Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  “Ah,” he said, understanding the panicked tone in my voice and nodding his head. “Let me show you to his office.”

  He walked me down the stairs and into the English department.

  “It makes sense if you think about it,” he said as he held open the door. “History’s on the first floor—all that is past. English is on the second—man’s reflection of his life experiences. Religious studies on the third and final floor—man’s realization of what is above and beyond him.”

  I nodded my head, still befuddled about being late to my appointment.

  Unlike the religion department, the English department was crowded, and many nervous freshmen were milling about. A bearded man in Birkenstocks was wheeling his bicycle into his office, and an overweight, unkempt lady was smoking a cigarette while making copies and taking a slug from a twenty-ounce bottle of Diet Pepsi.

  “Tell me your name,” Dr. Shaw said as he knocked on McSweeney’s closed door.

  “Adelaide,” I said. “Adelaide Piper.”

  From behind the thick door, someone cleared his throat and said, “You may enter.”

  “Morning, Randolph,” Dr. Shaw said. “A Miss Adelaide Piper seemed to be turned around this morning and waiting to meet with you on the third floor. I’m just showing her down to your office.”

  “I see,” said Dr. McSweeney. He motioned for me to enter, and I thanked Dr. Shaw before taking a seat on a wingback chair that swallowed me into its cracked, dark leather cushion. I looked up at Dr.

  McSweeney, who was staring at my name and social security number.

  “So you want to be an English major?” he said before looking up and flaring his nostrils at the sight of me. “Tell me, what’s your area of interest?”

  He looked like a bull with his ruddy face and bushy eyebrows. His head rested on his wide shoulders as though he had no neck at all, and I half expected steam to come out of his dark, round nostrils as he waited for my answer.

  “Poetry,” I said, handing him my chapbook from the Governor’s School.

  He thumbed through the book before handing it back to me. I couldn’t see his feet behind his stout mahogany desk, but in my mind’s eye I pictured strong hooves scraping a hole in the worn Oriental rug.

  “To begin with, contemporary poetry is like entering through the back door, don’t you think?” He narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “How can you presume to write poetry, Miss Adelaide, without a formal studying of the poets who came before you?”

  Ugh. Dr. McSweeney. He was charging, and I hadn’t even given him a reason to. What in the world could I say to chill this bull out? I needed him to sign off on the Dirkas workshop. I’d been pining over it all summer, and I had been reworking poems I could hardly wait to submit.

  “Well, sir,” I said, “that’s why I’m at NBU. To learn the background and take a crack at the present. Can’t I do those simultaneously?”

  He pushed his colorless lips to one side and brought his two index fingers up to them in mock contemplation.

  “Miss Piper, Expository Writing is a freshman requirement. I recommend you take that as well as Seventeenth-Century Poetry. From there you can work your way up in chronological order. If you make it through, then I’d recommend taking a poetry workshop your junior year.”

  “But—but I don’t want to miss this Dirkas opportunity. I’ve been working toward it all summer. I can still take Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Expository Writing along with it.”

  “It’s an upper-level, and I think you should wait until you have a firm literature foundation to stand on. There will be other visiting writers.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Why couldn’t I have gotten the crunchy Birkenstock professor for an adviser or the fat lady with the cigarette? What was this old bull (who should have been put out to pasture a decade ago) trying to do to me?

  “You know, Miss Piper, there is nothing new under the sun. There are only new ways to say it. How do you know you’re not mimicking someone who came before you, if you don’t, in fact, know what came before you?”

  I was more shocked than dismayed, and I couldn’t think of a coherent rebuttal. “Point taken, Dr. McSweeney.”

  “Then we’re settled,” he said, signing his name to my class registration form. He nodded once before crossing through my name with a yellow highlighter and moving on to the next.

  I stood and looked out the thick glass panes of his office window. To the right it was framed by a great Corinthian column, and to the left was a downward view of the quadrangle, with freshmen scurrying across with their registration papers. Beyond the canopy of pine lay the outer quadrangle where the steep and craggy mountain ridges pushed at the sky.

  McSweeney cleared his throat as if to say, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” and I gathered my bag and walked solemnly across the threshold of his pen.

  6

  Ivory Tower

  Brother Benton died in the wee hours of a Sunday morning two weeks after classes started. Though the reports were somewhat inconsistent, the gist of the story was this: Brother was in the middle of the KN initiation weekend when he refused to walk across the quadrangle in nothing but an NBU baseball cap. For his insubordination, he was ordered to drink a pint of whiskey, after which he stumbled home arm in arm with Frankie, where they both collapsed in their respective dorm rooms on the third floor.

  Brother got sick sometime in the night, and like the rock stars you hear about on the VH1 specials, he choked on his own puke without a soul between the stone walls of Tully knowing his struggle.

  For a month I felt what was like a brick in my gut, and I sat from time to time in the library, weeping over the waste of Brother Benton’s life as the campus slowly cranked back up again (though the KN house was under investigation). I had driven with Frankie down to Alabama and watched as they lowered Brother’s mahogany casket into the earth behind the First Presbyterian Church of Tuscaloosa while his daddy held his mama, who sobbed and sobbed through the service. Mostly I looked away from the hole in the patch of soil he had wanted to escape and instead watched his seven-year-old sister, whose hair was pulled back in a bun outlined with purple pansies. She blew dandelion fluff into the damp grass and looked at the weepy adults around her as though they were strangers.

  I wrote this in the margin of the church bulletin as Frankie drove us back up into the mountains:

  Alabama air

  thicker

  than kudzu vines.

  Your mama’s

  graveside cry

  shriller

  than a wren.

  You

  my potential

  suitor

  whose shirt

  still holds

  your scent

  gone

  (for what?)

  at eighteen.

  Yates, the KN president, was waiting in the dorm lobby when we returned from Tuscaloosa. Frankie held up his arm and said, “I’m not joining your godforsaken fraternity or any other. Brother’s gone, and I think KN is partly responsible for his death.”

  To that Yates held up his arms, shook his head in a kind of solemn frustration, and turned toward the door.

  I didn’t hear from Peter Carpenter again, though I had tried to call him a few times. I ran into him once on the colonnade. His eyes were bloodshot, and while he balanced a biology book on his hip, he seemed to have no idea where he was going.

  “Peter, you okay?”

  “Adelaide,” he said. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. It’s been a rough time.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, and we stood there, silent, as the chapel bell tolled for Seventeenth-Century Poetry.

  “Can’t be late for class,” I said, patting his shoulder. He didn’t move a muscle as I scurried into the humanities building.

  In my heart, I didn’t know if the KNs were responsible for Brother’s death. It was rumored that Peter had given the order to drink at Yates’s command, but I wondered why Brother didn’t refuse it.
>
  As the leaves on campus turned a ruddy orange and I fought to keep my grades high so that McSweeney would sign off on a creative writing course for the spring, I filed Brother’s death away in my mind as a sad, horrible, freak event, and I didn’t expect anything like it to happen again.

  But I had a bird’s-eye view from my Expository Writing class that October when the Troutville County police pulled Peter Carpenter out of the Burroway Science Building and charged him with manslaughter right there on the front quad beneath Nathaniel Buxton’s statue as a handful of nervous students gathered around the outlying columns and patches of emerald landscaping.

  They handcuffed him on the spot and read him his rights, and he dropped to his knees and began to bawl.

  As they led him to the police car, a surge of nausea crept up my throat, and I bolted out of my classroom, where my professor was in midsentence, and ran to a weeping willow tree to get sick. How I wished Mama or Juliabelle were there to hold my hair back and wipe my eyes. There was a sour churning like lava in the pit of my stomach, and before I knew it I was running to the chapel to see if I could ice it down with a prayer.

  When I walked into the arched doors of the sanctuary, I remembered the convocation speech in which President Schaeffer had told us we were on a mission to cultivate intellectual growth in a setting that stressed the importance of individual honor and integrity. And then there was his bit about our responsibility to serve humanity through the productive use of our education. Humph.

  “How will you take advantage of this opportunity, scholars?” he had said right into my eyes.

  I had toiled to get here. I had kicked and scratched my way up through Williamstown High and put my daddy’s dreams on hold. And for what?

  I didn’t realize how loud I was weeping, but before I knew it, the stout and elderly man who ran the chapel bookstore came up, offered me a tissue, and sat beside me as I blew my nose.

  I flung myself into his soft little chest and cried. I didn’t even know who he was, but he was nice enough to bring me a tissue, and he patted my back and told me not to worry. Not to worry.

  He smelled like mothballs and Tic Tacs, and by the time I pulled away from him, the pocket of his starched oxford shirt was soaked.

  A tourist interested in purchasing a postcard of the chapel had come in the middle of the outburst, and when she cleared her throat, he had to excuse himself to ring her up.

  Mostly, I felt alone. It was only autumn, and it was colder than any winter Williamstown had known, and the two young men who had remotely noticed me were gone—one in a graveyard in Tuscaloosa and the other handcuffed and headed for the Roanoke County Jail. What was going on?

  The tissue the sweet man had given me was shredded now, and when I reached in my backpack for another, I felt something smaller than a coin and pulled it out to find that it was the St. Christopher medal Juliabelle had given me on my graduation day. It was oval, and on the outer rim it said, “Behold St. Christopher—And Go Your Way in Safety.” In the center was the hulking saint leaning on a cane and looking back at the sacred passenger on his shoulder.

  I rubbed the medal and thought about my commencement speech and the “out to sea” adventure that I proclaimed would make up our post–high school life. I thought about Juliabelle’s promise, “You know I’ll make the prayer for you, my Adelaide. I’ll be here making it every time you come to mind.”

  The “Go” in “Go Your Way” was in my mind now, and I mouthed it more than once as the little man came back and asked me if I’d like him to walk me to the counselor’s office.

  “I’m okay,” I said to him, and he smiled a dear and sympathetic smile at me.

  “You’re welcome here anytime, miss.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Go my way. I mean, I couldn’t give up now. Okay, two freak things had happened—Brother Benton was gone and Peter was in trouble— but I still had to hold my future by the scruff and not let go. That fury rose inside me like the day on the beach when Daddy wanted me to swim. I could hear him say, “C’mon, sister!”

  I inhaled, buttoned my coat, and walked out onto the great hill as a flutter of the fiery-colored leaves loosened from their hinges and fell onto the green grass.

  On the quadrangle I could see Dean Atwood pacing the colonnade with President Schaeffer as two media trucks from Roanoke and one from Richmond raised their large antennae for a press conference in response to the arrest. I walked right toward them on my way to Tully, and I gave President Schaeffer the mean eye for the crock of dung he had spewed at us at the convocation. Heck, this wasn’t the ivory tower, set apart from reality. Rather, it was its own little warped world tucked in the mountains.

  A thought was coming to me. Maybe a title for a poem. I was trying to remember the name of that book I’d read in tenth-grade English class in which a group of young and well-bred boarding-school children devolve from civilized to barbaric after they are stranded on an island.

  Before I knew it, a lady in a red suit with gold buttons approached me.

  “What year are you, ma’am?” She spoke into a black microphone that had “WKIV-ABC News” sealed across it.

  “Freshman,” I said as a camera wheeled around to my left.

  “What do you think about the arrest that just took place here?”

  “I think it’s sad,” I said. “I know the boy from home, and he is a good boy.”

  “Oh, so you know Mr. Carpenter?”

  Dean Atwood was racing toward me with her finger making a mock slash across her mouth as if to instruct me to button up. The reporter, sensing the urgency, shoved the microphone closer to my lips. “Give me your reaction of the events that have transpired here over the last few weeks.”

  “I can’t make heads or tails of it, miss. I worked my whole life to get into a school like NBU”—I nodded toward the colonnade—“and now the highest-caliber person I know is on his way to jail.”

  Then the thought came to me! The title of the book was on the tip of my tongue, and I had to spout it out.

  “The Lord of the Flies meets Animal House is how I’d describe it here so far. And this ivory tower is beginning to look more and more like the pig’s head on a stick.”

  Dean Atwood furrowed her brow, then narrowed her eyes at me. She pinched her fingers over her lips in her own version of “Pipe down, Piper!”

  But I was too riled up not to finish my thought. I looked away from her and into the camera. “How are we supposed to thrive in an environment like this?”

  7

  Freshman Spring

  When Devon Hunt asked me out, I believed it was a turning point in what had been a remarkably tough year.

  The shock and horror of what happened to Brother and the subsequent arrest of Peter were the cornerstones, and so was Dean Atwood’s sharp letter to me saying that my remarks to the press would adversely affect NBU’s reputation and requesting that I leave communications up to those who were trained in that area.

  But, moreover, a thin layer upon layer of rejection and self-loathing was what really walled us in.

  We all gained our fair share of the freshman fifteen. Pizza was easy to come by. In fact, it was everywhere—in the lounges of the dormitories for every meeting or social, on the quadrangle on Friday afternoons, and even in the foyer of the library at midnight on Wednesdays. This fed the self-loathing that was being birthed in me, and when the button of my favorite pair of jeans popped, I went into the dormitory shower to cry.

  Unexpected Weight

  The blonde girls

  hit their tennis balls

  back and forth

  across the net.

  The calories

  they burn

  rise up

  like mist

  above the court

  before the

  mountain wind

  ushers them

  through the crack

  in my window.

  They affix

  themselves

  to
my roommate

  and me

  while we sleep,

  and the next morning

  we spot them

  beneath our chins

  as we peer into

  the bathroom mirror.

  Jif, the one with the most means and a keen eye for style, refused to be an outcast. She shed her fifteen pounds by eating Raisin Bran for every meal and walking briskly around the campus twice each day. She made regular trips to the tanning salon to put on the appearance that she spent her life outside, and her dorm room was packed with J.Crew and Brooks Brothers catalogs; she studied them and circled her choices and added up the price tags on her calculator. Once she was armed with her mother’s credit card number, a package containing an addition to her carefully chosen wardrobe arrived in her PO box weekly. She even refined her Southern dialect so that she sounded more like Scarlett O’Hara. Jif remade herself into a thin, preppy, earthy beauty, and before long the girls from the Northeast befriended her and invited her into their blonde and beautiful world.

  As for my academic life, I found the 101 classes to be monotonous and unnecessarily complicated. My only light in the academic realm was the Josiah Dirkas workshop he asked McSweeney if I could audit after reading the poems I slipped under his door and, to my surprise, a religion class about social justice that I stumbled upon during my spring term.

  When I called my born-again friend, Shannon, to tell her that I was studying Christianity, she shrieked with delight, “Yes!” to which I rolled my eyes and said, “Don’t get too excited, Miss Jesus Freak.”

  Then we both chuckled, and I was grateful that Shannon had not surrendered her sense of humor to the cause.

  Overall, I continued to be surprised by how little college had to do with academics. Fraternity parties dominated most conversations among classmates, and as far as I could tell, they appeared to be simply higher-budget versions of the cul-de-sac episodes I had reluctantly attended in Williamstown. Though I’ll admit I wanted to be invited out from time to time.

  After witnessing a game of keg rolling in the street that had inadvertently crushed one of my Chaucer professor’s beloved old house cats, I wrote: