The Shakespeare Requirement

by Julie Schumacher

  Assuming that Fitger would arrive midwedding and take a seat at the back, Janet sat near the altar, in front of Fran, who scooted forward to inform her of the obvious: that Fitger hadn’t yet come.

  “Nice to see you too,” Janet said.

  A minister glided past in his robe and plunked a missal down on the lectern.

  “Ms. Matthias used to be married to Professor Fitger,” Fran said to Ashkir.

  Janet ignored the sharp intake of breath denoting Ashkir’s surprise. There were no flowers in the chapel. Should she have brought some? No: better to have brought the gift of a check made out to Angela, folded neatly in half in a card in her purse.

  Lugubrious music issued from two tinny speakers to the left of the altar.

  Ashkir said he was sure that Professor Fitger would be there soon: it was a three-minute walk from Willard Hall.

  “Three and a half,” Fran said. She tapped Janet’s shoulder. “Did you hear about our department event?” she asked. No? She nudged Ashkir; could he give Ms. Matthias one of their flyers?

  Janet accepted a bookmark-sized piece of paper announcing the Department of English’s end-of-year speaker. She turned around in her pew. “Orest Weisel?”

  “He is Professor Kentrell’s friend,” Ashkir said.

  “But—”

  The music shifted to something Gaelic; Janet stuffed the flyer into a hymnbook.

  “He’d better get here,” Fran said. “I was hoping he’d be able to talk Angela out of this.”

  Ashkir said he was sure Professor Fitger would arrive very soon.

  * * *

  —

  In his Willard Hall office, having told Fran that he would catch up with her at the wedding, Fitger was sorting through seventeen different versions of the Statement of Vision. Having fallen behind due to the upcoming visit of the nation’s premier preschool poet, he had only a few more weeks in which to forge a faculty consensus. Rutledge, when he resurfaced, would probably approve QUAP’s recommendations, and Econ’s announcement of its soon-to-be-acquired millions would give Roland a power no other faculty member at Payne had ever known. The SOV would provide a meager, temporary protection. Fitger was therefore trying to assemble agreeable passages from the seventeen previous drafts of the document, each of which, when submitted to the faculty, had been roundly condemned.

  The Department of English at Payne University, he wrote, engages undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in the study and analysis and creation of literature [he remembered that Stang objected to the word “analysis”]…in the study and creation of literature that…He paused. Someone—West?—had insisted on “literatures” and not “literature.” He added an “s.” Emphasizing critical inquiry, aesthetics, and textual knowledge and appreciation [Glenk disliked the word “appreciation,” but might let it pass], instruction in English spans centuries and disciplines [Christ, he sounded like Carl Sagan], from the Anglo-Saxon period to…Cassovan would never allow him to use the term “Anglo-Saxon” if Shakespeare wasn’t represented as well.

  Through the ceiling, he heard the rolling thunder of Roland Gladwell’s executive chair. QUAP had decimated Theater and chewed Gusev to pieces over in Classics, the committee’s job becoming simpler after Roland had purchased Hinckler’s nonintervention via an associate professorship in the French horn; the dean would return to the Department of Music, his pockets weighed down with thirty pieces of silver, in June.

  Fitger looked at his watch: fifteen minutes remained before Angela’s wedding. Janet should have warned him about the dean; why didn’t she tell him that Hinckler and his French horn would accept a payoff? Fitger picked up his pen and went back to the Statement of Vision, keeping in mind the preferences and particular needs of each of his colleagues. Of the twelve tenured or tenure-track faculty members in English, eleven, he thought, were, at least at the current moment, potentially receptive to compromise.

  One was Hesseldine, rescued from Rodentia;

  Two was Lovejoy, relieved of her masturbator;

  Three was Brown-Wilson, never again to serve on a committee (Fitger had signed a contract to this effect) with either Tyne or Kentrell;

  Four was West, never again to serve on a committee with Kentrell or Stang;

  Five was Stang, given precedence for “childcare”;

  Six was Fitger;

  Seven was Glenk, whose miniature donkeys had tentatively approved a reversal of position;

  Eight was Atherman, whose birthday, as well as those of Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë, was now denoted via a party hat on the calendar;

  Nine was Beauchamp, given clearance to brew and dispense kombucha (to faculty only) down the hall in her office;

  Ten was Tyne (Fitger cringed when he thought of the Jiffy Maids who had confronted Albert’s shuddersome enclosure, what with the animal cadavers and the bottles of urine collected over so many years);

  Eleven was Kentrell, who had been fed, housed, and cosseted for the better part of a month.

  Which left only Dennis Cassovan, whose portion of the Shakespeare scorecard remained pristine.

  Rogaine—Fran had left him behind in the office—was snuffling at something in Fitger’s briefcase. “Get out of there, you hairless rascal. What are you eating?” The dog had chewed a hole in a bag of confetti Fitger had purchased, along with a gift certificate to the campus bookstore, for Angela’s wedding, after having been told that, for some sort of environmental reason, it was no longer appropriate to toss handfuls of rice. Rogaine had swallowed some of the brightly shredded contents. Now he held his chin close to the floor as if about to be sick.

  “What’s the matter with you? What do you need? Water?” Fitger filled a coffee mug at the fountain in the hall and set it on the floor in front of the dog. A thought occurred: Would Dennis Cassovan be at the wedding? Angela had been in his class as well, so he probably would be. Perhaps, before the ceremony started, Fitger could talk to him for a few minutes. Janet, of course, would be at the wedding, too.

  Rogaine wheezed, a sprinkle of confetti chuffing out of his mouth. “Look at you,” Fitger said, aware that it was no longer unusual for him to talk to the dog. “You need to drink something.” He pointed with his toe to the mug of water, which Rogaine promptly knocked over with his paw.

  Fitger consulted his watch again. “Shit.” Weddings didn’t generally start on time, did they? Fran had told him to leave the dog behind to guard the office, but fearing a confetti-induced asphyxiation, he clipped a leash to Rogaine’s collar, and together they went to the chapel to see Angela wed.

  * * *

  —

  Helena Stang, suffering from laryngitis, had felt unwell enough to make legitimate excuses and to skip her student’s wedding, but she had rallied and made that extra effort, deciding to attend for intellectual as well as feminist reasons. Weddings were stunningly patriarchal, beginning with a parade of pastel virgins preceding the victim/sacrifice on her way to the shrine. Stang unwrapped and put a lozenge into her mouth while studying the young man with the face of a tapir, obviously the groom, who was currently escorting a middle-aged female version of himself to the front of the church.

  Bagpipe music began to squeal from a CD player; Dennis Cassovan, in the pew beside her, stood. Well, this was interesting: rather than a full bouquet of maiden attendants, here came a single brassy young creature in a bright red dress, who stalked hips-first up the aisle like a majorette. Close behind her, walking alone (at least she wasn’t being traded like a bargaining chip from one male arm to another), was the bride, looking fertile and anxious in a flowered smock. Angela, enrolled in Professor Stang’s Feminism and Literature class, had spent two weeks studying institutionalized gender bias, after which she had knocked on her professor’s door and handed her an invitation to her espousal. Stang had init
ially wondered whether this gesture might be a work of subversive theater; unfortunately, it was not. Angela was a bright young woman, but irony was a difficult concept for her to grasp.

  * * *

  —

  Dennis Cassovan, at Helena Stang’s side, had quietly signaled to the cluster of undergraduates (who looked as if they were about to be graded on an exam for which no one had studied) in the opposite pews, indicating that they should stand as the bride began to walk down the aisle. He smiled at Angela. He himself had married at twenty-eight; his wife, Louise, had been only nineteen. Back in those days, even seventeen or eighteen conferred adulthood; now, unbridled adolescence seemed to begin before puberty and to peak during the college years, extending through graduate school and beyond. When Angela came to his office with that handwritten wedding invitation he had immediately noticed the thickness at her waist and the careful, self-conscious way she sat down. He remembered Louise, pregnant with their son (how terrified he had been about the idea of being a father!), moving in the same way.

  He thought about the portion of his book that focused on Coriolanus. I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Impossible to alter the past, and yet the desire to amend it in one’s mind was constant. Perhaps if he shifted the first chapter’s discussion of cognizance to…Angela, her eyebrows pinched above the bridge of her nose, glanced quickly and, it seemed, anxiously in his direction. It wasn’t the role of faculty to intrude on students’ personal lives and decisions (the university hired counselors for that), but Cassovan shifted uncomfortably—hasty marriage seldom proveth well—as she took her place at the front of the church. Where was her family? Who was advising the poor girl? He would have liked to tap Fran on the shoulder and ask. The groom—who brought Much Ado About Nothing’s Dogberry to mind—stood near the baptismal font, as rigid and unmoving as a stave.

  * * *

  —

  Dearly beloved, we are gathered…

  Fran had been hoping that Angela might come to her senses and make a run for the exit, but now that the ceremony had started, that possibility seemed more remote. She probably felt trapped—a situation Fran knew a few things about—and was latching onto the idea of marriage like a drowning victim reaching for even a semi-inflated raft.

  Fitger hadn’t shown up. If he didn’t get to the chapel soon, Fran would personally kill him, thus lending a sense of satisfaction to the end of her week. Angela looked very cute in that dress. She was such a sweet kid. Fran saw her flash an interrogatory half smile at the boy she was marrying, who responded with terror or surprise, as if someone had slammed his finger in a car door. Fran would happily kill him, too, at any indication that he was unkind to Angela. It was too easy to get married, she thought, whereas a number of painful years were usually involved in coming to the realization that one’s spouse was a dud.

  Let us pray.

  * * *

  —

  At the back of the chapel (he hadn’t missed much; the wedding had just started), Fitger took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom; then, wanting to evade responsibility for the confetti-filled dog, he made a beeline for Fran. Man and dog clattered into the pew beside her.

  “What’s that on his face?” Fran hissed. “What did you feed him?” Rogaine appeared to be wearing makeup; his lips and whiskers were flecked with blue.

  Fitger tried to explain, but a woman whose spine was curved like a shepherd’s crook had tiptoed toward them to say that dogs and other pets were not allowed in the church.

  “This is a guide dog,” Fitger said, pointing to Rogaine’s Girl Scout sash.

  “A therapy dog,” Ashkir added.

  Amen. You may sit.

  “Rogaine, sit,” said Fran.

  Everyone sat. The woman with the crooked back walked away.

  The all-wise Creator in the Garden of Eden—

  Fitger gave Fran the leash and control of the dog, then harrumphed once, wanting Angela to know he had come. Janet was sitting directly in front of him. His gaze immediately settled on the back of her head, which had always struck him as pleasantly shaped: there was something of the old-fashioned lightbulb about it, with a cup at the nape like a small oval pool. He remembered their wedding, performed by a justice of the peace in a ceremony that lasted about forty-three seconds. A sudden rainstorm had kept them from leaving the courthouse when it was finished, so they’d had quick, furtive sex (probably recorded by surveillance cameras) in a basement corridor, under the stairs. It was a memory that returned to him during weddings; he wanted to ask her if she thought about it also, but he needed to talk to Dennis Cassovan, seated diagonally behind him, first.

  Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman…

  Fitger leaned, uncomfortably, over the back of his pew. “Dennis,” he whispered. “Do you have a moment?”

  Cassovan was still thinking about Coriolanus; his mind was wandering.

  “Dennis, I’m writing another version of the Statement of Vision,” Fitger whispered. “And I’m hoping you might be willing to—” Stang (what was she wearing around her neck? Fitger wondered; it looked like a typewriter that had been flattened by a train) was flapping her hand to get his attention.

  “Just a minute, Helena,” Fitger said.

  She had scribbled the word OBJECT in the margins of the previous Sunday’s program (“Art Thou Weary, Art Thou Languid,” Fitger noticed, was the week’s chosen hymn) and was thrusting it toward him.

  “Uh-oh, watch it,” Fran said. Rogaine coughed up a pile of blue mulch.

  At the front of the chapel, the minister spoke at some length about God’s separate, divinely sanctioned plans for wives and for husbands.

  “Dennis, wait,” Fitger said. Cassovan removed himself to the far end of the pew, while Stang continued to press the previous week’s program on Fitger, pointing at the word OBJECT with her thumb. A noun or a verb? Fitger wondered.

  Fran said it was no way to treat a dog; Fitger needed to keep a better eye on Rogaine if he was going to adopt.

  “Who said I was going to adopt?” he asked. The minister paused and looked up.

  “Sorry.” Fitger helped Fran cover the vomit with a collection of tissues. He sat facing forward in the pew. There was Janet’s well-shaped head again, just in front of him. “I didn’t know you broke up with Phil,” he said.

  Janet scratched at an earlobe.

  “He sold out to Roland. But I guess you knew that.” Fitger leaned closer.

  Continuing to read from his zealot’s playbook, the minister reminded Angela that, in wedlock, she would be “submitting to the headship” of her future spouse.

  “Is he talking about blow jobs?” Fran asked. “I never heard of that being written into the wedding vows.”

  Stang’s typewriter necklace was rattling; she kicked the underside of the pew.

  “I took your advice all year,” Fitger murmured, still speaking to the back of Janet’s head. He wasn’t sure whether he was pleading or scolding. He told Janet he had done everything she suggested—not always because he thought her suggestions were good but because they were hers. He had gone door-to-door through the building, he had networked with other department chairs, he had conferred with Wilcox, and now he was going to humiliate himself by staging a campus event that would be of interest mainly to those who hadn’t yet learned to count to ten.

  “And Marie Eland and I aren’t dating,” he said. “You can ask her.”

  Janet’s head revolved, slowly, on the stem of her neck. She proceeded to tell him, speaking in a whisper reminiscent, in Fitger’s mind, of a samurai sword, that she didn’t care if he was dating or not dating, and she had tried to tell him at their divorce anniversary dinner that Phil had sold out to Roland and QUAP but he had refused to hear. And as for her suggestions, she had offered them against her better judgment while bending university codes of cond
uct. In addition to providing him with a year’s worth of sound administrative advice, she had put up with his neediness and had hired his student; and she was not responsible for his selfish ineptitude or for his department being eviscerated by QUAP. Maybe he should have spent more time advising his students instead of flirting. And she hoped to god he didn’t flatter himself by imagining that he or English had anything to do with her decision to break up with Phil.

  At the altar, perhaps fully persuaded that she was at fault for the Fall of Mankind, Angela handed her plastic flowers to Brandi.

  Would Trevor, as first among equals, promise to have and to hold, to guide and to tutor—

  “We need to talk. I want to talk to you,” Fitger said. Would Janet meet him after the service?

  “Fuck you, Jay,” she said. She would not.

  —and for her portion, would Angela promise forever to honor and to render obedience to Trevor L. Thurley?

  * * *

  —

  Angela had heard Professor Fitger enter the church (she was glad that he and her other professors were there), and during the wedding she had been reassured by the sound of his voice occasionally rising and falling behind her, as if he were a participant in the service or the prayers. Based on some of his comments in class, she didn’t think he was religious; but there were things he strongly believed in and, during his Narratives of Adventure class, he talked about character and success and failure and virtue in a way she admired. They had finished discussing True Grit and he had spoken about Mattie Ross and the arc of her life as if she were real. That was what Angela loved about books: that she could live within them and through them.