by Gail Bowen
As I walked back from Political Science 101 class on Wednesday morning, I was wholly absorbed with the problem of how to get Fraser Jackson to open up to me. My arms were full of essays, and when I reached to open the door to the main office, they shifted, and the copy of Political Perspectives that had appeared so fortuitously minutes before my first meeting with Ariel’s class, slid to the floor. I bent to pick it up and knew I had my opening.
Rosalie was at her computer. She was wearing a sweater set the colour of violets, and she was beaming. “Guess what?” she said. “I cooked an entire meal for Robert, and he loved it.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “What did you make?”
“All his favourites.” As she recited the menu, she ticked the items off on her blunt-edged fingers: “Roast beef with suet pudding, fried potatoes, onion rings, broccoli in cheese sauce, rolls and butter, and gravy, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “And for dessert?”
“Chocolate eclairs,” she said. “But I cheated. I bought them frozen at Safeway.” A tiny frown crimped her forehead. “Am I wrong, or are you looking a little disapproving?”
“Not disapproving,” I said. “It’s just … Rosalie, how old is Robert?”
“Sixty-one,” she said.
“If you want him to see sixty-two, you might want to cut back a little on the cholesterol.”
She took my meaning. “A new cookbook?”
“Maybe just a more judicious selection from the old one.”
Rosalie whipped out the Rombauers from under her desk. “I’ll get right on it,” she said.
“Before you do, I have a question. Yesterday, when Ariel’s book turned up on our doorstep, you said there was no note.”
“That’s because there wasn’t one.”
“I know, but I forgot to ask you if the book was in any kind of wrapping.”
“It wasn’t wrapped up,” she said. “Just stuck in an inter-office envelope. But your name wasn’t on it, and there was no sender’s name. I checked.”
“Is the envelope still around?”
“I haven’t sent anything out.” She walked over to the shelf under our mailboxes and removed a stack of large brown envelopes. “I’ll go through these if you’ll tell me what to look for.”
I glanced at the envelope on top. “No need,” I said. “We hit the jackpot, first time out.” I pointed to the last address.
“The Theatre department,” she said. “I don’t get it.”
“I think we’ve found our secret Santa,” I said.
I dropped off my books, and headed off in search of Fraser Jackson. His office was in our campus’s shiniest new bauble, the University Centre, a building with a soaring glass entrance, floor tiles arranged to represent an abstracted aerial view of our province’s southern landscape, a painting of a huge woman, defiantly and confidently naked, an upscale food court, two theatres, a clutch of offices that tended to student affairs, and the departments of Music and Theatre.
When I stopped in front of Fraser Jackson’s door, a student passing by told me that Professor Jackson was in the Shu-Box, the nickname that had inevitably attached itself to the theatre donated by philanthropists Morris and Jacqui Schumiatcher.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the theatre, but I felt my way to a chair at the back, settled in, and watched as a student massacred one of the loveliest passages in The Tempest. Jeff Neeley, the young man onstage, was the quarterback of our football team, and he recited Caliban’s speech at breakneck speed, as if he had to unload the words before he was sacked.
When Jeff finished, Fraser rose from his seat in the front row and walked over to him. Jeff’s body tightened, but Fraser’s voice was disarmingly soft.
“You’re finding it hard to connect to this.” It was a statement of fact, not a question. “You know that moment that comes when you first wake up and what you’re waking up to is a hundred times worse than what you’re leaving behind?”
Jeff knitted his brow, then the light bulb went on. “Yeah,” he said. “Like when I wake up the morning after we’ve lost a game. The worst was last year against the Huskies. All I could throw were interceptions. Then in the final play I got clocked and fractured my femur. They shot me full of Demerol. I was dreaming that I’d run into the end zone for a touchdown and we’d won; then I woke up.” He shook his head in wonder at a world that had such moments in it. “I would have given my left nut to have drifted off again.”
Fraser’s nod was empathetic. He was wearing Nikes, jogging shorts, and a sweatshirt. His body was hard-muscled and athletic; it was easy to believe he understood the power of Jeff’s dream. When he put his hand on Jeff’s shoulder and locked eyes with him, the fact that he’d made a connection was apparent. “I knew you had an instinct for what this scene’s about,” Fraser said. “Now use what you just told me, and let’s hear it again – from the top.”
Jeff squared his shoulders and began: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises.…” By the time he got to “The clouds methought would open, and show riches/Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked/I cried to dream again,” he had me. He wasn’t Kenneth Branaugh, but he wasn’t bad.
Jeff glanced towards Fraser expectantly.
“Not there yet,” Fraser said. “But definitely within field-goal range. Keep working on it.”
As Jeff sprinted past me towards the doors that would release him into the world of sunlight and scrimmages, his relief was palpable, but I knew my ordeal was just beginning.
Fraser Jackson was slumped in a seat in the front row with a script, but as soon as he spotted me, he smiled and stood up. “Did you catch the performance?”
“I did.”
“There’s still a perception among the jocks that Theatre is an easy credit. I’m doing my best to get the word out that it’s not.”
“If the entire Rams team transfers into Poli Sci, I’ll know who to thank,” I said.
His laughter was deep and reassuringly warm. “What can I do for you, Joanne?”
“You’ve already done it,” I said. “I came to thank you for sending me Ariel’s copy of Political Perspectives.”
He exhaled heavily. “How did you know it came from me?”
“You used an inter-office envelope. Your department was the last addressee, and I knew you and Ariel were close.”
His eyes were wary. “I wouldn’t have made much of a spy,” he said finally.
It was now or never. “Maybe not,” I said, “but Ariel believed you’d be a good father.”
Pain knifed his face, but he was an actor who had learned strategies for containing emotion. He shifted his gaze from me to the empty pool of light on the darkened stage. “She told you?”
“It must have been a terrible loss for you,” I said.
“It was,” he said huskily. “It’s been hard not being able to talk about it.”
“Do you want to talk about it now?”
In the half-light of the theatre, Fraser Jackson’s profile had the power that made me understand why Bebe had called him an African prince. “Can I trust you?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“A conflict of interests,” he said, “because of your friendship with Charlie Dowhanuik’s father?”
“Yes.”
“I need to talk,” he said, “so I’ll have to take my chances. Would you mind if we went outside? I could use a cigarette.”
On our way through the lobby we passed a display of origami and a young woman crying at a public telephone. The origami was clever, and the young woman’s tearful iteration, “I gave you five fucking months of my life,” was plaintive, but Fraser was oblivious.
As soon as we passed through the doors, he lit up and dragged deeply. When he walked over to an arrangement of large rocks that the students had designated an unofficial smoking area, I followed. Fraser chose a slab of marble large enough for us to sit on side by side. He finished his cigarette, and pulled another from the pack
. He shook his head in disgust. “I don’t need this. Grabbing the nearest prop is a trick incompetent actors use when they’re trying to think of their next line. They believe it distracts the audience.”
“You have an audience of one,” I said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes met mine. “Okay,” he said. “No tricks.” Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Did you ever hear that song ‘I Feel Ten Feet High and Bulletproof’?”
I nodded.
“From the moment Ariel told me she wanted me to be the father of her child, that’s the way I felt.”
“But you must have been surprised.”
“Any man would have been.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Of course, you are too polite to say your next line.”
“Which is …?”
“Which is that I must have been more surprised than most men would have been because I’m black.” He spread out his hands in front of him as if to check the reality of his statement. “Not tan or café au lait or pleasingly brown, but black – black as sin or pitch or Toby’s proverbial ass. What’s more, my features are distinctly non-Caucasian. I’m sure these sobering facts would have given you pause, Joanne.”
“Yes,” I said. “If I’d been looking for a father for my child, I would have considered the donor’s background.”
“Rightly so,” he said. “A woman would be a fool to leave such matters to chance. I’m sure you remember the old limerick students in genetics class used to help them remember Mendel’s Law.
“There was a young lady named Sarkey,
And she fell in love with a darkey,
The result of her sins,
Was quadruplets, not twins,
One black and one white and two khaki.”
There was no anger in Fraser Jackson’s voice; he was travelling a path he’d been down a thousand times. Nonetheless, I found myself flinching at the old poem and eager to distance myself from its casual racism. “Fraser, if we were talking about love here, genetics would be irrelevant. I could understand Ariel falling in love with you. I could understand any woman falling in love with you. But Ariel’s decision wasn’t about love, was it?”
He shook his head and put the unlit cigarette back in the pack. “No,” he said. “What she wanted from me wasn’t love. She came to my office one Friday afternoon last February and asked if I was up for a walk. It was a crazy idea. It had been snowing all day, and the temperature was dropping. By the time we got down to the boardwalk by the bird sanctuary, the wind had come up and the snow was swirling. We were hanging on to one another’s arms and laughing like eight-year-olds. The university and the Parkway were five minutes away, but we couldn’t see a thing except one another. Ariel said it was like being inside a snow-globe. Then all of a sudden, she just stopped laughing and asked me.
“She told me I was her first choice, but if I said no, she’d find someone else. She said there would never be any obligation, financial or emotional, to her or to the baby, and that the only ‘condition’ she had was that she wanted her baby’s conception to be a natural one – no visits to the lab for sperm donations; no sexual encounters dictated by basal thermometer temperatures. She wanted us to make love on a regular basis until she became pregnant.”
“And you agreed.”
“I was honoured.”
“But she stayed with Charlie all the time you and she were …”
“That wasn’t the plan,” he said tightly.
“Then why did it happen that way?”
“Charlie,” he said, and it was hard to imagine how a single word could be infused with such contempt. “Your friend Howard’s son is a consummate games player.”
“In what way?”
Fraser shook his head. “He made her the centre of his life. For a woman like Ariel, that was a heavy obligation. Whenever she tried to leave, there were threats.”
“He threatened her …”
“That would have made her choice easy. No, Joanne, he threatened to kill himself. She couldn’t leave.”
“But she did leave. Two weeks before she died, she moved out …”
“It was after she saw the ultrasound photograph of the baby. Seeing our child made us both realize there were larger obligations.”
“Did Charlie know about the baby?”
“Watching a woman as closely as he watched Ariel – I don’t see how he couldn’t have.”
“Fraser, did it ever occur to you that one reason Ariel chose you to father her baby might have been to prevent Charlie from convincing himself the baby was his.”
“I’m not a stupid man, Joanne. The thought occurred to me. I also realized that Ariel wanted to make her decision irrevocable. That didn’t make me love our child any less.”
He stood and took out his cigarette pack, but instead of lighting up, he arced the package through the air so that it landed in a garbage bin ten metres away. “At least I can do this for them,” he said.
I watched him walk away a big man who, for a few magical, ardent weeks, had been ten feet tall and bulletproof. But even as Fraser Jackson had gloried in his good fortune, there had been a silver bullet waiting. As I rose to walk back to my office, my limbs were heavy, made leaden by the weight of evidence that seemed to link Charlie Dowhanuik to the sequence of events that had resulted in the deaths of Ariel and her baby. Whether or not to convey what I’d learned to Howard Dowhanuik was no longer an option, but it wasn’t going to be easy to tell my old friend what I had learned about his son. I needed time and quiet; what I got was Kevin Coyle in full manic mode.
As he approached me from the hall outside his office, his eyes glittered huge and intense through his thick glasses, and his grin, a dentist’s nightmare of ancient silver fillings, was fearsome.
“You look like you’ve been mainlining locusts and honey,” I said.
“A Biblical allusion,” he sneered, “and as such, increasingly irrelevant. Who needs God now that we have the Internet? Come have coffee, and I’ll show you my new toy.”
I followed Kevin into his office. He poured our coffee – mine into the orange and brown striped mug that was apparently now reserved permanently for me. He gestured to the low tables that had once held his prized games of Risk. The board games were gone now, replaced by a high-end computer system with all the bells and whistles.
I sipped my coffee. “Impressive,” I said.
“The coffee or the Complete Home Office?” he asked.
“Both.” I raised my cup to him. “Kevin, I have to hand it to you. When you commit, you commit.”
He caressed his seventeen-inch monitor. “The whole world appears on this screen,” he said solemnly. “Anything I want to learn about, buy, own, peruse, discuss – it’s all here for me.”
“Eden,” I said.
“Another Biblical allusion,” he said, “but this one is acceptable because the metaphor works. My machine can conjure up Eden, but it also brings serpents.” He dropped to the floor, knelt before his computer, and logged on to the Internet. Then he called up the Web page devoted to Ariel and clicked from it to “Red Riding Hood.” “They haven’t taken it off. Worse yet, the Friends of Ariel have undergone a metamorphosis. They are now the Friends of Red Riding Hood, a name change which allows them to focus on fresh atrocities.”
I looked over his shoulder at the monitor. The role of Red Riding Hood #1 had been taken over by another hideously mutilated woman. I tried to keep my voice even. “When it comes to abuse, there are always fresh atrocities.”
He peered up at me. “But aren’t we supposed to be remembering Ariel Warren?”
I thought of the young woman who had been so moved by the shining idealism of a single line in the Hippocratic oath. “They’re just using her,” I said. “I’m going to make Livia put a stop to it.”
Rosalie wasn’t in her customary place in the outer office, but Livia’s door was open, a sure indication that she was inside. She wasn’t alone. As I walked towards the door, I could hear raised voices. When I stopped to
listen, I discovered that the topic under discussion was me.
Ann Vogel’s voice was harsh. “Joanne Kilbourn is not one of us. You remember who she sided with in my attitudinal-harassment case.”
“I wasn’t here,” Solange said calmly, “so I don’t remember. It wasn’t my battle, and it wasn’t Ariel’s. Until the vigil, I never had any feelings one way or the other about Joanne. She’s certainly easy to dismiss: middle-aged, middle-class, middlebrow … middle-everything. But that night she said exactly the right thing. Perhaps there’s more to her than we thought. I’m beginning to think she might be right about allowing Ariel to become just another morality tale on ‘Red Riding Hood.’ ”
“Which, of course, implies that I’m wrong.” Ann was beyond fury. “What has Joanne Kilbourn ever done for you? Did she get you a job? No. We did. Livia and me. I was the student representative on the committee that hired you. There were male candidates who had much better paper qualifications than either you or Ariel, but we made sure the department hired women this time.”
Solange’s response was icy. “We were qualified.”
“Being qualified is never enough for a woman. You know that. What Livia and I did wasn’t pretty, but it was necessary.”
“Naama, stop.” Livia’s voice was a little light on New Age empathy. In fact, she sounded downright threatening. “You’ve said enough.”
“We’ve all said enough.” Solange sounded weary. “Let’s leave this for another time.”
When Solange emerged from Livia’s office, Ann Vogel was right behind her. She grabbed Solange’s arm and spun her back before either of them had a chance to see me.
“I reinvented myself for you,” Ann said. “I …”
Solange cut her short. “This isn’t high school. No one asked you to become someone else. That choice was yours, and this choice is mine. I’m going to delete the link to ‘Red Riding Hood.’ ”
Livia appeared behind them. Her eyes widened when she saw me. “You should have let us know you were here, Joanne.”
