by Ted Bernard
“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 for
gotten 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.”
