The Shakespeare Requirement

by Julie Schumacher

  Cassovan looked at his watch—noon. Another morning had gone by, and he had done almost nothing, and the night before he had torn the opening chapter of his monograph apart again. Wondering whether this lack of concentration was a harbinger of dementia, he spread out his lunch: half a sandwich, an orange (peeled), and a serving of raisins from the cardboard container he kept on his shelf. The poster of Shakespeare with his extinguished black eyes seemed to examine him, and the “” did seem threatening, even shining through in reverse from the other side.

  After he had eaten, he used the restroom and returned to find the English Department chairman outside his door.

  “Dennis,” Fitger said. “Do you have time to talk?”

  No, actually, he didn’t. Noticing that Fitger had a sizeable bruise on his cheek, as if he had fallen, face-first, onto a table or floor, he said, “I have a class in twenty-five minutes.”

  Fitger said he would take whatever was offered; he simply wanted to open the conversational channel and reestablish a civil dialogue. “By the way,” he said, “I was sorry to see this.” He gestured toward the poster. “I could probably scare up enough funds to buy you a replacement. Perhaps not the same visage, with that lovely ruff around the neck, but—”

  “That isn’t necessary.” Fitger, Cassovan thought, was as likely a culprit as any other colleague to have defaced the poster and, as chair, he had keys to the building.

  “You intend to leave it there?” Fitger asked.

  Cassovan had been gathering notes for his lecture. “Are you asking me to take it down?”

  No, he wasn’t—though he wondered what the point of leaving it was.

  Cassovan snapped the clasp on his briefcase. He hadn’t taken the poster down because he needed a small screwdriver in order to do so; but now, he thought, he might let it be. Not wanting to be accused of histrionics, he had made light of the defacement with one or two other colleagues—it was a poster and not a person, and the writing, thankfully, was not obscene—but he would not minimize the affront with Fitger.

  He put on his gloves and his scarf and his hat. The first floor was cold and seemed almost unheated; he had been wearing his coat most of the week.

  Fitger noticed the button pinned to his colleague’s scarf. “SOS. Is that for ‘Shakespeare Our Savior’?”

  Cassovan looked down at his scarf, annoyed. He had forgotten about the button. He had meant to remove it, but now that Fitger had ridiculed it, he would allow it—like the poster—to stay. “I’m leaving for class now,” he said. “I teach in Buford.”

  “I’ll keep you company,” Fitger said. “I’ll walk you there.”

  Cassovan preferred to walk alone; it allowed him to ruminate on his lecture. He understood that most faculty had forsaken this traditional format, spending class time on a multimedia assemblage of PowerPoint, soundtrack, student caucus groups, clickers, and dramatizations, but Cassovan lectured. His long-established habit was to review his notes at the lectern in the final minutes before class and, when the second hand reached the top of the hour, to clear his throat and begin. He paused every ten minutes for students’ questions, and ended each session with a quotation or a poetic reading, despite the tremolo of his voice, which had once been strong. But here—annoyingly—was Fitger, trotting alongside.

  Outdoors, the wind had kicked up. Thick wet snow from the day before was dripping from rooftops; it had formed a slushy white hedge on both sides of the walk.

  Fitger shivered; he wasn’t wearing a jacket. “Listen, Dennis,” he said. “We haven’t gotten off on the right foot this semester. But I think we can try to find a compromise. I’ve been working on some new language for the Statement of Vision that—” He pulled some mangled scraps of paper from his pocket. “Hold on; I need to find the most recent version…”

  They were moving slowly. Cassovan stuck to the middle of the walk to avoid the ice—following the window screen incident, he was wary of falls—leaving Fitger to hopscotch through the puddles and avoid oncoming students, who were staggering in their carbohydrate comas away from the main dining hall.

  “I want both of us to be candid,” Fitger said, still sifting through scraps and odds and ends in his pocket. “I assume you know that, as a scholar and a colleague, I respect you. And I certainly hope you return that respect. You were on the committee that invited me to Payne and hired me, nearly twenty-four years ago.”

  Cassovan nodded hello to a passing student. “To be candid—because you asked for candor,” he said, “I voted against your hire. It wasn’t personal. I didn’t care for your work.”

  “My novel?” Fitger looked stunned. “Stain? It got terrific reviews.”

  “I found it pretentious and discursive.”

  “Really? But— How many people voted against me?”

  “I don’t remember the exact number.” Cassovan greeted another student, who gave him a thumbs-up and hefted her backpack—many of the students carried packs the size of steamer trunks—to show him a button: “SAVE WILL.”

  “Were there more than two votes against me?” Fitger asked.

  “I believe there were three of us. Perhaps four.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s in the past,” Fitger said. “So we can put it aside, though I do think— Fuck!”

  They had been walking next to the library, the sloping overhang of which seemed specifically engineered to funnel precipitation onto pedestrians on the walk below. A frigid cascade of slush had slipped down the roof and landed with a slap against Fitger’s neck, and was now melting and trickling into his shirt. “Whoever designed this goddamn building must have graduated from a clown academy instead of architecture school.”

  Cassovan waited under the overhang while Fitger, doglike, shook the snow from his shirt.

  “It seems I don’t have the current version of the SOV with me,” he said, “but that can wait for another time. The gist of the thing is, I need to hammer out a compromise, and in order to do that I’m going to talk to every member of the English faculty and find out what they need. And, Dennis, I’m talking to you first. I want you to let me know what it might be in my power to do, to make your position in the department more agreeable. In return, I’ll work with you directly, to propose a solution: something along the lines of a semester of Shakespeare being required for honors students, or a requirement that all majors enroll in a semester of Chaucer or Milton or Shakespeare—or perhaps any pre-eighteenth-century survey. What do you think?”

  Cassovan stopped walking. Here was one of the reasons why, years ago, he had voted not to hire Fitger. It wasn’t simply that he had found his novel pompous; he had also sensed in the then young man a cocksure certainty about the influence he could wield over others. “No,” he said.

  “No, what?” They were out of range of the library’s treacherous overhang; still, Fitger looked up, wary of hazards from above. “Do you mean no, you won’t work with me? Or no, you don’t like the solutions I’ve proposed?”

  “Both,” Cassovan said. “And, in addition, I’m not interested in ‘whatever it might be in your power’ to do for me. The idea is insulting; it smacks of graft.”

  Fitger laughed—what were academic politics without graft?—then looked perturbed. “You’re categorically rejecting the idea of compromise?”

  “On this issue, yes,” Cassovan said. “We either have a Shakespeare requirement written into the document, or we don’t.”

  They climbed the steps of Buford Hall, where Cassovan’s class was due to start in ten minutes. Fitger paused by the door. “It’s curious,” he said. “You want everyone to believe that some anti-Shakespeare hooligan scribbled on your precious poster…” He tapped his index finger—tick tack tick—on the SOS button on his colleague’s scarf. “But maybe that’s not really what happened.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Cassovan asked.

  “I thi
nk you know what I’m suggesting.”

  “Excuse me—Professors?” A student was trying to make her way into the building.

  “Excuse us, Ms. Vackrey.” Cassovan stepped to the side.

  “Angela,” Fitger said. “Hello. You have a class in Buford?”

  “With Professor Cassovan.” She bobbed her head. As always, she wore a skirt that made her look like a Mennonite, her knee socks slipping down her legs and into her shoes.

  “Two English classes during your first semester—that’s unusual.” Fitger opened the door. Angela said nothing, and they watched her fumble her ungainly way down the hall.

  “An excellent student,” Cassovan murmured.

  Fitger held the door for his colleague. He said he hoped that Cassovan would understand his earlier remark as something blurted out in the heat of the moment and not to be seriously considered.

  “Be assured that I do not and will continue not to take you seriously,” Cassovan said.

  Fitger headed back down the stairs the way he had come.

  * * *

  —

  Letters to the editor—on the topic of Shakespeare—began to appear with regularity in the Campus Scribe. Some offered support of Professor Cassovan, who was a “good professor even if his classes were pretty hard”; a few suggested that Fitger be severely castigated and, preferably, fired. One letter made an unusual claim about censorship, enjoining other members of the Payne campus to “stick up for Shakespeare and other blacklisted writers.”

  Fitger skimmed the latest group of letters and shoved the Scribe in the trash. Noting the layer of ice covering the interior of his office window, he tested the radiator with the palm of his hand. Nothing. In some portions of campus, steam heat churned through the buildings; on the first floor of Willard, the metal accordion-like structures mainly served as abstract art, remaining cool to the touch while occasionally emitting a few clanking sounds.

  It was December, the season of personal crises and exhaustion, and there were only two weeks left until the end of the term. Some sort of virus was on the loose, turning classrooms into sick wards. During his Literature of Apocalypse class, irriguous coughs erupting from every corner, Fitger had snapped in response to a student’s question: Why would any writer bother to make stuff up? Because, Fitger answered, reality was bleak and often unbearable, their puny lives a meaningless trudge toward the blank vault of death. One of the students named Sam—Fitger had trouble, still, distinguishing one from the others—gathered his books and his coat and walked out of the room.

  In the wake of his ineffectual conversation with Cassovan, Fitger found it difficult to motivate himself for additional tête-à-têtes with the faculty; but remembering with a certain wistfulness Janet’s suggestion that he journey door-to-door through the building, charming his colleagues, he knocked at the office of Helena Stang.

  Stang was obviously surprised to see him: he didn’t remember ever having entered her office, which—with its stark metal-topped desk and barbed-wire artwork on the wall, brought to mind a modernist abattoir.

  She listened calmly while he referred to the department’s “unfortunate curricular challenge” regarding the requirement—or lack of requirement—of the work of Shakespeare. Compromise would be difficult, he said, and he understood that faculty had principles from which he would never attempt to dissuade them; but he hoped, eventually, to find common ground. Might Helena Stang be flexible regarding some of the Statement of Vision’s finer points? How might he persuade her to be so, if she was not?

  While he talked, Stang toyed with her necklace, a heavy, industrial design composed of ball bearings and roofing nails, and stared at him flatly, fixedly, without blinking, across the desk. Fitger had seen her employ this technique on students: after four or five minutes even the most cynical were apt to succumb to her mesmeric gaze, confessing to plagiarism, unexcused absences, sexual errors and misjudgments, and childhood cruelty to siblings and pets. Stang lifted the necklace—he guessed that it must have weighed fifteen pounds—and let it fall with a clank against her chest. “Do you know how long I’ve been a member of this department, Jay?”

  He heard a squeak of despair escape his throat. He was going to have to listen to a Personal History, including a roster of indignities suffered, against a backdrop of his colleague’s sterling intellectual capabilities, her exemplary research and publication, and the collegial virtues that had surely served as inspiration to one and all. “You were hired before I was,” he said.

  “Correct.” Without turning around, Stang pushed the button on an espresso machine, the scent of French roast filling the room. Fitger dialed up a facial expression—something between “alert” and “concerned”—while Stang, continuously talking, steamed a cup of vanilla froth and sprinkled on top of it, via a doll-sized spoon, a few motes of cinnamon. She hadn’t offered him a coffee, and its intoxicating smell was a torment. “Nevertheless,” she said, finally bringing her self-congratulatory remarks to a close, “I don’t delude myself by imagining that you’ve come to talk to me about the value of my participation in the department, or that this conversation is taking place for my benefit.”

  Fitger protested. She was wrong. That was precisely why he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to ask whether there were ways in which her contributions might be recognized or acknowledged, so that perhaps…

  “Ah.” Stang indulged in a moment of reflection. Fitger tried not to imagine the dwindling sand in the hourglass of his life.

  “I’m sure you know I have always been—more than anyone else in this department—collaborative and open-minded.”

  Fitger forced himself to nod.

  “And I am prepared to be so again,” she said. “Depending.”

  “Depending.” He swam up through several levels of consciousness. “Depending…on what?”

  Well, she was merely thinking aloud right now rather than making promises, but as he appeared to be inquiring about things that would lighten her load and make it easier for her to be fully productive and therefore open-minded—

  “Yes, exactly,” he said, digging a small pad of paper (courtesy of Dr. Moradi and the American Academy of Periodontology) from his pocket. “Go ahead. What?”

  Stang pushed her coffee cup aside. “I haven’t been entirely happy this semester with my teaching schedule. I didn’t want to mention it earlier, but you’re raising the subject…”

  Fitger clicked the tip of his pen. For the past dozen years, via some obscure and unwritten agreement, Stang had taught only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while most of the other professors taught three, if not five, days per week. “What about the schedule?”

  “My Women in Literature class isn’t over this semester until four-fifteen,” she said. “As you probably know, I’m a single parent. I don’t want to teach after three-thirty.” It was only reasonable, Stang said, that the department adopt a family-friendly attitude and give scheduling precedence to professors with children.

  Fitger had started making a note on his pad of paper, but paused to look up. “Isn’t your son at least in high school?” He remembered running into Helena Stang at the grocery store over the summer, and seeing her arguing with a sullen, heavily tattooed young man among the frozen foods.

  “Rudy is sixteen,” she said. But a child was a child, and as a mother she had particular duties and responsibilities that made it difficult for her to be on campus, whether for class or for a meeting, after 3:00 p.m.

  He nodded and scribbled: Stang—childcare?!?—not after 3. In order to give her an even more preferential schedule, he would have to nudge some of the other faculty into the most inconvenient teaching slots—an arrangement to which Fran would undoubtedly raise some objection—but he could deal with that at another time.

  He thanked Stang and stood—the blood had pooled in his lower legs—and then let himself out. On the way back to his own o
ffice, he walked past Cassovan’s Shakespeare poster, now accompanied by twenty or thirty SOS buttons (where were the absurd things coming from?) taped to the door.

  * * *

  —

  Buoyed by his tentative success with Helena Stang, Fitger continued to seek out his colleagues. He tracked Sandra Atherman through a parking lot (though dressed in character as one of the Brontës, she darted across a street and was nearly hit by a truck in an effort to evade him), and subsequently discussed with Jennifer Brown-Wilson the possibility of her removal, in perpetuity, from any committee assignment or task involving Albert Tyne or Franklin Kentrell.

  When he knocked and presented himself at Donna Lovejoy’s basement office—he noticed the rusted space heater, an obvious fire code violation—she addressed him without looking up. “I don’t have time, Jay. I’m grading.”

  He offered what he hoped was a sympathetic nod and took a seat across from her in one of the chairs reserved for students. On the desk between them were several thick stacks of essays. On top of one of them, Lovejoy’s hand was a scribbling autonomous creature holding a pen. She had taken on an additional class for extra pay, and, between the yearlong survey and her Beowulf seminar and two sections of comp, was probably evaluating the work, each week, of 125 students.

  “Sorry to intrude,” he said, stretching one foot in the direction of the unauthorized heater. “I waited until your office hours began before I came by.” The index card on Lovejoy’s door said You may find me here on Wednesdays and Fridays, 3–4:30; DO NOT text me or attempt to find me at home.

  “Office hours are for students, not faculty.” Lovejoy briefly glanced up, so that he saw the dark crescents of fatigue beneath her eyes. Watching her return to the stack of papers, Fitger suspected that she could grade essays while she slept or bathed or had sex. Her hand would keep moving, circling subject/verb disagreements and flawed logic, scrawling awk and cite! down the length of each page.