The Shakespeare Requirement

by Julie Schumacher

  “Really?” Janet looked at Rogaine.

  Yes, it was true: because of Ashkir, they didn’t have to pay for the auditorium, and Weisel, after waiving his usual fee, had, post-sing-along, even made a donation. “I think I have it here in my wallet.” Fitger took a check from his billfold: fifty dollars, made out to the Department of English.

  Fran dropped it into her in-box. “I need to leave a little early. Octavia is going in for a checkup.” She bobbed her head in the direction of the monitor lizard, then said something to Janet about the dog’s evening meal. “Has Rogaine had a chance yet, today, to do his business?”

  “If by ‘business,’ ” Fitger said, “you mean chewing the decomposing carcasses of squirrels or humping my briefcase, yes, he’s enjoyed the opportunity for both.” He looked at Janet. “Are you…taking him home?”

  “For the weekend.” Janet held her hand out to the dog, and Rogaine licked some rain from her skin.

  “Traitor,” Fitger said, while she scratched the dog’s skull. “He never puts his ears back nicely that way for me.”

  “Maybe that’s because Janet doesn’t talk to him about euthanasia,” Fran said. She handed him a manila envelope. “Here. You’ve probably been trying to forget about these.”

  Fitger felt a tide of weariness wash across him, a liquid torpor taking the place of the blood in his veins. Did he feel queasy, too, about Rogaine?

  “What’s in the envelope?” Janet asked.

  “Ballots,” said Fran. She explained that the English faculty had been given a week to read Fitger’s most recent sixteen-word version of the Statement of Vision and, by checking Yes, No, or Abstain, to cast their votes by Friday at two. Here were the results. Fitger tucked the envelope under his arm.

  Janet looked at him directly for the first time. “Aren’t you going to open it?” she asked.

  “He can’t,” said Fran. Department policy clearly stated that ballots had to be opened and counted in the presence of two members of the English faculty and one member of staff. And it was now 4:25 on a Friday and Fran was late for a veterinary appointment, and they weren’t likely to find any faculty still in the building. They would have to wait until the following week. She went into her office and came back a moment later clutching what looked like a small cloth suitcase—a carry-all, Fitger saw, for the monitor lizard. A hole in the back allowed for a furfuraceous tail.

  “I’m a member of staff,” Janet said. “Does the staff have to be Department of English?”

  Fran raised her eyebrows. “No, I guess not,” she said. “But you still have to find a second faculty member. And if you do dig up someone”—she looked severely at Fitger—“you have to count the ballots twice. The chair writes the final tally down and then signs it.” She started toward the door, the lizard’s tail lashing behind her like a rope. “If you have any questions—”

  “I’ll be fine,” Janet said. She knelt on the floor to untangle the leash from Rogaine’s paws.

  Fitger stood by and watched; he hadn’t seen Janet since Angela’s wedding—or non-wedding. He had wanted to call her or stop by the law school, but understood that she preferred he stay away. But here she was, kneeling on the ragged carpet in the English Department office, reviving in him the hope that she didn’t revile him; that in fact the Caesar salad episode (he understood, now, that she had probably been trying to tell him about Hinckler) was evidence of an evolution in her feelings for him; and while perhaps she wasn’t fond of him, per se, she was able to think, as he did, about their marriage and their years together with affection, and would therefore allow him to tell her (even though he was half a dozen years too late with this declaration) that he had missed her every single day since the divorce and, in his own flawed and rudimentary way, he loved her still.

  “Angela came to talk to me a few days ago,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for recommending her as an intern.”

  “You’re welcome.” Fitger couldn’t parse her expression. “Janet, I—”

  She cut him off. “I came here from the Econ event,” she said, looking up. “I assumed you wouldn’t be in the audience.”

  “No. Rogaine and I considered attending,” he said, pulling a burr from the dog’s ear. “But other matters kept us here in the office. How was it? Were there seven or eight zeroes on the check?”

  Janet stood up. The rain had stopped. She looked out the window. “You know they moved the event to the gym?”

  Yes, Fitger knew.

  She paused. “It didn’t go well. Roland…misspoke.”

  “What do you mean, he ‘misspoke’?”

  Well, he had some sort of altercation with Pup-Dog, and his obvious dislike for the mascot made the students unhappy. Then—maybe he was rattled—he mispronounced the donors’ names. “And not just once,” she said. “After the second time he did it, Pup-Dog covered his eyes with his paws and crawled off the stage. The local papers were there, and I think half the students in the audience caught it on film.”

  “I don’t understand. He mispronounced ‘Pratt’ and ‘Fixx’?”

  “Into the microphone. It was loud. There was no mistaking what he said.”

  “Pratt-Fixx?” Fitger asked. “The Pratt-Fixx Endowment?”

  Janet pinched the air with her thumbs and fingers and moved her right hand over the left as if rearranging words and letters in the air.

  “Pratt-Fixx…Fatt—”

  “And apparently the agreement wasn’t signed yet,” Janet said, “and word on the street is that the money is going to be redirected to a ‘worthier cause.’ ”

  Fitger shook his head as if to clear it. The Fat Pricks Endowment. The Department of Economics in Fat Pricks Hall. “President Hoffman was there? And Rutledge?”

  “I didn’t see Rutledge,” Janet said. “But Hoffman was sitting next to the donors; when they walked out, all in a row, she brought up the rear.”

  Fitger envisioned a thread of hope dangling in the air before him. With Roland disgraced and Econ bereft of its windfall, English would remain, at least for the immediate future, in Willard. He felt almost fond of the building. He and Janet sat in silence for a while.

  “Thanks for bringing the news,” he said.

  Janet said he was welcome, but she had something else to discuss with him as well. A proposition.

  “Oh?” He tried to quell the surge of optimism that quickened his heart.

  “Now that Phil and I aren’t together anymore,” she said, “I spend a lot of time alone. For a while, I thought about getting a cat. It turns out I’m allergic.”

  “Ah. Interesting,” Fitger said.

  Rogaine licked some crumbs from the carpet.

  “So I was talking to Fran, and I told her I didn’t want a dog, because I’m not home often enough. You have to walk a dog and take care of it.”

  “Right,” Fitger said.

  “But then Fran told me that some people who don’t want sole responsibility for a dog co-adopt. They co-own it. The dog would have two separate owners and two separate houses; it would go back and forth.”

  As if aware that he and his kind were being discussed, Rogaine yawned, showing the cave of his mouth.

  “I thought we might try it, if you were interested,” Janet said. “It’s just an idea. We’d have to work out the logistics, but if you were willing, we could share him. Take some time, and let me know what you think.”

  Fitger understood the openheartedness of her offer: she was telling him that she didn’t love or intend ever again to love him; but it was possible that from the stupidest move of his life he might be freed and forgiven. He looked at Rogaine. If they co-owned the dog, might Fitger walk him to Janet’s house on the weekends and, like a divorced co-parent, be invited in for an ex-marital consult regarding the problems of canine behavior, over a beer?

  Probably not. But the possibil
ity would sustain him and he would try to be satisfied with it; for now, it would do.

  Janet picked up the loop of Rogaine’s leash (the dog behaved much better for her than it did for Fitger) and suggested that they look for a colleague who could help with the counting of ballots. Out in the hall, she headed toward Fitger’s old office, from which, as always, one could hear the clickety-clack of computer keys.

  “That won’t work. There’s a Norwegian in there,” Fitger said. “It has to be a member of the English department.”

  “Why are you harboring Norwegians?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t have a department.” Fitger had become convinced that Arnljot had recorded a tape of someone typing and was playing it, in an endless loop, while he napped on the floor.

  “Kick him out,” Janet said, as Rogaine sniffed at a trash can. “Wield some power; after all, you’re the chair.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  A custodian waved to them from the end of the hallway.

  “The Fat Pricks Fellowship,” Fitger murmured.

  “It does have a ring to it,” Janet agreed.

  “Payne University’s Fat Pricks Prize in Economics.”

  The custodian, a cart full of fluorescent lightbulbs behind him, was hurrying in their direction. “Professor? Please. Would you please come with me?”

  * * *

  —

  The study of literature, Dennis Cassovan had always thought, was a preparation for death. By definition, the literary scholar was continuously engaged in a scrutiny of the arc that gave shape to existence, via Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and inevitable end. Our little life is rounded with a sleep. How had he managed to persuade himself that his own demise, like that of a literary hero, would arrive in dramatic form—rather than softly, while he worked by the light of his father’s lamp in his office, alone?

  Cassovan’s hand—he had trained himself to write with the left, after the childhood polio weakened his right side—had been in the act of annotating the essay questions (his undergraduate class would be tested, among other things, on vengeance in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet) for the next week’s exam. Observing the sudden, involuntary jolting of his pen, he had suffered a spasm of disappointment; he would not be grading the exam himself, or explaining his absence, unexcused, to his students. He envisioned them on Monday morning waiting in their seats, irritated, restless, and eventually picking up their books and heading back to their dorms. He made a final effort to rise from his chair but his body remained oddly immobile. Even his breath had come to a quiet close—and how strange it was to realize that the ghostly footsteps he believed to have dogged his progress around campus for the past few months had been tracing instead a simple path toward his heart.

  He understood, or was given to understand, that this final transition would not be difficult. His affairs had long been in order, and he had tried to make peace with sadness and put conflicts to rest. Of course there would always be tasks not completed. Most personally painful was the fact that his book—Anamnesis in Three Roman Plays—would remain unfinished, his study of retrospection and memory never granted a final form. (Lincoln Young would attempt, unsuccessfully, to appropriate the first chapter, but would misread and misinterpret Cassovan’s notes, which were color-coded and neatly organized and rubber-banded in his left-hand drawer.)

  Strange: the overhead lights (had he turned them on?) had begun to flicker, and his wooden chair had suddenly reminded him of a cradle. There on his desk (whose missing right front foot had been replaced, forty years earlier, with a brick) were the incomplete essay exam, the banker’s lamp with its green glass shade, his mother smiling while she pinned up her hair, a black rotary phone, his wife admonishing their son about the washing of hands, an apple cut into perfect quarters, a velvet curtain splashing onto the stage at the end of the play, and a five-dollar clock purchased at a hardware store by his son, Ben—a Father’s Day gift—about six months before he died at the age of fourteen. Such small but lovely souvenirs; such—

  * * *

  —

  The fur on Rogaine’s spine rose up, from just behind his ears to his tail. He had smelled dead things before—tire-tracked squirrels, rabbits, possums, birds, mice—but this odor was heavier, and different. Cautious, he extended his nose and flexed his nostrils. Fruit-blood-eggs-urine-dirt-sweat-bread-ink-wool-soap-rain…and the body-with-clothing smell of a very old man. He had never smelled a dead human. He tugged at his leash and lay down with his nose by the door.

  Fitger touched Cassovan’s wrist; it was cold. Cassovan was wearing what he would likely be buried in: his traditional black suit, white shirt, and black tie. His rawboned fingers were still gripping a pen; and on his face, Fitger couldn’t help noticing, there was a look of mild but not unpleasant surprise.

  “We should call 911,” Janet said.

  Pinned to the blade of Cassovan’s letter opener, which rested precisely next to the stapler, was a ballot. It was not filled out.

  “Jay?” Janet asked.

  Fitger picked up the letter opener and plucked the ballot from its tip. Then he tore open the manila envelope Fran had given him and spilled the rest of the ballots onto Cassovan’s desk. He remembered Fran’s admonition: ballots had to be counted in the presence of two English Department faculty members and one representative of the university staff. Department policy made no mention of both faculty members still being alive. Do you approve of the Statement of Vision for the Department of English as stated below? Check Yes, No, or Abstain.

  Rogaine crawled forward, dragging his belly along the floor, and sniffed Cassovan’s shoe. Setting Cassovan’s blank ballot aside, Fitger counted the others. Eleven to zero. A unanimous Yes. He counted them a second time to be sure.

  Janet picked up the phone. Rogaine whined. On Cassovan’s bookshelf, Fitger saw an SOS button. Save Our Shakespeare. He slipped it into Cassovan’s pocket. Keep this man safe, he thought, contemplating his colleague. I had rather have such men my friends than enemies.

  Janet called his attention to something out the window. At the edge of the parking lot behind Willard Hall, Angela Vackrey was sitting on a suitcase, eating an apple. She was immersed in a book.

  The first order of business in the coming year, Fitger thought, would be the reestablishment of the breastfeeding lounge.

  Acknowledgments

  A thousand thanks to my wonderful editor, Gerald Howard, who didn’t care for the original version of this novel and persuaded me to start over. Let’s be honest: I wasn’t happy about it at the time, but he was right in the end. Also at Doubleday, thanks to Emily Mahon (I apologize for being a pain in the ass about the cover), and to Nora Reichard and Lawrence Krauser and Nora Grubb and Sarah Engelmann and—especially—Michael Goldsmith.

  Thank you, again and again, to Lisa Bankoff, who has the strength and tenacity of a hundred merely mortal literary agents.

  At the University of Minnesota, sincere thanks to my colleagues in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English (who truly are not represented in the pages of this novel): Kim Todd, who handed me the title during a lull in a faculty meeting one afternoon; Katherine Scheil, who offered valuable insight into all things Shakespeare and even allowed me to grill her undergrads in my search for material; Charles Baxter and Patricia Hampl, who championed this book in its early stages (I hope I didn’t let you down by not getting that Guggenheim); John Watkins, whose perspective on academic and department politics is always refreshing; and Andrew Elfenbein, department chair par excellence. Thank god you’re serving as chair, so that I don’t have to.

  Thank you to everyone at Ucross, for that beautiful studio. I threw out most of what I wrote while I was there (see paragraph no. 1, above), but I loved every second of my time in Wyoming.

  Thanks to Alison McGhee, for near-continuous moral support; and to Kate DiCamillo, for thinkin
g both versions of the opening chapters were good.

  Thanks to Jon Baxter Williams, for his knowledge of tarantulas; and to Karie Swenson, for passing that horrible knowledge (with illustrations) along.

  Thanks to the members of my book club, who encouraged me to use their names for various unsavory minor characters.

  Thanks to Emma and Bella, who didn’t exactly help with this book that I can remember, but that’s okay because they inspire me in a hundred other ways, and I love them for simply being themselves.

  And finally, thanks to Moo, Hazel, and Vince, who provided hours of bewhiskered companionship while I typed up this book. Any errors in the work are theirs alone.

  About the Author

  Julie Schumacher grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University, where she earned her MFA. Her first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her 2014 novel, Dear Committee Members, won the James Thurber Prize for American Humor; she is the first woman to have been so honored. She lives in St. Paul and is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.

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