Come, get for me some supper,—
A good and regular meal,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the pain I feel.
—PHOEBE CARY
THAT WOMAN IS A WITCH,” Jane Birdwort hissed in my ear. The night was dark and cold as I left my office, and I couldn’t understand why Jane, this year’s visiting poet, was lurking outside Dickinson Hall, nearly hidden behind a marble column. Except for Ms. Birdwort, the campus common seemed entirely deserted, and both Jane and her odd greeting startled the hell out of me.
“Wh-who?” I stuttered, as I regained my equilibrium.
“That one.” The small woman in the drab quilted jacket pointed at a bulky figure just disappearing around the corner of the college library. The short, stocky shape was easily recognizable as that of Monica Cassale. Funny, the English Department office had been unlit and locked for at least an hour; I’d assumed she’d left campus long ago.
“Monica? Well, she’s not the friendliest person in the world,” I replied, “but I wouldn’t exactly call her a witch.”
“She’s a witch,” Jane asserted, nodding sagaciously. “She—”
The massive Dickinson Hall door creaked open. As Elliot Corbin advanced down the granite steps, Jane put her finger to her lips, as if to vow me to silence, and scurried away into the darkness. I stared after her, until she vanished in the same general direction as Monica. Had Jane been standing there waiting for that one brief glimpse of Elliot? But why?
Lights flickered on in dormitory windows as students returned from dinner and prepared for Friday-night dissipations. The library, just to the left of me, was lit up like the Titanic, but the academic departmental buildings clustered around the oval campus common were dark. Not many Enfield professors had as little to do on a Friday evening as I did. A chill wind whistled around the corner of Dickinson Hall and blustered through my wool jacket. Winter was lurking somewhere behind the placid facades of this tidy New England campus, and I was in no way prepared. I followed Elliot in the general direction of the parking lot. Thoughts of the lonely bed awaiting me did nothing to take the bone-numbing chill out of the walk. He got into a red BMW. I got into my ten-year-old gray Jetta. The Jetta’s failing heater gave off about as much warmth as a mouse panting on my ankle. I’m certain my colleague was as toasty as his distinguished career could make him.
The phone began ringing the second I inserted my key in the deadbolt keyhole. I counted one ring as I turned the bolt, then two more as I fumbled with my key-ring in an effort to find the other doorkey. On some evenings the moon and stars would have provided key-light, but not tonight, and at seven-fifteen that morning, rushing to get to class on time, I hadn’t found it essential to turn on the outside light. I was operating in the Stygian darkness of a narrow porch attached to a small house on a country road with no visible neighbors. On the fourth ring of the phone I found the key. Five. Six. I found the keyhole. Seven. Eight. The door slammed behind me as I dropped my book bag on the floor and sprinted toward the kitchen. On the ninth ring I knocked my shin on an end table in the unlit living room. Just as the tenth ring began, I grabbed the phone. “Karen? Help!” choked a distraught voice on the other end of the line.
“Jill? My God! What’s the matter?” The overhead light flared on as I flicked the wall switch.
“You’ve gotta help me,” she sobbed, “before I do something violent.”
“Whaa?” I was used to Jill Greenberg’s hyperbole, but my young friend had never threatened violence before.
“Oh, Karen, she’s been screaming all day, and I can’t make her stop! I’ve tried everything, and nothing works. Now I’ve started screaming back. Who knows what I’ll do next!”
“Oh, you mean Eloise!” I relaxed. Jill’s baby was four weeks old. The infant had inherited not only her mother’s red hair, but, obviously, her relentless determination as well.
“Yeah. Eloise! Nothing’s wrong with her, but she won’t listen to reason; she just keeps on screaming. I never heard anything like it. I don’t know what to do. Oh, I’m such a terrible mother!”
Listen to reason? A new-born baby? “Jill, you’re not a terrible mother. You’re just overwhelmed—it’s all so new to you. What can I do to help?”
“Kenny says if I want to go out for a while, he’ll watch her. He says I’ve just got to relax. So I thought maybe you and I could get a bite somewhere.” Kenny Halvorsen was Jill’s neighbor. He lived in the other first-floor apartment in the sprawling college-owned Victorian that housed half a dozen faculty members. Big blond Kenny, the soccer coach, had taken on the role of Jill’s friendly protector, but I’d suspected for some time that his feelings for her had become a bit more complicated than that.
In the month since Eloise’s birth, Kenny had become a surrogate uncle and I’d become a surrogate aunt. Jill needed all the help she could get; the father of her child was five-months dead—and probably wouldn’t have been on the scene had he been living. Jill seemed to prefer that kind of guy—the irresponsible kind, not the deceased kind.
A half hour later, having changed my teaching duds for jeans and an acid-green sweater, I was back in Enfield, at the Blue Dolphin diner. When Jill rushed in fifteen minutes after the appointed time, she threw her arms around me. “I can’t believe it,” she cried. “A night out! Just like a grown-up person!” I hugged her back, then held her at arms’ length to get a good look at her.
I couldn’t get over the change in Jill. A week before Eloise’s birth, she’d had her wild red-gold curls radically clipped—a “mommy cut,” she’d called it—and, if it weren’t for the newly zaftig nursing-mother bod, she’d have resembled nothing so much as an eight-year-old boy from Norman Rockwell Land.
“What’re you looking at?” she demanded. Then she gave a little shriek. “Oh, my God! Are my boobs leaking?”
I laughed. “No, your boobs are fine. It’s just that … that … well … there’s so much of them!”
“Yeah? Well … every cloud must have a silver lining, they say. I just hope some of it sticks to my boobs. Now, listen, Karen,” she said, beckoning to the waitress, “I don’t want to talk about boobs or babies; I’m starved for food and I’m really starved for gossip. What’s going on at school? Tell me everything.” Jill was on maternity leave from the Sociology Department.
I filled her in on all the gossip, then told her about that afternoon’s altercation in Elliot Corbin’s office. “Wow!” Jill responded. “He actually said you double-crossing bitch? Who do you think he was talking to? And what do you think it was all about?”
“I’ve been pondering that …” I paused to order the Blue Dolphin’s famous Friday-night beef stew. Jill requested a bacon cheeseburger, extra-large fries, and a salad with blue-cheese dressing. “… and Monday is the deadline for the Palaver Chair application—”
“What’s the Palaver Chair?” As I began to answer, she held up a slim hand. “Oh,” she said, looking solemn, “I remember. That was Randy Astin-Berger’s position, wasn’t it?” My colleague Randy had been mysteriously murdered two years earlier, and I’d had a hand in assisting the police investigation.
“By the way”—without giving me a chance to respond, Jill veered abruptly off the topic—“do you ever see that homicide cop? The lieutenant? You know, the one that you—”
“Piotrowski? No. Why would I see him?”
“It’s just … you know … that I thought he was kind of cute, in a very large way. And, you, you’re all alone—”
“Jill! Give me a break! I do not need another cop in my life. One was enough!” Tony, my ex-boyfriend, was a state police captain in Manhattan, in charge of a drug investigation unit.
“Yeah, but you really loved Tony, and I don’t think you’ve ever gotten over—”
“I have so!” I sounded more petulant than I’d meant to. The waitress delivering the tall, sweating glasses of Diet Coke shot me a sympathetic look. Men: Ain’t they the pits?
I smiled at her meekly, and stripped the wrapper off my straw. “And besides,” I told Jill, lowering my voice, “Piotrowski has no interest in me. He thinks I’m a pain in the neck. And, I don’t even know if he’s married or not.”
“He doesn’t have that married look.” Jill smiled knowingly. “Methinks the lady—”
“Give me a break!” I repeated. “Let’s get back to Elliot.… That nasty quarrel I overheard probably had something to do with one of his political machinations.” I told her about how my colleague had been lobbying for the Palaver position.
“What’s his research field?” Jill asked.
“He’s an Edgar Allan Poe scholar. A couple of years ago he came out with a book called The Transvestite Poe.”
“I saw that on the Enfield authors display shelf in the library. It’s got a really hunky picture of Elliot on the back.”
“Yeah.” I laughed. “The picture’s even more famous than the book: the scholar as postmodernist pinup boy.” The black-and-white photograph was a dramatic shot of Elliot casually dressed—in black, of course—smiling ambiguously at the camera, with a semi-industrial wasteland in the near background. The book, a cutting-edge investigation of gender fluidity in Poe’s poems and stories, had made Elliott’s current reputation. It had deviated sharply from his earlier, more traditional, work, ending a scholarly dry spell of over a decade, and establishing him on the contemporary map of the American intelligentsia as a fearless avant-garde literary critic. Thus, the plethora of speaking engagements after Elliot’s long academic silence.
“About Elliot’s book,” I said, cattily, still affronted by his earlier rudeness, “I, personally, thought it was trendy and shallow.”
“You think that counts for anything? What you, a lowly-worm assistant professor, personally thought?” Jill teased. “Face it, Karen, you’re not the one globe-hopping on the expense accounts of prestigious international institutions of higher learning.”
“You’re right, of course. But I’m also not the only member of the Enfield English Department who finds Professor Corbin’s reputation just the teensiest bit inflated. Miles Jewell—”
“Oh, I’ve heard about that. Your chairman has a blow-up of Elliot’s picture taped up in his garage, right? And after department meetings he hurls tournament darts at it.”
“So they say,” I replied. The beef stew had arrived, and I speared a potato with my fork. “But that’s enough about Elliot Corbin. Let’s talk about you and why you’re feeling so frazzled. And by the way, there’s this little damp circle right in the center of your left breast—”
Jill gave another little shriek, dropped her burger without taking a bite, and scurried to the ladies’ room.