to me with a practiced smile. “Karen,” he said, coming forward with his hand extended, “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  “Good to meet you, Marc.” His grip was strong without being painful. A firm, reliable, lawyerly handshake. Like his smile, it was practiced.

  “Coffee, Karen? Or perhaps a drink?” Avery examined the contents of a cabinet by the clean-swept fireplace. “I’ve got Glenfiddich here, some bourbon, a little Harvey’s—”

  “No, thanks, Avery. I’m fine.” Going through the liquor cabinet meant he didn’t have to shake my hand when Marc did. I noted the evasion.

  Avery gestured to a maroon leather chair. When I was seated, he adjusted the chintz drapes so that what little sun there was no longer shone in my eyes.

  “Cigarette, Karen?” Marc was at my side with a pack of Dunhills.

  “Thank you, but no.”

  Avery moved a crystal bowl of hard candies to the table beside my chair. I ignored it. These two minions of the college were fussing over me far more than was seemly, which sharpened my paranoia about their agenda. At last, Marc got down to business. Edith Hart’s will, of course, was currently going through probate, but a facsimile had been made available t
o him. He had read through the language, he said, and had found a troubling loophole. The terms of the will, seemingly cobbled together in a hurry by a less-than-meticulous lawyer, had bequeathed Meadowbrook and its endowment to the college on the condition that I be appointed director. No alternative had been considered should I refuse the directorship.

  “So you see, Karen,” Marc summarized, “the college finds itself in a position where it needs to have your intentions clarified …” I glanced over at Avery; he nodded, smiled, smooth as silk. “… because, an, er, situation has arisen—about which, I do believe, Avery has briefed you.”

  “You mean—Thibault Brewster’s threatened lawsuit?”

  “Well, er, yes. You could put it that way. That’s one element of the situation.” Marc leaned forward in his black Enfield College captain’s chair, his hands flat on gray summer-weight wool knees. His expression was earnest, his gaze intense. Avery had assumed a similar posture in his leather armchair, hands flat on khaki, cool blue eyes trained directly on my face.

  Whoa, I thought, as it hit me. These guys are in desperate need of my cooperation. I am in the catbird seat today. If I were a different kind of person, I would have flashed a shit-eating grin right then and there, and declared, “Okay, boys, tell me what you’re gonna do for me,” and they might have doubled my salary, granted me early tenure, promoted me to full professor. But I’ve never been one to play games, and I wasn’t about to start now.

  But I was no patsy either. “So? What are the implications here? In particular,” I glanced over at Avery, “since our talk the other evening, I’ve been wondering about my liability should Brewster proceed to press a suit against me.”