TO MISS MARYANNE VEER, Donegal Steele was not a son of a bitch—Miss Veer didn’t even think in words like that; they were vulgar and immodest, and never once in her sixty-three years had she ever been tempted to either sin—but a threat of apocalyptic importance, the trumpet blast of an approaching Armageddon. Miss Maryanne Veer had come to Independence College at the age of nineteen, fresh from a year at the Katherine Gibbs secretarial school in New York City. Except for the two-week educational walking tours of European cities she took every July with her friend Margaret Lorret, that year represented the only significant time Maryanne had ever spent outside this small Pennsylvania valley. First she had lived with her mother, then she had lived alone, then she had let Margaret join her in a small house she had bought at the edge of the campus with the money from her mother’s life insurance policy. None of these changes seemed to her to be of the least importance. Miss Veer’s life was a seamless garment. Houses came and went, friends and relatives came and went even faster, but The College went on forever. Ever since she had first wandered onto this campus at the age of six, a shy child with a ferocious passion for books being brought up among people who thought all reading was done by radicals and “queers,” Miss Veer had known she was going to find her home in it.
Now she looked down at the piles of pink message slips spread out across her desk and sighed. Back then, it had never occurred to her to do the obvious and apply for admission. Half a dozen students in her own high-school graduating class had been taken on as commuters, all tuition paid by the Crockett Memorial Valley Scholarship Fund. Maybe it was the fact that those students had all been from the other side of town, where houses were neat and conscientiously painted and fathers were present and meticulously sober, that had made her believe, unconsciously, that she was not qualified to be among them. Maybe it was just that, in that time and in that place, “secretary” was the job most women were taught to aspire to. Either that, or “teacher.” Miss Maryanne Veer had never suffered from the delusion that she had the talent to be a teacher.
Sometimes she wondered if she had the talent to be sixty-three years old. Maybe that was her problem. Under the old rules, she would have been forced to retire in just two years. Now she could stay on until she was seventy, and until the Great Doctor Donegal Steele turned up she had been looking forward to that. She had come to The Program—Miss Maryanne Veer always thought in titles and capital letters; The Program was her interior designation for The Interdisciplinary Major in The American Idea—at its inception, years ago. Since then, through a succession of weak-minded and weakly educated chairmen, she had pretty much run it on her own. She would go on running it on her own, too, as long as the Great Doctor Donegal Steele didn’t get himself installed in the chairman’s office.
She heard a squawk in her ear, and realized with some embarrassment that she still had the phone wedged up there, and that Margaret was still on the line. When Margaret started talking, she also started blithering. When Margaret started blithering, Maryanne tuned her out. It was a simple matter of self-defense. If Maryanne had listened to everything Margaret said, she’d have gone crazy in a week.
Once, back in 1975, when the college employee educational program was first started, Maryanne had taken a course in introductory psychology. Most of it she had considered criminal nonsense. Part of it she now had to admit the truth of. She and Margaret were the quintessential example of what that course had called The Female Couple: Margaret “feminine” and dependent to the point of ludicrousness; Maryanne herself rigid and rational to the point of caricature. The only thing the course had got wrong was the bit about sex. Miss Veer couldn’t imagine having sex with Margaret. Miss Veer couldn’t imagine having sex with anybody.
She adjusted the telephone receiver and said, “Margaret? I’m sorry, Margaret. I got distracted.”
“Did you put me on hold?”
“Only mentally. I’ve got a desk full of message slips here.”
“I know, dear. You’re very busy. I ought to get off the line. But I think what I was saying had a lot of merit in it. Don’t you?”
Because Maryanne hadn’t heard a word Margaret had said beyond “hello,” she grunted. Margaret would take the hint.
Margaret did. “I don’t think you’re giving enough weight to the seniority business, Maryanne. I really don’t. After all, Dr. Steele has only been at the college since the start of the semester—”
“Dr. Steele came in as a full professor. Tenured. The administration likes him, Margaret.”
“I know they do, dear, but—”
“And he wrote that book.” Miss Veer made a face, and then wondered why she’d done it. There was nobody here to see her, “That book,” she said slowly, “has sold six hundred thousand copies. In hardcover.”
“The Literacy Enigma. Yes, Maryanne, I know. But you said yourself it wasn’t very scholarly.”
“It’s famous,” Miss Veer said patiently. “He’s famous. Famous authors attract students. And with a dwindling student candidate population—”
“Yes, yes, Maryanne. I understand that. You explained it all yesterday. But I don’t see how you can leave the seniority out of it. I mean, the college really doesn’t know a thing about this man. And look at what’s happened now. He’s disappeared. He isn’t reliable.”
“He hasn’t disappeared, Margaret.”
“Well, what would you call it? He didn’t show up for his ten o’clock class. You told me that yourself. And he hasn’t shown up since. Have you tried calling him at home?”
“Of course I have.”
“And was he there?”
“No, Margaret, he wasn’t. If he had been, I wouldn’t be fretting about these messages. But—”
“I think he’s run off for the day with one of those students of his. You’ve told me again and again how awful he is about women. He’s probably locked away in a motel room somewhere, doing—well, doing God knows what.”
Miss Maryanne Veer sometimes read an off-campus, student-generated publication called The Hedonist, meant to be a contribution to “the alternative press.” She corrected the grammar in it—which took a lot of work—but she also paid attention to the things it said. By now, although she would never have admitted it to anyone, she knew exactly what was implied by “God knows what.”
Still.
She looked down at the message slips again and shook her head. The door to the office was open, as it always was. Only the chairman’s inner sanctum was kept private and shut. Anything she said could be heard outside in the hall—assuming there was anybody out there to listen to it.
Maryanne picked up the message slips she had written out to the Great Doctor Donegal Steele, looked through them, and found the three she wanted. They had come in at three-hour intervals over the course of the day, becoming increasingly hysterical. They were all from a girl named Chessey Flint.
That was the problem with Margaret’s analysis of this little glitch in the life of the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. If he was going to be camped out in a motel room with anybody today, it was going to be with Chessey Flint. His only other interest at the moment was in Dr. Alice Elkinson, and that was entirely unrequited. Maryanne knew for sure.
She dumped the message slips back on the desk and said, “I have to get off the phone, Margaret. I still have a hundred things to do before I can come home.”
“Of course,” Margaret said. “You just get busy. We can talk about all this later.”
“We’ll talk about it over dinner.”
“I’m making Yankee pot roast for dinner, dear. I know it’s not your absolute favorite thing, but I had to do something with the meat. I just know it’s not a good thing to leave meat for too long in a freezer.”
The meat had been in the freezer for less than a week, and Maryanne hated Yankee pot roast. It didn’t matter. Margaret had already hung up.
Maryanne hung up, too, and then sat for a while looking at those message slips. Then she got up and put them in the Great Doctor Donegal Steele’s departmental mailbox.
At the back of her mind, a warning light was blinking on and off, telling her that something was very wrong here. Whatever else Dr. Donegal Steele might be, he was not the type to miss his classes or fail to show up for his appointments. He was not the kind to drop out of sight without phoning the office at least three times to make his presence felt. He was positively addicted to having an audience.
If it had been Ken Crockett or Alice Elkinson who had started behaving like this, Miss Maryanne Veer would not have been worried.
As it was, she could think of only one thing: Wherever that slimy little fool had gone, she hoped to God he stayed there.