Quoth the raven,
“Nevermore.”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE
AT 7:51 MONDAY MORNING, AS I pushed open the heavy front door of Dickinson Hall, a shadow detached itself from the general darkness in the corridor as if in response to the intrusive wedge of misty daylight. I peered down the hallway and fumbled for the light switch. The shadow seemed to falter, then gathered momentum and slipped around the corner. I flicked the switch and illuminated the hallway. Nothing there. Hallucinating again. That’ll happen when you stay up half the night reading Poe in preparation for an early-morning class.
An eight o’clock session with my freshmen was a challenge. Everyone was still groggy. Because I was all too often tempted to indulge in a few extra moments of sleep, I usually trotted directly from the parking lot to my classroom in Emerson Hall, the large administrative building in the center of campus. But this morning I’d stopped at my office first, to retrieve a photograph of Poe I’d filed away with other literary miscellanea. I was moving fast, because I hate to be late for class. Certain other professors, naming no names—certainly not naming powerful, full-professor names such as Elliot Corbin—will, without apology, stroll into the classroom five, ten minutes late, open their briefcases, open their mouths, and, without looking up from their notes, pontificate without ceasing until the bell rings.
I don’t teach that way. The literature classroom is a seldom-again-to-be-encountered-in-one’s-lifetime opportunity for students to engage in thoughtful, informed dialogue about crucial human dilemmas. Dialogue is the operative word—not professorial monologue—at least, as far as I’m concerned. In later years, a student can always go back to a reference book and recover facts and scholarly opinions, but in my classes we talk. How often will a student have the occasion to figure out for herself that, when Walt Whitman refers to his poetry as a barbaric yawp, the image has something to do with snatching American poetry from the hands of the educated and privileged? Or, when Emily Dickinson refers to herself as Nobody, she seems to think that’s a good thing? Or, when Charlotte Perkins Gilman has her narrator peel away the yellow wallpaper, maybe, just maybe, that narrator is deconstructing centuries of male texts that oppress and imprison women? I like to leave my comfortable Enfield College students just a little bit less comfortable when they finish a course than they were when they began it.
The big UPS box stood in the middle of my office, directly between me and the filing cabinet where I kept the Poe photograph. The box! If I’d been thinking a little more coherently when I’d gone to the town library yesterday, I could have brought a knife or something, proceeded to campus, and opened it then. But—there was no time now: four minutes to class time, and it would take me that long to get across campus.
That morning I taught “The Raven.” Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore …, I read to my dreary—weary, bleary-eyed—students. In spite of my admonition at our previous meeting, nobody had come to class with anything particularly thoughtful to say about the poem. Including me. So I read aloud some more: Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow—
“Why didn’t he try Prozac?” Today Mike Vitale looked like himself again, rather than like the ghost of someone I couldn’t quite identify. The bristling ponytail and gold earring gave a sardonic edge to the long jaw, intellectual forehead, close-set ears.
I laughed. “What is it with you and Poe, Mike?” I teased him. “You haven’t been this unrelentingly critical of any other writer.”
He slapped his hand down hard against the open pages of his poetry anthology, startling Tom Lundgren, who jumped almost as ludicrously as I did. “I think ‘The Raven’ is the stupidest poem I’ve ever read. I mean—Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Give me a break! That’s like a line from some kind of a third-rate computer game—something with a name like, oh, Avian Raptor!” And Mike went on to wax even more sarcastic about this poem than he had about Poe’s stories, almost as if he had some personal agenda in deflating the poetic reputation of America’s Poet of the Terminally Weird.
Most of the other students, however, liked the poem—although they were relentlessly biographical in their discussion of it. I urged the kids to re-examine their direct equation of life and poem. “Edgar Allan Poe is such a compellingly bizarre figure that I know it seems impossible to separate his personal history from the art of his poetry,” I said. “Now, Whitman’s poems, and Dickinson’s, too, would doubtless survive on their own merits, even if we knew nothing about the authors. But would Poe’s?” I asked. “Without the legends of drinking, fighting, illicit romance, charges of forgery, Emmeline Foster’s purported suicide—not to mention his marriage to a thirteen-year-old cousin—would you still be interested in this poem?”
They gaped at me: Was I kidding? Drinking? Fighting? Suicide? Teenage sex? Who needed poetry? And besides, it was the final day of class before the Thanksgiving break; nobody wanted to think about poetry.
After class, I stood in the doorway and collected essays. As Freddie Whitby handed me hers, Elliot Corbin pushed through the double doors that lead from the administrative offices. I nodded at him as he passed by in the hall, and slipped Freddie’s paper to the bottom of the stack; the sight of Freddie Whitby’s prose wasn’t bearable quite so early in the morning. As my colleague disappeared down the corridor, I couldn’t help wondering what Poe expert, Professor Corbin, would have made of my class’s discussion of “The Raven.” There had been nary a mention of transvestism; Elliot probably would have thought the discussion was hopelessly banal. With difficulty I jammed the freshman essays into my book bag. I really had to take a few minutes and go through this bag; it was so overloaded I hardly knew what was in it any more. One of these days I was going to lose something—probably a student’s paper; then I would really be in trouble.
“Here, let me help you carry that.” For some reason Mike Vitale had again lingered in the classroom after the others had trooped out for their breakfasts. “It looks heavy.”
“Thanks, Mike, but I can manage. Did you want to see me about something?”
“No,” he replied. “Not really.” Cautiously he poked his head out into the corridor and looked around. Then, giving me a breezy goodbye, he departed.
The campus seemed soaked in a clammy late-fall miasma as I headed for the coffee shop after class. Brick and stone buildings wavered in the mist as if they were emanations of the air itself. Students and colleagues wafted by, as indistinguishable from one another as if they were phantoms. I shivered in my heavy wool jacket and pushed open the door of the coffee shop. The pungent scent of dark-roast Colombian roused me from my own personal fog. Dumping my heavy book bag on a table in a sequestered window nook, I slid my tray along the stainless-steel counter, reached behind the bagels to retrieve a pumpkin muffin, then poured coffee into a white ceramic mug and sipped it as I waited in line to pay. Round tables hosted a mix of students and between-classes professors. Wan light slanted through the mullioned windows and illuminated the white stuccoed walls and ceiling, casting faint, narrow shadows next to faux half-timbered beams. A good place for a few moments of quiet reflection before the FroshHum staff meeting later that morning.
I’d scarcely had a chance to take a bite of my muffin when Elliot Corbin plunked his mug of black coffee and plate of unbuttered whole-wheat toast down on my secluded table and plopped his gym bag on the floor next to my feet. “What are you doing way back here in the corner, Karen?” he asked, sliding into a chair. “Hiding from students?”
And colleagues, I thought, but I laughed at his sally, nonetheless. Being untenured weasels an assistant professor into all sorts of petty hypocrisies.
“That’s not a very healthy breakfast,” Elliot commented, gesturing toward my muffin with a virtuous triangle of dry toast.
I smiled noncommittally, broke off a big muffin chunk, and stuffed it in my mouth. None of your business, big boy, I thought.
“So,” my companion continued, munching his toast, “you’re teaching Poe, are you? I was walking by your classroom this morning and heard a few snatches of the discussion.”
“Oh, really?” Damn. Why hadn’t I remembered to close the classroom door?
“I suppose it’s none of my business,” Elliot said, “but I do think biographical analysis is a markedly wrongheaded approach.”
I sighed, and tried to hide it in a gulp of coffee. What the hell was Professor Elliot Corbin doing lurking outside my classroom long enough to get the drift of a class discussion?
“But, then, of course, it’s understandable that I would have developed a far more sophisticated pedagogical approach than you, Karen, immersed as I am in Foucauldian theory.…” I nodded, swallowing my sudden hot irritation along with my coffee. Tenure, I consoled myself. Tenure. “And also seeing as I have some not inconsequential experience with graduate teaching.” He paused. I was supposed to be impressed.
“Really?” It was all I could manage.
“Oh, yes. I’ve taught several graduate seminars at the state university over the past few semesters. They’re only too happy to avail themselves of a scholar of my reputation.”
“How nice.” I got the words out, but the admiring smile died somewhere between my servile untenured status and my integrity.
Elliot was off, in full lecture-hall mode. “As I advise my grad students, when we literary critics speak of an author, we have an obligation to address, not some putative human being, but, rather, the author function. When I say Poe, for instance, my reference elides the man as an independent historical or biographical entity, and contemplates Poe, the discursive function, the ‘author’ as a body of language operating within a social and cultural field, a published, circulated, and commented-upon compilation of words and works generated by and functioning within cultural discursive formations. And thus …”
I stopped listening; I’d heard it all before. I’ve read Foucault; I am, after all, a late-twentieth-century literary critic and my thinking has been indelibly impacted by postmodernist theorizing. But I wouldn’t want to imagine the response in a freshman classroom to the bloodless suggestion that we discuss the badly behaved and deliciously fascinating Edgar Allan Poe as a discursive function. I’d rather talk about anything else, even the ways in which all the love was leaking out of his life—or whatever it was Freddie Whitby had claimed. In spite of my impatience with the emotional hyperbole of eighteen-year-olds, I do understand a little bit about the loss of love.
I banished the thought of Tony immediately; he was married now, and gone, gone, gone. Another image flitted by: Avery Mitchell, Enfield College’s president. Since an evening last spring when he’d kissed me on a lovely New England mountainside, we’d had only fleeting, and awkward, encounters—mostly over the establishment of a research center recently donated to the college. I bit my lip to subdue my wayward imagination. My elegant and handsome boss was reconciled with his wife and living an exemplary college-presidential life.
“The positionality of authorship within a systemics of race, class, and gender …,” Elliot droned. I think he was boring even himself; we both started as his watch beeped. “My God, handball,” he exclaimed, jumping up from the table. Elliot’s daily handball game was a big deal. He designed elaborate computerized handball schedules around his classes and the classes of the colleagues he bullied into playing him, then posted them on the bulletin board in the department hallway and on the department’s Internet website. Elliot allowed nothing to come between himself and handball. Without saying goodbye, he grabbed his gym bag and pivoted toward the door, bulldozing between Earlene Johnson and the student with whom she was in earnest deanly conversation. Earlene glared after Elliot, then turned, curious, to investigate his trajectory. When she saw me in my corner, she raised her eyebrows: What now? Handball, I mouthed. Earlene slumped her shoulders dramatically—Jeez—and turned back to the student.
I sipped at my cold coffee, and brooded. Guys like Elliot, arrogant, with super-organized lives—and super-organized intellects—get to me. I didn’t know Elliot Corbin very well; he was too busy being an academic celebrity to have much time for the junior faculty. But he seemed to be a man who had it made: full professorship, hefty salary, clearly theorized intellectual life, no personal encumbrances—at least I’d never heard of any wife or children. I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting at his place tomorrow evening. I could picture the house a man like that would live in: white walls, blond wood furniture, leather and chrome chairs, cool, light, uncluttered space. Just like his mind: fashionably furnished uncluttered space. The author function, I thought, sarcastically. How disinterested. No need for Professor Corbin to consider messy human lives and messy human needs: All he had to do was deconstruct a body of language constituted within a cultural field.
But surely there was something just a little bit smarmy in Elliot’s need to eavesdrop outside a colleague’s classroom?
“What’re you doing back here in the corner, Karen?” Earlene slid into the seat Elliot had just vacated. “Hiding from students?”
I laughed, with genuine humor this time. “Earlene, I’m not going to tell you who else just asked me that very same question.”
“If it was Saint Elliot of the handball court, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to share the same language as that man. I can’t begin to tell you how many students have—Well, Karen, you know I can’t talk about the problems students bring to me. But, you can imagine.…”
An icy drizzle rendered the campus walkways slippery and treacherous. When something slammed into me from behind, I went down hard, my overloaded bag flying, books, pens, and class notes scattering. I hit the ground with a thud and an uffff as all the air in my lungs was forcefully expelled; then I lay dazed on the ice-slick concrete.
Sprawled near me on the frosted grass, a young boy, a kid of about ten with a cap of tight black curls, lay pale and frighteningly motionless. Five yards away, an overturned skateboard spun its lethal little wheels. I scrabbled to my knees and knelt over the inert child. Open eyes stared blindly at an empty sky. My indignant rebuke died on my lips. “Ohmigod, kid,” I gasped, “are you okay?” No response. “Ohmigod!” I shook him. The small body was limp; arms and legs wobbled bonelessly; the open eyes snapped shut.
“Professor Pelletier,” Tom Lundgren cried, rushing up frantically, “what happened? Are you okay? Oh, my God, are you okay?” He grabbed me by the arms and tried to lug me to my feet. I pushed him away. The last thing I needed at this moment of crisis was a white knight smitten with a terminal case of puppy love.
“I’m okay, Tom. Don’t worry about me. But this poor kid—I think he’s … unconscious.” I bent more closely over the boy. Not a notion of a breath emerged from between his parted lips. “Or, Ohmigod, maybe, he’s …” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. In my oblivious haste to get to my FroshHum faculty meeting on time, I’d become an unknowing obstacle to this child’s innocent play, and now he lay sprawled lifeless at my feet.
“Don’t move,” Tom cried, not even glancing at the boy. “You’re probably concussed. I’ll get the EMS! I’ll get an ambulance! I’ll get the cops!” Attracted by the eruption of misadventure into an otherwise routine day, a small crowd of students was beginning to gather. They hovered, buzzing with excitement. Amber Nichols, on her way to the same meeting I’d been heading for, joined them, but, in her usual disengaged manner, she lingered at the edge of the swarm.
“Hurry,” I exclaimed to Tom, and he leapt to his feet. From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the child’s eyelids flutter. Then he gasped involuntarily, as if his lungs were starved for breath.
“Wait,” I yelled at Tom’s departing back. I bent over the child again. One eye opened, then the other. They were brown and sly. They closed again. Why, you little faker! I thought. You … you little phony! I’ll teach you …
“Tom,” I commanded, “there’s no time for an ambulance. He’s … he’s not breathing! I’m going to have to do a … a … an emergency … ah … tracheotomy!” I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word. I winked at the gaping crowd. “Does anyone have a sharp knife?”
The little fraud’s eyes popped open like chestnuts on hot coals. “I’m okay, lady!” He jumped hastily to his feet. “Really, really, I’m fine! Just …” He paled for real this time. “Just don’t tell my mother. She’ll … she’ll kill me if she finds out I ran into you!”
I tried not to laugh. His consternation was so comical my irritation with his rotten little play for attention had instantly vanished. “I’m not hurt,” I reassured him.
“I mean—she’ll kill me if the skateboard’s broken,” the boy clarified, examining the painted board minutely. “I just got it last week, and if it’s wrecked, I’m dead meat.”
“Oh,” I murmured, chastened. My throbbing wrist and scraped knees were obviously of no concern in a world where skateboards were so highly prized.
“Oh, crumb. Look at this! It’s got a humongous scratch!” The words were accusatory. As I struggled to my feet, I studied the boy, but not as closely as he examined his precious board. This kid looked familiar—the close set of the eyes, the pugnacious jut to the chin, the dark curly hair—quite familiar. Had I seen this child—or someone very much like him—recently? Was he maybe a faculty kid or the brother of one of my students?
By the time I collected my belongings and turned toward Dickinson Hall and the FroshHum meeting for which I was now very late, the small crowd had dispersed, Tom Lundgren had retreated once again into mumbles and blushes, and the curly-haired little kid and his skateboard had vanished.