Honest Doubt

by Amanda Cross

  “Sounds awful,” I said, dismissing the subject. “Times change, and there’s no doubt they’re changing now. Shall we contemplate coffee and a really horrendous dessert?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t have coffee; I’d never get to sleep. I don’t even dare to drink decaf.”

  “Dessert, then. I insist. This is your night to say boo to your diet.”

  The waiter came around with the dessert cart, and we each chose one. She had a hard time making up her mind, and I ordered the one she finally rejected so that I could offer her a bite, claiming a bite of hers, to be fair. She’d told me a lot, and I wanted her, in exchange, to have a good time. I suspected her life didn’t include too many good times. I couldn’t help wondering if any of those old professors ever took her out for a meal; somehow, I doubted it. Later, I dropped Dawn at her home, and took the taxi on to Park Slope. I’ve never understood how people can keep cars in Park Slope; there’s never anywhere to put them. A guy I know calls it Double-Park Slope. Thank the lord for my land-lords, their area space, and my bike.

  My next obvious task was to interview some of the professors myself, to try to narrow my list of professors down to those who might be suspects in Charles Haycock’s murder. Dawn had given me a sense of the atmosphere in the whole department; it hardly encouraged me to think that was enough to make my interviews productive. The professors might agree to see me once in a murder investigation of one of their number, but a repeat might not be so easy to arrange. I had to make the first interview count, at least until my suspicions were a little more directed.

  It seemed only natural to consult Kate Fansler at this point. She would certainly have some suggestions, and—this was a thought I was a bit ashamed of, but upon which I was, all the same, determined— I wanted to see if her husband, Reed Amhearst, who had connections in the D.A.’s office, could get me in touch with the police detective on the case, even though the case was in New Jersey, where Clifton College was. Police officers do offer their colleagues from other places a certain amount of courtesy. I was sure that if the police who were handling the case and I could combine information we could both do better, but it’s far from easy to convince the police of this. They don’t like private eyes messing around in their cases. It would have to be a special favor, and maybe Reed Amhearst could manage it.

  I took a shower and, back in my sweats, sat down with a pad and pen to plan out my questions for Kate Fansler. Sure, I knew I could have waited to see her; probably I should have waited to see her. But I really did need to get my head cleared about English departments; families are much more common ground to me. People say that all families are different, but for my money they’re all pretty much the same. My hope was that all academic departments were pretty much the same too, so I could really get a handle on this from my own investigations and with Kate Fansler’s help.

  Besides, I wouldn’t mind seeing Banny again.

  The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing, humorous old men who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it.

  —C. S. LEWIS, in a letter to his brother

  Three

  WHEN I called Kate Fansler for another appointment, I offered to go to her office. This seemed more professional and fairer to her than intruding upon the privacy of her home. But, having thanked me for my consideration, she told me to come to her house as before. “You’ll want to see Banny again,” she said, “and I can hardly take her to the university. Dogs are forbidden on the campus, and she’s so big that people with dog phobias become hysterical and have to be carted off to the infirmary.”

  I agreed, thanking her. My own interpretation, not to undermine her generosity and hospitality, was that she hardly wanted to be seen consulting a private investigator about a fairly famous academic murder at another college. Kate was by now, I supposed, fairly well known as a detective, and the murder at Clifton College was the topic of the moment; I thought her keeping her work as a snoop away from her colleagues was a good idea.

  Not that I wasn’t grateful to be going to her apartment, seeing Banny and seeing her in her own space, so to speak; I was damn glad of the chance. But one figures things out for oneself; one has to, no distrust intended.

  Banny recognized me, which was a nice compliment. She actually got up, huge tail wagging, and walked over to me after Kate had opened the door. I dropped my helmet in the outside hall, gave Banny a really good doggy greeting and Kate a modified one, and followed both hosts into the living room. Once seated, I denied being thirsty, and pulled out my notes. I figured I owed it to Kate to get right down to business.

  But Kate had noticed me dropping my helmet outside her door, as she had not last time. Somehow, the fact that I ride a motorbike fascinates even the most sophisticated people; they want to know why, and how, and if I ever give someone else a ride.

  “No, I don’t. For one thing, they haven’t a helmet. For another, while there’s theoretically room behind me, there isn’t much room behind me. How come you noticed my helmet this time? You didn’t notice it on my first visit.”

  “Reed noticed it when he came in the last time you were here. He said, ‘I see she rides a motorbike,’ and I asked how he knew, since I’m supposed to be the detective in the family, and he mentioned the helmet, gallantly admitting that had he been inside when you arrived, rather than arriving from outside, he wouldn’t have noticed it either.”

  I nodded and returned to my notes. But she was still in a questioning mood.

  “Why do you always mention being . . . well, heavy?” she asked. “I know that’s not a very tactful question, but if I don’t come right out with it, I’ll be thinking of it through all our conversations, which would, you admit, be distracting. So forgive me and answer.”

  “Would you start out asking a black woman why she referred so often to her race?”

  I could see I had embarrassed her.

  “Kate, please. Being fat’s my hang-up, the cross I bear rather less gladly than I might; that’s a quotation from a hymn, in case they didn’t make you go to church. All the other nasty jokes are now forbidden, but not against fat people. Example: someone gave me a collection of short stories, detective stories, by women, and here’s how one by Sue Grafton begins. I’ve been lugging the book around with me to read while waiting for appointments, so I happen to have it here, as evidence. Grafton is describing a woman waiting outside her office. ‘She was short and quite plump, wearing jeans in a size I’ve never seen on the rack. Her blouse was tunic-length, ostensibly to disguise her considerable rear end.’ Later, Grafton’s detective goes to see a relative of this woman and notes that, like the first one, ‘she was decked out in a pair of jeans, with an oversize T-shirt hanging almost to her knees. It was clear big butts ran in the family.’1 See what I mean?”Kate seemed to be searching for something to say. I kept on talking, to give her a moment. I guess I really wanted her to understand how I felt about this fat stuff.

  “Look,” I said, “being fat’s been a lot of use to me. You can believe that. It’s gotten me confidences I’d never have had otherwise. But I don’t see why thin has to be a qualification for looking down on others, the way white used to be. I’ve made it a kind of crusade. But I do agree, it can get boring as a subject, and I’ll try not to mention it again. Now, can I tell you—”

  “It isn’t boring, and I’m perfectly willing and happy to have you talk about it, now that you know I’ve mentioned it so we both don’t have to pretend you’re not saying what you’re saying. I do hope you see what I mean.”

  “I do, and I’m grateful you brought it out in the open. If there’s one thing I hate more than another, it’s tact. Not real tact, maybe, but the kind where you know they’re being tactful. I meet up with a lot of that. It doesn’t deserve the name ‘tact,’ does it?”

  “I’m pretty tired of tact,” Kate said. “It’s mostly a technique useful to those trying to get away with something.” She lo
oked at her watch. “I’d like a drink. Can I offer you something? I’m having Scotch, but you can have whatever you want. It is well after five.”

  “ ‘And as the sun sinks my thirst rises.’ I had an uncle who used to say that. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait till I’ve gotten through these notes and heard what you have to say. I’ve got to go and see these professors, and it’s absolutely new terrain for me. Maybe after I’ve talked to you, I won’t sound quite so ditsy. It’s not exactly in my usual line of work.”

  “Perhaps you’ll make a specialty of it when this case is over,” Kate said. She went across the room, where there was liquor and ice and everything, and made herself a drink. I agreed to have a glass of seltzer, and settled down. I hoped Scotch didn’t affect her too much, but what the hell. At least she made me feel welcome. Banny’s eyes followed Kate’s passage across the room, but Banny didn’t move; Kate wasn’t going anywhere.

  Kate sipped her drink. “Claire Wiseman told me that the department sounded like a business the owners were trying to wrest from one another. She seems to know someone who used to work there, and her tales are pretty harrowing, Claire says. Not that I’ve ever been an admirer of small colleges in the countryside; there’s far too much togetherness and far too much interest in one another’s lives. In a university in New York City, like mine, we all go home at night and fade into a different, largely private world. Certainly there are departmental struggles, but they aren’t each professor’s whole life. Also, small departments are either pleasant or hell. Tell me about this one—the details, I mean. I know you can’t make any judgments yet.” She took another sip and sat back, all attention.

  I took a deep breath and peered at my notes, though I had them by heart. It does no good to sound too knowledgeable before those who may offer information; it’s best if they feel themselves to be the authority in the matter, which of course they usually are, to some extent. I didn’t act differently with Kate.

  “It’s a department of ten professors,” I reported, “six tenured, four not. Divided, as I suppose all English departments are, into periods, or maybe they should be called fields, or areas—I’m not too clear on that. Anyway, the periods or fields, in no particular order, are Victorian—well, there is a particular order here, because that was Haycock’s field, and he’s the reason we’re talking about all this. I know you said most professors aren’t given to murder, but are English departments more given to murder than most?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Kate said. “The only act comparable to murder I know of personally was a suicide. A new assistant professor was found to have plagiarized his dissertation and his book; he killed himself before the matter went far, thus proclaiming his guilt, or so everyone thought. That’s about it. Do go on.”

  “Well, in addition to Victorian, we have American, Modern—I’m not sure what that is, exactly— Medieval, Renaissance, Romantics/Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, and something Comparative. Most of these have a full professor attached to them, lord of all he surveys, so to speak.”

  “That’s a new and insightful way to put it,” Kate said. “Go on.”

  “The leftover fields are covered by assistant professors. Sometimes one of these chaps, or an assistant professor, teaches the novel. There’s also a part-time person who teaches creative writing, which, I gathered, is there to bring in the money from people in the neighborhood who are yearning to become published writers.” (It was Octavia who gathered this, but I saw no point in saying so.) “The person teaching it last year and this year is named Kevin Oakwood, a writer I’ve never heard of. And that’s about it. The only one of these fields with a woman running it—that’s probably not the right term—is Modern. I think that may be a part of the trouble with Haycock—he hated professional women, or so it seems. And two of the three assistant professors are women. I did learn that there’s a lot of turnover in the junior faculty; two on tenure-track lines—I hope I’m impressing you with my newfound lingo —were new last year and stick together. It was over the promotion of one of the assistant professors who’d actually stuck around a while that the war of the sexes broke out in the rolling fields of New Jersey.”

  “Professor Haycock took his cue from Tennyson when it came to women,” Kate said. “Hold on a minute while I get a book. It’s a quote too suitable to Haycock to miss.” Kate left the room, then came back, turning the pages of a book—the poems of Tennyson, I was detective enough to deduce.

  “Here we are: ‘Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions matched with mine / Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.’ That’s from ‘Locksley Hall.’ And, to do Tennyson and Haycock full justice, we ought to add another couple of lines from ‘Locksley Hall’: ‘He will hold thee, when his passion / Shall have spent its novel force / Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.’ ”

  “Was Tennyson serious?” I asked.

  “Ah, you’ll have to ask a Tennyson expert that. But I’ll try to brush up on that exalted poet. I used to quite like him, but I never admitted it; he wasn’t the accepted cup of tea when I was young, and probably isn’t now. But he could write neat lines.”

  Kate paused, as if reminded of something. “But you know, he did write one famous line that still bothers me after all this time; it’s one of his prize bits: ‘Now lies the earth all Danaë to the stars,’ from a lyric called ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal.’ An immortal line, beautiful. But what disturbs me is that Zeus came to Danaë, whose father had locked her up to prevent her getting pregnant, in a shower of gold. The Greek gods always found a way to screw the women they were after. But the stars do not affect the earth in any way; the earth does not lie vulnerable to the stars. So it’s a weak, fanciful metaphor, though a gorgeous one, describing a clear night in the country.”

  There was a pause as I took this in. “You know, Kate,” I finally said, allowing an edge to creep into my voice, “there is no doubt that you’re going to be a big help to me in this case.”

  “I’m glad you appreciate that.” Kate grinned. “Leave me the lists of courses and faculty, the whole thing, and I’ll be ready to talk about it in a more coherent way then, when I’ve got the whole department and faculty straight.”

  “So I guess I should be going now,” I said. I, who usually couldn’t wait to be on my way, seemed to be lingering. I gathered up my notes and the book I’d been reading from.

  But Kate held up a hand. “You have to realize that you’re likely to do better than I would in this particular investigation. I’d be handling too much baggage to be able to see the situation with any clarity. I’ve been an academic for too long. I’m unlikely to view things in a new light. I’d have expectations and knowledge of how an English department works on the inside.”

  “That sounds like an advantage to me. I’ve learned as an investigator that you can’t know too much about a situation; you rarely know enough.”

  “True. But I think in this case, with murder a possibility, a fresh look and new impressions might be worth a lot—and you can always get the fruits of my long experience here when you feel need of them. Your perceptions of these people and what they’re like—that’s what you ought to be going along with, for a while at least.” She seemed to reflect on her words.

  “Nonetheless,” she went on, “there is some information that might be worth having before you talk to the personnel and gain impressions of the scene. That is, the background of the academic situation you’ll be observing and how it came about—in a very general sort of way, of course. When my generation of professors was getting tenure, the academic picture was a lot rosier than it is today. Never mind the reasons for the change—there’s some disagreement about that— but no one debates the effect: there is too little money for faculty, too few positions for the generation of new Ph.D.’s coming along. There’s a general exploitation of new Ph.D.’s, hiring them part-time and as adjuncts, where they make too little money with no benefits and no real part to play in the department.
”

  “Why do the departments keep turning out Ph.D.’s if there are no jobs?” I asked. “Or is that one of those questions for which there is an obvious answer I’m not bright enough to see?”

  “On the contrary. I’m telling you all this because the real answer is not widely admitted. Why do the major universities, and even the second-rank universities, continue to turn out Ph.D.’s? The university wants the money, they want the population so that they can keep their place in the world, and the professors prefer teaching graduate students, who are self-selected for literary studies and smart, to teaching college-age kids whose desire to learn is hardly passionate; they’re inspired by quite different passions in those years. But above all, the senior professors want graduate students to teach the introductory courses, like literature surveys and composition, so that they don’t have to teach them themselves. As it happens, the graduate students make very good teachers; they’re enthusiastic, new to teaching experience, excited to be in the life they’ve always dreamed about. But that’s hardly permanent; once they’ve done their stint, they’re on their own with no jobs in sight, or very few.”

  “Don’t professors like teaching?” I asked. “Isn’t that why they’re professors?”

  “Possibly that’s why they wanted to be professors. Some of them are great teachers, but that isn’t how you get ahead in the academic world—not even in a small college like Clifton. You’re supposed to publish. No one will read what you’ve published. No one is really interested most of the time—but if you haven’t published you’re not a respected academic. So what every professor wants is time to research and write a book—any book. For an assistant professor today to be promoted to associate professor, they are often expected to have published more than any of the established professors of my generation or older have published in their whole lives.”