The Shakespeare Requirement

by Julie Schumacher

  From the passenger seat, no response.

  “You take good care of him. He’s a real sweetheart.” The orderly shook Fitger’s hand, patted the Santa on the shoulder, and hustled back through the hospital door.

  Fitger sprinted around to the driver’s side and cranked the heater. “So,” he said. “Franklin. We’re headed to 2217 Goodwell, am I right?”

  A faint nod from the passenger side of the car, where Kentrell wore the uncomprehending expression of a slaughter-bound sheep.

  Detesting himself, Fitger chattered about the weather. Cold, wasn’t it? Perhaps by the end of the week it would be warmer. Or perhaps it would not.

  Soon they arrived at a redbrick row house: 2217. Kentrell was asleep. Fitger turned off the car. “Franklin?” Kentrell’s face was thin. He had clearly lost weight, and pain had impressed itself on his features. “Franklin. Do you have your keys?”

  Kentrell roused himself and gestured toward a canvas bag by his feet.

  “Sit tight, I’ll get them.” Fitger rummaged through the canvas bag, located the keys, and then managed with the help of the collapsible walker to convey his colleague from the car, up the frozen, unshoveled sidewalk and the three short steps to the door. Once inside, Kentrell deposited himself in a dark blue armchair—clearly a favorite, based on the soiled spot for his head—his eyes fluttering closed.

  Hardly a medical expert, Fitger didn’t think his colleague’s face was a healthful color. Hospitals were wont to release patients, he thought, while the surgeons were still busy stitching them up. He looked at his watch. Five-twenty—an hour left until he needed to leave for his drink with Marie Eland. “Is there something I can get for you, Franklin?” he asked.

  Kentrell shook his head.

  “Something to eat? I could probably manage an egg or a piece of burnt toast.”

  No answer.

  “Maybe a glass of water?” Fitger headed into the kitchen. The house, surprisingly, he thought, was modern and spare. The walls were a muted, indefinite color, the floors were dark wood, and over the couch near the gas fireplace was a framed Picasso poster that, Fitger noticed, had been hung upside down. He decided to unpack some of the hospital paraphernalia, setting the pills and the medical instructions on the kitchen counter next to the stove. Would Kentrell want some soup or some crackers later? Fitger looked through the cabinets (which held a vast selection of tuna but not much else) and the refrigerator, where he found a jar of tomato sauce, some mustard and mayonnaise, a stale-looking dinner roll, and half a gallon of expired milk.

  Well, all right. He could fit in a quick trip to the store. He returned to the living room to find out if there was something Kentrell might want to add to a grocery list, but his colleague had fallen asleep again.

  The house, Fitger realized, was cold. He turned the gas fireplace on and found the thermostat and cranked up the heat. He put on his coat and his gloves and went outside and shoveled the walk. Kentrell was snoring when he came in. It was five thirty-five—still enough time for Fitger to pick up some groceries and go home and shave and change his clothes. Should he change his clothes? Perhaps he had read too much into Marie Eland’s interest in having a drink. His shirts, in any case, had probably tied themselves into a wrinkled knot in the dryer.

  He decided to set Kentrell’s hospital bath chair in the shower or tub. Tucking the contraption under his arm, he mounted the stairs, which were steep and uncarpeted and would probably be difficult if not impossible for someone in Kentrell’s condition (the poor bastard) to—

  Fitger stopped. Shower chair under his arm, he descended the stairs and walked slowly, room by room, through the house. There was no bedroom or bathroom on the first floor.

  “Franklin,” he said. Kentrell barely stirred. Fitger switched the gas fireplace off, turned off the thermostat, and went into the kitchen and poured the expired milk down the drain. He packed up the bottles of pills with their instructions and gathered up the overnight bag and put everything back into the trunk of his car. He called Marie Eland; then he touched Kentrell’s shoulder. “Wake up, Franklin. I’m taking you home.”

  ELEVEN

  Momentarily stymied by his lack of access to the provost, Roland Gladwell—never thwarted or disappointed for long—was pursuing a number of strategies vis-à-vis the removal of English from Willard Hall. First, he had purchased Hinckler’s noninterference with the promise of a paltry position in Music. Second, he was close to securing a multimillion-dollar donation from two benefactors. (He had recently led Manuela Pratt and Big Bill Fixx on a tour of the building, pointing out the benefits of a newly refashioned, and rechristened, Pratt-Fixx Hall.) Third, he had used Theater, a hopelessly inept department, as a test case for shrinkage and subjugation; he would soon turn QUAP’s attention to English, steering the committee toward recommendations such as a 50 percent reduction in the size of the faculty (to be achieved by moving West into administration, denying tenure to Brown-Wilson, and pushing Tyne, Glenk, and Cassovan into retirement) after which the remainder of Fitger’s department could be compressed onto the basement floor.

  But: because of the attention—and sympathy—Cassovan had lately received in the press, Roland thought it prudent to proceed with caution where the Shakespearean was concerned. Three times since the middle of the fall semester, Roland had made overtures, suggesting an after-work drink or a midmorning coffee; Cassovan had declined. After refusing Roland’s first invitation, he had ignored all the others, which was why, in early January, during the doldrums of winter break, Roland made inquiries and learned that, driven out of his office like the Little Match Girl in the cold, Cassovan was laboring away in a study carrel toward the back of the library’s fourth (and top) floor.

  Roland hadn’t been in the Payne library for years. Known as a place where undergraduates went to nap (and, some said, to engage in intercourse in the group study rooms), the building was sadly in need of modernization. Its towering metal rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves created a catacomb-like effect, and the overhead lights, cued to old-fashioned timers, had a way of clicking off all at once, leaving patrons stranded in the airless dark. Roland exited the clangorous elevator, which opened its doors several inches above its stop, and—spinning the timers on the lights as he went—began an exploratory tour of the modest carrels that hugged the outer rim of the fourth floor. In a pinched little cubby (consisting of a wooden slab of a desk, a small metal overhead locker, a gooseneck lamp, and a worn, uncomfortable-looking chair) he found Dennis Cassovan taking notes on a series of index cards in a cramped but immaculate hand.

  Roland stood by the side of the carrel and waited. Cassovan must have been at least eighty, he thought; and in his black suit, white shirt, and black tie, and with a fountain pen in his fist, he looked like a tonsured monk in his cell.

  Cassovan capped his pen and set it neatly down on the desk. “Is there something I can help you with?” he asked.

  Roland stepped into his line of sight. He introduced himself—a gesture typically unnecessary at Payne, because everyone knew who he was, but there was no telling what shape the old man’s mind might be in. “You aren’t easy to find,” he said. “This is a gloomy little hideaway; the library is fairly empty during winter term.”

  “I chose it because I’m not usually disturbed here,” Cassovan said. He wouldn’t have been disturbed in his office, either, especially with the students still enjoying their winter break, but the cold (due to Fitger’s mismanagement, Cassovan assumed, of the budget) had driven him out. In truth, the vandalism of his poster and its aftermath had driven him out also. His door was now pockmarked with SOS buttons interspersed with clippings from the papers: Shakespeare in Danger at Universities? No Room for the Bard in Higher Ed? While at first he had found the attention justified and affirming (Lincoln Young assured him that it would help), the publicity began to feel distasteful. That other literature scholars would have a stake in th
e issue made sense; but the larger brouhaha was peculiar, as was—at Payne—the undergraduates’ continuing interest. Something strange was afoot. Late in the fall, Cassovan had entered his office and found the items on his desk rearranged: the tape dispenser had been moved to the place where the clock usually rested, and the letter opener (always kept on the left, parallel to the stapler) protruded, weapon-like, from a drawer. A threat? Or was he losing his mind? Picking up the ersatz weapon (the letter opener was, in fact, sharp), Cassovan remembered the board game his son, Ben, had liked to play when he was small, the object being to identify a murderer: the colleague with the letter opener in the office; the department chair with the window screen on the sidewalk; and now, perhaps, the economist, with a sharpened pencil, amid the library’s shelves.

  Roland dragged a chair to the edge of the carrel, hemming Cassovan in. Through the narrow window by the desk, a gunmetal sky was threatening snow. “I won’t take up much of your time,” Roland said. “You may have heard about the quality assessment program, of which I am chair. I understand that you have some frustrations—some dissatisfaction—with your department.”

  Cassovan didn’t answer. He didn’t care for Gladwell’s ambitions or for his pedagogical philosophy, which seemed to have been developed from a North Korean model, each student to be hewn and fashioned into a cog in the grinding wheel. Their two pairs of knees (Roland’s three times the size) were uncomfortably close. An expensive watch gleamed from within the hair on Roland’s wrist.

  “You might suppose that it’s none of my business, what transpires in English,” Roland said. “But QUAP has made it my business. And while some may be needlessly cautious or timid about the assessment process, I think you might find it could work to your benefit.”

  The overhead lights began to click off one row at a time, a tide of darkness approaching. Roland stood up and spun the two nearest dials. Cassovan might not know, he said, that he had studied Shakespeare in college and had once taken the part of Claudius in a classroom play.

  Cassovan cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. His eyes were bloodshot, rheumy, set deep in his face like matching fires in two ancient caves.

  “In any case, the point I’m getting to,” Roland said, “is that I applaud what you’re doing: you’re defending quality and upholding standards. But I wonder if it’s occurred to you that English—as a department—isn’t the best way to do that. Why entrust your legacy at Payne to a poorly functioning unit and its powerless chair?”

  Cassovan finished cleaning his glasses and put them back on. What an implacable buzzard, Roland thought: he might as well have been chatting with one of the statues on Easter Island. That twerp of an assistant, Lincoln Young, hadn’t adequately briefed him. Never mind: Roland laid out his plan. In order for any curricular initiative to survive, he explained, it would have to be funded; to think otherwise was to believe in fairy tales. English didn’t have funding. If Cassovan was angling for a permanent, or close to permanent, place for Shakespeare at Payne, he would need to think and to work beyond English. He would need to—

  The lights began to extinguish themselves again. Roland stood up, nearly knocking his chair over, and strode from one metal bookshelf to the next, spinning the dials.

  “ ‘Upon the world dim darkness doth display,’ ” Cassovan murmured.

  Roland sat down again, releasing a subtle whiff of cologne. “Excuse me?”

  “A poem. Go on.”

  Roland’s proposal, he assured his older colleague, was innovative and cross-disciplinary. Payne would offer Shakespeare instruction across the curriculum, rather than in English. English was bankrupt anyway, having turned its back on traditional literatures. What did Cassovan think about the idea of an annual Shakespeare lecture, perhaps bearing his name? They would have to fund-raise and gather the money, of course, but Roland had contacts. “And if you were to retire next fall”—he paused to allow this proposition time to sink in—“we could arrange to kick-start the fund with a semester’s worth of your salary.”

  With the tip of a finger, Cassovan straightened his stack of index cards. He found the smell of the library—the quiet, musty scent of books—oddly reassuring. It reminded him of the impermanence of his work: how deeply invested in it he was, and how little it meant to almost anyone else—which was as it should be. Men like Roland Gladwell imagined themselves with each completed project to be hewing their likenesses in bronze; but all scholarly endeavor was eventually reduced to these codified symbols tucked into endless paper beds, then bound between tombstone covers and seldom disturbed.

  Still, the economist’s proposition was somewhat intriguing: a lecture series in exchange for retirement. Cassovan cleared his throat. In his experience, he said, few students attended campus-wide lectures. Could undergraduates majoring in biology or Spanish or—he gestured in the direction of his robust colleague—economics be expected to rush off to hear an analysis of Twelfth Night? Occasional lectures were for those who had already cultivated an interest in a given topic; in the absence of a Shakespeare curriculum, there would be no audience for a series such as the one he described.

  Roland planted his fists on his monumental knees. “You’re saying a lecture isn’t enough for you?”

  In the darkness beyond the columns of books, they heard a clanking, jangling noise, as of chains being dragged along a prison floor.

  “Ghosts.” Cassovan smiled. A few seconds later, a custodian emerged from the gloom, pushing a bucket and mop contraption.

  “Hello, Henry,” Cassovan said.

  The custodian nodded, depositing a clump of grime on Roland’s pants with the edge of his cart.

  “Whether it is or isn’t enough for me is irrelevant,” Cassovan said. Roland brought to mind one of Cassovan’s undergraduates: a handsome soccer player, quick to anger, who took every editorial comment and correction as a personal slight, his pride a trophy he carried with him everywhere. “I’m interested only in what benefits the students. An annual lecture delivered by an overpaid visiting scholar is not the same as a recognition of Shakespeare’s place in the curriculum.”

  Roland examined his polished wingtips. He respected a colleague who knew how to bargain. Cassovan was one of the few well-regarded scholars in English. If Roland couldn’t persuade him to retire, he could perhaps pluck him from the bosom of his department. “You want a class, then,” he said. “Presumably a class the undergrads have no choice but to take.”

  Cassovan didn’t care for the phrasing—“no choice” had a punitive ring—but he shrugged his assent.

  “Such a class,” Roland said, “wouldn’t have to be offered by English. Might another academic department absorb it?”

  Another department? Through the slice of window on his left, Cassovan saw the snow begin again, oversized flakes spinning down from a flat gray sky. What other department would regularly offer a class on Shakespeare? Roland was probably thinking of Theater—whose chair, Margulies, was about to be coerced into retirement—or, god forbid, Film. So many of Cassovan’s students already showed up in his Shakespeare seminar talking about Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. One student had wanted, for “extra credit” (a phenomenon, akin to raffles and lottery tickets, in which Cassovan had never indulged), to screen an animated barbarity called Gnomeo and Juliet. Turning back from the window, he said, “I’m afraid the Film Studies Program is not equipped to—”

  Roland held up a meaty hand. “It wouldn’t have to be Film. It could be funded by the president or the provost, as part of a ‘Great Works’ experience. The faculty member in charge”—he was thinking now on his feet—“could be a member of any department. He could be a Shakespeare scholar-at-large. In light of the protests here on campus, we could easily sell the idea to donors: ‘Payne reestablishing rigorous standards in undergraduate education.’ Remove it from English, and every student on campus—not just the literature majors—could be re
quired to study Shakespeare.”

  Every student? Cassovan felt the tug of a fishing line—and there was Roland Gladwell sitting on the riverbank with a rod and a reel. “We’ve never had a required course that crosses departments,” he said. “And I imagine the chairs of Sociology and History and Physics would want their disciplines represented.”

  Roland erased this petty concern from the airspace between them. QUAP had been authorized to make curricular recommendations; and, as the committee’s chair, he had access to donors and to clout.

  The snowflakes were falling faster now, pressing themselves like tiny, desperate hands against the glass. It had been snowing on the afternoon that Cassovan’s son had died at the age of fourteen. The vivid memory of that day, though decades old, occasionally rose up in Cassovan’s mind to assail him. Ben would be middle-aged now. Year by year, his brief, graceful life grew more distant, like that of a character in a novel his father had dearly loved but would never read again.

  He gathered his things. He wanted to leave before the snow made walking difficult; falling, at his age, might mean a permanent change of address, to a nursing home.

  “You’re leaving?” Roland asked. “We’ll walk out together.” He spun the timer, and a runway of light illuminated their path through the shelves. As they reached the elevator, Roland put his hand—it felt more like a lion’s paw—on Cassovan’s shoulder. “You’ll give some thought to our conversation?”