Those who don’t feel this love
pulling them like a river,
Those who don’t drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset
like supper,
Those who don’t want to change,
let them sleep.
— Rumivii
1
A TENTATIVE KNOCK ON MY OFFICE DOOR, as I swivel round to face Katherine Bridgeston. Slightly older than other graduate students in her cohort, Katherine seems to have been schooled by the real world: the crab circle drabness of demeaning work in cramped cubicles, grimy walkups with exorbitant rents, loveless nights, taxes, and the like. At that time, nothing but speculation on my part, of course. I smile at the tall, open-faced woman in the doorway.
“Sorry for being late. I over-slept my alarm,” she confesses.
“A likely story.”
“It’s the truth, Stefan. It’s what happens when one is over her head writing a paper for ecology in the wee hours.”
I notice the heat in her cheeks. She diverts her eyes. “No worries, Katherine. Punctuality is not one of my obsessions. See, no clocks anywhere. No watch either.”
“Are you some kind of throwback?”
“In some ways I am a throwback. In others, I qualify as a systems wonk.”
She places a tiny digital recorder on my desk. “You okay with me recording?”
“Sure, but you’re not going to upload it anyplace are you?”
“Nope.” I note a peevish grin. “This conversation is just between us.” She pauses and flushes again, maybe at the brashness of her coquetry, hovering over my desk like a swallowtail. Her caramel eyes are alert and glimmering. I can’t help being drawn to them. I imagine that they could become a home for my own. Her beauty, not exactly perfection, surprises me up close. The individual elements are mighty pleasing: shimmering hair and the way it dances across her shoulder and round her long neck, her natural linen skin, her lips, fuller now than I remembered in class, an intriguingly proportioned torso, great hands. An enigma: how the sum of all renders me motionless. I abruptly lower my eyes. I ponder her self-assurance — a quiet confidence both overt and somehow sheltered. Despite my inclination to keep fantasies at bay, my imagination fires up. Maybe we could get something going. Settle down and raise some beautiful kids with delicate faces and bodies like hers. We’d live on a farm outside of town, do a big vegetable garden, milk some goats, have cats, a couple of horses, go contra dancing Saturday nights. Whoa! She’s my student.
“Okay,” she says, adjusting the recorder. “Professor Mansfield told us that this interview is meant to garner deeper background on the education and expertise of a faculty member in our school. Deeper, that is, than that you can get from a prof’s website. I chose you, lucky man.” She looks up and I note something mischievous there, followed by a tiny throat clearance.
“Lucky I am.”
“After the interview, we’re to write a 1000-word paper as if it were an article for The New York Times Magazine or for Slate dot com.”
“Sounds like fun.”
She shifts forward in her chair, leaning over the desk, and studies a page of her notebook.
“First, why no website?”
“Actually, no grand design or lack of it. I just haven’t got around to it. Teaching two classes, attending too many meetings, and trying to think and write all seem more important than self-promotion.”
“I get that. No clocks, no website.”
“I do have a computer.” I point to my battered laptop with the Kenyan flag. She utters nothing more than “I see”.
“Tell me about your upbringing. Where did you grow up? Go to school? What interested you as a kid? Early life stuff.”
“I grew up in Maine, a small town called South Bow. Ever heard of it?”
“Can’t say as I have. But the one summer I spent in Maine changed my life.”
“Changed your life. What were you doing in Maine?”
“I was a counselor-in-training at a camp near Eastport. I was fourteen. It was my first time away from home. There were international kids there doing the same thing — a couple of Brits, one girl from France, another from Israel, several Canadians from across the border in New Brunswick. They really opened my eyes to a world beyond my provincial upbringing. One of those kids was an Italian guy. He was sixteen and seemed so sophisticated. He got me interested in Italian. I learned some words, a bit of slang and street talk, how to flirt. After that summer of puppy love, I promised myself I would try to learn how to speak Italian like a native.”
“Did you ever follow through?” I force myself to ignore the puppy love bit.
“Si!” She beams a smile gaining like dawn. “I took four years of Italian at Virginia and spent a semester in Florence. After graduation, I went back to Florence and worked there. Talk about immersion! Can you imagine trying to keep up in an office of smart native speakers who were perpetually trading barbs, mostly with sexual undercurrents?”
“I cannot. That’s an incredible accomplishment. Is there a way you could put your Italian to use here?”
“Maybe. Um, so … South Bow. Tell me about your days there, going to school, academic interests, what you did in high school, where you went to college.”
“South Bow is a crossroads about 20 miles from Gardner in southern Maine. Population 828, last I looked. No supermarkets or other big boxes, still a few mom and pop businesses, no stop lights. A friendly place where folks know each other, sometimes too well. Through childhood and my teens, I spent lots of time in the woods, fishing off the coast, hanging out at the beaches in summer.” I pause as my mind tracks back to those days of innocence.
Katherine waits patiently. She seems to comprehend my reverie.
I come back. “I was an okay student in elementary and middle schools, then became a drifter at the periphery of high school activity. Okay, with better than average grades. Not a national merit kind of kid, though never labeled a loser. My parents wanted me to be more engaged but I wasn’t into sports, student council, stuff like that. Sports teams there were called the Moose. How’s that?”
“Not exactly a nimble critter.”
“My kind of critter. My interest was not in the Moose, at least not the ones on the gridiron. I liked bird watching, tracking animals, climbing mountains and hiking, skating and skiing in winter, fishing in summer. I did well enough to get into Southeastern Maine University. Majored in anthropology with a minor in field ecology.”
“Do you speak a foreign language?”
“As you already know, some Latvian, my parents' native tongue, and Swahili. I did research in East Africa. Got to use it daily, mainly to ask where to find the local duka — the little shops in every village, where they sold Tuskers. Most of the interviews in my project were done in the vernacular, Kikinyati . I needed interpreters to help with that.”
“Tuskers?”
“Kenya beer.”
“Ahh. Say, I’ve been wondering about your surname. Does it mean ‘free man’ in German or something?”
“Yes, it is Germanic, same derivative as people with the last name, Freyman. It may mean ‘man from the place called Frie or Frey’. But I like being thought of as a ‘free man’.” As usual, I expected this would get a rise.
“Ah ha, a happily single dude,” she ventures.
“So far.”
She straightens up, puts on a resolute face. “Let’s go on to your grad work. Did you go right on to grad school after South … what was it?”
“Southeastern Maine University. Yes, I got into an environmental studies program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and somehow persisted there to the PhD.”
“How long?”
“Seven years.”
“Aarg! I don’t think I could do that. I’ve heard that tenacity is more important than smarts in doctoral programs. Is that so?”
“It’s partly true, especially for those like me who aren’t geniuses. I’m a patient person who likes to take his time getting a grasp on things. Also, I was overseas almost two years in Kenya. When I got back to Madison, I was lucky enough to land a fellowship to write my dissertation and get out some publications. I was in no hurry. But that was almost a decade ago. Nowadays, they give you only three or four years of support. People are rushed through their degrees.”
“It still sounds like a long pull.”
“From what I know about you, Katherine, you’d be fine. You’re ambitious and capable. You could be one of those high achievers rather than a turtle like me.”
“A turtle! That’s the last animal I would choose as your totem. But for me, even if I were to have the ambition, I can’t imagine another five years of stress. And I think I’m too old. Gosh, I’d be trending toward middle age by the time I finished.”
“Sorry Katherine, that’s absurd. How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight. And you?”
“Going on thirty-three. See, if you stayed with it, you’d only be a bit older than I am now. I don’t think of myself as anywhere near middle age and people don’t hit their prime creativity until the early forties.”
“Yeah, maybe. Let’s see, back to you. Umm, what do you think of Gilligan? Living in Argolis? Social life here?”
“I can answer those questions but don’t you want to know about my dissertation, my teaching, what I’m writing, what I read? You’ll get an F on Manny’s assignment.”
“Yes, of course. Still a bit sleepy, I guess. Manny?”
“Between us, that’s what the old guys in the school call your prof, Patricia Mansfield. Behind her back, of course. She and Sophie Knowles, who is ‘Soapy’ to them, and Marilyn Shesky, who they call ‘Pesky’, are the only women among twenty-plus faculty. That number tells you something about this school. The women joke among themselves about their nicknames but they surely feel the sexism and derisiveness. I don’t blame them.”
“Wait a minute, you called my prof ‘Manny’ and the senior faculty ‘old guys’? Aren’t we being a little hypocritical here?”
“Yeah, we are, or more accurately I am.” I feel increasingly drawn to the pluck of this woman. Compared to others of my grad students, she seems comfortable in her own skin, confident of her intellect. Many of the others seem so mainstream Ohio obedient, even phlegmatic.
“Sorry, that was discourteous. When I arrived, I introduced myself to two of those senior faculty, who shall go unnamed. They were climbing the stairs, both in plaid Bermuda shorts. Their knobby-kneed legs made them look like chickens. They were probably on their way to write arcane papers for journals nobody ever heard of. Since then they haven’t made the least bit of effort to interact with me. But not all the senior faculty are like that. I’ve got a nice friendship going with Burt Zielinski, the climatologist. He couldn’t have been more welcoming. Ah, sorry! None of this is helping you gather information for your paper. And, if you would erase all this gossip, I’d be very pleased.”
I rise and stretch toward the ceiling, breathing a sigh that reverberates around the office. Katherine looks up, wondering about the abrupt break. She draws in a deep breath, seems to be swooning.
“You okay?”
“Yes, yes. Just a little overtired.”
“Say, do you think we could continue at The Eclipse?” I ask. “I’m sorely in need of a second cup of coffee.”
“That would be lovely. Let me gather my things.”
We descend the dimly lit stairway, passing undergraduates rushing upward to class. We break out into the bright morning, the maples ablaze as crackling fires. Across the street, we elbow our way into The Eclipse Coffee Company, a chintzy converted house with 1980s fixtures and vinyl covered booths. The Eclipse is favored by science and engineering geeks on Southwell Quad, especially international students, who this morning fill the place and hold forth in many tongues. With two steaming mugs in hand, I point toward the patio. She follows, a bounce back in her step. We choose a sunny table.
Sitting in the sunshine, filtered by a honey locust, on an autumn day of perfection, sipping strong coffee, exotic languages just a table away, Katherine is silent, perhaps, like me, willing the moment to infinity. I sip my coffee, basking in the sunshine and her company. I look her way and pull a roguish smile.
She blinks. “Oh yeah, the interview.” She turns on the recorder. “Okay, let’s do the academic questions. Tell me about your dissertation research and what’s come of it?”
I tell her about becoming fascinated with Africa, taking African Studies courses, and learning enough Swahili to function in Kenya. I describe the influence of Kate Nickleby, an ecologist with a strong interest in cultural ecology. I explain that she was my advisor and dissertation supervisor but also my mentor and friend, the one who introduced me to complex adaptive systems theory and panarchy.
Katherine interrupts. “So, our text is your mentor’s book? And she was called Kate?”
With that she pries my heart open. “Yes and yes, the very one.” I’m sure she senses the abrupt turn in my mood.
She nods. She looks across at me, gathering in my troubled expression, but she says nothing about it.
I continue, saying that Kate and I had published several papers. I tell her of the morning Kate was found dead on her office floor, and of how hard it was to return to my writing. I admit that I cannot stop thinking about this woman and her calculated risk. I confess that I will always cherish Kate’s wisdom and kindness.
“It must be so difficult to call up those memories.”
“Eyup, course ‘tis,” I reply, my Down East accent surfacing. “But if I stop telling Kate’s story, I fear I may lose her. You understand, perhaps.”
She wraps her index finger around her chin and nods. “I do.” That she was so palpably suffused with the sensibility of loss, summons once again my own unrelenting sorrow. She smiles a sad knowing smile, a smile that seems to convey a grasp of tragedy in the midst of living life amply and of redemption in revealing life’s inexplicably painful twists. She almost whispers. “One of my favorite poets, the Palestinian American, Naomi Shihab Nye, wrote that ‘kindness and sorrow are the only ways to know the full size of life’. I live by her words.”
“Beautiful lines, those.”
Back to the interview, she asks about my philosophy of teaching.
“Based on a few weeks in my class, what would you say about my teaching? You can be honest.”
She ponders the question a moment. “I see structure in the way you’ve laid out the semester for us. I also see flexibility depending on where discussion takes us, day to day. I think you have tough standards and are committed to having us really learn what you’re teaching. I think I speak for my classmates here.” She pauses. “These standards are challenging for us, Stefan. We work twice as hard in your class as in the others combined. Though we moan about papers that bleed red, I think one day we might be thankful for your high standards. Finally, well not finally, but for now, I find your ways of teasing out information and stories from us intriguing and somewhat mystifying. It’s like you’re liberating our imaginations. I’m not sure how you pull that off, but it sure leads to good chemistry. Finally, really finally, I think you sometimes see us more clearly than we see ourselves. That is truly spooky.”
“Yeah, I do try to see each of you as interesting and important people and so you are my teachers.”
“Funny how that works.”
“One of humanity’s most virtuous cycles, for sure. Most of what you just said accords with what little I’ve thought about a so-called philosophy of teaching. The term is somehow repugnant to me. Teaching is primordial human behavior — from mothers and grandmas to the guy who taught me how to fish, coaches, even cellmates in prison: none of these has a philosophy of education but each may be offering important lessons. Everybody’s a teacher at some point. Good teaching is just being hospitable toward somebody who wants to learn. That’s how I see it. In the end both parties benefit, the teacher often more so than the learner.”
“Who taught you how to fish?”
How curious that she let the bit about teaching as a prosaic act collect dust.
“My father.”
“Okay,” she says abruptly. “I think I’ve got plenty to work with here.” She put away the recorder. Heat radiated off her face as she embraced the crisp morning in this classically beautiful and captivating university. “I love it here,” she says.
2
Enough for a Saturday morning! I cannot bear to read one more undergraduate essay. Great gods of grammar and style, whatever happened to high school English? I change into running togs and huff through fifty push-ups. From the drinking fountain in the hallway, I fill my water bottle, insert it into my runner’s pack, lope down the stairs two at a time, and head east. In less than a mile I cruise onto a rail-to-trail path along the Shawnee River. Unexpectedly, off to the left, I see hundreds of people wandering among dozens of open-air stalls beneath an array of multi-colored umbrellas and canopies. An acoustic trio with a guitarist, a bassist, and a banjo player fills the air with folk tunes. A woman and man in clown costumes dance. Children skitter from booth to booth. Laughing groups of international students mill about.
This joyful market scene matches my mood so perfectly that I decide to explore the offerings: the stalls of organic vegetables, potatoes, squashes and pumpkins, sunflowers and mums, apples and pears, pawpaws, baked goods, meats and cheeses, locally prepared salsas, spices, relishes, granola, honey, and maple syrup. Not since Kenya had I encountered the happy union of farmers and villagers at a weekly market. I come upon a guy overseeing “Peace River Peppers”. On a long table, he has spread a colorful array of sweet and hot peppers and jars of preserved pepper jams, salsas, and relishes. He’s an elfin, late middle-aged man, brown bearded with streaks of gray, dressed in a faded ochre t-shirt with the message, “Patience? Shit!”. He smells of Patchouli oil, musty leather, perspiration, and animal manure mixed with the smoky essence of ganja .
“Lovely looking peppers. Is this your mainstay?” I ask, lamely.
“Ah no, I’ve got a diversified, all-purpose little vegetable farm with goats and chickens. Some horses: Percherons, Morgans, a nag or two. Sustains me and the little woman who sleeps next to me. She’s the one who claimed back about 30 years ago, ‘If I can grab hold of yer pecker, yer heart will surely follow’.” He laughs boisterously.
“Are you a regular vendor here?”
“Well, not exactly. I only come to town in late summer when the peppers and the neo-hippy chicks are ripe n’ pretty and I can trade some weed. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Peter Pecker packed a pipe of potent paca loco.”
“Weed? Isn’t it illegal in Ohio?”
“Wahl, shure. But county sheriffs look t’other way thanks to payoffs from certain growers. Aw, they hire a ‘healiocopter’ for a week every August to rattle those who make our living from the sacred herb. Mostly for show, they bust a couple of growers each season, the ones who refuse to pay tribute. Then they forget about the rest of us.” He removes his UFW cap to scratch a disheveled mop. “Say, are you in the market for some Grieg County Gold?”
“Not at the moment, thanks. The last time I smoked, I got seriously dizzy and barfed all over my date.”
“Well, podner, you know where to find me. I’ll be here until about November fifteenth.” He held out his beefy hand. “Rutherford Bosworth Hays. People call me ‘Boss’.”
“Pleased to meet you, Boss. I’m Stefan Friemanis, here for a couple of years to teach environmental studies at GUO.”
“Well, Stefan, you and I may need to talk. I got a lot of environmental concerns, shall we say?”
“I’d like that! But now I’m off on a run to Great Gable State Park.”
“Good luck to you. Exercise is good for the body and soul. Me, I regularly exercise my right wrist here, snapping off the tops of cans o’ Bud. Then I go to a neck workout, tipping that golden liquid down ol’ Boss’ gullet.”
“That’s one serious workout.”
As I walk away from Boss, I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder. I turn to see Katherine Bridgeston smiling brightly with a “Hello stranger!” accompanied by a girlish fluttering of her left hand. Her fathoms-deep caramel eyes appear to crave something I naively hope is more than a brief hello. “My god, Katherine, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you!”
“Yeah, Thursday seems ages ago.” She laughs bashfully.
An irresistible urge, verboten though it might be, bubbles up. I want to invite Katherine to hang out with me today. She looks vibrant in her loose-fitting Gilligan sweatshirt, raggedy jeans, scuffed Converse sneakers. “Getting a week’s worth of veggies and fruits?” I ask. If this isn’t the worst pick-up line I’ve ever uttered, it must be close.
“That I am. And you?”
I explain that this is my first time at the market, that I’d just begun a ten-mile run and couldn’t resist stopping. “It’s seems like a Norman Rockwell scene.”
“Norman who?”
“Ah, I guess you’re a bit too young to know about him. I’ll tell you about Norman another time.”
“Okaaaay. So, are you an accomplished road runner? A marathoner, maybe?”
“No, no. I’ve never run a race. I’m not prone to competition”
“I do remember that about you — and our lovely sunny morning coffee at The Eclipse. By the way, I got an A on the paper based on that interview. Many thanks for that.”
At that point, an awkward silence ensues. Apparently, we had run out of small talk. As I am wont to do on such occasions, I remove my baseball cap, the faded red one with the big W, and aimlessly run my hand through my hair. Katherine crosses and uncrosses her arms and shifts from foot to foot. At last, she breaks the silence. “Stefan, could we step aside someplace? I have something to ask you.”
We leave the market and head toward a park bench. We sit side-by-side in the shade of tall sycamores. Their yellow leaves drift over us like parachutes. A pair of mourning doves flutter out of a branch above. The whistling sounds of their wings fade. Katherine’s eyes track them into the blue. I study her.
“What’s on your mind, Katherine?”
She leans toward me and looks straight into my eyes. She draws in a deep breath. This triggers a faint but unnerving alarm in the reptilian part of my brain. Her face seems twisted with emotion. Her eyes are shut tight as if she’s about to expunge a nightmare.
“Is this something tragic?”
“No. But it’s more than a little bit daunting.” She then hurls words across the space between us. “Look, I have something I must tell you. It’s about Blackwood Forest. I need advice. But what I have to say must be held in confidence. You could be at personal risk. If hearing this makes you feel uncomfortable, we can stop right now. Honestly.” She pauses breathlessly, looking at me, deeply expectant, as if my reply could somehow alter everything from here on.
Shit. I admit to being thoroughly bedazzled, this entrancing woman so close-by. With nary a thought about consequences, I reply, “Whatever this is, it sounds intriguing. I sense there’s something menacing about it, something not to be taken lightly. Yeah, you can trust me. Go ahead.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you.” She exhales a long breath and her body visibly relaxes. She stretches her taut arms, interlocks her hands outward with another sigh, then drops them quickly to her lap. “This may seem like some kind of fictional thriller, but trust me, it is not. This is really happening here at Gilligan and it is very creepy. Let me just spin it out as factually as I can.”
“Okay.” I try to imagine what she could be intimating and begin to wonder whether I’d made a mistake.
In the next few minutes, she unveils the story — the stakes being Blackwood Forest and maybe other university property, the fossil fuel wealth, the tycoon Jasper Morse, Lara’s dissertation on warblers and her career, the drillers Lara encountered in the forest, the student activists, Dr. Tulkinghorn’s creepy insinuation of Hannah, the university’s energy plan. She asks if I could discover what my colleagues in CNRD think about Blackwood and whether I could suss out information about Tulkinghorn. She finishes by telling me her fellow activists have been clamoring for demonstrations and boycotts.
“You are a pacifist and your students know that about you and respect you. Look, could you help us keep things non-violent?” She pauses and looks behind her, as if she expects Dr. Tulkinghorn to leap out from behind a sycamore. “There you have it: the improbable story that’s been driving me bonkers.”
She reaches into her shoulder bag for a water bottle. As though it were vintage Bordeaux, she takes a few tiny sips and daintily dabs her lips. “Sooo, I promised the other students that I would seek the advice of an unnamed GUO staff member. All along, I had you in mind. I never told them who I would consult, just that it was someone I trusted.” Rather primly she asks, “Now, knowing what you know, what do you think?”
“Stranger than fiction,” is all I could come up with. I immediately regret my vapidity but that thought leads to another. I mutter a question.
She replies with another. “Oh my, are you asking me to go out with you?”
“Yes I am.” Good lord, she seems aghast.
But then she says, “I hope you’re not kidding because I’ve been a silly fool these past few weeks, dreaming of getting to know you better.”
I try to belie my giddy heart. If ever the word providential applied, this is the moment. “Look, Katherine, I need time to ruminate over your cloak and dagger tale. How about we discuss this over dinner this evening?”
“Oh yes, I would like that,” her throaty voice channels Katherine Hepburn. Katherine Hepburn? You archaic dweeb! She tilts her head and continues to grin.
“Alright! What if I were to pick you up at your place at, say, six-thirty?”
“That would be beautiful.” We sit a few more moments, grinning and nodding like teenagers.
I realize I know nothing about her. “By the way, where is your place?”
“Two-thirteen Spruce, apartment two.”
“Okay, Katherine, I’ll be there, six-thirtyish.”
3
I pull up to the curb in the two-hundred block of Spruce Street. Alfred Jaggers, my landlord and colleague, loaned me his wife’s car for the evening. “Natalie’s out of town,” he explained, “and besides she would be more than happy to let you borrow it. She’s intrigued by you. Not to say hot for you. And she’s not alone, I’d guess.”
“You got a big date tonight?” Alfred asked.
“Well, a date, not sure how big it’s going to be. But I do need to escape the uptown scene on a Saturday night.”
“Good choice,” Al agreed.
Apart from meeting a GUO anthropologist named Martha at the Monsoon Cafe for dinner a couple of times, I had not initiated a full-fledged date in several years. Sure, I’d hung out with a few women in grad school and had fallen unintentionally into a couple of relationships, but these were typically short-term and low-budget — a movie and beer and pizza at somebody’s apartment on a Friday night, followed, often regrettably, by heartless sex. Then there had been that trip in East Africa with Gathoni. Those were nothing like this: me, a guy going on thirty-three, battling a nervous stomach, beating back wild fantasies, and behaving like a dizzy teenager on his way to the prom.
I knock on her door. Katherine bounds down the steps and greets me warmly, ready to roll. With amicable banter, we drive twenty miles north to the small town of Bennettsville, then westward another few miles on a winding road into the Creola Hills. Just beyond Hemlock Falls, I turn into the Barn Swallow Resort. Twilight imbues the autumn foliage with hues of burnished red, tangerine, and gold. We amble across the parking lot and into the restaurant.
We’re escorted to a corner table in the darkened log cabin. A giant crackling fire in a fieldstone fireplace, heavy oak beams, rough-hewn walls, and wide-plank pine flooring cast a rustic aura. Memorabilia and photographs from Ohio’s early years portray the pioneer history of this hill country, a time when men were men and women suffered the consequences, or so I imagined. Like one of those nineteenth century women, our waitress appears wearing a full-length paisley homespun dress. She hands us two leather-bound menus and lights a homemade candle while chatting about the cabin’s history, the evening’s specials, the wine list. We settle on a bottle of sauvignon blanc.
I stealthily scan the half-full dining room and see no one I recognize. I tell Katherine that she looks great and I thank her for accepting my invitation.
“The pleasure is all mine,” she says. “I’ve been so buried in my studies, in such a graduate student funk, I’ve not been able to even imagine a night like this. It feels so magical. Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah, anything, sure.”
“Are we breaking code tonight? I mean, are professors warned that they must not date their students?”
“Ah Katherine, codes are made to be broken. Let’s enjoy the evening and forget our roles for a few hours. I’m just Stefan, a thirty-two-year-old lover of life who finds Katherine an intelligent, sensitive, and enchanting woman. Simple as that.”
“What more could a woman want? Except that you may have forgotten one of the main ingredients tonight. You, a professor, are poised to advise me, a student activist, about Blackwood Forest. Not to take the shine off the evening.”
“There’s that, yes. But let’s first drink some wine, enjoy our food, perhaps stroll around before we get to the hard stuff.”
“Here’s to procrastination!” She lifts her glass to a toast.
Looking at the menu, Katherine tells me, “Gosh, Stefan, these prices are in the D.C. stratosphere. Are you sure you want to treat me?”
“Hey, I’m a professor, remember?”
“Aren’t we supposed to be forgetting our roles?”
“Oops, yeah. My point is that big bucks flow into my account every two weeks, compliments of GUO and the great state of Ohio. Let’s live it up.”
“Big bucks, eh?” She inclines her head as if she knows something of visiting professor pay scales.
“Well, not hedge-fund-manager big bucks, but more money than I’ve ever made in my life. More even than the combined incomes of my still working parents. And, not to cast a pall over things, but our dinner could be equal to half the GDP of Malawi.”
“And what am I supposed to do with that?”
“I’ve no idea. More wine?”
Over dinner, I steer the conversation toward Katherine. “You know, because of that interview for Patricia Mansfield’s class, I believe you have much more of my story than I have of yours. Mind if I try to redress the balance a bit?”
“Well, okay, but actually, you may know more about me than you realize. In that interview you subtly asked as many questions as you answered. That’s when I got the clue you might someday want to know even more.”
“But I did not ask about puppy love with a dashing Italian boy in the Maine woods.”
“'Tis true and thanks for the discretion.”
“Did it unnerve you? A professor becoming too inquisitive?”
“Unnerve me? Not close.” She sips, sets her wine glass down, lapses briefly — an inexplicable elision, her dewy eyes far away. She rallies, looks my way. “You know, Stefan, I haven’t dared to dream of an evening like this. But like that fourteen-year-old girl in the Maine woods, I have not been able to quell my infatuation.”
Needing no more confirmation of an evolving chemistry, I refrain from pursuing the matter of infatuation, reminding myself of our ‘legal’ roles. I allow my mental image of a yearning fourteen-year-old Katherine to float toward the fireplace and up the chimney.
“Tell me something of your Virginia upbringing: your family, your younger years.”
“Well, my family is not nearly as exotic as yours. We are ordinary middle class white Americans with a bit of history. The Bridgestons arrived in Virginia in the eighteenth century, landed gentry, with slaves we presume. How ghastly it was for my dad to have come to that conclusion several years ago.”
“I sympathize. I read a book by Edward Ball called Slaves in the Family. It was a painstaking and painful tale of the same sort. But it is unproductive to take on the guilt of ancestors who lived three centuries ago.”
“Uh huh, true. More or less what my dad decided. On my mom’s side, the Kemmerles and Chamberlains, came from Scotland, arriving in Virginia in the early 1800s when Jefferson was president. No slaves there as far as we can tell. They settled in what was soon to become Charlottesville and they were reputed to have known Jefferson. Many generations down the line, my mom’s dad, Robert Kemmerle, was an orthopedist who also taught in the University of Virginia Medical School. His wife, my grandmother, Hattie Kemmerle, kept the home together. She’s still living. A widow. Eighty-four now, I believe, and she promises to come across the mountains to visit me. She’s my North Star. Her grit and loving heart keep me going.”
Katherine continued. “Mom met dad at the University of Virginia when they were students during the seventies. She was a pre-law student; he was studying English literature with a minor in secondary education.”
“Does your dad teach?”
“He does. He teaches English at Eastern Shore Junior College.”
“Hence the incredulous response to my ‘big bucks’ claim, as well as your extraordinary vocabulary.”
“Well, my dad’s a wordsmith and so, in fact, is mom. We grew up with word puzzles, playing Scrabble, tossing around senseless puns, challenging each other with newly discovered words. And, yeah, I’m aware that salaries in education won’t lead one into the upper middle class. In our family, we’ve always had two incomes. Mom has a law degree and a good job as Clerk of Circuit Courts for Northampton County. Together, they built a comfortable life for our family.”
“Where exactly is Northampton County?”
“On the Eastern Shore — part of the Delmarva peninsula that juts between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. Only the very southern tip is Virginia. My hometown is Cape Charles, a little town with less than two thousand people.”
Waxing lyrically about being a child there, Katherine tells of fishing and crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay and surfing, just a few minutes in the other direction, in the Atlantic Ocean. She speaks of her sister, of white and black playmates and friends, her many activities, her small public high school, and lovingly of the shore birds and seasonal waterfowl migrations.
“So, we have similar small town histories and the salty sea in our veins,” I observe.
“The salty sea. I do miss having it nearby,” she admits.
“Me too, but Gilligan and Argolis have their charms, don’t you think?”
“Surprisingly so. “
“Getting back to you, Katherine. You told the class on the first day about working in Florence at the time of the global financial crisis. I remember that you mentioned in our interview that your fluency in Italian landed you a job there. You obviously lost your job as the economy faltered. Tell me more about Florence.”
Katherine falls silent. Her eyes sag toward her unfinished salad. She seems to be holding her breath in discomfort. I cannot read the sudden change. “Sorry if I’ve ventured into terra infirma. We can change the subject.”
She shivers an apology. “Well, Florence held many fond memories and one life-shattering one. I can relate the fond ones. I’m not sure about sharing the other, at least for now. Almost five years down the road, it still feels raw.” She sighs audibly. Her chiseled cheek bones seem to recede. Her jaw tenses. “Some days, honestly, it’s like a seriously cracked gigantic tree limb hangs over me, dangling in some hideous way, about to crush me. Sorry to sound so dramatic. The image may derive from Hurricane Floyd which passed right over the Eastern Shore when I was a teen. We lost trees in that storm. One mammoth branch demolished the porch roof just below my bedroom window.”
“Sounds like you endured more than your share of pain in Florence. That story can keep.”
Forcing brightness, she refurbishes the empty space between us and tells of Florence and its museums, galleries, and restaurants, her work and colleagues in the publishing house. She says that losing her job was a shock. It forced her homeward far sooner than she had planned.
“On return to the U.S., my main mission was to help my mom recover from breast cancer and surgery. The good thing, the miracle in our family, is that Mom has fully recovered. Five years later, she’s a breast cancer survivor at fifty-four. In 2009, when she was clearly on her way back to full health, she dispatched me to Washington to seek my fortune. That’s when I got a job waiting on tables at F.J. Crostini, a restaurant in Georgetown. I also wrote and edited for FCNL, and with these two part-time jobs, I was able to pay my bills … barely. Four years in D.C. convinced me I’d better skill-up, as they say.”
“How fortunate, your mother’s recovery. What’s FCNL?”
“Yes, Mom is the most positive cancer survivor you’ll ever encounter and she’s become an activist on the Eastern Shore. Your other question?”
“FCNL.”
“Yeah. FCNL is the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobbying organization.”
“Quaker lobbying? That seems somehow an oxymoron. Are you a Quaker?”
“No, no. Nominally Episcopalian but long since lapsed. Lobbying in D.C. does seem un-Quakerly, but they’ve been trying to keep Congress honest since the 1940s. When I worked there, they were building coalitions around issues their membership deemed crucial, like disarmament, the defense budget, environmental justice, climate change, Native American well-being, and so forth. It was more-or-less a losing battle, given how dysfunctional Congress had become. But FCNL didn’t see it that way.”
“Altruistic, great-hearted causes”.
“Yes, it was fulfilling work and FCNL was staffed with progressive, sweet people working with uncommon dedication. It was hard to leave them.”
After our main courses, we share a slice of carrot cake with mints and coffee, a tiny hint of something I dare not name. Katherine wonders aloud at the way fate has drawn us simultaneously to Gilligan at this time in our lives, a fable newfound couples often recite. Without cynicism, I tell her, “I would much rather praise old man fate than to say, as somebody once did, that he plays a mean game of chess.”
“What makes you think fate is not a young woman or a trans-gendered person?”
“Hell’s bells. She/he could be. She may even be a child at play.”
I sign for the check and we wander outside to an open patio behind the restaurant. There’s a path lined by low lighting and manicured patches of sensitive ferns. It leads toward cottages on the other side of a small lake. A chorus of crickets lends ambiance to the crisp evening. Putting aside this backdrop and repressing my desire to deepen our friendship, I say, “Blackwood …”
She draws closer to me, takes my arm, one of the more erotic moves I could imagine at the time. Later she asked me, “Where is it written that I may not touch this man whose heart reaches out to mine and whose neck carries the fragrance of the pines and hemlocks of these hills? Touch is my birthright.” And so it was. My own heartbeat quickens and the atmosphere seems charged, as if the pathway has gained intelligence.
“Blackwood,” I repeat, “is poised to become a victim unless you activists can become smarter about the forest, the law and natural resource politics, and about the theory and practice of non-violence. You need to amass hundreds of willing believers in protest — day-after-day, night-after-night. You must engage the Ohio media, work behind the scenes with sympathetic faculty, of whom there surely will be several in CNRD. You must be prepared to expose Morse and then be ready to cut a deal with the administration.”
“That’s it in a nutshell?” she asks.
“Yes. It is easily spoken, but it may be difficult to achieve. It comes down to tapping into student wrath, channeling that wrath, and building solidarity, despite the odds, despite the fear of failure. Street actions around the world these days have been propelled by social media. Twenty-somethings have written the playbook. I know nothing of it. But when this strategy works, as it did in Tunisia, other media are drawn like ants to honey. Once a critical mass has gathered, there’s no telling how it will behave. It will be hard to contain let alone manage. Leadership must be nimble, inclusive, reflexive. Circumstances will constantly change. Egos will assert themselves. They must be squelched as must those who would brandish weapons or torch or loot.
I remember a quip going around at the time of the 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq. Somebody said, ‘This may work in practice but will it work in theory?’ My point is that protests theoretically can be perceived as complex systems with untold emergent properties. What looks to be successful on the ground may be otherwise up the hierarchy and in the long term.”
She grasps my arm more tightly. “Oh, Stefan. This is seriously scary to me.”
“No gainsaying that.”
“Where do we start?”
“If you find what I’ve said helpful, share it with your co-conspirators. Tell them about the absolute need for confidentiality, especially if you find Tulkinghorn and Morse are in collusion. Not to frighten you, but, if the stakes are as high as you suggest, the risk of exposure could be dangerous.”
“No wonder I’m on overload.”
Arm-in-arm still, we complete the path’s circuit and return to the car. En route back to Argolis, Katherine wants more details. Using the light of her phone, she scribbles notes. I promise her that I will try to assess attitudes about Blackwood among my colleagues. Coming into Argolis on the Cambridge Road, we nearly side-swipe a cyclist dressed entirely in black and riding an unlighted bicycle. The cyclist swerves at the last moment, regaining balance on the road’s shoulder.
“That guy must have a death wish,” Katherine ventures.
By the time we pull up to 213 Spruce, it’s after one o’clock.
“This was a lovelier evening than my teenage alter ego could ever have conjured,” Katherine says in a dreamy voice.
Though it seems a moment of transcendent possibility, I can only sputter the mundane. “And a wonderful evening for me too, Katherine.” I take her hand and gently squeeze it, my first tentative gambit. “Fate willing, we will find ways to enjoy another such evening. That is, if she sees rightness in such a project.”
“How could she not?”
Our intimacy to this point had reached its peak in the arm-in-arm walk around the lake. Now I realize I need to thread my way through unfamiliar terrain, pitted as it is with emotional and perhaps legal quicksand. I say, “Were we not student and teacher at this moment, I might gently place my hands on either side of your delicate face, draw you to me, and kiss you lightly before escorting you to the door. But that’s for another semester, assuming you would not balk and you understand the wait.”
Katherine shifts subtly toward me. “I cannot wait,” she whispers. She stretches across the console and blindly lands a long tender kiss, missing my lips at first. When she slowly withdraws, her hands softly tracing my jaws, she expels a trembling breath. Retreating to her side, she giggles. “Whew, I am out of practice.”
“More practice, more practice,” I say, shivering through a smile.
She remains still, her eyes closed, her breath slowing, her knees pressed together.
We climb out of the car and walk to her door, my arm around her waist.
She says, “Much as I’d like to invite you to climb these stairs, against all my impulses, I shall resist the temptation.”
“Good call, unfortunately. Sleep well, Katherine.” We hug briefly and kiss once again.
I drive home, the pulse of a wider life thumping my temples. I pose unanswerable questions: Had we been intimate to the nth degree, would I be more delirious? Would she? What is it about her that evokes Kate?