On the first floor of Willard Hall, a window screen bucked and tumbled out of its casement, skating onto the sidewalk in front of an old man carrying an armload of books. The screen was followed by several rolls of toilet paper, which unfurled themselves like banners on the way down. The old man startled, nearly falling, and several of his books landed, with their pages splayed open, in the grass.
Angela waited for someone to help him, but one student ran off, chasing a Frisbee, and another was stuffing the toilet paper rolls into an oversized purse. She stepped forward. The man was thin and very old, his face so deeply creased she imagined smoothing out the flesh with her mother’s iron. He was dressed in a black suit and black shoes and tie, as if he’d been at a funeral. She bent to pick up his books while he shaded his eyes and squinted at the building’s now screenless window. A portable fan—maybe that was the problem—teetered and revolved on the peeling sill. When she brushed the dirt and grass from his books, the old man seemed to soften. He peered at the nametag on her lanyard. “Ms. Vackrey. Thank you. Are you new to Payne? A freshman perhaps?”
Angela nodded and blushed.
He introduced himself: “Professor Cassovan, Shakespearean, Department of English. I hope the remainder of your time here at Payne will be hazard-free. No more objects plummeting out of the windows.” He smiled.
Angela willed herself to say something—here was her first meeting with a professor!—but ended up only scraping her shoe, like a pony’s hoof, across the cement.
Professor Cassovan waited a moment, then nodded as if she had answered or even said something wise. “Well, I wish you a stimulating first semester. And thank you again for the assistance. You know what they say: ‘Virtue is bold, and goodness never—’ ”
Fearful, Angela thought. Shakespeare! He was quoting Shakespeare, and though she wasn’t sure where the line came from she knew its author. The old man seemed to understand that she’d found it familiar, and perhaps was waiting for her to speak. But beyond the suggestion of an F, she couldn’t bring herself to make a sound.
Back in Vellmar, when Angela’s mother and grandma talked about her (which they often did after dinner, Angela listening through the heating vents in her room), they worried aloud about her shyness, which they attributed to the fact that she walked around all day with her nose in a book. Angela’s mother had always encouraged her to read for pleasure—but her future, like everyone else’s, it seemed, lay in the sciences and math. Angela was smart; if she kept up her grades and held on to her scholarship, she could have a career as a dental hygienist. The dentist in Vellmar, Dr. Crain, often said that for a bright young woman like her, it would be a terrific career.
The old man with the stack of books was studying Angela’s face as if he were privy to this conversation and had immediately discerned the narrowness of her life, which sometimes felt to Angela like a long anonymous hallway with a gravestone planted like a goalpost at the end. He had quoted Shakespeare and she had known what it was. Though total strangers, they had understood one another via a secret, purposeful language, one that ran separate and subterranean from the clumsy dialogue Angela struggled to engage in every day. The professor nodded—it was almost a bow—and she watched him slowly climb the steps of Willard Hall, dragging the broken window screen behind. Angela wanted to throw herself down on the grass and weep. “Be good,” her mother had said, before she left. “You know you can come home if you aren’t happy.” But how would Angela know if she wasn’t happy? How did anyone know? She looked at her watch; its face was blurred.
In the middle of the lawn up ahead she saw a group of student leaders in matching blue T-shirts printed with the freshmen orientation slogan: GET READY FOR PAYNE. Angela took a deep breath. She was going to do her best to be ready. She would be outgoing; she would meet other students and talk to strangers; she would take advantage of everything that college threw her way. And because one of the first things it had thrown her was a professor of Shakespeare, she was going to drop either physics or chemistry in favor of something that Professor Cassovan was teaching. She would send her adviser, Professor Fitger, a message on P-Cal to let him know.
* * *
—
Dennis Cassovan carried the crumpled window screen with which, accidentally or no, someone in Willard Hall had just tried to kill him, and propped it outside the chair’s office next to a trash can overloaded with broken ceiling tiles, the remains of rusted Venetian blinds, and other miscellaneous debris. Cassovan had been on sabbatical during the previous year, fortuitously absent during the renovation of the second floor of Willard Hall. He didn’t care one way or the other about the economists upstairs—they and their spreadsheet ilk were beyond irrelevant—but he detested disruption and noise. Given the poorly socialized nature of his own department, whose faculty behaved with all the decorum of a pack of wolves, Cassovan’s general workplace practice was to keep his own counsel, speak cordially and briefly when addressed, and get his work done.
Opening the door to his office, Cassovan set down his books and, with a sigh of contentment, surveyed the familiar, if modest, surroundings. Here was the plain oak desk propped up with a brick where it was missing its right front foot; here were the industrial metal bookshelves with a full set of Shakespeare Quarterly and the OED; here the electric typewriter (yes, still in use); the green-shaded banker’s desk lamp that had been his father’s; the five-dollar clock; and the ancient, nearly patternless oriental rug beneath his wooden chair. Other than the layer of dust, presumably caused by construction, everything was, reassuringly, the same. This was the setting in which the majority of Professor Cassovan’s life—the parts of it that he cared to think about and remember—had transpired. His wife, Margery, had succumbed to a heart attack in her fifties some decades before, and their only son had died of cancer in his teens. That was the outer, dispiriting shell, the objective existence that others recognized and acknowledged, thereby reducing his life to a single-line caption: professor, widower, no heirs. But Professor Cassovan’s true existence had flowered within the confines of this dingy eight-by-ten-foot room, the faded quality of his workspace an ideal backdrop to the intellectual labor of forty-two years.
A Shakespeare scholar, Cassovan had published only two monographs, but in both instances it was as if he had wrested from the earth the hunks of clay with which he was laboriously sculpting his own psyche: his two books were more completely Dennis Cassovan than were his hobbies (of which he had none) or his face or body, now so vitiated with age. Cassovan’s research was not flashy or groundbreaking but it was precise, as thorough and intricate as an ivory carving, and it was the result of decades of meticulous philological work. His readership—typically other scholars of Shakespeare’s Roman plays—was small, and some reviewers had initially dismissed his more recent tome (a study of augury in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus) as “almost excruciating in its level of detail,” but during the past few years, younger up-and-coming scholars had begun to cite him. He had spent his recent sabbatical at Shakespearean archives in the United States and abroad, assembling material for his third (and perhaps final) book—appropriately, given his age, an examination of memory and remembrance he had titled Anamnesis in Three Roman Plays. Now, reinstalled at his desk, he hoped to spend the fall semester getting the preface and the opening chapter into shape.
A knock at the door announced the arrival of his research assistant, Lincoln Young. Lincoln had a PhD in English but, now balding and fast approaching forty, had been unable to find steady work; he taught one or two sections of composition each semester at Payne and then, like an itinerant tinker or scissors grinder, traveled from private high school to community college to tutoring center in order to assemble a living wage. Because no one in English had research funds, Cassovan paid him privately, unofficially, fifteen dollars per hour under the table. Ostensibly, he was doing his assistant a favor, but he was aware, given the ravenous look that Lincoln
Young occasionally gave him, that the favor he preferred would be for his supervisor to die and free up a job.
Lincoln sat down, the chair beneath him wheezing gently. Although the semester hadn’t yet started, he looked a bit weary, almost waterlogged, his hair a collection of dark threads pasted across a sweaty scalp. How was Professor Cassovan’s time away? Productive? Good. And this was his first day back? Had he been upstairs yet, to see Econ’s refurbished part of the building?
No, he had not. He was not a professor of economics and had no business or interest in that vacuous field. Could they get to work? They were both obviously very busy preparing classes, and—
Yes, of course. Definitely. Right to work. Lincoln smiled in a sidesaddle fashion. He was one of the few people Cassovan knew who was less attractive when he smiled: he wore the pitiful, wrenching grin of a suffering clown. Before they settled on the first list of tasks for the semester, he wanted Professor Cassovan to know that he might not be teaching at Payne after the coming year.
Oh? Cassovan tried not to look surprised. Had he found a regular position somewhere?
Another torqued smile. Unfortunately, no. But word on the street—or in the windowless basement offices where the adjunct faculty and TAs were housed—was that the university’s financial problems were particularly dire that year; and that the non-tenure-track instructors, come spring, would not be rehired. Lincoln would hate to leave Professor Cassovan in the lurch, especially now, when they were collaborating on a paper for the upcoming conference; but perhaps, as an esteemed senior member of the department, he might intercede on Lincoln’s behalf, arranging for a two- or three-year lectureship, via Fitger, the incoming chair.
Cassovan blew his nose severely into a handkerchief. While he sympathized with the temporary instructors, who could probably earn more as forty-hour-a-week fast-food managers than they did as adjunct faculty at Payne, these rumors about fiscal and administrative crisis swept through the campus every year; moreover, it was unprofessional of Lincoln Young to suggest that Cassovan cut a back-channel deal with the incoming chair. Clearly, Fitger was a poor choice to lead the department—Cassovan wouldn’t have trusted him to run a pet shop—but if and when true crisis came, he wasn’t likely to respond to it by firing the adjuncts, who toiled away on endless stacks of freshman essays for miserable wages in a warren of cubicles on the subfloor.
Might his fellow instructors’ anxiety, Cassovan asked, be premature? It was a stressful time in higher education, and changes, at Payne and elsewhere, were undoubtedly afoot, but personally he hadn’t heard of—
Lincoln interrupted. Sometimes the instructors, he explained, who were more vulnerable than the tenure-track faculty, made it their business to learn about these shifts in policy first.
Cassovan was rankled—he didn’t like being interrupted. “What shifts in policy?” he asked.
Lincoln stroked his thinning hair—a nervous tic—with his fingers. He confessed to being a bit of a computer nerd; he kept late hours and in moments of insomnia browsed through university documents online. Did Professor Cassovan know that English would soon submit its new Statement of Vision?
Cassovan pointedly glanced at his watch. The Statement of Vision was a needless make-work task imposed on all departments by the upper-level administration.
“I only mention it,” Lincoln said, “because you were away last year and might not have seen it.” He paused. “You have to read between the lines, but—”
“But what?”
“Well…they’re going to eliminate Shakespeare.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I suppose it’s partly a financial decision.” Lincoln continued caressing the hair on his head. “And partly about teaching what the undergrads enjoy. You know—the things they find relevant.”
An abhorrent buzzword, “relevance,” Cassovan thought, was best confined to books about tax preparation and the literature of self-help. “Where did you learn about this?”
About the new Statement? Lincoln couldn’t remember, exactly. He read so many university-related e-mails and bulletins, and he didn’t want to waste Professor Cassovan’s money or time—unless the professor wanted him to spend a few additional minutes…?
Cassovan nodded. Then, while Lincoln Young opened his laptop and searched, he sat and waited, studying the brittle black-and-white poster of William Shakespeare, greatest writer in the English language, that for several decades had hung on his glass-front door.
* * *
—
At the opposite end of the hallway, outside the department chair’s suite, Professor Jason T. Fitger, pant legs rolled haphazardly up his calves, was duct-taping a third extension cord to the floor.
“Just FYI.” Fran peered down at him where he crawled through the dust like a penitent, legs sticky with sweat. “I’m getting ready to spray, in the office.”
Fitger ripped the duct tape with his teeth. Fran had managed to find him a semifunctional laptop, and he was determined to be able to plug it in while making simultaneous use of both desk lamp and fan. She was shaking a sizeable container—it looked like a magnum, he thought—of insecticide. “You can’t use that indoors.” He peeled another strip of tape from the roll.
Two junior economists, briefcases and lattes in hand, emerged from the stairwell. Confronted with a heavily perspiring man kneeling in front of the WELC ME TO ENGLI H sign, they quickly rectified their mistake and moved along.
“You have a nest of wasps right by your window,” Fran said. “And you don’t have a screen.”
“I thought you were an animal sympathizer.”
“I have no sympathy,” Fran said, “for arthropods.”
Fitger stood up and followed her through the anteroom into his office, and together they noted the comings-and-goings of a number of flying insects, half a dozen of which were making loops around the traylike fluorescent lights. Fitger ducked when one of the creatures flew near. “I think if we open the door and prop the—”
Fran pressed the nozzle, which seemed to misfire, and a wet arrow of insecticide—Fitger remembered an uncle describing the effects of Agent Orange—caught the rim of his ear.
“Whoops.” She sent a second blast toward the ceiling, the fallout trickling onto his head, a toxic mist.
Fitger shielded his eyes and, wondering about neurological damage, staggered into Fran’s part of the office. She followed behind him, shutting the door. “Did I get you?” she asked.
He was wiping his eyes with the tail of his shirt. “You almost blinded me,” he said. “And all you did was make them angry.” They watched the wasps swarming and diving on the other side of the Plexiglas window.
“We’ll give them ten minutes,” Fran said. She took a seat at her desk, logged into her computer, and started to work.
Leaning on the file cabinet behind her, Fitger (dabbing thick, poisonous tears from his face) noticed that their two nearly identical offices resembled side-by-side containers for a pair of Siamese fighting fish. “Could we order a blind for that window?” he asked.
She continued typing. “Money for a blind would have to come from our supply budget.”
“And?”
“We don’t have a supply budget. Or, I should say, we have one but there’s nothing in it.”
Fitger gazed through the window into his insect-ridden compartment. The wasps seemed to be increasing in strength and number.
“In case you’re wondering,” Fran said, “I’m trying to get you set up on P-Cal. What do you want your password to be?”
“I don’t want to use P-Cal,” Fitger said. “I refuse to adapt every six months to a pointless new system.”
Fran didn’t hear or pretended not to hear this response. She explained that, once his P-Cal account was established, either of them would be able to input (Fitger ground his teeth at this unpalatable verb) appoin
tments on his calendar, while other P-Cal users on campus would be able to access (more hideous usage!) his agenda and know when he was free.
“I have a better idea,” he said. Why didn’t they forget about P-Cal, which he had no intention of using, and instead make a list of things he needed for the office, a list beginning, for example, with a working telephone and computer; two functional electrical outlets; a chair that didn’t double as a Venus flytrap; a desk lamp that didn’t heat itself up to six hundred degrees; more than one piece of stationery; and a nameplate that spelled his name correctly, on something more lasting than the back of a cereal box top.
Fran said she would appreciate it if he would keep the sarcastic tone to a minimum, and he didn’t need to nag her about the computer. She had already given up her lunch hour in order to engage in a lengthy conversation with one of the techs from Tech-Help; their office was busy at this time of year but they would show up sooner or later; that was all she could do. “Huh.” She sat up straighter in her chair, her feet several inches from the floor. “Look at this: your P-Cal account is up and running, but because you haven’t logged in, the system has made it look like you’re always available. It must be a glitch. You’ve got a lot of appointments with people already.”
The Shakespeare Requirement Page 3
