The 19th Jew

By Robin Hemley

AT HER MEETING with the associate dean, Edith Margareten asked the administrator, a woman in her mid-40s, about the climate for Jews at Notre Dame. “Oh, it’s fine,” she said. “I’m Methodist myself.”

“Ah,” Edith said, tilting her head ironically.

The woman flipped through the pages of a scrapbook-sized volume. Edith looked down at her lap and smoothed out her wool skirt, which she had bought specifically for the interview. It was gray with little flecks of brown, and itchy. The dress looked Catholic on the rack, but she regretted buying it now. She placed her hands on her knees and regarded the associate dean while the woman flipped. Edith could hardly keep her eyes open. The woman bored her, and she’d slept terribly the night before. The Morris Inn on campus had the skinniest beds, as hard as palettes, designed so that no one could possibly sleep — nor consider sinning in them. Over every door in her suite, where normally one might expect to see a smoke detector, a cross hung or a swooning Jesus, or a proud Mary. Edith had unpacked, humming, “Left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day.” But no smoke detectors.

“Yes, we have 17 Jews on campus,” the woman announced, pointing at a page somewhere toward the middle of this mysterious book.

“What’s one more?” Edith said.

“Exactly,” the woman said, lifting her hand, palm up, and giving Edith a wide open expression devoid of irony.

“You really keep track?” Edith asked, but it wasn’t meant to be a question. “In a book.”

This seemed to catch the associate dean by surprise. She sat up straight in her chair and locked her eyes on Edith. Edith wondered if this woman had ever read one of her books, if she even read books anymore, if she knew who Edith was. Going into the interview, she had asked the English department chair, a Milton scholar named Dan Massey, what an associate dean was. The real dean had been off-campus, and so they’d come up with this low-cal Methodist version. He’d leaned over conspiratorially and whispered, “A mouse studying to become a rat.”

“There might be more,” the woman said.

“These are the ones you know of,” Edith said.

The woman closed her scrapbook. “This is a Catholic institution, and part of our mission is to provide an exceptional education within a Catholic framework. But Notre Dame is known for its ecumenical atmosphere. The Catholic faculty hovers around 51 percent.”

Edith smiled. “They hover, too.” There was no possibility, she decided, of ever working for such a place. They probably wanted to hold the line, in any case, at 17 Jews.

The job she had applied for — they had approached her actually — was hardly a job at all, more like a sinecure: The Leo L. Ward chair in creative writing. Edith, if she was offered the job and took it, would be its first recipient, and she was made to understand she could keep the job as long as she wanted. Father Ward had been head of the English department in the 1940s at Notre Dame and had died in the early 1950s — a volume of short stories, “Men in the Field,” was published posthumously by the Notre Dame Press. Edith had run across the book by chance at Gotham Book Mart, bought the copy and read through it before her interview. But when she mentioned her find to the chair of the English department at a party in her honor, he cut her off. “Oh please,” he squealed. “Don’t embarrass me. ‘Men in the Field.’ What, there were no women around?” Dan Massey made a gibbon-like face at her — all chin and eyes — pathetic, needy and curious, and then he gave her a wide smile.

“I found some of the stories touching,” she said. “But they’re vignettes really. I wouldn’t call them stories.”

Dan Massey began to sputter and then broke into a kind of braying. Edith stood back and regarded him with a glass of white wine in her hand. No one at Notre Dame, she assumed, had even read Father Ward’s stories in decades. They simply needed his name, the tradition he supposedly represented.

“Have you read them?” she asked.

“Oh please,” he said with a wave. “ ‘Men in the Field.’ “

Dan Massey bent toward her and said, “Edith, we’re lantsmen. I’m one-sixteenth Jewish. My great-grandfather.” He bobbed in her direction — she couldn’t say whether he was purposefully making fun of a religious Jew benching or if it was merely an effect of the wine. And he brayed as though this was an impressive revelation and not an insult as Edith saw it.

“One-sixteenth,” she said. “Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.”

He smiled broadly at her.

“It’s Horace,” she said. “It means, ‘Those who cross the sea, change the sky above them but not their souls.’”

“That’s true,” he said. “I know this sounds silly,” and he bent close to her again with his gibbon expression, “but sometimes I feel my soul is Jewish. Especially when I read Singer.”

She took a sip of wine and scratched her leg where the wool of her skirt had irritated it. The sea he had crossed was the shallowest body of water, and one hardly needed a ship, merely hip waders. Dan Massey was a fool. She was partial to fools. She wrote about them. She had married and divorced one. But this kind of fool, the academic variety, was not to her liking — his calibrations were slightly off.

She kept her demeanor cool but pleasant in a superior way, though the interview was over for her. Dan Massey was yet another reason she would never come to work for Notre Dame.

A week later, Massey called. He asked how much it would take to bring her. She didn’t want to go, and she assumed that would be the end of it when she named an outrageous sum. The chair paused and said, “Edith, you charmed everyone who met you.”

Years later she still wondered on occasion what had charmed them so. In her circle of friends and enemies, she was considered many things: pathologically self-obsessed, pedantic and paranoid — not qualities one normally associated with charm. She had been ready to flatly refuse Massey’s offer, despite the salary, but this revelation that they’d found her charming surprised her, weakened her resolve, lulled her into a kind of curious stupor that made her willing to suspend her natural suspicion of others.

“Really?” she said.

“Everyone’s been talking about you. The graduate students, the members of the department. I’ve never seen such overwhelming support.”

She’d spent the week after the interview denigrating the place to her friends and her relatives, so when she changed her mind, many were shocked. One friend said, “You can’t leave New York. You’ll die,” as though New York were a rare blood type. Another asked if she’d have trouble finding fresh coffee. One friend placed South Bend in Wisconsin rather than Indiana, and when Edith corrected him, he said, “I’m never going there.” But the only reaction that truly angered her was that of her Aunt Judy, a bitter and opinionated woman who had never approved of a decision of anybody’s in her life. “Five years from now you’ll have lost your voice,” she said. “You’ll be writing Willa Cather novels.”

“My values are my values,” Edith said.

“But you told me — they have Jesus on the side of the library.”

Yes, he loomed over campus like a benevolent version of Godzilla over Tokyo, but even that didn’t change her mind. She was ready for a change. And getting used to something like a hundred-foot Christ, being adaptable — that was part of living.

Seven years later, Edith was still settling into the place, but settling in comfortably. Edith’s job made few demands on her — she lived in Chicago and commuted twice a week on the South Shore railroad to South Bend, took a cab to campus and kept an office hour. Usually, she had no interruptions and wrote during this hour — students didn’t bother her because she didn’t post her office hour or tell the departmental secretaries when it was. She didn’t feel obligated to speak with any students who lacked the perseverance to track her down. Twice a year, she taught a class to 12 hand-picked graduate students. Rather than discuss their work, she thought it more beneficial for them to hear about her own creative process — sometimes she asked them to write in class, and she took this opportunity to write as well. Sometimes she allowed them to read what they had composed.

Mostly, people left her alone. The associate dean had been right, after all, about the climate.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Edith had been spoken of as someone on the Nobel committee’s short list, and the list seemed to be getting shorter every year. She had been compared to everyone, and so believed, or hoped at least, that she really must be like no one: 24 reviewers had, over the course of her career, compared her to Paley, 16 to Singer (for whom, they dutifully noted, she had translated), 14 to Elkin, 7 to Kafka, 11 to Malamud, 3 to Ozick, 2 to Bellow, and 1 lost soul had compared her to all seven. Most often, she was lumped with other Jewish writers, but sometimes Catholics, too. She dealt with moral issues in her work, with hypocrisy and comeuppance at the forefront. She often gave her characters Old Testament-type tests. They made mistakes, made the wrong decisions, like Jonah or Abraham, and that’s why the Catholics liked her, she decided. They, too, were always making the wrong decisions: the Inquisition, their treatment of native peoples in the New World, St. Dominic’s eradication of the Albigensians on the orders of Pope Innocent III.

There was a man in her stories who almost always appeared, a fool named Brennerman, neither a Singer fool, nor a Sholom Aleichem fool — a blessed know-nothing — nor a Shakespearean fool, wise but sad, a teaser. More of a trickster. Sometimes Brennerman knew a lot, sometimes he knew nothing. Sometimes he taunted her main character, Edith’s alter-ego, Francine Riemer. Brennerman liked to sit on Francine’s shoulder like a conscience. Brennerman appeared in Francine’s dreams, and Edith’s, too, told her to stop taking herself so seriously, that the world could live without her. Brennerman existed for Edith and Francine both in the world of their imagination and in the real world. He was based on a man Edith had once seen painting directional arrows in the lanes of the parking lot of the Green Acres shopping mall in Valley Stream, Long Island. She was there shopping with her mother, who lived in nearby Woodmere. The man’s fellow workers were standing around smoking and talking while he was doing all the work. The lane he painted was blocked off with orange cones. In the other lanes, all with freshly painted arrows, none of the cars paid any attention to the new directions. The man ignored the chaos around him just as the world ignored him. She decided this man’s name was Brennerman. She never saw him again, but Edith’s character, Francine, saw him all the time.

The names of God, Francine Riemer suspected, were legion, more than the combined last names of all of humanity, but how many more? How many last names could there be in the world? Had anyone counted, done a study, because she kept hearing new ones — Sloyer, Ege, Cashio, Paykue, Spawr. Francine wanted to know. She collected last names, from personal encounters, from far-off reports and news dispatches. She was a smart woman and knew, of course, that collecting names was an odd pursuit. She held out no hope for monetary gain. Her names had none of the intrinsic value of her mother’s autograph collection — a Fred Astaire, a Tyrone Power, a Franchot Tone — nor her cousin Sophie’s collection of Italian leather decanters.

Francine’s mother said this was an unhealthy occupation.

“Preoccupation, Mother.”

“Aren’t you happy with your name?”

“I’m happy with my name.”

“Because if you’re not happy, you should change it.”

“ I like my name, Ma.”

“A name like Smith, perhaps. Or Jones. Or Arnold. That has a nice ring. Benedict Arnold.”

“Ma!”

“Eh, what does a pig know about noodles?”

That was her mother’s favorite saying. She used it all the time, but always, Francine thought, slightly out of context, and so Francine never really felt she understood what the saying meant.

Francine didn’t feel unhealthy. Her dedication to names didn’t interfere with her personal life (she had none), nor her work at the food co-op. But lately, she couldn’t pass a man, a woman, a child on the street without desiring to discover who they were — at least as much as one can discover through the porthole of a last name.

In fact, when Francine and her mother were having this discussion, the one recorded nearly verbatim above, they were walking through the parking lot of a nearly famous suburban shopping mall on a mission to buy a hat for Francine’s mother, a belated — as always — birthday gift from Francine, when Francine and her mother walked by a man working in one of the lanes of the parking lot. The man, a young, lanky fellow in overalls, a yarmulke perched on his head, was intently painting an arrow in the middle of the lane while three other workers stood above him, smoking and spitting and laughing, but not lending a hand at all.

The man’s last name pierced Francine’s foot like a shard of glass and made its way through her intestines to her heart. The name rose in her like a complaint. “Brennerman!” she shouted.

The men stopped laughing. Francine’s mother stood still. The man painting the arrows looked up at her and smiled, an extraordinary smile, his top bicuspids missing, as though he’d actually given his eye-teeth, as the saying goes, but for what, Francine couldn’t guess.

That was how the world was introduced to Brennerman and Francine Riemer. Brennerman had been gold to her. She owed him her entire writing career. But sometimes she still wondered, despite her success, where the source was of that internal voice, the one that made her stories possible. Sometimes she worried that she might be falling into a pernicious pattern, a diction that wasn’t naturally hers, but wholly derivative. She worried even about Brennerman, her beloved fool, whether he was truly hers or not, whether she could rightfully claim him. She worried that what she presented to the world might not be true enough, but merely a caricature of Jewish literature. She despised the current crop of Southern writers for this reason; they often sounded so similar, she wondered whether they simply passed around a pad of paper to be continued where the last one left off. Perhaps the Nobel committee discerned this same affliction in her own writing.

She did not want to be an imitator — discernible, yes, within a tradition, but original enough so that she could not be typed or ethnically patronized. The comparisons people made between her and other Jewish writers bothered her less because she knew such comparisons were ultimately meaningless. Not only had she been compared to other Jewish writers, but often she was compared to gentiles. Catholics: Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene. Latin Americans: Cortazar, Márquez, Fuentes, Borges. Once, when she’d written a book from a teenager’s perspective, she’d been compared to Salinger and Harper Lee both. People needed to believe in such a great Literary Chain of Being, and that’s why they made such comparisons.

Singer, perhaps, was to blame for her insecurities. He had fed them, been quite cruel to her. She had known Singer well, had translated some of his early stories when she had worked at Noonday Press and later at Farrar Straus as a young woman in the ‘50s and ‘60s. In later years, she lost touch with him, partly because of Singer’s secretary, Joanne, who treated him like a windup toy. The world treated him much the same, a little Yiddish gnome, reduced, cataloged, purchased. All of his well-cultivated eccentricities, the parakeets in his home that perched on his head, his vegetarianism, the requisite copy of the Daily Forward under his arm, were part of the package, accessories one might purchase for a Barbie doll.

She had been deceived by that version of the man when she first met him, but saw another side once when she had dinner at his apartment. They had been working on a translation of one of his stories, although to call her work translating was a misnomer. Her knowledge of Yiddish was limited to a few curses her Uncle Al had taught her. Singer did the rough translations himself, and his translators polished his prose. They had been working on one of the stories from “Gimpel the Fool” all day when Singer suggested she stay for dinner. When his wife walked in the door after work — she worked in the women’s sportswear department at Saks — he ordered her to prepare dinner for them both and then all through the meal he ignored her. Edith and Singer had been discussing the Suez Canal, and when his wife offered her opinion, he paid no attention, except to tell Edith pointedly that it was nice, for once, to have an intelligent conversation with an intelligent woman.

Edith had a hard time forgiving herself for being so young and stupid. She had showed him a story, but only because he had asked to see it. This was after they slept together one afternoon not long after the dinner with his wife. That night, she had a nightmare that Singer told her she was completely without talent, and when she woke up she was glad it was only a dream, but it turned out worse. He told her that he was astounded how poor her writing was. He had assumed she was good because Roger Straus had recommended her, but he wasn’t even sure she had the ear now to help him with the polishing of his own roughs.

“Do you want me to leave, Mr. Singer?” she had asked.

“What does your mother do?” he asked her.

“My mother?” she said, wondering whether he wanted her mother to translate, to sleep with him too. “My mother sells hats.”

“That’s a good occupation. You should sell hats too. Forget writing. It’s a tough business.”

Sometimes, in her dreams, she still heard herself asking meekly, in her craven voice, “Do you want me to leave, Mr. Singer?” — and waiting for his reply. He just looked at her with that impish smile. “Hats. I’ll say it again. Sell hats.”

Edith was asked to serve on a committee — an unusual occurrence, the first, actually, of its kind. She was not expected under normal circumstances to serve on committees, nor attend department meetings, though she had on occasion been prevailed upon to serve on the thesis committee of a particularly promising graduate student or two. But this committee was different. It was a university-wide committee established to decide on an award, a kind of junior version of her post, the Ernest Hoover Fellowship, named in honor of another beloved former professor and writer from the English department. The award would be given annually to a young writer in early to mid-career, and provide a stipend for the writer to finish a project of exceptional merit.

Dan Massey, who was no longer the chair of English, but the new associate dean, assured her that her presence on the committee was crucial, that she was the only one on campus who had the knowledge, experience and prestige to make such an important decision. “Anyway,” he said, “you can’t leave me alone. I’ll be the only Jewish person on the committee.”

“You’re not a Jew, Dan,” she said.

“Why don’t you ever humor me, Edith? Hey, maybe you can make me an honorary Jew.”

“That’s a tall order.”

“Who am I, trying to fool you?” he said and laughed.

She hated the man, but he seemed to think they were best friends. She knew he was right. They needed her on this committee, not because she was Jewish, of course, but because no one else could be trusted.

Edith spent much more time at the task of sorting though the applications than she had originally anticipated. Most of the writers who applied were clearly not competitive. To say that they were beginning writers would be to assume that they even knew where GO was. A beginning predicted an end, but with most of the applicants, the only end Edith could envision was her own premature death, a kind of literary aneurysm. Other applicants were clearly unworthy because they were too far along in their careers. One such writer was one of those who had initially expressed such horror at the thought of her accepting the job at Notre Dame, at venturing outside of 200 miles from New York. Now, he warmly addressed his application directly to Edith and ended his letter by writing, “I hear reports that you’re getting along famously in Indiana, so it must be bearable. But I always thought you’d moved to Wisconsin!! What’s the difference, right?” She gave him a handwritten reply:

Dear Bruce,

When I told you I was leaving New York for the Midwest, you said that it didn’t matter where South Bend was because you were never going there. You were right.

After a month, she came across an application she liked, from a Hispanic poet with the single name Mi. The poet was barely in her 30s and had already won every fellowship in the known universe and hardly needed another: the Hodder Fellowship, the Stegner, a Whiting, a Guggenheim, an NEA. But it was difficult to deny the power of her poems. Mi had been an addict and prostitute in Houston, and she wrote persona poems from the points of view of other hookers and addicts, gang members, white businessmen, cops. While those poems were good, there was one amazing sequence of poems that threaded through Mi’s manuscript, a fanciful but searing series of prose poems in which the world’s past revolutionary leaders all visited Mi, and while she tried to talk politics with them, all they wanted to do was to satisfy their personal sexual urges. In one poem, she masturbated Mao. In another, she had oral sex with Ho Chi Minh. She whipped Lenin. She had straight sex with Che, while Fidel watched. All of them, in their turn, made excuses for not paying her. The title poem of the manuscript, called “The Long March,” detailed a night in jail, trying to keep her head from exploding. Mao, in the form of a fly buzzing around her, berated her for being caught, for having it easy, for betraying the others who hid in caves and evaded planes, machine guns, torture and bombs of the Japanese and Kuomintang. The poem was an incredible meshing of Chinese history against the backdrop of mini-mart America. It ended in a gorgeous and surprising stanza in which the poet revealed she was writing the poem from the Bellagio Center for the Arts in Italy and that the fly lay dead on her windowsill.

Such a presence would knock their frocks off at Notre Dame.

At the next meeting of the committee, Edith suggested Mi for the fellowship. There were six members from various departments and disciplines, chaired by Dean Smoot, the former associate dean and sometime Methodist (who had since converted) who had interviewed Edith and allowed that one more Jew would not tarnish Notre Dame’s Golden Dome. There was a moment of silence while the members passed around the folder, glanced at it to refresh their memories, and then looked at their laps, all except for Stan White-Watson, who agreed with Edith that Mi should be awarded the fellowship.

No one in the English department, or anywhere, as far as Edith could tell, cared for him. But unlike her colleagues, Edith did not pretend to like him. His name was Stanford White-Watson, and as he was fond of telling people within three minutes of meeting them that he had been named after the famous architect Stanford White. Stan was an opportunist, a loudmouth and a bully: one of those people who throws back his head and laughs after saying something terribly vituperative, but his jolliness counteracted his meanness, and so people rarely knew how to respond to him, except to laugh along in a kind of forced self-deprecation. When people spoke of powers within the university, Stan White-Watson was always among the first names mentioned. As far as Edith could tell, the source of Stan’s power as well as his pretend popularity was his complete readiness and willingness to give a cocktail party at a moment’s notice. When a candidate needed to be entertained or a visiting dignitary feted, Stan was the man with the wine and cheese and the full liquor cabinet.

The reason Stan and Edith did not get along had to do with a party given in Stan’s honor. A couple of years earlier, Stan had left his wife of 19 years and his two children, and had moved in with David Kitto from political science. Although Edith had not known Stan’s wife, Clarise, well at all (nor anyone else at Notre Dame), the rest of the department had been friends with her. The response by a number of them to the breakup of Stan’s marriage was to hold a party for Stan to celebrate his coming out. None of this interested Edith in the least, and she had refused to go to the party, not because of his sexual orientation, but because she saw the breakup of his family as a tragedy, not a cause for celebration. She had told him as much when he asked her in the hall one day why she hadn’t been there.

“Too bad I didn’t know,” Stan said. “Clarise was holding a concurrent party for self-righteous homophobes,” and he threw his head back and started to shake with laughter.

“I think that what you did was selfish,” she said. “But private nonetheless. It’s the poor taste of your friends, nothing more, that kept me away from this party.”

Edith had had enemies before — a natural result of her own honesty and unwillingness to compromise her values, but none seemed as contemptible and bilious as Stanford White-Watson. Now she found herself in an uncomfortable alliance with him.

“We would like to have a Hispanic,” the dean finally told them, “but not this Hispanic.”

“What do you mean, you’d like to have a Hispanic?” said Stan.

“I have to agree with the dean,” said Jack Ormsby from engineering. “Her poems seem pushy.”

The dean looked at Edith and smiled.

Another member of the committee, Millicent Kent from copy duplicating services, mentioned that she had just noticed that the ad for the position had a comma splice in it that no one had caught.

“My God,” said Massey, grabbing the ad and peering at it closely. “I can’t believe that got by us.”

He passed the piece of paper glumly to Dean Smoot. “Too late now,” she said. “We’ll have to watch that in the future. That does not reflect well on us.”

“I want to talk about Mi,” said Edith.

The committee members looked across the table at her. Stan White-Watson tapped the edge of the table with a pencil. “Do you always have to be the center of attention, Edith?”

“The poet,” Edith said. “The Hispanic poet who, for some reason, threatens this committee.”

“I’m surprised she doesn’t threaten you, too,” Stan White-Watson said in a nasty tone and laughed again, but Edith ignored him.

“What exactly about her makes you so uncomfortable?” she asked the others.

“She’s vulgar,” said Millicent Kent.

“Tasteless,” said the dean.

“We just don’t like her work,” said Ormsby.

“I don’t think you’re judging her work,” Edith said. “You’re judging who you think she is. Judge the work.”

“It’s vulgar,” said Millicent Kent.

“I don’t get it,” said Ormsby.

“This is making me ill,” said Edith.

“Me, too,” said Stan. “We should at least bring her to campus.”

“We’re not authorized to bring anyone to campus,” said the dean. “We make our decision, and that’s who wins the fellowship.”

“Aren’t we allowed to simply not like her work, to think she’s not very good?” asked Millicent Kent.

“No,” said Edith. “You’re not.” She stood up and pointed a finger at the woman, who shrank a bit in her seat. “What do you think, Dan?” she asked Massey.

Massey simply gave her a befuddled smile like the fool he was. But in the end, Edith and Stan prevailed, with the pliable support of Dan Massey.

There was a connection between this young poet’s work and her own, Edith felt. They shared other things in common as well, such as a fear of flying. Mi currently had a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, and so took the train from Boston to New York to Chicago. The committee didn’t even have to ask Edith to pick her up at Union Station. Edith volunteered. She didn’t want anyone getting to the young poet before she did and possibly saying something off-putting.

On the cab ride from her Lake Shore Drive apartment to Union Station, Edith imagined a conversation between herself and Mi. Edith was always composing, talking to herself, imagining outcomes. This was what made her such a fine writer, her deep interior life, the almost spiritual plane on which she hovered.

“It’s an injustice that you have not won,” says Mi.

“I’m sure you’ll win someday,” says Edith. “You’ve won everything else.”

“I’d tell them that they should have given it to you, just as Hemingway said that Isak Dinesen should have won — though she was a colonialist, hardly a better choice.”

“Out of Africa, indeed,” says Edith.

“Perhaps you threaten them,” says Mi. “You must. But I would take that as a compliment.”

“I do, child,” says Edith.

Edith, absorbed in her dialogue with Mi, didn’t notice until the cab stopped that the cabbie had taken her to Northwestern Station rather than Union Station. By the time she arrived at Union Station, she was 20 minutes late and was sure that for once a train had probably arrived on time.

In the huge waiting hall of Union Station, the indistinct echoes and cries like exotic birds bounced off the stone walls. The place sounded almost haunted. Noise permeated the waiting area, a wall of sound created by a thousand travelers. Edith sat on a bench and scanned the crowd for the poet. A chubby black girl sat beside Edith, patting out some insistent tune on her thighs, looking in every direction at once, chatting maniacally with her mother and sister. Edith looked at the girl’s thighs, then directly at the girl, who seemed not even to notice Edith. Twenty years ago, Edith would have pretended to be color-blind, would have perhaps started up a conversation with the girl to prove to herself and anyone within earshot that she was color-blind. But she thought now, if I cast this girl in a story, would I mention she was black? Yes, this was the first thing she noticed about the girl. The second thing she noticed was the girl’s weight, both corporeal considerations. Why mention them? But what stood out for Edith in this hall of sound was that drumming the girl did on her thighs. Would Edith have noticed a thin white girl drumming on her thighs? She hoped so. It was the sound that annoyed her, only the sound, insistent and harsh.

Edith noticed a dark-skinned-but-not-black woman standing by a bank of phones, who seemed to be waiting for someone. The woman was tall and had an aquiline nose and a dancer’s posture. Edith fled the thigh-pounding black girl and approached the young woman by the phones with a warm smile and extended hand.

“Are you Mi?” she asked the woman.

The woman looked briefly with alarm into Edith’s eyes. “What?”

“You’re not Mi, are you?” Edith said.

The woman seemed to notice something far above her and then off to the left.

Edith backed away. “Mi. It’s her name. Mi. Mimi.”

But the woman seemed not to be listening. She was frozen with a grim expression, almost fearful.

“Does she look like Mi?” a voice boomed behind her.

Edith turned and saw Mi. No one Edith had ever seen looked like Mi. Her hair was reddish-blond, not brown as in the picture Edith had seen, but as she drew close, Edith could see this was a wig. Mi’s most striking aspect was not her reddish-blond wig, but the full-length black fur coat the poet wore, worth thousands of dollars, Edith was certain, but not the most appropriate fashion statement these days.

“She is not Mi. I am Mi.”

“Edith Margareten,” said Edith clearly and firmly to let Mi know just whom she had snapped at so imperiously. Edith held out her hand. The woman brushed her fingers to Edith’s and drew them back as though Edith’s fingers were sticky. She looked impassively at Edith, who panicked and thought, She doesn’t like my work. She thinks I’m bourgeois, pretentious. She’d better like my work.

Mi hardly spoke a word to Edith until they got into the cab to go to the InterContinental on Michigan Avenue, where Mi was to spend her first night. She turned to Edith. “So, are you a writer?” Mi asked Edith the same way Edith asked teenagers at book signings who obviously wanted to be.

Edith suddenly felt tired and could barely keep her eyes open. She wondered if Mi had been sent by a vengeful God to mock her, to humble her. She was Mi. Mi was she. It was a dirty trick, and she wouldn’t succumb, not even to God.

“Books,” Edith said. “Many books.”

“Tell me their titles. I want to read them.” But she did not sound convincing, and Edith could barely find the energy to talk.

“‘My Antonia’ ... ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop,’” she whispered.

“What? Speak louder.”

“My books are unimportant,” Edith said.

Mi nodded. “There are so few books of true importance.”

And then Mi started telling her about a trip she’d taken to the former Soviet Union a number of years back in which she gave a reading with Yevtushenko and Bob Dylan. “At the end of the reading, they gave me the flowers — they only give flowers to one person. The Russians love me.” Then she launched into a tirade against the Academy of American Poets. “They continue obstinately to ignore me.”

Edith nodded, but she wasn’t listening. She was thinking of a new story, and while she didn’t know exactly what this one was going to be about, she saw the last image quite clearly. She saw Brennerman as a thief in this story, breaking into Francine’s apartment and painting arrows on the walls of her kitchen. “What are you doing to my beautiful apartment?” she’d have Francine scream at Brennerman. “I thought this is what you wanted. Isn’t this what you always wanted?” Brennerman would ask, and that would be the end of the story. Now she only needed a story to fit that ending.

The next day there was no one to meet Mi at her hotel to bring her to South Bend. Mi did not make it to Notre Dame, perhaps not even out of Chicago. Edith never found out what happened to Mi. No one told her, and she did not ask. The other committee members were wise enough not to mention the word “Mi” in Edith’s presence, except as a personal pronoun. At the next meeting of the committee, Edith hardly said a word and half-listened to their recommendations — until Massey brought up the name of William Cradle Flower.

“I don’t remember William Cradle Flower,” Edith said.

“We were holding it back from you,” said Ormsby, the buffoon from engineering, staring into his coffee cup, which had a replica of the mosaic Jesus on the side of the library. “We didn’t want to excite you and Stanford too much.”

The faculty received two free tickets to every Notre Dame football game, and ever since the committee had formed, she’d given her tickets to Ormsby. But no more. She’d go back to tossing them in the trash, maybe ripping them up with great ceremony and scattering them in the hallway. The only time she’d ever been near a Notre Dame football game was once when she went to observe the strange men who prayed at the grotto and lit candles before every home game. Ormsby was probably their head priest, their oracle.

“He’s just kidding,” Massey said. He smiled at Edith warmly, and for the first time, she felt a nickel of warmth for him, too. Maybe he wasn’t hopeless.

Ormsby blew on his coffee. “The application came in late, past the deadline.”

“Who cares?” said Edith. “Is he good?

“He’s written a novel,” said Massey, “that takes place ....”

“If you like that kind of thing,” said Ormsby. “But it didn’t go anywhere.”

“It didn’t have a car chase?” White-Watson asked.

“I think it’s a beautiful novel,” said Millicent Kent. “It’s mythic.”

Edith looked down at her notes, pursed her lips, and waited a few seconds. Then she looked up at the woman from copy duplicating services and said, “The term ‘myth’ implies an irreality that native people do not feel. For them, there is no border between the empirical world and the world of dreams or myth. Ultimately, it’s a patronizing term.”

“Oh ... well ... what I meant was .....” said Millicent Kent, and she put on a long face. “I didn’t mean to patronize ....”

“Are we allowed to ask his tribal affiliation?” Massey asked the dean.

“Cradle Flower,” said the dean, picking at something on the sleeve of her jacket. “Cradle Flower. I can’t stop saying it.”

Edith took the novel home with her to Chicago, read half of it on the train and finished it that night at her kitchen table while sipping tea. She finished it by 2 a.m., but didn’t get to sleep until dawn — a combination of the tea and the excitement of discovering such a talent kept her from sleeping. The novel was titled “Incurable Hearts,” and that was the main character’s name. Incurable Heart was a Crow who, by day, worked as a park ranger at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and by night worked as a blackjack dealer at the Little Bighorn Casino just outside of the battlefield. Incurable Heart felt conflicted about the past of his tribe because the Crow had scouted for Custer against the Sioux, their enemies, and had been rewarded with one of the largest reservations of all the tribes by the federal government. He hardly ever slept and had visions of a coyote spirit, a trickster who was always confusing him. Sleepless and befuddled, he sometimes dealt blackjack to the RV tourists at the monument who wanted to hear about what a hero Custer was and who still referred to the battlefield as the Custer National Memorial. And sometimes Incurable Heart gave lectures on Benteen and why he wasn’t able to come to Custer’s aid, but he delivered these lectures at the casino while dealing to the same tourists who had visited the battlefield earlier in the day, the tourists who now wanted only to drink beer, sing karaoke in the lounge and get rich. Eventually, he was fired for incompetence and set off on a kind of inverted Candide-like adventure, accompanied by Coyote, who, like Pangloss in “Candide,” had his own reductive and impossibly buoyant outlook, despite the many deprivations and injustices they encountered on the road. Finally, they wound up in Los Angeles at the La Brea tar pits, where Coyote fell in and was trapped forever among the mastodons, despite Incurable Heart’s best efforts to save him by making a lifeline out of his 501 Levi’s. The novel ended with Incurable Heart spending the night in the drunk tank, arrested for vagrancy, public intoxication and indecent exposure, trying to convince anyone who would listen that it wasn’t too late to save his friend, that Coyote could hold his breath for an impossibly long time.

This was the new voice of a generation. Elements in his work reminded her of Marquez and Calvino, Kundera and Rushdie, Donald Barthelme and DeLillo, Erdrich and Morrison, Malcolm Lowry. But of all the people he could be compared to, William Cradle Flower’s work felt most like her own vision. She gleaned in his work a brilliance that she rarely saw in any of the younger writers. And best of all, unlike Mi, William Cradle Flower had not been discovered by anyone else.

The host of the welcome party for William Cradle Flower was Stan White-Watson. No surprise there. He lived in a sprawling house on Riverside Drive built in the Knute Rockne days. It wasn’t much of a river. Not the Hudson, but the St. Joseph. And not New Jersey on the other side but ... the other side. After all these years, she still missed New York and secretly felt sometimes that she’d made the wrong decision to come to the Midwest. Her reputation, while still solid, seemed to be stagnating, and she worried that people back East had forgotten her. Here, a party was only a party. People were supposed to have fun; they could do no more. Not that she missed the people, but the parties she used to attend back East were more than gatherings of people — they were gatherings of reputations. The people took up only part of the space; their reputations filled the gaps.

William Cradle Flower, who was being escorted by Dan Massey, had not yet arrived when Edith showed, but half of Notre Dame seemed to be there, including many from her own department whom she had never met or whose names she’d forgotten. She burrowed through them, found her way to the dining room and poured a glass of wine from the many bottles on the table. Retreating to a corner, she stood there with her coat still on and sipped, glancing away when anyone looked in her direction.

“It’s the Phantom,” Stan said, reaching out his arms toward her in mock horror.

The people gathered around him turned and smiled meekly at her. “Edith,” said Howard Salinas, the new chair of the department, waving her over, obviously trying to counter Stan’s rudeness. Stan, Edith knew, acquired his personality via his liquor stock, and most of it was pretty cheap, so she rarely was offended anymore by his barbs.

“Stan was just telling us about something called ‘Soul Retrieval.’”

“At a place called the College of Shamanistic Healing in Santa Fe,” said Tess Narokin, Howard Salinas’ wife, who taught Russian and French.

“Make fun of it if you like,” said Stan, “but I found it healing. We all need to be healed. All of us.”

He looked at Edith, but she said nothing and simply took a sip of her wine. She felt as though they were setting her up — Stan, especially, seemed on edge, already drunk.

“I, for one, prefer not to be healed,” she said finally.

“What do you mean?” asked Tess.

“I mean that I’m a kind of Christian Scientist of the spirit. I acknowledge the sickness in my soul, but refuse all known treatment, especially from doctors of divinity.”

“I knew she’d make fun of me,” said Stan.

“I’m serious,” she said. “My refusal to be treated makes me a better writer.”

The front door opened, and Dan Massey appeared, accompanied by a wisp of a man dressed in jeans, a sports jacket, a blood-red shirt and a little rope tie. He stood there for a second looking as though he’d entered the wrong bathroom and wanted to turn around, but Dan Massey ushered him in and closed the door. Stan, of course, was the first to greet William Cradle Flower. “Stanford White-Watson,” he said solemnly, grasping William Cradle Flower’s hand and leading him into the living room. “One of those three-barreled names like yours,” he said, but Edith cut him off before he could launch into the extended history of his name. She could almost hear his teeth grinding. If there was one way to torture Stan White-Watson, it was to cut him off, either speechwise or liquorwise. Like so many of these academics, he had a compulsion to hear himself speak.

“Edith Margareten,” she said, extending her hand. “Your novel was superb. Welcome.”

William Cradle Flower looked at her with wide, little-boy eyes. But he wasn’t a little boy. His hair was thinning, and he had deep smile lines around his mouth. His eyes were blue, and his hair was sandy blond, what Edith’s mother had always called dirty blond.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” Stan asked.

“A rum and Coke,” said William Cradle Flower.

“Rum and Coke?” said Stan. “How old are you?” He gave one of his trademark laughs and left.

Massey, standing in between Edith and William Cradle Flower, glowed like he was marrying them.

“We had dinner at the LaSalle Grill,” Massey told Edith. “Bill was telling me that he admires your work more than almost anyone alive.” Massey was speaking loudly, distinctly and a little more slowly than normal.

“Do you like to be called ‘William’ or ‘Bill?’” Edith asked, wishing she could protect this frail and quiet young man from the buffoons around them.

He seemed not to hear her. He brought a finger up to his mouth and started gnawing at a fingernail.

“Here’s your rum and Coke,” Stan said, handing the drink to Cradle Flower. “So, as I was saying, my father was a frustrated architect, and he named me after Stanford White. I suppose he would have preferred that I become an architect, too, but all I build are castles in the air. My last name is Watson, like Sherlock Holmes’ assistant. But I’m not a doctor, though I have a doctorate, and the detective I assist is not Mr. Sherlock Holmes, but Mr. Jacques Derrida. The crimes we investigate are crimes of hermeneutics.”

William Cradle Flower looked up as though a smoke alarm had gone off. His eyes brightened, glowed almost mischievously, and he said, “My father was a frustrated rabbi.”

“He wanted to be a rabbi?” Edith asked.

“He was a rabbi ... he was frustrated,” said Cradle Flower. “For a while, I wanted to be a rabbi too. But I have always felt, even as a little boy, like an Indian.”

Edith’s stomach turned over. She rooted in her coat for a hard candy. She was down to her last one. The little candy sat snugly in its roll, a long snake of wrapping trailing around it.

The novel was good, she thought, but not that good. If she hadn’t been so tired when she read it, she would have discerned how derivative it truly was.

“We have met before,” said Cradle Flower to Edith.

“Oh boy,” she said. “When was that?”

“Twenty-three-hundred years ago when I was a Levite. That was before the Temple was destroyed.” He pointed to Massey. “You made music.” He pointed to Stan. “You made the fire.”

“What did she do?” Stan asked, indicating Edith.

“You made the sacrifice.” Cradle Flower said, turning to her.

For a second, Edith could see herself with the knife in her hand, poised over the animal’s throat.

“But those other people no longer exist. We have all changed our names. I had my name changed to fit my true nature. I am a Miami warrior. I was here in South Bend when La Salle came through. I sat under the Council Oak and exchanged gifts with him.”

Cradle Flower gulped down his rum and Coke and sat beside Edith on the Victorian loveseat she occupied. He smiled shyly at Edith and said in an almost-normal voice, “I’m so happy you liked my writing.”

Edith popped up and the candy went down her throat undissolved.

“What was your name before you changed it?” she asked. She wondered what the dean would put in her scrapbook under Cradle Flower’s name. “In this lifetime.”

“As ego fades, we return to the elements that surround us,” Cradle Flower said.

“Your name,” she said again. “Your real ... name.”

“Ha ha ha,” Cradle Flower sang in a sing-song. “Who’s afraid? Ha ha ha. Who’s afraid?” and he rocked back and forth in the loveseat, his eyes fixed on Edith.

“This man is insane,” said Edith to Massey. “We can’t award him anything.”

Massey fluttered his hand. “Legally, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s done, Edith. And it’s only for a year.”

“But, our reputations,” Edith said weakly. She saw herself in a cemetery, dressed in mourning. She saw herself rending her garments. She saw Mr. Singer. “I told you,” he said. “Hats ... are your true calling.”

She bent down and pulled one of the large buttons off Cradle Flower’s red shirt like an officer stripping a subordinate of rank. “We paid for an Indian.”

“Edith,” said Massey.

“I always knew she was a bigot,” Stan said and gave one sharp laugh. “A hell of a nom de plume,” he said to Cradle Flower. “You had us fooled. Oh well.” Stan looked at Massey and said, “You need your drink freshened?”

Cradle Flower stood up and stopped his sing-song. He stood stiffly at attention, his eyes on some invisible point like a national flag that only he could see, but which claimed his undying loyalty. “My name,” he shouted, “My undying name ....”

The room quieted and they waited for the man who called himself Cradle Flower to speak. Even Edith waited, as though an eternal mystery was about to be solved.

“My one true name is Crevecoeur,” he said.

“Heartbreak,” yelled Tess Narokin with the intensity of a jackpot winner. “That means heartbreak in French.”

“Or Willow,” said Cradle Flower. “Or Otter ... Mackinaw Island ... Space Needle ... Or the wind. Or Grandfather. Or The Spirit That Resides in All Things, or Bebe Rebozo, Jack Lord.”

“You never know,” said Stan, draining his glass.

“It’s still a hell of a novel,” said Massey.

“Or Dream Pillow,” Cradle Flower said. “Skunk Medicine. Or the Owl. The Pussycat. At sea in a pea-green boat. We are living in the time of the Seventh Fire. We have no need for names.”

Edith wanted to cry, wanted to jump into the St. Joseph. Arrows. Everywhere, she saw arrows. In their hands, instead of drinks, through their hearts, on the walls. On the floor. Like a goofy joke, she imagined an arrow poking through her head. This is what she looked like, what she’d been carrying around for so many years, the source of her pain, her voice, everything rich and bankrupt, ridiculous and blessed.

“What a fool,” she said to no one in particular, patting the side of her head. She looked around the room and saw her lantsmen, her people. She was almost ready to embrace them.

“Brennerman,” she said, a name she detested now.

“Or Brennerman,” the man said, nodding, his eyes no longer lucid.